Chapter 204: The Ultimate Winner of the Tournament!
"Congratulations, Anna! You have one of the craziest runs that I have ever seen directly!" Right after the game was announced, Irfan came and greeted her warmly.
As the arbiter, he felt the need to do so for the winner, and it didn’t help that Anna herself was the talent that he had scouted directly in the past. This was enough to make the man feel smug for at least a week, bragging about her to the other veteran players like Susanto or Novendra later behind the stage.
"Ah... I am just a little bit lucky here..." Anna rubbed the back of her head sheepishly, still getting overwhelmed by her win in this tournament to react properly.
"Don’t be too modest, girl." Medina suddenly spoke, startling the girl a little bit. The woman had a pretty complicated expression, mostly dominated by disappointment for her failure to win. However, she wouldn’t diminish Anna’s win as luck at all. "You did a good job here, playing ambitiously and even winning twice against Sister Irene. Don’t let the others—or even yourself—tell you that it is just luck. You are good, and you deserve to win."
"Um... Thank you..." Anna was still too dumbfounded by the kind words she received from Medina.
It wasn’t like Medina was a mean person here. Still, the woman was always quiet and aloof, sometimes giving the image of being unapproachable here. Moreover, the age gap between them was quite big, so it was understandable for the two to be unfamiliar with each other.
Well, this didn’t last for too long inside her mind, as Anna finally showed a proper reaction right after that. The moment she saw Sheva smiling at him from afar, the girl jumped from the chair immediately, and to everyone’s surprise, she engulfed him in the warmest hug she could muster.
"Shev! I win! I can go with you next month!" She exclaimed enthusiastically, not even knowing the commotion she made here.
"Uh... Oh... Um... Congrats... Um..." Sheva felt his brain shut down forcefully at the sudden hug here. He even stuttered a little bit, not knowing what kind of reaction he should give. Hell, the boy didn’t even notice that Bagas was taking a picture of them here with a mischievous smile, clearly wanting to show this to his mom or wanting to save it as blackmail material in the future. "Uh... Could you let go of me first?" In the end, that was the first reaction that Sheva had here.
"Um? Let go of you?" At first, Anna was confused by the question. However, the girl noticed immediately that she was still hugging Sheva in a pretty intimate position, and as everything connected inside her brain, her face slowly turned red, and she jumped out of the hug immediately. "Ah! Sorry! I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to! I am sorry, Shev! I am just too excited here! Oh, God..."
"Ah... Don’t worry..."
Seeing the awkward situation between those two, not a single person here wanted to interrupt them, deciding to watch the fun from the sidelines. Somehow, the tense atmosphere that was in the room just a moment ago was gone, melting away as everyone looked at the two main protagonists here mischievously. Well, not all of them, as Claudia herself pouted, as if wanting to join the fun here.
"Oh... It is good to be young, right?" Irfan sighed dramatically, saying this pretty loud so that the two teenagers could hear it clearly.
"Yeah, I still remember my first girlfriend in High School..." Even Master Susanto joined the fun here, and Anna had to cover her face to hide her embarrassment. Hell, if it were possible, the girl would want Earth to open up and eat her alive, letting her disappear from the living plane. For a shy girl like her, the public affection like this was something that was a little bit too much to handle.
Well, her reaction might seem excessive, but some of the people here could understand why Anna reacted strongly like that. It was pretty rare for a player to bounce back this strongly after losing her first game, yet Anna really did that. Moreover, Claudia could still remember that Sheva was the only one who didn’t count Anna out after her defeat in the first round, and it was probably because of his trust that she could play this well for the rest of the tournament.
Still, that didn’t mean they would tease her, as this was probably the first time that they saw Anna pretty close with a boy of her age.
"Good for you, eh?" Bagas nudged his best friend playfully
"W—What? What do you mean by that?" Sheva tried to act cool and innocent here, not even realizing that his face was as red as a boiled lobster.
"Oh, don’t think that I didn’t notice it." The grin on Bagas’s face got wider in a second. "The grin on your face is so uncanny. What? Happy that you can go together with her abroad? Planning for an elope? Man, aunty would be ecstatic when she heard about this news."
"W—What grin?! I don’t know what you mean, Bastard!" Sheva retorted, yet the boy also turned his face away, somehow realizing that the more he looked at Bagas’s grin, the more embarrassed he would get.
Still, inwardly, he was indeed ecstatic. After all, his first choice when Dina explained this matter was to ask Anna directly. This way, though, he could still go with Anna, while the girl also didn’t face any scrutiny from the others, as she got the place based on her own merit.
As for the fact that he would go abroad together for about ten days with Anna...
’Oh, well...’ Sheva coughed a little, trying to brush it off nonchalantly. ’We are going to be there to play chess, no need to make a big fuss about it, right?’ Yeah, that was what he told to convince himself. The grin on his face, though, was a big sign of his feelings about this. If it was Medina who won the tournament, there was no way Sheva would react this... Goofily.
Amidst the teasing of the others, the mini tournament between the ladies of the group was finally over, and with Anna being crowned as the winner, they all had already reached the same conclusion here: Sheva and Anna would go to the Biel International Chess Festival next month, and they would try to raise their level one step further before the Olympiad began.