Eugene woke up. It was a very restful sleep. He was mentally tired from the days in the timeless realm he spent learning about the dominant variant of Hibiscus Chess played today. And he couldn’t just sleep in the timeless realm, because going to sleep would cause him to lose concentration and slip out. Even with Kevin’s License Plate, Eugene still had to actively dedicate a mote of his consciousness to avoiding being pushed out of the timeless realm.
He rose from his large, luxurious bed and walked out of the suite. The tournament would begin in an hour. The Elder bracket of the tournament, reserved exclusively for those in the Purple Realm, involved three contests. The first was for board games, the precursor to all LitRPGS, which would be represented by Hibiscus Chess. The second and third would involve video games and litRPGs themselves, respectively.
Every win over an opponent in each tournament would be converted to a particular point value, which would all be added up at the end to determine the winner. The same players would appear in each of the three Elder tournaments.
Chess was a popular game played amongst cultivators. The game was very Hibiscanly resonant, and the variety of openings played in the game strongly resembled the different paths that the plot of Purple Hibiscus could have gone down. The events that canonically happened in the Holy Book most closely resembled the opening known as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Gambit. In the Holy Scripture, Ade Coker was Eugene’s queen (not literally, but in the sense of being his most valuable asset) and Big Oga’s queen was the letter bomb. In standard chess, the ICBM gambit involved sacrificing a pawn, bishop, and knight to allow your queen to take the other player's queen unopposed. This mirrored the events of the Holy Book in how Big Oga killed Ade Coker, but suffered severe losses in the process. Such losses were not of people but rather involved increasing instability and civil unrest within Nigeria that eventually led to him being overthrown.
However, Hibiscus Chess enthusiasts soon were unable to play the game. That is because once people ascended to the Red Realm, their own knowledge and intelligence was able to perfectly understand the Hibiscan resonances of the game. And thus, all players could play it perfectly, and all games ended in draws.
This problem was solved with the invention of Mega Hibiscus Chess. It increased the complexity of the game by multiple orders of magnitude, such that no one would be able to solve it. Large teams of cultivators painstakingly created many new variants of chess, and eventually the one that was determined to most resemble the Holy Book was officially deemed to be Mega Hibiscus Chess But then Jajas began appearing. For those in the Purple Realm, they could play Mega Hibiscus Chess perfectly. And so the problem reappeared again.
The greatest Hibiscan minds set to work crafting Giga Hibiscus Chess. It took hundreds of years and thousands of competing variants before one was determined to be the most similar to the Holy Book. Two hundred years ago, it was fully finalized, which was six hundred years after the first variants appeared. The game was complex and sophisticated enough so that even a peak-tier Kambili could only begin to understand its secrets.
Giga Hibiscus Chess was played on a 65536 by 65536 board, totalling 4294967296 squares. There were 8192 unique pieces, and 1048576 in total. There were 27 kings on each side. It was a monstrous, disgusting, enormous beast of a game.
Eugene had already arranged a game with the Eugene-rank cultivator he had enraged. His future opponent was apparently the clear favorite to win. Eugene had confidence that they would find themselves playing against each other in the final game of the tournament. The Dawn and Dusk Sect Elders would participate too, but Eugene anticipated that they would be largely crushed. He had some hopes pinned on Elzpsein, who apparently was a skilled Giga Hibiscus Chess player, but Eugene wouldn’t be surprised if the former Super Senior did poorly.
Eugene walked into the enormous room dedicated purely to Hibiscus Chess. The tournament master sat in an elevated, throne-like chair, wearing elaborate robes. He was of the Warlock class. A few cultivators had already assembled, Elzpsein among them.
“Greetings, Sect Elder,” he said, waving.
Eugene walked over to him.
“It’s good to see you arrived here so early.”
“I expect a good showing from this tournament,” he commented. “I hear there’s a prodigy among their ranks. They call him the next Kambili.”
