Borrowed Artefacts

AFTER DISLODGING THE CROWD’S democratically-exempted favourite through a 2-1 upset, Van Phong “B-EL-K” Dinh progressed up the ladder to the Open Platoon’s final rung. Dinh was a top-mark graduate from The Company’s war academy, where he’d been schooled in Lee’s “polylectic” method. This post-reform style of command centred on a core of player soldiers, who were sacrificed algebraically, dialectically, repeatedly, iteratively, and an assortment of other jargon-ly-s. Of note an angelic design flaw in the style provoked defection when employed on NPCs.

Opposing Dinh was the tutelary angel himself. Lee’d used the category as a chill hangout with his inner circle, and his roster tallied so many grand-manipulators of Saana’s history that, as one archdeacon destined for exsanguination put it, “Disposing of just two squads would take back the continent, the full platoon the planet.” These titans goofed around with Lee, who satisfied his boredom by wagering with them over extra win conditions like killing teams in alphabetic order or in hairstyle clusters.

As Dinh and Lee’s platoons took the finals stage, Alex Wong awaited snickering. A twist had been prepared. He revealed four shimmering Legendaries and smugly boasted to the crowd that the brat who’d downplayed his cheats as “tools” for years would be on the receiving end of these tools and their “instrumental impartiality”. He distributed these artefacts amongst the troops of Dinh, who’d until then stood not one lottery ticket’s chance of rivalling the teacher. Lee meanwhile was challenged to fight without his own equalising treasures.

Lee counter-offered to increase the hype, staking four Legendaries against the handicapping arsenal. An unconfident Wong refused the wager outright. As the stadium booed the gutless heel, Lee accepted the challenge anyway and joked it was merely the latest instance of Wong handicapping his career.

He tried to nullify the disadvantage through speed-built mazes, the Legendaries' wielders split and their targets screened, direct contact avoided as Dinh’s force were whittled down through mobile spell batteries. The first round ended with Lee’s loss and two items surviving.

Lee reversed the outcome of the next two matches through nightmarishly-swift improvements. The original scheme evolved mid-series with the dramaticness of a velociraptor into an eagle. The shape streamlined, the excess weight hollowed from its skeleton, and at last its arms lifted to the sky as wings. This bird’s wings were then clipped in the fourth round by a counter-growth from Dinh familiarising with his armament.

Before the final match, the audience chanted at Alex Wong to accept the rejected wager, the mob encouraged by one announcer high on gambling. “To pentuple this tyrant’s first loss,” he foamed, “it would be a stake whose epic pay-out would attest so much to the supreme intelligence of the gambler that were Alex Wong to rise beyond Saana’s imperial throne, becoming the emperor of planet earth, his noble mullet would glisten deservedly beneath a crown blessed forever by lady luck!” Wong almost kneeled to this flattery but was restrained by a mild whiff of concoction. “You overestimate this cripple’s infirmities and underestimate his wickedness,” he informed the crowd. “That last limp was a scam to give you all false confidence.”

Lee in addition to intentionally throwing that match had bribed the announcer.

But if his charade had been successful, the items would’ve slipped without a fuss into his bottomless fannypack. Not only did he breeze through round five after evolving his maze-strat from a bird to a spaceship, but Lee also elevated the challenge to the heroic exosphere by ambushing the four artefact wielders personally and knifing them himself. Through this extraneous feat, the bet was then enforced post-hoc, as Lee withheld the picked-up items and claimed he would be borrowing them “until the funeral ends”. He explained: “We can’t have these pesky things returning when I practise for the bliss ahead by napping through the Open 6s.”

The crowd enraged by the jest to repeat his duos truancy—which Lee would indeed repeat—threw trash.

Wong’s temper also flared, and he belted a theatrical order for the soldiers to retrieve his loot. The directive contained a further escalation to seize all Lee’s items as punishment. “Empty out this scrooge’s tomb! Soon The People will see his rusting treasures put to action!”—an oddly prophetic statement. Wong slipped in pettily: “For this blatant infringement of the ruleset, I declare the match result invalid and the competitor officially defeated!”

But neither player nor NPC troops budged in compliance. The casket of Lee’s supposed retirement was not far in the soil, his body had throughout this ‘funeral’ exhibited contradictory signs of life, and so most dismissed Wong’s cries as rebellion against their true and immortal emperor. The expansion of Lee’s arsenal by four also made the job unsafe.

“This memberless loudmouth is asking for our suicide in more ways than he knows,” one Chayokan sergeant ignoring the command wrote his sister after. “His tantrums continuously test the patience of He whose thousand-headed virility sustains the imperial familia. I fear the catastrophic day our parent will exile His unruly infants or, worse, turn upon our soft necks these tools he’s multiplying. It is already doubtful whether we still in the crib will survive our guardian’s departure, so what then if our misbehaviour has provoked Him into making us His enemy? These sleepless nights repeat that thought. My ear detects our father creaking through the house, and I keep wondering: was it the irritation of our midnight cry that roused Him from His bed of shadows? And this object hid in father’s palm, is it not aimed in our ungrateful direction?”

