Chapter 178: The Ultimate Wicked God - The Black Sun [2-in-1]
"Finesse, who is she?"
The girl in the hospital bed was giving Amano a persistent feeling of recognition without any actual memory attached to it. Something too faint to pull into focus.
"Sakuraba Nao. She died last night."
"She... died?"
The body, then. That explained the police tape surrounding the bed on every side.
The name Sakuraba Nao sharpened the feeling of recognition. Not because he had met her in person: he had looked her up in the Eva network records a few days ago and seen a photograph. That was all. The impression had been too shallow to store properly.
"Sakuraba Nao. Was that not the name connected to the Soulswindler?"
The suspected true identity of the Soulswindler. He leaned in slightly to confirm the detail he had read in the file. There, on the unconscious pallor of the girl's left cheek, was the faint evidence of a burn scar. The same marker the Wein family had been tracking across multiple targets.
Sakuraba Nao had fallen into an unexplained coma the same night Amano faced the Soulswindler in a Dark Game deep within the Eva network. Cross-referencing the timing and the burn mark, he had assumed the Soulswindler's consciousness had shattered in that duel, leaving the host body in a coma.
"Is the cause of death the body failing after being without a soul for too long?"
"The official cause of death is currently unknown. A soul detaching from a body is a concept that does not hold up to conventional medical scrutiny. That is why the police cordoned off the room this morning the moment they found her."
"But if she is not the only one who died last night, why did you need me here in person? You could have sent a VSN message."
"Because everyone died last night."
The tremor in Finesse's mental voice was not subtle.
"Every single target the Wein family had under surveillance died last night. Through different causes. Car accident. Falling from a building. Cardiac arrest."
The complexity of Finesse's emotions came through clearly. These people, some of them, were almost certainly among the ones she had been chasing for years. The revenge she had carried forward from her mother's death. And now they had all simply died in the span of a single night, without her hand in any of it.
Was that revenge? It felt nothing like it.
"Car accident. Falling from a building. Cardiac arrest."
None of those were obvious homicides. Each one plausibly accidental in isolation. Together they looked exactly like a death list being checked off by an entity that did not need to make contact.
He did not believe any of it was coincidental. The original anomaly had been six people developing identical burn scars on their left eyes. That was already a vanishingly improbable event. Six people from that same group dying on the same night pushed the probability of coincidence to effectively zero.
Six people.
He stopped on that number.
Car accident plus falling from a building plus cardiac arrest plus the Soul Binder consumed by the flame wall during the Riding Duel plus Sakuraba Nao with her unknown cause of death. That was five. The sixth person with a tracked burn scar was still unaccounted for.
"Finesse, what about Kuroshio Nagi? Did something happen to her last night?"
"Why would you specifically ask about Kuroshio Nagi? I did not mention her at all." A pause. "Sharp instincts. You are correct: she is the only one who is fine. She is still at school right now. We have also largely cleared her from suspicion at this point. Her burn scar appears to have been a genuine accident after all."
Finesse did not know yet about the duel at the Synchro Academy gate. She was unaware that Amano knew Kuroshio Nagi personally.
He let out a quiet breath. His number-one fan was safe.
Nagi had nothing to do with the Puppeteer's network. That was now confirmed.
"Of the remaining five, more precisely four," Finesse continued, "Sakuraba Nao is the only one whose death cannot be attributed to an external cause. No physical injury. No cardiac event. Nothing."
Amano had already intuited where this was heading, and understood why Finesse had asked him to make the trip in person rather than relaying information remotely.
"You think it was a Dark Game."
"If it is possible to detect residue from a Dark Game at the scene, you would be better placed to recognize it than I would."
"I will try."
He was not a specialist in this. If he had brought Dark Magician Girl's card, Mana's familiarity with Dark Game phenomena would have been considerably more useful. But he stepped over the yellow police tape regardless.
"Miss, you cannot go in there right now." The officer guarding the perimeter moved to intervene, and was stopped by Karl's hand.
"Let her through. If anything goes wrong, I take responsibility."
Karl was evidently already aware that the person currently operating inside Finesse's body was Amano. She must have briefed him before making the transfer.
He approached the bed and looked at Sakuraba Nao closely. The girl's face was drained white in a way that went beyond ordinary pallor, but her expression was peaceful. She did not look like someone who had died in pain. Nothing like the aftermath of a Dark Game that had consumed its loser from within.
Perhaps the body truly had simply failed on its own, after the soul that animated it had dissolved.
He was still considering this when the system notification surfaced.
Detecting professional identity. Recording.
He had not expected this.
Professional identity: Diviner.
Upright: "The World." Symbolizing the cosmic endpoint and dynamic equilibrium. The conclusion of one life stage and the beginning of the cycle that follows.
"All things can be achieved, all dreams can become reality. In this new world created by human hands!"
Not the Soulswindler. The Diviner. A tarot-based identity, from the description.
He was broadly familiar with the World as a tarot card, even without detailed knowledge of the tradition. It was also the ace monster of Yusuke Fujiwara from the Yu-Gi-Oh GX Light of Destruction arc. The card had the ability to stop time for nine seconds...
No. He was misremembering. That was a different reference entirely.
The actual effect of Arcana Force XXI - The World was to skip the opponent's next turn entirely. The system had presumably already added it to his Eva Terminal.
He filed that away and redirected his attention.
"You have been quiet. Did you find something?" Finesse asked.
"Sakuraba Nao was not actually the Soulswindler."
"Not the Soulswindler? How do you know that?"
"Consider it a professional identity detection ability I have. Her true dark duelist identity was Diviner, not Soulswindler."
