Ren hated shogi.
Not because it was boring — that would have been almost bearable.
He hated it because he kept losing, and because the losing had started to feel personal in a way that made no sense for a wooden board and a collection of oddly shaped pieces.
“Your king is in check,” Kaito said, moving another piece with the unbothered ease of a man discussing the weather.
“No it isn’t.”
“It is.”
“That’s impossible.
I would know if my king were in check.”
Kaito pointed.
Ren looked.
His king was, undeniably, in check.
“How.”
“You left it exposed.”
“That was bait.”
“It wasn’t bait.”
“Strategic bait.
Advanced strategic bait.”
Kaito captured another piece without dignifying that further, and Ren stared at the board with the specific, wounded confusion of a man who had genuinely expected this to go differently.
He’d assumed it would be easy.
He’d spent — in a life that felt increasingly like something he’d read secondhand — thousands of hours inside games.
Strategy games.
Turn-based games.
Card games with more rules than some legal systems.
He’d understood optimization, positioning, risk and reward, the particular shape of a plan five moves deep.
None of that, it turned out, had prepared him even slightly for a board where the pieces you captured didn’t have the decency to stay captured.
Kaito simply dropped a fallen soldier back onto the board a few turns later, now fighting for the other side, and every time it happened Ren felt something in him offended on a near-spiritual level.
“That’s horrifying,” he said, the first time it happened to him personally.
“That’s the fun part,” Kaito said.
“We have very different definitions of fun.”
He lost that game.
He lost the next one to Masaru, who played with the unhurried patience of a man for whom losing simply wasn’t a category he expected to visit.
“You said you barely knew this game,” Ren said, staring at the board after the sixth loss.
“I know enough.”
“You’ve beaten me six times.”
“Seven.”
Ren turned slowly.
“You counted?”
“You kept challenging me.”
“That’s cruel.”
Masaru’s expression didn’t so much as flicker.
“Again?”
Ren narrowed his eyes at him, at the board, at the general unfairness of the universe.
“Absolutely.”
He lost the seventh, too, and somewhere in there Jiro — who had claimed, with a straight face, that he barely understood the rules — beat him twice in the same afternoon without seeming to try particularly hard.
Ren found this personally offensive in a way he didn’t fully examine.
Hanako found him afterward, sitting in front of the board with the specific expression of a man contemplating the collapse of civilization.
“What happened?”
“Shogi happened.”
She glanced at the board.
“You lost.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s obvious.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“It is obvious.”
He slumped.
“I hate everyone in this prison.”
“Good,” she said, and went back to whatever she’d actually come over to do, which — he was fairly sure — had not been to check on his shogi record.
“You people,” Ren said to no one in particular, “have exactly one response to everything.”
The board didn’t answer him either.
Between chores, Ren still made time for the forms with Jiro, when there was light left for it — a stance corrected here, a foot angle fixed with one flat word there.
Some evenings the shogi board simply replaced the practice altogether, and on those evenings Jiro made him do both anyway, on the grounds, apparently, that losing at a board game wasn’t an excuse for a lazy stance.
Hanako’s shelf of poisons hadn’t gone anywhere either, though it had shrunk from an entire wall to merely most of a wall, which felt, some days, like the only genuine progress he was making at anything.
He began studying shogi properly, the way he’d once studied games that had actually mattered to a career instead of just his dignity.
He memorized openings.
He replayed his losses in his head during chores, moving pieces that weren’t there across a board that didn’t exist, until Takeshi asked him once, not unkindly, whether he was having a stroke.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re twitching.”
“That’s what thinking looks like when you’re doing it correctly.”
It didn’t help immediately.
He kept losing — to Kaito, to Masaru, occasionally, insultingly, to Jiro — but somewhere in the losing he noticed something else start to happen.
The game demanded he think several moves past the obvious one: not just what will they do, but what will they expect me to expect them to do, and what happened if the safe move was actually the trap and the trap was actually the safe move wearing a disguise.
It was, he realized one evening with the vague horror of a man recognizing an old enemy in new clothes, exactly the same shape of thinking Jiro made him do with a wooden stick in the yard.
A fight happened in seconds.
A game could take an hour.
Both of them, underneath, wanted the same thing from him: prediction, patience, and the willingness to lose a piece now for something better three moves later.
He didn’t say any of that out loud.
He suspected at least two of his five teachers would find it insufferable, and the other three would simply say good and move on, which was somehow worse.
The board had, by then, quietly become something more than a way to lose gracefully.
Prisoners who otherwise had no reason to sit near each other gathered around it in the evenings — a small, unlikely commons, drawn less by the game itself than by the simple, rare pleasure of an hour that wasn’t chores or sentences or silence.
One of the older prisoners, a quiet man Ren mostly knew from kitchen duty, turned out to be devastatingly good at it — better than Kaito, better than Masaru, a fact that startled everyone including, visibly, the man himself when he won his first game against Masaru and didn’t seem to know what to do with his own face afterward.
Ren decided he liked shogi considerably more once it had started making other people happy too, which he privately suspected said something about him he wasn’t ready to examine closely.
The chess idea arrived out of pure, undignified spite.
