“You’re terrible at this you know,” Sofiane said.

Natsuko bit her lip. “Shut up! I’m trying to think!”

She moved to lay a card down on the table.

“Are you sure about that?” Sofiane said.

She pulled the card back up to her hand. Paused. Thought about it. Then said, “Wait, how do you know what I was going to play?”

“I don’t, I was just asking if you were sure.”

“You’re obnoxious,,” Natsuko said.

Sofiane looked up from over his cards at his opponent. Her response felt oddly subdued. He would have been lying if he said it wasn’t tempting to poke at her some more. But he also felt drained.

“What happened?” Sofiane asked, laying down his spell-negation card before Natsuko had even set her own spell down. He had clocked by now that her playstyle was to put every single card she could down as fast as possible.

“You play like a little bitch, you know that?” Natsuko said, throwing the monster she was going to play in her discard. “Only cowards use counters.”

“Ç'est les cartes!” he said, tossing the counter in his own discard. For a moment, only the ambient hum of the city crowds passed between them.

“You mean with Frederick?” Natsuko asked, tapping the table to end her turn.

Sofiane drew a card, eyes scanning it and the rest of his hand, thinking how they might be used together. “No, the other major side-quest you went on.”

Again, this was Natsuko’s cue to snip back at him, but she didn’t. Leaning back in her chair, she said, “I already told you just about all of it.”

Sofiane was absorbed in tapping all his Accessories and Fonts to get whatever resources he needed to string together one of his big combos. Natsuko didn’t even really care enough to check his numbers or rule-following. If he said she lost, she probably did. That had been how the other six games they’d played had ended. She learned not to ask how on the first game.

“All of it? I can tell it’s bothering you, and you didn’t seem this rattled when Margaret died,” Sofiane said without looking up from his card-tapping.

“Cuz she’s not really dead, she’s just chopped up in that dungeon. We can get the Yishang to fix her,” Natsuko said, setting her cards down to slam back the rest of her wine glass full of cinnamon whiskey.

“You didn’t know that at the time.”

“Guess I didn’t. Tell you what, you wanna know the rest? Then you have to tell me what you and Daisy are up to,” Natsuko said.

“Huh? What are you talking about?” Sofiane said, his card-tapping coming to a halt.

She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t wanna tell me? That’s fine. You don’t get the full story about me and Frederick.”

“You and Frederick? Okay, you dated way back when, broke up, but you still felt something for him and didn’t like seeing him want to kill himself. That about it?” Sofiane said. “I pass.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Natsuko slapped her cards down on the table and went to pour herself another mixture of whiskey and cinnamon-sugar.

“Hey, it’s your turn!”

“You’re gonna win anyway. Next turn you’re gonna explain to me how you win by numbers going up to infinity. Who cares if I get a drink first?” Natsuko yelled from the bar.

“I’m sure there are ways you can win,” Shuixing said.

Natsuko jumped and almost dropped the whiskey bottle as she was surprised by Shuixing and Pechorin sitting on the couch.

“Gods, Shui, cough or something!”

“My apologies! Erm… we have learned some information about Yuna’s whereabouts this past week…”

“And?” Sofiane said, antsy to get his turn over so he could explain to Natsuko why she lost by numbers going up to infinity.

“She was missing from Tianzhou long enough to make the trip to Vermögenburgh.”

Sofiane grinned. “Haha! Looks like we were on the money. Now we just need Daisy to get back and tell us she couldn’t get a hold of her and we can do this card tournament thing.”

Pechorin leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Why do you think that will be the case?”

“Because it would be inconvenient, and there is nothing that our little universe likes more than throwing inconveniences at us,” Sofiane said.

Frederick’s words about the Yishang were still ringing in Natsuko’s head. She hadn’t quite bought all of it, but it made her more wary of Daisy and Sofiane. The former had absolutely no reason to question or go against the Yishang, and the latter was still clutching at the idea that you could win at the Use-Ranking game if you tried hard enough.

Either way, Natsuko didn’t know what they planned to do if or when they got Shuixing’s papers back. And while Sofiane at least wore his greediness on his sleeve, Daisy kept it hidden under her bubbly personality. The act suckered Natsuko in initially, but she wasn’t buying it anymore. Something was off about her and she was going to—

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Play your damn turn!” Sofiane yelled.

“Fine, Puffball, tell me why I’m going to lose next turn,” she said, sitting back down with her new drink and crossing her legs.

“Play your turn first.”

Shuixing wandered over and looked over Natsuko’s shoulders. She hadn’t played much in the way of cards because the game had come out after she’d devoted herself to studying Natsuko’s bottle. But the rules were simple enough. It looked like Sofiane had the advantage, having almost twice as many cards laid out in three neat little rows. Given the rules of the game, she could figure out what about 2/3rds of them did just by glancing at them.

“You said he’s trying to make some kind of infinite combo?” Shui asked, pushing her glasses up her nose.

“Yeah, that’s how he always tries to win: Through unfair bullshit. On brand, right?” Natsuko said.

“From the bottle girl!?” Sofiane said.

Ignoring their quarrel, Shuixing’s eyes scanned the cards on Sofiane’s side once again. Most of the cards in the second row seemed like passive things that let him draw more cards or expend more resources, not something that would let him string together a combo. Thus, whatever he was doing had to be on the monster cards. Of the six he had out, one drew her eye. It was a weak monster, but the wording on the card said it could tap to make more mud sprites.