Kambili, the cultivator of Hibiscan legend, emerged a few hundred years after Eugene vanished. Not only was he the founder of the Five-Headed Tortoise Sect, he was unmatched at Hibiscus Chess during the era in which different Giga Hibiscus Chess variants competed for supremacy. He won thousands of games and lost zero. The only thing preventing him from continuing his winning streak was his death.
“They call me the next Kambili,” Eugene responded.
“Arrogance felled many a cultivator,” said Elzpsein.
“There exist forests which are one tree.” Eugene said cryptically.
Elzpsein chuckled. “Tell me. If a tree falls in a forest, but no one hears it, does it make a sound?”
“Ah, the classic question from the pre-Hibiscan era,” replied Eugene. “Let me counter with this: Two hands make a clapping noise. What sound does one hand clapping make?”
“Reaching into the pool of ancient wisdom,” said Elzpsein. “Is water wet?”
“It both is and isn’t at the same time.”
“A paradox. Let me respond with one of my own. Is autological autological?”
“Heh, a clever question for once. Refer to my previous answer.”
“What defines words?” asked Elzspein.
“Their usage.”
“Ah, you’ve contradicted yourself.”
“How so?”
Eugene could not parse Elzpsein’s line of reasoning. One of them had just blundered, but Eugene couldn’t figure out who. Maybe Eugene’s lack of understanding was because Elzpsein’s argument was too sophisticated for him, or maybe Elzpsein was just stupid.
“Is an axe defined by its usage? When a man and his axe lay idle, are they undefined? But if the forest that is a tree stands unattacked by the man and his axe, is it not also lying unused?”
Elzpsein was talking circles around him now. Eugene was groping at a defense, but it remained at the tip of his tongue, just out of reach.
Eugene’s continued silence prompted Elzpsein to continue.
“The heart of all stories is conflict. The story ceases as the conflict ceases. If the forest that is a tree is entirely unfelled, it does not exist.”
Eugene was enlightened. Elzpsein was only partially correct, grasping at the truth but not quite taking hold of it.
“It is both a contradiction and not a contradiction,” replied Eugene. “Stand or not stand, the forest remains.”
“But the forest cannot remain, for that is contradiction without non-contradiction. The coexistence of contradiction and anti-contradiction hides within the heart of logic. But if the forest that is a tree has a contradiction but no non-contradiction, it has an antithesis but lacks a thesis. It is backwards. The synthesis does not cohere, the Purple Hibiscus does not bloom.”
“No,” stated Eugene. “The forest is two dimensional but non-Euclidean. Its growth is restricted to only one dimension. Latitude is locked off.”
“Then where is Mount Tai?” asked Elzspein, a gleam in his eye.
“At the eastern sunrise, just beyond all reach.”
Elzpsein was enlightened. “I only used to understand the latter half of that ancient declaration. But now, I understand the first. Longitude is the path of Achilles chasing the Tortoise.”
“The Purple Hibiscus blooms,” declared Eugene.
“The shades converge,” agreed Elzpsein.
Both of their Hibiscan energy rippled, morphing into something greater. Bliss fell upon both of them as they ascended. Elzpsein ascended two tiers at once, now at high-tier Jaja. Eugene climbed to peak-tier of Eugene rank.
They drew stares from the ever-growing crowd. The other cultivators had listened to their conversation with rapt attention, one of them even writing down everything he heard. Those in the room were shocked into silence by what they had just witnessed.
Eugene and Elzpsein only further contemplated the truth that they had together unveiled.
At the eastern sunrise, just beyond all reach. That was Kambili’s answer to a question posed by his second-in-command when he asked where Kambili was going. It was his last recorded words.
A man walked in, nearly late to the tournament. He scanned the room and stood in befuddlement at why everyone was staring at Grzegorz and some random Dawn and Dusk Sect Elder. Eugene recognized him as the man he had started a feud with.
A screen powered by Hibiscan energy flickered to life, projected across the room by a “magical artifact” with runes carved into it.
The tournament master spoke up. “Who will be playing who and in which order is displayed.” Settle in your chairs, for the tournament begins in a minute.
