On the frozen slopes of Reaper’s Rock, a towering warforged named Atlas squared off against Bromir, a snow-rubbing, pony-throwing wrestler with boulders for fists. What began as a brawl full of nipple jokes and growth hormones slowly became something stranger: a fight between two champions who would rather respect each other than kill each other. It ended with one of the most honorable deaths the arena had seen, and with a secret only the Arbiter knew.
The Story
The Anthem and a Late Start
The match opened with music. The Arbiter performed “the ceremonial anthem of our people,” a stirring number heavy on shouts of “Blood!” He confessed afterward that he “took some liberties in the bridge and I went up a little bit,” calling the result “Respectful, but patriotic.” The Grandmaster graciously filed the performance under his “musical hobby” and allowed that “the heart was there.”
Her patience ran out quickly. The Arbiter, it turned out, hadn’t prepared the fight, “despite me apparently asking for this three times earlier today.” Once the champions were finally placed, Bromir low on the mountainside and Atlas perched above him on a precipice, she laid out her terms:
The Grandmaster: “Champions, as we leave this battlefield, do not disappoint me. Give me a show. Give me blood. And when it comes to time, give me death.”
Robot Tin Man and the Lightning Pony
Atlas, played by DeadAussieGamer, shook the ice from his hissing joints and opened with manners. “You, organic man, you appear to be cold in the attire that you wear. Perhaps you would like a coat?” The coat, he explained, was so Bromir could dab the tears from his eyes once Atlas thrashed him. His plates then parted in blue-purple light and he cried “Come forth, Halifax!”, summoning a horse made of crackling lightning.
Bromir, played by Jared, was not intimidated. “You brought a pony to this fight… Let me tell you how it’s done.” He rubbed snow over his body and enlarged himself: “I’m gonna grow up and come down on you, robot tin man.” The Grandmaster immediately wanted his vitamins on her Amazon list, and the Arbiter offered to “ask Jeff Bezos personally.”
Atlas leapt off the precipice, his hydraulics soaking up the landing. His forearm split open into a crossbow of pure energy that loosed five bolts, one of which hit Bromir hard. Bromir flexed off part of the damage (“not today”), then took hold of the crackling Halifax without flinching and threw the horse at Atlas. The yeeted pony missed and landed beside its master, mostly unhurt. Meanwhile the Grandmaster told the Arbiter, “Arbiter, you suck,” and he replied that “Small minds can only handle small tasks,” then rolled his eyes at her behind her back. She never saw it.
Shocks, Blessings and a Blizzard
Halifax became a bolt of lightning and struck Bromir (“Have I somehow summoned a metal Thor to my field?”). Then Atlas called up a tidal wave, and the electrified water found Bromir’s nipples. Bromir was outraged: “No one shocks my nipples except my boyfriend, and I don’t like that, and he won’t like that either.” The Grandmaster mourned the water for other reasons: “I was hoping to put a pool in this place eventually.”
When Bromir whiffed three punches in a row, the Grandmaster took pity. Her wings opened and bathed him in a purple spotlight like a bodybuilder on stage. “An angel of my own,” he marveled. Blessed, he landed two solid punches, and Atlas’s magical ward swallowed every bit of both. Atlas explained himself: “I was built by a monastery of priests to stand against those who would fight against the bulwark of justice. My abjuration engine protects me from those wicked hands.”
Then the mountain turned on them both. A blizzard roared in, blowing the champions across the ice and cutting visibility to almost nothing, with only three braziers offering refuge from the killing cold. Atlas climbed a ladder to one and struck his signature pose: half-kneeling, shouldering a ball of light from his core that showed the Grandmaster’s face. Charmed, she made his flame grow. Bromir, for his part, admitted, “What is a mammal? I don’t even know what that is, brother.”
Mountains Falling
Bromir leapt thirty feet into the air and dropped an elbow on poor Halifax, and Atlas answered with a blast of radiant light that punished the attack. The Grandmaster was unimpressed by how little menace Bromir was managing, so she injected him with the Amazon supplements herself. He grew another size, tall enough to stand face to face with Atlas on the ledge and share his fire. “The cream rises to the top just like I did,” Bromir boasted. “Dead birds also float,” came the reply.
