The closing sequence has begun for the final conflict, built up in the short course of two weeks for some and, for others, centuries. The two chosen adversaries once preparing in each other’s shadow have sighted each other openly. They’ve drawn their estimations of strength. They’ve equipped themselves. They’ve committed each to their respective plan of action. Both plan—to borrow from the infantile, somewhat misleading framing of one of the chosen—to ‘duel’.

  Before they step down into the sand for the last duel, a moment might be taken to clarify some purpose from out of this affair’s enigmatic preamble. Only by doing so might the essential transformation occur, from the otherwise mundane sequence of two people stabbing each other to death, into a moment of greater human interest.

  One of the chosen, if they had the proper space to think and self-examine, might answer that theirs has been a story meditating on a person’s tragic relationship to fate. A universe, this one or another outside these fantastical boundaries, sometimes imposes on a victim soul a situation far beyond any personal capacity to conquer. It coordinates too many dangers at once for the individual to manage. Or it selects amongst its dangers one that is, by simple magnitude, too large to resist in any meaningful way, a fortress of an enemy whose outer layers stand impenetrable, let alone the sturdier interior. Against such opposition, when defeat is guaranteed, is fated, a difficult question arises as to how a person is supposed to continue acting in the absence of any realistic hope, and it is this problem of responding to a losing fate that the tale seeks to answer.

  Several answers, some positive, some negative, many absurd, have been offered in exemplar by the cast of this tournament, who’ve been faced repeatedly with an opponent they were fated never to beat. One soul profits from her loss in other ways, using the momentary grief as motivation to finally divorce herself from a dysfunctional attachment. Another carries on tangential to defeat, his aspirations elsewhere, in tiny, pettier acts of love and vengeance. Another tries and fails to insulate herself from her defeat through disguise. Another, after much public hype, just loses and is never heard or seen again. Another retreats into an elaborate religious fantasy that posits an ultimate purpose and victory in her defeat. Another refuses to admit defeat, preserves the battle in his heart, and loses thereby all possession of himself as he continues forever to replicate the battle psychically wherever an opportunity arises.

  Across these diverse responses, there is—if not a single coherent statement of advice—a proposal of a multiplicity of options. Defeat is fated, certainly, but within the loss remains plenty of wriggle room for decision and for action. The merit of the individual is determined not just from the outcome but from whether they conduct themselves appropriately in their losing situation. A superior soul is that which chooses opportunism, humbleness, and resilience. An inferior soul chooses timidity, farce, and resentment. One, after losing, gets back up and moves on taller and ennobled with its lessons picked up in the dirt. The other remains in defeat, broods on it, is deformed by it, and maybe gets back up too but inadvisably. The distinction isn’t always in a single action – a virtue like persistence swings into psychopathy if one pushes too far, if one doesn’t balance a pursuit against others, if the mindset and the ultimate goal become demented. And from that ambiguity, it might be concluded that the proposal against fate is fundamentally multiplicit, mirroring the form of a certain figure’s juggling technique, a number of distinct and contradictory items being balanced adaptively, and somewhat confusingly, around a unified intention. Against fate, a person might indeed have to expand into this manifold, chaotic nature, since the singular goal that establishes the mood of fate is by definition lost.

  To derive such a conclusion from a weekend tournament of amateur Offworlders may seem quite ludicrous, and—to be sure, lest this impression be prematurely rejected—it is in many ways ludicrous. However, the core dynamic portrayed can extend beyond the inconsequential grounds of an arena, which could be reframed merely as a microcosm of life and fate, the setting at once parodying their conflict, minimising it in certain respects and intensifying it in others. Fate can ambush a soul in a variety of masks: as financial losses, as debilitating accidents, as romantic rejections, as abrupt military invasions, as gradual national declines. Even if one has the fortune to cruise past all these troubles, there exits for every soul without exception that ultimate fate, when their turn to spin life’s wheel grinds to a halt and their atoms, no longer contained by the centripetal forces of continuous striving, are dispersed back into the primordial substances of being from which the succeeding generations are recycled. Whatever guise fate chooses to arrive in, the challenge is different in magnitude but not in species from that confronted by these competitors, and the same vague, manifold lesson spread across them might be applied. Even in the hour of defeat, many options still remain. The heroic soul, if such a figure can exist without victory, might be distinguished by its remembrance of that fact, by its wisdom in selecting from the diminishing choices, by the technique of its execution, by its tough yet flexible willingness to maintain action right up until the end and perhaps beyond the end.

  Such would’ve been the lesson on fate as offered by one of the duel’s chosen - if they’d had the freedom of space to explain.