Eugene looked at it and saw who he would be playing for the first round. This would be tedious, though he would get some practice in. It was a round-robin tournament, meaning every player played every player. The way it worked was that after the games were finished, the Dawn and Dusk Sect cultivator with the highest point total would play the LitRPG Sect cultivator with the highest point total as the final match to determine which sect won overall.
This meant Eugene would certainly play with the seething man twice.
Eugene effortlessly won his first three games. But on the fourth, he looked at the screen and saw he would be facing him.
Eugene and the man sat down.
“My name is Rafael,” he said, and the game began by him moving out his Jaja, the most powerful piece. A tricky move, that was, and very confrontational. But Eugene knew the perfect defense to it.
They played back and forth, each responded to the other’s cleverly laid attacks with defenses that were even more sophisticated. They both castled, and the game looked like it was heading towards a draw. They had each traded over a hundred thousand pieces by this point, and their positions were of equal strength.
“I don’t want our Bondage Vouch to apply to this game.”
“Oh, really?” responded Rafael sarcastically.
“We are certain to play each other at the end of the tournament, our strength is unmatched by anyone save ourselves. That game is much more interesting.”
“I would not expect a worm like you to provide such excellent reasoning. I am forced to accept your proposal.”
The game continued on, neither player being able to win over an advantage. They were both locked in, playing the best game of their lives so far, exhilarated by such a strong opponent, but there were simply no gains there to be made.
Rafael opened his mouth to speak for the first time in hours.
“Your rapid advances in cultivation continue to astonish the Hibiscan world. The astute observer might draw a connection between that and Eugene’s ancient feat of going from Aunty Ifeoma rank to Jaja rank in merely a week by sacrificing millions.”
Eugene carefully hid any reaction to that. Rafael was merely trash-talking, he did not actually know that Grzegorz was Eugene.
The game ended up in a position with only four pieces remaining. Eugene had one king and a rook, while Rafael had a king and a Beatrice. Both of them knew how to play this position perfectly, and if they did so it was guaranteed to end in a draw. However, Rafael refused Eugene’s draw offer. He played out the next thousand moves very quickly, hoping that Eugene would slip up and blunder the game. But he didn’t, and they finally traded the Beatrice for the rook. Draw by insufficient material. Rafael left the board seething.
The other games were a blur for Eugene. He destroyed several other opponents, barely even having to use his brain. He could only think of his upcoming match with Rafael.
Eugene concluded his penultimate game with a brilliant mate with a knight that his opponent couldn’t defend against, his king trapped within a web of Beatrices.
The scoreboard displayed Eugene and Rafael as being even in points. Third place was occupied by Elzpsein. Eugene was pleasantly surprised, he hadn’t realized the extent of the former Super Senior’s skill. He had only lost two games, to Eugene and to Rafael.
Everyone waited in anticipation of the final game. Eugene and Rafael sat in front of the board. Rafael again was randomly selected to play White.
He moved the pawn above his central king two squares forward. The most common opening move, and the consensus pick for best opening.
Eugene mirrored Rafael’s move.
Rafael Bongclouded.
Eugene, in shock, reflexively threw himself into the timeless realm. He needed time to think about what this meant. While using the timeless realm to extend the amount of time you have to think may appear to be cheating, it was not considered to be so under the rules. It was treated as merely another tool you have. Playing a game of Giga Hibiscus Chess was, after all, a battle of cultivation. And the better a cultivator you were, the longer you could last in the timeless realm before being forcibly ejected.
Thus, staying in the timeless realm by using Kevin’s License Plate to anchor him there would be cheating. Which is why Eugene did not do that. Instead, he entered it purely on his own strength. Already, he could feel it tugging at him, wanting to force him back into the normal timestream.
The Bongcloud was the worst opening. Only a fool or a troll would play it. Rafael was so arrogant, so overconfident, he trusted himself to win a game at such a severe disadvantage.
