Page 45 of Winterveil

Yet his mind—seemingly as ever—was on Klaudia. He glanced solicitously around the lawn to see if he could spot her, but he couldn’t. She was probably tucked in a corner of the library, head bent over her tablet and surrounded by a stack of books. Julian tried to imagine her in the sunlight. He thought idly about how it would make her pale skin glow.

Admittedly, he had become the slightest bit obsessed. Just yesterday he had followed her up to the strategy classroom, keeping a careful distance, and watched her through the window. She was alone with Professor Narendra, writing something on the chalkboard that looked more like hieroglyphics than mathematical equations.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Klaudia to him was that she had so much stacked against her. Her name, her gender, her looks. She was playing at an inherent disadvantage and she still managed to win cleanly, every single time. And Julian, with all the privileges life had afforded him, couldn’t manage to beat her. It felt wrong on some fundamental level.

This fact had spiraled him into an even deeper obsession. He stared at her during mealtimes whenever she wasn’t looking, always briefly mesmerized by the way her tongue flickered over her lips when she spoke or how her dark curls turned glossy when they caught the light. Even when she was not in front of him, he thought about her incessantly. Klaudia had successfully conquered his mind.

Julian was considering these matters grimly when Mikhail suddenly dropped down onto the grass beside him.

“Working on your team?” he asked with a smile.

He hadn’t been. In fact, he was actively trying not to. Thymos had only become another arena in which Klaudia thoroughly confounded him. With Julian stuck with the other first years, he hadn’t and would never be in a simulation with Klaudia again. They could continue winning against their peers and only reinforce their rankings. Thymos should have been a welcome substitution—a proxy game. Once Mikhail had opened up PvP mode, Julian had challenged her to a match immediately. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, he had been trounced.

“What’s the point?” Julian replied, sounding more surly than he’d intended. “Klaudia has already cracked the game.”

Her team was something of a sadistic booby trap. Unassuming at first, considering that it was built of seemingly mediocre pieces with unimpressive statistics. But the way she piloted it was like a snake slowly strangling its prey.

The strategy consisted of two key pieces: Psycha, a humanoid creature dressed in a dark lace petticoat, eerily resembling a Gothic maiden. Its ability, Spectral Trap, imprisoned all pieces on the field, disabling the switch-out mechanic. The second piece, Marionette—with the appearance of a haunted doll—had a signature move called Ghostly Chorus. When it used the move, all pieces on the field would be removed within three turns, unless they were switched out, which of course Psycha prevented.

Julian had tried everything. He had built a team of the strongest pieces, aiming to overwhelm her with damage. But Klaudia had played carefully and defensively, slowing the pace of the game, and Julian hadn’t been able to knock out Psycha in time. Raw power wasn’t enough—not in the face of such calculated and meticulous gameplay.

“You’ll figure it out,” Mikhail assured him.

“What about a balance patch?” Julian suggested hopefully. “You could nerf Psycha. . . .”

Mikhail grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“There’s nothing fun about getting rolled by Ghostly Trap over and over again.” Julian had already given Klaudia’s strategy an epithet. “You’ve tried playing her, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. And I got rolled, too.” Mikhail shook his head. “I did have another idea, though. I was thinking about sending the game out to some other students. The neural net is already evolving. The more people who play the better the AI will get.”

Julian’s chest swelled. “So the AI will learn how to beat Ghostly Trap?”

“Ideally it will learn how to beat anything. Like a chess engine.”

“Then it sounds like a great plan,” said Julian, perhaps too emphatically. “Maybe someone else at Valeran can beat her.”

Mikhail gave him a look. “You wouldn’t like that. Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Because you want to be the one to do it,” Mikhail said. “You’re not all that subtle, you know.”

Heat rose to Julian’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sighing, Mikhail just shook his head again. Julian, still flushing, quickly changed the subject.

After eating lunch with Mikhail, Julian climbed the stairs to the second floor of the main building. He was running over his Thymos team in his mind, mentally adjusting stats and visualizing past games. It would have been easier to focus back in his dorm room, but there was an advantage to being seen studying publicly. It strengthened the sense of camaraderie among him in his fellow students. Despite the fact that he was wearing a $50,000 watch, he was just like them in the ways that mattered.

His campaign had taught him that, too. In lieu of typical in-person rallies, he had done livestreams on social media and gaming apps. Letting his supporters play him in chess, letting them type their questions directly into the chat. It had made him feel real. Relatable.

Not untouchable—as Klaudia strove to be. Her strategy was of another order entirely.

Admittedly, a small part of him was hoping he would see her in the reading room. He had learned from secretly following her that it was one of her favorite haunts.

As Julian opened the door to the reading room, it was Klaudia he found there. But she wasn’t alone.

Carter Egan stood in the center of the room, his back to the unlit fireplace. Two of his lackeys, whose names Julian had never bothered to learn, stood before him. Together, they had Klaudia pinned between them, her hair mussed and her lipstick smudged.