In a few hours the sergeant’s head and the concerns in it would be shattered by an iceblast.

Changing Diet

SAMPLING THE FESTIVAL BANQUET, Ramiro formed a concrete sense of his future slave empire’s sprawling anatomy. His treasury would be the merchants collecting gold from shopaholics in the marketplace, his trade apparatus their wagons and their foreign galleys floating in the bay. In the northern tent city, his specialists would be the background labourers using skills and equipment shipped in from all corners of Lee’s thalassocracy. His peasants would, of course, be his usurped millions awaiting reclamation in the slum. On the opposite pole of wealth and strength, seductive as a gilded throne overseeing the planet, his army would be Lee’s ash-grey militia stationed at the arena.

A few of those Chayokan soldiers manned the venue’s gates. Their brains were the most tempting entrypoint to begin the infiltration. But Ramiro, for now, avoided the grounds while his loyalists surveyed it. Those inside had reported a security arrangement suspiciously less vigilant than what was demanded by the day’s apocalyptic foreshadowing.

Disguised agents roaming the audience to interrogate NPCs missed several of his converts. The ground’s perimeter outside was only sparsely patrolled by those hunting for Ramiro’s inert body leashed by a half-kilometre puppeteering range. Inside Lee’s legionnaires spread in a lax formation that was “isolated and outnumbered by hostiles, deficient in materiel, severed from supply lines, and guaranteed for capture,” according to a mindslaved general whose frontal lobe would be caved in by a hammer.

Behind this superficial neglect lurked Lee’s trap, a scheme to collapse on Ramiro shortly after infiltration. Bolstering the visible troops was a ceaseless rotation of stealthed assassins, each tasked with tracking the puppet network’s mobile nodes and snipping the exit paths. The capture hinged on the slimmest of error margins, the fate of the army balanced between Lee’s snap calculations and the Argentine’s mastery of a three-second body leap interval. Ramiro was blind to much of this. He would be saved by a paranoia gurgling alongside the orphans in his stomach: since failure seemed impossible, it must’ve been the only outcome.

As a rule Ramiro would not flirt with the proximity characteristic of his moonlit swineing, would not dissect Lee’s military corpus with his own wet hands before ingestion. In politics he adhered to the shady modus operandi learned from Lee to maintain several gaps of plausible deniability between orders and the frontline mess. One should ideally be anonymous until the campaign’s climax. Such an absence bypassed the ambiguous phases during which the public cemented into its heart doubts about legitimacy, grudges formed in conflict, and grievances over losses. Once the crown adorned your head, and once the alternatives were decapitated, most of this criticism retreated of its own accord and the past soon collapsed to justify the irreversible present. The king had strangled street urchins and devoured their hacked-sawed segments, or the king had enslaved forty million and splashed their majority to nothing through his reckless human waves. What of it? No humanists had volunteered. Every single slab of flesh has been a necessary sacrifice towards salvation, a true saint cultivating the palate to stomach even the martyrdom of his immortal soul.

Adding support to this psychotic self-defence, Ramiro pointed to the fact his new powers had spawned a limitless supply of his preferred child bodies yet he’d cannibalised only adults.

From this selectivity he reasoned that his latest victims constituted a mere utilitarian commitment, a means of growing his avatar’s strength for the trial ahead, one performed without the slow-paced ritualisms of old. Their components were processed minus any sentiment, like a bison carcass cleaned by a desert vulture. As for the smaller prey, the hares and the roaches, Ramiro’d vowed total abstinence. Only the colossal beasts of sea and sky would satisfy the greater hunger of his second reign.

But these redemptive compromises may have been short-lasting. Ramiro’s more tender cravings as described by a British game-journalist were “a highly addictive, highly perverted form of stress eating, like wolfing down a tub of ice-cream layered in chocolate sauce and rainbow sprinkles”. On the horizon loomed stresses that would test The Hog’s new diet plan.

Artistic Passions

EL-MASRY WAS ANGUISHING over whether to retire his chisel. He left the stadium with the female judge—the blue-haired female judge—and continued to boil with resentment. All the sweat he’d mixed into Dina’s statue only for some military musclehead to steal her. To cuck him. What more could a sculptor do in the competition over woman’s inattentive heart? El-Masry had reached the field’s pinnacle. Yet his wimpy art was dwarfed in masculine appeal, in the potency to stimulate the feminine pulse.

At a private workshop in The Company’s tent city, El-Masry blushed when the judge stripped nude, and he begged forgiveness of Allah, The All-Seeing and All-Judging. He kneaded into her commission a conflicted grief over his two dying passions. His work progressed without any knowledge that the posture and appearance of his model imitated the once-cherished muse of a cosmic sculpting deity, nor that the clay he patted had been laced with an infusion of rare ingredients teleported over from one of Lee’s Sokgyemantine storehouses.

Upon the Legendary statue’s completion, its eyes flickered with the glow of life.

