The week following the first official visit of the SOS Brigade to Hinamizawa was also its newest member’s first week in her new school and it only took one trip for the near northern solstice’s sun to burn into Sasaki the certainty that only a moron or a sadist builds a school at the top a hill without taking into account public transportation’s routes.
In spite of her efforts, her discomfort didn’t go unnoticed by her friends, who decided that some compensation was in order and after considering that Sasaki never took part of the Brigade’s or practically any other non-academic after-school activity, they thought it would be nice if she enjoyed the usufruct of the clubroom for a few hours after class as she saw fit with Kyon appointed as her official escort for not-so-alleged security concerns.
So, what did a hopelessly in love sixteen-years-old girl get up to alone with her boyfriend in a perfectly soundproofed room?
They played chess and chatted.
Even Mikuru thought it was sad.
It wasn’t like Sasaki actually missed the implied meaning behind her friends’ antics, but she had her reasons to do so.
Even before they became friends, one of the first things that caught her eye about Kyon in middle school was his ability to seemingly effortlessly come up with solid tactics when he played with their classmates, yet the two of them never got the opportunity to play a strategy game before.
Cram school forbade any kind of tabletop games and their lunch breaks ended up being better spent in conversation. Not even the occasional study sessions at either of their homes gave them that chance because neither of their education-oriented mothers was capable of checking on them at intervals longer than eight minutes each.
The real reason for such scrutiny passed way over Kyon’s oblivious-to-romance head, but Sasaki couldn’t help but feel a little mortified that both women expected that kind of hormonal behavior from them.
In this regard, Sasaki wasn’t sure if it was a change for the worse or for the better when Kyon somehow managed to get on her mother’s good side, turning any apprehensive feeling the latter could have about her daughter’s best male friend into annoyingly enthusiastic approval.
Now her chagrin had an entirely new source.
Sixth game. Black’s 27th move. Checkmate.
The above defeat was Sasaki’s best result to date.
It was amazing in a way that only makes sense if you’re at the other side of the board. The way how your almost every plan falls apart in its first or second stage at most, with the only exceptions being when you’re walking into a trap and you haven’t realize it yet.
No bragging. No mercy. No effort.
That was what Kyon offered as an opponent.
Sasaki didn’t know it yet, but this was part of the reason why Koizumi Itsuki persisted in trying to triumph over Kyon in such games, only to fail every time. For him, there was something comforting about the fact that Suzumiya Haruhi’s chosen one couldn’t be defeated by a ploy of his making.
The sixth game was also the moment Sasaki realized why Haruhi jokingly warned her against playing “strip-chess” the moment the supreme commander heard of her plans.
Whether inadvertently following her friend’s advice was something to be grateful for or not, it was a question Sasaki preferred to leave unanswered.
The most annoying part was that Kyon barely took notice of the board, busying himself instead with his narration of some of the ordinary, publicly known stories about the SOS Brigade.
In particular, the one about Haruhi and Yuki serving as stand-ins for a girl band called ENOZ during the last cultural festival caught her attention. Especially after he almost made her promise to not encourage Haruhi about forming a band with the Brigade members.
“I never knew you were so skilled at chess. You must have practiced a lot,” Sasaki commented, once more placing the pieces back into their initial formation and switching their sides’ color. She suspected that said action was the only reason why he hadn’t thought of putting the board away yet.
“Not really. Koizumi brought the game to the clubroom last year a little after Tanabata and needed someone to play with him, so I learned the rules. In hindsight we never played much, but lately it seems that Yuki-chan took a liking to chess and shogi and invites me to play with her,” Kyon replied and opened their seventh game by advancing one of his white pawns two squares.
“I see. How do fare against her?” she asked as she completed her turn.
“I’m not sure. I think she tends to win in chess more, roughly in the same proportion I do in shogi,” Kyon guessed.
“So, under the assumption Nagato-san is equally good at both games, it follows you’re a better at shogi than chess?” Sasaki posited.