Or, well, maybe that wasn’t his thought process. Maybe he could tell that Eugene was the type of person who, when facing the Bongcloud, always Bongclouded back. For Eugene had two options to choose from. To Bongcloud, or not to Bongcloud? The latter was not even worth considering for a moment. It near-guaranteed a win for yourself, but it would be a cheap, hollow victory. Eugene would not defile the honor of his opponent. Eugene’s mind began to cook up a devious plan to weaponize the Bongcloud to his advantage. He constructed a devious five-phase plan that would be certain to dismantle Rafael.
In fact, he spent months cooking the plan. Eugene hadn’t been this invested in anything, ever. The game he was playing was far more exhilarating than his fight with Kash. His earlier game with Rafael paled in comparison.
He left the timeless realm and responded in tandem, Bongclouding as well. Eugene contemplated his motivations for playing the game. He had just made a Bondage Vouch that would likely cause his death if he lost this game. And instead of trying to win, he was fucking Bongclouding. But Eugene was fully at peace with his decision. He traveled seven hundred years in the future first and foremost because he was bored by the state of the world back then. But now, he was exhilarated! He lived life only because it interested him, so why would Eugene back down from a fascinating competition he was engaged in? If Eugene wasn’t willing to risk his life, why bother doing anything? Because the act of cultivation was fundamentally the act of challenging the heavens. It was declaring that your pitiful understanding of the Holy Book Purple Hibiscus might one day rival the understanding that the Four Gods had of it.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He was jolted out of his thoughts by Rafael chuckling to himself. He leapt forward his Aunty Ifeoma to its max distance. It was a piece that moved like a knight, but could choose to travel the equivalent of up to 10000 traditional knight moves in a single move in a single direction.
Eugene moved out his queen 17029 squares diagonally. They continued playing the game in a completely normal fashion, acting like nothing had happened. Normal piece development occurred on both sides, except for Rafael Bongclouding each and every one of his 27 kings, and Eugene mirroring him. Eugene concluded Phase One of his plan when he moved his final king.
So far, they were playing what was called the Traditional Bongcloud, in which the kings were not moved at all after they were each Bongclouded. Other variants included the Arrogant Bongcloud, in which the kings were moved out further, and the Shameful Bongcloud, in which the kings were moved back.
Giga Hibiscus Chess did not exist in its modern form in Eugene’s time, and so only some of the lessons he had learned playing it were relevant to the game he was in right now. However, Eugene was particularly well-versed in opening theory regarding the Bongcloud.
Bongcloud games of the traditional variety centered around both players spreading their pieces thin as they covered for the substantial weaknesses of each of their kings. Each player would launch probing attacks to test the defenses of the opponent, and it would typically escalate into a brutal procession of piece trades.
Check didn’t exist in Giga Hibiscus Chess. Instead, a player could simply ignore it and let their king be captured. This made king trades and even king sacrifices relatively common, and kings could even take each other. A player would only lose when their last king was taken.
When all the kings had finished their Bongcloud development, Eugene spotted a critical weakness in Rafael’s position. He decided to transition the game into an arrogant Bongcloud by again moving forward his central king. Eugene was uninterested in continuing to play the traditional Bongcloud.
Rafael merely moved his Jaja out 10000 squares. There was only one Jaja per player. It moved like a rook, except it could leap over any squares it wanted to. Games would often begin with the players trading their Jajas with each other. It was a supremely dangerous piece.
Eugene moved his central king again out by one square, and Rafael paused. All his previous moves had been made in less than five seconds. But for this one, he had to think. Rafael suddenly shifted in his seat and blinked a few times, moving his Jaja so that it forked every single one of Eugene’s kings except the one he had just moved.
A sign that he had been in the timeless realm! Eugene now knew Rafael’s tell. Eugene making such an unfathomably shitty move by not bothering to counter the threat of the Jaja baffled Rafael so much that he had to retreat to the timeless realm to determine if it was genius or stupid.
Eugene could not move his own Jaja to defend his kings. This was because, if he did that, the piece would be undefended, and Rafael would simply take it. He was losing a king no matter what.
