"Fight!"

SaNguiNe ran straight at her.

The Third Gate, with no more matches to buffer a loss, instantly abandoned all pretence of roleplaying a wrestler. She chipped at him before their skirmish by flinging magic from behind a shield while retreating using fencer-like backsteps.

SaNguiNe in turn continuously lunged, snatching for her shield. He caught it on his third attempt.

As he yanked the shield to pull her with it into him, she desummoned it to make him fall, and a replacement shield simultaneously appeared in her hand concealed behind through a basic inventory swap.

She’d intended to repeat this cheap tactic to prolong the opener and eke out every small advantage. SaNguiNe, however, never losing his forward momentum, snatched the replacement shield, and then—as she discarded it as well—he apprehended The Third—

The Third Gate would catch most of the spectators off-guard by initiating the grapple herself with an arm throw. As the wrestler reached out for her, she moved forward, captured his limb, twisted, backstepped into his chest, and, dropping to one knee, heaved him over her shoulder like a sack of dry shit.

But SaNguiNe was no longer duped by her deceptions. Ready and eager for the tussle, he hit bullet-time immediately and twisted mid-air to land on his feet. He quickly circled her from out of the intended position, trying meanwhile to drag her down, onto her stomach and under his heavier chest for a rearmount.

The Third Gate resisted the pull and counter-circled with him. Another two seconds of scrambling later, and a feinted disengagement from her into a blocked takedown attempt, they finished in a mutual standing positioning, handfighting for clinches and chances to offbalance each other.

SaNguiNe had assimilated the knowledge of her preferred shapeshifting-grapple. He utilised one hand to aggressively push her about. The other posted loosely on the shoulder of her dominant arm. This contrasted with standard dagger-wrestling countertactics. Against those systems, the opponent’s dominant arm required both hands to secure since single-grip holds were trivial to break.

The mystic recognised from this choice that he’d cracked one of the puzzles in her design of this series.

“Cute!” said FuzzyGirl35 in chipper approval, out of all characters. “But my knifework isn’t that trash.”

At the fourth word of her comment, her dagger arm had broken free and—wielding a short-sword from nowhere—swung to sever the wrestler’s neck.

SaNguiNe pre-felt the move through her muscles activating in his grip. By instinct, he gave her attacking shoulder a hard shove. The force, rippling down her arm, knocked her swing off trajectory and dissipated its strength, causing the blade to deal his tricep a shallow slice.

The rest of his response, chaining from this minor opening to his finisher, would also emerge from raw instinct, a faster-than-thought synthesis of the weeks and the lifetime of martial material combusting within him.

Before he’d consciously registered either the swing or its nullification, his body activated to exploit the six-second window before her attack cooldown reset. He dipped low and shot for a basic high crotch, his shoulder ramming into her belly, his arms threading her thigh and lifting.

The high crotch was an odd choice of takedown, one that most combat analyses would judge insensible.

A potent feeling of aversion stirring in SaNguiNe at that moment to the many unknowns surrounding the roleplayer had prompted him to draw the move from the most conservative reservoir of his technique, from his prehistory in freestyle wrestling instead of Saana. Although stock-standard in freestyle, in Saana, the additional factor of weapons caused attempts at the high crotch, or any other grab committing both arms to the opponent's legs, to result in getting stabbed. Against shapeshift grapplers, it fared doubly poor, for the takedown pressed one's head hard into the side of the target's torso, right under an arm, a position that exposed the head to an easy guillotine and—shortly after—a snapped neck.

However, in this singular instance, several subtler variables combined to modify the value of the move against what might be determined on paper. One of these was the high crotch's rarity due precisely to its disadvantages, which'd left The Third Gate not quite prepared for it. Another was the personal speed of execution that SaNguiNe had acquired from drilling it for years.

By the time it had occurred to the mystic to secure his offered head, the wrestler had landed his shot, swivelled behind her out of danger, picked her up, and driven her belly-down into the ground.