“Probably. Uncle Keiichi taught me how to play when I was twelve, so I have more experience with the former.”
“Your uncle?” she voiced a little incredulously.
“Yeah. Neither he or Auntie Satoko are what we can call your stereotypical shogi players, but for some reason they were playing a lot during that Golden Week,” Kyon agreed. “They even made a punishment game out of it where the loser had to shout whatever the winner wanted.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely. All my aunts and uncles are avid tabletop gamers and they like to bet anything other than money or goods, punishment games being their favourite choice when they have the chance. I think they even made a club in high school devoted to that.”
“How unique. Back to the topic, I gather you learned the game from observing your uncle and aunt?” Sasaki asked and for some reason Kyon looked a little embarrassed.
“To be completely honest, I was just hiding from Matsuri-chan. She was six or seven at the time and I was a little tired of her following me everywhere. Thankfully Uncle Keiichi was losing almost consistently and she ran away after Auntie Satoko made him shout ‘Matsu-chan, I LUV U!!!!!!’, so I considered that staying next to him was the best option,” Kyon said, somehow managing to deadpan even that.
Sasaki couldn’t help but giggle a little at both the story and his narration.
“Now that I think about it, something happened after that,” Kyon mused aloud.
“What is it?”
“Er, well. It’s a bit of a long story. Do you mind?” If he was surprised at Sasaki’s question, Kyon didn’t delve into it.
“Not at all!” Sasaki encouraged after glancing the board one last time and deciding she could forget about winning that match too.
“OK, then. Where was I…? Right. If I recall correctly, Auntie Satoko went to check on the other kids and I needed an excuse to remain there, so I asked my uncle to teach me to play. He explained to me about the pieces, their movement, promotions, drops, etc. He said it was easier to learn shogi by playing and I followed his lead,” Kyon related slowly, absently toying with the black bishop in his left hand.
“He won the first two matches but by the third I could remember all the rules and managed to win twice. From what I could tell, his greatest weakness in shogi was that he had problems constraining his ideas to a rigid, small set of rules. He came up with and discarded tactics on the fly before they could give him any definite advantage.”
“That’s interesting,” Sasaki commented, actually referring to Kyon’s insightfulness rather than his assessment by itself. “How did you best him then?”
“I played simply, an obvious yet efficient strategy. His pieces were too disorganized to stop it. I remember when Auntie Satoko came back and Uncle Keiichi mimicked being shot in the heart and said ‘you defeated the first Dark General, young hero. But the next one will be stronger!’ Then he took my aunt by the shoulders and made her sit in front of the board,” Kyon reminisced with some fondness yet still kept the deadpan on.
“What happened next?” she prompted him to continue.
“We played. I lost the first game soundly. Auntie Satoko’s style was completely different from my uncle.”
“How would you describe it?”
“… If I have to describe her in a word as a shogi player, I’d go for ‘trickster’. She mounted traps inside traps surrounded by traps and even if you avoid one, you could be setting another one off. Anyway, even though she won, Auntie Satoko was very surprised when my uncle told her that technically that game was my fifth one. We played two more times, a draw and a victory.”
“Did you win?”
“Yes. You see, traps are inherently reactive. Except as a deterrent, the enemy needs to actually trigger it for a trap to accomplish anything. So I… how was it? ‘lured the tiger out of the mountain’?”
“The Thirty-Six Stratagems?” Sasaki recognized.
“That’s the book,” Kyon nodded nonplussed, having long got used to Sasaki’s extensive academic knowledge. “Auntie Satoko is not a patient person, so when I played defensively she soon charged in, losing numbers with each exchange. It didn’t take long before she had too few pieces on the board to play as she was used to and then I attacked.”
“That’s amazing,” she said sincerely. “You must have been very happy then to be able to defeat two grown-ups in a row.”
“Actually, I didn’t care too much about that. I was more worried about the fact that, without Uncle Keiichi yelling embarrassing things, Matsuri-chan would return sooner than latter. That’s why I got behind his idea of me fighting the ‘Third Dark General’ and I followed him to Auntie Rena’s house.”
