One day was more than enough for every contestant to hear about the time-freeze replays. Ten silver a pop and worth every coin.
Rita did not leave her room the next day. Her stated reason: pre-match prep.
Mistblade did not leave her room either. Same reason.
Maple Syrup went out. Rumor said she told everyone she met that her hearing had been a little off since the Fun Match.
Fate is right. She is insufferable. If that is not a nemesis, what is?
The future her and Maple Syrup must have a terrible relationship.
Rita did not step outside until the moment the second match began. One Absolute Freedom hop took her straight to the venue. She planted herself in Moonlight Marsh's waiting zone with folded arms and a cold face.
She was in her villain arc. She intended to isolate the world.
Seven or eight meters away, Mistblade mirrored her, hands in her pockets, expressionless.
Fat Goose and Motor walked past Rita, then both backed up in tandem.
Fat Goose wiped his eyes with his sleeve, voice tight. "Junior, are you okay?"
Motor sniffled twice. "Do you need a handkerchief?"
Rita drew her dagger, face still blank.
Fat Goose and Motor jogged away, waving as they ran toward Mistblade while chanting nonsense like "Mistblade starts something and drops it."
Over in the problem-child section reserved for the unenrolled, Maple Syrup's grin had not left her face since Rita and Mistblade appeared. Her gaze bounced between the two of them like a metronome.
Every so often she would suddenly bow her head, cover her eyes, and laugh silently like something had shorted out inside.
Since the day ten-year-old Rita first met Maple Syrup, she had never seen her this cheerful. It felt like Maple Syrup had used up a lifetime's ration of laughter in one morning.
Even Pine Bloom seemed a little exasperated. She leaned in and whispered something in Maple Syrup's ear. Maple Syrup cupped a hand behind her own ear and said loudly, "What did you say? My ears have been funny since the Fun Match. Speak up."
It was her fault. She must have knocked Maple Syrup's brain loose during the match.
At last, the cards moved.
Rita fired off several party invites as she sprinted toward where the card spun off.
If anything went wrong, she was ready to twist perceptions with No Logic. One way or another, she was getting into the team match with her squad.
Contracts were great. Her skills were better.
Fortunately, no one on her team got cold feet at the last second. At least for now.
As she ran, her gaze slid toward Maple Syrup and Pine Bloom's side and locked on the fifth player following them. Frenzied Shark?
She eased up next to NightFury and asked, "Does Frenzied Shark have people problems too?"
"Yeah. Why else would he team up with Crab?" NightFury said. "He likes cultivating mutant plants. Thorn cacti, man-eating flowers. He has almost killed classmates a few times, but the Dog Ranch doesn't care as long as you don't do what Pine Bloom did and rough up a teacher."
"I thought he had a team."
"He did," NightFury said, sounding like she knew everything. "Pine Bloom left, Wither Monarch teamed with others for undead interests, Autumn Deer provoked Golden Hills, and teaming with him is more trouble than it is worth. The squad fell apart. I didn't expect him to end up with Maple Syrup either."
The card loomed ahead. They stopped talking and dove through the gilded veil. ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡⚑𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚⚑𝙣𝙚𝙩
[Team Match Game — Block Clear]
[The last team standing wins]
[If your bookshelf is blocked, you fail]
[Hidden objective: kill any librarian. They only appear on the hour]
Rita found herself standing in front of a gigantic empty bookshelf.
No—calling it a bookshelf felt off.
It looked almost identical to the shelves from the Fun Match, but only almost. Every shelf plank that would hold books was gone.
It was more like an empty wardrobe than a shelf.
Using her height of one seventy-three as a rough measure, she eyeballed it. About ten meters tall. Five meters wide. Not thick, maybe half a meter.
Block clear? What blocks, what kind of clear?
Half a dozen little puzzle games flashed through her mind.
The rest of her team blinked in one after another. Everyone scanned the arena.
Rita glanced left, right, then behind.
Still a ring-shaped structure, but unlike the Fun Match, the central island had ballooned in size, while the surrounding library ring had shrunk to roughly three meters wide. Just enough space to line a shelf facing the island, with barely enough room left to move behind it.
There were at least ten levels. They were on the seventh, with hundreds of shelves on each tier all facing the central "stage."
In short, this was a Roman amphitheater in library drag.
Every team's shelf stood in the bleachers. From any level and any point, you could see all the other teams and their shelves.
A one-meter gap separated shelf from shelf. When Rita tried to step toward the neighboring section, an invisible screen stopped her.
So you cannot attack each other's shelves, and you cannot enter another team's section.
If the Fun Match could not resist a brawl, the Team Match would not be peaceful either. That left one conclusion: the battlefield was not on the bleachers.
Her eyes dropped to the massive round "stage" in the middle.
Before the countdown hit zero, she studied every tier of the arena and locked in the positions of a handful of dangerous opponents.
When she left, the lower grades were starting to catch up, but aside from a few prodigies, most were still behind the older students.
Which meant her real rivals would be the current seventh-years.
As for the most capable sixth-years, a fifth of them were on her team.
At the end of the ten-minute countdown, blocks appeared on every team's shelf, arranged differently from shelf to shelf.
On theirs, a piece formed from four purple squares in a straight line was slowly drifting downward.
The shades of purple varied slightly. From a distance they looked the same, but up close you could tell each square was the condensed cover of a different book.
At this speed, it would land on the base in about ten seconds.
Meanwhile, the central stage swarmed with book-shaped "monsters," each the size of a normal volume, flitting through the air.
Glowing block icons floated above their heads.
There were the four kinds of L pieces, pointing different ways, Γ, L, ┓, ┘.
There were solid squares made of four blocks.
There were ┣, ┫, ┳, ┻.
And the long pieces, the line and the bar.
Given the rule about shelves failing if they got blocked, Rita smacked her thigh and shouted, "It is you—Tetris!"