Chapter 27 - Beneath the Old Blue Dorm

The path to the Abandoned Dorm didn't begin at a gate. It began in the way Duel Academy tried to pretend certain places didn't exist: by not putting them on the map you were handed on your first day.

The main campus had directions for everything that mattered: lecture halls, practice arenas, dorm wings, the plaza, the waterfront… Each route cleanly marked and brightly named, as if a label could turn a building into something safe. The older students learned the rest the way sailors learned reefs: by rumor, by near-misses, by watching who refused to walk a certain stretch of road after sunset.

Julian had learned it in a different way. He knew the Abandoned Dorm before he ever set foot on the island. Not because he'd been told: because he'd watched it burn in a story that wasn't supposed to be his life.

Now, on a pale afternoon that looked too ordinary to be trusted, he walked toward it with Alexis Rhodes at his side.

The two kept a steady pace. Not hurried, because hurried drew attention, and attention had a way of becoming a witness for something that in theory was forbidden by the institution. Not leisurely either, because loitering in the wrong area made staff appear out of nowhere with questions they didn't ask anyone else, especially when it came to a boy and a girl together.

The academy around them moved as usual. Students crossed courtyards with Duel Disks tucked under their arms. A pair of Slifers argued loudly about a misplay from last week's bracket. Two Obelisks passed with polished composure, eyes flicking once toward Alexis, then towards Julian, and then away again, like they'd just registered a fact and stored it for gossip later.

Julian's new jacket didn't make him invisible. It made him legible. He could feel it in the way heads turned and then corrected, in the half-second pause before conversations resumed. The Obelisk blue was an invitation and a warning in the same stitch: come closer, but mind the rules.

Alexis wore it like she'd been born in it.

Julian tried not to watch her too directly, because watching her meant noticing the smallest tells: how her shoulders stayed squared even when her fingers tightened, how her chin stayed lifted even when her gaze kept searching the edges of the path as if expecting something to step out and call her brother's name.

She hadn't said much since she'd approached him after training. She hadn't needed to.

Her voice had been steady, her posture controlled. Her request phrased like a simple favor between classmates. But her eyes… her eyes had been honest in a way the rest of her could not afford to be.

Julian had agreed because he was human. Because he cared. Because seeing that kind of desperate, quiet restraint in someone you admired did something to you, whether you were prepared for it or not.

And because, somewhere deep in him, he carried a list of things he told himself he could fix if he got there early enough.

The island's main roads started to thin the further they went. The sound of the arenas and courtyards softened, replaced by wind and the distant, constant hush of the sea.

Ahead, the terrain rose slightly, and the trees changed. Not into neglect, but into age. The academy's manicured hedges and aggressively trimmed lawns gave way to older landscaping, grown dense rather than wild. The greenery here had not been abandoned so much as left to mature on its own terms, branches arching higher, shadows deeper. The path beneath their feet remained deliberate and well-laid, wide stone slabs worn smooth by years of careful use. It wasn't lesser than the main campus roads: just quieter, built for a time when prestige didn't need to announce itself at every step.

"You know…" Alexis said at last, voice low enough that it belonged to them and not the island. "I used to think the island was small."

Julian glanced at her. "It is. Relatively."

Her mouth tightened in something that wasn't quite a smile. "Not when you're looking for what it hides. Finally, let's get some answers."

That landed closer than she probably meant it to. Julian let the thought pass through him without catching it, the way he'd learned to let a crowd's whispers pass without swallowing them. He kept his gaze forward.

The Abandoned Dorm was not visible yet—and that, Julian realized, was entirely intentional.

The academy did not hide it through neglect, but through design. Sightlines were deliberate things here. Buildings, walkways, even the curvature of the terrain guided the eye toward what was meant to matter: the arena gleaming under the sun, the current dormitories standing proud and immaculate, the central hall framed by banners and polished stone.

The old Blue Dorm existed outside that logic. Not forgotten, simply excluded.

To reach it, one did not wander. One diverged. You had to step away from the routes that promised recognition and spectacle, follow a path that still bore the marks of importance, but no longer participated in the academy's performance of itself.

It wasn't a fall from prestige. It was a removal from the narrative.

Julian found himself thinking, unhelpfully, about the way it was described in Japanese, in the version of the story he'd watched long before this world had ever felt like it could bite back: the Old Blue Dorm.

That phrase mattered more than people realized. Because "abandoned" implied a mistake. A failure. A place that fell apart.

But "old" implied something else: replacement. Upgrade. A deliberate step away.

He'd seen the new Obelisk dorm. He lived in it now. He knew exactly how much money had been poured into that marble and glass and quiet, how much luxury had been carefully engineered to feel inevitable.

And he could imagine the memo that justified it: We are modernizing the facilities, expanding capacity, improving security and comfort. We are… moving on.

He didn't need to be a political genius to understand how an upgrade could function as a cover story.

An old dorm suffers an incident. Students vanish. Questions are asked. Parents make noise. The media sniffs around. Sponsors start to worry.

So you don't fight the questions head on. You drown them in comfort.

You give everyone a new, gleaming building to point at and say: Look. See? We took care of it. We fixed the problem. We're better now.

And the old building becomes a relic no one is allowed to touch.

Julian's jaw tightened. He wasn't angry, exactly. He'd had enough time to understand that institutions rarely did evil with a cackling grin. They did it with paperwork. With budgets. With risk assessments. With choices framed as "practical."

He glanced at Alexis again, careful this time, and saw her watching the path with a kind of guarded vigilance that made his chest tighten.

For her, this wasn't politics. It was a hole in her family. It was a bedroom left unused. A name that still got set at the dinner table in her head before she remembered.

"You're sure you want to do this now?" Julian asked.

It came out softer than he intended. Not because he thought she'd say no. Because he wanted her to hear the option existed.

Alexis didn't look at him right away. She kept walking. The wind tugged at a strand of hair near her temple, and she tucked it back with a movement so precise it almost looked rehearsed.

Then she spoke, still facing forward.

"I've been sure for a long time." she said. "I've just… been waiting for someone… Or something that could actually indicate to me a path to the right answer. I want to know, whatever it takes."

Julian felt the weight of that settle in his ribs. Someone.

Not her friends. Not her teachers. Not the academy. Someone like him, now.

That was a kind of trust that shouldn't have felt good, not when it came down to her absence of a kin. It did anyway, like a whisper of sin in his ears, because Julian was not immune to wanting to be needed.

He swallowed it down, then walked in silence next to her for a few more minutes. The path narrowed again, and a small slope led them past a cluster of trees that formed a natural curtain.

When they emerged on the other side, Julian finally saw it.

The Abandoned Dorm sat like a swallowed breath. It wasn't ruined, not in the dramatic way a horror movie would have wanted. It wasn't collapsed or burning or twisted into jagged shapes. That would have made it easier, in a way. Easy to point at and say: Yes, of course it's dangerous.

Instead, it stood nearly intact.

The building had the posture of something that had once been elegant and had since been told it was no longer invited.

Stone walls, weathered but solid. Tall windows that were dusty rather than shattered. An older style of architecture: still refined, still expensive, but with less theatrical luxury than the current Obelisk dorm. Less glass, more carved stone. Less "hotel for champions," more "estate for heirs."

A middle stage, Julian realized. A stepping stone between the crowded practicality of Ra and the polished performance of modern Obelisk.

If this had been where Obelisk students once lived, it made a strange sense. A dorm that still carried status, still carried comfort, but hadn't yet turned "elite" into a lifestyle brand.

Alexis slowed, just slightly. Julian didn't need to look at her to feel the shift. The air around them seemed to thicken with memory.

"This is it." she said.

Julian nodded, eyes scanning.

There were signs of abandonment, but subtle. Vines creeping along one side where maintenance had stopped caring. A path that had once been kept clear now half-reclaimed by weeds. The doors, heavy wood reinforced with metal, were closed, and the locks were not simple.

The academy didn't trust a "keep out" sign. It trusted barriers.

Julian approached the entrance without stepping too close. He studied the lock, the seal, the small embedded plate that looked like it would recognize an administrative Duel Disk.

"They didn't just prohibit entry." he murmured. "They engineered it."

Alexis hugged her arms for a second, then let them fall again as if she'd caught herself doing something too vulnerable. "They said it was for our safety."

Julian's eyes stayed on the door. "It usually is, don't get me wrong." he said. "But it's also for theirs."

Alexis didn't argue. She didn't need to. She already knew the academy's ability to speak the truth and still hide it at the same time.

Julian stepped back and let his gaze travel over the building's face. His mind supplied the invisible map.

A year before the events of the story: Atticus here. Fujiwara here. Other Obelisks. Vanished. Files stored inside. Because no one was permitted to enter. A ritual performed here, later, pulling someone to a World of Darkness and infecting the dorm. The mask, Nightshroud.