But Eugene simply did not care, and moved out his Ade Coker. When the Ade Coker took a piece, it exploded not only itself, but also all the pieces around it in a 5x5 square centered on itself. It moved like a bishop, except it also had the option to move one square up or down at a time, like a king, thus allowing it to move on both light and dark squares.
Rafael took one of Eugene’s kings. By moving the Ade Coker, his Jaja was now protected from being captured, so he moved it out. Rafael traded Jajas, and Eugene took it with the Ade Coker, detonating another one of his kings in the process. Rafael was baffled. Eugene just lost two kings and one of four Ade Cokers just to get a Jaja trade! He sat and thought for a minute straight, then moved his Beatrice fully out. It was a piece that moved like a bishop, but only a maximum of 1024 squares out. It could leap over pieces, and it once it moved, on the next move, it could choose one piece within a 7x7 square of itself to die of rat poison.
The rest of the game proceeded with Rafael further bringing his pieces out, solidifying his position, while Eugene kept pushing his kings. After several hours of play, Eugene had gathered his 25 remaining kings in a 5x5 square formation. This would be extremely vulnerable to an Ade Coker attack, if not for Eugene having steadily outplayed Rafael by taking all the other player’s Ade Cokers without suffering substantial losses himself. Once the kings were in the square formation, Eugene concluded Phase Two.
Eugene had determined by this point that Rafael was a one in a billion talent, a master of Giga Hibiscus Chess. His play so far was astonishingly good, every move having layers and layers of complexity to it, simultaneously defending his own position while readying devastating attacks on Eugene’s. But Eugene was a one in eight billion peerless genius, and thus was steadily outplaying Rafael. The difference between them was like the difference between heaven and earth.
By offering up two of his kings and one Ade Coker, Eugene perfectly executed the Traditional Bongcloud Jaja Gambit, Ade Coker variation. It was a gambit he had invented himself just now, and it exposed multiple weaknesses in Rafael’s position.The other player recognized some of them, and had acted to partially cover said weaknesses. But he left his position critically vulnerable to a devastating 25-fold kingwalk attack, the central purpose of Phase Three of Eugene’s plan. At this point, Eugene was threatening king promotion. Normal pawn promotion was a thing in Giga Hibiscus Chess, and they could be promoted to any piece save a Jaja. Yes, this meant that pawns could turn into kings. However, king promotion had been added, which allowed kings to turn into any piece in the game, except for Jajas.
However, there was another option. Kings could be promoted to sniper kings, a piece only attainable via king promotion. They shot out bullets that would kill any piece they had line of sight on within a 27x27 square centered on them. This would be a very weak ability, considering that sniper kings could still only move one square in any direction.
However, sniper kings could shoot other sniper kings. Instead of being destroyed, those sniper kings absorbed that bullet, and if they shot it, it would be able to travel double the distance. A player could keep doing this for every sniper king they had. However, a particular bullet shot by a sniper king could not return to the same king, because that would be too overpowered. So, the total distance of how far a bullet could travel was dependent on how many sniper kings a player managed to promote. The key fact in all this was that all of this took only one turn. If a sniper king shot another piece, that took up a turn. But shooting each other and transferring the bullet took zero in-game time.
Rafael was keenly aware of the strategy associated with sniper kings. A sniper king array was devastatingly powerful once set up, but could be easily sabotaged. However, if Rafael threw all his pieces at Eugene’s 25 kings, he would give time for Eugene to launch his own crippling counterattack on Rafael’s vulnerable, Bongclouded kings.
So Rafael chose to gamble. He ignored the sniper kings for the most part. He took the occasional move to take a few of them, sacrificing most of his Aunty Ifeoma’s in the process. Instead, Rafael concerned himself with destroying Eugene’s most valuable pieces, most of which hadn’t even been developed yet. When Eugene finished promoting his kings, he had 12 of them left. Surveying the board, he noted that his attacking power was nearly destroyed. Except, that mattered not at all. For 12 sniper kings was enough to reach nearly the entire board. This was the idea of Phase Four! Eliminate Rafael’s army piece by piece using the constructed sniper array.
