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 it felt like 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 at least 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 thought about doing the same, but instead chose to play d3. She played Nd4. It was awkwardly straightforward. Slid a knight across to d4, taking the knight she had just moved, and of course, since nothing is free in life, she took back with exd4.
We traded down a bit through the center. My knight hopped to d5, and she met it instantly with Nxd5, eating the piece without a flicker of hesitation. Reasonable. Predictable. Deeply annoying.
We dragged on like this for a bit, and on move 19, driven entirely by cabin fever and a severe lack of better judgment, I played Bxe6.
I realized how monumentally stupid that move was about a microsecond after my fingers left the piece. It wasn't a brilliant tactical sacrifice that would earn me a standing ovation. It was a panic-induced cry for help. A cry that was ignored.
Lysandrias looked up, giving me that slow, disappointed look a parent reserves for a child trying to eat a crayon. She calmly met it with Rxe6.
Brilliant. I was now actively bleeding material, and we hadn't even hit the twentieth move. Desperate not to start leaking even more pieces, I slid my bishop to c3, snatching a lonely pawn just to pretend I was still contributing to society.
How down was I? I squinted across the board, trying to find a single thread to pull.
Oh, I found vulnerabilities. About four major ones, actually. Which would have been great news, except for the tiny, miniscule, atom-sized, depressing detail that all four of them belonged to my camp, and zero belonged to hers. Before I could even process my own impending doom, she fired back with Rxe1+. I countered with a miserable Bxe1, staring down at the smoking crater of my position.
I mentally retired at that exact moment and just started throwing pieces wherever felt least painful.
Maybe that early-game stunt where I tried to play mind games with a millennium-old entity wasn't my finest hour.
Somehow, all of her minor pieces had completely bypassed my lines like ghosts, leaving my remaining forces viciously attacking empty air. Her pieces clicked into place with terrifying rhythm, her turns taking less than a fifth of the time mine did. And you would think that because I was taking three times as long, I was actually clawing back some kind of advantage? No.
I was playing pristine, hyper-optimised aggressive chess, and it was doing precisely fuck all.
By move 25, I came to accept that I wasn't making back the positioning I'd so carelessly gift-wrapped for her in the opening. She continued to carve up the board while actual beads of sweat formed on my forehead as I performed hopeless, panic-driven calculations. From a macro view, it looked like I was managing a fragile equality, ang ignoring the catastrophic downside that my situation was actively suffocating me.
By move 30, I realized I hadn't just made a mistake; I was thoroughly, masterfully trapped.
The whole board was effectively poisoned, and every legal move in front of me only sped up my structural collapse.
By move 35, I looked down. Really looked down. I spent a full minute hunting for a forced stalemate, before stopping. My overinflated ego would never let me do that, and Lysandrias wouldn't let me off the hook anyway. Every piece I owned was either completely paralyzed or actively participating in its own execution.
Huh. I'm completely fucked.
Thirty moves later—after a grueling, pathetic exercise in stalling where my remaining king and rook played a tragic game of hide-and-seek against a firing squad—Lysandrias offered the first drop of emotion I'd seen since move 4: actual, unadulterated pity. She put an end to my suffering on move 64.
"Queen g7 mate. Good game," she said. The quiet, vindictive joy in her voice was practically vibrating off the canvas walls. It was like this every single time we played. I still didn't understand why a literal ancient dragon derived so much soul-cleansing glee from turning my brain into grey mush over a wooden board.
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.