  But, lest the observer accept this pseudo-philosophising too much and commit themselves to its implied path of resignation, one little step of scepticism might be taken back. The voice of doubt shouldn't be squashed that has probably arisen at several points in this overly-aggrandised, overly-pessimistic interpretation of an Offworlder tournament, whose moments of despair are nigh indiscernible amongst an outnumbering mass of drolleries and theatrics. It should be questioned seriously—or unseriously—whether the force governing such a frivolous event is, in fact, an entity as oppressively morbid as ‘fate’.

  Fate, it must be known, isn’t always fate. What is attributed to fate by many a victim soul—or to similar concepts like bad luck, unfairness, demonic interference, systematic injustice by the No'Are cabal—is understood by older souls, familiar with a larger cast of humanity for comparison, to not be fate whatsoever but a stand-in for lesser problems of a less deterministic nature. One person’s fate is only their ignorance; they have not formed a complete picture of the factors arrayed against them, and this obscurity places those factors beyond any sense of personal control. Another’s fate is their weakness, their ineptitude, their immaturity, or their laziness, and where they slam against impossibility, a different, more capable soul succeeds. Fate, according to the religious mind, is none of this, which commits a sin of hubris by positioning any soul in the spot of prime agency and responsibility; fate rather is a supra-individual force, a conscious, designed arrangement of circumstances by a higher power in a way that appears hopeless to the individual but that is ultimately for the good of themselves and others.

  With the last duel, might not some of these alternatives better describe the operations of 'fate'?

  Such is what is argued here, by an impartial third party. The last duel if it is about fate is more so about fate in this more nuanced sense. A conflict within the conflict is proposed between fate perceived as fate and fate realised as falsity, and the ultimate victory hinges on whether those chosen succeed or fail in the task of differentiation, on how high each can ascend up a ladder of increasing complexity and difficulty to identify the causal agents masquerading as their fate. For the victim soul below, the events do indeed have the appearance of fate, stalking up behind them, leaping on them unexpectedly, climaxing in their helpless death, and then retreating back to its unknowable lurking place. For the heroic soul above, who has clawed their way up beyond their ignorance and their ineptitude, ‘fate’ loses its mystique and refines into something much less tragic, into the most splendid, necessary, beloved, and fated of personal tests.

  A consciousness of this duality may reveal the ultimate meaning of the comic sequence concluding this tournament, in which multiple parties—not just the chosen ones—contend at various proximities to fate or not fate. For most at a distance, the duellist's loss springs even faster than fate, will find them with their pants down shocked, confused, embarrassed, and shrivelled of soul. Others, slightly closer to fate, will glimpse the loss vaguely beforehand but misread its purposes and agents. For others, closer still to fate and able to decode some of its logic in the pattern of repetition, the loss becomes a prime opportunity, another surprising chance to expand the soul, to gain the magnitude of person needed to wrestle with fate. And for the elect few who venture beyond fate after hurling it and its false corpse beneath them—a rank that will soon include the observer privileged to compare these lesser beings lost in struggle and consolidate the tale that unites them—the loss becomes divine design, all the pieces orchestrated carefully in advance by one benevolent helper from above.

  To appreciate the full design, two settings will need to be compared and contrasted. First up is the stadium absorbing most of the public attention.

  Presently, the venue is napping after the previous hecticness. The audience, waiting politely for the grand finale, are being advertised tour packages for continuing their fun adventures after the tournament – one might quench the thirst built up by the local perma-drought in the rainforests of Yamalai, or cool off from the heatstroke in any of The Company’s three northern snow frontiers. The stage meanwhile is being restored to its pre-destruction condition, the tunnel holes filled in and the fortifications of the humanoid intruders dismantled.

  Most of the refuse can be cleaned up without observational interest, its design function already fulfilled. Of mild noteworthiness—and providing both a cute link with the second setting to come and a demonstration of the operative layerings of 'fate'—is the labour to remove the monster carcasses. These are being dragged out into a growing, fly-swarmed mound outside the arena’s glass dome, larger beasts like the python and the giant orangutan having to squeeze through the entrance in hacksawed segments. Some carcasses from the mound are being carted off outside the stadium for rendering into materials, but not all. Those of lesser value are auctioned on the spot to bidders in the crowd, to craftsmen and to exotic chefs competing with audience members wanting souvenirs of the massacre. These public sales, importantly, are not to the preference of The Company, whose official protocol would be to inspect each carcass thoroughly before release, but they are forced into a compromise due to a reduction in manpower springing from earlier sequences in the design, from The Church's growing paranoia of their presence and the request (or order) to withdraw their military to their ships. These circumstances generate one of fate's mini-tests, which The Company is now failing. The correct response—according to the higher, undetermined layers of fate—would be to destroy the carcasses they could not process. But this precaution is never considered by the individual overseeing the cleanup, who is neither an administrator nor a carcass specialist educated in custom practises to limit zoological dangers—those being assigned elsewhere—but the colonel of an elite guard. This colonel's lack of oversight ripples into other missed oddities. None of his troops inspect a parrot in the pile, whose puke-yellow colouration and pustules hidden under the feathers—not to mention its lack of wounds—would’ve informed them that it’d not been their leader who had slain it, the thing having dropped dead within seconds of arrival. Nobody notices likewise that this parrot, despite its morbid state, is flapping its dead wings periodically. They similarly miss the oddities of the butcher being handed this parrot by them for a fair, voluntary price and tossing it into the back of his meat wagon laden with other disease-carrying carcasses – the oddity of his clothes being too warm for the local climate, the oddity of his huge hat concealing his horns, the oddity of the blue-shade of his eyebrows that management has issued a memorandum to monitor for that has since been forgotten by the overworked staff. All of these are clues by which The Company could've avoided later troubles of 'fate'. Alas, the butcher goes undetected, and he will soon return in the second setting of observational comparison, in which he will encourage but not himself conduct—fate maintaining its impartiality—the formulation of a curious bio-weapon.

