Chapter 277: Please, Just This Once!
When both Dark Games ended simultaneously, the power of Super Polymerization caused a brief moment of dimensional convergence between the alternate world and their own, and in that window Jaden used the crossing to pull everyone who would have vanished alongside the alternate world's defeat back to Duel Academy.
But Amano's group had their own world to return to.
The collapse of the Chronicle's environmental data arrived at almost exactly the same moment as the dimensional collapse.
In the original GX story, the Amano belonging to this era would have returned to the Academy alongside everyone else.
But the Amano from three thousand years in the future had his consciousness pulled back to Eden.
As the collapsing environment data closed in around Amano and Kikawayu, the familiar weightless drop of leaving a Chronicle followed.
This was Amano's first time exiting a Chronicle while occupying someone else's body through Hacker Invasion.
He was worried something might go wrong, and without thinking about it, he kept Kikawayu's body wrapped tightly around his own unconscious form.
Though whether that was Amano's own instinct or the body's own muscle memory was not entirely clear.
Either way: every exit from a Chronicle came with a moment of disorientation, a brief gap in consciousness. And in that gap, being in a ghost-in-the-machine state, Amano's consciousness slipped back into the mental passageway he had crossed when invading Kikawayu's body, and found itself inside her mind-room.
From experience, even a brief lapse in the real world could stretch into a long stretch of time inside a mind-room. He had learned that during the first time he had entered Finesse's: what felt like a lengthy conversation had corresponded to just the few seconds of Finesse being knocked unconscious by the Puppeteer before the end of a turn.
Kikawayu's mind-room.
Like the passage that led to it: completely dark. Because of how the situation had unfolded, Amano had not had a second to look at it when he first entered.
Examining it now with a bit more time: it felt like a bedroom type, similar to Rin Seiya's. He could make out the blurred shapes of a table and a bed in the darkness. And the fact that his clothes were still on confirmed it: Kikawayu's mind-room had the same special property as Rin Seiya's.
Was this Kikawayu's actual room reproduced in the mind?
Thinking about it: across eighteen years of friendship, Amano had been to Kikawayu's room exactly once. That was genuinely strange for two people who had been that close their whole lives. He had actually visited childhood friend Yui's room more times than Kikawayu's.
The reason was simple: every time he wanted to go, Kikawayu found an excuse to delay him or redirect him somewhere else. The one time he successfully got in was because Amano had pushed for it out of pure curiosity and Kikawayu had reluctantly agreed.
The curiosity, once satisfied, had not lingered. It was a perfectly ordinary room. Simple, even sparse. The kind of minimal setup that most people in District 32 had.
"Kikawayu's room..."
He still had a rough mental map of it from that single visit, and going by memory, he felt along the wall until his fingers found the light switch.
He was about to flip it when a small, thin voice reached him from the dark.
"Don't. Don't turn it on, Rei."
"You're in here."
He had assumed he was alone in the mind-room. Kikawayu had been somewhere in the dark the whole time.
Was she planning to pop out from under the bed like Rin Seiya in that younger form, trying to catch him off guard?
"Rei, don't turn the light on..."
If anything, Kikawayu's voice was getting quieter. Weaker. Something like pleading was creeping into it.
"What's wrong, Kikawayu?"
If this was a bedroom-type mind-room and his clothes were on, both of them should be fully dressed even with the lights on. Nothing to be especially worried about.
"If you see it, please don't hate me for it."
"I won't. I'm turning it on."
Such a vague reason. Amano cleared every hesitation from his mind and pressed the switch.
Light flooded the room, swallowing the darkness of the previous second and illuminating every corner of the dim bedroom.
When Amano saw what was in the room, he discovered he had overestimated his own composure.
The walls. These could not be called walls anymore. Every surface, from floor to ceiling, was covered in photographs of himself, pressed together so densely that not one sliver of the original wall was visible anywhere.
Like some kind of unsettling ritual arrangement, Amano found himself surrounded on all sides by what had to be several thousand copies of his own face, and the only thing he could accurately describe his reaction as was his scalp going numb, followed by a wave of genuine nausea.
Kikawayu stood in the corner of the room with her hands clasped behind her back, looking like a child who knew exactly what she had done, eyes drifting everywhere but toward Amano.
After the initial reaction faded enough for Amano to look more carefully, he found the coverage was thorough in a way that deserved acknowledgment. There were photos from when he was about two or three years old, running continuously through to recent pictures including his duel against Kaiba Chiaki at the Academy Challenge tournament. A complete personal chronicle, compressing the full arc of Amano Rei's life into one bedroom.
"Kikawayu. What exactly is this?"
Kikawayu, hands still behind her back, answered with an audible trace of pride: "My collection."
"What collection?! And you have the nerve to say it out loud like that!"
Amano, thoroughly exasperated and genuinely angry, grabbed Kikawayu by both cheeks and pulled in opposite directions.
"Ow!"
