Chapter 236
"He held on! We actually held on!"
"That was magnificent, Rin!"
The moment Prayano's Life Points finally hit zero, Principal Leiden, who had been squeezing Principal Grapha's arm hard enough to cut off circulation in his panic, released his grip at last. Both academy principals let out a long, relieved breath.
As Amano had observed from the stands, the duel had looked desperate from the outside, but Senpai Rin had been dueling with complete composure the entire time. She had even managed to squeeze in a financial optimization play at the finish line.
Maybe Rin Seiya had been right about the source material. In the Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's lore, the Meklord Emperors were mass-produced cannon fodder. A ghost from Fusion Academy's enrollment records a hundred and ten years ago, however, had equipped them with Machine Emperor cards considerably more dangerous than anything that appeared in the anime.
"Wait, what is that?!" Finesse pointed toward the arena in alarm.
"How is that possible?" Even Nanki'in Sakuya, who almost never showed visible emotion, had an expression of clear shock on her face.
As the stardust light faded from the Gold Stage arena, everyone finally got a clear look at what had been hidden beneath the grey-white cloak.
Left half human. Right half machine. Split down the center of the face. That kind of design was common enough in movies and television, but seeing it in person hit completely differently. The mechanical half was grotesque, all exposed components and reinforced structure where a person's face should have been.
But it was not the mechanical side that stunned the crowd.
It was the human half.
Kikawayu stepped forward without a word, pressed one hand onto Amano's shoulder, and used the other to cover the right side of his face. Then she held up the comparison.
It was not anyone's imagination.
"They look alike," the crowd said, nearly in unison.
Not identical, but the resemblance was strong enough. Eighty percent, at least.
"What is going on here, Rei? When did you start cosplaying as yourself?"
"You're asking me? I want to know too."
Who cosplays as their own face? And that would technically be someone else cosplaying as him, not the other way around. But the real question was why a being that supposedly enrolled at Fusion Academy a hundred and ten years ago had half a face that looked like his.
"Hmm, hmm, hahaha! Of course! So that is what this is!"
While everyone else stood around in confused shock, Rin Seiya, who had gotten a close look at the face from across the arena, laughed with obvious satisfaction after a moment's thought.
"I know exactly what is happening here. I have completely figured out the truth! It is the fake Jack Atlas from episodes eighty-three and eighty-four, right?!"
What was Senpai suddenly talking about?
Actually, hold on. When she put it that way, something did click. Amano did not have Rin Seiya's encyclopedic episode recall, but he did have a memory of a 5D's story arc involving a robot impersonator going around causing trouble in Jack Atlas's name.
"So this proves it, right? My junior here really is Jack Atlas. Even if this one is just a knockoff robot."
The rare moment of sharp insight did not last. Senpai's anime-obsessed brain had already veered back toward its natural destination.
Amano had more pressing things to notice than the robot's face.
Why had nothing ended yet?
Prayano's Life Points had been at zero for a while now, and the Eva mainframe had still not declared the Gold Stage duel concluded.
Prayano spoke. "Did you think this was over? No. This is only the beginning."
Seeing a face that closely resembled his own, split down the middle with half of it replaced by machinery, saying that with only the human half moving was one of the more unsettling things Amano had encountered in recent memory. A cold feeling crept up the back of his neck.
Then the sound of two D-Wheels roaring through the crowd snapped everyone's attention sideways. After everything that had already happened, people instinctively stepped out of the way. The two D-Wheels arrived without riders, moving as though they had minds of their own, and rolled straight up onto the Gold Stage arena.
Amano recognized one of them. The one painted red.
"Yusei No. 2!" Rin Seiya stared at her beloved D-Wheel, the one with three years of loan payments still attached to it. "Why did Yusei No. 2 just show up on its own? Fiona never told me she installed an autopilot function."
Her Duel Disk connected to the D-Wheel a second later, receiving the signal that a Riding Duel was being forced open.