And beneath it all: a basement, belonging to Amnael, the true identity behind the amicable face of Professor Banner. An alchemy lab, with Stone tablets that had once held the first hints of the titanical presences behind all of the first season: the Sacred Beasts.

Julian felt the familiar itch of meta-knowledge trying to assert itself as certainty.

He forced himself to breathe.

In this world, knowledge wasn't always power. Sometimes it was a trap. Sometimes it made you act too quickly because you believed you understood the shape of the danger.

He couldn't afford that here. Not with Alexis beside him.

He turned to her and lowered his voice. "Before we go in… we need to agree on something."

Her gaze sharpened. "What?"

"No heroics." Julian said. He saw her mouth twitch, and he added, "I'm serious."

Alexis's expression softened by a fraction, not into amusement, but into something like reluctant understanding.

Julian continued, choosing his words carefully. "If something happens in there, you don't prove you're brave by standing your ground. You prove you're brave by leaving. We're here to get answers, just that."

Alexis didn't answer immediately. Her eyes drifted to the door again, to the building that had swallowed her brother's life and spit out nothing but silence.

Then she looked back at Julian.

"I came here to find him." she said quietly. "Not to disappear as well."

The sentence hit harder than it should have. Julian nodded once, slow.

"Good…" he said. "Because I'm not interested in burying anyone today."

Alexis's breath left her in a controlled exhale. She nodded, matching him.

Julian's fingers flexed once at his side. He could feel Nightmare-Eyes at the edge of his awareness: quiet, watchful, like a shadow leaning forward.

He didn't summon him. Not yet. He didn't want to walk into the dorm announcing himself to whatever still lingered here like a flare fired into the sky.

Alexis shifted her stance, and Julian caught the subtle change, the way her shoulders squared, her weight balanced, her spine aligning like she was preparing for a duel.

Not a duel-disk duel. Something else. Julian saw it and shook his head slightly.

"Don't." he murmured.

Alexis blinked. "I wasn't…"

"You were." Julian's voice stayed gentle, but there was no room for argument. He tilted his head toward her chest, toward the invisible place where she'd been learning to form shielding. "Walking in with your guard up like that is… loud."

Alexis's eyes narrowed. "Loud?"

"To anything that senses it, yeah." Julian said. He glanced at the building again. "If there's something in there, it will feel you bracing. It will feel intent. And intent invites response."

Alexis's lips parted, then closed. She swallowed, and Julian could see her forcing herself to relax in a way that was not natural.

"That feels stupid." she said softly. "To not defend yourself."

"It's not 'don't defend.'" Julian corrected. "It's 'don't broadcast.' You defend when you have to. You keep your presence… small until then."

Alexis's gaze flicked toward him. "And you?"

Julian's mouth curved faintly, not in humor but in something like acknowledgment. "I can keep mine small. Mostly. Having a partner to help on the flow of control goes a long way."

She studied him for a beat. There was a question in her eyes, one she didn't speak aloud. Something about the spirits. About his Ka. About the things the academy pretended weren't real.

Julian didn't answer the unasked question. He didn't want to say the words here, with this door listening.

Instead, he shifted his weight and glanced down the path behind them.

No one. No staff, no students. No curious Slifer trailing them with a camera and a bad sense of boundaries and no mercenary duelist to try and make them expelled. Good, let's leave Titan to the sidelines and focus on what matters.

He took a step closer to the door, close enough now to see the details of the seal. The plate embedded in the lock had a small crest: not Obelisk, not Ra, not Slifer. The academy's administrative symbol: the one that meant "grown-ups."

Julian stopped a few steps short of it.

Alexis glanced at the doors, then at him. "So… that's it?"

"For the front entrance." Julian said calmly.

He shifted his gaze to the side of the structure, toward where the building's geometry broke just slightly out of symmetry. A wing that didn't quite align. A service corridor that curved away instead of toward the central façade.

He allowed himself the faintest smile. "There's always a back way."

Alexis followed his line of sight. Her brow furrowed. "You sound awfully confident about that."

Julian shrugged lightly. "Old buildings are like old decks. They accumulate… unintended interactions."

They circled the dorm in silence, footsteps soft against stone that had once been polished by constant use. The structure itself wasn't decayed. If anything, that was what made it unsettling. The walls were intact. The windows unbroken. The neglect here wasn't rot… it was absence.

They found it near the eastern side: a tall, narrow window set lower than the others, half-hidden by ivy that had grown freely after no one bothered to trim it back anymore. The latch was old-fashioned, mechanical. No seal. No system. Just height and expectation doing the work.

Alexis stopped. "Julian."

He looked at her.

"If we get caught…" she began, then stopped herself. She didn't need to finish the sentence.

"We get expelled." Julian said evenly.

'Or…' a traitorous corner of his mind supplied while he nodded. 'We get challenged to a tag duel by a pair of professional weirdos with theatrical masks and way too much free time, having our spots on the line.'

He pushed the thought aside immediately. That only worked in Jaden's orbit. And even then, mostly because the universe seemed to like him. It would be better to simply not need his plot armor.

Alexis swallowed. Her eyes didn't leave the passage. "Then why are we…"

'Because you asked. Because you looked at me like the world would end if I didn't.' Julian didn't say that either.

"Because there's a difference between rules meant to protect people and rules meant to protect reputations." he said instead.

Alexis's gaze flashed. She understood the implication, and it made her angrier than fear did.

She exhaled, slow. "Just checking that we're aligned on the stakes. Thank you."

Julian crouched, testing the stone beneath the window, then straightened. "I'll go first."

"Obviously." Alexis said dryly, rolling her eyes, but keeping a faint smile of gratitude in the corner of her mouth for his concern.

He climbed with practiced ease, pulling himself up just enough to reach the latch. It resisted for half a second, then gave. The window opened inward with a soft, protesting creak.

Julian paused. Listened. Nothing moved.

He slipped inside, landing silently, then turned and offered a hand back out. Alexis took it without hesitation.

As she stepped through, the air changed.

Not cold. Not warm. Just… stale. Like a place that had been sealed not because it was dangerous, but because it remembered things the academy preferred not to.

Julian released her hand and straightened. The Abandoned Dorm had accepted them. Whether it would let them leave was another question entirely.

The interior was dim, dust-muted. The faintest outline of a corridor, the suggestion of old decor, and the kind of silence that didn't feel empty so much as… listened.

He turned his head toward Alexis.

"One more thing," he murmured.

She looked up at him, tense but present. "Yeah?"

Julian's voice lowered further. "If you feel something… don't name it out loud."

Alexis's brows drew together. "Why?"

"Once again… Names are attention." Julian said. "And attention is an invitation. Just pinch my back or something like that."

Her throat bobbed with a swallow. She nodded once.

Julian let himself breathe.

He didn't like how easily it was to find another way in. He didn't like that the place had accepted him without complaint. It felt less like a locked area and more like a place that had been waiting for someone to decide to enter.

The hallway swallowed the light behind him, and the air turned colder by degrees. Dust hung in the faint beam from the open window. The corridor inside had once been refined: the walls paneled in dark wood, the floor polished stone now dulled. Framed banners still hung in places, their colors faded but recognizable. Blue. Or at least what it once was.

Julian's eyes tracked the details automatically. A grand staircase further in. Side corridors branching toward what must have been lounges, rooms, study halls. It wasn't the Obelisk mansion as it stood now, but it had the bones of status.

Alexis stepped in behind him, and Julian heard the quiet sound of her breath catching.

Not in terror, but in recognition.

"This…" she whispered, then stopped herself, remembering his rule about naming.

Julian glanced back. "It feels familiar?"

Alexis's eyes moved over the hall like someone touching a bruise. "It feels like… it was supposed to be home."

Julian nodded slowly. A couple years ago, it would have been. At least for him.

He let the window close behind them, but not fully. He left it slightly ajar. A line of outside breeze remained, thin but present.

An exit should always be visible.

He turned back to the corridor. His mind kept supplying facts like a nervous habit: the official files of the missing students should be stored somewhere around here. The signs from Fujiwara's ritual, Banner's lab, his body, the stone tablets of the Sacred Beasts…

Julian exhaled and forced the list to quiet down.

Facts were useful. But he was here for proof.

Proof he could put in Alexis's hands. Proof he could put in Sheppard's hands if he needed to. Proof that didn't rely on saying: trust me, I watched the anime.

He took a step forward, then another. The old dorm creaked faintly, not as if it were about to collapse, but as if it resented being remembered.

Alexis walked beside him, her steps controlled, shoulders square, posture perfect in that way she always was when she needed to be strong.

Julian noticed the way she kept glancing at him: not constantly, but enough to remind him she was using him as her anchor. If he flinched, she would flinch. If he looked calm, she could borrow it.

He kept his face composed. He kept his breathing slow. He did not let the unease show.