Atlas brought the mountainside down on him. Halifax kicked at his calves while Bromir held his ground with a perfectly timed flex, and then he vanished under the boulders. In the rubble he stepped on a crushed healing potion, left behind by miners who had died there earlier. Atlas then grabbed the torch and crushed its flame in his fist: “The Grandmaster did not come here to watch me break you.” Bromir got his revenge by collapsing more of the cliff on everyone. Atlas held his shield against what the table called “a literal mountain.”
The Snow Bridge
The ground heaved and split open into a chasm “we’ve yet to find the bottom of,” spanned only by a thin bridge of ice. Atlas teleported across it so Bromir’s back was to the drop. Halifax, wandering blind through the snow, got his tongue frozen to the wall.
Bromir hoisted Atlas into a grapple and carried him out onto the bridge: “Let’s raise the stakes, Tin Man.” The ice cracked under their combined weight. Atlas didn’t struggle. He simply stared at Bromir. “Respect. I show you respect,” Bromir said, and he threw Atlas clear before leaping to safety himself.
Moved, the Grandmaster gave each of them a greater healing potion with a toast: “As we fight, we live. And as we live, we fight for what we love. We should never give up on either.” Atlas, having no mouth, tossed his potion to Bromir. “Atlas, I respect you,” Bromir said. “You earned the right of your name.”
Two Champions, Equal Footing
Atlas reabsorbed Halifax’s lightning, a heartbeat-like pulse in his core, and transformed into a war machine with a massive upper body and hands floating free of his forearms on gouts of energy. He threw his shield into the pit and took up his sword in both hands. The Grandmaster was so moved she ended the blizzard, and Atlas made a superhero landing across the gap.
Bromir had one request: “Allow me to return to my true size so I may face him on equal footing.” With a wave of her jeweled hand, the Grandmaster drew the drug back out of him. He charged screaming “Oh yeah!”, unleashed a thunderous blast and flexed. Her verdict: “This was cooler when you were bigger.” Atlas swung his huge longsword like a baseball bat, Bromir swept his legs and slapped him, and neither landed much. Bromir wiped the blood from his face and stared Atlas down until the machine hesitated, recalibrating.
The Arbiter’s Elemental
Watching them, the Arbiter grew suspicious: “These two seem to be delaying the inevitable. It seems that they don’t even want to kill each other, really.” The Grandmaster let him pick the next chaos, warning him that she had “two options already in front of me” to replace him. He fused a water elemental and an air elemental into an ice elemental with two spinning faces, “like a twisty ice cream cone.” It flipped spectacularly over the chasm and then merely splashed the champions (“You feel slightly hydrated”). Even its creator conceded, “Sometimes two heads are better than one. Clearly, this was a mistake over here.”
The rivals became a team. Bromir asked for a boost, and Atlas answered “This unit will comply,” spun his waist a full circle and catapulted Bromir into a double-leg drop on the elemental. The creature whirled Bromir into the chasm, but Atlas hurled his sword into the cliff wall as a foothold, and Bromir caught it ten feet down. Atlas then dropped his transformation and fired a disintegrating beam from the siege engine on his back, blowing a hole straight through the elemental. “Atlas is unbreakable,” he declared. The crowd threw trash at the elemental.
The Fall
Hanging from the sword, Bromir made his choice. He taunted the creature (“Snow Cone… I’ll fight you all the way to the second level of hell”), hauled himself up one-handed and blasted the cliff edge with thunder. The elemental’s water vaporized, and it fell into the ravine. So did he. As he dropped, he saluted Atlas with Atlas’s own sword, threw it back to him and flexed at the Grandmaster.
Bromir: “Well fought, sir. You beat Bromir with a boulder fist. Go on to do better.”
The Grandmaster and the entire crowd flexed back in salute. Atlas refused to accept it. “No. Illogical. Atlas has not beaten you yet.” He reached through the cliff itself to grab Bromir by the neck, but his iced hands slipped. The Grandmaster stopped him: “Some deaths must happen on this field, and there are few that come as noble as the one Bromir showed us today. Let it stand, and we will honor him.” Atlas gave the anthem salute.
Far below, Bromir fell through an eternity of galaxies and stars. Out of nowhere, the Arbiter appeared. “You may have fallen on the field, but I still have a use for you.” He grabbed Bromir by the throat and vanished with him, unbeknownst to anybody.
