Chapter 227
Victory's light descended on Synchro.
When Amano declared the end of his turn, he declared his victory at the same time.
"He won! Brother actually won! Yes yes yes yes YES!"
Shio forgot entirely about the azure gemstone pendant that had been burning hot against her chest. She and Finesse were pressing their hands together and bouncing in place.
Shio was in the middle school section. Her brother winning was an entirely reasonable reason to celebrate.
Finesse, on the other hand, was a Fusion Academy student. Her academy's Gold Stage had just been broken. The level of excitement she was expressing under those circumstances was genuinely questionable.
At the outermost edge of the crowd, Chiha watched with feelings that were considerably more complicated.
She had helped push things along with something close to spite, clearing the path through Fusion's Bronze Stage herself so Amano could reach Chiaki faster. But now that her "invincible" older sister had genuinely lost, Chiha found that she did not feel as pleased as she might have expected.
Her current mood was not particularly better than any of the deflated Fusion Academy students around her.
There was nothing to be done about it. No matter what she had said out loud, this was still the sister she had liked for twenty years.
Eve: "We all really tried our best! All of us!"
Ivaliss: "You just came out at the beginning to absorb damage. I was the one who defeated Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon on my own."
Mana: "I was just used as Fusion material."
Ecclesia: "And I was Synchro material. But I suppose this was the first time we all came out together."
It genuinely was. The first time in recorded history that every card spirit in Amano's deck had taken the field in a single duel.
"The truly critical one was me, wasn't it?"
The familiar cool, quiet voice appeared after a long absence, accompanied by the equally familiar one-strike-and-vanish exit that needed no further explanation.
On the matter of which monster had been most central to this duel, Blue-Eyes White Dragon was correct.
The card spirits' noise pulled Amano back from wherever his thoughts had drifted.
Standing in the ruins of what had been the Gold Stage arena, he set down his Duel Disk. The genuine sensation of victory arrived slowly, like something that had not yet been fully authorized.
He had actually beaten that Kaiba. He had beaten the strongest person in Fusion Academy.
Was he now the strongest in the academy?
No. One person still stood between him and that title in any meaningful sense.
Cumulative Ranking Points: +231,000.
Amano Rei. Ranking: 96 to 10.
After collecting over two hundred thousand points from Chiaki, Amano had broken into the top ten of the academy city rankings.
Simultaneously, somewhere on the Synchro Academy Gold Stage, a white-haired upperclassman who had been sitting there doing nothing all morning stared at her Duel Disk notification.
Rin Seiya. Ranking: 3 to 2.
Rin Seiya: "Hm? A free level-up? A thing like this actually exists?"
Amano's cumulative total historical points: 541,000.
He remembered this range. It was approximately what the troublesome young lady had been at before their duel. Both Kaiba sisters had handed their points directly to him, which had taken a first-year student and placed him squarely in the top ten of the academy city.
He also remembered how Chiha had reacted when she lost the points to him: crying and rolling on the floor.
Could it be...
Amano looked across at Chiaki. She had not moved at all. Literally, as if someone had hit pause on her. Not one motion.
Though on closer inspection, her apparently motionless body was very faintly trembling. The elevated position of the broken stage had spared anyone else from noticing. Only Amano was close enough to see it.
"Kaiba. Senpai."
The honorific reattached itself now that the duel was over. In the heat of the duel itself, his head had contained nothing except "Kaiba," but facing her now with something to ask, the "senpai" came back on its own.
"Are you alright?"
The trembling stopped. Chiaki's unfocused deep-blue eyes sharpened back into their usual composure.
"What a boring question. You won this time. The next time will not be the same, Amano."
She put her Duel Disk away, pushed her chestnut hair back from her shoulder with a casual flick, and stepped off the ruined stage with every appearance of taking the whole thing in stride.
"That should not count as an insult to Kaiba, right? The Kaiba family tradition isn't supposed to be..."
The system affection notification answered before he finished the thought.