And somewhere at the edge of his awareness, Nightmare-Eyes stirred: silent, protective, sensing the shift in the air the way a guard dog sensed a door opening in the night.

Julian didn't call him into visibility. Not yet.

He let him remain what he needed to be for now: the shadow behind his shadow.

They moved deeper into the old corridor, toward the heart of the abandoned Blue Dorm, where luxuries had once been routine and where, now, the academy had left a place to rot quietly rather than admit what had happened inside.

Julian kept walking. He kept Alexis close, but not too close, just enough that if one of them needed to move, the other wouldn't become an anchor. Close enough to communicate without raising their voices. Close enough that if something stepped out of the dark, he could pull her back on instinct.

The corridor swallowed their footsteps.

Not entirely. The sound still existed, soft taps of shoes on old stone, the faintest whisper of fabric, but it didn't behave the way sound behaved in the academy's living spaces. Here, echoes didn't roll forward and fade. They stopped short, as if a hand had reached out midair and pinched them off.

It was subtle, not cinematic. But it made the hair at the base of Julian's neck lift anyway.

Alexis noticed the same thing a moment later. He could see it in the way her shoulders rose and settled again, like she was trying to recalibrate her breathing. She didn't say anything yet. She didn't want to be the first to acknowledge the fear. That, too, was part of the composure she'd learned to wear.

Julian's eyes adjusted further. The Abandoned Dorm was… preserved in a way that made neglect feel deliberate.

Dust existed, yes… thin sheets of it along the top edges of frames and rails, gathered in the corners where air didn't move much. But it wasn't the thick, choking dust of a place left to truly decay. Someone had ensured the building didn't collapse. Someone had ensured it didn't become a hazard. The academy could call this "sealed," "prohibited," "unsafe," but the architecture itself hadn't been allowed to fail.

Because failure would raise questions. And questions were the one thing this place had been designed to prevent.

They passed a wall of framed photographs. Julian slowed despite himself.

Old class pictures: Obelisk students in crisp blue, lined up in neat rows. Faces blurred slightly by time, not by damage. The frames were still straight, still hung at uniform height, as if the dorm itself refused to accept that its inhabitants were gone.

Alexis's gaze caught on the images too. Her steps faltered.

Julian watched her eyes move: fast, searching, hungry. He knew that hunger. It wasn't just grief. It was the particular cruelty of an unanswered disappearance. When there was no body, no funeral, no certainty, grief didn't have a shape. It became a constant, active force. A searchlight.

She leaned closer to one frame, as if proximity might bring recognition.

Julian didn't touch her. He didn't offer comfort too early. Comfort sometimes made people collapse. And he needed her standing.

"Do you see him?" Julian asked quietly.

Alexis's mouth tightened. She shook her head once, too small to be dramatic. "No." she whispered. "But I keep thinking I will."

Julian nodded, acknowledging the truth without feeding it. They probably didn't take the picture in his year when the disaster happened. Taking that aside, the two of them continued walking, as the hall opened into a lounge.

Not the type Obelisk lounge Julian had seen in the new dorm, with marble, modern screens and curated opulence. This room had been designed in a different era of wealth: darker woods, weightier furniture, a fireplace that looked real rather than decorative. Velvet seats, arranged for conversation. A low table with an inlaid pattern of intersecting circles. Decorative, elegant, but also… faintly reminiscent of ritual geometry if your mind insisted on seeing patterns everywhere.

Julian's gaze flicked to the corners. The room wasn't empty. Not fully.

There were little signs of life that should have been impossible: a half-collapsed stack of magazines on one seat; an academy-issued Duel Disk case pushed under a side table; a chess set on a shelf where two pieces had been knocked sideways as if someone had bumped the board and never returned to fix it.

"Why is any of this still here?" Alexis asked, voice low.

Julian didn't answer right away. Because there were two answers.

The simple one: because no one wants to touch it.

The true one: because they want this place to remain a vault.

"This dorm didn't get abandoned like a building." Julian said carefully. "It got abandoned like a crime scene."

Alexis's throat worked. She looked around again, as if the words changed what the furniture meant.

Julian stepped toward the chess set. He didn't touch it. He just observed the arrangement. A king still standing. A queen missing.

Not a symbol, probably not. But his mind refused to stop translating everything into language, into lore, into meaning. That was the trap of being the kind of person who believed the world ran on patterns.

He turned away before he could indulge it. They moved deeper, and the corridor branched.

To the left, a stairwell that clearly led upward. To the right, a narrower passage lined with doors that looked less decorative, more utilitarian.

Julian took the right. Alexis followed without asking why, but the question lived in the air between them anyway, a silent pressure building with every choice he made without hesitation.

The doors here weren't student rooms. They were labeled with small brass plaques: Storage, Equipment, Maintenance.

Julian paused at one. The plaque had been scratched, as if someone had once tried to remove it. The screw marks were deeper than they needed to be.

He leaned in, listening. Nothing, of course. No sound of machinery, no hum of electricity. Just that strange quiet again, quiet that felt like it was being held in place.

Julian reached for the handle. It turned. The door opened with the soft complaint of old hinges.

Inside: normal shelving. Old cleaning supplies, boxes of uniform fabric in sealed plastic, spare light fixtures. The kind of mundane infrastructure that made a dormitory like that function as most people forget. And yet, even here, the air felt wrong. Slightly metallic. Slightly… charged. Eerie in an unnatural sense that was harsh to put into words.

Alexis didn't step inside. She hovered at the threshold like crossing it would be a mistake.

Julian didn't blame her. Mundane spaces in haunted places were often the worst. You expected monsters in the grand rooms. You didn't expect them in the broom closet.

He closed the door again, and they simply kept going. Their path carried them past a small alcove that might once have been a trophy display. The shelves were empty now, but the wall behind them still held faint, rectangular outlines where plaques had been mounted.

"What happened to the records?" Alexis asked.

Julian's eyes traced the outlines. "Removed." he said.

"By who?"

Julian didn't shrug. Shrugging was too casual.

"By people who didn't want anyone else asking that question. The ones that can be shown are probably in the new dorm." he replied.

Alexis's mouth tightened. There was anger there now, threading through fear… An anger that had nowhere to go because there was no target.

'Good.' Julian thought grimly. Anger helped people stay upright.

They walked for what felt like longer than the building's footprint should have allowed.

That was another subtle wrongness. The dorm's interior felt slightly… stretched. Not like an illusion, not like a maze, but like a place that had been subjected to something that bent spatial expectation without fully breaking it. Or like time itself behaved in a different fashion inside of the place. As if the dorm itself had learned new geometry and never unlearned it.

Julian kept his breathing even and his mind active. He didn't let the atmosphere become story. He forced everything into analysis, rationalizing every single last detail under the filter of his meta-knowledge and spiritual learrning: 'Residual spiritual contamination. Localized. Not active. Echo pressure increasing as we approach epicenter. No direct manifestations yet. Not yet.'

Alexis slowed at a particular doorway. The plaque read: Archives.

Julian stopped beside her.

"You think there are records?" she asked, too quickly. Hope spiking, raw and immediate.

Julian's answer was honest. "Maybe. Unlikely, what happened was probably an event that changed everything in one night, not something with paperwork left behind. But it is worth a shot."

He pushed the door open.

Inside was a narrow room with filing cabinets and shelves. Most of the shelves were empty: cleanly emptied, not ransacked. The cabinets had been locked, then forced open, then relocked again by someone with more authority than subtlety. Drawers sat slightly misaligned. Papers were absent.

But not all.

On the far wall, a corkboard still hung. Pinned to it were empty pushpins and a single yellowed sheet of paper that had been forgotten or left behind on purpose. Julian approached, careful, and read it.

It was a list of student names.

Not many, just a handful. No explanations, no dates.

Just names, written neatly, with a stamp at the bottom that read: TRANSFER PROGRAM — INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH INITIATIVE.

Alexis's breath caught.

"That's…" she began.

"Yeah, the cover story they used. It seems it was a true plan for exchange students between the academies before. Probably cancelled with the whole thing and just used as a cover up. No one would want to send their children to the academy that makes students go missing." Julian finished quietly.

She stepped closer, eyes scanning the names. Julian watched her face change as she searched for one in particular.

He knew she wouldn't find it. Atticus wasn't here. Atticus was too important to be left on a forgotten sheet. Atticus had been handled carefully, rewritten in a way that didn't leave scraps.

Alexis's shoulders sagged, just a fraction.

Julian tore his gaze away from the paper and examined the pinholes around it. There were patterns, clusters where multiple papers had once been stacked.

An active board. A living investigation, now gutted.

He let the moment hang. It mattered that Alexis saw it. It mattered that she understood: the academy hadn't merely failed to find answers.

It had chosen not to let answers exist in accessible form. Julian closed the archive door behind them.

And once again, they walked on.