“How was she?”
“I think the whole thing about the ‘Four Dark Generals’ predated me by a long shot because what Haruhi calls the ‘Sorting Algorithm of Evil’ was in full effect,” he said. Sasaki didn’t know the term, but she guessed it meant something along the lines of ‘the next rival will be stronger than the one before.’ “She was… a difficult opponent,” Kyon worded slowly.
“I would think so. From her books you can tell she is a very creative and intelligent person.”
“Did you read them?” Kyon asked.
“Just the first one of the Brave Detective Sasha series yesterday. For some reason my mother owns a collection of the first six books. But tell me, how did you fare against Ryuguu-san?”
“One draw, one victory.”
“You won?”
“Yes, but I had to almost cheat to pull it off. It took me the half of the first match to figure out that her game wasn’t on the board.”
“What do you mean?”
“Auntie Rena was very apt at predicting my movements and counter them, but she wasn’t reading them from my game. She was reading me instead.”
“Like a poker player?” Sasaki suggested.
“Exactly. The problem was I had no idea what my ‘tells’ were or how to keep her from reading them. If I tried something, she most likely would see through the deception,” Kyon related and crossed his arms, still holding the black bishop in his left hand.
“How did you defeat her then?”
“Have you ever seen a traditional shogi board? The one we had then was as big as a nightstand’s drawer,” he asked suddenly and pantomimed the board’s dimensions with his hands. “And it included two little pedestals that the players set at their right side of the board to place the captured pieces on. Or the other side if you’re left-handed, I suppose,” Kyon said the last bit almost to himself.
“Actually I have, but…”
“I’m getting there. The thing is that the only way to trick her I could come up with then was to fool myself first.”
Sasaki was genuinely intrigued at Kyon’s vague clues. For his part, Kyon couldn’t help but think that her curious expression, with her head slightly tilted to the side and her pensive face, was in fact quite cute.
“During the second match, I captured one of her gin (silver general) early in the game, but I didn’t place it on the pedestal. Instead…” He called her attention to the black piece held now between his index and middle finger. “…I left it behind the board from her point of view.” He hid the bishop from her eyes by setting it down on the table and behind his open right hand, which was laid on its side with its back toward her.
“Then, I made myself forget about it,” he finished, saying that as though he thought it was explanation enough.
“What.” Sasaki’s flat tone conveyed that she didn’t agree with that.
“I mean, it was like I was trying to convince myself of stuff like: ‘the gin wasn’t there’, ‘it wasn’t mine’, ‘I didn’t capture it’, ‘it was somebody else’s problem’, ‘what was that thing about a gin again?’, etc. Just forgoing the silly mantra.”
“How does–?” Sasaki interrupted herself once she remembered about the ‘dropping’ rule in shogi and realized the incredible mix of guile and naiveté (a lot more of the latter than the former, in her opinion) in young Kyon’s plan. “You are kidding, right?”
“In my defense, I didn’t really expect it to work. As you already guessed, we continued playing and Auntie Rena kept predicting my moves. By the endgame, when we were heading to a second tie, I spent a turn putting the gin back on the board. It completely blindsided her and the checkmate came two turns later.”
Sasaki confirmed her misgivings: Yes, cute lil’ twelve years old Kyon somehow weaponized his own willful ignorance and placed an auto-suggestion on himself to make Rena’s own superior perspicacity work against her. What the heck?
“Did you ever meet the ‘fourth dark general’?” Sasaki asked after shaking her head.
“Yes, during that same visit to Hinamizawa. The last ‘Dark General’: Auntie Mion. She was something else entirely, hands down.”
“Did your uncle take you to play with her?”
“It was a little more convoluted than that. It was almost dinnertime after the second match against Auntie Rena and, with the exception of Auntie Mion who was in Okinomiya at the time, we all dined at the Fuurude house,” Kyon elaborated and glanced through the clubroom window for a moment.
