It has been several months since we last introduced you to the cultural event known as "Blaseball," a league game in the name of baseball in which players bet fake coins on simulated games between fictitious teams. Much has happened in the months since then. Through concerted voting, fans have successfully performed black magic and brought back the Jaylen Hotdog Finger. A giant peanut renamed a bunch of players peanuts, and began trapping the league's most idolized players not named Peanut in a giant peanut shell. Squid showed up.

Blaseball was also played, giving fans the highs, lows, and camaraderie of real sports, just by watching through a web browser text feed It's easy to get carried away by the magical realism of Blaseball's overarching story, but It's worth keeping in mind that everything is underpinned by a solid sports foundation of underdogs, incredible comebacks, and punishing, brutal defeats.

And now, at the end of Season 9, it is clear that there is a seemingly unbeatable entity looking to wreak havoc on the league: after a tough battle with the Baltimore Crabs, who were favored to win for the third time, Charleston's Shoe Seavers scored a triple in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the Internet Series. home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to complete an incredible comeback to win the Internet Series for the first time. The reward for their victory was that they were forced to face off against the Angry God's henchmen.

Fortunately, the whole thing was recorded for posterity. You can watch it in its entirety in the video below. The battle begins around 23:10.

To explain, the fans have something of an adversarial relationship with "The Shelled One," who is the aforementioned giant peanut and represents one of the pantheon of Brass Ball gods. Things came to a head at the end of Season 8 when the players "wasted" 100 million peanuts by donating them to the Hall Monitor (squid as a tribute to the dead players). We were officially put on The Shelled One's shit list.

The shoe thieves were the first to be punished as The Shelled One demanded all currently shelled players in the league and unleashed them against the champions. This new team, THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS, came loaded with OP status buffs. This was not a normal game; strikeouts and runs scored sapped the opposing team's spirit. This was not a game, but a JRPG boss fight, like the early stages of a campaign where the heroes were scripted to be unwinnable; Shelled One played with the shoe thieves, taunted them, and ultimately defeated and cursed them.

Season 10 is about to begin, and this probably won't be the last we hear from The Shelled One, although you can watch all the developments for yourself by signing up for a free account on the Blaseball site. For a recap, I recommend looking at the Wiki timeline.