A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge at the AMF, Section A, prompt 52 – write a drabble between 201 and 300 words.
The Deceitful First Meeting
When Saori first met Yasuoka Shion, she never thought she'd wind up hating her. In retrospect, she should have expected it. Women's shougi wasn't as cutthroat as the men's pro leagues, but it was fairly intense, and she saw with her own eyes how deep their souls were in the game.
And, sometimes, you had to hate your opponent to beat them. She knew that. It was one of the unwritten rules of the game: one of those things you had to know if you ever wanted to be a champion. And she did. That was why she had made shougi her life, taking the best teachers available to culminate her skills using her parents' connections – the parents who were never home and not good for anything else.
So she should have known that, despite how cute and innocent and pitiable little Shion looked, there'd be a day where they'd meet in battle across a shougi board. And that was one step closer to hating her – particularly when she'd tossed aside her "gentle" manner of playing because it was only hurting her in the end. Those were all her soft, naïve ideals: ideals she had to let go of now that the ante had been raised.
But the ante hadn't been raised. Not really. It was just that a new wave of kishi had come, a wave that could turn the idea of the gentle and weak women's shougi on their head.
She was going to become strong, and to do that she was going to make everyone look at her shougi – starting by tearing Hani-meijin's eyes away from that fateful game between Saito Ayumi and Yasuoka Shion.