“There my uncle ‘revealed’ to her that it was my first day playing shogi and, unless I’m missing my mark, they were more proud at the fact I tricked Auntie Rena than just the game’s result,” he said and turned his eyes to the face of the analog clock hanging on the wall.
“After we finished our meal, the self-appointed ‘Three Mighty Dark Generals’ hunched together like rugby players next to the table and held a whispered emergency meeting. Stage whispered, I mean,” Kyon finally added, bringing his attention back to Sasaki again.
She blinked at the mental image. He simply sighed.
“From what I gathered from the pieces of conversation I could hear while I helped Auntie Rika carry the dirty dishes to the sink, they were discussing my chances against the fourth of them. Apparently Auntie Rena couldn’t answer Uncle Keiichi’s question about if I was ‘really, really good’ at shogi or in fact a ‘Mi-chan-class’ player.”
“That’s… good, I guess. It mean you really impressed them,” Sasaki commented tentatively.
“The truth was Uncle Keiichi was plotting something and my aunts liked what he was thinking. If someday I see the three of them turning as one to look at me with matching smirks like that, I will run away. No question asked,” Kyon nodded to himself and imparted his hard-earned wisdom. “I must admit it was strangely satisfying when Auntie Rika broke the moment by covering his head with a cloth and telling him it was his turn to wash the dishes, though.” he added.
“Anyway, a few days later I managed to forget about it and I didn’t delve too much into it when Auntie Satoko took me to the Sonozaki house and left my sister in Auntie Rena’s care. When we were close enough to the main building, I heard Uncle Keiichi and Auntie Mion’s voices. Because of the distance I couldn’t discern what they were saying, but it was obvious that they were speaking quite loudly to each other. At my side my aunt apparently could tell more and just grinned.”
“Did he…?” Sasaki ventured.
“That’s right. We entered the house through the sliding doors facing the yard and I realized then that my uncle and aunt were in fact trash-talking, with him just finishing a flowery speech about how ‘his champion’ will ‘teach her what strategy is really about’.” Kyon shook his head disapprovingly.
“No pressures, I see,” Sasaki quipped.
“It gets worse. After we arrived to the living room where Auntie Mion, Auntie Rika and Uncle Keiichi waited, I was forced to deeply empathize with Matsuri-chan.”
“What do you mean?”
“Uncle Keiichi was dressed up as my personal one-man-ouendan (cheerleader squad) with the gakuran, headband, plastic megaphone…” Kyon recalled with an uncomfortable expression on his face.
“You’re making that up,” she deadpanned.
“I wish. Apparently the costume and pictures of him wearing it was what Auntie Rena demanded for watching over the children that evening. Later he told me that he got lucky with the get-up.”
“What did he mean?”
“He said it was at least a male cheerleader outfit.”
That was the moment when Sasaki’s brain betrayed her by dutifully providing her with the relevant mental images. Some of Kyon’s narration was lost to her while she suppressed them.
“… then he gave me an embarrassing motivational speech and I decided that it was for the best if I tuned him out and devoted my focus to the game.”
Sasaki decided she should follow suit. “How did it go?”
“Well, we had rules of engagement this time: 1) There will be three matches. 2) The winner is decided by points. 3) Wins score 3 points each. No points for draws, forfeits or defeats. 4) As a handicap in my favor, my wins score 2 additional points.” Kyon punctuated each rule with a finger.
Sasaki quickly ran some numbers in her head and realized that under such rules Kyon needed at least a win and a draw to be the winner. Any other case sans 3 draws in a row would mean Mion’s victory.
“It’s getting kind of late,” Kyon stated abruptly. “Should I continue now or we–?”
“I would like to hear what happened in your three matches against Sonozaki-san. Was she as good as your aunts and uncle suggested?”
“Better. It was like playing against Yuki-chan or the hardest levels of chess in Skynet.” Kyon motioned to his phone. A certain blue-haired interface got a self-satisfied smile at that, but as she wasn’t currently projecting herself in the AR environment, neither of the humans in the room noticed.
