Chapter 184: Break Destiny! The Draw That Reaches the Earth!
"Per Destiny HERO - Dominance's effect, I can rearrange these five cards in any order."
Five cards laid out before Amano and Finesse in the brief window of the scrying effect. Two of those five were from Latir, handed over in the moment before she lost consciousness. If this duel was going to be won, those two cards were both required.
And Amano needed to draw a specific card before this turn ended: the one he had deliberately placed at the top of the deck.
"I activate Spell Card, H - Heated Heart! One monster I control gains 500 ATK!"
The burning flame that was thematic to the H-cards spread along the blade of Destiny HERO - Dominance.
Dominance. ATK: 2900 to 3400.
Three thousand four hundred. Just enough to clear Super Conductor Tyranno's 3300.
"Battle Phase! Dominance attacks Super Conductor Tyranno!"
"Destiny Heavy Slash!"
The great destiny blade detonated against the armored dinosaur.
Shiyue did not appear particularly concerned. She flipped one of her Set cards with an almost casual gesture.
"Continuous Trap, Soul Barrier."
Soul Barrier. Continuous Trap: As long as the controller has monsters on the field, all battle damage taken by the controller becomes zero.
"You will not take even one hundred battle damage?"
"I am sensitive to pain." Shiyue shrugged. "What can I say."
Then her expression shifted. The lightness dropped out of it entirely, replaced by something that belonged to a very different kind of story.
"But more than that: I will leave no version of hope in your hands. None. I want every single person watching this broadcast to feel absolute despair."
She was still thinking about being called a fool by Kaiba Chiaki.
The one hundred damage was the least of it. Soul Barrier combined with a Wicked Avatar that could not be removed from the field meant that Shiyue would take zero battle damage for the rest of the duel. Her entire strategy had been built from the beginning to do one thing: keep the Wicked Avatar alive, and let the rest of the deck handle everything else.
As long as the Wicked God stands, I am invincible.
Super Conductor Tyranno: destroyed.
The destruction was real even without the damage. And when Dominance destroyed a monster by battle, its second effect triggered.
When this card destroys an opponent's monster by battle: draw 1 card from Deck.
Amano drew.
He looked at the card, then Set it without revealing it.
Field state: Dominance in Attack Position, one Set card behind it, one card remaining in hand.
Shiyue's turn.
Two draws. LP 15600 to 16100.
"Equip Spell, Premature Burial! I revive Super Conductor Tyranno from my Graveyard equipped with this card. And since I activated Embracing Sins Mystic Eye, I pay no LP cost whatsoever."
Even paying costs was apparently an inconvenience she had decided to eliminate.
Super Conductor Tyranno returned to the field at 3300 ATK. Wicked Avatar recalibrated: without Dominance's H - Heated Heart buff, which had expired at the end of last turn, Dominance was back to 2900 ATK. Super Conductor Tyranno's 3300 was now the highest ATK on the field.
Wicked Avatar. ATK: 3301.
Two dinosaurs on Shiyue's field, one white and one black, both roaring.
"Die here, Amano Rei."
The last Set card in Shiyue's back row lifted.
"Trap Card, Meteor Rain! For this turn, all my monsters' attacks on Defense Position monsters gain piercing: if the attacking monster's ATK exceeds the defender's DEF, deal the difference as battle damage."
Amano's field held Destiny HERO - Malicious in Defense Position, DEF 800.
The math was straightforward and brutal: Wicked Avatar at 3301 ATK, Malicious at 800 DEF, piercing applied, Death-Praising Mystic Eye doubling battle damage against monsters.
3301 minus 800 equals 2501. Doubled: 5002.
"Wicked Avatar attacks Malicious! With piercing and doubled damage!"
"I activate Destiny HERO - Dreamer's effect from the Graveyard."
The effect text surfaced from memory: when a Destiny HERO you control is in damage calculation, Special Summon Dreamer from the Graveyard in Defense, that Destiny HERO monster is not destroyed by battle, and battle damage from that combat becomes zero.
"I Special Summon Dreamer in Defense. Malicious is not destroyed and the damage is zero."
Destiny HERO - Dreamer. DEF: 600. Defense Position.
The first attack was neutralized.
"So you survived one hit." Shiyue's expression had passed beyond ordinary frustration into something almost theatrical. "Death-Praising Mystic Eye allows my monsters to attack twice per turn. Continue!"
Amano activated the last card in the back row.
"Trap Card, Rainbow Life!"
Rainbow Life. Trap Card: Discard 1 card from your hand; until the End Phase, all damage you would take instead becomes LP recovery.
He sent Destiny Phantasm from his hand to the Graveyard as the discard cost.
