The Weird Chess Tournament

“ALIZA! ALIZA!” The crowds were roaring with all the calories left in their bodies. All demanding for perfection. “ATARI!” A person who forgot his main character leaving the lobby, still saying hello to him. And even if he entered, nobody would know.

Aliza stepped in the center battlefield. One of her legs was enough to make the crowd shout loudly enough to burst the eardrums of the muscle man. She lifted her coal-black glasses which served as a blindfold for her. “We’ve came to the showdown fans!” she shouted.

“Hey we’re not fans, we don’t spin above your head.” One person replied back. Everyone went silent for a second…and then hooted in laughter.

Her observation shifted to the opposite side. The Crowd were cheering for the player that still didn’t enter the battlefield. “PEA IS GOING TO WIN!” one person shouted with all his might.

She hated that word. Pea. She soon started hating the person who shouted. At least she deserved the right to play with a human in the finals, not a vegetable.

Aliza walked up to a security guard, who looked like a muscular man dragged from a gym contest to manage the crowd. Forgetting everything, she inquired “Um, sir, where is Pea- I mean Atari? The match started five minutes ago!”

The guard sighed, “Unfortunately—He’s in the restroom.”

Aliza inhaled sharply, sounding like paper tearing “WHAT!?”

“Yes, He is having a stomach ache.”

Aliza’s gaze narrowed, inspecting the guard like a flawed equation, “That so in a finals game?”

“Yes ma’am.” Aliza made a weird face. “Ma’am is there something wrong? Can I-”

Aliza, “I’m very disappointed of you…” she cut off the conversation with a single, brutal sentence without even looking at him.

“But it was Atari who was ill, shouldn’t have told it either.”

After half an hour, Aliza stopped forming philosophies about the universe and started to focus on the game. Her boring waiting session ended as Pea entered the hall.

Atari, loud and arrogant, said, “The wait is over as Pea is here, small yet smart.”

Aliza, “You don’t look like that though… You look like an Atta flour”

The crowd towards Atari were relieved as their champion had made it. The Aliza fans didn’t stop to scream. The noise settled into a tense, vibrating hum as the cameras zoomed in on the chessboard and Aliza, Atari’s low height format wasn’t supported in the camera.

Aliza didn’t play chess like a normal person, she planned all of her moves and alternate paths even before the game started.

The commentator’s voice cut through the air, “The finals begin. White to move first.”

The game began. Aliza didn’t move. Instead, she inhaled a ton of oxygen. Her hands hovered over the pawn. She played the move. “Aliza – E4” the commentator briefed.

“We can see Atari anxious. Aliza is leading the game!” the commentators announced with all their might. “Queen to D5” Aliza played the best move possible. She checked her watch. It read 6:21, 1 hour late then scheduled. Atari was still juggling balls in his mind.

Her hand reached her bottle and as she looked down…

“What?” she gasped. The voice ripped from her lungs, silent yet violent. There was an absurd shadow forming near her hair. It wasn’t the shadow of the chessboard or lights, It was a new shadow randomly forming. It changed shapes when she gazed at it for a while, from an oval to a rhomboid.

Losing her focus, she played a blunder on the chessboard. As she noticed it, she drowned in the sea of anxiety. ‘What? Am I going to lose?’

She shifted her sight towards the shadow. It had started to slowly cripple out. She looked back on the chess board but it was too late. Atari, the digestive disaster, had checkmated her.

People started criticizing Aliza but she didn’t listen, nor did she say something. She stared at the empty space where the shadow had been forming.

Atari, “Saw it, this pea is better at chess than you elephants!”

Accepting her first defeat in three years, she took her compensation certificate and went home.

Aliza mumbled to herself in her bedroom, “What was it? How did it form? Was it a hallucination?” Clueless, she went to her laptop to research.

“Hey Gemini, do you know why weird shadows form on my hair?”

“As per your saved data, women usually hallucinate it during chess as they think the boxes in the chessboard are cookies.”

“Who even taught that crap to you?”

“You. You asked me to save it as ‘High Priority Mental Flaw’ in 6/7/2024, 12:35 IS-”

“Forget those, start a research for it.”

“I sniffed up all the corners of the internet and also ate some cookies. It’s a very astonishing and weird report.”

“SPIT IT OUT!”

“As in the report, people across the globe, especially students are weirdly disappearing, soon after or during Halloween without any trace. Their journals expressed depression, mental pressure and sorrow before the incident.”

Aliza’s voice dropped to a terrifying whisper, “What? Do you have more?”

“Yes. Another Japanese student who later appeared back in Arizona stated that he had been teleported to another dimension and was tortured by ghosts. He somehow managed to find the portal and escape. But he also disappeared back in the next Halloween (ie. 2024)”

Soon after, her laptop’s battery finished up. She slept with the terror and a newly formed fear, which she had to finish.

“Aliza, get up to your feet and try to find me… HAHAHA!”