Chapter 230: Exodia, Lend Me Your Head!
"We have an incredible relationship!"
[Mizuki] [Affection: 69]
Incredible was not an exaggeration, either. By the system's own ranking scale, sixty-nine affection points placed a person squarely in the bracket labeled "very close friends." Mizuki was not lying. There was a professional dimension to their partnership, a mutual investment in the streaming account they both had a stake in. But none of that changed the fact that she genuinely considered Amano Rei a kindred spirit.
Good friends, then. Which meant there was no reason to dance around what he wanted.
"Since we have such a great relationship, I'll just come out and say it, Mizuki. I need to borrow something from you."
"Sure, go ahead. Just name it, Amano-bro. As long as it's within my power, I'd even lend you money."
"I need to borrow your head."
"I'd die........ that can't be right..."
"I'm joking. What I actually want is to borrow your copy of Exodia the Forbidden One."
At present, Amano's collection of the sealed pieces stood at four out of five: he held the Right Arm, Left Arm, Right Leg, and Left Leg of the Forbidden One. The one piece he was missing was the only Effect Monster in the set, the head itself.
Having Eve stand in as a makeshift bootleg head was no permanent solution. And a counterfeit head carried none of what actually mattered: the instant-win condition.
Eve: "(3)> I would rather not be assembled into that thing's head, for the record!"
"Oh! So that kind of head!" Mizuki broke into a laugh of sudden understanding.
Once she grasped what Amano was actually after, her expression didn't shift dramatically. She simply reached into the card case on her desk and placed the card directly into his hand.
Staring at the card the pink-haired girl had given him, Amano felt a strange, dreamlike disbelief settle over him.
That easy?
[Exodia the Forbidden One]
[Level 3 / DARK]
[Spellcaster / Effect]
[ATK: 1000 / DEF: 1000]
[If this card and "Right Arm of the Forbidden One," "Left Arm of the Forbidden One," "Right Leg of the Forbidden One," and "Left Leg of the Forbidden One" are all in your hand: you win the Duel.]
That was the real article. The legitimate head. The one that triggered the actual rule victory upon assembling all five pieces.
But as Amano stood there, the copy of Exodia the Forbidden One dissolved into pale blue data and flowed right back into Mizuki's possession.
"Two more months..." Mizuki murmured.
"What just happened?" The sight of a card teleporting back to its owner wasn't entirely new to him. It was exactly what had happened when he'd handed his soul-bound Blue-Eyes White Dragon to Kaiba Chiha, only to watch it snap straight back into his deck.
So this was what Chiha had felt in that moment. Poor girl.
But Amano distinctly remembered Mizuki mentioning this card was not soul-bound. It was a family heirloom, passed down through generations.
"Amano-bro, you know about the trade cooldown period, right?"
"I do."
The Eva system had implemented the rule to prevent duelists from sharing a single deck or cycling a single powerful card among players. After any transfer of ownership, a card entered a one-month cooldown period during which it was bound to the new holder and could not change hands again.
But the semester had been running for over a month already. By any reasonable count, Mizuki's cooldown should have long since expired.
Mizuki added: "That's just the standard cooldown. For certain special cards, though, if ownership has changed hands too many times over the years, the cooldown periods stack on top of each other. And as you know, this card has been in my family for generations."
Passed down through generations meant the card had transferred between owners countless times since her ancestors first acquired it. If each transfer added to the accumulated cooldown, the total could grow extraordinary.
"When I first received this card, the trade cooldown was three full years. Just now when I tried to hand it over, the Eva system told me there are still two months remaining."
Three years of cooldown on top of everything else. Practically a prison sentence.
Which also meant that even after the remaining two months expired and Mizuki was willing to lend it to him, returning it afterward would trigger a fresh cooldown of at least three years.
So there was no assembling all five pieces to challenge the Atem AI's Egyptian God lineup within these next two months.
Two months wasn't really that long, though.
And Kaiba Chiaki had never specified any deadline for completing the assignment.
Once he thought about it that way, the urgency drained right out of him.
There was a saying along the lines of: finish your boss's tasks too efficiently and you'll only end up buried under more tasks.
Don't be that person.
With his mind fully relaxed, Amano leaned back in the club room chair, crossed his legs, and idly watched Mizuki busy herself with video editing.
Then his eyes drifted to the affection indicator floating above her head.
[Mizuki] [Affection: 69]
One point away from unlocking her skill.
Given that her family had guarded the head of the Dark Wizard across multiple generations, her skill reward might well be connected to it. Maybe, just maybe, her skill would place a copy of Exodia the Forbidden One directly into his main deck.