[Eva: Duel Authorized]
[Duelist: Rin Seiya]
[Duelist: Prayano Type 2]
[Data Network Linked. Duel Field Generated.]
[Duel Type: Academy Challenge Tournament x Riding Duel]
It was still registering as an Academy Challenge Tournament match. And the duel type had shifted to Riding Duel.
Prayano had already mounted a D-Wheel with a vaguely industrial, antique mechanical aesthetic. The half-and-half face turned toward Rin Seiya with a clear challenge.
"Come on. If you do not accept this Riding Duel, the Synchro Academy stage will be considered breached."
"That person already lost," Principal Leiden said flatly, unhappy.
He was right. The duelist called Prayano had lost. But the duel contract the Eva mainframe had just announced listed the opponent as Prayano Type 2. Prayano lost the duel. That had nothing to do with Prayano Type 2.
No one could explain why the Eva mainframe was cooperating with a half-mechanical robot whose face looked like a student enrolled a hundred and ten years ago. But the fact remained: Eva had classified this as an Academy Challenge Tournament match. As the current Gold Stage champion, Rin Seiya could not refuse the challenge.
Even in a newly established academy city, the Eva mainframe's authority ran above a principal's jurisdiction.
"Fine." Rin Seiya swung a leg over Yusei No. 2. "You happen to have a face that looks like my junior, so I am going to beat your knockoff version twice as hard. And when I do, you better give me the most pitifully satisfying expression you can manage."
The priority here is the face similarity, Senpai?
[Riding Duel! Acceleration!!]
With the Eva mainframe's declaration, both D-Wheels launched off the Gold Stage and tore into the city.
The arena had technically left the stage entirely. Was this still considered a defense of the Gold Stage at this point?
By the time everyone processed what had happened, the two D-Wheels had already cut through the gathered students and hit the open roads of the mid-level district. A second later, the ground shook.
"Whoa!" Amano Shio, with her mechanical leg exoskeletons, could not keep her footing through the unexpected tremor and fell into Amano again.
"An earthquake?" Nanki'in Sakuya speculated.
They were in the mid-level district. Earthquakes were a lower-level concern. Whatever this was, it was something else.
The shaking continued for nearly a full minute. Then, along both sides of the mid-level district roads, massive steel barriers rose from the ground and sealed the street into a closed track.
It looked exactly like Neo Domino City from the 5D's anime, a purpose-built urban circuit for Riding Duels. The kind of infrastructure that only existed in the show.
Amano was fairly certain Eden Tower did not have this function. The last dark Riding Duel he had witnessed used the Earthbound God's power to raise walls of flame. A supernatural duel construct, not a built-in city feature. This was something different. A capability that most people did not have authorization to activate. Something only a very specific kind of presence, with a very specific set of permissions, could turn the city into a racing circuit.
Something like the half-mechanical entity currently riding inside those walls.
"There is a feed!" Finesse pointed toward the rear of the Gold Stage. The backdrop wall that had served as an arena display had converted itself into a projection screen showing the Riding Duel in progress.
The screen lit up just in time to show Yusei No. 2 vanishing and reappearing.
"Let the crystallized dreams of the future open the gate to a new evolution! Shine as a road of light!"
"Accel Synchro! Shooting Star Dragon, descend!!"
Where the earlier duel had required a calculated risk with Majestic Star Dragon's board-wipe play, this Riding Duel saw Senpai Rin go with a textbook approach. She Accel Synchro Summoned Shooting Star Dragon, the card specifically designed to counter Meklord Emperor strategies in the anime.
"Shooting Star Dragon's effect activates! I reveal the top five cards of my Deck! This turn, Shooting Star Dragon can attack a number of times equal to the number of Tuners among the revealed cards!"
Three Tuners. Three attacks.
Three phantom images of Shooting Star Dragon split off from the original as the triple-attack effect resolved.
Shooting Star Dragon destroyed Prayano's Meklord Emperor in battle, then followed through with two additional direct strikes.
