Jim was half-kneeling on the ground, lifting his head with some difficulty.
The hologram system in the arena had just shut down, and the afterimages had yet to fully vanish. The field was slowly filling with black smoke. Through that curtain of smoke, he could only barely make out Kira's upright silhouette; his exact appearance was obscured, leaving only a distant, towering impression in Jim's mind.
So strong.
That was Jim's first, instinctive reaction.
Of course, he wasn't just strong.
He was infuriating.
Jim didn't know if it was just a coincidence, but everything the other side pulled out today—Necrovalley, Macro Cosmos—were all "underworld" cards that stomped right on his weaknesses. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say this was the worst possible matchup for Jim.
But then again, this was the first time he'd ever met the Duel King.
Jim knew he was quite well-known in his own branch campus, but that fame was confined to that little patch of land. It's not like he was some internationally famous Duelist.
He didn't feel that his strength was any weaker than some of the big-name pros, but in terms of reputation, he felt he wasn't yet at the level to draw the notice of a top-tier master like the Duel King.
So the notion that "the opponent specifically tech'd against me" flashed through his mind, but was quickly dismissed.
That guy was the supreme King. Was he really the type to bother digging into the background of some student from another school just to teach him a lesson? To even prepare a custom strategy?
How could a King be that petty?
Coincidence. It had to be coincidence.
Jim quickly talked himself into it.
Both Macro Cosmos and Necrovalley were powerful, broadly applicable hate cards. While they were especially oppressive against his Fossil deck, they worked decently well against many mainstream strategies.
Besides, it was Jim himself who had challenged the Duel King. He knew that even if he came to the main campus, he might not actually get a chance to see the King in action. So beforehand, he had deliberately scouted all the places Kira often visited, staking them out for a long time until he finally caught this opportunity to challenge him.
Faced with a sudden challenge like that, how could the other side possibly have had the time to run background checks and construct a hard-counter game plan?
If this person truly had the power of prophecy, able to foresee every future opponent he would face, know all their decks and weaknesses in advance, then that would already count as part of his strength. If that were the case, Jim wouldn't even feel wronged about getting countered. He'd accept his loss wholeheartedly.
He'd just run into a bad matchup. That was all.
That said, Kira had indeed considered that Jim used Fossils, and specifically wanted to let a friend from off-campus experience how cruel the real world could be. But he hadn't gone as far as to painstakingly investigate every possible future opponent's deck and tactics.
He was targeting Jim only because he happened to already know Jim was on Fossils.
Oh, and also to test a deck.
The deck Kira used today was one he was still developing—far from finished. Necrovalley and Macro Cosmos were both tools to lock down graveyards, and the Glads, a world-champion deck he'd recently acquired, were a powerful system that could almost operate without using the graveyard at all.
Dimension-Glads had once been a common meta build in the Gladiator Beast heyday. The concept was to banish both players' graveyards with cards like Dimensional Fissure and Macro Cosmos, then let the Glads keep looping: battle, shuffle back into the deck, Special Summon from the deck, keep Contact Fusing, keep popping cards, and keep bouncing between deck and field. They didn't need graveyard resources yet still maintained strong offense and endurance.
On top of that, the Glad system worked very well with lots of generic trap disruption. Plus, with a full suite of high-impact "trap holes" in the deck, it could easily bomb the opponent into misery and then grind them until they doubted life itself.
As for the few Monarch cards mixed in, that was purely Kira testing the upper limits of his fate power.
This was something he'd been trying for a while. With the many new spirits he'd obtained, the constant practice, and the repeated tempering of his momentum in duels against top-level masters, his fate power now was incomparable to when he'd first entered the academy. Because of that, he could be a lot bolder in his deckbuilding.
Monarchs were the 2007 Fifth World Championship winner, and Glads just happened to be the next year's champion deck, the 2008 Sixth World Championship winner.
A fun idea had occurred to him long ago.
If one day his fate power reached the level of King-like, to the point where a random pile of unrelated archetypes would run perfectly—where even stuffing Kaiba's own mishmash pile of different series into the deck wouldn't break it…
If his fate power was strong enough for that, couldn't he just jam together decklists from multiple past World Champions and build a Champion Goodstuff pile?
A blind box of all past champion decks: whichever system you draw, that's what you play. Sounded kind of fun just thinking about it.
But that was something for the future.
Trying bold builds was also a way of exploring his limits. And the more clearly he perceived those limits, the more he could remind himself how long the road ahead still was, how much room there was to improve.
"I lost."
Jim wasn't particularly discouraged; he just let out a regretful sigh.
"There's always someone better. That saying is definitely true. I thought that even if I couldn't beat you, at least I'd be able to put up a fight. But now it seems…"
He gave a bitter smile and shook his head.
This was probably the most miserable duel he'd ever played in his life.
He even had a strange illusion that he wasn't sure if what had just happened really counted as a "duel" at all.
He basically hadn't been able to play.
But Kira just smiled. "I can tell you're quite strong."
"Are you comforting me, or mocking me?" Jim said helplessly.
Of course he'd think that. From his viewpoint, he'd basically had no room to do anything the whole duel, played like a toy in the palm of that invincible Grave and Macro Cosmos.
No—in fact, judging from the terrifying burst the "Gladiator Beasts" had shown when Kira got even a little serious on the final turn, Jim suspected that even without those "underworld" floodgates, he might still not have been a match.
Kira shook his head.
"I'm serious. Besides, you didn't actually go all out either, did you?"
As he spoke, he glanced at Jim's sealed eye.
Jim touched that eye, froze for a moment, then smiled and shook his head.
"Oh, that. When I was a kid, the one who gave this to me said it was a power that would only awaken one day when I was fighting for an important friend. I'm not actually sure how to use it…"
Kira nodded.
He was interested not only in Jim's deck, but in that eye as well. This was a divine artifact that had once allowed an ordinary person's "momentum" to instantly rival the Supreme King's. Although it had still ultimately lost, that put it at a pretty high level.
Definitely worth researching.
The Fossil deck went without saying.
With that in mind, Kira gave a mysterious smile and clapped Jim on the shoulder.
"Have you ever considered transferring to the main campus and joining our lab?"
Jim froze.
"Huh?"
…