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection +1. Affection: 70.
Unlocked new love skill: Gaze of the Blue-Eyes.
The skill: At the start of a duel, randomly add three Blue-Eyes cards to the main deck.
Amano's first reaction was that this was a Blue-Eyes archetype skill. Which was fine in principle. But he only had one Blue-Eyes White Dragon in his deck. Adding three more Blue-Eyes cards at random had a realistic chance of creating deck inconsistencies.
Then again, the Blue-Eyes archetype did contain cards with strong individual power regardless of what else the deck was doing.
Then more notifications:
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection +2.
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection +3.
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection +4.
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection +5.
Staggered increases. A rising staircase.
Kaiba Chiaki. Affection: 84.
Warm reminder: affection is too high. There is a risk of being pursued by Kaiba. Please raise with caution.
The system itself had issued a warning. His system had a special note specifically for Chiaki's affection level.
Amano was well acquainted with the famous Yu-Gi-Oh urban legend. When a duelist truly earns Kaiba's acknowledgment in a fight, it does not matter if three thousand years pass. Kaiba will find them and demand a rematch.
Unlocked at affection 80: new love skill, Searching Across a Thousand Years.
Skill description: Hacker Invasion exclusive skill. Activates in background spirit mode.
A background spirit exclusive. Meaning it was not currently usable, since that required inhabiting someone else's perspective. But it would apply if he ever ended up in Chiaki's point of view somehow.
Which was something Amano genuinely could not picture ever happening.
He finished organizing the skills and cards and stepped down off the stage. If he had won, the least he could do was return like one.
"Amano!!!"
"President, we revere you!!!"
The Synchro Academy student wave hit him like a physical object, loud enough to drown out even the cheering from his own thirty-second district group. He was pulled into the middle of the Synchro Class E crowd, surrounded on every side.
Kikawayu Yuu had been attempting to take advantage of the crowd chaos and edge in close, but could not break through the density.
Fujiwara: "Three, two, one! Throw!"
This was the first time Amano had experienced it firsthand: being lifted by an excited crowd and sent into the air, exactly like it happened in anime. Even though the sky over Eden was artificial, a ceiling built over a structure inside a tower, the warmth rising from everyone below was entirely real. Warmer than any sun he had been made to face.
In this moment, every hard day in the slums felt like it had been worth it.
This was the kind of life a transmigrant was supposed to get to live.
Security Bureau.
Well. There it was.
Inside the interrogation room, Amano sat locked into his chair, looking at three people in Security Bureau uniforms on the other side of the table, and quietly reflected on his life choices.
Was this what Rin Seiya had meant when she described Security Bureau officers as people who could never manage to be useful at critical moments? In the 5D's era, the New Domino City bureau had seemed to operate almost entirely through one officer. But here in Eden, the enforcement capacity appeared to be considerably more active.
He had won his duel in the morning. By noon they had collected him.
The senior officer, who looked oldest of the three and carried the most insignia on his shoulders, spoke first.
"Don't be nervous, Amano. We have a few routine questions. Just answer honestly."
Routine questions.
But the shoulder insignia on all three of you is not exactly entry-level.
Amano did not understand the structure of Eden's Security Bureau well enough to read the exact ranks, but between the age, the bearing, and the insignia count, everyone sitting in front of him seemed senior.
"Amano. Where did you obtain The Wicked Avatar?"
There it was. He had already started mentally listing every possible offense the moment they took him away.
For an upstanding young person of law-abiding character with a hobby of beating elders at card games, the only realistic reason for a Security Bureau visit had to be the god card.
The Wicked Avatar had been the direct cause of a near-catastrophic incident in the mid-tier district not long ago. Using it openly in front of several hundred people without offering any explanation was guaranteed to attract attention from exactly the kind of people now sitting in front of him. The shoulder insignia started making more sense. For Eden's Security Bureau, a Wicked God card appearing in civilian hands was presumably classified at the highest possible level.
