The next day was... boring, to say the least. There wasn't much development, as there was more healing to be done, and honestly, the healing wasn't particularly preventing us from moving forward; we just didn't want to.
Most of my group was just tired, and there wasn't any pressing issue forcing us to go forward. So we didn't.
I stepped into Lis's tent, holding a familiar leather-bound box in my hands.
"Hey, Li—" The words didn't have time to leave my mouth before I had to duck a beam of particularly concentrated mana that shot directly from Lis.
Right. Forgot about that. I would have to ask her why she was so sensitive about that name later, but for now, we had more pressing matters.
"Wanna play?" I ignored the steaming hole in the tent behind me, I was going to have to fix that later, because there was no chance she would agree to clean up after her own mess.
"Play what? Scrap that, I know what you're going to say." She still hadn't looked back up at me, and asking about whatever she was tinkering with would have me sent out, and I was too bored to go looking for the others.
"Place it down." She continued, dropping whatever she was working on into a dark, swirling space on her desk.
I placed the box down, opened it, and set up the pieces. It was the only game we really played out here; chess.
"I'm white." I exclaimed, knowing that against her, I needed just about every advantage I could get.
"I assumed you would be. Go ahead then." She had already adopted one of 'those' faces, where everything you had thought of, she had thought of, 5 moves ago.
I opened somewhat conventionally with e4.
She looked at it for about 3 milliseconds, sighed, and slid her own king's pawn across to e5. Classical. Reasonable. Boring.
So I decided that that was where logic ended.
Qf3. Violating every fundamental rule of openings in chess by bringing out my queen early. Why? I don't know. I like playing sacrificial? Although, Qf3 probably wasn't the best for that either.
She looked genuinely confused for a moment, before responding with Nc6. She bit. Kinda?
Bc4, threatening quite possibly the most obvious checkmate known to man, and as expected, she shut down my hopes of a Scholar's Mate immediately with Nf6, blocking my queen.
Right. Where to go next? I looked down at the board, trying to calculate my way through this for all of 5 seconds before realising that the branches of the tree were far too wide for that.
Eh, play whatever. Nc3. It's probably time to develop atleast one of my knights, seeing as my other knight is blocked off by whatever the hell Qf3 was.
Lysandrias looked up at me for a moment before chuckling.
"Sure, why not, let's do that then."
Then, having still not wiped the smirk off her face, she slid her bishop across to e7.
"Alright, Be7, we should be pretty even now. Are you gonna actually play yet or do you have any more tricks?"
Although it sounded nice, from my eyes, it looked sadistic. Like a predator toying with prey.
But I wasn't going to go down that easily. Hopefully.
The next few moves were mostly void of the nonsense that I had opened with, as I had come to the same realisation I come to every game; she isn't going to fall for psychological warfare, especially not when it was admittedly pretty obvious psychological warfare.
The rest of the game played out reasonably. I continued with Nge2, she countered with O-O, I did the same, she played d6. It was awkwardly straightforward. Slid a pawn across to h3, and there was some additional king movement with Kh8.
Alright, cool, I'm managing this pretty well. Looks even enough. My queen went to e3, her knight went to b4.
And I made the mistake of thinking it wasn't looking so bad, and so for reasons known only to myself at that moment, I played Qg3. I realised how bad that move was too late, and my hands had already come off the piece.
Lysandrias looked up at me, trying to question if I had actually gone insane. Upon confirming that no, I was not insane, I was just stupid, she played Nxc2.
Great. I was down material, and we were on the 8th move. Deciding I didn't want to lose more material, I slid my rook to b1.
How down was I... I glanced across the board, trying to see if there were any vulnerabilities to exploit.
Oh, there were. I saw about... four vulnerabilities. That was great news.
Except for the fact that those were four of my vulnerabilities. And zero of hers.
If I hadn't been tormented enough, she plays a5. I mentally retire at that exact moment, and just start playing whatever feels best.
Maybe that early game stunt wasn't my best decision.
It's no better that she just starts hailing pawns on me, forcing me to play defensive. Against pawns.
Her pieces clicked into place methodically, her turns taking less than a fifth the time mine did. And you would think that because I'm taking so much longer, I would be clawing out some kind of advantage? No.
I was flailing at best. And we were barely a dozen moves in.
By move 20, I come to accept that I am not making back that point of material I lost in the opening.
She continues to carve space while there's probably actual beads of sweat forming on my forehead as I perform hopeless calculations, but it looks like I'm managing 'some' level of board equality. As in, my situation doesn't look to be getting any worse.
By move 30 I realise that I wasn't just mistaken, I was horribly, horribly misguided.
The whole board was effectively poisoned, and all possible moves will make my position worse.
I looked down at move 35. Like really look down. I try to look for any forced stalemate, before stopping. My ego would never let me do that, and Lysandrias wouldn't either. Every piece I have is either completely stuck, or should not be moved under any circumstances.
Huh. I'm fucked.
30 moves later, after doing what is realistically no more than stalling, since after move 51, there has been nothing on the board but my king and rook, Lysandrias looked at me with the first drop of emotion I'd seen since move 4; pity, and put an end to my suffering on move 65.
"Queen g7 mate. Good game" The joy in her voice was palpable. It was like this every time we played. I didn't understand why she was so gleeful beating me in this like it was the only thing she as better than me in.
