Three Matches, No Mercy
A winning streak format. Three matches in a row.
When I'd been a healthy adult man, I wouldn't have felt the strain. Now, it wears on me a little.
Of course, it's well within what I can handle — but in a contest against the world's top-tier female professionals, a single trivial factor can spell defeat.
Megumi Yuzu, 8-dan. Like me, she's the last runner clinging to the edge of the cliff — Japan's final hope. She'll be ready to do whatever it takes to win.
But could I really give it my all?
Through the WY Cup Amateur Tournament, the unified preliminaries of the NJ Fire Cup, the Huaihe Cup, the Women's Kuksu Tournament, and on and on — 'Ryu Seoa' has unquestionably grown.
And to let 'Ryu Seoa' grow, I kept 'Shin Changmo' suppressed.
The first game of the Huaihe Cup final was the lone exception. The moment 'Shin Changmo's' Go took the wheel, 'Ryu Seoa's' color was buried completely beneath it.
Since then, her Go has kept improving, but I wouldn't call it a dramatic transformation.
Still, I can't just sit on my hands and wait for 'Ryu Seoa's' Go to mature on its own, forever. Life is far too short to lay bricks one at a time at leisure.
Nigiri. Black plays first.
It's time for a change.
Megumi Yuzu, 8-dan, and the two players still to come are far too strong for me to fight while throttling my own ability. The male professionals waiting in the open tournaments beyond this one go without saying.
I pick up the weapon in the way my hands know best. The familiar openings, the countless hours of drill and repetition crystallized into practiced motion — even the simplest gesture looks like artistry.
It's the same as the first round of the Huaihe Cup — the same as when I played online as 'tlsckdah1021'.
The homework is how to weave in 'Ryu Seoa's' strengths. I interrogate the meaning of every move 'Shin Changmo' would play, weigh its efficiency. And then I go further — actively hunting for something better.
One person, two roles. Innovation and stability. Trying to embrace two clashing, contradictory things at once feels like my brain might combust. It's agonizing. It hurts.
But God, it's fun.
Go is my purpose and my calling. If this is a trial on the road to achievement and growth, I can endure any amount of it.
What I fear is stagnation — or regression — after burning my passion and stoking the flame with sheer persistence. Yet to grumble that I lacked talent or luck without ever having dared at all — that would be pathetic.
I have no intention of settling at this level. I don't even expect success today. If I keep failing, if I eventually smash into a wall anyway… it won't be because I didn't try hard enough.
Megumi Yuzu, 8-dan, studies the board after the opening plays wound down.
She had been overwhelmed from the fuseki onward. In the entire history of the women's circuit, no one had ever crushed her — the sole female Honinbo, a titleholder of legendary prestige — in the opening stage.
There had been no mistakes. Ryu Seoa 2-dan had countered with a trade-first strategy, securing profit in the upper-left and lower-right corners, widening her territorial borders along the sides, and then stacking a thick, heavy wall toward the center. Not excessive, not lacking — an exquisite sense of balance. Each move flowed gently into the next, but the moment you grasped her intent, a crushing pressure that you hadn't felt before suddenly closed in around your throat.
"…"
A psychological pressure that made her want to retch. She steadied herself, determined not to grow impatient — yet out of old habit her hand rose to rub her eyes and press against her face.
She had reviewed Ryu Seoa's first tournament games against Fujisawa Natsuyo, 9-dan, and against Xian Liu, 7-dan. Brilliance and creativity worthy of a Huaihe Cup champion. From just two game records alone, she had found herself nodding along with the verdict: a once-in-a-century prodigy.
But that girl's Go had still been rough and raw. Minor blunders, to be sure, and quite a few outright miscalculations of value. Kindly put, she was a player who delighted in unpredictable, unorthodox moves. Unkindly put, an immature player whose game was inconsistent, disordered — a style not yet established at all.
None of that applied to today's Ryu Seoa 2-dan.
Concision. Clarity. Lucidity. The Go this girl played today looked, to a professional's eyes, like a sequence of great teachings — gospel written for players of the game.
A clear-cut sequence of moves strung together in a line as unbroken as a textbook. And yet, in certain positions, she would boldly hurl out something startlingly fresh.
The girl sitting across the board was unmistakably Ryu Seoa 2-dan. A human being cannot improve that much in a single day.
Which meant what Megumi was witnessing right now was the girl's true strength.
Come to think of it, this girl had never known failure. She'd been knocked out once in the unified preliminaries of the world tournament — but her executioner there had been Park Pilgyu, 9-dan, a legendary figure in both Korea and Japan who had left his mark on the Nihon Ki-in itself.
The realization that this might not be the end at all — that there might be even more below the surface — sent a chill crawling up Megumi Yuzu's spine.
In this lopsided opening, she needed a gambit to stir up complications. Megumi Yuzu, 8-dan, threw her winning move at the lower side.
White 58.
A piercing strike, fired with the desperate tenacity of a last runner refusing to quit. It slashed cleanly into the smallest crack in the enemy's position — a move so perfect that, on any other day, she would have placed it without a shred of unease or second-guessing.
But against the momentum Ryu Seoa 2-dan carried today, some inexplicable instinct whispered that she would defuse it without much trouble at all.
The girl stared down at White 58 with a face utterly unlike the one that had beamed through the pre-game bow — composed, unreadable, glinting.
A gambit that could flip the current of the game. Black 59.
A strategic key point. The pivot of the defense. A move that, to a careless eye, could read as a passive retreat of the entire front line. But considering that Black's position would likely collapse into ruins if she got greedy and tried to wall it off from the outside, it was a staggeringly cold, surgically exact judgment.
A seamless parry. Then a counterattack from the upper side — on ground unfavorable to White. Even so, Megumi Yuzu fought hard. But fighting hard was never going to be enough to seize victory.
Ryu Seoa 2-dan's Go was flawless, without a single seam to pick at. Megumi forgot, at some point, that the girl across the board was her enemy — and simply sat there, dazed and spellbound by the bright, lilting current of her play.
She had abandoned the win long ago. She carried the game to its end not for any hope of a comeback, but on obsession alone: she wanted to see more of this girl's Go.
"…"
Counting.
A victory for Ryu Seoa 2-dan, and a lopsided one at that.
Yet despite taking the win, the girl with the exotic blonde hair did not look pleased at all. She puffed out her cheeks like a sulking child and glared around the board. She had shown the best condition of anyone in this tournament, played the most crushing Go of anyone here — what on earth could she be dissatisfied with?
It was a pity the language barrier kept Megumi from prying into what was really going on behind those blue eyes.
Megumi Yuzu, 8-dan, exchanged a light bow with Ryu Seoa 2-dan and packed up her things.
The last runner had fallen. Japan had fallen.
All that remained were the two Chinese players. The next opponent: Hui Yun, 5-dan — the very player Ryu Seoa had faced in the Huaihe Cup final.
She would make time to watch that match, Megumi promised herself, no matter what it took — and walked away from the tournament hall, the taste of it still lingering on her tongue.