"Stardust Phantom!!"
Prayano LP: 4000 to 0. Overkill: 7000.
The Type 2 unit wailed and crashed its D-Wheel. Even in a Riding Duel, Rin Seiya handled a Meklord Emperor deck with the same unhurried ease she showed on the regular stage.
Rin sighed. "Even with a face that looks like my junior's, a knockoff's scream still does nothing for me."
Senpai, do you want to hear a specific person scream?
"But that should be the end of it..." Rin started to say.
Then stopped.
Three more D-Wheels closed in and surrounded her before she could finish the sentence.
Given the circumstances, no one could blame her for the expression she made. Three more machines, each wearing the same half-human, half-mechanical face, appearing all at once was a significant amount of visual impact at once.
Just like in the anime. Mass-produced.
[Eva: Duel Authorized]
[Duelist: Rin Seiya]
[Duelist: Prayano Type 3]
[Duel Type: Academy Challenge Tournament x Riding Duel x Consecutive Battle]
A new rule had been added. Consecutive Battle. The same format as the WRGP Riding Duel tournament: the field carried over, no Life Point recovery, no hand replenishment, directly into the next duel.
Amano frowned at the screen. "What is the Eva system doing? It feels like it is specifically targeting Senpai Rin."
Then Ivaliss's voice cut through clearly: "Drop the 'feels like.' Those machines are specifically targeting Synchro Academy."
"Ivaliss. You know something?"
"I know nothing. But I can sense it. Those mechanical undead..." A pause, then a sound that was half laughter. "Mass-produced Amano Rei. That is genuinely funny, I cannot help it."
"Get to the point. Sense what?"
"Those mechanical undead feel very similar to the bug that appeared in Eva's duel contract system during that incident in the lower district. And this time, normal dueling probably will not be enough to stop them."
Ivaliss had been born from exactly that kind of anomaly in the Eva system. Her sensitivity to similar phenomena was sharper than anyone else's.
Normal dueling would not stop them.
"Then all Senpai has to do is knock out the remaining three mass-produced units and..."
Amano stopped mid-sentence as the screen showed what had followed the three surrounding D-Wheels into the sealed track.
Dozens more.
An unbroken stream of D-Wheels, engines roaring, pouring into the circuit behind the three that had Rin Seiya surrounded.
There was no end to them. There was simply no end to them.
"So many of them," Kikawayu said, eyes going blank and still.
Even acknowledging that this was a 5D's anime storyline made real, seeing more than a dozen copies of your own face all in the same place was deeply unsettling.
What Kikawayu said next made it considerably worse.
"Even if they are fakes, if you could take two heads and put them together to make one complete face, I think it would make a nice room decoration."
First of all, both heads would be left halves. Putting two left halves together would look nothing like a normal face. Second, that was his face she was describing mounting on a wall. Even accounting for Kikawayu's particular sense of humor, that was genuinely disturbing.
Before Amano could finish that thought, the screen showed a new development.
Prayano Type 4 had opened the attack.
"I activate Speed World 2's effect! I remove four Speed Counters, reveal two Speed Spells, and deal you 1600 points of damage!"
Rin Seiya LP: 3500 to 1900.
The Consecutive Battle format meant no Life Point recovery between rounds. The Speed Spell forced damage made it a reliable method of grinding down a duelist through sheer numbers, regardless of how decisively they won each individual exchange. Even Rin Seiya could not sustain that pressure indefinitely against an unlimited supply of opponents.
Finesse received a call. She relayed the contents to Amano a moment later.
"Latir says the Public Security Bureau has noticed the Riding Duel. But the steel walls the system raised around the track are blocking the police D-Wheels from entering."
Exactly the outcome Senpai Rin would have predicted from the police, with exactly zero surprise.
If there were friendly Riding Duelists available on this side who could enter the track and intercept some of the incoming machines, there might be a way to turn the situation around. But the walls blocked that option entirely.