“Sofiane, in the nature of fair play, is there a card in your deck that states that your monster cards don’t tap when you use them?”

His gaze sharpened and he straightened his back. “Why yes, Madame Shuixing, there is.”

“Natsu, use your fireball spell to kill that card,” Shuixing said, pointing at the Swamp Summoner monster. Her voice in teacher mode.

“He’s just gonna counter it again!” Natsuko whined.

“I don’t think he has a counter. Consider the number of cards. He has 60 in a deck and since he most likely needs to cast a lot of spells, he’s going to have more Elemental Fonts than normal. That accounts for about 26, and then a few Accessory cards to compensate for needing several different Elemental Energies. Then, as you can see out on the table, he needs multiple key passives to help his board ramp up in power. Considering he is allowed to have three copies of each card in his deck, and he needs certain combos to win, it’s likely that for each copy of one of these he’s going to have the maximum. Add all those on the table up and you get 54 total cards, which means the last six are his allotment of counter cards. How many have you spent, Sofiane?”

He set his hand down and crossed his arms. “Four.”

“Two remain to be used. However, with three cards in his hand and 27 left in the deck, this means that the probability that each one of those three cards could be a counter is two over 30 reducing to one over 15. Doing that three times gives us…”

She paused to let Natsuko do the math.

“A snowball’s chance in hell?”

“A 20% probability that Sofiane is holding a spell which can negate your fireball."

Natsuko’s eyes widened and she grinned wickedly. She slapped her fireball spell down.

“Hehehe. Fireball bitch! Get that shit off a’ my table!” she said, nearly spilling her cinnamon whiskey in her excitement.

Sofiane picked the Swamp Summoner up and gently deposited him in his own discard pile. “Shui?”

“O-Oh, u-um, I’m really sorry about interrupting your game!” Shuixing said, her voice regaining its quiet wispiness.

“Congratulations. You’ve been promoted to my partner in the Get Access to Yuna Through Winning the Card Tournament Plan B. Natsuko, you’re fired.”

“Thank the gods,” Natsuko said, chucking her cards down and standing up from the table.

Shuixing tried to wave Sofiane off. “I-I don’t actually know the game that well, that was all just guesswork and basic probabilities!”

“You don’t have to know it well. I know it well, and you have the brain to help me maximize my chances,” Sofiane said.

“Didn’t you pick it up yesterday?” Natsuko asked.

“Some things are natural talents,” he said. “Like the ability to annoy people. Maybe go nourish your talents somewhere else?”

Natsuko gave him the finger. “Not while there’s free food and booze here.”

“Not free. Charged to Daisy,” Pechorin said.

“Yeah, but, functionally free,” Natsuko said.

“I’ve never known you to take handouts. I thought you were explicitly against them,” Pechorin replied.

“Hey! These aren’t handouts, these are operational costs!”

Something seemed different about Pechorin too, Sofiane thought. But Pechorin was harder to peg because his baseline was rooted in wild, overzealous archetype-building. Maybe that’s what was different. He seemed more normal.

Aside from talking to Pechorin, there wasn’t much Natsuko could do besides watch Sofiane explain things to Shuixing who explained things back to Sofiane which all flew way over her head the moment her dear, intellectual friend started talking about probabilistic outcomes. She let her eyes glaze while riding the waves of her drink.

The banter of her Non-Hero drinking buddies had seemed like such a small part of her day back in Vermögenburgh, but she realized how much more fun it made getting plastered. Being drunk while watching other people play cards wasn’t even enjoyable, it just made her dizzy. You wouldn’t know they were on a dangerous mission to recover the secrets of how to commit permanent murder by watching Sofiane and Shuixing talk card strategy.

Not only that, the more bored she got, the more her brain started to think about recent events, and she didn’t want that at all. What she wanted was something big and actiony to do.

“Oh, Natsuko, I forgot to tell you,” Shuixing said. “You know who we stumbled across on the way to Tianzhou?”

“Our mystery attacker? And you caught them and beat them up and from then on you all have been playing a hilarious prank pretending our master plan to get your papers back involves a freakin’ card game, just to see how long your old pal Natsuko will go along with it?”

“Er, no, Zhidao!”

“Ugh,” Natsuko said, her face screwing up in disgust. “I’d rather the prank.”

Shuixing giggled.

“What!? He’s creepy, okay? I said it then, I’ll say it now: That smarmy little fox has some weird shit going on with him. I would bet my mother’s life that’s the case.”

“Who’s your mother?” Sofiane asked.

“Fine. On Shui’s life.”

“Please don’t bet my own life for me,” Shuixing said.

“Where’d he go?” Natsuko asked.

“No idea. Why?” Sofiane said.

“I’m gonna go find him,” Natsuko said, standing up, wobbling for a moment, then stomping to the door. “M’gonna beat his secrets out of ‘em. Never trust no damn mascots.”

Pechorin watched her slam the door shut. “Should we go stop…”

By the time he turned around, Sofiane and Shuixing were already enraptured in their card strategizing. His old teammate Shui had apparently found something almost as enthralling as physics to study.