The second setting of comparison.

  Outside the stadium, while the last duel undergoes its final preparations, the marketplace and festival grounds have broken into a chequerboard of chaos. In some areas, a civil peace holds out, business carrying on under The Company’s surveilling umbrage. Other regions interlaced with these are not so fortunate. They have plunged into a lawless madness, hundreds of thousands of Offworlder marauders duking it out amidst the collapsed wreckages of buildings. The landscape under these rioting mobs is swept with fire and the bloody grunts of clashing mass formations. Forts are sacked. Defences are blasted aside with volleys of lightning. Struggling for footholds on the debris, the isolated are ambushed, the routed are run down, the heroic make their final stands to glory in the ecstasies of self-annihilation.

  Where has this unruly horde originated from? What is their motivation? Such questions, of interest to some, are mostly tangential to the present observations of the last duel.

  There is, however, one peculiar scene in a section of the destroyed marketplace about to host a battle between two enemy alliances. The territory is currently being contested by vanguard patrols, who skirmish as they survey and modify the forts left over from a previous battle.

  Right in the middle of this action, a lone patrol consisting of middleschool hooligans has abandoned their duties. They stand gathered, watching with sickly fascination, as a butcher—a random butcher with a massive mushroom-shaped hat—hacks apart a camel, unpacks its organs, and quips as he describes the preferred method of cooking each organ.

  “The cops assert this one is too inedible for sale,” says this butcher, displaying to the circling hooligans a neon-orange gland that smells as poisonous as its hue suggests. “Actually, it’s quite tolerable with a few splashes of lime juice.”

  The hooligan patrol had initially caught this stranger driving his wagon through the area. They’d first presumed he was one of the many scavengers touring these battlefields for forgotten gear, or perhaps an enemy spy pretending to be a scavenger. He was instead, according to confessed fact, a butcher with radical anarcho-capitalist tendencies, who’d looked upon these battlefields and recognised an ideal market without the stranglehold of state-backed monopoly. The boys, before killing this madman, had decided on a bit of playful bullying - they’d given him a perverse request with the intention of attacking after refusal, the group asking for a serving of nothing from his wagon but the camel needed to pull it. To their surprise, however, the butcher had acquiesced happily, apologising to his mount in soothing tones before snapping its neck.

  The butcher squeezes a lime over the camel’s neon-orange gland, the juice of the fruit dribbling pink with the blood from his fingers. “The shock if you survive will also triple the power of your immune system, and that’s the real reason the cops forbid it – to keep us, the free people, weak of body and enslaved of wallet to their overly-sanitised industrial produce. Eat it raw for the best boost!”

  He tosses the disgusting gland to one boy. The boy dodges. The gland flying past this boy rolls in the dirt, which prompts the anarcho-capitalist butcher to claim its dollar value has only increased from the extra probiotics.

  Most of the group’s attention is not on any of these absurdities but on an eye-catching scimitar being used by the butcher for his work. Pulled out from beneath his giant mushroom hat—which also hides his antlers and several other joke props—the weapon has a blade made from a thin sheet of glass. The blade is thin. It is so thin that, inspecting it point down, it seems invisible, as if the butcher were flicking about a broken-off handle. Despite its apparent fragility, however, the blade processes the camel meat with ease, snipping through joint and bone with no more friction than if they were stalks of early summer wheat.

  In an Offworlder telecommunication channel, they are presently debating who will claim this scimitar after the butcher joins his camel in death. When assertions based on seniority fail, they decide it would rightly go to the last survivor of a democratic free-for-all. This decision is correct, but not in the precise sense imagined. Fate with its sense of humour will invert the arrangement slightly – the last to survive a looming battle will indeed receive the sword, but that survivor will not be any of them but the bioweapon they give birth to.

  The butcher, reading in the boys’ designs against him the larger designs of fate, gives a mischievous smirk. “But enough of business. Why aren’t you smart customers tuned into the last duel? Have the state-promoted commercials triggered your sense of economic injustice? Or have you, like many, lost the plot in the torrent of distractions? Or do neither of the parties chosen for the last duel spark your fancy?”