That would spare him the trouble of borrowing it at all, and save him from the looming three-year return cooldown once the loan was done.
Besides, Mizuki's personality didn't strike him as particularly difficult to win over.
"Mizuki, are you thirsty? I can get you some water."
"There's cola in the fridge, Amano-bro. Help yourself if you need something."
"Mizuki, are you hungry?"
"I just finished a bowl of instant noodles."
It was at that moment Amano Rei rediscovered a harsh truth about himself: he had absolutely no idea how to proactively raise a girl's affection.
He supposed he was fortunate that Eden ran on a dueling worldview. Every relationship that had grown to meaningful heights had been built across a card table. That was simply how things worked here.
"Mizuki, want to duel?"
"Absolutely not!" Her expression turned genuinely pained. "You'd demolish me. I'm not going to humiliate myself like that."
So the dueling approach was useless with Mizuki.
At a complete loss, Amano stood up and decided to at least tidy the room. He wasn't counting on it to earn him much affection. The place just genuinely needed it. The club room looked exactly like the den of someone who never left the house.
"Amano-bro, I can clean it myself..."
"It's fine, keep working. This will be quick."
"Okay. Thanks."
After that brief exchange, the pink-haired girl buried herself in her screen again.
Amano had barely cleared half the floor when the door swung open and a faint trace of tobacco drifted in.
He looked up. "Kuroshio?"
The moment their eyes met, Kuroshio Nagi froze solid. Then she began backing out through the doorway, as if time itself were rewinding. She retreated in perfect reverse, pulled the door shut behind her.
That girl radiated such a guilty energy. Why?
Outside, Kuroshio pressed her back against the wall, took a slow breath, and ground out her cigarette against the floor.
"Why is he in the club room? Wait, he's a member of this club too. Of course he's here. That's completely normal! This isn't a dream! Yes!"
After composing herself, she rearranged her expression into what she clearly believed was a bright, cheerful smile, and pushed the door open again.
"Good morning, everyone!"
Amano could see the effort she was putting into projecting the image of a lively, energetic girl. Unfortunately, paired with the spectacular dark circles under her eyes, the result landed somewhere closer to "tragic" than "charming."
Mizuki turned from her desk. "Knew it was you, Kuroshio-senpai. I saw a shadow dart past and then smelled cigarette smoke."
"You two know each other?" Amano asked.
He thought back to the first time he had met Kuroshio, when he'd brought her back to the club building after the Dark Game. He had borrowed Mizuki's club room for that. At the time, Kuroshio had mentioned she was interested in becoming a streaming duelist and would join the club when she got the chance.
Apparently that had happened while he wasn't paying attention.
Mizuki said: "Kuroshio-senpai officially joined the club a few days ago, Amano-bro."
Hearing Mizuki call her "senpai" reminded Amano that Kuroshio Nagi was a second-year student, actually an upperclassman to both of them.
Given the circumstances of their first meeting, catching her crouching in an alley smoking and then watching her get beaten badly enough to collapse in the street, he had simply never processed her that way.
She didn't seem to mind.
Kuroshio slid across the tatami in one fluid motion and came to a stop directly in front of Amano. "We're club partners from now on, so please take care of me, my oshi!"
"You being here means...?"
"Yep, I lost!"
For someone who had just lost her Bronze Stage defending duties, Kuroshio wore the relaxed expression of a person finally let out of a cell.
"I was the last one to fall. The Synchro Academy Bronze Stage had already been cleared before me. Honestly, I'm satisfied with that."
Synchro Academy's Bronze Stage had fallen too. That meant all three academies this year had been pushed at least to the Silver Stage. The tournament's overall intensity was genuinely remarkable.
That said, today was the final day of the Academy Challenge Tournament. With the exception of Fusion Academy, which Amano had cleared straight through, the other two academies would almost certainly follow historical precedent and end at the Silver Stage.
"Since you've joined the club, Kuroshio-san, are you planning to start streaming? I could stay and cheer you on."
Amano's goodwill toward Kuroshio had nothing to do with her personality, her appearance, her gothic fashion sense, or her smoking. The single fact that she had sponsored him with three copies of Nibiru, the Primal Being earned her enormous gratitude. He was grateful enough that even being dragged into a Dark Game on the spot was basically water under the bridge.
"No, I have something more important to handle right now!"
Kuroshio flipped open the spare tablet in the room and pulled up Mizuki's Bilibili account.
"More important than streaming?"
