Chapter 16
THE FINALS OF THE TRADING card game tournament were coming to a head as both sides fought back and forth.
Having been cheered on by an angel, the handsome lad had played his hand while denying his opponent any opportunities she could exploit. He’d managed to survive by the skin of his teeth—again. Every time he managed to survive, girlish shrieks erupted from his fans and gasps came from the general spectators as well.
Occasionally, when not too invested in either side, people rooted for the underdog. This was especially true in situations when it seemed like the underdog was about to lose but managed to hold on and change the tide.
Hrmm… They’re really jumping on the hype train. At this rate, I’ll probably end up losing. And right after someone finally played my card!
Before she’d even realized it, the entire room had begun to favor the handsome lad. Everyone loves a comeback story where someone struggles back from the verge of defeat.
Danblf of the Nine Wise Men was going to lose to Simonikrith of the Forty-Eight Nameless Generals. Of course, this was only in the trading card game…not in reality. Nevertheless, the idea didn’t sit well with her.
With an anxious look on her face, Mira watched closely as the match unfolded.
It was the handsome lad’s turn. It was still a very tight race, but every play he made was clever and aimed at turning the tables. He wasn’t just covering himself; he was concentrating more than ever before and exploiting even the tiniest gaps in his opponent’s plays.
The pretty girl survived the handsome lad’s onslaught by a hair. However, her composure was beginning to give way to frustration.
This was understandable. Just one more attack, even a minor one, would decide the match. A match in which victory had been in her sights but was now exceedingly close. Not only that, it even began to look like the boy might pull off an upset. You couldn’t blame her for feeling like her back was against the wall.
This feeling of frustration seemed to have made its way to the pretty girl’s fans, too, who were cloaked in dismay as they anticipated a loss.
This is precisely the time when you need to let her know that you believe in her!
There were such cheers coming from the pretty girl’s fans, but they were tepid and dull—drowned out by the girlish shrieks that were cheering the handsome lad on.
At that moment, Mira decided to act. She once more extricated herself from the spectators and marched straight toward where the pretty girl’s fans had gathered.
“This isn’t looking good.”
“Danblf should’ve moved the game in her favor.”
“How the heck did he manage to survive that?”
These were the things the pretty girl’s fans were saying as they looked at the board uneasily. The look in their eyes seemed to suggest that they saw an upset on the horizon.
“What’s the deal with you guys being this lifeless? She’s trying really hard! Now more than ever you should believe in her and cheer her on. Isn’t that what fans are for?!” Mira chided, after crossing the fired-up venue and slipping in amongst the ranks of the pretty girl’s fans.
The pretty girl wasn’t losing due to a lack of skill. She had more skill than the handsome lad did. But right now, she was on the ropes. Why was that?
She was losing mentally.
The male fans recognized that they’d let themselves be swallowed by insecurity. And that was when they understood what they needed to do to break through the current situation.
“Yeah, that’s true. You’re exactly right. If we don’t have her back now, then who will?!”
Mira’s scolding having opened their eyes, they began fiercely cheering for the pretty girl as if a literal fire had been lit under them. Mira could be heard cheering as well.
Then they got a bit too loud and got a warning from the entire staff.
Everyone laughed at having been given the warning. Witnessing this, the pretty girl laughed as well. And then the state of the board changed.
Their heartfelt cheers had an effect. The girl’s demeanor changed, and her unease seemed to melt away as she mounted a ferocious counterattack.
Perspective is crucial no matter what situation you’re in. More importantly, it can even sometimes bring you good luck. Thanks to Mira and the other fans’ cheers, the battle began to slide in the girl’s favor.
At the same time, scream-like cries rose from the handsome lad’s fans.
“He got ahead of himself,” one of the pretty girl’s fans murmured. Being a casual fan, Mira hadn’t noticed it, but the handsome lad had misplayed and now wore an extremely perturbed expression.
The flow of the match changed almost at once. The pretty girl ruthlessly destroyed each of the boy’s units with her plays.
At last, the final turn came, and the match was decided with one final blow from Danblf on the handsome lad’s camp.
“Leona is the winner!”
A loud round of applause burst out, and the venue shook with the sound of cheers. It had been a comeback from a comeback. The match was lauded as one of the greatest in recent years, and it had been won by the pretty girl.
The neutral spectators who’d been rooting for the handsome lad were just as exhilarated to see how Leona had pulled off the upset. The venue was buzzing with excitement that seemed like it’d never die down.