He’d lost another game — his ninth, or possibly his eleventh; he’d stopped counting somewhere around the point where counting became actively depressing — and was sitting with the pieces scattered in front of him when the memory surfaced, uninvited, the way they always did: a board with sixty-four squares instead of shogi’s larger grid, pieces that stayed captured once they fell, a queen that moved like she owned the entire battlefield.
He’d played it, in the life before this one, badly and occasionally, the way most people played games they weren’t devoted to.
But he remembered the shape of it.
The rules.
The pieces.
Enough.
If I can’t win at your game, he thought, with the specific petty satisfaction of a man about to do something deeply undignified, I’ll simply invent a worse one and make you all lose at that instead.
It took him several days, whittled scraps of wood carved into rough approximations of pieces he could no longer picture perfectly, a board scratched into a flat plank with the point of a nail.
He gathered them — Jiro, Hanako, Takeshi, Masaru, Kaito, plus whoever else happened to be within earshot when he announced, with more ceremony than the moment strictly deserved, “This is chess.”
Jiro looked at the board.
“How do you play.”
“Allow me to explain,” Ren said, and did, for the better part of twenty minutes, while Jiro grew increasingly confused, Kaito grew increasingly interested, Masaru looked openly skeptical, Takeshi looked amused in the specific way he only ever looked amused, and Hanako simply watched, saying nothing, which by now Ren understood was its own kind of attention.
“So,” Ren said, when he’d finished.
“Who wants to lose?”
Jiro went first.
Ren won.
He froze.
He stared at the board, then at Jiro, then back at the board, as though it might quietly rearrange itself back into a game he understood the odds of.
“I won.”
Jiro nodded. Get faster updates on novelping.com.
“Yes.”
Ren stood up too fast, both hands already halfway into the air before the rest of him caught up — and then he stopped, one hand still raised, the other arm simply not there to match it.
For a fraction of a second the old ache flickered somewhere behind his shoulder, familiar and unwelcome.
He lowered the hand.
Jiro noticed.
He didn’t say anything about it, which Ren had come, by now, to recognize as its own quiet form of kindness.
“Again,” Ren said instead, and sat back down.
The second game lasted considerably longer.
Jiro won it.
Ren stared at the board.
“…Interesting.”
Something that might have been a smile crossed Jiro’s face.
“You created a game you can’t consistently win.”
“Nobody asked you to expose me like that.”
Chess spread through the prison the way shogi had, only faster, dragging its own small chaos behind it.
It became a currency of sorts — games traded for favors, favors traded for games, arguments breaking out over rules Ren had explained only once and apparently not clearly enough, which meant he found himself, against every instinct he had, writing an actual rulebook.
Then someone accused someone else of cheating, which meant he had to write rules about cheating.
Then someone tried to distract an opponent mid-game with a deeply unnecessary story about a goat, which meant he had to ban that too.
“You created bureaucracy,” Kaito said, watching him amend the rulebook for the third time that week.
“I created civilization.”
“You created arguments.”
“Same thing,” Ren said, with the weary conviction of a man who had, against all better judgment, become someone’s landlord.
Takeshi, who had loudly and repeatedly claimed no interest in either game, beat him within the month anyway.
“How,” Ren said, staring at the board with the same expression he’d worn for most of this chapter.
Takeshi shrugged.
“I watched the others.”
“You learned from watching?”
“Yes.”
Ren pointed at him, betrayed.
“That’s cheating.”
“It isn’t.”
“It’s absolutely cheating.”
“It isn’t,” Takeshi said again, and went back to whatever he’d been doing before Ren interrupted it, entirely unbothered by the accusation, which somehow made it worse.
The games taught him something he hadn’t expected to learn from a piece of scratched wood and a board full of splinters: he wasn’t always the smartest person in a room, and that turned out to be considerably more useful than the alternative.
Losing showed him exactly where he was weak, in a way winning never once had.
Shogi had taught him patience — actual patience, not the performed kind he’d been faking for Masaru’s benefit for weeks.
Chess had taught him planning, several moves at a time, consequences that didn’t announce themselves until long after the choice that caused them.
Somewhere underneath both of those, quietly, the same lesson kept resurfacing that a corridor drawn in the dirt had already tried to teach him once, with a stick, in front of all five of them: prediction wasn’t a trick.
It was a discipline, and disciplines had to be practiced badly for a long time before they got practiced well.
He mentioned as much to Hanako, one evening, half-expecting her usual flat good.
Instead she considered it for a moment, turning a small wooden pawn over in her fingers — his second attempt at carving one, slightly less lopsided than the first.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Turning everything into the same lesson.”
Ren thought about that — about a sword and a lock and a body and a country, about a shogi board that had somehow ended up teaching him the same thing Jiro’s stick had been teaching him in the yard for months.
“Is that a problem?”
“No,” Hanako said, setting the pawn back down among its crooked siblings.
“It’s just going to be exhausting to live with, eventually.”
“For who?”
“Everyone who has to listen to you explain it.”
Ren considered being offended by that, decided it wasn’t worth the effort, and went back to losing at his own game instead — cheerfully, this time, which was, he privately thought, its own small kind of progress.