Crowned at Reaper’s Rock
The Grandmaster raised a small mountain beneath Atlas and named him winner of Reaper’s Rock: “You have true heart that no flesh and blood could ever mimic.” She sent him home to fulfill his charge, “to bring justice. To offer protection where it is needed,” and promised to bring him back one day for “a true fight. That you may also kiss death.” The Acolytes chanted “Atlas!” until some of them fainted. Atlas said nothing. He knelt and shouldered his orb of light with her face in it.
Notable Moments
- Bromir picked up a horse made of lightning and threw it at its owner.
- The tidal wave that shocked Bromir’s nipples, and his concern for his boyfriend’s feelings about it.
- The Grandmaster dosed Bromir with Amazon supplements, then removed them when he asked to fight fair.
- Halifax got his tongue frozen to the wall in the blizzard.
- The rivals teamed up, with Atlas spinning his waist all the way around to catapult Bromir at the ice elemental.
- Bromir’s sacrificial fall, saluted by a flexing Grandmaster and crowd, and his secret capture by the Arbiter.
Memorable Quotes
- The Arbiter: “I took some liberties in the bridge and I went up a little bit… Respectful, but patriotic.”
- Atlas: “You, organic man, you appear to be cold in the attire that you wear. Perhaps you would like a coat?”
- Bromir: “No one shocks my nipples except my boyfriend.”
- The Grandmaster: “As we fight, we live. And as we live, we fight for what we love. We should never give up on either.”
- Bromir: “Allow me to return to my true size so I may face him on equal footing.”
- Atlas: “No. Illogical. Atlas has not beaten you yet.”
- The Grandmaster: “Some deaths must happen on this field, and there are few that come as noble as the one Bromir showed us today.”
- The Arbiter: “You may have fallen on the field, but I still have a use for you.”
Who and What Appears
Atlas. Warforged built by a monastery of priests to defend “the bulwark of justice.” Abjuration engine (arcane ward), shield master, longsword, a siege engine on his back; casts spells (steel wind strike, tidal wave, mold earth, passwall, disintegrate, Tenser’s transformation, channel divinity Rebuke Violence). Speaks of himself in the third person: “Atlas is unbreakable.” Signature pose honoring the Grandmaster with an orb of light bearing her face. Summons Halifax. A tiny engraving somewhere on him reads “Nokia” (player joke, 1:56:18). Winner of Reaper’s Rock; sent home to fulfill his charge; promised a return.
Halifax. Atlas’s horse of crackling lightning. Thrown by Bromir, elbow-dropped, got its tongue stuck to a frozen wall, reabsorbed into Atlas.
Bromir. Champion with boulder fists (“Bromir’s Boulder Fists”), wrestler persona (“brother,” “Oh yeah!,” “the smackdown”), fighter with sorcery (enlarge, jump, thunderwave). Has a boyfriend. Mentions “Mama’s Playland.” Resistant to cold. Grew twice the size by the Grandmaster’s gift, then asked to return to normal to fight fair. Fell into the abyss in a self-sacrifice that killed the ice elemental. Secretly taken by the Arbiter: “I still have a use for you.” (One of the Arbiter’s secret revivals, per DM_NOTES.)
The Grandmaster. Wings that glow purple; jeweled hands; grants Bless, potions, growth and the end of the blizzard; values honor and sportsmanship. Threatens to replace the Arbiter.
The Arbiter. Musical hobby (the anthem); poor dice; rolls his eyes behind her back; designs the fused ice elemental; secretly takes the fallen Bromir.
The ice elemental. A fusion of water and air elementals with two spinning faces. Destroyed.
The dead miners. Died in the rock slide area earlier; one left a healing potion.
Places
- Reaper’s Rock: a frozen, snowy mountainside arena; a precipice, a ladder, three braziers, a rock wall, a bottomless chasm under a snow bridge, remains of miners. (Probably the same place as Kirken’s Mine from S1E4, per Mudcat; no mine is named here.)
- The abyss under Reaper’s Rock: Bromir falls past “galaxies and stars.”
Show details
- The anthem has words (“Blood!”); the Arbiter performs it; champions salute.
- The crowd: “acolytes of our Grandmaster.”
- Chaos events triggered by “fate rolls” (rules mechanic).
Full Round-by-Round
Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)
- 0:00:00 — Anthem. The recording starts as the Grandmaster calls the champions to the middle. The Arbiter performs “the ceremonial anthem of our people” (“Blood! … Undeth!”). He “took some liberties in the bridge and I went up a little bit.” The Grandmaster calls it his “musical hobby”: “the heart was there.”