Leona and the handsome lad went into a waiting room to get ready for the award ceremony. Watching as they went, one of the Leona fans turned to Mira with an expression of anticipation, asking, “Who even are you? I haven’t seen you around here. Are you a fan of Leona’s?”
“Me…? No, I’m just a Danblf fan who happened to be passing through,” Mira answered.
She couldn’t reveal her true motives, and yet, her answer wasn’t far from the mark.
“Gotcha, I see. But we like Danblf, too… He’s Leona’s trump card.”
Despite having shown himself to be a tad let down, the fanboy quickly recovered and flashed a smile. Overjoyed to have met a pretty young girl, he began to awkwardly make a pass at her when he was gently pried away and replaced by another man who’d stepped forward.
“You have my gratitude. Her win was all thanks to you,” the man seemed like the leader of the fans and smiled as he extended his hand.
“Huh? What’re you thanking me for? It just felt like you guys weren’t doing anything, so I butted in,” Mira answered, grabbing the hand that’d been offered to her. She shot a harsh look at the Leona fans.
“The way we were acting can only be described as shameful.”
“True.”
“Yeah, really pathetic.”
The fans smiled bitterly and swore that they wouldn’t forget what’d happened and would make sure to learn from the experience and do better the next time. The group then pushed aside the leader who’d had hold of Mira’s hand the entire time and scrambled to shake her hand, too.
As Mira shook their hands, she told them all to do their best.
Having watched the trading card game preliminaries, Mira prayed that Leona would succeed during the championships and left the store.
Meanwhile, the handsome lad was inside the store’s waiting room, feeling utterly depressed.
“What in the world happened back there? Regardless of how desperate the situation was, it isn’t like you to make a misplay like that,” the concerned friend of the depressed boy said.
Perhaps not wanting to answer, the boy kept his head down, saying only, “Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing? You’ve been acting weird. Did they…do something to you?”
His friend had picked up on it. Right before the handsome lad had made his fatal mistake, his concentration had been more intense than ever…then it had broken. He then became more distracted than he’d ever been.
The precise moment this happened had been when Leona launched her counterattack.
“No, it wasn’t that. You should know they’re not the kind of people that’d do something like that.”
The friend had assumed that Leona’s fans had done something to put him at a disadvantage so that she would win. Given the circumstances, such a thing wasn’t unthinkable. However, the handsome lad rejected that notion. Leona’s fans treated her opponents with respect; he knew them to be a chivalrous group.
But more than anything, the handsome lad knew the exact reason why he’d choked.
“…Yeah, that’s true. Then what was it? It’s pretty silly to completely lose your focus right in the middle of a match, isn’t it? What happened?”
His friend also seemed to recognize that Leona’s fans were blameless. But aside from that, he couldn’t think of how to explain what’d happened. He knew just how capable of a player his friend was and how seriously he took these tournaments. He couldn’t get himself to believe what’d happened.
“Well…” the handsome lad said, trailing off.
Was it something hard for him to talk about, or was it just something he didn’t want to talk about? Unable to figure out which one it was, his friend looked straight at him.
“Is it something you can’t even tell me? Then I won’t ask. But, hey, let me know if you ever need to talk.”
It wasn’t just about this specific time. If some other big tournament was to come up, then he couldn’t let the same kind of thing happen again.
He ought to strike while the iron was hot and fix whatever had happened, his friend thought but bit his tongue. It was still right after he’d lost the tournament, so he’d most likely need some time to work through his thoughts and feelings.
And so, they began to chat about what he needed to do to get stronger hands, whether or not they should go looking for more rare legends, and so on. Judging by how they only really talked about cards, they must’ve really loved the game.
After they’d been talking like that for a while, the handsome lad spoke up.
“About what happened back there…”
Having calmed down a bit, he began speaking about what it was that’d made him lose his concentration. It’d all happened at the end of the match, when defeat seemed certain. Somehow, he’d drawn his rare legend after managing to escape death and saw an opportunity to counterattack.
“At that moment, I thought my luck had changed. But just like I’d expected, the very next turn Leona played Danblf. That’s when it happened.”
Recounting what he remembered, the handsome lad smiled dreamily as if in ecstasy. He then continued, “I heard it. I heard that wonderful voice.”
“A wonderful…voice? What does that have to do with the way you choked? Stop beating around the bush and just tell me what happened.”
The friend wanted to know why the handsome lad had fumbled so badly, but he wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. The friend pointed this out, to which the handsome lad remarked calmly that he’d had a very important encounter at that moment.
