This is the death of AncientPower:
A starburst of clarity blossoms within i_like_swords's mind, when he says to himself Oh. I get it, now and discovers that the dishonesty within his enemy can be a weapon, too.
It is that simple, and that complex.
And it is final.
AP is dead already. The rest is mere detail.
The play is still on; the comedy of rhetorical quips and emotional snaps and rage-induced hisses. AP and ILS, a one-time-only command performance, for an audience of many. Fabricator and liar, moron and Vitidiot, arguing, lying, forging quotes, crying and weeping, mocking, insulting, b itching and moaning and ripping the thread around them with posts of stupidity.
And all for nothing, because a nuclear flame has consumed i_like_swords's Sheevite restraint, and determination becomes logic without effort, and logic is a blade that makes his arguments into a toy.
The play goes on, but the suspense is over. It has become mere pantomime, as intricate and as meaningless as the space-time curves that guide versus threads through a measureless forum.
AP's decades of debating experience are irrelevant. Its mastery of sophistry is useless. Its vast retardation, its forum influence, flagrant dishonesty, laughably low IQ, unbelievable self-delusion—the pursuits and points of pride to which it has devoted so much of its time and attention over the long, long years of its career—are now chains hung upon its spirit, bending its neck before the ax.
Even its knowledge of the Vitidiocy has become a joke.
It is this knowledge that shows it its death, makes it handle it, turn it this way and that in its mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. AP's comedic farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its loser.
But for ILS, in the fight there is only logic, and rhetoric.
Only he stands between death and the two characters he loves best in all the world, and he can no longer afford to hold anything back. That imaginary pseudo-cowboy tries its best to freeze away his strength, to whisper him that Maul lost before, that Maul has none of the power of Sheev, to remind him how Maul got thrown off a cliff, how Maul could be struck down by even Padawan Obi-Wan himself seemingly without effort and now ILS is all alone and he will never be a able to restore Maul's honor on the forums—
But The Tempest's words Maul moonwalks through the ancient Sith have given ILS permission to unseal the shielding around his furnace heart, and all his frustrations and all his doubts shrivel in its flame.
When AncientPower flies at him, arguments flashing, Maul's fist cracks out from ILS' childhood to knock the Vitidiot tumbling back.
When with all the power that dishonesty can draw from throughout twitter, AP hurls a forged quote from Filoni saying Maul sucks, the Zabrak's confident boast At last we will have revenge, ILS smashes it aside.
His head has been filled with the smoke from his smothered heart for far too long; it has been the thunder that darkens his mind. In Carthage's threads, in Filoni's office, on his couch watching Rebels, that smoke had clouded his mind, had blinded him and left him flailing in the dark, a mindless machine of slaughter; but here now, within this thread, this microscopic cell of life in the infinitesterile desert of KMC, his firewalls have opened so that the anger and the rage are out there, in the fight instead of in his head, and ILS's mind is clear as a crystal bell.
In that pristine clarity, there is only one thing he must do.
Decide.
So he does.
He decides to win.
He decides that AP should lose the same integrity Maul lost.
Decision is reality, here: his arguments moves simultaneously with his will and logical acumen vaporizes black Vitidiot nanosilk and disintegrates flesh and shears bone, and away falls a retard's keyboard hand, trailing smoke that tastes of charred meat and burned hair. The hand falls with a bar of putrid dishonesty still extending from its spastic death grip, and ILS's heart sings for the fall of that disgusting filth.
He reaches out and Maul's newly-restored honor catches it for him.
And then ILS takes AP's other hand as well.
AP crumples to its knees, face blank, mouth slack, and its weapon whirs through the air to the victor's hand, and ILS finds his vision of the future happening before his eyes: two arguments at AP's throat.
But here, now, the truth belies the dream. Both arguments are in his hands, and the one in his hand of poetic justice flares with the blatant bullshit of a sophistic lie.
AP, cringing, shrinking with dread, still finds some hope in its heart that it is wrong, that the forum has not betrayed it, that this has all been proceeding according to plan—
Until he hears "Good, ILS! Good! I knew you could do it!" and registers this is the audience's voice and feels within the darkest depths of all it is the approach of the words that are to come next.
"Kill it," the audience says. "Kill it now."
In 'Swords's eyes it sees only flames.
"KMC, please!" it gasps, desperate and helpless, his aristocratic demeanor invisible, his courage only a bitter memory. He is reduced to begging for its life, as so many of its victims have. "Please, you promised me to inflate my ego! We had a deal! Help me!"
And his begging gains it a share of mercy equal to that which he has dispensed.
"A deal only if you stopped lying," the audience replies, cold as interthread space. "Not if you forged quotes to suit your agenda."
And he knows, then, that all has indeed been going according to plan. The Tempest's plan, not his own. This had been a Sheevite trap indeed, but Sheevites were not the quarry.
They were the bait.
"ILS," the audience says quietly. "Finish it."
Years of watching Maul's humiliations make ILS hesitate; he looks down upon AP and sees not a pathological liar but a beaten, broken, cringing sad creature.
"I shouldn't—"
But when the audience barks, "Do it! Now!" ILS realizes that this isn't actually an order. That it is, in fact, nothing morethan what he's been waiting for his whole life.
Permission.
And AP—
As its looks up into the eyes of i_like_swords for the final time, AncientPower knows that it has been humiliated not just today, but for many, many years. That it has never been a good debater. That it has never been a candidate for the best debaters list. It has been only a loser.
His whole career—all its victories, all its struggles, all its heritage, all its principles and its sacrifices, everything it's done, everything it owns, everything it's been, all its dreams and grand vision for a forum where Vitiate is ranked number 1 and Exar Kun is capable of one-shotting DE Sheev—have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of it, add up only to this.
He has existed only for this.
This.
To be the victim of i_like_swords's first victory in his renewed campaign.
First but not, it knows, the last.
Then the arguments crossed at his throat uncross like scissors.
Snip.
And all of it becomes nothing at all.
Forum Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sheevites