“However, at the time it was my first time against someone that good. I think I wouldn’t do her game justice if I try to put it into words. The adaptability, the decisiveness, the resourcefulness. I was so impressed that when I lost the first match I couldn’t bring myself to care. I just wanted to keep playing but I wasn’t even thinking about wanting to keep playing…” Kyon reminisced with unusual intensity. “Sasaki, have you ever been ‘in the zone’ before?” he asked her suddenly.
“Do you mean that state of absolute concentration?”
“That’s the one.”
“Not personally, but I read a little about it. Formally, it’s called ‘flow’ and it’s described as a mental state of operation where immersion, involvement and enjoyment are fully devoted to the activity at hand.”
“I think that was what happened to me. Somehow, I started to unravel every single element composing her strategy and more importantly how each of them fit together. The harder she played, the quicker I understood. I vaguely remember my aunts’ surprised faces when the second match ended in a stalemate or my uncle’s cheers getting louder. I just picked up the pieces and prepared the board to play again.”
At this point Kyon was telling his story almost to himself. Sasaki remained quiet for the time being, observing him carefully.
“Then, during the third match, Auntie Mion made a mistake. Not a feint nor a bait like several times before. Just a blunder. I won’t say I managed to force her to that, but I didn’t hesitate to capitalize on it. Two turns later she realized it together with the fact it would cost her the match. Then… something unexpected happened,” he trailed off.
“What was it?” Sasaki prompted after several seconds of silence.
“She blushed.”
Kyon’s words came as a non sequitur for Sasaki. “What?”
“Auntie Mion blushed and that brought my attention out of the board but for some reason I remained in that ‘flow state’. I looked at her and I observed she was also stealing glances at my uncle, growing uncomfortable. Then, somehow, it was like the board expanded to envelop us all.
“Everything that it happened in the last few days, especially the last two and a half hours of gaming, came together. It was obvious, really: Uncle Keiichi and Auntie Mion made a bet on the result of our little tournament and whatever the payment was, it was something very embarrassing. Apparently both wagered the same thing because I heard them say something along the lines of ‘Same stakes, no pulling back, no excuses from the loser.’ just before Auntie Satoko and I arrived to the house.
“It was then when I realized I could remember a lot of things I supposedly didn’t pay attention to and another fact became evident: Auntie Satoko and Auntie Rena wanted Uncle Keiichi to lose. The former was laughing with that trademark ‘ohhhh, ho-ho-ho’ of hers during the first match, but that diminished a lot during the second one and now she was simply trying to assess the situation on the shogi board without success.
“On the other hand, the latter must have known from the beginning that no matter how much of a knack for shogi a twelve years old boy could have, he simply was no match against someone at Auntie Mion’s level. Probably the two of them hyped my skills to Uncle Keiichi so he would dare to make a bet in the first place. There was also the detail that none of them tried to practice with me during the in-between days in preparation for the match, even if Auntie Rena was the one who got more chances to do it because my sister and I spent a day in her house playing with Yurie-chan.
“For her part, Auntie Mion didn’t hold back one bit against me from the start. During the first match, most of the respite I got came from the fact she was still studying me. Her attitude then was the complete opposite of her usual policy of losing on purpose but not too obviously against children, which is something I learned from her and I still do when I play with my sister and cousins.”
Sasaki couldn’t help but notice he was ignoring one of the most obvious oddities there: he was actually winning against Mion.
“It didn’t bother me that they cast me to play the role of the unwitting pawn of their games. It was, after all, just that: a silly bet. But all that deviated my thoughts from ‘how’ to play more towards ‘why’ or ‘what for’ I should do it.”
Kyon reached out his right hand, took his white bishop from the chessboard and presented both identical yet color-mirrored pieces to Sasaki with both of his palms up.
The sunset sun illuminated the clubroom through the window and the lower spectrum of the light visible at that hour bathed his visage with orange tones and sharp shadows. Because of that, even his usual, somewhat tired posture acquired a fraction of the gravitas one would expect from a person whose actions and decisions affect the fate of one or more worlds, preventing Sasaki from saying anything or even turning her eyes away from him.