If Amano had known the barriers were coming, he would have gotten on his D-Wheel and driven in before they went up. At this point, the only way to provide support was to abandon the D-Wheel entirely and physically climb over the steel walls to get in on foot.
"Actually, there is still one way." Finesse caught his eye, tilting her head with a look that carried considerable meaning.
"Are you saying..."
"There is not really any other option, is there."
The Hacker Invasion skill. The background spirit possession Amano had not used since Shiyue Yi had been dealt with. The absence of Dark Game situations since then had left it sitting unused in the back of his toolkit.
Physical steel walls presented no problem for a technique that could penetrate the barrier of a Dark Game itself.
"But will it actually help?"
This situation was different from every previous time he had used it. Before, when Amano had served as background spirit support for Finesse and Nanki'in Sakuya, it was because they were facing Dark Games they could not win on their own. Rin Seiya was not losing. She was being overwhelmed by numbers alone. Her dueling ability was not the problem.
If Senpai Rin could not manage an unlimited stream of opponents, what made Amano think he could?
The best he could add in background spirit mode was access to more Dragon-type Extra Deck options. Was that going to be enough?
"Stop overthinking it!" Finesse gave him a solid slap on the back. "Even if it does not help, going in and trying gives you more of a chance to change things than standing here watching. Right?"
She was not wrong. Hesitating and doing nothing was not a style that suited him.
Something else surprised him, though. Since when had she become this relaxed about the situation? She had shown up at Senpai Rin's apartment once to make a point. And now she was actively pushing him to take over another woman's body.
Then there was the other problem.
Amano leaned toward Finesse and lowered his voice. "There are a lot of people here. If I go under, is that going to cause a problem?"
Especially with Kikawayu standing right there. Given his good friend's personality, Amano was genuinely uncertain what she might do if he suddenly lost consciousness in public.
Finesse smiled. "Already handled. I called for backup."
"Backup?"
Two minutes later, a sports car engine cut through the crowd. After the D-Wheel incidents, everyone had developed the instinct to step aside for anything moving fast through the area.
"Get in, Amano Rei." Karl, wearing sunglasses, beckoned from the driver's seat.
"Get in?" Amano blinked.
"I am taking you somewhere." That was the story Finesse had arranged in advance.
Taking you somewhere. Where exactly was left entirely to everyone else's imagination, with the implicit sense of urgency making it clear that no explanation was owed. There was one very important detail about Karl's sports car that sealed the arrangement: two seats only. Anyone who wanted to come along simply had no way to fit.
Amano worked out what the Wein siblings were doing in about three seconds.
"Thanks for this, big bro."
"Do not call me big bro."
Amano got in. Karl hit the accelerator and the car vanished from sight.
Somehow Karl had become increasingly useful as a supporting cast member lately. Ever since the siblings had patched up their relationship, Finesse had been deploying him with growing confidence.
She was even actively encouraging him right now to go and take over another woman's body, despite being the one who had personally shown up at that woman's apartment to establish a territorial claim. Amano was not sure when that change had happened.
"Do not worry about a thing," Karl said, eyes on the road as the city blurred past. "I will keep driving until you come back. Nobody is getting near you."
"I honestly did not expect you to be on board with this."
Karl was helping Finesse's self-declared boyfriend channel his consciousness into another woman's body. That was a specific set of circumstances.
Karl lowered his sunglasses slightly. The silver-grey eyes behind them, the same shade as Finesse's, glanced over at the passenger seat, and he produced a smile that made Amano feel momentarily outclassed in that particular department.
"A hero never asks about origins."
"Understood."
In the passenger seat, as the sports car pushed through the city at speed, Amano activated the skill and let the gold light of his Eva Terminal come alive on his wrist.
This possession was unlike any he had attempted before. He was going into a Riding Duel already in progress, against an enemy with no visible ceiling on their numbers, with no clear solution to the situation.
But waiting outside and doing nothing was not who he was.
The way through would have to reveal itself once he was already inside.
"Hacker Invasion!!"
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