Chapter 180: Heroes Are Not Stopped by the Ghosts of the Past
On the roof of the Eva Network Tower, Shiyue watched the broadcast feed and let the smile fade.
"Why? Finesse Wein was the first one to win her duel?"
She had expected the opposite. By any reasonable calculation, Finesse should have been the most difficult of the three. Bounty Hunter Lutz had come within a single moment of killing her during the District 11 incident. If Amano had not intervened with the Millennium Puzzle ability at the last second, the Wein family would have been down to two siblings.
And now Lutz had been destroyed like a stray dog in the street.
How strong had Finesse actually become?
The unease that flickered through her was not something she had anticipated. The dark barrier she had raised with the Wicked Avatar's power should have exceeded anything the Millennium Puzzle could counter. Amano should not have been able to get inside.
So why did she still feel something was wrong?
She turned her attention back to the other two feeds. Latir and Karl were not moving much slower than Finesse. Both of them had no hesitation to show and no restraint to spare. With five seconds between them and a patient's life on the line for every delay, there was nothing in their nature that would allow them to hold back.
"In my Battle Phase, I activate Quick-Play Spell Form Change! I return WIND-attribute Masked HERO Blast to the Extra Deck and Special Summon DARK-attribute Masked HERO Dark Law with a direct attack!"
"Dark Shatter Rider Kick!"
Latir's charge through the south stairwell left her Dark Game opponent in pieces behind her. The Masked HERO's dark wings carved a path straight upward.
And in the west stairwell, Karl had a different approach.
"Xyz Summon! Heroic Champion - Solaris! Effect: I pay my Life Points down to 500. At the start of my Battle Phase, I select one monster I control and double its ATK!"
Heroic Champion - Solaris. ATK: 2500 to 5000.
"Stand aside, you remnant."
"Radiant Glory! Holy Blade Solaris!"
The golden light cut through the dark stairwell and reduced the obstacle in front of Karl to nothing. He stepped over the remnants and kept climbing, the light from his Xyz monster still illuminating the stairs above him.
The forced broadcast had been designed to show a struggling hero family in crisis, to send a message to every other powerful family in Eden about what happened when the wrong people were targeted. The expected image was three people fighting desperately against enemies they could barely survive.
None of the three had given the audience that.
No one retreated. No one fell behind. All three fronts advanced simultaneously, cutting through the darkness in parallel, and the children watching from the orphanage in front of the TV were not watching in fear anymore.
"That is amazing. Is that what a hero's duel looks like?"
"Go, the big sister using HERO cards!"
"And the brother who is not a hero but is doing heroic things. Do not lose either!"
Shiyue stood, brushed the dust from where she had been sitting on the edge of the tower roof, and let the smile come back.
"Fine. Skip the small monsters. Send in the final boss directly. Letting heroes see hope before crushing it makes the despair much deeper."
She jumped off the rooftop.
Halfway down the hundred-meter drop, her body dissolved like data being erased. A seam opened in the mid-air, something that looked like a tear in the fabric of reality leading through to the network space behind it, and she stepped through it and was gone.
In the hospital stairwell, something Amano had been quietly tracking shifted. The persistent unsteadiness in Finesse's legs, the physical manifestation of her fear, gradually settled. The trembling stopped.
"Have you found your footing, Finesse?"
"Actually. Actually, when I think about it carefully, there is nothing to be afraid of."
"That is exactly right. You are a hero. And heroes are not stopped by the ghosts of a past era."
A pause from the other side of the mental connection.
"Heroes are not stopped by the ghosts of the past era. That is it. I think I just had a realization, Amano."
The fear in Finesse's voice had genuinely cleared. Not suppressed, not overridden by adrenaline. Actually gone.
"Ha. After everything we have done together, I keep noticing that things I used to be frightened of just... stop being frightening. Is that the courage you give me?"
"That courage comes from inside you, Finesse. It always did."
A few seconds more, and through the final stretch of the stairwell, the iron door to the rooftop came into view. Amano pushed it open.
The space on the other side was not a hospital rooftop.
He recognized it immediately. The pure white extending outward without any visible boundary, the absence of any physical landmark, the quality of the light coming from everywhere and nowhere. The deepest layer of the Eva network. The place where he had once fought two of the Wicked Gods side by side, the place the Soulswindler had called the network's innermost space.
It should have been empty.
The voice that drifted through it was not his.
"Mom. Mom?"
Finesse.
Before Amano could process the question of where a mother was or who she was, Finesse's body moved. Not under his direction. Something in her had simply overridden the control, and the body walked forward on its own, drawn toward whatever the white space contained, her will pulling harder than his.
They stepped through the iron door together, and the Back Seat Soul connection released.