Eugene set to work sniping Rafael’s pieces. The interesting thing was, despite having less than a quarter the number of pieces Rafael did, he was actually up a few quadrillion points in material. The way for calculating the value of sniper kings depended on how many there were. A single one was worth 49 points. If there were two, they were each worth 49^2 points. And so on and so forth. The value of 12 sniper kings was (49^12)*12, which was equal to 2.2989748 × 10^21 points.
The game so far had only taken 17 hours and 4 minutes. But the ensuing slog that was the battle between Rafael’s overwhelming advantage in piece quantity and Eugene’s destructive sniper cannon looked like it would take days to conclude. Rafael had too many exposed pieces that were within the sight line of the circle of sniper kings. He had to move his valuable pieces behind his pawns and other irrelevant pieces. And tearing into Eugene’s sniper circle was impossible to do without incurring heavy losses, because most pieces he had would have to expose themself to the snipers before being able to take them.
For Rafael to attack the sniper circle, he first needed to build up enormous walls of pieces faster than Eugene could snipe them. Then, he would put his pieces that could simultaneously jump over other pieces and travel long distances behind the wall. After four days of relentless play from both sides, Rafael had sacrificed over six hundred thousand pieces to take out three of Eugene’s kings.
This substantially weakened Eugene’s sniper array, making it functionally useless. Now, the only purpose it served was to lock off a small section of the board, making it so that Rafael could never really enter that square that was the sniper circle’s territory. But most of the board was unthreatened by the sniper array.
But now, Eugene executed Phase Five of his plan. He moved out his few remaining dangerous pieces that existed, including all 61 of his queens (only three of which he had sacrificed), his Beatrices, and his Big Ogas. The Big Ogas were extremely powerful, but could only act in a local area. Within a 2047x2047 square centered on itself, a Big Oga could move to literally any square within that. It was weak offensively, only being able to move 2047 squares at a time, but defensively was among the strongest pieces in the game.
Eugene now was executing a large-scale pawnwalk. His 61 queens and 32 Big Ogas would be arranged in a linear fashion in between the starting location of his pawns and the sniper king circle. Once the pawns reached the sniper king circle at the end of the board, they were fully safe from attack and could turn into kings. But pawn-kings, as kings that used to be pawns were called, could be the subject of king promotion. But they had to walk all the way back to their own starting side to promote again. Once they were sniper kings, Eugene would then repeat the arduous process, and walk them to being within range of the sniper king circle. After doing this three times, he would be back to 12 sniper kings, and would win the game. However, the problem was that this would take ages and ages to accomplish, giving Rafael much more time to assemble an attack that could penetrate Eugene’s pawn defense.
Eugene’s previous gambit of saccing untold hundreds of thousands of pieces to assemble a sniper king circle had paid off. This was because Eugene took months in the timeless realm to calculate it all. But eventually the timeless realm’s pushing became so strong that he was thrust out before he had time to figure out what to do once the sniper king circle was compromised. The schizo pawn walk plan was something he had improvised yesterday. Eugene had no idea if it would actually work.
He couldn’t just re-enter the timeless realm again to figure it all out. After spending an amount of time in the timeless realm, you couldn’t re-enter until roughly half that time had passed in the real world. Not unless you had Kevin’s License Plate, that is, but that would be cheating.
The consequences of this were tremendous. Eugene was gambling the entire game away. Rafael had outplayed him. The saccing of 600,000+ pieces was actually genius, because Rafael not only destroyed Eugene’s sniper king array but also set himself up to counter Eugene’s pawnwalk. He had truly cooked. Rafael was layering attack after attack against Eugene as he pushed his pieces towards the assembling pawn corridor. Truly, Rafael’s play style was unparalleled in its efficiency first and foremost. Every move served multiple purposes and laid many clever plans.
Eugene started his feud with Rafael by insulting the man repeatedly. His attempt at psychological warfare only caused Rafael to be further energized. But now, Eugene would try a different approach.