  Several boys respond dismissively. They see no way for the last match to equal the duellist’s preceding free-for-all, especially after the defeat of The Third Gate, for whose theatrics some of them had been rooting.

  “Show’s baked,” answers one hooligan. “Ain’t no point after sis got the spin by that lucky knight fucker. Old T’s gonna slap him and that’s that.”

  “Shit’s Greg,” adds another in indecipherable Offworlder middleschooler slang.

  “Fermented Greg,” elaborates another hooligan. “Hours and hours of setup for sis’s doomsday plot scrapped for nothing. Because of luck.”

  “Or because of fate,” says the butcher, mimicking their frustration as he splits a camel thighbone and scoops the marrow out onto a serving plate. “Yes, her departure has been categorically Greg and borderline Urkel. I join you customers in commiserating her loss without duress or bribery. She was—quite honestly—a child of the first anarchic half of my heart, even if we’d disagree strongly around the commercially-maturer second. Gone with her is the youthful voice of opposition that points out this event’s ‘gifts’ of coin and spectacle might not be so free. There is always a price. Do you fine customers know that price?”

  The hooligans do not even understand the question.

  The butcher nods as if they’d answered perfectly. “Yes, the best answer is silence – us lovers of liberty must, for reasons of self-preservation, remain cryptically aloof from the ever-listening cops. But, for those who do grope the price’s form through the obscurities, there is certainly some wisdom in Sister Gate’s example, isn’t there? We, too—if we didn’t have bills to pay or anti-statist coups to fund—might also leave the stadiums and wander shoeless through this land of ash and rubble, possessing if nothing of apparent material value then at least that more essential thing not traded for a shadow’s coin - the price. In this, I suppose we have another answer to why you customers are not tuned in to the last duel, an answer within the answer. How Urkel.”

  The boys are dumbfounded by the butcher’s ramblings, which they attribute to the same capture-inflicted hysteria underlying him killing his mount and serving it to them for food. Nevertheless, they do agree that The Third Gate’s plight is Urkel - astringently Urkel.

  Some boys have been investigating the contents of the butcher’s wagon. It contains a curious assortment of carcasses. They look unregulated, not exactly the type one envisions in a palatable or legal meal – python-sized centipedes, dog-headed Goblybeasts, bipedal hedgehogs, a mound of crushed tarantulas, one disease-yellow parrot. These monsters, which tickle amongst the hooligans a foggy recognition, are spread around an elaborate Carcassworker’s contraption with several metal drums connected by a tangle of leather hoses.

  One boy is about to fiddle with a dial. The butcher leaps like a panicked gazelle back into the wagon and slaps away his naughty fingers.

  “Good customer, do not touch that unless you want trouble and anarchy!” warns the man gravely. “And certainly don’t twist it 82 degrees counterclockwise into the cold-boil setting! And definitely don’t do that after injecting three Blood-element-infused stones into these slots!” He jabs a warning finger at a configuration. “Plus four Fires and a Plague in that other slot – you must, absolutely, not add those unless you want trouble…and anarchy.”

  The radical anarcho-capitalist butcher continues to rant through warnings, which seem, by their specificity, to be a step-by-step guide for operating the contraption.

  Some might call a foul on this, the butcher not even maintaining the pretence of fate’s impartiality. But, in fact, his instructions are woefully deficient, and it would take an unlikely miracle to execute them into the bioweapon’s completion, an impossible coordination of fragmentary skills learned by the boys earlier in the week and two additional specialists who would have to arrive in the middle of the battle, one of them an enemy (albeit a spy only pretending to be an enemy). Not to mention, the viability of these instructions rests on an assumption of the boys possessing the right supply of toxic animal components, another obstacle according to regular market conditions, where such dangerous items wouldn’t even be permitted through customs. It is, economically, impossible.

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  Leaving the hooligans confused, the butcher returns to his camel, the sides of his giant mushroom hat lifting as he squeezes out of the wagon.

  He resumes the interrupted topic of the last duel. “But, good customers, I’ll have you know that this day is only superficially Urkel, and there may be reason yet to not divest our souls from the stadium. The last duel, between our crusader and Him—”

  “It’s a series,” interjects a hooligan, annoyed by the old man’s constant mistake on this point. “Not one duel – five duels.

