I felt excited.

It was the first time I was playing the finals despite many tournaments I had joined, my previous attempts were ruined due to my lacking skills.

And it would be a lie to say it didn’t hurt. I lacked the passion for chess, but that didn’t make me any less competitive. After a spectacular number of failures, I was excited to sit on the competition seat.

I decided to take a break to wash my face while they announced a fifteen-minute intermission, changing the table layout to create a better viewing experience.

“It was a nice victory,” my guide said with her usual chipper tone. Luckily, this time, she managed to keep herself from speaking until we reached the end of the corridor.

“Thanks. I was just doing my best,” I answered before moving to the main topic, trying to hide my tenseness before I asked my question. However, it was not about the final I was about to take part in. “Did I collect enough Intent to get more Traits?”

I took a deep breath as she closed her eyes momentarily. I was afraid, because I didn’t know whether she would notice I had managed to trigger the System in her absence, and more importantly, how she would react if she indeed noticed it.

I still remembered the sudden oppressive aura she had radiated once she was annoyed.

Luckily, when she opened her eyes, there was no shift in her expression. “Unfortunately, no,” she answered with a cheerful shrug. “There seems to be not enough attention to trigger any new Traits.”

“Interesting,” I murmured, trying to make my sigh of relief as unnoticeable as I could manage. Luckily, she wasn’t attentive enough to catch the shift in my attention. More importantly, any comment on my increased Traits was suspiciously absent.

Which meant that, she either didn’t notice it due to a lack of attention, or she lacked the ability to notice it in the first place.

I didn’t dare to ask explicitly, afraid to alert her if it was the first case. And if she would react badly, she could do so once I had used the same trick again.

Apologizing was easier than asking permission.

With that resolved, I stepped into the restroom, washing my face, trying to focus away from the benefits I had received --- or hadn’t received --- to focus on the game, but that turned out to be impossible, not with the implications of the latest developments --- and the lack of it.

Despite the commotion my victories created, there were no traits. No new ones, no improvements.

I tried to calculate how it worked, which was difficult considering I had almost no direct data point, and the nature of the Intent was nebulous in the first place. However, even with the little data I could gather, I was able to do some simple mental calculations.

And the results suggested that the cost to improve Traits was more exponential in nature than simply additive. On the positive side, the number of different traits I was receiving suggested that, their relation, at least partially, was independent of each other.

Of course, it was just a rough analysis I did with no data, making those conclusions suspect.

The impact of different events on the Intent I had collected, however, was much more interesting. It was clear that the final output was not just about how many people that immediately surrounded me were thinking about me. It also worked remotely. More importantly, the event clearly didn’t have to be real.

Without that, the campus-wide raging gossip wouldn’t have benefited me significantly more than both the chess tournament where I showed off my skills and the party itself where the commotion that drove the gossip happened.

And the bonuses I had received from the gossip were even more interesting, particularly the improvements to the Tactics and Strategy, which was unrelated to the event itself. But since my identity as a chess player had been a part of the discussion, they had received a significant improvement.

Compared to that, the new physical traits I had received were more understandable, despite my guide’s explanation that they were much harder to receive.

Still, it was ironic that baseless gossip was given me much more than my actual achievements.

What a beautiful reflection of life, style over substance.

However, when the referee called the game to start, I abandoned that track out of thought, instead of sitting in front of my beautiful opponent who was busy fixing her glasses, the glasses she hadn’t been wearing outside.

“Are you ready, sweetie?” I said, hitting her with a crooked smile that carried the full weight of my new Seduction Trait.

“S-shut up, don’t call me sweetie when we’re about to play,” she whispered back, trying not to be overheard by the others.

Her blush was cute, but her cuteness wasn’t enough to prevent me from bringing the full range of my abilities to her. Since she was was good enough to reach the finals --- and pretty easily too, according to the snippets I was able to catch about her --- I didn’t have the luxury to take her lightly.

“Well, I have to, considering you’re yet to tell me your name, beautiful,” I said.