"Comment control! The section has been absolutely overrun with antis lately. I am not letting these people pollute my oshi's comment section!"
He had antis now?
Well. In the age of mass internet access, the real surprise would be not having them.
Amano leaned over to get a look at the tablet. What kind of criticism could he have possibly attracted from posting duel videos?
Maybe people were saying he wasn't handsome enough. That would be pure slander.
"My oshi, you're so... so close." The proximity of her actual idol was enough to spike Kuroshio's heart rate considerably.
Close? I changed your diapers when you were little.
He set that thought aside and read the highest-engagement comments under Mizuki's recent videos.
[This has to be scripted. No one duels this well every single time.]
[Results like this consistently? The streamer is clearly faking it.]
[And where are these duels even happening? You can't find that location anywhere. AI-generated footage.]
[Boycott AI-generated scripted streamers!]
Staged duels, then.
It made sense, in a way. The two most viral videos currently were the Chronicle run against Aster Phoenix and the freshly uploaded WRGP Chronicle riding duel against Jack Atlas. Both came from Chronicle sequences, an environment only Amano could access and display in that particular way. The footage genuinely didn't have an easy explanation.
Kuroshio continued, her voice tight with indignation: "Skeptics have popped up before, but since there were never any obvious signs of AI generation, the noise always died down fast. Recently, though, a streamer with a pretty substantial following started pushing the narrative, and now the entire comment section is a mess."
"A substantial following?"
"This one!" Kuroshio's finger swept across the screen and opened an account belonging to someone named Lilith Alpha.
"A VTuber?"
A virtual streamer, the kind who presented themselves almost entirely through a two-dimensional animated avatar. This particular creator, Lilith Alpha, used the image of a blue-haired demon girl as her face. Her two most recently pinned posts were both dedicated to calling out Mizuki's duel footage as staged and fabricated.
"Mizuki, do you have any history with this person?" Amano asked.
"None whatsoever."
That tracked. A month ago, Mizuki had been the kind of streamer whose videos averaged fewer than fifty views. There was no realistic way she could have crossed someone with Lilith Alpha's reach.
"This is what people call clout chasing," Kuroshio explained, shifting into the lecturing tone of someone fluent in the darker corners of internet culture. "Your videos blew up, my oshi, and as the saying goes, the bigger you get, the more people come for you. Some streamers will do anything for traffic. They don't even need actual evidence. Just making a loud public accusation drags attention your way."
The internet really was its own ecosystem.
Everyone in this era had carved out their own way to survive in it. Amano had no sweeping judgment to offer about that.
But when it started affecting him and the people around him, something had to be done about it.
At the end of Lilith Alpha's most recent callout video, he noticed one final key detail.
["Mizuki Mu, if you genuinely believe your duels are real, come and accept my challenge. Prove your skills in a live duel against me!"]
No online matches in Eden. That made this a direct real-world challenge.
If they accepted, the traffic would flow straight to Lilith Alpha's platform just as Kuroshio described. Engagement would hit new heights, almost entirely on Lilith Alpha's terms.
"Fine. Challenge accepted."
"Amano-bro, isn't that a little rash?"
"My oshi, the other side is a former pro. There's nothing in this for us if things go wrong. If we lose, it's a disaster."
Former professional players occupied a different tier from academy students. Each year, a fraction of the most elite graduates pursued professional careers. But the ones who actually survived in that environment were the sharpest edge of an already sharp field.
Key word being "former," though.
A former pro meant someone the professional circuit had already eliminated.
"All I have to do is win," Amano said simply.
Declining a challenge from a washed pro was not something he was willing to do.
There was also another angle to consider. Watching Mizuki today grinding through clip edits, watching Kuroshio going line by line through hostile comments, thinking back to Rin Seiya putting in filming work on their behalf. Everyone connected to this streaming account was putting in real effort. Meanwhile, all Amano ever did was show up and play cards, and he still walked away with half the revenue. That sat uncomfortably.
If playing cards was his contribution, then playing cards was how he would fix this.
"Mizuki, drop the Kaiba footage too. Seriously. You've given Kaiba Corporation enough reason to resent you already, and that would be twice."
"But..."
Amano pressed one hand firmly down on the pink-haired girl's head and gave it two firm, spinning rubs.
"Trust me. We're going to win. Send the challenge."
"Okay. I trust you, Amano-bro!"
Just as she had broadcast the Amano versus Chiha duel live despite all the pressure that carried, Mizuki chose to trust him again. Her partner on the road to this dream was not going to lose.