The building grew colder at every second. Not air-conditioner cold. Earth cold. The kind of cold you felt in old stone and underground spaces. The kind that made your breath feel slightly louder than it should.

Alexis folded her arms, rubbing her hands once, then stopping as if she'd caught herself doing something childish.

Julian watched her, then spoke before the silence could press too hard.

"We're alone because we have to be." he said.

Alexis looked up sharply. "Because it's forbidden."

"Yes." Julian replied. "And because if we brought the others, we'd be bringing them into the line of fire."

Her brow furrowed. "We could protect them. They could protect themselves."

Julian's mouth tightened.

He glanced down the corridor, then back at her.

"You saw what happened in the arena." he said quietly. "You saw what the academy does when it wants to contain something. If we get caught, it isn't just punishment. It's control. They'll separate people. Restrict movement. Monitor dorms. Use it as an excuse to tighten the leash on everyone."

Alexis swallowed. She knew he wasn't exaggerating.

Julian continued, voice steady.

"And… if something is still here, something spiritual, having more people means more targets. More bodies to shield. More minds to stabilize if panic hits."

He didn't say Nightmare-Eyes' name. He didn't need to.

Alexis's eyes flicked, briefly, toward the shadows at Julian's side, as if some part of her could sense the presence even when it wasn't visible.

"I didn't want to come alone." Alexis said, and the honesty in it was sharp. "But I couldn't bring them into this without knowing what it is."

Julian nodded. "Exactly. More efficient for my partner too."

A beat. Then she looked at him again, suspicion threaded through fear.

"You're walking like you're looking for something specific." she said, and there it was… the question she'd been holding back. "Not just… exploring."

Julian didn't deny it. He also didn't confirm too much.

"There are only so many places the academy could hide something important." he said carefully. "Basements. Restricted wings. Maintenance access. Anywhere that isn't meant for students."

Alexis's gaze sharpened. "You're guessing."

"Yes." Julian said. And then, because she deserved more honesty than that: "And I'm using what I know of how this place is built. I took a look into this place's schematics. There are a few places that raise suspicion."

It was true without being the whole truth.

Alexis studied him for a moment like she was trying to decide whether to press harder. She didn't.

Because she couldn't afford to break trust right now. Trust was the only rope bridge across this place.

Still walking, the two of them reached another intersection.

Here the architecture shifted subtly: less decorative, more functional. The stonework became rougher. The walls narrowed. Ceiling lights were absent, replaced by old fixtures that hadn't been used in a long time.

This was where the dorm stopped pretending it was a home and started admitting it was a structure with secrets.

Julian slowed as the air pressure changed. Not physically, spiritually. A weight settled on his senses like static gathering on skin.

Alexis felt it too. She froze, breath shallow. Julian lifted a hand: not to shield, but to signal stillness.

They stood in silence. Nothing attacked. Nothing appeared.

But the sense of being near something… deepened.

Alexis whispered, barely audible. "This is… the center."

"Not the center itself." Julian corrected softly. "The path to it."

He looked along the wall.

There: faint discoloration in the stone. A seam that didn't match the rest. Not obvious, but present if you knew to look for it: the kind of hidden door built into old institutional architecture. A service access. A maintenance passage.

Julian's pulse quickened. Not from fear, but from confirmation. Alexis saw his gaze lock onto the seam.

"You did know." she whispered.

Julian didn't look away.

"I suspected." he said. "Strongly."

Alexis stared at the seam like it might open by itself. Then she looked at Julian again.

"How?" she asked, and the word carried everything she wasn't saying: How are you so sure? How are you so calm? How are you walking through my brother's grave like it's a puzzle?

Julian felt something in his chest twist. He chose his words carefully.

"Because if I treat this like unknowable horror," he said, "it wins before we even find anything. If I treat it like a system, like something with rules, I can move. I can act. I can keep you safe."

Alexis's eyes softened, just a fraction.

"And if it doesn't have rules?" she asked quietly.

Julian's certainty held. It shouldn't have.

"It does." he said, and then completed in almost a whisper. "It has to."

Later, he would remember this moment. He would remember the confidence. And he would understand it as arrogance wearing a scientist's coat.

But for now, it was a firm belief, as he stepped closer to the seam. He didn't touch it yet.

He listened again: less with his ears and more with that half-trained sense that told him when a space was occupied by more than air.

The pressure responded. Not with hostility, but with awareness. Like something recognizing that a line had been crossed.

Alexis's hand lifted again, instinctive. Julian caught her wrist gently.

"Not yet." he whispered. Her eyes flashed once more with frustration and fear.

Julian leaned closer, voice low enough that the dorm itself might not hear it.

"If something wants us to raise shields…" he murmured. "It's because it wants us to spend energy before the time or to reveal ourselves. They might know that we're here, but not where we are. Save your energy, but keep your senses sharp."

Alexis stared at him. Then, slowly, she lowered her hand again. Julian released her wrist.

He looked at the seam. Somewhere behind it lay an older layer of the academy's rot. Something kept beneath student floors and dorm rituals and polished speeches. Something that connected to why people disappeared and why the academy had needed a story.

Julian inhaled. He set his fingers against the edge of the disguised panel and felt, for the first time, something like a pulse beneath the stone.

Not a heartbeat, a resonance. A spiritual aftershock that had become part of the building's bones.

He turned his head slightly toward Alexis.

"Whatever's behind this…" he said quietly. "We look, we take what we can, and we leave. No heroics."

Alexis nodded once, tight.

"No heroics." she echoed. Julian pressed forward.

The panel shifted with a reluctant groan, stone sliding against stone with the sound of something being disturbed after too long. A narrow gap opened, letting out a breath of air that was colder and older than anything above.

It carried a faint scent of chemicals, and something else beneath it. Something sweet in the wrong way. Like a fruity smell that had been left too long.

Alexis's face tightened. Julian felt Nightmare-Eyes move at the edge of his awareness, alerting, guarding, without revealing itself.

He let him remain the shadow behind his shadow. Julian widened the opening just enough for them to slip through.

The darkness beyond was not empty. It was waiting.

They moved deeper into the old corridor, as Julian held his Duel Disk arm low and loose. The thing was still folded, inert, only metal and weight. Beside him, Alexis's steps were careful in a way that tried to look casual and failed. Her composure was there. It always was. But this wasn't a duel field. There were no lines to stand on, no rules to lean against.

The hallway narrowed into something older. Not "wilder," not "neglected," not the kind of disrepair you got when no one cared: this had been built to last. The stone underfoot was fitted too neatly for that. The walls were not cracked so much as scuffed, the kind of marks left by movement and time rather than decay. Even the dust had a disciplined look to it, lying in sheets where air didn't flow and absent in places where something, or even better - someone, had brushed past recently.

Ahead, the corridor sloped downward. The smell shifted from old fabric and stale wood into mineral damp, stone that had been sealed too long and remembered moisture. The acoustics changed, too. Each step didn't just sound, it returned, a faint echo that made their presence feel louder than it should have.

Here, the architecture stopped pretending to be a dormitory. The clean lines and tasteful paneling gave way to raw excavation. The walls became rough stone, carved and reinforced rather than finished. Wooden beams (thick, repeating, utilitarian) braced the ceiling at intervals, their surfaces splintered in places, the edges scarred by tools and time. There were no banners here, no polished sconces, no decorative flourishes meant to soothe wealthy parents and impress prospective students. This was what you built when you needed something beneath something else, and you needed it to stay up.

A tunnel, a passage. A spine of some sort.

Alexis's gaze tracked the beams, then the shadows between them. Her breathing was controlled. Julian could hear it anyway.

"This…" she murmured.

He didn't look at her immediately. He watched the corridor. Watched the way the darkness sat in the corners, thicker in some places than others. Watched the subtle signs that someone had been down here since the dorm's "abandonment." A scuff where dust should have been. A faint smear on stone that looked like the residue of a hand that had touched it, not as a desperate person but as someone using it like a railing.

"This wasn't meant to be seen. We must be on the right track." Alexis finished, quieter than before, as if speaking too loudly would make the place answer.

Julian gave the slightest nod.

"Whatever is here, it is something someone wants hidden." he said.

It came out calm. It didn't feel calm inside him. Not fear, something else. A slow tightening, the way a muscle tightened when it knew it was about to carry weight.

Alexis's hand drifted, almost unconsciously, toward her chest. Not dramatic. Not a clutching gesture. Just a reflex, like she was checking something still existed there.

The tunnel stretched longer than a dorm corridor had any right to. It made Julian think, fleetingly, of the way some buildings had hidden depths. On how on the surface everything was polite, controlled, a postcard. And beneath, you could bury an entire world if you had the will, the money, and the reason.

This was not a place where students had lived like normal boys. It was a place where something had been done.

Alexis faltered once when the tunnel widened into a junction, a branching that suggested this was part of a larger network. She stared down one path, then another, and the look on her face carried the weight of someone realizing how easy it would be to get lost down here.