“If I decided to win the third match,” Kyon posited while raising the hand holding the black chess piece. “The score would be 5-3 to my favor and Auntie Mion would have to pay her bet.”
“On the other hand,” he lowered his left arm at the same time and speed he raised his right one, as if pantomiming the plates of a weighing scale. “If I forfeited or either proposed or forced a draw, the outcome would be a 0-3 and Uncle Keiichi would lose.” He then left both palms at the same level.
“What do you think I did?” Kyon suddenly asked.
His question broke the spell and Sasaki realized he was looking at her curiously, as if wondering what was going on with her but refraining from asking.
“Er… I-I think you won, right? The way you say it makes look like Fuurude-san was played into losing his bet. Furthermore, if you had such a high opinion of Sonozaki-san’s skills, then it just natural you wanted to prove yourself before her,” Sasaki conjectured and decided that it was a good idea to occupy herself and put away the chessboard.
As she just turned the foldable board upside-down and she was about to place the first pieces inside, Kyon smiled at her and simply stated:
“Nobody won that bet.”
“Wait. That’s impossible,” Sasaki’s analytical mind spoke in her place before she could put too much intention on it. “The two outcomes you just described are the only possible ones.”
“That’s correct, but when it came down to it, I just didn’t want that either Uncle Keiichi or Auntie Mion to have to lose. So I took a third option and resorted to the biggest asset I had.”
“What was that?”
“The fact I was a twelve years old kid who wasn’t told anything about the wager by anyone.”
“… what? How?”
“Allow me to explain. In that moment, Auntie Mion and I were the only ones who knew she was going to lose, to anyone else it was still an ongoing match, but she wasn’t aware I was sure of it and the fact she realized that.”
By the way, Sasaki was a little confused too.
“To accomplish what I wanted, I needed to get rid of something first and to do it I put on my best I-know-nothing face, the kind of expression that served me well in the past to save my sister from my mother’s ire, and I asked ‘How many points did I get for the last match?’“
As before, Kyon seemed to think that was explanation enough. This time he realized on his own that Sasaki wanted him to elaborate further.
“Auntie Satoko pointed out that draws scored no points and asked me if I remembered the rules. I told her something along the lines of ‘of course, the winner is the best of three matches’. Auntie Rika then repeated the rules one by one and when she mentioned the fourth rule, the one about the handicap, I frowned and told them I didn’t need one.”
Sasaki blinked as the pieces of puzzle begun to fall into place.
“I took the best lessons of my sister’s book about petulant kids. I crossed my arms, pouted a little and surly told them that a boy doesn’t need or want handicaps in a competition against a girl and that I wasn’t going to play anymore if that was the case.
“Normally, my aunts and uncles are very serious about their games’ rules and they won’t bend them in the middle of a match, especially if there was bet in play, but I wasn’t one of them and I wasn’t supposed to know a thing about a bet in the first place.
“Uncle Keiichi was the only one with something to lose if we removed the handicap, therefore the one only one with strong reasons to oppose, but he started to warm to the idea when I let slip something close to ‘a man should set and live by his own rules’. By then, probably he also started to think that it was unlikely I would get a clean victory over Auntie Mion. In the end, they granted my wish.”
“So, one can infer that the last match…?” Sasaki deduced.
“Yes. It was my win and the final score was 3-3. Although, I had to put on a proper show and prolong the match as much as possible to avoid suspicions. Because of that and the looks I got from Auntie Mion, I’m sure she figured out something.” Kyon shrugged as implying that there are no perfect plans.
“Did you ever tell them anything about this?”
“I didn’t and only once someone asked me about it. It happened that very same night.”
“Who? Sonozaki-san?”
“Auntie Rika. She volunteered to take me back to her house and once we were alone she asked me, point-blank, why I refused to win.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I tried to play dumb and reuse the ‘handicaps are for sissies’ excuse, but then she got a very serious and dignified expression, stared down at me and asked the same question again. It was very intimidating to me then, she was taller and I tend to forget she is the miko in charge of the shrine dedicated to Oyashiro-sama,” Kyon said while staring fixedly at the clubroom’s long table from his seated position.
