เต๊กเลาDilu

Dilu (+1 horse): defensive mount. Other seats are 1 further away when targeting you — identical in effect to Shadow Runner. Only one defensive mount at a time.

Dilu is the horse that carried Liu Bei over the Tanxi stream west of Xiangyang with assassins closing in — an escape horse, not a charging one, and the card plays the same role. It puts every other seat 1 further away when they target you: an unarmed attacker has range 1 and cannot reach you at all, even from the next chair, and the distance-1 tricks — Steal, Supply Shortage — cannot be aimed at you either. Only one defensive mount at a time, a new one replacing the old, though it sits alongside an offensive mount; it earns most late, when seats have died and the table has closed in around you.

Dilu's printed face is ♣5 — the only club-suited mount in the deck, which makes it the one mount Pang Tong can spend as a Chain through Ironbind. So a spare Dilu is never a dead card in his hand, even with his defensive slot already filled. Worn, it stacks with Eight Trigrams the ordinary way: whoever can still reach you then has the dodge judgement to beat as well.

Steal will not take it off him: Steal is a distance-1 card, and Dilu is precisely what pushes its wearer out of distance 1. Use Dismantle, which has no range limit, or bring reach of your own — a long weapon or an offensive mount cancels the extra step. The blunter answer is to ignore distance entirely: a Duel, and the cards that hit the whole table at once, never check range, so this mount saves its rider from none of them — fitting, for a horse Liu Bei was warned would be the ruin of whoever rode it.