In the absence of those all-important numbers, everything felt strangely equal and even to Natsuko. She was now far more aware of how those numbers stood above almost every interaction she had,dictating how everyone ought to act. Those omnipresent numbers… and then they were gone.
For a moment, anyway. Then her brain turned over the fact that she had only had this revelation because of Daisy and Sofiane spending a whole lot of money to get her here. Money they had because their numbers were so much higher than hers. It popped a hole in her numberless joy. It was still all about that damned money.
Sitting down at their assigned table, Natsuko made extra efforts to guard her wine bottle, tucking it down between her legs and pinching it with her ankles to make sure it didn’t move an inch. She had been dimly aware before, but was now extra conscious of the fact that her bottle was perhaps the only thing in the entirety of Po-Lin completely impervious to those numbers.
Shuixing sat to her right, tucking the many folds of her hanfu under her before sitting down. Pechorin sat to her left with a careful and deliberate clasping of his hands. Across, facing the door, sat a very self-satisfied Sofiane, basking in the first part of his plan going well. This lasted maybe a few moments.
“Oh fuck…”
Sofiane’s aura of invulnerability shriveled up as quickly as Natsuko’s had. She followed his gaze to another table of well-dressed Heroes (same tailor, but Sofiane’s party had slightly better outfits). The table Sofiane was staring at weren’t smirking or sneering, but Natsuko could tell they were sneaking peeks back at Sofiane and whispering under their breath.
Natsuko gestured at the other table with a jerk of her head. “You know ‘em?”
Sofiane pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling. “Those… would be my old teammates. Baran, Xiuquan, and Gula.”
“They kick you out?”
“Yeah,” he said, the word pushed out of his chest. “Adventuring is a group effort. That means getting power crept is a contagious disease. Once I start dragging my team down, that drops our dungeon clear rate, and it’s a downward spiral from there.”
One of them, Gula, Natsuko vaguely recognized but couldn’t remember why. No amount of squinting at the glaring al-Nuwban Hero helped.
“And they really did that just cuz the Yishang summoned another pretty boy Hero?” Natsuko asked.
He nodded.
“Wow. No wonder you’re so obnoxious. You must’ve got it from them,” Natsuko said.
“At least I have an excuse.”
A few minutes later, after pouring and downing a few surreptitious shots of whiskey from her obi into a shot glass she swiped from the hotel room, Natsuko’s brain caught up with her. “Wait, are you implying I don’t have an excuse?”
A voice boomed through the first floor of the parlor. “Ladies and gentlemen, Heroes and Non-Heroes. Thank you all for joining us for the Third Annual Tianzhou City Grand Card Tournament!”
The voice came from a man in heavy robes and a pointed cap the same lapis color as the parlor itself.
“I am Cao Hong, owner of the Heavenly Card Parlor and your master of ceremonies for the week’s events…”
And the speech continued in great length, because it and the closing ceremony were the only events of the year in which even Heroes had to bend their ears to Cao Hong, a Non-Hero. It wasn’t a habit specific to him. If you gave the mic to a Non-Hero at an event like this, they’d squeeze out every drop of importance they could.
Halfway through the speech, Daisy finally arrived, single-handedly creating an intermission. Shuixing and Natsuko were tied for dead last in their ability to identify opulence, but there was no mistaking it here. In a side-ruffled magenta cocktail dress, white fur hat, and matching heels and gloves complete with her golden pocket watch dangling from her wrist, Daisy was the patron saint of opulence.
There was a reason—Natsuko now understood—why Sofiane had told them to shoot for being, “the joke in on the joke,” rather than whatever Daisy was doing. There was no copying it. It was such a statement that Daisy didn’t even bother doing The Walk, instead bounding into the room.
“Ohmigosh! Sorry I’m late. My cat nap turned into a tiger!” Daisy said before throwing herself into a snort laugh.
It scared Natsuko how well the humbling effect worked despite Daisy telling her the exact amount of time she was aiming to be late by. In the span of a few years, the game of being on top had changed to become almost unrecognizable to Natsuko. All she had ever done was beat up monsters and get experience points. Bread and butter stuff. But now, even if she did find some magical golden bullet to rocket her stats back up and make another play for a high ranking, she wasn’t sure she could ever do what Daisy did.
Daisy’s arrival was accompanied by raucous cheers and laughter and every table with anyone of note beckoned her to sit with them. Sofiane’s table was out of the running, since the point was not to let Yuna know they were working together.
“She’s gonna go with Cunegonde’s table,” Sofiane whispered to Shuixing. “Watch.”
A moment later, Daisy, spinning around and making a show of not knowing who to sit with, finally lurched towards Cunegonde’s table as though it were a spur-of-the-moment choice.
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“She’s the highest Use-Rank here besides Yuna who… well, you know,” Sofiane said.
Shuixing nodded. She didn’t particularly care. Her thoughts were turning on cards, but Sofiane seemed to be having fun playing “who’s who” and she thought it best not to ruin it.
“I’m hungry,” Pechorin said.
“Hungry? I thought you were Pechorin!” Natsuko said, laughing loudly at her joke and smacking the table. The guests around them shifted their chairs a little further away.
“Now then, after our unexpected but very welcome new arrival,” Cao Hong continued once the crowd noise abated, “I should mention that there have been some last-minute changes to the bracket, which we will project for you now.”
On a reel projector imported from Deco Imperia, the tournament bracket displayed on a giant paper screen behind Cao Hong.
“Oh gods-dammit,” Sofiane said.
“What?” Pechorin asked.