  The butcher snickers ironically. “We’ll see if fate cares for your semantic pedantry. But as I was saying, this last duel, between our crusader and Him, abounds beneath its surface pointlessness with all the same dramatic, soul-expanding morsels of the battle preceding, and it has far more of these to offer than what our defeated mystic might have in its stead. This last duel has its own profound history of conflict and grudges, of comical confusions of identity, of strange encounters with gods, of wagers manly and reckless, of impressively-long periods of training. It even has the unique theme of unique swords.” His glass scimitar bisects the camel’s spine. “Good customers, you don’t believe me? You don’t believe that this last duel is packed full, from feet to brain, right through to the bursting wallet of the soul?”

  What the hooligans, studying the stranger weirdly, can’t believe is that this lone individual surviving at their mercy would talk to them so arrogantly.

  “Good!” he continues. “You shouldn’t believe me, just a no-name, innocent butcher peddling his wares on the wonderfully unregulated marketplace of ideas. But you might believe this:” He reaches under his giant mushroom hat and plucks out a notebook; the words, ‘The Knight’, are pencilled on its cover, the letters smeared by a splash of blood that appears still moist - and human. “This treasure contains all the juicy insider information behind the duel that less-privileged eyes will never see until it’s far too late to short. It once belonged to an assistant of a certain mystical ‘Sis’ recently eliminated from a certain tournament. The assistant’s task had been to research her opponents for the formulation of satirical skits. During this, he’d uncovered the knight’s secret history, recited second-hand at an amateur competition by a bard who mistook it for a fabrication. As for how this treasure came into my lucky fingers, it was dropped by her assistant, promoted to narration duties, after an incensed crowd stabbed him to death. The acquirer, mistaking the loot for worthless, exchanged it with me for a hyena leg - one of those splendidly-lopsided trades possible only under ideal market conditions of irrationality.” He gestures fondly at the devastated scenery around them, at the smashed remnants of stalls hammered into stakes and barriers, at the smell of ash carried to them by the winds of war. “The book is too valuable for sale, but I am willing to recite from it – for a small price.”

  A quick series of actions unravel from these banal admissions. One hooligan, who’d tried and failed to find a recording of The Third Gate’s duels, recognises a temporospatial incongruity in the butcher’s account. The time between the death of the notebook owner—assuming them to be one of The Third Gate’s killed narrators—and their group’s ambush does not align. It is far too brief to travel the kilometres of distance between the current location and the stadium. One would have to teleport – an impossibility. The observant youth accuses the butcher of deception, and the butcher defends himself with a string of vulgar jokes in praise of his dead camel’s impressive raciness, jokes which imply, from claims of experience with its speed in multiple areas, that he’s committed bestiality with it. Most of the boys are disturbed by the contrast of this defence, given with a lustful nostalgia, and the butcher being drenched in the beast’s inner fluids as he dismembers it. One hooligan, however—the group’s leader, operating in a more critical, rational space—has an epiphany. They realise, putting together several contextual hints like the bestiality and references to souls, that the butcher has in fact not lied, that he has the unique capacity to traverse great distances because the group has unwittingly attempted to ambush Saana’s teleporting, animal-seducing, soul-expanding deity. In reward for this recognition, the leader receives an approving wink from said deity along with the transmission of a questline to potentially earn the glass sword being flaunted if they can survive to hear the knight’s history as contained in the notebook. For such a mighty prize, several extra hidden conditions are attached beyond survival, one of which the leader presumes to be the completion of the earlier given non-instructions for operating the butcher’s contraption to produce a bioweapon. The rest of the conditions are not of much observational interest because the leader is decreed by fate to fail, the leader’s destiny being to burn alive after the other hooligans are decimated in a battle about to break out. There is, knowing this end already, a futility in over-examining the leader’s doomed efforts, their instantaneous assignment of the hooligans to construct fortifications, their begging for support from the general of their army, their additional communications with the ousted Offworlder Ramiro for whom the leader is a female agent merely pretending to be a teenage boy, their seemingly-impossible performance in this crisis as a consequence of that dual identity, etc.