“L-Lauren,” she stammered with a blush, before her anger recovered. “And don’t call me beautiful.”

“But lying is a sin,” I said, amused by her stammer. I was going to continue as well, but a warning glare from the referee stopped me. They weren’t able to hear our discussion, but they could see Lauren’s face getting redder, and I had just enough of a reputation for intimidation to make them interject.

With a smirk, I pushed my pawn forward, ready to tease her some more after my first victory...

Only to be demolished absolutely.

I had started aggressive, with a variant of Smith-Morra Gambit to counter her Sicilian Defense, a solid approach that not only forced her to react very carefully, but also left a lot of aggressive angles for me to leverage.

The game started confidently, but by move ten, I was behind two pawns, even as I stretched my newly found abilities to the limit. By the move fifteen, I was desperately sacrificing a knight for a pawn just to have a chance to breathe, but by the move twenty, my loss was absolutely certain.

Fuck, I thought even as I tried to breathe even for a moment. She was good, definitely good enough to count as a low-ranked Grandmaster, maybe even more.

Which was certainly unexpected to come across in a third-rate tournament.

Of course, just because she was much more skilled than me didn’t mean that I wanted to surrender. I decided to rely on what I did best, started to force the game to unusual situations even more, hoping to exhaust her before the next one.

So, after a very lengthy battle, she finally acquired her victory through an aggressive center push, and the first game was hers.

She was good, much better than a little college tournament like this deserved.

“Damn, girl, that was a vicious game, you’re killing me,” I whispered, just soft enough not to be heard by the audience.

It was intended as a compliment, but I saw her flinch, as I had insulted her. I didn’t know why, but she was clearly feeling self-conscious about her skills.

I wasn’t a nice guy, and if I hadn’t found myself in the football team, I would have pushed that particular softness hoping for a victory --- even though, with the skill she displayed, even that would give me a small chance of victory. I could definitely steal a game, maybe even two, but definitely not full victory unless she collapsed completely.

Though, it would be a lie if I said that the beautiful frown behind her glasses didn’t play any role in that decision.

She said nothing else, and I didn’t push her, trying to focus on the next game, curious just how good I could play against her.

In the second game, she started with a soft, very defensive opening, showing that she felt self-conscious about the comment. If she was any weaker, I would have used a traditional hyper-aggressive push to leverage her distraction for a quick victory, but her skills made that an impossibility.

Instead, I responded with a confusing, unorthodox move, attacking from the sides even as I let her expand into the center, creating an unbreakable defensive formation.

She responded to the confusing layout with a decent speed, despite the challenges of responding to a confusing layout even with the format, giving her to have only a few seconds to consider each move.

We continued fighting over the left side of the board, while my occasional bursts prevented her from developing a strong presence on the center. She attempted to cut me off, but I managed to use my Queen defensively, cutting her attempt down even as I continued to batter her defenses, again and again, extending my control over the board. However, she still played very defensively.

Which, in the end, managed to be her downfall. Her passivity allowed me to set up a very complicated attack pattern --- one that was only possible with the assistance of my Traits --- which allowed me to deliver a lengthy, merciless attack that finally managed to bring me the victory.

When the game was over, both of us were sweating.

However, I didn’t have the time to pity her, because, despite losing the game, she didn’t look broken down. Instead, she had a vicious smile on her face, one that reminded me of myself.

“Let’s play,” she said widely.

I would have loved to say that it was the start of an amazing, very competitive game that went back and forth again and again until I managed to eke out a victory.

Unfortunately, the reality was crueler. For the next two games, she attacked mercilessly, the chess equivalent of a berserker, not even giving me a chance to set up a counter-attack, dominating me thoroughly.

I expanded every little trick in my bag of tricks, but even then, I was barely able to extend the games a few moves.

“Good game,” I said, leaving the table gracefully after shaking her hand before moving to my seat, while the referees and the well-wishers gathered around her to celebrate her victory.