The second attack came. The Wicked Avatar drove into Malicious with the full weight of 3301 ATK and piercing. What would have been 5002 doubled piercing damage became 5002 LP recovery.
Destiny HERO - Malicious: destroyed.
Amano LP: 4547 to 9549.
"You are going to keep attacking, Shiyue? Every attack you land while Rainbow Life is active just gives me more LP."
"Yes, I am." Shiyue's tone had changed. The arithmetic was obvious to her too. She was not attacking to deal damage. "Super Conductor Tyranno attacks Destiny HERO - Dominance!"
This was the point. Dominance was the card that could see and reorder the next five draws. Letting it stay on the field was the larger danger.
Super Conductor Tyranno hit Dominance at 3300 ATK versus 2900 ATK. With doubling, 800 damage became 1600. With Rainbow Life, 1600 LP recovered.
Destiny HERO - Dominance: destroyed.
Amano LP: 9549 to 10349.
"When Destiny HERO - Dominance is destroyed by battle or effect, its third effect activates!"
When this Fusion Summoned card is destroyed by battle or effect: target up to 3 Level 9 or lower Destiny HERO monsters in your Graveyard (max 1 copy of each); Special Summon them.
Three beams of revival light rose from the Graveyard.
"I Special Summon Diamond Dude, Drill Guy, and Disk Commander!"
Destiny HERO - Diamond Dude. DEF: 1600.
Destiny HERO - Drill Guy. DEF: 1200.
Destiny HERO - Disk Commander. DEF: 300.
"And when Disk Commander is Special Summoned from the Graveyard, I draw two cards."
The field had three monsters in Defense. Amano's hand was building. His LP was over ten thousand.
Watching from the D-Wheel evacuation column a safe distance from the barrier's edge, Rin Seiya could not take her eyes off the broadcast.
"It is like he cannot be beaten. The more they fight him the stronger he gets."
The people watching from across Eden had started with fear. The visible shift in the broadcast had started somewhere around the moment Class 1-E was shown refusing to leave their classmates behind, and accelerated when the rescue helicopters came. Now, with a duelist who had been cornered on an empty field somehow arriving at full field, ten thousand LP, and a hand full of options, the fear was changing into something else.
"Come on, Shiyue." Amano had entered a register that was almost openly provocative. "Super Conductor Tyranno has one more attack. All of my Defense Position monsters have low DEF and no protection. Piercing plus doubled damage all being converted to healing. Go ahead."
Every calculation Shiyue ran landed at the same answer. She could not win this through battle damage.
She ended the Battle Phase.
"The last card in my hand."
She held it up briefly before sending it into the Duel Disk.
"Dark Hole. Destroy all monsters on the field."
The classic catastrophe spell. A singularity opened at the center of the dark field and consumed everything that could be consumed: Diamond Dude, Drill Guy, Disk Commander, Dreamer, the Super Conductor Tyranno she had revived.
Every monster on both sides of the field was pulled in and erased.
Every monster except one.
The Wicked Avatar could not be affected by card effects. It contracted back into its featureless black sphere form and waited.
Shiyue spread her hands. Empty field on Amano's side. No hand cards visible. No Set cards she could see. An unassailable divine monster on her side backed by 16100 LP.
"You have nothing left. No monsters, no resources. There is nothing you can do from here."
"Is there not?"
A sound.
The particular sharp clarity of a mirror breaking.
Shiyue recognized it before she identified what it was. That sound. She had just heard it a short while ago. The exact sound Finesse had made when she shattered the simulation of the data world and walked free through sheer force of will.
If Finesse had not made that sound, if the simulation had held, Shiyue would not be standing on this rooftop right now. Amano would not be in this duel.
Another crack. Louder. More pervasive.
"What is that sound?"
"Can you hear it too?" Amano's voice was measured, deliberate, arriving alongside the growing fracture sounds from every direction. "That is the sound of destiny breaking."
Shiyue stared at the empty field across from her.
No monsters. No Set cards.
Then five Destiny HERO monsters were standing on it.
"From the Graveyard, I activate Transaction Rollback's second effect. Banish it from my Graveyard, pay half my LP. Target Destiny Phantasm in my own Graveyard, and apply its activation effect."
Transaction Rollback's GY effect: banish this card; pay half LP; target 1 Normal Trap in controller's own Graveyard; apply that trap's activation effect.
Amano LP: 10349 to 5175.
More than five thousand Life Points, spent without hesitation.
Destiny Phantasm. The card that had appeared in Finesse's hand when she walked out of the collapsing simulation. The card she had discarded as Rainbow Life's cost, placing it in the Graveyard at the exact moment it was needed.