- 0:01:46 — Placement. The Grandmaster complains that the Arbiter hasn’t prepared the fight “despite me apparently asking for this three times earlier today.” Bromir starts low; Atlas “over here with some elevation.” “Give me a show. Give me blood. And when it comes to time, give me death.”
- 0:05:27 — Atlas’s opening. Atlas (a warforged; his joints hiss, shaking off ice) offers “organic man” a coat “so you can dab the tears from your eyes once I thrash you.” His plates separate in blue-purple light: “Come forth, Halifax!” He summons Halifax, a horse made of crackling lightning (phantom steed flavored as an elemental spirit).
- 0:07:30 — Bromir’s opening. “You brought a pony to this fight… I’m at Mama’s Playland right now. Yeah, brother.” Bromir rubs snow on his body and enlarges himself: “I’m gonna grow up and come down on you, robot tin man.” The Grandmaster wants his vitamins on her Amazon list; the Arbiter offers to “ask Jeff Bezos personally.”
- 0:10:37 — Steel wind strike. Atlas leaps down off the precipice (hydraulics absorb the landing). His forearm splits into a crossbow of energy firing five bolts; one hits Bromir hard. Bromir flexes off part of it (“not today”). The Grandmaster: “It was one of my favorites growing up.”
- 0:19:23 — Bromir throws the pony. He passes a constitution check to touch the lightning horse, picks up Halifax and throws it at Atlas (“Yeeting the pony”). It misses, but lands beside Atlas, unhurt but for a few points.
- 0:23:52 — Arbiter and Grandmaster. “Arbiter, you suck.” “Small minds can only handle small tasks.” He turns and rolls his eyes at her; she doesn’t see it.
- 0:24:47 — Lightning and the tidal wave. Halifax turns into a bolt and strikes Bromir (“Have I somehow summoned a metal Thor to my field?”). Atlas casts Tidal Wave; the electrified water shocks Bromir’s nipples. Bromir: “No one shocks my nipples except my boyfriend, and I don’t like that, and he won’t like that either.” The Grandmaster: “I was hoping to put a pool in this place eventually.”
- 0:30:21 — Bromir misses three punches; the Grandmaster grants him Bless: her wings open and purple light spotlights him like a bodybuilder. “An angel of my own.” With action surge he lands two punches, but Atlas’s arcane ward soaks all of it.
- 0:36:45 — Atlas’s origin: “I was built by a monastery of priests to stand against those who would fight against the bulwark of justice. My abjuration engine protects me from those wicked hands.”
- 0:38:20 — Chaos event: blizzard. Both are blown 15 feet (Bromir rolls a nat 1). Visibility drops to 10 feet; they take escalating cold damage unless within reach of one of three braziers. Atlas climbs a ladder to a brazier and honors the Grandmaster with his pose: half-kneeling, shouldering a ball of light from his core showing her face. She makes his flame grow. Bromir: “What is a mammal? I don’t even know what that is, brother.”
- 0:47:34 — Bromir’s elbow drop. He casts jump, leaps 30 feet and drops an elbow on Halifax. Atlas’s Rebuke Violence blasts Bromir with radiant light. The Grandmaster, unimpressed by Bromir’s menace, injects him with the Amazon supplements and makes him grow another size, tall enough to stand face to face with Atlas on the ledge and share his fire. “The cream rises to the top just like I did.” “Dead birds also float.”
- 0:59:34 — Rock slide. Atlas uses mold earth to bring the mountainside down on Bromir; Halifax kicks his calves (he stays up with a nat 20 flex). Bromir is buried in boulders. In the rubble he steps on a crushed healing potion left by dead miners who were caught there (1:07:43). Atlas then grabs the torch and crushes its flame in his fist: “The Grandmaster did not come here to watch me break you.” The Grandmaster: death “only has one eye.”
- 1:09:00 — Bromir collapses more of the cliff on everyone. Atlas shields himself and keeps hold of his shield against “a literal mountain.” Bromir catches his breath. “We don’t drug here, minus the growth hormones I gave you.” “The Blood Scouts” swear on honor.
- 1:14:38 — Chaos event: the snow bridge. The ground heaves and opens a chasm “we’ve yet to find the bottom of,” covered by a thin ice bridge that can be crossed three times.