Amano's presence in the space was not physical this time. A ghost's impression of himself, capable of observing but not of acting, present in the white void as the environment changed around him.
The space transformed. Like a cinema screen lighting up, a scene assembled itself from the white light, intimate and warm. A modest, comfortable room lit by soft warm light. A small red-haired girl sat on the lap of a gentle-faced woman, rubbing one cheek against the woman's palm in a gesture of complete and unguarded affection.
"Mom, I want to go back to that stew place tonight. Can we go again? Please?"
"Finesse, we have already been three times this week. Are you really not tired of it?"
"Never. The stew goes into a completely different stomach."
"What am I going to do with you."
The woman's face held about nine parts resemblance to Finesse. The child's face held the same. This was a scene from before the world that Amano knew existed.
"Is this a memory? Young Finesse and her mother?"
"It is not exactly a memory." The familiar child's voice arrived from behind him. "It is a reconstruction from data. The scene Finesse misses most and most wants to return to."
Amano turned.
Shiyue stood there looking up at him, the burn scar on her left eye uncovered now, vivid red against her face. The bandage was gone.
"Shiyue. You."
There had been, now that he thought about it, a small flicker of something when he had first noticed that bandage on her eye. A momentary question: had that really come from bullying, or was it the same kind of mark that linked all the others? He had dismissed it. She had been too young. Too innocent-seeming. Too easy to like.
She had been counting on exactly that.
"It has been a while, hasn't it. Very handsome Amano-nii."
She had said that every time she visited, whenever Shio brought her to the dorm on weekends. Her face tilted up at him with that sweet curiosity and the compliment delivered straight. He had found it charming. He had never questioned it.
"You were lying to me even then."
Shiyue tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Half and half. The lying part was the context. The compliment was sincere. You do have a nice face, Amano Rei. But you also absolutely refuse to leave well enough alone, which I find irritating in equal measure."
When she had seen his consciousness appear inside the data space within Finesse's mind, the unease had resolved into certainty. He had entered Finesse's body before the barrier went up. The Wicked Avatar's dark barrier could seal the outside, but it could not dislodge someone already inside.
"I cannot believe you keep showing up everywhere. You stick like taffy and you are just as impossible to remove."
"But this time," Shiyue added, "you cannot do anything to stop me. Watch."
Through the sky of the white space, like looking through a transparent ceiling at the world above, the rooftop battle was visible. Latir and Karl had arrived. Both of them were facing the Wicked Avatar, the black sun's physical form taking shape as a combatant on the field.
It copied.
Whatever monster stood against it, the Wicked Avatar assumed an identical silhouette, the same shape, the same proportions. But uniformly, absolutely black, no detail retained beyond the outline. And its ATK was always one point higher than the monster it mirrored.
Masked HERO Koga. ATK: 3500.
Wicked Avatar. ATK: 3501.
Masked HERO Koga: destroyed.
Heroic Champion - Steelbane. ATK: 4000.
Wicked Avatar. ATK: 4001.
Heroic Champion - Steelbane: destroyed.
"You cannot win that way," Shiyue said simply. "No matter what Latir Wein and Karl Wein put on the field, the Avatar will always exceed it by one point. The effect does not enter a chain, so it cannot be negated. Winning through pure ATK damage against the Wicked Avatar is theoretically impossible."
A card effect that permanently maintained the highest ATK on the field plus one point. An effect immune to chaining and therefore immune to negation. Direct combat was not a path to victory.
"When Latir and Karl lose, the broadcast will carry that failure to every screen in Eden. Everyone inside the hospital will die with them. Despair delivered live, to the entire tower. The Wein family will never recover from that image."
"Why are you doing this, Shiyue? Why does any of it require killing people in a hospital?"
"Orders from the elders at the top of the Tower. A few hundred lives, or any number of lives, means nothing to them. Physical existence means nothing to them. Most of the people at the top of this tower abandoned their physical bodies a long time ago."
"Abandoned their physical bodies?"
"Like that."
Both of them looked from the battle in the sky back to the scene in front of them. The warm room. The stew restaurant that Finesse had taken Amano to after a late-night gathering, exactly the same as he remembered it. The child-sized Finesse at the table, spoon clenched in both hands, eating her cream stew one careful spoonful at a time with an expression of pure focused happiness.
He had seen that expression on an adult face once. Same spoon grip. Same focused joy.
"Without pain. Without regret. Without loss. The soul's final destination after releasing the body: a world of perfect data, constructed from the truest sense of what a person cherishes most. This is the Eternal Cradle Plan. We will dismantle Eva's rule step by step, replace her false utopia with the true paradise that humanity actually deserves."
"True paradise."
