14. Melting Point (30)
14. Melting Point (30)
The match had been a one-sided rout in Anais's favor from the very start. Her opponent kept blundering into her traps, missing turns, forfeiting coins, and losing cards.
She couldn't bring herself to enjoy it. Anyone watching would have assumed she was reading his every move and steamrolling him, but that wasn't the truth.
Every play that denied her opponent a foothold also wrecked her own ability to build a foundation. Even when she deliberately pivoted to avoid those lines, he kept shoving his head under the blade—as though he were actively trying to get sniped.
'At this rate...'
Just as she'd feared, the situation rapidly fulfilled the activation conditions for her opponent's Theater Card.
"I'll construct the ‹Aterena Open-air Theater›."
The 'Aterena Open-air Theater' was one of the Six Great Theaters hosting the Circus Grand Prix preliminaries—an ancient stone ruin converted straight into a modern venue. It had originated with beggars who squatted in the derelict structure and staged performances to beg for alms, and it was the only theater in this game that could be built not by investing resources, but by meeting conditions that cost you resources.
Theater Cards exerted wide-area special effects that influenced the entire game board. Their power was formidable enough that constructing one typically wasn't feasible until the mid-game. The prerequisites for their establishment were correspondingly demanding.
Yet her opponent had erected his theater a mere five minutes into the match. In that moment, Anais's suspicion crystallized into certainty. He possessed perfect knowledge of his own hand—and of every card lying face-down on the table.
How he was pulling it off, though, remained stubbornly elusive no matter how she turned the puzzle over in her mind.
'Could it be magic? No—magic this deep in the frozen territories is unworkable.'
In this era, magical civilization flourished only on the eastern side of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The western side lay exposed to the polar lights sweeping down from the North Pole. Those lights churned mana into chaos, creating an environment harsh on spellcasting.
The Empire certainly had mages, but most could only barely exert minimal power in socially essential fields. This environmental disparity was precisely why the nations east of the mountains had sparked a logistics revolution with airships while the Empire remained slumbering—at least until the railways were laid down.
As far as Anais knew, only someone around the rank of the Imperial Palace's head mage could freely cast whatever magic they wished on imperial soil. And nobody would dispatch such an exalted figure merely to toy with a bar girl. Not even the Crown Prince.
The young gambler could easily discern what was troubling her. Her hands and eyes were ceaselessly scrutinizing cards and table alike.
'Go ahead and look. You'll never catch this trick.'
He was no ordinary gambler. Not long ago, he had walked the path of a magician, apprenticed since childhood to a renowned master.
But he'd fallen into the trap that snared so many young magicians: gambling.
At the gambling tables, even simple tricks like switching cards could earn dozens of times what a stage performance brought in. After that, putting on a show for an audience had lost all its appeal.
So he'd left his master behind and drifted full-time through the gambling dens. In truth, a great many cardsharps were former students of magic.
The trick he employed now was one of the techniques he'd stolen from his master's research notes: a deception utilizing a substance that glowed even in darkness.
Its name was radium. An element discovered only a few years prior, it had barely been listed on the Alchemy Guild's table. The backs of the cards he'd prepared were coated with a pigment made from it.
Thanks to the bright lamp mounted above the table, Anais had judged it difficult for her opponent to employ trickery—and that was precisely her blind spot. A luminescent substance was, paradoxically, hard to see in bright light.
It only became legible for a split second when someone leaned forward to draw a card, casting a shadow across the table. Yet if that were the whole secret, the odds that his opponent might stumble upon it by accident would have been high.
Even under shadow, the glow emitted by the radium was faint. Eyes adjusted to a bright lamp would struggle to notice it. To read the markings, you first had to dilate your pupils, letting your eyes acclimate to the dark.
Whenever his turn ended, he would lower his gaze to the cards in his hand, feigning a poker face as he inspected them. In reality, he wasn't scrutinizing—he was closing his eyes. He would wait with pupils attuned to darkness, and the moment his opponent leaned forward, he would flash them open just long enough to capture the luminescent writing inside the shadow.
This was his favored trick. He was absolutely confident he'd win. And indeed, no matter how intently Anais scanned the cards and table, she seemed to find nothing—kept falling further behind.
'Heh heh. Stare all you like. You'll never spot it.'
The young gambler suppressed a laugh. A mere tavern girl might be clever, but her limits were obvious.
A first-rate player, operating under the premise that her opponent knew every card, would have concocted an entirely different strategy. Yet she kept doggedly adhering to orthodox play.
Here lay the gulf between the upper class—worldly, broad-visioned people like himself—and the lower class, whose thinking stayed trapped within narrow boundaries.
'The trick is only a crutch. Your true failing is that limited perspective.'
Justifying his actions thus, he pressed the game onward. A crushingly monotonous rout repeated itself, turn after turn.
"Isn't this a bit much? Have you no concept of mercy?"
Koka erupted in booming laughter as he called out. The young man bowed humbly, all deference.
"How could I afford even an inch of negligence in furnishing a gift for His Highness?"
"Haha, I like this fellow! So all I need do is pick what I'll wring out of that bar girl?"
"What could a mere tavern wench possibly offer? Nothing but her own body, I suspect."
With laughter came a smattering of crass jokes from all around. Yet through it all, Anais never lost her focus on the game.
Months of enduring such mockery had inured her to it, but another factor loomed larger: Wonderstein, watching from behind her.
'The Troupe Leader has taken far worse mockery and still walked onto the stage smiling. No way I'm going to whine.'