He moved his Ball out. The Ball was a piece that moved like a queen and a knight, except it could do a large number of knight moves in a row. The thing that nerfed it was that it could only travel one square on its first move, whereas the normal queen, and even the standard rook and bishop, had no range limit. However, with every move it made, its range doubled. It took 17 moves to be able to traverse the entire board.
“Let’s raise the stakes,” he spat out, voice parched and cracked. Purple Realm cultivators could go without water for months until dying, but they would still suffer some adverse effects. One of those was difficulty speaking after several days.
It took Rafael much effort to open his mouth and speak. “H-how?” he asked.
“I want the loser to owe the winner two favors.”
“Why? That’s excessive.”
“I’ll do a Ball sac in exchange for you agreeing to it.”
“That would give me an unfair advan, advanta-tage,” he croaked out. “N-no.”
“Raising the stakes would heighten our level of play,” Eugene said. “We would both be improved.”
“Fine,” Rafael creaked out, more to end the conversation than anything else. He spat out blood from the exertion. “Still no Ball sac from you,” he barely got out.
“Of course.”
Eugene kept moving his ball for the next 16 moves, giving Rafael plenty of time to create a spear with which to destroy the pawn corridor. But Eugene didn’t care, as the Ball when fully engaged was simply too powerful. Some argued it was even more powerful than the Jaja, though Eugene personally considered those people to be fools.
Eugene completed the 17th move of the Ball and Rafael responded with a Nut sac. The Nut was powerful, but heavily restricted in its movement. It could only move to squares whose x and y coordinates were twin primes. Twin primes were primes whose distance is 2. So, NT11,13 (Algebraic chess notation had to be modified for the purposes of Giga Hibiscus Chess) was a viable move, but NT13,17 was not. Of course, primes become increasingly rare the larger numbers get, and twin primes even more so.
Rafael ascended to peak-tier of the Eugene rank. They were now even again. He moved NTx32027,32029, taking one of Eugene’s queens. He wasn’t bothering to hide the fact that he had retreated to the timeless realm, for at least a few weeks.
Eugene paused. The Nut was certainly a more valuable piece than the queen. He painstakingly looked for the purpose of that sac over the next few thousand moves, but saw nothing. Eugene chose to simply shore up his own defenses. He was slightly more vulnerable without one of his queens, but Rafael losing his only Nut was absolutely not worth it.
The three pawns were kings now. They began marching backwards. Rafael’s pieces were closer than ever to breaking the corridor.
It didn’t come to Eugene for any particular reason. Rafael didn’t make any move that exposed his true intentions. It was just that Eugene was a Hibiscan calculator, and after going through every major permutation of what Rafael could do, it dawned on him that Eugene taking the Nut was an abysmally terrible move. Rafael had forced mate in 21348 moves. Did Rafael see that exact line, or did he do the Nut sac because he saw that it improved his position in general by critically weakening the pawn corridor tens of thousands of moves down the line?
Eugene couldn’t know. The best strategy for him was simply to continue what he was already doing and fully reassemble the sniper king array. From that point onwards, there were a number of ways for Rafael to instantly lose and blunder forced mate in a few thousand moves if he didn’t play perfectly.
Eugene was now playing hope chess. It was hope that Rafael messed up. Eugene felt his confidence waver as Rafael deftly avoided Eugene’s every attempt at mating him. He was now certain that Rafael knew what he was doing and knew how to execute the forced mate. Eugene’s point advantage approached a googolplex, but his position was increasingly terrible. Nonetheless, he pressed on, laying many different traps with each move, giving Rafael opportunity after opportunity to blunder. But Rafael fell for none of it.
The brilliance of the mate was that it didn’t involve taking any of the sniper kings until the very last hundred or so moves. Tackling that threat early on would paradoxically make it so that Rafael couldn’t checkmate Eugene. However, that was where the danger lied. The necessity of keeping the sniper king array intact was the very same thing that made the mate so dangerous. If Rafael slipped up and mistook an inferior line to be better than another, he would instantly be in a losing position.