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  That is one, tiny thread of design unfolding in the background.

  That thread and the rest go unnoticed by the fated loser of the hour, called by those cheering in the crowd ‘The Tyrant’, although here that persona is subsidiary to a much older one as a duellist making a historical return.

  The young duellist busies himself in the sections of the arena being cleared, preparing for his last duel with grand, post-maximalist extravagance. For warm-up partners, he fights his own platoons using the artefacts debuted during the previous battle. Like any wise leader, he refrains from killing and further weakening these troops; instead, having lent out some of his armament, he roams in a mini-game of passivist retrieval, the item-carriers getting ambushed and dis-limbed. Many precautions from earlier in the weekend against surveillance, like his blacksite tent, have been forgotten. The mask slipping, he teleports about with the lightning shoes revealed against the cosmic death god and juggles dozens of his weapons with his instant-swap gloves.

  Of the hundreds of points that could be examined, his tactical usage of the weapons has an ever-changing, manic quality. It is something like a conversation between drunken strangers, at moments affable as the duellist trades away his weapons and shouts pointers, at others playful as he one-ups them with increasingly absurd combos, at others grievous as his victims swear vengeance while medics shovel their guts back into their torsos. For most observers, this conversationality, to the extent they even register it, signifies an improvisational casualness. For the better informed, it betrays a desperate effort to evolve beyond the bondages of fate through counter-chaos.

  That higher perspective might also recognise as another point—flashing by in the mix of weapons—the two new swords already beginning to integrate, Worldwalker’s phasing ability being used to somersault out of a four-tank box containment, Worldpiercer sniping a mage from casting at a distance. These join an even more recent acquisition, the duellist wearing an unidentifiable Earthfriend vest that, along with connecting to other abilities like the lightning shoes, enables him to morph into higher-tier forms beyond his level. This vest seems to have been used at points covertly during the fight to absorb several of the monsters slain, and these monsters, some still lying dead on stage, are now reappearing as part of the duellist's ever-changing flesh, their forms being mutated into his juggle and, in turn, mutating his juggle back. Again, the quest to evolve beyond fate dominates. (And, interestingly, this theft of forms is not an accounted-for part of the design, even if some might misinterpret it as such, might draw a false equivalence between the forms and the swords. The swords are part of the design—irrefutably—but not the monster forms. Fate can plead total innocence there because the vest, a not-so-obvious fabrication by the duellist, did not exist when the monsters were being cajoled to rise up in their squashed rebellion. Nevertheless, fate is flexible, and it will adapt to these adaptations.)

  Responses to the duellist’s practise by the watchers in the stands are varied, most being blindly entertained, a few studying very carefully as preparations for their own duels. These fatalistic observations might select someone in the middle:

  “Isn’t that a bit excessive?” comments an Offworlder in a middle-tier seat, eating a cheese-and-pickle hamburger and tasting an absurdity of the design.

  “What’s excessive?” mumbles his comrade, resting off a headache chin-to-chest under the shade of a sombrero.

  “All this flashing about blowing up dudes and whatnot. Doesn’t seem like he’s warming up for the next match at all. This is far too much for a duel. It’s excessive.”

  “Well, excess is The Tyrant’s motto, isn’t it? From the speeches – post-somethingism. Do more.”

  “But this is still too much more. For a duel. Something here, my friend, does not equate. That looks like he’s preparing for a whole battle.”

  “Well, maybe there’s another battle later, then. We just had that one battle. Could be a second bigger battle in store.”

  “But there are no battles on the schedule – I checked. It’s just duels from now on. This category of duels, then another category of duels, and then another category of duels, and then we’re sailing homeward.”