Julian didn't hesitate. He turned left on a splitted section and just kept walking with confidence.

Alexis looked at him, and for the first time since they'd stepped past the dorm's boundary, her composure cracked just enough for something sharper to show through.

"How do you…" she began, then stopped herself as if she'd bitten her own tongue.

Julian didn't glance back. He didn't need to. He could feel the question like a hand on his shoulder.

He answered without giving her what she couldn't have. "The air's moving."

Alexis frowned. "What?"

Julian slowed, just a fraction, enough that his words landed more clearly. "Listen. You can hear it, if you pay attention. There's a draft. It's stronger from this side. That means there's space ahead. Something bigger. Something open."

Alexis's gaze sharpened, and she listened. For a second she looked skeptical, then she inhaled slowly, and her eyes widened by the smallest margin. She heard it.

Julian continued, tone matter-of-fact. "And the dust is disturbed less here."

He did not add: because someone comes this way. 

Alexis's shoulders eased just a hair, not because she felt safe, but because she had an explanation to hold. She could exist inside logic. She had always been good at that, even when her emotions tried to pull her out of it.

They went deeper. The beams overhead changed from rough timber into reinforced supports that looked newer, less weathered. Cable lines appeared along one wall: thick bundles, secured with brackets, running like veins. Julian's eyes tracked them automatically.

There. A faint vibration. Barely there. Like a machine far away breathing.

Alexis noticed his glance and followed it. "There's power down here?"

Julian's expression didn't change, but his mind sharpened. "Yes."

"How is that possible if this place is…" She stopped, as if the word abandoned tasted wrong now.

"Abandoned is a story." Julian said quietly. "A status. Not necessarily the truth. Someone is still using this place."

Alexis's fingers curled and uncurled at her side. She didn't like that answer. She didn't want it to be true.

But the longer they walked, the more the tunnel answered for him.

The air became less stale. Not fresh, but circulated. There was a faint metallic tang now, like hot copper. The stone underfoot gave way in places to reinforced flooring, sections that looked installed after the original structure had been carved. The supports grew more regular, more engineered. The corridor started to feel less like a forgotten passage and more like access to something that still mattered.

Julian's heartbeat stayed steady. He tried to control his emotions to keep it that way deliberately. Because the truth was: this wasn't the dorm anymore.

It was the part beneath it where the dorm's polite face stopped being useful. And if he was right, and was frequently right, a key place on the whole endeavor, presented on the show much, much later.

As they rounded a final bend, the bright light swallowed him for a moment, blinding his eyes. A moment later, his eyes adjusted enough to see what lay ahead: not a hallway, a chamber. A cavern of a strange mix of modernity carved into old stone with traditional ancient patterns.

The room was immense, the ceiling high enough that it vanished into shadow, and it was filled with equipment. Not the kind of equipment you find in dormitories or classrooms either. This was not student-level tech. More than even something institutional. It was industrial, the type of high-tech he would only find in megacorporations, servers. Places like KaibaCorp or Industrial Illusions. The kind of thing you built when you had funding, purpose, and a willingness to solve an issue.

Alexis stepped in behind him and froze. Her breath caught on a sound that wasn't quite a gasp and wasn't quite a sob.

Julian let the door fall back into place behind them, not fully closed, just enough that it wouldn't clank.

He didn't move for a second. He let the space settle around them.

The air here was different. It wasn't stale. It wasn't fresh. It was working. It carried the faint warmth of machines that had been used recently, the smell of metal heated and cooled, the sharp bite of chemical residue that had clung to surfaces and refused to leave. Underneath it all, like a low note under a song, there was something else.

It was not physical. Not something you could point to and name. A sort of spiritual weight that sat in the room like a hand pressed against the back of your skull.

Alexis also felt it. Julian could tell by the way her shoulders stiffened, the way her eyes went distant for half a second as if her senses were trying to interpret a language they hadn't been taught.

Julian did not raise his own defenses. He still held his presence low, quiet. He let his awareness spread like a thin net, not a flare.

Then, he went forward slowly, and Alexis followed as if anchored to him. The machines were arranged like a laboratory and a server room had been forced to coexist.

Along one wall, towering cabinets of equipment rose in rows: dark panels, small lights, thick cables. Not a single computer on a desk. Not personal. These were servers, powerful enough to hum faintly even when idle. A control console sat near them, wide and complex, with switches and dials that looked older than the digital displays beside them.

Copper pipes, thick as Julian's forearm, ran along the ceiling and down into large reservoirs, with tanks of the same dull, reddish metal that sat like dormant beasts in the corners. Valves protruded from them at intervals, heavy and industrial. One of the tanks had a gauge attached, its needle resting near a mark Julian couldn't read from here.

Metal hooks hung from the ceiling in one section, attached to an overhead track like something in a workshop. Thick chains were coiled nearby. It made Alexis's expression harden. She didn't say anything, but the look in her eyes asked the obvious question.

What did they hang here? What was their purpose?

Julian's gaze just moved on.

Tables were lined in the left of the room, spaced like islands. Some held glassware, stained and dusty but not abandoned. Some held tools laid out with a precision that implied they were meant to be returned to those exact positions. A rack of vials stood against one table, half-empty. A chalkboard leaned against another wall, covered in faded symbols that were not quite math and not quite language.

The floor dipped slightly in the middle of the chamber, forming a recessed circular area: a ritual circle of some sort.

Julian felt his stomach tighten. Not because he was surprised. Because seeing it in person made it real in a way knowledge never could.

The circle was drawn into the stone itself, not painted on top. Lines carved deep, filled with something dark that had seeped into the grooves. There were markings around it, concentric rings, intersecting glyphs, the kind of geometry that pretended to be scientific until you looked too long and realized it was trying to map something that science refused to acknowledge.

At the center, a single point was marked, a dot like a pinprick in the world.

Alexis stared at it, then at the rest of the room, and her voice came out small despite her efforts. "This is… this is like…"

"Like his class." Julian finished gently.

Alexis looked at him, startled. "What?"

Julian kept his expression neutral. "Professor Banner teaches alchemy. He talks about transmutation circles, about symbolism, about… old sciences." He gestured faintly at the carvings. "This looks like some sort of chimera between science, magic, spiritualism and alchemy. The kind of thing he'd lecture about."

Alexis's gaze sharpened. "Then he…"

Julian didn't answer. He couldn't.

Not with certainty without making use of his meta-knowledge. Not with proof. At least, not in a way that wouldn't drag them into a different kind of danger.

So he said, carefully. "I don't know. What matters is, this room wasn't built for students. And probably has something to do with what happened two years ago."

Alexis's jaw tightened. "No…"

The word carried anger. Disbelief. A sense of betrayal that had nowhere to land yet because the target was still fog.

Julian let his attention sweep farther across the chamber. And then he saw them.

On the far side, partially obscured by equipment, three massive stone slabs stood upright like ancient doors.

They were not part of the machinery. They were not part of the modern infrastructure. They were older. And they felt older the way storms felt older than houses. Not by centuries, but by millenia.

Even from across the room, Julian could feel the aura rolling off them: heavy, slow, oppressive, like heat from a furnace you didn't see. It wasn't active or flaring. It simply existed, and the room bent around it.

Alexis noticed the shift in Julian's posture. "What is that?"

Julian's eyes didn't leave the slabs.

Stone tablets.

They were enormous, taller than a person, carved with the outlines of figures that were both familiar and wrong, monstrous forms etched into rock with a reverence that made them feel less like art and more like a record. Each slab had the shape of a card, but magnified, made into something archaic and ceremonial. The carvings were worn in places, but the lines of the beasts remained clear enough that Julian's mind supplied the missing pieces with cruel ease.

Three beings, three seals. Three hungers.

Julian swallowed. He didn't speak their names. He didn't need to. Saying them out loud would feel like calling attention.

Alexis moved a step closer, drawn by the same terrible magnetism. Her eyes widened as she took in the forms.

"I…" Her voice faltered. "Those look like…"

Julian's gaze flicked to her, not warning, just grounding. "Old. Remember, names have power."

Alexis tore her eyes away from the tablets with visible effort. "They're… radiating something."

Julian nodded once.

The pressure was like standing near a cliff edge: nothing happening, nothing moving, but your body knowing, instinctively, that a fall from here would not end in bruises. It would end in annihilation.

Alexis's hand rose slightly, as if she wanted to put a shield up without thinking.

Julian caught the motion. He didn't grab her. He simply said, low, "Not yet."

Alexis's fingers curled, then fell back to her side.

They stood for a moment in the presence of the tablets, and Julian let himself absorb the details because details mattered. The way the stone seemed to drink light instead of reflecting it. The way the carvings weren't decorative but declarative. The way the room's modern equipment looked almost small beside them.