SaNguiNe's chain flowed on faster, the roleplayer writhing beneath him like a python as she popped a spellshield and lost a hip-mounted knife. When that weapon was unsheathed, by the wrestler, The Third Gate broke his one-armed hold to scramble out, yet SaNguiNe, having already discarded the stolen item, contorted her into the final position of an inverted rearmount, his legs wrapped tight around her chest, his arms locking her legs and presenting her crotch to his face with a clear, unarmoured view.

This sequence had required two free hands. But in one of his, retrieved within the flow from the dagger circle summoned around them, he thrust into his mastered enemy a match-winning, vengeance-redeeming, organ-mining mop of seaweed.

Seaweed...

SaNguiNe, swamped by a jarring sense of incongruence, of vertigo, of plummeting, stared in horror.

His hand, which should’ve been wielding a dagger, was punching into the mystic’s groin a wet mop of seaweed.

It was the same wet mop of seaweed she'd worn while parodying his Greek crush Artemis.

And this silly piece of costumery was not alone. In one of the twists during their rolling, The Third Gate had dumped the wardrobe acquired and approved in their first duel for her ‘humanshifting’ charade. Wigs and shirts carpeted the sand around them, along with pom-poms and multiple snakestaffs, and each of these objects, teased in the course of her performance, happened to be planted right on top of the daggers summoned for the wrestler’s circle technique, whose coordinates she’d memorised.

He may have cracked one of her mystical clues, but only one.

The Third Gate, her head inverted from her foe's, had been gritting her teeth with suppressed laughter. This burst out in one mirthful torrent when he actually—actually—stabbed her with the seaweed.

SaNguiNe, hearing her laughter mocking from the expanding distance of his plummet, dropped the prop and shot his hand—with all the desperation of a climber reaching back up for the edge of a receding cliff—out for the weapon that’d been concealed beneath.

But he would not be fast enough. His moment on the slope was over, an icy sting already radiating from his knife-molested groin up into the churned slurry of his abdomen.

The Third Gate, wanting to knit a few more thematic motifs into her series finisher, refrained from daggering the wrestler to full completion. Gifting him a health buffer to prolong his squirming and failed stabbidy-stibbidy-stobs, she wrangled him amongst the litter of her wardrobe for a proper rearmount.

Four blending transformations later, as she clinched that hold, she screamed into his ear from behind with the raspy, roid-raged volume of a 20th-century pro-wrestler.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“BROTHER, CAN YOU HEAR THAT SWEET NOISE?!”

Finally, hitting a gorilla , she jerked his torso upwards and—with a sickening crack—snapped the base of his spinal column.

“FuzzyGirl35 Wins!”

As the announcement rang, as the greater music of the crowd’s amusement started, The Third Gate dumped the wrestler’s half-limp body.

Cancelling her silverback form, she stripped off her armour to expose her neon-pink tights beneath and sprinted towards her cheering fans in the stands. By the ringside, a fake referee strapped around her waist a golden belt engraved with the title, ‘Gorilla-Weight Champion of The World’. The mob of luchadores combined into a human pyramid beside them. Up its limbs, she monkey-climbed to greet her kinfolk rising from their seats and from their public scorn, howling, barking, meowing.

Africa continued to clap for the Somali hesitantly.

“BROTHERS OF THE END,” The Third Gate roared, “CAN YOU HEAR THAT SWEET NOISE?! SISTERS OF THE START, CAN YOU HEAR THAT SWEET NOISE?!” She flourished a hand and cupped it to her listening ear. “The spine supporting this false world is breaking, too! The Gates are opening with a CRACK! You and I, The Faithful Few, shall march with upright nobility into the two-fold bliss of heaven. As for these heathens, they may enter Our Eternal Kingdom, as they must enter, BUT,” she gestured back at her paralysed opponent, “BUT they may only enter CRAWLING!”