“For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why she did that, why she wanted to know my reasons that badly. Because I’m sure she didn’t care one bit about how I knew about the bet or anything else, really. Finally, I told her what I said to you and then she smiled in a way she never did in front of me before.”
“Pardon me, what was it again?”
“My think my words were ‘I was enjoying the game, so I just didn’t want anyone to have to lose’. Anyway, a few minutes later I took advantage of her good mood and asked what Uncle Keiichi and Auntie Mion gambled on the game for them to want to avoid losing that badly.”
“I must confess I’m curious too. Did she tell you?” Sasaki admitted.
“She got very uncomfortable and after pestering her a little she only said I was too young to know. I have a theory, though.”
“What is it?”
“I think the loser was supposed to wear a police or perhaps a prisoner cosplay,” Kyon unexpectedly suggested.
“An embarrassing outfit sounds like a likely possibility, buy why do you think it’s that, specifically?”
“Because I’m sure I heard Auntie Satoko whispering something about padded handcuffs at some point during the second match against Auntie Mion. I mean, no other costume needs that kind of props, right?”
Sasaki decided it was an excellent time to finally put away those chess pieces.
“Also, considering what we know now about their job, it makes sense for them to be reluctant to dress up like that.” Kyon obliviously nodded to himself. For her part, Sasaki studiously pretended to agree with him and mirrored the gesture.
“Would you give your analysis about my game?” Sasaki suddenly requested, looking for a way to escape from her treacherous brain and its unwanted mental images.
“My analysis?” he parroted, unsure of what she meant by that.
“Yes. Like you did with Fuurude-san and Houjou-san about shogi. What would you say are my weaknesses on the chessboard?” she elaborated.
“Oh,” Kyon uttered and thought to himself for a moment. “You aimed too hard for an all-encompassing solution, working on every little detail of your strategy. There is nothing wrong with that by itself, but in a practical situation you’re giving your opponent the opportunity to figure out your overall plans at the same time you’re building them,” he finally said.
Sasaki considered his assessment for a little while. “Your advice?” she enquired.
“You need to progress in your long-term goals at the same time you reap the benefits of achieving the short-term ones, to know where you want to go without planning on your every step there from the start,” Kyon suggested.
The girl wearing Kitago’s uniform stopped her movements for a moment and almost imperceptibly widened her eyes. Then she resumed her self-imposed duty of transferring chess pieces from the table to the inverted side of the foldable chessboard.
“What about your weaknesses, then?” Sasaki asked, walking around the table and dragging the board with her, picking up along the way the few pieces that rolled across it to the end of the furniture and putting them away.
“I have a lot of them to pick. For example, I’m weak against surprise attacks as the next person.” Kyon motioned as if to stand and store by himself the two bishops he was still holding in his hands, Sasaki gestured him to stay on his seat and she reached out with both hands to take the pieces from his.
“It especially confuses me when an enemy charges in without too much of a chance of victory, as though they expect to be overwhelmed and just want–”
That was when Sasaki suddenly grabbed his hands instead of the bishops, pulled herself towards him and sat on his lap in one smooth motion. By the time the symmetrical chess pieces hit the floor and rolled away, she already had her arms around his neck and she was kissing him full on the lips.
Most likely he was the only one who didn’t see that one coming.
Just for the record, the Hinamizawa local rule about a punishment game that ends tied is that everyone who didn’t win must pay their bets, as it was the case when Rena and Keiichi won together the ‘life-or-death’ squirt-gun battle and Mion, Satoko and Rika had to follow their orders or the time where the whole club had to parade across the town while wearing cosplay and ended walking toward that quarry.
Now you know.
§
Special thanks to the troper Silver, who went “all editorial on” that ugly thing I dared to call “draft”.
This snippet got an epilogue here.