My Stubborn Soul Card Follower

But thinking of how the meta used to be, now that Shen Sui’s playstyle has spread, even Theis has been affected.

So, when Shen Sui watched as You Wenqi had just summoned his first Starry Companion and then both sides immediately slapped down three or four hand traps to counter each other, he kind of couldn’t hold it in.

Damn it, what the hell happened to Life Card Duels? Since when did they turn into Hand Trap Wars?

You Wenqi and Theis were crazily throwing in hand traps, the latter in order not to let You Wenqi gain even a sliver of first-turn advantage, and the former to prevent exactly that from happening.

However, after dumping a ton of hand traps, the downside appeared: both sides no longer had enough starters.

Although You Wenqi relied on his slightly superior hand trap quality to successfully maintain his first-turn advantage, the problem was... his hand size got heavily shaved down in that wave of hand trap trading.

It wasn’t to the point of bricking, but it objectively impacted his ability to extend.

In the past, if You Wenqi got the first turn and didn’t at least flood the board with three Zodiac Gods, he’d feel like he’d wasted a whole turn.

This time, though, You Wenqi stopped after just summoning two Zodiac Gods and ended his turn.

If it were someone else, even if they’d only summoned a single fifteen-star Follower going first, they’d probably already have an eighty percent win rate, but this was You Wenqi, and his opponent was Theis.

Theis, just like You Wenqi, was also an owner of a large number of High-Star Gods. Two fifteen-star Followers, even if they had full resist, might not be all that impressive.

However, when Theis started his own first turn, he ran into the same problem as You Wenqi.

Because the hand trap exchange during the first-turn round had burned a lot of cards, and their hand traps weren’t on the level of Shen Sui’s Puppets or Loli Dragon Princess that still had effects in the graveyard—once spent, they were just spent; there was no way to use graveyard effects later to squeeze more value.

Looking at the three cards in his hand, Theis chose to take the same route as You Wenqi.

The result was that their Duel entered a long, drawn-out tug-of-war where their Divine Cards simply couldn’t do anything to each other in a short time.

Shen Sui hadn’t seen a back-and-forth Duel that dragged on for more than five turns in a long while; after all, with his deck, by the fourth turn his deck would probably be nearly milled out thanks to all the filtering and dumping—though to be fair, there weren’t many opponents who could even last that long against him.

Once a Duel falls into a tug-of-war, it gets a bit boring.

Even though both sides’ Gods had super cool entrance effects, the fact remained that the board state was completely stalled.

Bored out of his mind, Shen Sui opened his Dueling Device, planning to check how Alice’s new harbor district construction was going.

After sealing Haral’s left eye, Alice—who had fully recovered that same day—said goodbye to Vivian and the others and set off once more on her journey to the new harbor district.

The construction of the new harbor district was going even more smoothly than Shen Sui had imagined.

In reality, the Deep Sea hadn’t shown up to stop Alice’s construction the way he’d expected; instead, there were plenty of people inside the Azure Federation who were openly and secretly trying to throw wrenches in the works.

Seeing this all-too-familiar vibe, Shen Sui suspected that all these people were Life Card Masters deliberately stirring up chaos to farm Life Cards.

They probably thought that Alice, who’d accidentally become the Peace Faction’s leader, was the kind of person who would swallow all this humiliation without complaint.

Unfortunately for them, that was not what Alice’s personality was like.

When all kinds of warnings failed to stop the other side’s sabotage, Alice just shouldered her Ship Armor and marched straight in.

The blonde devil miss fully showcased her demonic side on these "little troublemakers."

Barging into someone else’s Guardian Mansion, giving their shipgirls a brutal beatdown, stripping off their Ship Armor, and conveniently taking away their supplies to support frontline construction—this was Alice’s most standard operation.

It even got to the point where Alice developed a kind of path dependence; she treasured the resources Lexington and the others had brought—the ones Shen Sui had hoarded—so much that she refused to touch them. Every time the harbor district was short on supplies, she’d start thinking about paying those guys’ Guardian Mansions a visit.