Trap Card: When Destiny HERO monsters you control are destroyed by an opponent's card and sent to the Graveyard, Special Summon all Destiny HERO monsters destroyed that way this turn.
Dark Hole had destroyed them. Dark Hole was Shiyue's card. Every Destiny HERO it sent to the Graveyard this turn was now coming back.
And more than just this turn's Dark Hole victims: Destiny Phantasm covered all Destiny HEROes destroyed by the opponent this turn. Malicious had been destroyed in battle during Shiyue's Battle Phase. That also counted.
Behind the image of shattering mirror glass, the phantasm of destiny resolved five silhouettes back onto the field simultaneously.
"I Special Summon Diamond Dude, Drill Guy, Malicious, Disk Commander, and Dominance!"
Five Destiny HEROes. The complete roster. Every card that had fought and fallen this duel, standing again.
"We actually did it," Finesse said from the mental space, a shaking edge in her voice. "We pulled it off, Amano!"
"This is only the beginning. The moment to exceed destiny comes after this."
Disk Commander triggered its revival draw for the second time, adding two more cards.
The combined total: one draw from Dominance's monster-destroy effect, plus four draws from Disk Commander triggering twice. Five cards. Exactly the five cards that Dominance had looked at through the scrying effect and placed deliberately at the top of the deck.
All five of those predetermined cards were now in Amano's hand.
And none of them was the card he actually needed to end the duel.
He had seen what those five would be. He had positioned them with full knowledge. The key card, the one that could overcome the Wicked Avatar, was not among them. It had to be. It had to exist. He had built this entire chain on the possibility of the sixth draw.
The fifth predetermined card entered his hand.
He looked at the deck in his Duel Disk.
The question that had haunted him since the Chronicle, since the reward notice had appeared with no explanation of how to use it, was about to have an answer or not have one. His one-time-use authorization for Obelisk the Tormentor. The Chronicle had given it to him. The system had logged it. No one had ever told him how to activate it, and it behaved unlike every other skill or card in his arsenal: it had not been added to his deck, had not appeared in his Extra Deck, had given no prompt at the start of this duel asking whether to include it.
In the moment of drawing it, the possible outcomes of every parallel fate had either converged or had not.
"But in this moment, we have already gone beyond destiny. There is only one outcome left."
The ground shook.
Not the building. The ground of the mid-level district itself, the black flood that the Wicked Avatar had been pouring across every surface for the length of this duel, the liquid that had been spreading and consuming and expanding with each Life Point Shiyue recovered.
It stopped.
The tide of black liquid halted at every edge simultaneously, as though the rule that governed it had been suspended. And then, across the entire covered expanse of the mid-level district, the black flood began to boil.
Shiyue stumbled back several steps, the eyes of a God Tamer wide.
"The energy's nature has changed. Something is coming from beneath the ground. Impossible. In an artificial earth, something is actually sleeping there?"
Artificial earth.
That phrase.
In the final moments of the Chronicle's collapse, the voice that had spoken to him before the light took everything had used exactly those words. He had never fully understood them until now.
"The future of dueling I have been pursuing will not be stopped by anyone. So witness it for me, Amano Rei. Witness whether the future I bet everything to create has reached the heights you and I both hoped for."
Kaiba Seto.
This artificial ground had been built by his hands. And in it, he had buried a seed.
Amano Rei was not going to draw from his Duel Disk.
He raised his open palm toward the sky, mirroring a posture he had seen once in a Chronicle that was now dust. The stance of someone who was not drawing from a deck but demanding something from the world itself.
And then, under the gaze of every screen in Eden, Amano Rei drove his hand into the boiling black earth.
"Draw!"
The ground erupted.
The black flood that had been slowly reclaiming the mid-level district for the last several minutes blew outward in every direction at once, a detonation of dark liquid clearing the earth beneath it to reveal what had been sleeping there since before this city's generation was born.
"That is real." Shiyue could not make her voice behave. "Something is actually coming. I felt it. I felt it before any of this happened and I did not understand what it was."
The final hero of the earth was waking up.
"Obelisk the Tormentor!"
From the artificial ground that Kaiba Seto had built into this tower, erupting through the black mud with a sound that reached every corner of every district from the lowest slum to the highest spire, the deep blue colossus rose.
A divine body large enough to fill the gap between the floor and ceiling of the mid-level district entirely. The roar it released as it came free of the earth shook the tower's superstructure, rattled every window in the evacuation routes, and could be heard without any broadcast transmission by anyone within a kilometer in any direction.
The Final Battle: the Earth, the Heroes, and the Divine Soldier.