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Tri Tail is a three-tailed cat spirit and one of the encounters put in front of players at the 2026 Offline Playtest of Swords of Legends. It is the lightest of the fights shown so far in tone, built around a single joke that the encounter then takes seriously, and hands-on accounts agreed it was among the least demanding of the build.

Two Forms

The fight opens with a small, soft-looking kitten that reads as harmless. The moment the hero closes in it swells into something far larger: a heavily muscled brawler that throws its full weight behind every punch. The transformation is played for comedy rather than horror, because the face does not change with the body. The same round, guileless kitten features sit on top of the new frame, which is the joke the whole encounter is built on.

The larger form does not simply drop the animal. Cat behaviour keeps surfacing through the fight, and the boss cycles through a recognisably feline moveset rather than a generic beast one.

The Ball

A rattan ball styled after cuju, the old Chinese kickball game, appears in the inventory during this encounter, and it is the one piece of the fight that rewards experimenting. Thrown at the boss in its large form it does nothing, which is why early accounts of the build reported it as an unexplained prop. It works on the small form: when the cat reverts to its kitten shape, throwing the ball stops it dead for several seconds, long enough to be a real opening. The item is a stun rather than a curiosity, and it only reads that way if the player tries it in the right phase.

It is also a neat piece of symmetry with the boss's own ranged attack, since the fight has both sides throwing a ball at each other.

Where the Fight Sits

Tri Tail was one of the encounters players could pick after the opening stretch of the build, alongside Kong Kong Zi and Wu Yang. Where those two are staged as set pieces with a cultural tradition behind every move, Tri Tail is the palate cleanser of the build: shorter, more playful, and noticeably easier. Players who fought it described the difficulty as low even by the standards of a demo the studio had already said was not meant to punish.

The design still follows the same rule the rest of the roster does. The studio has said it wants adversaries that carry a personality before any dialogue arrives, and a boss that stops to lick a paw in the middle of a fight makes that argument as directly as a boss built from a Han-dynasty silk painting does. The full roster of encounters seen so far is collected under Bosses, and the toolkit the hero brings to them is set out under Combat.