Life Card Masters in the Shipgirl World, because of the need for large numbers of Followers in their decks, basically had to raise a lot of shipgirls, and powerful shipgirls were massive resource black holes. Add in Alice’s utterly un-sportsmanlike habit of stripping their Ship Armor, and she had these Life Card Masters suffering miserably.

The key point was, this little Witch had now learned how to manufacture her own excuses to show up and rob people.

Yes, we did deliberately create a lot of conflicts just to farm Soul Cards, but doing what you’re doing is a bit too shameless, isn’t it?

So, these victims jointly filed a complaint against Alice in the military court.

[The judge held the indictment, spent half an hour reading, and finally finished reading all the plaintiffs’ names.]

Shen Sui cracked up the moment he read the very first line.

Alice, I’ve only been in one Duel, right? Even though I sped up the Shipgirl World’s time so you could finish the harbor district faster, isn’t your efficiency just a bit too ridiculous?

It’s only been a few days, and the list of victims is already long enough for the judge to read for half an hour.

Shen Sui had originally planned to scold her, but upon closer inspection, he found that the people Alice was giving trouble to were basically that batch of Commanders who were confirmed to have maliciously stirred up the internal war to seize power, so he gave up on that idea.

["They seem to be accusing you of attempting to incite a civil war." The judge didn’t really believe it himself when he said that.]

[Attempting to incite a civil war? Just look at the fleet she commands.]

[Does she even need to ’incite’ a civil war? If she wanted, sweeping the entire Azure Federation and proclaiming herself emperor would be child’s play, wouldn’t it?]

["How did I incite a civil war?" Alice crossed her arms and said righteously, "Has the threshold for calling something a civil war really gotten this low? We’re all Commanders here. No matter what, a civil war has to involve conflict between fleets, right?"]

["Uh..."]

[Alice waved her tiny fist, revealed her cute little tiger teeth, and said with a grin, "I never used any shipgirls the whole time~! At most this counts as a brawl between Commanders! If they’re not happy about it, I’ll pay some medical fees, that’s all."]

Yes, in order not to tarnish Lexington and the others’ good reputation, whenever Alice did something bad, she went in alone.

Anyway, the rules of the Shipgirl World had almost all been parsed by Alice by now, and with the previous incident of sealing Haral, the world’s consciousness turned a blind eye to what Alice was doing. At this point, Alice could unleash about ninety percent of her strength in the Shipgirl World.

In every sense, there was absolutely nothing wrong with what Alice said.

They were all Commanders; if you’re going to accuse someone of inciting a civil war, you at least have to define the term. No matter what, it needs to be a clash between fleets, right? A Commander barging in alone—no matter how you spin it—doesn’t count as a military-level conflict.

In fact, from the public’s perspective, it was actually the plaintiffs who used shipgirls that looked more like the ones bullying the weak.

Laws, after all, have to align with how ordinary people think.

In this world, ordinary people’s mindset was that the side with shipgirls was the stronger party.

["Still... there has to be some compensation, right?" The judge felt that, judging from how strength was defined, Alice really ought to count as a shipgirl no matter what, but her registration information stubbornly said Commander.]

[But regardless, the blast radius of this case was just too huge. If there wasn’t even a bit of compensation, it would be hard to justify.]

["Oh." Alice blinked. "That’s fine, I’m not an unreasonable person."]

[Alice submitted all her assets as her compensation.]

...

You’ve only been in the Shipgirl World for a few days, right? How many assets could you possibly have?

Shen Sui was puzzled as he read this.

Then he scrolled down.

Good grief—averaging out to eighty cents per person.

Even someone like Shen Sui, who thought these troublemakers totally deserved it, felt a little bit of sympathy for them when he saw this scene.

If you run into Alice while you’re stirring up trouble, that’s just your bad luck.

That said, Shen Sui felt he should find an opportunity to toss Alice into the High Magic World.

He was genuinely worried that she’d get overconfident from stomping weaklings.

Conveniently, Shen Sui still hadn’t given up on Haral’s hands; he could have Alice take a trip to the Starry World and track down Haral’s whereabouts.

And while she was at it, she could look for the "inheritance" he’d left behind in the Starry World.