Looking at child Finesse in that lit room, the happiness on her face was genuine. More complete than anything Amano had seen on the real Finesse in any moment he could remember. For one unguarded instant, the logic of it almost made sense.
Was it real? Was it right?
"Is it good, Finesse?" The woman reached over and ruffled the loose red hair gently. "Do you like it?"
"Yes!"
"Do you like being with Mom?"
"So much!"
"Then would Finesse like to be with Mom forever?"
"Forever." The child paused, put her spoon down. "Just you and me?"
"If that is what Finesse wants. But we could also bring others. We could go find Dad. And your sister. And your brother."
"Others? Then can we bring Amano?"
"Amano?" Finesse's mother tilted her head, genuinely puzzled. "Who is that?"
The data space could not generate people who existed only in the real world and not within Finesse's childhood memories. The simulation had no reference for the name. It could not build him from nothing.
Child Finesse looked down at the bowl in front of her. Some decision was being made behind her eyes. Then she picked up her spoon again and started eating faster, cleaning the bowl in a few decisive mouthfuls.
"I am full, Mom."
"Another bowl? There is more."
"No thank you. I have to go."
"Go? Where are you going, Finesse?"
She set down the small wooden spoon.
"Mom, you always told me that eating enough gives you the courage to face life. But I figured out as I got older that you had it slightly wrong."
The simulated mother could not process this. The data ran out of responses and held her expression in a gentle, questioning tilt.
"It is not about being full. It is having the people who matter to you that makes courage possible. I only understood that after I met Amano."
The air cracked.
"And Amano told me something."
A sound like the first fracture in thin ice. Then another. The light of the space beginning to fragment.
"Heroes are not stopped by the ghosts of the past era."
The crack was audible. Clear and sharp, like reality splitting open at a seam.
The child was gone. The adult Finesse sat in her place at the small table, pale crimson hair, Finesse as she actually was, looking at the simulated shape of her mother across the narrow space between them.
"Mom. I miss you every day. Every hour. That has not changed and it will not change."
Another fracture sound, wider now, the edges of the constructed world beginning to come apart.
Finesse stood up from the table.
"But the past holds what once bound me, and the future holds what I still have to protect. Those are two different directions, and I know which one to face."
"Finesse." The woman's smile had not wavered through any of it. Through all the cracks spreading across the sky and the walls and the warm-lit floor. Even as the data world failed around her, the smile stayed. "You have really grown up."
"I have. I grew up properly. So do not worry about me."
The data space collapsed.
When Amano opened Finesse's eyes, the white space was gone. Real air. Real light. A real hospital stairwell door in front of them.
"You got out on your own."
"An eternal cradle? A phantom paradise? Something that cannot even hold me is not going to hold anyone worth saving. It is barely convincing enough to fool a child."
Finesse's voice was fiercer than usual, cleaner, the way something sounds when a weight that has been there so long it became invisible is finally gone.
A card was in her hand. It had not been there a moment before.
Destiny Phantasm. Trap Card: When a "Destiny HERO" monster you control is destroyed by an opponent's effect and sent to the Graveyard, Special Summon all "Destiny HERO" monsters destroyed by that effect this turn.
The broken data space, made physical. A card born from the moment the illusion shattered.
The simulation had not been too strong. Finesse had simply always been stronger than she appeared.
"It is our turn, Finesse."
They pushed through the door.
The black sun was still there, hanging over the mid-level district, unmoving. Below it, on the hospital rooftop, Latir and Karl were both down. The battle had gone exactly as Shiyue had predicted: no combination of their decks could produce a monster that exceeded the Wicked Avatar's ATK, not when the Avatar's value adjusted in real time to stay exactly one above whatever faced it.
Latir was still conscious. She looked up from where she had half-collapsed, her eyes finding Finesse as she came through the rooftop door. Her weakest sibling stepping forward to face what she and Karl could not.
Countless stories had told people that not every hero wins in the end. But the other half of every one of those stories was that someone always stepped up.
"Amano Rei. Finesse."
Karl pulled the last card from his deck. Latir did the same. Both cards left their hands at the same moment, arcing through the air toward Amano.
Latir used everything she had left to push out one last sentence before losing consciousness.
"This is the hero's legacy."
Karl's strength held a moment longer. His voice was quiet but steady.
"The evil god is not invincible. You will find the way through. We believe in both of you."
Amano caught the cards. Karl's card, Latir's card, and the Destiny Phantasm that had appeared in Finesse's hand: all three slotted into the deck in Finesse's Duel Disk.
Under the light of the black sun. Broadcast to every screen in Eden. The weight of two defeated siblings at their back and the most powerful monster in the network in front of them.
Amano Rei and Finesse Wein stepped forward to challenge the Wicked Avatar.
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