“I saw an angel.”
Having heard the handsome lad’s absurd answer, the friend said, “…Huh?!”
Paying no heed to this, the handsome lad continued, saying that in the moment Leona played her trump card, he was convinced that defeat was certain. Then he heard a voice and looked up. And there he saw an angel, he said with a smile.
“From the moment I saw her, I remember my entire body feeling warm. She was right alongside all the girls that were cheering for me. An angel was rooting for me. The moment I thought that, I was filled with something so powerful that I couldn’t even understand it. And then I began to see a way in which I might win that I hadn’t noticed before. That must’ve been a miracle bestowed on me by that angel,” the handsome lad said, sounding absurd again.
But his friend had heard enough to understand what it was that he was getting at.
“In other words, that was why you started doing so well. So did that angel also have something to do with how you started playing poorly right after?”
The handsome lad had demonstrated powerful focus and incredible luck of the kind he’d never seen before. And this angel had had something to do with how he turned the entire match on its head.
The friend wondered if the angel was a metaphor or wondered if there’d really been a girl that beautiful there. If that was the case, then it was easy to presume that that same beautiful girl might’ve been responsible for him dropping the ball.
That was correct. The handsome lad dropped his head conspicuously.
“Yeah… I thought she was rooting for me, but I was wrong. That angel wasn’t rooting for me,” the handsome lad lamented as he recounted the scene.
With victory in his grasp and Leona on the ropes, he heard the sound of her fans cheering fervently. Their cheers were filled with such passion that it was clear they believed that she would emerge victorious. Despite them cheering for his opponent, the handsome lad said she must’ve had some great friends. He seemed quite moved.
“But I wasn’t going to lose. I had everyone cheering me on as well. And, most importantly, I had…or should’ve had, my angel.”
The handsome lad grew quiet, thinking about what happened. But after a little while, he began to talk about it.
Leona’s fans had been cheering too loudly, and the staff had to go over and give them a warning. And there among them, impossible to mistake, was the angel.
“At first, I thought something must’ve been wrong with my eyes. I was so happy that maybe I was hallucinating or something. But that wasn’t the case. The angel really was standing there,” the handsome lad said as he dejectedly looked toward the sky. The angel seemed to be friends with Leona’s fans! “At that moment, it was as if some kind of magic spell had been broken, and I couldn’t see myself winning anymore.”
“I see.”
His friend understood. On top of that, he picked up on something that the handsome lad himself hadn’t even realized: His friend had fallen in love with this girl he referred to as an angel. As a result, he’d been on a roll like never before. But once he saw her mingling with Leona’s fans, he got extremely jealous. The roll came to a screeching halt.
When you put it that way, it made a lot of sense.
Despite how popular he is, he’s never had any experience with love or having a crush, huh?
It was puppy love. And because it was his first time feeling any of this, his feelings must’ve been quite erratic. His long-time friend wondered what should be done.
Quickly glancing at the handsome lad, he could tell it was still bothering him, as he wasn’t his usual, calm self. The friend had never seen him like this before. This might be a real issue.
It’s best to resolve one’s feelings in cases like these.
He’d fallen in love for the first time with a girl at the venue… Not only that, this love was so strong that it’d shaken him to his core. The friend thought that if he kept these feelings bottled up, they might resurface down the line and hurt him.
“Well, if you could meet this angel one more time, would you want to?”
The matches were all over, but there was an afterparty planned at the store. And if this angel was one of Leona’s fans, she’d surely stick around to celebrate making it to the championships.
His friend thought for a moment about asking the girl if she’d go out with the handsome lad. Regardless of how it went, it’d be a closure of sorts. It had to be an improvement over the current descent into despair that seemed never-ending.
“…I would,” the handsome lad murmured after thinking it over for a while. He then continued, “I wanna meet her and make sure.”
“Make sure of what?”
“Make sure of her relationship with them.”
The handsome lad’s answer was immediate. He’d mentioned…them. He was referring to Leona’s fans, who his angel had been cheerfully chatting with.
“All right, sure thing. I’ll go look for her, so you just wait here. After all, if you go out there, the place will get all rowdy again.”
Maybe they simply were all fans. He figured that if asking about this would make his friend feel better, then he’d do it. But he hadn’t heard a single thing about what she looked like.
The friend turned around as he got to the door, asking, “Can you tell me what this angel looked like?”
“Ah, well…”
It’d been his first time seeing her, and yet, it seemed like he’d gotten a very good look. The handsome lad described her in great detail…
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