He had always found Kikawayu's face easy to poke and pull at over the years. It was objectively a very cute face, cuter than most. If your childhood best friend growing up happened to have a face like that, the impulse to pinch it was understandable. This particular time was entirely about anger.
"Don't tell me your real room is the same."
"Identical! One-to-one!"
She said it with unmistakable satisfaction, which only made Amano more furious. He increased the pressure.
"That's why you never let anyone into your room."
"Because having the collection found would be a problem."
"You're fully aware it would be a problem!"
Kikawayu's attitude of "well, it's all out now, might as well own it" left Amano at a complete loss for how to express what he was feeling. He released her cheeks, tired of it. The effort had left two vivid red fingermarks pressed into the soft skin on both sides of her face.
She didn't seem bothered at all, lifting her head and looking at him without the slightest embarrassment.
In male form, Kikawayu and Amano stood at about the same height. In this form, she was a head shorter, and looking up at him with that unguarded smile with the red marks on her cheeks, it did something to the overall impression that Amano found himself completely unprepared for.
He turned his head away. Looking at Kikawayu directly was not an option right now. The alternative: the walls covered in photographs of himself, or looking down at the floor, which apparently had cushions with his face on them too.
When did she photograph that pose? He did not remember anything like that.
His best friend's true level of it was clearly something even the Thought Reading skill had only caught the surface of.
He was also reconsidering his assessment of Yubel's role here. The mind-room did not lie. Kikawayu had not been twisted by Yubel. This was simply who she was.
But as he had promised Kikawayu, he did not hate her for it. If anything, looking at all of this made him want to confirm something.
"Kikawayu. Do you actually like me this much?"
"Not like." She shook her head. "I love you, Rei. Deeply."
With everything out in the open, Kikawayu had completely stopped managing how she expressed herself.
"But why?"
It was still something Amano genuinely could not work out. Two people who had been that close their whole lives: sure. But in his recollection, he had not been exactly kind to Kikawayu when they were younger. Even after growing up and moving past the rougher edges, the relationship had always been something he thought of as mutual support between equals, not anything that should have produced this.
"There's no 'why,' Rei. 'Liking' someone might need a reason, or it might be something fleeting. But 'loving' someone is different: it weaves itself into everyday life, into thousands of ordinary days and nights. That's the one thing you can never get wrong."
Amano had never been on the winning end of a verbal exchange with Kikawayu in female form, and this one was no exception.
"I understand, Kikawayu."
Kikawayu's eyes went immediately wide, the expectation visible in them before she even spoke. "So you agree?"
"...I said I'll think about it."
Accepting, all at once, that the person he had grown up beside as a best friend was a woman and had felt this way the entire time: Amano was not there yet.
"How long will you think?"
"Not long."
Kikawayu pressed her lips together. "Fine. But I have one more thing to ask."
Amano braced himself. She was probably going to ask about the Hacker Invasion and how he had gotten into her body.
"When you saw my female form, you recognized me immediately. Even Finesse-sama didn't recognize me. Why?"
He was thrown. Of all the things she could have asked, this.
The true answer: after the coma from the Dark Game against the Wicked God, he had dreamed of Eva, and Eva had given him something like eyes that could see through illusions. He had been seeing Kikawayu's actual form ever since, and had spent the entire time telling himself it was his own mind producing things it wanted to see.
Admitting that would mean admitting he had already seen her as a girl for some time and had written it off as wishful thinking. That was both embarrassing and potentially incriminating.
The mind-room began to lose its edges. Kikawayu's physical body in the real world was regaining consciousness, which meant they were about to leave.
Amano improvised: "Think about how long we've known each other. Kikawayu is Kikawayu. Whatever form you take, I'll always recognize you."
The effect was immediate. Kikawayu's cheeks went from her normal color to bright red in what was practically an instant, her legs shifted against each other involuntarily, and her hand shot out and closed around Amano's wrist.
"I agreed to give you time. But can you promise me one thing in return?"
"What?"
"It's fine if we stay as friends for now. I'll beg you if I have to!"
The mind-room was dissolving. All Amano could see in the last seconds was Kikawayu's mismatched eyes, like still water, fixed entirely on him as her grip on his wrist tightened.
"Please. Just this once!"
Had he misheard something?
When Amano opened his eyes again, the scene waiting for him was not the virtual network login booth.
A white expanse. In the center of it, a flat-chested girl with a mysterious smile on her face.
"Eve? No, that's not..."
Amano had been here three times now, and recognized it immediately: the interior of Eva's network, beyond the surface layer.
"Eva. Why are you appearing again."
Since Z-one's warning, Amano's guard when it came to Eva had shifted. Before that conversation, he had treated the mainframe as exactly what she appeared to be: the management system for Eden, and her communications with him as responses generated by programming. He had not particularly questioned her even when acting as her proxy executor.
Z-one had told him not to trust Eva completely. That had introduced a wariness he had not previously felt.
Eva set aside her smile. "This Chronicle was unusual, Amano Rei. Do you know why?"