  The butcher watches everything unfold with an appreciation of destructive transformations. The boys, one moment confidently trapping him, are trembling the next in their make-shift defences, studying with paranoia for the enemy scouts around them recalled as a background threat. There is a state of confusion, their leader withholding a full explanation for their orders. Nevertheless, the souls of the boys comprehend everything – this is what they have been seeking all this time through the eternal boredom that dumped them here outside a stadium’s oppressive walls.

  The butcher is left for the requirements of the quest with an audience of three stooges, plus the leader buried nearby underground in a hole that they will be incinerated in. He begins to read from the notebook of The Third Gate’s assistant in a thick Somali accent.

  “‘To the sweet lady of apocalypse—” He immediately breaks away in explanation. “Supplementary commentary on the knight’s tale is provided by the assistant, trying to suck up for a spot on stage. This cannot be skipped because it contains many valuable insights missed in the original tale – a full understanding of the last duel requires reading between many cryptic lines.” He coughs in resumption. “‘To the sweet lady of apocalypse, here is transcribed the recording from a village competition this August past. The tale, which took 17th place, provides a curious background on the knight Justinian that I believe will prove highly useful in our stage productions.’”

  “17th place out of how many?” asks one of the stooges, a 7-year-old younger brother who could serve no combat value.

  A muted scream rumbles underground nearby, the leader noticing an increase to their survival timer. “Shut the fuck up! Don’t ask him questions!”

  “17th out of 19,” answers the butcher without referencing anything in the notebook. “Although we shouldn’t judge the quality of the tale based on that – the contestants below were disqualified for stabbing one of the judges.” He coughs again. “‘It tells of—’ No, no, there are too many spoilers and redundancies in this donkey-kisser’s introduction. Skip it: Blah blah swords, blah blah wagers, blah blah mistaken identities. ‘Please, my queen of devastation, if you have any gratitude for this discovery, then allow me to take second lead on the sketches of this imitation Quixote.” That’s a Don Quixote reference. Do you boys know Don Quixote? It’s a wonderful Offworlder romance about another knight.”

  “DON’T ANSWER! DON’T YOU USELESS SHITS DIALOGUE AT ALL!”

  The butcher’s face, when the stooges abide this instruction, flashes with a humourless coldness. “You are shrinking with each self-insulting act of compliance to this dead master.” His smile resumes. “‘I am overflowing with inspiration, and my loyalties are to both you and the stage, unlike Ibraahiim, that two-faced narcissist who, no matter his talent, is only motivated by a quest to enlarge his public profile and to bed more of these easy European skanks. My vocal mimicry is improving, alhamdulilah, and it will no longer embarrass your impeccable example. Please, my dirt-haired angel, please, please, please! You will not be disappointed in any favours bestowed upon Warmooge.’”

  Just as he is about to break into the story proper, a scout with binoculars reports movements in the distance. A box tumbles randomly down a mound of rubble, having been accidentally kicked by a stealthed combatant. A reply to the hooligan’s leader from command confirms it isn’t one of their own. The leader can’t be sure how much has been exposed - they send up an urgent request for their cavalry to feign a push elsewhere, just to buy time for the arrival of reinforcements.

  The butcher chuckles at these na?ve attempts of youth to dodge its fate. “No, good customers. The silent phases of this auction have concluded. Others come, with purses thick and jingling, and choice now is only to outbid them through the largess of your soul or to go home with nothing - as nothing.”

  Leading his trail of three stooges, he prances over to the meat wagon and, lifting a leg, rips a comic flatulence that peels off the vehicle’s canvas roof and exposes the boys inside rushing to operate his contraption. Another gust collapses a wall being erected to obscure him during the recitation. From under his mushroom hat, he pulls out a concert-sized harp. Plucking this one-handed, still reading from the notebook, he begins to sing-talk with the eccentricity and volume of a bard. His voice and music carry far out over the battlefield, drawing attention from both enemies and allies nearby.

  “Oooooooh!” he swings into the song with a piratey lilt. “This next strange fantasy that’s sung comes from the town Byzantium…”