Chaos Pact: Supernatural Battle (Coven Caves Book 2) by Kelly St Clare

Author:Kelly St Clare [St Clare, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palimpsest Publishing
Published: 2023-05-31T18:30:00+00:00

21

I’d never considered this part.

The part after winning. Now, sitting in a meeting chamber with Vero team leaders, I was struck by the importance of making a move on the gameboard. This was crucial. Wherever we set up next was integral to taking over another quadrant. Vero had two quadrants, and Fertim had two. That meant whoever won the third quadrant would upset the balance and eventually win Caves.

We had to be that team, and my quipu had no information on this part of the game. Not yet. I was on my own.

I stared at the map hovering in the middle of the meeting table with the other team leaders.

“Generally,” Winona said, “we try to base our move on what may come next.”

“We can make the move anywhere?” I asked. “Not just where the mission was won?”

“We can move Vero players into adjacent space,” she said. “Any number of players in a single move. For instance, we could move five novices on the edge of our western quadrant into the bordering Fertim territory.”

I nodded. “You can move different magic classes at once? Like three novices and a proven?”

“No, just one or the other. Generally we move proven first.”

Moving the strongest made sense, and that also left a weakness wherever we moved them from, but that weakness could be covered. Really, only a couple of moves made sense. We held the west and south quadrants, so we had to push into the north or east from the fringes.

Except our numbers were lowest at the edges of our quadrants and highest in the middle.

“I say we go east with novices,” Sage said. “That mission is likely to come up for us soon.”

“We already have novices there. Why not proven?” Barrow asked.

“Because we don’t have many proven to push over there,” she replied. “But ample novice numbers could help us hold ground.”

I eyed the number of Fertim proven in the area. They’d annihilate us. I was with Barrow on that one.

I raised my hand. “I have a crazy idea.”

Delta flipped the dagger in her hand. “How did I know we’d hear from you?”

“Because I’m worth listening to, ma’am.”

She chuckled and slipped her dagger into a sheath. “Fertim just had a mission to claim the west quadrant.”

Delta was already on the same wavelength. “Exactly. We push all our proven from the middle-western territory to the north edge.”

She blinked.

Turned out we weren’t on the same wavelength. I was essentially recommending that we take out the guts of our proven numbers, creating a doughnut hole in the middle of our western quadrant. The result would be high numbers of proven bordering the north Fertim quadrant, ready for the next chance we got to seize more ground.

“That will leave us weak,” Delta said.

“Not really,” I said. “Nothing we couldn’t easily recoup.”

“That risk has been taken in the past,” Sage said. “It didn’t end well.”

“Without risk, we won’t claim more of the caves, either, and this risk isn’t large,” I countered. “The object is to win the game.”

Barrow rubbed his face.

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