Wonderstein was still wearing that confident smile, as if her victory were a foregone conclusion. Anais felt strength surge through her as she drew her next card.
'...Looks like she's losing?'
Wonderstein's eyes swept the table anxiously. No matter how he looked at it, Anais was on the back foot. Her strategy was statistically high-percentage, that much was certain, but her opponent was absurdly "lucky" in conjuring those low-probability outcomes. Something was being manipulated. Even a total layman to the game would sense the contrivance.
'Well, if she does lose, I've got other methods.'
The game rolled into its second half. The young gambler, reaching for a card out of sheer momentum as he had every turn before, suddenly felt a pang of wrongness.
'What...?'
He looked at the cards arrayed before Anais.
One configuration stood out glaringly: the Magic Cards.
Acrobatics, Play, Music, Magic.
Of the 188 Performance Cards divided across those four categories, only 14 were Magic Cards—the sparsest category by far. Yet somehow, seven of them sat in front of Anais.
Each Magic Card provided one of seven kinds of magic implements. A single card held little individual value, but collecting two of the same implement unlocked that implement's special ability. Collecting all seven types won you the game outright on the spot.
And among the seven cards Anais had gathered, six were of distinct types. One more card bearing the remaining implement, and victory was hers.
'Since when...?'
Her strategy hadn't shifted from start to finish. She'd aimed to exploit the abilities of the ‹Rose Windmill Cabaret› and ‹Christian Memorial Hall› Theater Cards to amass gold and points. He in turn had focused entirely on obstructing her—forcing her to take cards other than the ones she wanted. Lower-value cards.
Some of the Magic Cards before her were ones he himself had tossed her way to take. Others were cards he'd missed while pursuing a card she had her eye on. And all of it... had been deliberate?
'This is absurd. Impossible. Me, bested by some tavern wench...'
He shook his head in disbelief. As those around them began to piece together what had unfolded across the game board, Anais spoke.
"It would appear you've noticed."
"Wha—what are you talking about...? You—you're telling me you intended this? Heh, just a lucky accident—"
"An accident, you say?"
Anais gave a derisive snort.
"I've known from the start that you marked the cards."
"H—how... No, what—what nonsense are you spouting? I marked them?"
"Deny it if you like. But I built my entire strategy on that premise—that you possess full knowledge of every card with a marked back."
The young man ground his teeth, then stared back down at the table. A moment later, realization hit and he burst out.
"D—don't make me laugh! Even if that were true, to collect the exact cards you needed, you too would've had to know what every face-down card was!"
She drew her next card and nodded.
"Naturally. You're right. I did know what the face-down cards were. Or, more precisely—I figured it out."
"H—how?"
A faint smile crossed her lips as she gestured at their surroundings.
"Since ancient times, the phenomenon of will-o'-the-wisps has been frequently observed near geysers and hot springs. A few years ago, the Alchemy Guild explained it: it is caused by a substance called radium within the rock strata. The energy released as that substance decays reflects off certain materials and becomes visible as light. Naturally, the hot spring water also contains significant amounts of radium."
She lifted one of her own cards and showed its back. Faint, green-glowing letters had bloomed across it—far brighter than anything he had intended.
"You applied an extremely fine amount of radium to the cards. Under normal conditions, the decay reaction proceeds very slowly, and the glow is correspondingly faint. But earlier, I 'accidentally' dropped this card into the water. When I pulled it out, the lettering had become this clear. I suspect the actively decaying radium mixed into the hot spring water influenced the pigment."
He remembered the moment Anais had fumbled a card earlier. He'd dismissed it as simple nerves...
"Radium? What's that? First time I've heard of it..."
"Do you not read the newspaper? You know, the stuff they say cures skin diseases if you rub it on."
"Isn't it used in luminous clocks?"
"Hell if I know. Whatever."
"Ugh, you ignorant swine."
"More importantly, how does a bar girl know all of that?"
Jaws dropped as knowledge poured from Anais's lips like a flowing stream. Rattling off such encyclopedia-level knowledge from memory was impressive enough, but her skill in untangling the truth from the slenderest of clues right there on the spot was staggering.
"Discovering the radium was an accident, born from my own mistake while agonizing over how to escape this predicament. Still, it let me deduce the nature of your trick. From there, I simply read the card markings the same way you did—by closing my eyes, then opening them at the right moment."
She'd even worked that out.
The young gambler raked his nails roughly across the table in frustration.
"Kh... graah... just some tavern serving girl, where does she get that kind of knowledge..."
"In my line of work, one hears a great deal about the goings-on of the world."
She was the chairwoman of a major trading company. Standing at the cutting edge of information was only natural.
Moreover, her illness had driven her to follow medical and engineering advancements obsessively and invest heavily in them for many years. A new substance discovered a few years ago—unfamiliar to the general public, perhaps, but it didn't qualify as breaking news for her.
"B—but... even so... how did you know which card was which? The markings use a code known only to me..."
"I started to see the pattern after turning over about twenty face-down cards. That's what took me so long."
"Th—that's a lie... You cracked it on the spot, right here...?"
Her turn came around again. She picked up a face-down card from the table and, without checking it, flipped its front straight toward him.
"Acrobatics Card. 'Rat Fire Play,' correct?"
"Ghk—!"
His throat swallowed a defeated groan. At the same moment, exclamations of admiration and applause erupted for her.
"Incredible!"
"How did she get every single one?"
"That was amazing, miss!"
The shouts came mostly from the women the young nobles had brought along. They'd privately been disgusted by the men's antics, and watching Anais land such a magnificent blow filled them with deep satisfaction.