Stepping out of Lysandrias's tent felt less like leaving a room and more like crawling out of a tomb after losing a prolonged battle against a machine designed explicitly for my humiliation. My ego was bruised, my pride was shattered, and my brain felt like it had been run over by a magical steamroller. Sixty-four moves. Sixty-four agonizing, calculated, suffocating turns of slow, painful execution, ending in a queen checkmate that she probably saw coming the moment I brought my queen out on the second move like an absolute clown.
The cold air hit my face, doing little to clear the dense fog of defeat lingering in my skull. I stood there for a second, staring blankly at the canvas flap of her tent as if willing it to catch fire, before remembering the minor detail that she had nearly blown a hole clean through the back wall with a concentrated mana beam roughly two hours ago.
Right. The tent.
I turned around, dragging my feet through the dirt of the campsite, and stared at the smoking, charred perimeter of her temporary lodging. It was a neat, circular hole about the size of a dinner plate, smelling faintly of misery and scorched canvas. She wasn't going to fix it. Of course she wasn't. Expecting an ancient, terrifying dragon disguised as a brooding researcher to pick up a needle and thread was like expecting a boulder to sprout wings and fly away. It was entirely my problem, as were most of the structural and emotional disasters that somehow gravitated toward me on a daily basis.
Muttering a string of creative profanities under my breath, I shuffled over to my own gear pack, rummaging through the miscellaneous assortment of supplies until I fished out a roll of heavy-duty mending cloth and a spool of reinforced thread. Riveting work.
Truly, this was the grand, epic destiny I had signed up for when I decided to get mixed up in high-level politics and continent-spanning threats—mending canvas burn holes because one of my two resident magical powerhouses has the emotional regulation of a hyperactive toddler with a tactical nuke.
As I sat there cross-legged on a dry patch of earth, jabbing a thick needle through stubborn, soot-blackened fabric, I could hear the faint, muffled sounds of the rest of the camp waking up to the mid-afternoon slump.
We really weren't doing anything. It was pathetic, honestly. There was a whole world out there teetering on the edge of collapse, various factions probably tearing their hair out wondering where we vanished to, and here we were, sitting on our collective asses because nobody had the sheer willpower to pack up the tents and start walking again. My fingers pulled the thread tight, wincing slightly as the coarse twine bit into a callus. My muscles still ached from the previous week's encounters, a dull, nagging reminder that healing magic only does so much when you insist on doing stupid things like fighting things twice your size.
A heavy thump echoed nearby, followed by a muffled groan. I looked up to see one of our primary vanguard fighters stumbling out of their tent, looking just as thoroughly wrecked by rest and inactivity as I felt.
"Morning," I muttered, not looking up from my tragic attempt at embroidery.
"It's three in the afternoon, Aren," a groggy, heavily exhausted voice shot back. It was Vane, wiping sleep from his eyes and looking like he had aged five years overnight just from staring at the ceiling of his canvas shelter. "And stop talking like you've been up doing anything productive. I heard the blast. Did you go play chess with the dragon again?"
"It wasn't just a game," I shot back defensively, pulling the thread through with an aggressive tug. "It was a tactical exercise in psychological warfare."
"You lost horribly, didn't you?"
"She played an unsurprising checkmate on move sixty-four," I muttered, the bitterness creeping back into my tone. "And she looked entirely too happy about it. I'm convinced she keeps me around purely as a form of afternoon entertainment. Like a circus animal that occasionally speaks."
Vane let out a dry, rattling chuckle that quickly turned into a cough, wandering over toward the cold fire pit in search of leftover water or some semblance of breakfast. "At least she's entertaining herself. The rest of us are just rotting in place. Are we moving tomorrow, or are we just going to sit here until moss grows over our boots?"
"Ask me tomorrow," I sighed, tying off the knot with my teeth and biting the thread off. I held up the mended patch of the tent wall, squinting at the lopsided, hideous stitching. It looked like a blind spider had crawled across the canvas, but it would hold. "Right now, my brain is fried from calculating pawn structures I had no business touching, and my soul hurts."
"Fair enough." Vane kicked lazily at a loose pebble, sending it skipping into the brush. "If we stay here another day, I'm going to start challenging the local wildlife to staring contests just to feel something."
"Don't. The last time you tried to assert dominance over a local fauna, we had to spend three hours running from an oversized badger-bear hybrid."
"It was a noble endeavour," Vane mumbled, though a faint, self-deprecating grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.
I tossed the sewing kit back into my pack, rubbing my temples as a fresh wave of exhaustion settled over me. The quiet of the camp stretched out again, heavy and undisturbed, save for the distant rustle of wind through the canopy above. We had a long road ahead of us whenever we finally decided to pull our heads out of the dirt, and we were going to need every ounce of preparation we could get—especially if I ever wanted a remote chance of beating Lysandrias in a game that didn't end in absolute, soul-crushing humiliation.
For now, though, the sun was beginning its slow, lazy descent toward the horizon, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and orange. Another day of absolute, unadulterated laziness ticked by, bringing us one step closer to whatever disaster was inevitably waiting for us down the line. But that was a problem for tomorrow's Aren. Today's Aren had suffered quite enough losses for one afternoon.