When Eva finally arrived at the shrine she was greeted by a scene of more or less disgruntled regular visitors leaving the shrine grounds. As she stepped inside, the Kitsune noticed a few of the less friendly, to her at least, elderly visitors saying a short prayer before crossing the path to be on the other side of it from Eva. Others just passed her by, some that didn’t recognize her telling her not to bother today, while those that did gave her various mumbled wishes of good luck.

One of them even stopped before Eva and greeted her politely. “Hello, you’re the foreigner working for Komaki right?”

“Ah yes that would be me.”

He put a hand on Eva’s shoulder and gave it what was probably intended to be a reassuring squeeze. “Best of luck with the purification. That poor dead bird dying in the Honden surely isn’t a good sign of things to come.”

Unsure what exactly he meant, Eva just looked after the leaving visitor unsurely. After a moment though, she remembered she was here to check in on Kurt and how he was doing against Karasuza’s father.

Getting into the house was rather quick once she had moved past the worshipers on their way home. The scene inside though made her check the time on her phone. After confirming it had only been about 20 minutes since she left Kurt’s place, she looked up again.

Sitting at the table and before Kurt’s laptop was Karasuza’s father, while everyone was standing or sitting behind him gazes glued to the devices screen.

Deciding not to interrupt whatever was happening, she walked over to stand next to Kurt. Leaning closer towards him she whispered: “What exactly did I miss?”

Kurt twitched a bit, having completely missed Eva approaching. “Woah. Hey there Fuchs.” He said, before taking a moment to gather his thoughts. “And you missed most of it really.”

“Really?” Eva inquired with a raised eyebrow.

“Mhm. As we had agreed, we set up the game on your computer as well and gave him a few minutes explanation of everything.” Kurt began to explain, nodding towards the currently unused laptop on the table. “Well, turns out he’s not as bad with technology as many other elderly people.”

“And it’s already all over?” She pushed further. “I thought you said usually a game takes ten minutes. Did you guys not play a best of 3?”

“No.” Kurt said with a shake of his head. “He beat me handily in the first game. Then demanded to be shown a worthier opponent.”

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“And you just let him off? What about getting Karasuza the chance to stay here?”

“Well, not ‘just’.” Kurt says with a shake of his head. “In fact she pushed him about it. Batted her eyelashes at him, pulled out the puppy dog eyes and all that. Then she asked how he could just give up like this. How he’d forfeit if he ended the match there.”

“And?”

“Well. He told her that if we managed to produce an actually challenging opponent for him ‘in this lightning filled machine’ He was willing to concede that his views of modern humanity were wrong, and he’d allow her to explore it at her leisure.”

“So how is it going with that?” Eva inquired her gaze slowly drifting to the screen filled with moving armies that didn’t tell her much.

“Well he has been through one ranking match so far. He breezed through it. I am curious to see where he will be ranked.”

“So how do these ranking matches work?” Eva inquired, still not sure what was actually going on on screen.

“He’ll have to play I think six more matches. Then he will be placed amongst one of the ranks depending on his results. If he keeps going like this he’ll probably be put in platinum or diamond, the algorithm doesn’t let you place higher than those.”

“I see.”

After that, the two of them fell into silence as they too did their best to follow what the old Tengu was doing. After that match was done, and Eva got to see a game from the start, she at least managed to get the gist of how the game was going. While it started seemingly even, the Tengu’s army soon overwhelmed the opponents.

The next few matches went quite similar, though each time, as far as Eva could tell, the time for Karasuza’s dad’s army to pull ahead was getting longer and longer.

Then finally, in the last match before he would be placed according to Kurt, he actually lost the first game to some kind of well executed early attack. Which was a bit surprising as similar aggressions had been fended off easily by his defenses before. The second game, the Tengu seemed to focus more on defense than he had before, but this time no early aggression came. Instead the game progressed to the messy armies marching on each other that Eva had yet to get enough of a hang off to tell how it was going at any one moment. In the End, this time it was the elderly youkai that slowly but surely lost the game and thus the match.

As a pop up appeared congratulating him on making it to Platinum, he turned to Kurt. “This Game is indeed an incredible rush. While not as storied or wrapped in tradition as Go or Shogi, it is clearly much easier to find a worthy opponent.” He then stood up and bowed to the werewolf. “Would you please inform me as to where I could obtain such a ‘laptop’ of mine own?”

“Ah of course.” Kurt said as he sat down next to the Tengu and began to direct him to an online reseller of electronics. “Does that mean Karasuza gets to stay here?”

“Maybe.” The Tengu said with a shake of his head. “For now. Until I find us a new house closer to human civilization.”