He knew who brought these here, and they had been dealing with forces far beyond what Duel Academy admitted existed. Far beyond what its brochures promised.

Julian forced himself to look away. He couldn't let the tablets become the center of this moment, even if the titanic spiritual power of the Sacred Beasts roared and claimed for attention. Not with Alexis beside him. Not with the reason they were here burning in her like an open wound.

He turned his attention to the left side of the chamber. And then he saw the coffin.

It rested against the stone wall, half-swallowed by shadow, not centered, not elevated, not presented. It hadn't been hidden so much as placed aside, as if whoever put it there hadn't wanted it forgotten, only… inconvenient.

It was stone. Solid, uninterrupted slabs fitted together with brutal precision. No ornamentation. No inscriptions. No iconography. It wasn't a sarcophagus meant to honor the dead.

It was something meant to simply contain them.

Alexis noticed it the same second he did. Her steps slowed. Not abruptly or dramatically. Just enough that Julian felt it beside him, the shift in her breathing, the way her shoulders pulled back as if her body had recognized danger before her mind caught up.

"What is that?" she asked.

Her voice was controlled. Too controlled. The kind of tone people used when they already knew the answer would hurt.

Julian didn't respond right away. He walked toward it instead, each step deliberate, buying himself time he didn't have.

'Do I let her see this?' The question landed fully formed, heavy as the stone in front of him.

He already knew what was inside. Not because he had seen it before, at least not personally. Not like this. But because knowledge, once acquired, had a way of making uncertainty feel dishonest. And yet knowing didn't mean this moment wasn't real. Didn't mean Alexis wouldn't carry it with her like a scar forever.

He catalogued reasons to justify not opening it: the room was too advanced to be abandoned. There could be cameras, sensors, records. Opening it would leave evidence, dust displaced, stone shifted, a weight that couldn't be returned to its exact resting position. Whoever used this place would know someone had been here. And once opened, closing it again wouldn't be simple. Stone didn't forget being moved.

But even as he thought those things, he knew none of them were the truth.

The truth was simpler, and worse. She had already seen the object, and now wanted answers.

Alexis had taken a step closer, her gaze fixed now, narrowed not with fear but with recognition. With that awful, human instinct that said this matters, even if you don't yet know why.

"Julian…" she said, and this time there was no edge to her voice. Just strain. "If… if that's..."

She didn't finish. She didn't need to.

Julian stopped beside her. He turned his head and looked at her properly. Not to ask permission or to prepare an explanation, but to acknowledge what he was about to take from her: the ability to not know.

He waited for her to look back at him. When she did, her eyes were steady. Wet, but steady.

She nodded once. Not because she was ready, but because she thought it was needed to be. Especially when inside that lid could be the corpse of her beloved brother.

Julian exhaled slowly and placed both hands against the edge of the lid.

Up close, the stone radiated cold. Not something supernatural, just the honest chill of mass that hadn't moved in a very long time. There were no locks. No seals. No mechanisms of any kind: just weight.

Someone hadn't wanted this secured. They had wanted it difficult.

Julian braced himself and pushed. The lid didn't budge.

For a brief, absurd moment, he wondered if that was the answer. If this was the line: you can't do this, physically enforced by stone and gravity.

Then Alexis stepped in beside him without a word. She placed her hands next to his, fingers splaying against the rough surface, knuckles whitening as she leaned her weight in.

Together, they pushed.

The stone resisted, stubborn and uncompromising, then gave a fraction of an inch with a sound that wasn't a crack or a scrape, but something deeper: stone shifting against stone, a complaint dragged out of the earth itself.

Julian adjusted his footing as Alexis did the same, then they pushed again.

This time, the lid moved. Slowly. Reluctantly. The way something ancient moved for the first time after being sealed for a very long time. A gap opened, no more than a hand's breadth at first, and stale air spilled out.

It wasn't the smell of rot. There was no decay here. No corruption.

The scent was dry. Preserved. Tinged faintly with chemicals and dust and something medicinal, like old linen stored too long.

Alexis inhaled sharply. Julian lifted the lid the rest of the way, muscles burning as the full weight shifted. Together, they tilted it just enough for him to slide it aside, letting it rest against the floor with a dull, final thud.

Silence followed. Heavy, expectant. Julian looked down and whatever arguments he had left dissolved.

Inside the stone coffin lay a body.

Mummified. Preserved with care rather than ritual. Wrapped not in reverent layers but in something closer to procedure. Time had hollowed the features, drawn skin tight against bone, but the shape was unmistakable.

A human form.

Alexis's breath hitched, sharp and involuntary.

"Julian…" she whispered, and for the first time since they'd entered the dorm, her composure cracked completely. "That's…"

He didn't clarify things for her, as he couldn't justify the origin of the intel. Because in that moment, there were no theories. No timelines. No safe abstractions.

There was only the undeniable truth of a body where no body should have been.

Alexis stepped forward, eyes locked, and Julian saw the split-second where her mind refused to accept what it was seeing.

Then her gaze dropped to the tag.

A small label attached near the chest, clean and modern in contrast to everything else. White with black text: BANNER.

Alexis's breath left her in a harsh exhale.

"No!" The word came out broken.

Julian's pulse spiked.

Alexis's hands rose to her mouth, then stopped halfway as if she couldn't decide whether to scream or pray. Her eyes didn't blink. They stared like blinking would make it real.

"That's…" Her voice cracked. She tried again. "That's Professor Banner."

The label said what it said, and whatever truth existed behind it was a mess of questions neither of them could untangle here.

Alexis stepped back abruptly, like the coffin had lunged at her.

Julian caught her elbow lightly, just enough contact to steady, not enough to trap.

Alexis jerked away anyway, not in anger, but in reflex. Her breathing sped up.

Julian lowered the lid a fraction, not closing it, but reducing the sightline. Not for his sake. For hers.

Alexis's voice came out in a whisper that didn't belong to the confident girl who dueled in front of crowds. "How… how is he here?"

Julian's mind raced through possibilities, forced to stay in the realm of things that could be spoken aloud without invoking knowledge he couldn't justify.

"He could have been down here." Julian said slowly. "He teaches alchemy. He's… interested in old things. In artifacts."

Alexis's eyes flashed, furious. "That doesn't explain why he's dead."

Julian didn't flinch at the word.

He had to be careful here. He had to keep her grounded without lying.

"I… don't know. At least it explains why his name would be associated with a place like this." Julian said.

Alexis's hands trembled. She tried to hide it by clasping them together.

Julian watched her, and behind his calm he felt the pressure of the moment: they had come here to find proof, to reclaim something, and instead they had opened a coffin with the name of a teacher they saw every day written on it like an inventory item.

Alexis's gaze flicked back to the tag.

"Is that…" She swallowed hard. "Is that really him?"

Julian's jaw tightened.

He let himself look at the body again, properly, not as a shock but as an observation.

The wrappings, the preservation. The absence of normal decay. The way the fabric looked ancient, not something you did in a modern setting unless you were imitating something.

"It might be." Julian said quietly. Telling her that this was his original body and the Banner they knew was some sort of homunculi for his soul was not a viable option.

Alexis's eyes widened, hurt flaring. "Might? Julian…"

Julian met her gaze. "I don't want to tell you what to believe." he said. "But… if someone wanted to hide something, hiding a body in a forbidden place is… one way."

Alexis's face went pale.

Julian continued, carefully. "Or… someone wanted this found. Eventually."

Alexis's lips parted. "Why would anyone want that?"

Julian's mind offered an ugly answer. Because fear is a tool. Because leaving a corpse with a name tag is a message.

He didn't say any of that. He said something safer.

"Leverage." Julian murmured. "Misdirection, proof? I have no idea."

Alexis's gaze snapped to him, and there was accusation there: not of dishonesty, but of distance. Of the way he could name tactics in the face of a corpse.

Julian softened his tone. "Alexis. Breathe."

She did, sharply.

Julian watched her inhale again. "Look at the labe." he said. "It's clean. Modern. Anyone could get his clip and put on a corpse."

Alexis's eyes flicked to it. "So… someone is claiming it's him."

"We can't be sure, in either case." Julian said.

Alexis stared down at the coffin, at the body, at the tag, and the anger in her expression sharpened into something colder.

"If that's true," she whispered, "then someone has been walking around this academy pretending to be him."

Julian didn't react outwardly, but inside he felt something twist. Alexis looked at him, and the next question arrived like a blade.

"And if that's the case… if it is him…" Her voice faltered. "Then how long has he been dead?"

Julian held her gaze. He couldn't give her comfort. Only honesty within limits.

"I don't know. Not an expert on corpses, especially not preserved ones like that. You would need someone on Pegasus' archeology team for that." he said. "But I don't think this happened yesterday. If I had to guess, just randomly… About two years ago?"

