Shit, Sofiane barely managed to keep himself from saying out loud.

“Aw, don’t tell me that big entrance was for a mediocre cardplayer?” Warada said, crossing her legs.

Sofiane held up his hands and grinned. “Alright, you got me, I’ll stop screwing around.”

He played a ramping artifact of his own and passed the turn. Warada immediately tapped everything and slapped a Goblin Skirmisher and a Dynamite card down. The first card let her attack with a monster the same turn it was summoned, the second destroyed his ramping artifact.

“Oops,” she said sarcastically.

Sofiane bit the inside of his cheek. No one in this tournament was a dunce, not even the first-rounders, but this was brutal. He looked back at Shuixing. She was making little circles with her index fingers. That was their sign to spend his 50 health and ride out the damage. Taking as deep a breath as he dared without ruining his calm, cool, cocky aesthetic, he drew cards.

A few turns later and he was starting to sweat. More monsters, more direct damage, more destroying his stuff before he could set up combos. Shuixing was no longer making circles with her fingers.

“Gonna be hard to pull off combos with no enchantments,” Warada said.

“Hey, you play like I do!” Natsuko said with a laugh. “Blow up everything he’s got! Fire only baby, lesgo!”

Warada politely smiled at the drunk Hero. But that gave him an idea. He was sitting on counterspells, but he wanted to wait until the last second if possible. He needed to confer, so he kicked Pechorin in the shin again.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Pechorin asked.

“I already told you, didn’t I? You’re telling me you already forgot?” the judge said. The judge craned his neck back and forth to continue watching the game as Pechorin swayed back and forth to block the judge’s view.

“Yes. I forgot,” Pechorin replied.

Sofiane wanted to slap his forehead, but he didn’t have the time to spare.

“Shui, what are the chances she has more direct-target damage cards? I need to know how much more I can ride out the aggro rush.”

“33% unless she has discard retrieval,” Shuixing replied.

“Shit, that’s high. Screw it, we ball,” Sofiane said.

Warada scoffed. “H-Hey! No outside help! Judge—”

Pechorin stumbled between the judge and the table, blocking Warada’s protests. By the time he was gone and Warada could explain what had happened, the judge was glaring at Sofiane who just shrugged.

“I didn’t see anything amiss. Did anyone else?”

“Nope!” Natsuko said with a loud burp. “But I’d have to give a shit for that, hehehe.”

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice— I’m not gonna get fooled again, okay? No more asking to go to the bathroom!” the judge said, pointing at Pechorin. “Nothing else! If I catch you, or if we hear about you doing this one more time, you’re out.”

“I assure you, no such thing has happened or will happen. These are merely what we refer to in Cascadia as “Les Opps”,” Sofiane said.

Warada lost her playfulness and was now glaring at Sofiane. “If you want to make your loss more humiliating by trying to cheat, you are welcome to do so.”

Sofiane was able to heal a little bit of the direct damage she was dealing with water spells, but his health was slowly getting lower and lower. Now at five health, he was in the realm where a single-target Ability could take him out from behind the defenses of his monsters. That was the 33% chance he was afraid of. It affected when and how he could use his counterspells. Negating Warada destroying his enchantments meant he could combo and win, but not having the negation for a single-target Ability meant he lost the best-of-one.

Fortune favored the bold, he decided. Playing it safe was not how he had gotten as far as he had. And with that thought, he played the enchantment that would let him untap the monster that made more monsters infinitely.

Warada smirked and threw down an Insta-cast to destroy it, to which he threw down his counterspell. They locked eyes.

“You don’t have it,” Sofiane said with a shit-eating grin. “I know you don’t.”

“Who’s to say?” Warada replied.

“You would have put the fireball down immediately. You don’t have it.”

Warada held his gaze for a second before throwing her cards down. “Screw you, cheating asshole."

Sofiane leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. “Not a clue what you’re talking about. Next?”

“That’s it for today,” the judge said with acid in his voice. “Best-of-threes start tomorrow, however the parlor will remain open until midnight for free play.”

Sofiane turned to Shuixing. “Think we can schmooze our way up to Yuna? Might make things easier.”