The problem was there was no answer he could actually give. He could not tell them the truth: that his transmigrator system had consumed three dark duelist occupation entries and used them as a ritual offering to summon a god. That was not information he could share with anyone.
Silence.
The senior officer sighed.
A second officer leaned forward. "These cards are extremely dangerous. Please cooperate with the investigation. We cannot simply allow something like this to remain in the hands of someone who cannot account for where it came from."
Making up a story would not work either. Saying he had found it, or that Eden's AI system had generated it for him, would both be traceable in an environment where item origins could be verified.
The youngest officer had heard enough. "Boss. Why are we wasting time? Lock him up for three days, he'll talk."
The senior officer sighed. "You're the one being young here."
The young officer nodded earnestly. "Exactly. This kind of person who doesn't understand how the world works needs to learn the rules."
"I was referring to you."
"Me?" The young officer was lost.
A knock at the door.
"Captain Niu. Your guest arrived."
The senior officer stood up as if this was exactly what he had been waiting for. He reached forward and unclipped Amano's handcuffs personally.
"Routine questioning concluded. You're free to go, Amano."
"That's it?"
The young officer was as confused as Amano. Total time from entry to release: approximately twenty minutes.
This was how the Security Bureau operated?
Amano was not going to complain. He left the interrogation room.
The young officer turned to his superior. "What just happened?"
"Someone on the other side has a god card. You're going to push that? Monthly salary of three thousand and you want to risk your life?" The senior officer tapped Amano's identification file on the table, pointing specifically at the occupation field. "Look at what he listed."
"He's not a student?"
The young officer had not paid close attention to the file when Amano came in. When he actually read the profession listed, even a veteran interrogator who had processed suspects of every variety had to pause.
The occupation field did not say Deity Tamer.
It said: Kaiba Corporation Chief Duel Advisor and Tower-Exterior Exploration A-Rank Investigator.
"Kaiba Corporation," the young officer said slowly. "The Kaiba Corporation?"
In the span of a few seconds, he had mentally revisited his entire interaction with Amano and come to the private conclusion that his career had nearly ended before he reached senior rank.
"If you go outside now you'll probably still be able to see who came to pick him up."
"I think I'll stay here."
The person who had come in person to collect Amano was standing outside the Security Bureau entrance.
"Senpai Kaiba. You came yourself?"
When there was nothing to ask, it was just Chiaki. When there was something to ask, the honorific came back.
Amano had beaten Chiaki in the morning. By noon she had come personally to collect him from detention. The sequence of events was genuinely difficult to process.
Chiaki answered without any particular expression. "Using a God Card in public, I assumed you would run into exactly this kind of difficulty. I made arrangements in advance. They didn't give you any trouble?"
"No, they were perfectly polite about it."
Chiaki had anticipated the fallout from Amano summoning her own lifelong enemy and had cleaned it up before he finished his victory lap. He found this almost impossible to process.
"Come back to Kaiba Corporation with me, Amano."
"Why?"
He had been inside Kaiba Corporation once, in New Domino City during the Chronicle. The Eden branch was entirely unknown territory. His afternoon had originally been mapped toward the Xyz Stage to check in on his supporters and get a first look at Yuma Tsukumo, ranked at the top of Xyz Academy.
"There are things I want to discuss with you. And the matter of the position in Kaiba Corporation that I promised you."
The fifty-million annual salary offer.
Fifty thousand he might have negotiated over. Fifty million was worth at least finding out what she had in mind.
"Get in." Chiaki opened the car door for him herself, without a trace of executive posturing.
Parked further down the street, Karl and Finesse were climbing out of a different car. Karl had activated the Wein family's network the moment he heard Amano had been taken in.
He assessed the situation across the road and shrugged.
"Nothing to be done. We were too late."
Finesse stood on the pavement across from the Security Bureau, watching the familiar figure climb into Kaiba Chiaki's car.
Just one step short.
Finesse felt exactly like a helpless husband watching from the wrong side of the street.