God of The Asylum

ONE OF THE MOST COMPETITIVE, yet silliest, categories was the rookie six-squad, where supreme commander Lee carried a 400kg rucksack stuffed with his highschool pals and one quixotic knight roleplayer. A post-maximalist comedy podcast, called “Beyond Laughter”, scored every sub-tournament on a humour scale from one to seven, with a minimalist one being “children with cancer” and the maximal seven being “bald jokes”, and gave the 6v6 a respectable “anti-humour” 6. For some of the competitors, however, the encounter with Team Friendship Forever would deal lasting trauma.

Aasif ‘Equinox’ Verma, a Rajasthani polymath and the star prospect amongst the millions of recruits, described his series in the grand finale as, “a nihilistic wound, undercutting all ego and reality, a callous antidote to the delusion of generational progress.”

Verma had beaten Lee twice in the preliminaries. What’s more he’d won that day during his own tourney juggle a boardgame grandfinale for commander recruits, plus—he believed—The Company’s written administration exam that was still being tallied. “Our team prepared confidently and we entered confidently. None trembled before the immortal mythos, all recalled his vulnerabilities, those vulnerabilities we’d pierced ourselves in the prior victories. Thus were we beguiled by his greater mythos, the mirage of an obtainable humanity that lures wanderers deeper towards its desert truth.”

In their rematch he was splattered by the deity of legend. The coordination of Team Friendship Forever under Lee’s divine command had tripled, yesterday’s shabby performance revealed to be a by-product of him multitasking training exercises into matches. Especially miraculous was the reforging of the knight roleplayer. Verma—and he was not alone amongst the off-guard squadleaders—could not have anticipated Hadi ‘Justinian’ Suprana mastering the new technology of shields overnight.

The Rajasthani years later after recovering wrote of the incident and Lee: “He also practised an alchemy of people, every lump of lead transmuted into gold, then to some more lethal metal. Advance as we might through our game, shuffling pieces around these chequered battle lines, we still lag far behind that greater magic. Gone is the finer hand of a creator that shaped a pawn into a knight. Gone is the second, more compassionate eye of a god that—alongside our first perceiving the necessity of squeezing men into the mould of our designs—sees, promotes, and celebrates the wonderous potential of each to expand far beyond our limited vision.”

But before Verma could obtain that peaceful enlightenment, Lee humiliated him, delaying the third stomp of the series by inviting half a dozen guest speakers onto stage for a goofy intermission.

Lee’s earlier hijinks napping through the 2v2s turned out to be a fib, a cover for a side hustle. The four hours of his absence had been used to wheely in disguise around the festival doing dry-bys on lesser competitions. Tourney juggling was a disease of the brain, a post-maximalist ADHD, and Verma with his mere three events had to be taught who reigned unrivalled over the asylum. Lee’s guests queued to announce the results of the competitions they’d judged, and he interviewed each with puerile banter that pissed off the billion viewers waiting for the next category of the pro-level 6v6s.

The revelations were absurd.

“So whose set baked the chillest mousse?” Lee asked in 50s slang of one guest, a popular Bolivian moosestep-jazz fusion artist who'd judged an improv competition.

“Ah…he…you?...didn’t leave a name,” DJ Buzzed Gerbil replied.

“Did he have any identifiers other than a name? Strange articles of clothing, perhaps?”

“He did wear a chef’s apron.”

Lee smirked. “What kind of chef’s apron?”

Freaked out by the raging crowd, the DJ nervously answered. “It had a picture of a lobster.”

“Was it THIS lobster?”

Lee had equipped an apron with a picture of a lobster.

The next guest judge was a chef from a cook-off for lobster gumbo.

Lee asked them, “Can you tell everyone whose gumbo scored history’s FIRST eleven legs out of ten?”

The chef was debating whether to play along when one of Lee’s teammates spoiled the mystery.

“It’s obviously your gumbo, Henry!” she shouted. “Stop bullying the other team. Let’s finish them off and move on to your next tournament.”

The final guest was one of Lee’s colleagues, who wore a spotless uniform and a grumpy frown after being forced to rush score the admin exams. This was the category in which the polymath Verma should’ve secured a consolation second first place after his six-squad blowout, thereby admitting him, however unremarkably, to the elite echelon of tourney jugglers.

“Before you reveal the freshest prodigy of pencil pushing,” Lee said to them. “I’d like to ask one demographic question.”

“Let off it, mate. It’s too embarrassing...”

“What was this super nerd’s nationality?”

The colleague cringed as they revealed the winning applicant had been from India.

Lee had lost? The crowd roared with laughter.

Aasif Verma alone remained tense.

Lee, psychologically immune to embarrassment glided with a shrug into a follow-up question, asking the colleague, “And this Indian genius’s username?”

“Ganjanesha420...”

The spoofed ID flashed above Lee’s head. Igniting a spliff, the twenty-one-armed god-emperor of tournament juggling then began their match and murdered his opponent with a hatchet.