“They rewrote the tournament to give us a harder path. They were supposed to make the opening a breeze full so we could grab Yuna’s attention. They’re trying to get rid of us.”
“D-Did we not play the role of villains well enough?” Shuixing asked.
“No, you all did fine,” Sofiane said. “They’re just being assholes. Whatever! If they wanna do it this way, fine. We’ll win anyway.”
Shuixing gave a firm nod.
After another half an hour of drinking and socializing, Cao Hong announced the first game of the tournament. A company of judges marched into the room, ready to officiate several hundred matches simultaneously. Natsuko and Pechorin scooted their chairs out of the way for a Non-Hero and his friends.
“I’m Peilai Jiao. If you play cards well enough to be a contender in this tournament, you already know who I am,” Peilai said, folding his bureaucrat robes under him and adjusting his glasses.
“Uh-huh,” Sofiane said, laying his cards out. He looked over at Shuixing who had done the preliminary research and made the numbers 2, 4, and 6 with her fingers, letting him know that whoever this dork was, he played a Water-Earth-Wood deck. That meant that his deck made a lot of strong monsters and made it hard to kill them. That meant Sofiane needed to go for the throat early with his own Water-Wind-Lightning setup.
Rather than slapping down all the cards that would let him ramp up like he usually did, Sofiane spent early Elemental Energy to blow up all the low-level monsters he knew could get huge out of nowhere with the right combo.
Peilai grit his teeth. “You’re good. Real good. I didn’t expect that from someone I’ve never heard of before. What’s your name?”
“Uh, Sofiane,” he said. “And tell everyone who beat you, non? Build me a reputation.”
Peilai’s nose twitched. “You seem to think you’ve already won when that’s far from the case.”
It really wasn’t that far. Sofiane was two turns off one of his infinite combos. The only thing he didn’t know for sure was the chance of something getting negated. There was some hand sign he’d worked out with Shuixing that meant he was asking about that, but he’d been doing shots with Natsuko during the opening ceremony and already forgot the hand signs.
“Your move,” Peilai said with a smirk, finally able to get an artifact down that let him stack numbers on his monsters. Sofiane had to think fast.
“Pech, you’ve been drinking, right?”
“Not rea—”
“If you have to go to the bathroom, you could always ask the judge where it is.”
“But I—”
Sofiane kicked Pechorin in the shin. Without reacting, Pechorin stood up, towering over the judge. “Where’s the bathroom?”
While the judge was distracted, Sofiane leaned over and asked, “alright, what’s his negation odds, Shui?”
“27%”
“What!?” Peilai said. His friends started murmuring. “You can’t do that! That’s cheating!”
“Thanks,” Sofiane said, turning back around and playing the last piece of his combo and winning the game.
“No! That’s not fair! J-Judge, he was cheating by asking his friend!”
The judge said, “I-I’m sorry, I got distracted, but—”
“Doesn’t matter. There was nothing to see. We won, fair and square. Sorry kiddo. Have fun in the loser’s bracket!” Sofiane said with a sarcastic wave. He felt a little scummy, but in his defense, he was already planning to cheat anyway, so really Pelican or whatever his name was was only mad about it being blatant. And the first round of the tournament shouldn’t have been a Best-of-1 anyway, but it was, so there was no screwing around.
More protests from Peilai came to no avail, eventually having to be dragged off by his friends before he started a scene.
“Why is it a Bo1, by the way?” Sofiane asked the judge.
“We had 3,200 entrants, most of whom are playing outside in the square or at satellite locations. We’ve got a lot of folks to get through in not a lot of time,” the judge explained. “And let me make something clear, I have no way of confirming if you did anything to cheat, but I’ll be watching you real closely from now on, and there will be no preferential treatment just because you’re some hotshot Hero, got it?"
“On my honor as a musketeer of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Amélie de la Violette, I swear to you, good sir, I would never even think to cheat, nor to act in such an unethical manner as to accuse my opponent of cheating merely because I happen to be losing,” Sofiane said.
The judge’s face softened. “Of course, but I expect you to bear my warning in mind nonetheless.”
“I would dare to do no less than that,” Sofiane said.
The next half-hour they waited for the other games to finish while having to hear Natsuko whine about being bored and drinking from the whiskey she was no longer bothering to hide in her obi and asking the judge if he wanted some until Sofiane swatted her down.
“I’ll be your next opponent,” said a young woman with flowers in her hair as she sat down. She extended a hand which Sofiane shook. “I’m Warada, a community gardener out in the Mamoon Oasis in al-Nuwba.”
“Oh really? Very cool,” Sofiane said, trying to remember if he had done any quests there. After forgetting to introduce himself, they started their game. Shuixing shrugged her shoulders. Apparently Warada was a variable that Shuixing hadn’t scouted.
All he could go off of was smart play. As he drew his cards, he happened to look up. From across the room he caught the eye of his old teammate Xiuquan who, rather than looking at him with disdain, looked on with disinterest and turned his head.
“Umm… interesting move…” Warada said.
Sofiane looked down. He’d grabbed the wrong card and absent-mindedly slapped it down. Fingers off the card, the counterspell was legally cast and went straight to his discard pile having done nothing but eat his turn and deprive him of a key card.
“Anyway, my go, right? I’ll play Soul Swing, tap it for two Elemental Energy, then play this…” In one turn Warada had a font and two artifacts that gave her a boat load of energy to play with.
“I hope you didn’t think I was some chump Non-Hero you could flex on by deliberately wasting your turn,” she said with a pearly-white smile.