Adek: 44 Points
Isabella: 8 Points
Isabella was finally down to her last few points. She was at the stage where Adek going out, no matter his hand, had a good chance to kill her. Anything like a direct hit was guaranteed death.
She’s in a truly precarious situation, Adek thought as he drew his seven new cards for the round. However, I can’t afford to let my guard down. A direct hit has a decent chance to send me straight to the grave too.
Meanwhile, Isabella finished drawing her own cards. The new round started.
For me, games aren’t something I play, but something I win, Adek thought. Therefore, he’d make sure to deliver the coup de grâce. Luck may favor him, but at the end of the day, it was only chance. He wanted something definite: a total victory.
Heh heh, preparations are complete. Adek had a wide smirk on his face.
The round had been proceeding at a leisurely pace. Neither Isabella nor Adek had been especially lucky and both had yet to place a single meld on the table. The first to break the equilibrium was Isabella. She added the card she drew and one from her hand to an existing meld on the table, then dropped a three-card meld she’d apparently had all along, leaving her with two cards.
“I’m going to give you a heads-up: I’m only missing one card. Do be careful, okay?” Isabella told Adek.
“Oh, is that so? Then I’ll make sure to be extra careful,” he replied. He wasn’t some dimwit who’d blindly trust what Isabella had to say, but in this situation, the possibility of a direct hit was the thing he had to be wariest of. After all, his points were low enough for a single direct hit to finish him off. With seven cards in hand, like he had at the moment, that chance was more like a guarantee. He’d have to pass his turns by discarding safe cards, even if it delayed his own chances of going out.
Everything’s fine. She’s not that close yet, Adek thought with conviction before checking the top card of the deck. Incidentally, the card he was looking for at the moment was the four of hearts.
Hmm, at this rate, Isabella’s going to draw it on her next turn, so let’s do something about it. He sent instructions to his teammate.
“I take that,” the troll said. It picked up Alicia’s discarded card.
As a result, Adek ended up drawing the card originally meant for Isabella. Such a move would be pointless under normal circumstances; no one should be able to tell the identity of face-down cards.
“Heh heh, I finally have a meld, so I’ll play it safe and drop it on the table,” Adek said before dropping a three-card meld that included the four of hearts he’d just drawn.
Isabella didn’t show any particular reaction and continued with the game.
Yet, how did Adek know the four of hearts was the next card? How had he been so convinced earlier that Isabella wasn’t one card from going out yet? One might guess that he was somehow cheating, though within the space where the game took place, cheating through magic was impossible. If the chair monsters detected any magic other than telepathy magic, they would instantly devour its user whole.
Too bad for Isabella that cheating that doesn’t rely on magic is fine, as long as you don’t get caught, Adek thought.
Adek had cheated by marking the cards. It was a method where one would apply some kind of marking to the back of each card, to then be able to tell what a card was even face down. When executed well, it was a type of cheating that worked wonders.
Against Isabella, simply marking the back of each card like a naive fool would get him caught in an instant. Besides, since the cards were stacked in a deck, he’d only be able to identify the top one. Therefore, Adek had marked the cards on the side with tiny scratches so imperceptible that even shenmo, with their acute sense of sight, could barely notice them. The position he’d scratched each card was also subtly different. That allowed him to tell the cards apart even when stacked as a deck, as well as know which card his opponents drew each time. Of course, he hadn’t marked every card, only eleven of them up to that round. Even so, that was more than enough. Combined with his superb luck and high skill at the game, his victory was almost assured.
Isabella has the jack of spades in hand and the queen of spades in her discarded cards. I have the ten of spades in my hand and the troll has the other three jacks, Adek thought.
In other words, Isabella’s jack of spades was completely isolated. She couldn’t go out with a direct hit as long as she still had it.
On the other hand, things are great on my side. Adek inspected the deck. The small scratches on the side revealed the exact position and ranks of the marked cards.
Heh, I can go out with my next draw. His only concern was Isabella sensing that something was wrong and having Alicia pick up the troll’s discarded card to change the turn order. He wouldn’t put something like that past her.
Let’s see, what will you do now? Adek watched as the troll drew and discarded a card...which no one picked up. The card that would lead to his victory lay at the top of the deck.
I won. He was almost moved to tears. Defeating an enemy on a different level from the scrubs he usually killed filled Adek with deep elation.
“All right, it’s my turn next.” Adek drew a card: the winning one. “I’m sorry, but it looks like I’m going out,” he said before combining the three of clubs he’d just drawn—the card he already knew was his next draw—with two more threes in his hand to form a meld.
Alicia was stunned by the development.
“This was a great game, a truly magnificent one. Goodbye,” Adek said and discarded his last card, the ten of spades.
“Direct hit,” Isabella said at that very moment.
“Excuse me?”
Absurd, inconceivable. Isabella should have had a jack of spades in hand with nothing to go into a meld with it!
When she revealed her two cards, she actually had the jack and queen of spades. Either the ten or king of spades would have granted her victory. Adek twitched in shock. How was this possible? The queen of spades had been among Isabella’s discarded cards, but when he looked again, it was no longer on the table.
“You swapped it while I was drawing my card, didn’t you?”
“Whatever could you mean? I could tell you were staring at the deck very intently, so even if we suppose someone did do something, I doubt you would have noticed,” Isabella replied with a small, captivating smile. “Nevertheless, you discarded that card very carelessly. Did you have some solid reason to believe it was safe?” she added, turning the jack of spades horizontally and briefly showing off its side.