She sent the challenge directly from the account.
The response came instantly.
"Address!"
Mizuki sent the club building's location.
Another instant reply.
"There in two hours!"
With the mid-level district's floating rail network, two hours could cover almost anywhere.
Five minutes later, a pinned post appeared on Lilith Alpha's account: [Explosive livestream content in two hours. Stay tuned!]
"There it is, Amano-bro. Two hours, and a former pro duelist is coming straight for us."
Mizuki trusted him completely. That didn't stop her nerves from humming, though. This was her first direct online challenge match, and the streamer in her couldn't entirely suppress the anticipation that came with it.
"My oshi is so dependable! Go ahead and destroy her!"
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection +1] [Affection: 78]
The idol-filter effect on Kuroshio's affection gains was genuinely something else. Hers had been climbing quietly on its own and was now nearly at the threshold for her second skill.
Two hours later, the three of them waiting in the club building's central plaza finally watched a blue-haired girl roll up on an electric scooter.
The real person really did look something like her VTuber avatar. Not a bad resemblance at all. The "real-life beautiful girl" tag on her profile was not false advertising.
As a former professional who had competed on stage with her face visible, there was no hiding her appearance.
Amano confirmed: "You're Lilith Alpha?"
The girl hopped off the scooter, planted one hand on her hip, and pointed forward with theatrical confidence. "You're Mizuki Mu? Good thing you had the guts to actually show up!"
Amano was not Mizuki, but since the streaming account was now a shared operation, he didn't bother correcting her.
"Then let's get going! Here we go!"
She reached into the scooter's storage, pulled out her equipment, and flung it skyward.
Four compact drones activated overhead and spread into a four-point formation, capturing the entire arena from every angle simultaneously.
"Those are incredible streaming rigs. She really is a top-tier streamer," Kuroshio muttered, admiration leaking through even directed at an opponent.
"What are the contract terms?" Lilith Alpha asked.
Even a street challenge required contract terms in Eden. The Eva system demanded it.
Mizuki spoke first: "If you lose, you post a public apology on your account admitting that your accusations against us had no factual basis."
Lilith Alpha replied: "And if I win, you pin the video of your loss on your account for one full month."
Both sets of terms made her motivations completely transparent. Whether Amano's duel footage was real had stopped mattering entirely. This was maximum traffic optimization, start to finish.
An extreme traffic maximizer. Everyone in this era found their own lane for survival.
Amano offered no sweeping judgment about that. But since she had chosen to come after him and the people around him, she would see exactly what the consequences looked like.
[Eva: Duel Recognized]
[Duelist: Amano Rei]
[Duelist: Suzune Ruri]
[Connecting to data network. Duel field generating.]
[Duel type: Contract Duel]
[Proud duelists, let the outcome of this battle serve as the scale that weighs your souls!]
[Duel!]
The Eva system had announced both players' real names to the world.
Suzune Ruri drew her deck from beneath her skirt. When her Duel Disk unfolded, it did so with a transformation sequence that belonged in a magical girl production. Even her outfit shifted to match the costume worn by her VTuber avatar.
A fully custom duel skin. Similar in concept to Finesse's hero transformation. Someone had designed it specifically for her, the mark of a genuine professional approach to the streaming craft. Even for an impromptu street challenge, she maintained her on-brand presentation without missing a beat.
Before she arrived, Amano had gone through several of Lilith Alpha's past duel videos. She really did only use cards featuring female characters in battle. Not just the monsters either. Her Spells and Traps had to have women in their artwork too, without exception. A genuine self-imposed restriction, not a marketing angle.
But no two of her videos had shown the same deck. Every time she played, it was an entirely different collection of girl-themed cards. The card pool depth a former professional could draw on for that kind of variety was not trivial.
"I'll take first turn!" Suzune Ruri drew her opening hand from the ornate Duel Disk.
"Come on out, my adorable girls! Give everyone the most spectacular duel you've got!"
Her fingers raised a card against the backdrop of her glittering field.
"Normal Summon: Live Twin Ki-sikil!"
Amano stared.
Those cards exist in the mid-level district?
[Live Twin Ki-sikil]
[DARK / Cyberse / Effect]
[ATK: 500 / DEF: 0]
[The following effect of this card's name can only be used once per turn. (1): When this card is Summoned while you control no other monsters, this effect is a Mandatory Trigger. Special Summon 1 "Evil Twin" monster from your hand or Deck. (2): As long as this card is in the Monster Zone, your opponent must pay 500 LP to declare an attack.]