Hamming up the pro-wrestler act, she grabbed a luchador and double backflipped with him off the human pyramid into a suplex. When they landed in the dirt outside the ring, with a crunch, the ref slid by for a three-count. She pinned a leg and, shapeshifting, yanked it out of the hip.

While the mystic showered in applause and gore, the defeated wrestler lay in the background motionless.

SaNguiNe, too shocked to suicide his character, wallowed amongst the gravebed ornaments of costumes. A numb abyss within his lower half crept slowly up toward his heart.

Defeated by a disciple, he was thinking. He’d been utterly convinced he’d obtained the condition to demolish HF…yet he’d lost to a mere disciple…a clown disciple…

So much more burned inside him yearning to be exhibited…but all of it…the training…the technique…the speed…the transition…all of it was useless now…all of it fading…all of it cooling…to nothing…

To a god-damn disciple…

He was woken from this stupor by the crunching of footsteps, the familiar cadence of which—slow, casually aloof—restirred his sinking resentment.

He turned to see HF approaching - or as they now called him, ‘The Tyrant’. A samurai sword gleamed in the kid’s grip. SaNguiNe wondered if he wanted to execute him, to dispose of the rubbish no longer worthy of being in his stadium after failing to beat his minion.

In fact, the teen had come in a compassionate mood, feeling some sympathy for one whose tragedy resembled his own.

SaNguiNe grumbled. “So many secrets shared…but not this one…you conspired with her…”

HF directed a shooing gesture in front of the wrestler, at what looked like nobody. A stealthed cameraman filming the loser’s face stalked off. He then used his sword to pierce a cheerleader’s pom-pom and flick it away disdainfully.

“Nope,” HF replied. “This trash didn’t dumpster you - you know that, mate. She's just the better grappler. These props, like the rest of the comedy, are a superfluous cosmetic built upon the skill gap.” Swivelling, he demonstrated his own freak talents by kicking a key-shaped dagger; the weapon flew up in a wide arc, socked the showboating mystic in the back of the skull, and lodged into her dreadlocks. “But I wouldn’t stew in this one flop. The fault’s entirely with the organisers letting veterans into a recruitment tournament. These martial arts go ocean deep, and a month of training—even with your freestyle background—doesn’t get you off the shore.”

That was one lesson, the need of youth to humble itself before the limitations of its age. However, that was not the main lesson.

The teen squatted next to the wrestler, a few centimetres out of the latter’s disabled reach. “‘So take pride in being the first of your generation. Strive onwards with the knowledge that you have more room to grow, that you will one day be taller than these losers bullying the toddlers at the playground.’” He shook his head with sagely derision of this juvenile advice. “No, SaNguiNe, I will reveal to you the smarter insight of your pain.

“This week, you’ve risen from third rank in this dogshit zone to first amongst millions. On the one level, this is astonishing. More than the standing you’ve been stripped of on the summit, a fickle possession by nature, you’ve gained something infinitely more precious, something that none of these cowards jeering in the stands will ever comprehend. You’ve pushed yourself to the utmost limits of your capabilities, and you’ve—repeatedly—surpassed them. That’s precious. That might be the most precious asset in the world, instilling you with the transcendent suite of skills that underpins all substantial achievement: discipline, drive, frigid self-assessment, fearlessness, resourcefulness, experimentation.

“On another level, however, the goal to which you’ve directed this most precious suite is offensively insubstantial. Why the desperation to win a duelling tournament? Because you needed to prove yourself against some cunts talking smack? Because you got duped by a guy pretending to be a chick? Because, in the pursuit of these lesser things—and what’s truly incomprehensible to the mass—you’re discovering the higher, purer joys of single combat?”

The teen scowled most at the last. “Stop. Before you roam too far down this path, you should step back while the absurdity at its origin is still painfully apparent. Gaze with the objectivity granted by your humiliation at how your willpower and vitality have been misled into a dead-end technological substitute for genuine human action. If you want love, rather than hanging out with cross-dressers online, rather than competing in a duelling tournament, why not adventure outside and meet any of the real chicks around you? Hell, you can carry forward the skills you’ve exercised in this pointless struggle. Hit on them as tenaciously as you have sparred. Spam thousands of rejections per week. Ruthlessly manipulate womankind, and assimilate the teachings of your failures until your romantic takedown is invincible!