Alexis's shoulders shook once in the realization of his declaration, and she stilled them with sheer will. "So my brother…"

"No. What happened to Atticus and the others was another thing. I don't know what, but of that I can be sure. Their traces are different."

Alexis' voice came out hoarse, not knowing if his words were truthful analysis or just a comfort to her shaken state. "This isn't… this isn't what I thought we'd find."

Julian exhaled. "Me neither."

It was a true statement. True enough, at least.

Alexis's eyes flicked to the tablets again, as if she'd finally registered the full nightmare of the room. "Julian… what is this place?"

Julian glanced around, taking it in again, and felt the strange sensation of recognizing a set from a show you'd watched and being unsettled by how much bigger it was in real life.

"It's a laboratory, it seems." he said simply. "And… some sort of ritual site."

Alexis swallowed. "For what?"

Julian didn't answer immediately. Because the honest answer was: for things that should not be in a school.

Instead, he said. "For power."

Alexis's expression tightened. "You're sure."

Julian didn't correct her. He didn't say 'I'm sure of some things and guessing at others.' He didn't offer the comfort of certainty when certainty was part of what would get him hurt later.

He said. "Why would someone mess with this kind of thing? I feel the pressure from those stone tablets from here, and their spirits are not even out here. Whoever it was, it was messing with powerful shit. Shit that could make a dorm go away like that. Doesn't matter, we want proof for Atticus. Let's get it and get out of here."

They stood in silence for a moment, the room humming faintly around them.

Julian's attention moved again. Away from the coffin, away from the tablets, away from the circle, and settled on something tucked behind a cluster of copper piping near one of the tanks.

A containment unit.

It wasn't as large as the coffin, but it was similar in its function: reinforced, sealed, with a thick locking mechanism. This one had additional markings on it: etched lines, symbols, not quite the same as the ritual circle but related. Like layers of redundancy had been stacked on top of each other: metal, lock, seal, symbol.

Julian approached slowly.

Alexis followed, still shaken, and her gaze darted between the unit and the rest of the room like she expected something else to rise up and confirm this was a nightmare.

Julian crouched and studied the seal. He didn't touch it yet. He read it with his eyes first.

It was… restrained. Not decorative. Not a show of mystical flourish. A functional lattice, like a net meant to keep something in.

His senses, quiet and held low, felt a faint thrum from within. Not the oppressive weight of the tablets. Something sharper, smaller. Hungrier.

Alexis's voice was tight. "What is that?"

Julian didn't answer right away. He placed his fingertips lightly on the metal surface.

Cold. Then, beneath the cold, a subtle vibration. Like a heartbeat that wasn't his.

He withdrew his hand in a flash, ready for a strike.

Alexis watched him, and her eyes narrowed. "Julian?"

Julian kept his gaze on the unit. "There's something inside."

Alexis's throat worked. "Is it… related to Atticus?"

Julian's eyes flicked to her. He let the question sit, because answering it wrong could crush her. Answering it right could mislead her. It was not a sort of detail he saw in the anime or read in the manga, so he didn't have enough information to do either responsibly.

"I don't know." he said, with one-hundred percent honesty in his tone for the first time that night.

Alexis's hands clenched. The frustration in her was immediate, and Julian felt a pang of guilt. She had lived on hope long enough that not knowing felt like betrayal.

Julian softened his voice. "But it's not nothing."

Alexis swallowed. "Then open it."

Julian hesitated. He was thinking of the coffin, of the tablets… Of the fact that this room had already shown them it did not give answers gently.

He looked at the seal again. At the symbols layered over the lock. Then he looked, briefly, to the side, where the ritual circle sat like a wound in the floor.

And he felt, at the edge of his awareness, the presence behind his shadow stir.

Not visible. Not manifested. Just… attentive.

Julian exhaled.

"All right." he said quietly. "But stay behind me."

Alexis's chin lifted, pride flickering once again. "Julian…"

"Please." Julian added, and that single word, rare in his mouth (at least in that tone), weighted and made her stop.

Alexis's expression softened by a fraction, and she nodded.

Julian crouched again. He found the mechanism. It wasn't an academy seal or an alchemical containment. It was mechanical, reinforced, and it had been designed for repeated opening and closing. That suggested something had been taken out and put back in more than once.

He released the first lock in a soft clunk. The second came with heavier sound.

The third required more force. He had to brace his shoulder against the unit, twisting until the metal gave with a reluctant snap.

Alexis flinched at the sound.

Julian paused. He listened. Nothing moved.

The machines kept humming faintly. The tablets kept radiating their oppressive silence. The room stayed still.

Finally, Julian lifted the lid. Not all the way at once. Just enough to let air shift.

A smell slipped out. Not rot or the strange notes or preservation of the mummy-like corpse. Something… sweet, faintly, like overripe fruit, and beneath it, a chemical sharpness, like solvent.

Alexis inhaled and immediately recoiled. "That's…"

"Don't breathe too deep. It can be dangerous." Julian murmured.

Then, he lifted the lid fully to take a look. Inside, nestled in padded material designed to cradle and restrain, sat something that looked like a fruit and also did not.

It was the size of a large grapefruit, but its surface wasn't smooth. It had ridges, like segments, but the segments weren't natural. They looked grown with intent, sculpted. Its color in the dim light was difficult to place: it was near red, but not exactly. It had some shades beneath purple and green, like every second he glanced at it its shimmer was slightly different as if the hues shifted depending on the angle.

Thin, thorn-like protrusions curled around it like a crown, tucked close as if asleep. There were faint lines on its surface, like veins.

Julian stared.

Alexis took a step forward despite herself, then stopped, held by Julian's proximity like an invisible barrier. Her voice came out in a whisper. "What is it?"

Julian's mind reached for categories: an artifact, a biological sample, a spiritual anchor, a trap. He didn't find one that fit cleanly.

"It's…" He stopped, because saying I don't know again would make Alexis snap.

He tried a different angle. "It was sealed…" he said instead. "Probably for a reason."

Alexis's eyes were fixed on the thing, and Julian saw the pull in her expression: not curiosity, but the desperate hope that anything in this place could be a clue to Atticus. The way grief made you want to grab evidence with bare hands even when it burned.

Julian kept his tone low. "Don't touch it."

Alexis's gaze flicked to him, annoyed. "I wasn't going to."

Julian didn't argue. He simply watched.

Because the truth was: she might not intend to. But intention was not the only thing that mattered in a room like this.

The fruit sat there, inert. It certainly was not something related to Nightshroud and the whole ordeal of Atticus' disappearance, so it was for the best to return it to its original place: in the lock.

For a heartbeat, it seemed like nothing more than an unsettling object in a box. Then Julian felt it.

A subtle shift in the air. A change in pressure: spiritual, targeted, as if something in the box had become aware of being watched.

Alexis stiffened one second too late as Julian's senses sharpened. The fruit's thorn-like protrusions loosened, just slightly, like fingers uncurling in sleep.

And then, beneath Julian's skin, he felt a tug.

Not on his body. On the shape behind his body. On the part of him that answered to flares and shields and the quiet language of spirits.

The fruit did not awake in the way a person did. It extended like a powerful force, a predator lunging for a meal in absolute hunger.

Julian stepped forward, interposing himself between Alexis and the open container. It was not dramatic. Not a miraculous leap or an heroic intervention. Just one quiet step to the left that shifted the line of sight so that if anything happened, it happened to him first. And it did.

The fruit's surface rippled. A thorn extended. Not slowly, like a plant growing. Like a spear being thrown.

Julian saw it move and felt it at the same time. The way spiritual phenomena did not always obey the speed of light or the speed of nerves.

The dark, root-like tendril erupted from the fruit, thin at first, then branching as it crossed the air, leaving faint afterimages like cracks in glass. It went past Julian's shoulder toward Alexis, drawn to the raw vulnerability in her like a moth to flame.

Julian moved. He didn't think. He reacted.

He shoved Alexis back with his non-Duel Disk arm, a firm push to her shoulder that sent her stumbling two steps away from the container.

The tendril corrected mid-flight and snapped toward Julian instead, as if deciding, instantly, that he was the better meal.

Julian felt the world narrow. He tried to stay quiet. To not flare. To not announce himself like a beacon.

But the thing didn't need his announcement. It was already locked. The tendril struck.

Julian didn't feel pain the way he expected. Not at first. He felt connection. A point of contact like a hook sinking into something that was not skin. Then the sensation of roots trying to spread.

Faintly in the back of his head, he was able to hear as Alexis cried out his name: sharp, terrified… Because she could see the tendril wrapped around his arm like a thorny vine, digging in with invisible barbs.

Julian's teeth clenched as he tried to center himself spiritually to do something about it. He felt something tugging at him, sucking, not blood but presence. Feeding on his own Ba. Not life in the biological sense, but the energy that made his spirit a coherent thing.

His vision blurred at the edges.