Eugene moved out his Nut. Rafael had a tenth the piece count of Eugene and now only had less than a thousand left. Rafael paused and considered his next move. He could move his last Beatrice to fork Eugene’s Ball and Nut, both of which had survived to the endgame. It would cripple Eugene’s defense. Or, maybe that move would end the game for him because it would leave his kings vulnerable to being sniped. He only had one king left, the others he had allowed Eugene to snipe. That remaining king was tucked in a corner, as far away from the sniper array as possible, though the snipers could still reach it. He should move his Beatrice back to the king to better defend it.
Then, he had a thought. Why choose between two bad options when he had a great move available? He had a Big Oga which was up near the sniper king array, protected by over a hundred pawns. He could just use it to trade for one of Eugene’s snipers. Yes, there was the ever-present threat of him crippling his own carefully-laid defense by moving the Big Oga.
Eugene had many pieces ready to attack his last king, with almost all of them being the kind of weak, pitifully slow moving pieces that were perfectly countered by a Big Oga. By saving his king from the threat of Eugene’s sniper array, he would render it vulnerable to an attack from Eugene’s weaker pieces. After the snipers were forced to kill the Big Oga, he could then go ahead with the fork and go on to win the game.
He had foreseen this line days ago and assumed that forking the Ball and the Nut would lead to victory. He was right, but he was mistaken in which order the move should be. He took a sniper king with the Big Oga, and would do the fork on the next move.
Eugene only smiled. “The pawn is wasted on Aunty Ifeoma.”
Rafael saw it. Eugene had forced mate in just under 2000 moves. By moving the Aunty Ifeoma, he could fork Rafael’s king and his Big Oga. Rafael saw this but didn’t consider it to be a threat, because he could simply move his king, and Eugene’s position would actually be slightly worsened. Even though Rafael would lose his Big Oga and not gain any pieces, the Aunty Ifeoma would block the line of sight of the sniper king array, meaning its usefulness would be diminished until Eugene moved the Aunty Ifeoma elsewhere. That sequence of moves would actually slightly favor Rafael.
The issue was how the Aunty Ifeoma could work in tandem with either the Ball or Nut, depending on which one Eugene chose to save. The Big Oga was the perfect counter to those three pieces, and it was Rafael’s last one. The Beatrice wouldn’t be able to defend adequately without Big Oga support. This in fact was no issue at all, because Rafael had a pawn one step away from promotion that could be turned into a Big Oga. However, that pawn was defended by a hundred other pawns, but themselves were not defended by anything from the sniper array threat. Thus, Rafael could only promote the one pawn. But doing so would waste that pawn, which otherwise could have been used on a more valuable piece, on just a Big Oga. Eugene would be able to escape the mate threat and would use his piece advantage to surround and mate Rafael’s king.
It was over.
Rafael spat out blood. “I resign.”
He would not foolishly play this game out hoping that Eugene would blunder. There was a 0% chance of that happening, his path to victory was too clear. Rafael would not play the two thousand moves out just to spite Eugene and waste his time. He had developed too much respect for him as an opponent. When Rafael ascended a tier in cultivation, his heart was calmed and his mind cleared. He had no more time for petty hatred.
“You are the finest opponent I have ever played,” declared Eugene.
“I have nothing but the highest compliments to laud you with,” replied Rafael. “Let us fulfill the Bondage Vouch. What are your demands?”
The Four Gods fixed their gaze on the conversation.
Rafael made peace with his fate. He would accept whatever Eugene had in store.
“First,” said Eugene, “you must always speak in tercets with a ABA rhyming scheme, and each line needs to be five syllables long exactly.”
“I hate the wager, regret my actions, acting the favor,” said Rafael.
“For the last favor, I am undecided. I shall wait for what I want to make you do.”
The Four Gods looked away, satisfied.
“As I try to parse, what can only be, a stupendous farce,” Rafael finished.
Everyone in the room was dumbfounded. Such a high-stakes game, and Eugene wasted his Bondage Vouch-assured request with an annoying joke. Eugene simply turned and walked out.