If the system could record the identities of dead dark duelists by proximity, the other three bodies were worth approaching while he had a legitimate investigation excuse to do so. He was not going to turn down free data.
And if Sakuraba Nao was the Diviner, the question of who was actually the Soulswindler remained open. It might be one of the other three. It might be someone still alive.
From outside the police tape, Latir's voice cut through.
"Finesse, have you found anything in there?"
Finesse transmitted a quick internal note: Latir did not know about the Back Seat Soul arrangement. Explaining the skill to her would be more trouble than it was worth. Keep the act going. And stop calling her by a formal title.
Amano stepped back over the tape and used Finesse's voice.
"I have a lead. Latir, I want to check the other surveillance targets. There might be more we can work with."
"My little sister gets more capable every day." There was genuine warmth in it.
Since the duel and Finesse's breakthrough on the Puppeteer investigation, Latir's manner toward her had shifted meaningfully. A portion of the family business had been delegated to Finesse. Her decisions were being supported in ways they had not been before.
Latir had spent years afraid that Finesse's drive for revenge would get her killed before she had the ability to pursue it safely. That fear was gone now. What remained in its place was the older sister's preference: not protective interference, but active support for something she recognized as right.
"I will start contacting the other families now and see if we can get access."
Latir raised her wrist to her Eva Terminal.
Her eyebrow lifted slightly.
"Why has the signal dropped?"
The hospital corridors, which had been quiet a few minutes ago, were filling with hurried movement. Medical staff who had been passing infrequently were now moving at a continuous pace, voices clipped, something clearly wrong.
Karl caught a nurse mid-step as she went past.
"Excuse me. Can you tell me what is happening?"
The nurse, who had been several degrees short of pleasant when stopped, looked up at Karl's face and promptly stopped being short about anything.
"The hospital's internal network has gone down. Suddenly. Many of the instruments are non-functional. We are managing everything manually right now."
She clearly wanted to keep looking. The situation was clearly too chaotic for that. She excused herself and moved on.
"The hospital network crashed."
Amano's instinct was that this was not an isolated event.
He was right. Through the hospital window, looking down at the street below, the automated vehicle traffic had broken down into a series of collisions. Cars that should never be able to collide with each other were doing so at low speed, one after another, because whatever was directing them had stopped working.
This was not a hospital outage. This was the entire local network.
He had seen this before. The night of the Wicked God battle: the whole mid-level district's network going dark, the artificial sky going black, everything managed by Eva's systems failing at once.
The sky.
The thought arrived an instant before he looked up.
He looked up.
Every person in the hospital who happened to be near a window had done the same thing. Every person in the street below had stopped. The collisions had become an afterthought.
Nobody seemed to have an immediate reaction prepared for what they were seeing.
Then someone found the words.
"A black sun!"
Hanging inverted over the mid-level district sky was an enormous black sun. Absolute, lightless, wrong in the way that a fundamental rule of reality being broken is wrong. Its shadow was spreading downward across the district, slow and steady.
At the Kaiba Corporation headquarters, Kaiba Chiaki was looking up at the same sky from a different angle. The cold sweat on the back of her neck was visible.
Her expression was the expression of someone who had just seen something in broad daylight that had no business existing outside of a specific context.
"Why. Why is this thing in the real world?"
She encountered it once a week. She faced it in a Chronicle dungeon rated SSS difficulty, the hardest category the system offered. Every single time, she lost.
That was the nature of what she was looking at. A thing that was supposed to exist only inside a Chronicle, behind every difficulty gate that had been constructed to keep it contained.
The Wicked Avatar.
A Divine-class Wicked God requiring three Tributes to Summon. A monster that permanently held ATK and DEF one point higher than the strongest card on any field. A card completely immune to every other card effect in existence. A card that could not be Tributed. A card that, when successfully Summoned, locked the opponent out of activating Spell and Trap cards for two of their turns.
That entity was now a black sun hanging over the real world.
At the top of the Eva Network Tower, the tallest structure in Eden, a girl stood barefoot at the very edge of the rooftop, a hundred meters above the city, singing a children's song to herself. The melody was pleasant and the lyrics were wrong in the same way the sky was wrong.
"Black sun. Swallow the sky. The earth. The world."
"Wrong history. Erase it. Change it. Eliminate it."
She reached up and pulled the bandage away from her left eye. The burn scar was severe, vivid red, not something that could have been hidden without effort.
"The elders at the top of the Tower could not sit still after the Wein family started applying pressure. I told them from the beginning: abandon the useless pawns. Use the three professional cards as tributes to summon the Wicked God. That would have been the efficient approach."
If Amano or Shio had been standing on that rooftop, either of them would have recognized her face immediately.
She had been wearing the eye patch at school for a long time, supposedly due to bullying. The bullying had been arranged by her. Without it, the severity of her burn scar would have needed a different explanation.
Even the Wein family's professional investigators had not thought to look closely at an injured middle school girl who had been the documented victim of campus violence. That kind of cover was nearly invisible.
The most famous terror incident, after all, had happened ten years ago. The precedent for dark duelists being anywhere and anyone had been buried under time.
"Too bad, Shio. I will not be able to play friends with you anymore. If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at your brother for being so much trouble."
Her name was Shiyue. Her full name was Shiyue Yi.
Former professional identity: Soulswindler.
Current professional identity: God Tamer.
Her name, in the calendar that had been erased from human history along with the surface world, represented a particular date. April the first. A day that had once existed specifically as a day for deception.
Since that history had been erased, no one had thought to notice that the name meant anything at all.
No one had seen it coming. That was the point.
***
hell even I didn't see it coming