Unusual was accurate in any number of ways.
It was the first time Amano had spent more than a day inside a Chronicle. And more significantly: the Chronicle had refused to close even after the clear condition was met, extending for two full additional days until Amano's duel with Kikawayu concluded.
"Was it another Eva system bug?"
Eva shook her head with something that looked like mild offense. "Not me this time. You are the problem, Amano Rei."
"Me?"
"In this Chronicle, you deviated from the original historical timeline by far too large a margin. You should not have encountered Amon at that stage of the story. And you should not have defeated the Supreme King the way you did."
"I shouldn't have defeated the Supreme King that way? The clear condition for the Chronicle was defeating him."
"According to the original established history, you were supposed to fight the Supreme King to a mutual annihilation. You would have disappeared again in front of Jaden Yuki, and Jaden would have grown into a solitary hero, alone."
Eva added: "But you defeated him using Awaken, Your Slumbering Elemental HERO. That card changed Jaden Yuki's perception of you and altered the trajectory of his life going forward."
"And that's why the Chronicle extended for two extra days?"
"Amano Rei: this is the first time in any of your Chronicle visits that you have altered the past on this scale. The butterfly effect from three thousand years ago has caused changes in Eden three thousand years in the future."
"Eden changed? In what way?"
"The changes your own actions caused in history: those are yours to witness. As for whether the change is good or bad, I cannot judge that either."
Something that not even Eva could judge felt genuinely serious.
"Don't blame yourself too much. I assigned the mission, so whatever consequences follow, we share responsibility equally. And for completing an SSS Chronicle for the first time: I've made specific modifications to your Chronicle clear reward. Take what you've earned."
That reminded Amano: when the Chronicle first launched, the listed reward had been a set of Evil HERO monster cards. The SSS hidden reward had changed what could be taken out. But the extended two-day delay had meant he had never gotten a chance to actually see what the change was.
After Eva finished, Amano's consciousness made one more jump, and when he opened his eyes, he was back in the virtual network login booth where the Chronicle had started.
"Kikawayu?" Finesse had apparently woken up a few minutes ahead of him and was checking on his unconscious body when she noticed the other figure returning to consciousness. "Amano... wait, you mean..."
Amano confirmed it with a look. Finesse was sharp enough to piece it together without a full explanation.
Amano checked: back in Eden, Yubel's illusion on Kikawayu appeared to have reactivated. In his own perception Kikawayu remained in her actual female form, but everyone else in the room would be seeing the male version again.
"So Kikawayu was being controlled by the spirit called Yubel?" Finesse asked, taking the theory she had heard Amano put forward during the duel and running with it. "A dueling spirit that can twist people's will AND their gender?"
"Just go with that."
"I see. So that explains it." Finesse studied Kikawayu's body with renewed attention, and visibly relaxed at what she saw now that Yubel's illusion had reactivated.
During the Dark Game, the brief appearance of Kikawayu's actual form had been the single most surprising thing Finesse had witnessed, not the declaration of love. A man simply should not have been shaped like that.
Now back to looking entirely ordinary, Finesse quietly exhaled.
Though: seeing might not always match touching.
"Hold on..." Amano started to say. But Finesse's hand moved faster than his warning.
The full scope of Yubel's illusion was not limited to visual perception: it extended to touch as well, which was the only possible reason Amano had gone eighteen years of casual physical contact with his best friend without realizing anything was different.
The issue was that from Amano's position inside the body, no illusion was being applied to his own experience. What Finesse was touching in her own perception was a completely ordinary male chest. What Amano experienced from the inside was something considerably more specific.
He made a sound he had not entirely planned on making.
Is this how sensitive Kikawayu's body actually is?
Which meant eighteen years of poking and prodding and the occasional casual physical aggression that had passed for affection between best friends...
Finesse pulled her hand back, noticed Amano's expression with considerable interest, and allowed the corner of her mouth to curve upward.
"Could it be that Kikawayu is particularly ticklish?"
"Finesse, that was not appropriate."
"What does it matter? It's your soul in there, Amano."
He had a memory of this exact dynamic from being trapped in Rin Seiya's body, with Finesse performing a very similar ambush. Apparently this was simply something Finesse did when the opportunity arose.
Kikawayu's body, Amano discovered to his considerable embarrassment, had essentially no tolerance for this kind of attention: even being prodded at the sides produced a response he could not suppress, and Finesse, clearly enjoying herself, pushed the advantage without mercy until Amano was flat on the floor.
Then the door to the login booth opened.
At three in the morning, Kaiba Chiaki walked in. Dark circles visible, black coffee can in one hand. She took in the scene: Amano's body unconscious on the floor, Finesse with what could generously be described as an unfortunate expression on her face, and Kikawayu flat on the ground with eyes watering.
The tone that came out of Kaiba Chiaki's mouth was colder than Amano had ever heard from her.
"Would someone like to explain what exactly is happening here?"