- 1:17:45 — Atlas teleports with steel wind strike across the snow bridge so Bromir’s back is to the chasm. Halifax wanders blind and gets his tongue frozen to the wall.
- 1:26:02 — Bromir grapples Atlas with a nat 20 squat and carries him onto the ice bridge: “Let’s raise the stakes, Tin Man.” The ice breaks under their combined weight. Atlas doesn’t struggle and stares at him. Bromir: “Respect. I show you respect.” He throws Atlas clear and jumps with a flex; both make it to solid ground.
- 1:32:30 — The Grandmaster’s toast. She gives both a greater healing potion: “As we fight, we live. And as we live, we fight for what we love.” Atlas has no mouth and throws his potion to Bromir. Bromir: “Atlas, I respect you. You earned the right of your name.”
- 1:34:35 — Tenser’s transformation. Atlas reabsorbs Halifax’s lightning (a heartbeat-like pulse in his core) and transforms into a war machine: massive upper body, hands floating free of his forearms, held by gouts of energy. He throws his shield into the pit and takes his sword in both hands. Moved, the Grandmaster ends the blizzard. Superhero landing across the gap.
- 1:41:19 — Bromir asks to return to his true size “so I may face him on equal footing.” She draws the drug back out with a wave of her jeweled hand. He runs at Atlas screaming “Oh yeah!” and casts Thunderwave, then flexes; the Grandmaster: “This was cooler when you were bigger.”
- 1:45:38 — Atlas’s sword (the sound of cocking shotguns, a huge longsword swung like a baseball bat, then reversed). Bromir sweeps his legs and slaps him, all glancing blows; he wipes blood from his face and stares Atlas down, and Atlas hesitates (“Recalibrating. Little pinwheels of death”).
- 1:56:51 — The Arbiter’s chaos event. The Grandmaster lets him choose, threatening to replace him (“I have two options already in front of me”). He fuses a water elemental and an air elemental into an ice elemental with two spinning faces (“like a twisty ice cream cone”). It does an aerobatic flip over the chasm but at first only splashes them (“You feel slightly hydrated”). “Sometimes two heads are better than one. Clearly, this was a mistake over here.”
- 2:05:46 — Teamwork. Bromir asks Atlas for a boost; “this unit will comply.” Atlas spins his waist 360 degrees and catapults Bromir into a double-leg drop on the elemental.
- 2:11:48 — The elemental whirls Bromir into the chasm. Atlas throws his sword into the chasm wall as a foothold; Bromir catches it and hangs ten feet down. Atlas drops his transformation and fires a 7th-level disintegrate from a siege engine on his back, blowing a hole through the elemental’s body. “Atlas is unbreakable.” The crowd throws trash at the elemental.
- 2:21:35 — Bromir’s sacrifice. He goads the elemental (“Snow Cone… I’ll fight you all the way to the second level of hell”), does a one-handed pull-up (nat 20) and Thunderwaves the cliff edge, vaporizing the elemental’s water and dropping it, and himself, into the ravine. He salutes Atlas with Atlas’s sword: “Well fought, sir. You beat Bromir with a boulder fist. Go on to do better,” throws the sword back and flexes at the Grandmaster as he falls. The Grandmaster and the whole crowd flex back in salute.
- 2:26:34 — Atlas tries to save him (“Illogical. Atlas has not beaten you yet”): he casts passwall to reach into the cliff and grab Bromir by the neck, but his iced hands slip. The Grandmaster: “Some deaths must happen on this field, and there are few that come as noble as the one Bromir showed us today. Let it stand, and we will honor him.” Atlas gives the anthem salute.
- 2:29:56 — The Arbiter’s secret. “Down below the field in the abyss, Bromir falling through an eternity, galaxies and stars… Out of nowhere, the Arbiter appears to him. You may have fallen on the field, but I still have a use for you. As he grabs you by the throat and poofs you away. Unbeknownst to anybody.”
- 2:30:39 — Atlas crowned winner of Reaper’s Rock. The Grandmaster raises a small mountain under him: “You have true heart that no flesh and blood could ever mimic.” She sends him back home “that you may fulfill the charge that has been granted to you. To bring justice. To offer protection where it is needed,” promising to bring him back for “a true fight. That you may also kiss death.” The crowd chants “Atlas!” until some faint. Atlas says nothing, kneels and shoulders his orb of light with her face in it.