Jul 03, 2025
Time to talk about Chapter 489: Smoldering smidje.
And peak chess is finally back. The final battle of 6B is here and it really is something. Originally, I had this battle split into two chapters, but decided to merge them together since I felt it was better to keep the flow going. That means that you get to see this entire epic fight from start to finish in a single chapter.
This game and the bughouse games were the ones I was dreading for the longest time, with my worries with this one being the fact that it's two games at once, so double the work. One thing I will reveal about these games is that both were played against Chess.com's level 25 3200-rated engine bot around late January early February, so I've been sitting on these two games for a while now.
I'll also reveal the reason this match came to be, and that is the Belgian folk song, 't Smidje. It didn't come immediately, but after listening to it enough, I thought that having a final boss fight of sorts with Kaylee would be epic, and that's what ended up leading me to have her be Melisha. I also wanted to use the fight as a chance for Mimoko to be able to save someone, something she wasn't able to do back during the Michiko incident. I also wanted to use 6B as a chance to increase the stakes during the Chess Olympics as with the tournament format, there's been no chances to implement a chess death match.
In hindsight, I feel 6B is the weakest part of the story mainly due to Pre 6B. If I get all the remaining chapters for Season 7 done, you can expect to see some major shuffling around as I trim down Pre 6B and insert those chapters in their place.
And for one final thing, I'll leave it up to reader's interpretation to decipher what Kaylee meant in her last line. I guess I should also clarify she really is dead, though there is a chance she'll appear again in flashbacks. I do also plan to divulge the meaning behind her words as well in a later arc of the story.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