“Basically, what I’m trying to say, SaNguiNe, is you should follow this elder's lead. Walk The Way Beyond All Ways; walk away from videogames.”

Yes, this was the profound moral lesson in SaNguiNe’s tragedy, the same diamond of enlightenment shimmering in the teen’s tragedy. Videogames were a menace distorting society’s priorities. By playing them, our future youth risked becoming violent psychopaths and victims of gender-bending scammers.

But HF—several years younger than SaNguiNe, whose story if it hadn’t ended prematurely would’ve revealed he’d scored a bronze in the 2048 Olympics—may have been pulling the older player's paralysed leg.

“Grandpa's not joking.” The teen—so far gone he reckoned seniority only in time gaming—gestured emphatically at The Third Gate, who’d arrived part-way through his monologue to wrestle with her goons around them. “Gaze at your aunty in this path, and behold her fallen state!” The Third Gate, as could be calculated from her username, ‘FuzzyGirl35’, was actually younger than them both. “This decrepit hag is acting like she won the world, but what has she won except another hour to embarrass herself while squandering her fleeting youth? Both of you kids need to stop playing videogames right now and take up a more life-enriching hobby.”

“Like fannypack design?” asked one of The Third Gate’s assistants, being choked by her with a fannypack.

SaNguiNe, blocked by his pride from killing his character yet physically unable to walk away from the demonic monologue, sighed miserably.

This jabbering idiot was still giving him tips…HF wasn’t even aware of the quest for vengeance that'd long consumed and transcended the stupid crush…

SaNguiNe almost wept…

“I could’ve beaten you…” he declared with frustration.

HF responded with a double-flavoured frown, frowning at this youth rotting too deep in the cesspit of videogame addiction to register his bombs of sagacity, frowning at the delusional claim.

“That’s doubtful,” the teen replied. “You got ape-handled by my deformed spawn.”

SaNguiNe knew otherwise. “The transition...you would not have had the speed...for my transition…”

Rather than starting a pointless debate, the pair settled their disagreement with a 1v1. SaNguiNe respawned to heal his spinal injuries, and HF—his official matches scheduled next—continued to hold up the entire event, pissing off the crowd and his staff.

Everyone would be duly rewarded for the wait, however. The little scuffle in the centre of The Third Gate’s showboating would look remarkably similar to SaNguiNe’s second duel against ‘The Third Tyrant’. The wrestler opened by blasting the teen’s juggle with a spare shield. Twenty-seven seconds later, using his over-drilled countertactics, SaNguiNe forced the concession.

HF, the stadium’s laughter pivoting to him, disentangled with sage indifference. “Oh, yikes…well…any noob can over-specialise for one duel. Really, SaNguiNe, that’s another testament to your wayward priorities. You would’ve progressed further in the tourney if you hadn’t trained just for me but the more general field of competitors. And, beyond that lesser wisdom, you would’ve progressed further in redeeming your rejection if you hadn’t trained for either me or the general field but gone speed-dating.”

Enlightened nukes of truth these were. Alas, they would explode on deaf ears, the wrestler tumbling off and screaming in a celebration befitting a gold medalist and not his objective placement as an already eliminated loser.

“I KNEW it!” SaNguiNe exclaimed at the sky defiantly, smashing his fist against his muscled chest. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!” He turned with a twistflip and double flipped-off his teenage opponent. “Get rolled, you slow bitch! Fuck you!”

The Third Gate and her goons joined him in celebrating and flipping off The False Gate, The Sage of Sloth Reflexes, etc.

HF saw that there was no hope for this next generation of gamers, doomed to repeat their inane follies. With a shrug, he strolled off of the sandpit and straight into his official bouts with Septic Rose.