His instincts screamed to throw up a shield. But shielding here would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. A flare. A meal.

Julian forced himself to stay low, quiet, even as the tendril tightened. His mind thinking in a thousand different options and solutions, but having no sort of actual answer for a problem unknown to his all-mighty reincarnated brain.

He reached with his free hand, grabbing for the tendril, intending to rip it away physically.

His fingers met resistance that wasn't flesh. It felt like trying to grab smoke that fought back.

Julian's breath hitched as the tendril pulsed.

And suddenly it wasn't just pulling: it was anchoring.

Like roots sinking into soil. Julian's stomach dropped. Some sort of oily slick thrown into the pool of his spiritual presence, spreading itself and dragging his own self with it.

This wasn't a simple attack. This wasn't a lash to frighten them away. This was assimilation, attachment. A thing trying to make him its ground.

Alexis's voice came out frantic as she made a move with her duel disk. "Julian, here! Let me!"

He didn't answer. He couldn't afford to speak.

He felt the tendril push deeper, and for the first time, actual pain sparked. Not in his arm, but inside his chest, like something scraping against the inside of his ribs from the wrong side of reality.

Julian staggered. His knees threatened to buckle.

And then… The shadow behind his shadow moved. It didn't manifest fully. It didn't explode into the room like a summoned monster.

It arrived in the space between breaths, a presence snapping into focus behind Julian like a guardian stepping between a child and a blade.

The air chilled.

Not the room's cool. A different kind of cold, the kind that followed Nightmare-Eyes when it decided something was not allowed to exist unchallenged.

Alexis felt it and froze, her terror shifting, because she knew, on some level, that Julian's something else had entered the equation.

Julian didn't have time to look. He felt Nightmare-Eyes' attention clamp onto the tendril like a vice. There was a motion: fast, precise.

Not a slash with a physical blade. A cut in the connection itself. The tendril shuddered as if struck by lightning.

For a fraction of a second, Julian felt resistance, like the fruit fighting to keep its hook. But then, the connection snapped. The tendril recoiled violently, whipping back toward the container, trailing faint black motes like ash.

Julian gasped, air rushing into lungs that had forgotten how to work.

He stumbled, catching himself on the edge of a table. His arm shook. The place where the tendril had wrapped felt cold and wrong, like a bruise that didn't belong to skin.

Alexis stepped towards him on instinct, then stopped halfway, remembering his earlier warning. She was unsure whether raising her presence would make things worse.

"Are you…" she breathed, voice trembling.

Julian lifted a hand, not to stop her, but to signal: wait.

He forced his breathing loudly to grasp for air, and slowly decreased it to something steady.

The fruit sat in the container again, but it was no longer inert. Its thorn-crown was extended now, quivering, and the air around it seemed… restless. Like a sleeping animal that had been struck awake and was deciding whether to flee or fight.

Julian's pulse hammered.

Nightmare-Eyes remained present at the edge of perception, not visible, but unmistakably there: watching the fruit, watching the room, watching everything.

Julian swallowed hard.

He did not know, could not know, what had already happened beneath the surface of that cut. He only knew what he could feel in the immediate aftermath: exhaustion creeping in too fast, a faint numbness spreading up his arm, and a subtle, lingering sense that something had brushed his spirit and left residue behind.

Alexis stared at the container with horror and fury braided together. "That thing… it tried to…"

Julian's gaze stayed on the fruit.

"Yes." he said, voice rough. No more details, his breath was too short for that.

Alexis's eyes snapped to him. "What is it?"

Julian's mind reached again for language. For categories. For certainty. He found none that fit cleanly.

And the worst part was: even here, even now, surrounded by proof that this place was larger than any rumor, his brain still tried to treat it like a problem that could be solved if he just gathered enough information.

As if knowledge alone could make the supernatural predictable. Julian straightened slowly, ignoring the faint tremor in his arm.

He kept himself quiet, his presence low and his eyes on the fruit that had just tried to turn him into soil. Behind him, like a silent sentinel, Nightmare-Eyes held its ground: waiting, assessing, ready to cut again if the hunger reached for them a second time.

The fruit did not retreat. It pulsed. Once, then again.

The surface that had once looked inert: veined, heavy, half-crystallized, began to move once again. Its motion did not held any degree of violence or subtleness. It shifted quietly as something inside it rearranged itself, growing in response to stimulus rather than fear.

Julian felt it before he fully saw it. A pressure, low and wrong, crawling through the air like static before a storm. The spiritual scar of the room tightened, not flaring outward but folding inward, concentrating around the thing at the center.

The fruit split: Not cleanly or symmetrically. It opened along lines that hadn't existed a moment earlier, seams forming as if reality itself had decided where it should break. The outer shell peeled back in segments, each one stiffening and reshaping mid-motion, elongating into structures that resembled limbs only in the loosest, most unsettling sense.

Something stepped out of that new mass: something unhuman. It had the suggestion of shoulders, the echo of a torso, a silhouette that imitated upright posture without understanding why humans stood in that way. Its surface wasn't skin but layered material: crystal, resin, something fibrous underneath, and a faint sickly luminescence could be seen at its core.

Its face was worse. There were no eyes as humans understood them. No mouth. Just a smooth plane broken by shallow indentations where features should have been, like a mask sculpted by someone who had only heard descriptions of people secondhand.

Alexis staggered back half a step.

"That…" Her voice caught. She swallowed hard. "That thing… it's not…"

Julian was already moving. He jumped for the reservoir, closing the lid of the original fruit and restraining it once more in its seals. He trusted Nightmare-Eyes to protect himself and Alexis amidst it, but the larvae didn't rush forward. It didn't attack. It just kept growing, morphing and taking shape.

Finally, with the main threat apparently secured, Julian shifted his stance and brought his left arm up, angling his body just enough to place his Duel Disk squarely between himself and the creature like a shield.

A defensive reflex, a familiar one. To put an object between himself and the threat.

The disk's weight settled against his forearm, solid and reassuring, a piece of technology that obeyed rules, that made sense. For just a heartbeat, that small comfort drowned out the wrongness of everything else.

The creature froze. Not in fear, but in attention. Its head or whatever served as one, tilted slightly. The faint glow running through its body brightened, tracing patterns that echoed circuitry as much as veins.

Julian felt it then. Not a thought or a voice, but simple recognition in the most alien of forms. But living.

Alexis looked from the creature to Julian's raised arm, disbelief cutting through her fear. "Julian…" Her eyes widened. "That thing… It thinks you're…"

The thing moved again before she could finish.

From its right side, matter extruded outward, flowing and hardening simultaneously, shaping itself into a flat, angular form. Segments locked into place with precise clicks, each piece aligning with unsettling familiarity: a Duel Disk.

Not identical to his. Cruder. Grown rather than manufactured. Its surface was uneven, as if formed from the same substance as the creature's body, but the shape was unmistakable. The disk snapped into position. Card-like things appeared out of thin air on the appropriate slot.

It was activated, or whatever the term would be for some living thing like that.

"... challenge…" Alexis sentence continued, but her voice broke into something incredulous for a moment, almost hysterical. "It wants to Duel too?"

Julian didn't answer right away.

His mind should have stopped. Should have questioned this. Instead, his thoughts finally slid effortlessly into a familiar groove: of course it wants to duel.

That was how this world worked. Monsters challenged duelists. Darkness manifested through cards. Threats were answered with life points and strategy, with fields and phases and effects that could be understood, countered, won.

This was dangerous, yes. But it was also legible. A problem with a format.

Julian exhaled slowly and straightened, letting the weight of his fear settle into something colder and sharper.

"Okay… Alexis." he said quietly, without looking at her. "Stay behind me. If this thing wants a match, it didn't have to attack me like that. I'll be happy to oblige."

She didn't argue.

He flexed his arm, feeling the familiar alignment of the disk, the way it balanced against his stance like an extension of himself. Nightmare-Eyes shifted behind him, its presence tightening, ready, always ready, but not interfering.

Julian's lips curved, just barely.

"Guess that answers the question, after all." he murmured. "Some things really don't change."

He didn't consider what it meant that the creature had responded specifically to the Duel Disk. He didn't consider why the act of raising it had felt so natural, and so right, to something that had moments ago tried to root itself into his chest.

He accepted the challenge. Julian brought his arm down and activated the disk. Blue light flared to life, sharp and familiar, cutting through the murk of the underground chamber.

Across from him, the creature's disk responded in kind.

The air shifted. It was not a Shadow Game, not officially. But the space between them tightened, the room bending subtly as if preparing to accommodate rules older than either of them.

Alexis took another step back, heart hammering.

Julian didn't look away from his opponent, and as the first holographic outlines began to form, the world narrowed to something he understood all too well.

A field, an opponent. A duel.

And somewhere deep inside him, unnoticed and unnamed, something placed within him began to feed on his spiritual emission and take root.