  The sombrero Offworlder grows exasperated. “What do you want me to say, bro? I don’t know what’s happening. Death gods and orcs and snakes and shit out of nowhere, virgin motherfuckers smashing the infrastructure, that crazy bitch dressing like a luchador - nobody can explain any of this. Unless you’re going to walk down there and bypass the guards to ask him yourself, ‘Hey, hey, Tyrant, what are you doing? Amongst all the preposterous freak shit happening today, I’m feeling a minor incongruity with your practice methods that needs answering. Tell me why you’re being excessive.’ you’ve just got to learn to be content in your confusion. That’s life sometimes, bro. It’s confusing but…’ he pauses and joins those searching for a meaning amongst the enigmatic assaults of fate, “…but it is necessary. The confusion, too – it’s all necessary.”

  Others nearby nod in exhausted agreement.

  Such is the increasing fatalistic madness of those barred from understanding the mechanics of the last duel.

  The duellist himself, if his thoughts were probed as to this apparent excess of his practise, would be of no better help. Sneaking down into the ring past his guards, tracking behind him as he teleports about, peeling open his skull, and rummaging through the rapid firing of tactical calculations reveals nothing but an impenetrable soup of motivations: a paranoia initiated by the preceding battle whose strategical mannerisms, once activated, must persist until they’ve been processed by this cool down from it, a growing teenage impatience with playing games, a more mature calculation of this being the best course of action, and an even more mature silence of an entity hibernating calm amidst the outer frenzy.

  Thankfully, his motivations are much less opaque at the highest level of the design. The duellist practises thus because he must, because only by straying too far into the excess of these techniques mismatched for a duel can he be arranged to lose the next one.

  As for the opponent destined to beat him—Justinian The Great, correctly prophesied by the witch Offworlder he just defeated as The Favourite of Fate, The Chosen One, etc—this goofball character has been warming up in his much humbler way. He's been rolling about with sword and shield in the sandpit arena where he bested the mystic and where, in a few minutes, he will deliver the duellist’s fatal blow, his sword of justice penetrating as if into the heart of a dragon or an evil emperor lurking at the end of a chivalric epic.

  This minor crusader of the light, still, remains neither fully in the sights of the crowd nor the duellist, both distracted by previous events and by the timely deaths of anyone attempting to correct their error. This inattention, somewhat contrived, somewhat exploitative of natural tendencies, is another critical feature of the design. The knight’s path to victory must be sheltered right until the end like a fledgling flame against the breeze. Many, many pieces need to coordinate at the perfect moment, and this gives the plot some fragility, such that, if the duellist ever detected it, its negation would be trivial, as simple as the pronouncement of a four-minute pause to recalibrate. As it is, the duellist won’t be taking this or any other countermeasure. He has, at least on one level, over-committed to the same error as everyone else; all, after boxing this knight into a category of irrelevance, have never properly reassessed him, have never perceived the abundance of anomalies colluding with his crusade.

  But, critically, the knight does have a single Offworlder observer, one soul not so aloof.

  By the ringside of his practice—dressed in an imperial costume of a cancelled sketch, a royal-red cloak draping past his waist, a crown of gold atop his beaver-esque mullet—is of all people Alex Wong.

  This co-leader of The Company shows signs between amusement and distress. He strolls around the knight's perimeter with a cup of coffee and a thin-eyed studiousness. His lips shift between puckering and splitting for abrupt guffaws and sneers. A hand fiddles, agitatedly, with the pommel of a zweihander balancing on his shoulder whose golden blade attracts droplets of blood from the surrounding dirt as if they were charged magnetically. His glance alternates between this weapon and Justinian’s own zweihander. The latter’s, when compared with Alex Wong’s, appears to be a rough replica of his own, a forgery cheaply manufactured in a local shanty workshop.

  The copycat weapon acts as an increasing focal point of his rising suspicion, of a question—and a doubt—as to whether this is a coincidence.

  He—Alex Wong betraying a recognition of the knight, who returns a recognition back between the drills as a hostile frown—is detecting in this moment the improbable alignment of factors. Historical conflicts seem to be coordinating with alliances unplanned - or so he believes unplanned. These in turn coordinate with inexplicable overperformances and with a resonant theme repeated in earlier duels—and perhaps forecast by them—of other high-value weapons, particularly swords, undergoing transfers of ownership.

  Is this a coincidence? To Him perhaps. From a more informed vantage point, though, what Alex Wong is truly detecting is the design against him: his fate, like many entangled in the last duel, is to lose his manful sword.

  How? Why? For what precise function must he lose his sword? How is this relevant to the duellist or his duel? And how does one person losing a sword cause another to lose a duel, or vice versa?

  Adequate answer to these questions cannot be provided in this first setting. The actors here are too concentrated on the final phases of the design to fathom and appreciate its larger architecture, which extends across several continents and across not just the preceding two weeks but several Offworlder months before. To understand the greater background, these observances must teleport to a concurrent scene in another location, where the joint history ushering the actors into this moment of superficial serendipity is about to be divulged to a group of hooligans accidentally building a bioweapon.