“I… am not sure that will be possible at this time,” Shuixing said, pointing past Sofiane to the large group of mostly Heroes congregating around Yuna for a chance to be picked for the legendary “Money Match.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

~~~

“Doohoohoohoo!” Cunegonde laughed.

The irony was not lost on Daisy that Cunegonde’s laugh annoyed her while having an obnoxious laugh herself. But in her defense, Daisy reserved her own goofy laugh for things that were actually funny.

“The sheer of absurdity of it! Their chins were up so high you’d think they would have knocked over a chandelier. Honestly, it would have been amusing if someone with a high Use-Ranking had pulled such a stunt, but the fact that it was a gaggle of literal nobodies with Sofiane as their babysitter made it positively hilarious,” Cunegonde said before launching into more doohoohoo’s.

Daisy gave a small chuckle to be polite, but the lack of her snort-laugh chilled the entire table of Heroes she was sitting with. Her polite laugh might as well have been a slap in the face for how quickly Cunegonde turned red with embarrassment.

“A-Anyway, w-what do you and your team make of the you-know-what?” Cunegonde said, salvaging the conversation.

“The loss of a Hero?”

“Y-Yeah! Isn’t that scary!?” Cunegonde said with agreeing nods from Baphomat and Calhoun.

Daisy was glad to hear they were talking about the death of Natsuko’s friend. It meant she was in position to steer the rhetoric a bit. “Well, I haven’t had the chance to talk to my posse. They’re all out in the Sibe still while I was galavantin’ around waitin’ for the Mist to get pushed back…”

This was a minor flex. The rest of the table was taking a break from grinding out dungeons that Daisy’s team had already cleared. Talking shop put a look of worry on Baphomet and Calhoun’s faces.

“But you know what I did hear from that old Pengwu, Zhidao? Some folks’re testing out dimension-jumping again as a way to teleport straight across Po-Lin. Ain’t that somethin’? Except apparently there’s a few kinks to work out.”

“A few kinks?” Baphomet asked in his grumbly bass, bells tinkling where they hung from his ram’s horns. “I’d say throwing yourself into the void is definitely a kink. You will not catch me trying it, even if they iron them out.”

“Nor me,” Cunegonde said. “How dreadful!”

“Used to happen more often back when the 1st-gens were screwing around, I’ve heard,” Daisy said. “Hasn’t happened since any of us have been summoned but it’s nothin’ to worry your heads about!”

Cunegonde put a hand over her heart. “Thank the Celestials! I was concerned, I must admit.”

Daisy was relieved to hear them taking her interpretation to heart. Given her popularity, those three would go around telling everyone that the drop in the Use-Ranking total had been due to an experiment gone wrong, so sayeth Daisy Corduroy herself, and it would become the official explanation. Whether the Yishang bought it too, she didn’t know, but if it came to that she would just have to come clean and tell them the truth. At least they would clean up the matter of Natsuko’s bottle tidily.

Daisy had half a mind to go tell the Yishang everything right now, except she was worried they’d come down too harshly on Natsuko and Shuixing, and if she could resolve a little oopsie before it became a big oopsie, that was how she preferred to do things.

After that, the conversation took a break as the three Heroes sitting around her table went to go play their matches. This did not take long, since the tournament brackets had been drawn up with a mind to having any Hero of note playing disposable Non-Heroes until at least the last couple of days of the tournament. No one wanted a Non-Hero to get far by luck of the draw.

The exception, so far as Daisy could see, was Sofiane’s bracket. The organizers had done the exact opposite of what she expected them to do and gave him a grueling gauntlet right from the get-go. Two Non-Heroes on the first day, but then Xuiquan as his first match-up for tomorrow. Even Daisy knew he was a top-tier card player and she couldn’t be paid to care about a card game.

“You seem more distant than usual, Daisy. Is something the matter?” Cunegonde asked.

On her soft, round face, beneath a yellow bonnet and brown sausage curls, sprouting from a pair of audaciously gold-flecked lips, Cunegonde had the worst fake sympathy smile Daisy had ever seen. It wasn’t that she was trying to mock Daisy. More likely she was trying to curry favor with her in the hopes of hearing secrets and tips and maybe—optimally—getting a closer introduction to the Yishang. But she definitely did not actually care why Daisy was more distant than usual.

“Oh, just a lot on my mind. I could really use a—”

A waiter set down a mint julep in front of her before she could finish the sentence.

“Thank ya kindly!” she said, chugging the alcoholic drink through the accompanying loop-de-loop straw. She really liked those straws. Maybe she oughta ask the concierge at Yongfu if they could send some up to the minibar.

“The odds are 15:1 if you want to take them,” Cunegonde said.

“Odds for what now?” Daisy asked, reaching out for the second mint julep that was waiting for her when she emerged from her first one.

“Odds that Xiuquan trounces that tedious peacock Sofiane and it doesn’t even go to a game three,” Cunegonde said, cracking open a Tianzhounese fan and fanning herself.

“You mean I win if it goes to game three regardless of who wins?” Daisy asked.

“Doohoohoo! If you want to take the fool’s bet, I suppose. I mentioned it as a joke, darling.”

“Hell, I’ll put ten million Ying down on Sofiane,” Daisy said, this time paired with a proper, snorting laugh. Everyone at the table who had bet on Xiuquan went pale and was suddenly second-guessing their bid, wondering what Daisy knew that they didn’t.

This information rippled out and within a couple of minutes, the odds had tilted to 3:1 in favor of no game three.

Daisy snapped her finger when word got back to her table. “Rats! I was hoping to collect more. Oh well!”

“W-Why exactly are you going all in on Sofiane?” Cunegonde asked, clearly worried about the couple million Ying she had put down the other way. “I’ve never heard of him playing before. Surely this is some kind of embarrassing publicity stunt to pull up his sinking Use-Number? I cannot fathom someone like that beating Xiuquan.”

Cunegonde was right about it being an embarrassing publicity stunt, but wrong about the motive. Daisy’s job, she reminded herself, was to keep it that way. But why not fan the flames of a good tournament storyline in the process? Less wasn’t more, more was more! At least according to Mint Julep #2.

Daisy shrugged. “Well, sweetie, I’m a sucker for underdogs. What can I say?”

~~~

Into a lovely patch of the most famous and beautiful flower in all of Tianzhou: The lapis-colored Water Chrysanthemum, Natsuko projectile vomited.

“Don’t get any on your dress you idiot, we don’t have a spare!” Sofiane yelled.

They were a few blocks from the Heavenly Card Parlor and the sky was a dim grayish-orange from the light pollution of ten thousand lanterns. The lights in the house whose garden Natsuko was throwing up in were fortunately dark. Sofiane hoped they stayed that way.

“Shuixing— over— more!” Natsuko said in-between waves.

Her friend sighed and leaned Natsuko further over the hedge to keep any splashes away from her expensive kimono.

“I’m gonna have a hard time going to sleep tonight,” Sofiane said, bouncing on his feet. “Gods that was exhilarating! And I know we’re matched up against Heroes tomorrow so we should be well prepared for them, right Shui?”

Shuixing nodded. “Should be. I have a good bit of research on your next competitor.”

“Tch, shoot. Forgot to look at the bracket. Who is it?”

“A Hero named Xiuquan.”

At the mention of that name, Sofiane suddenly felt like joining Natsuko at the flower bed.