Chapter 159: The Girl with the Millennium Puzzle Fragment
Kuroshio Nagi?
Amano Rei stared at the system notification drifting across his field of view.
That name was familiar.
Was this not the missing suspect Finesse had flagged yesterday?
What was she doing crouched in an alley at this hour of the morning?
And despite this being their first-ever encounter, the system was reporting an affection value above 50. Not barely above: five full points above the usual threshold for total strangers.
Looking at the bandage wrapped around Kuroshio Nagi's left eye, it was probably covering some kind of burn mark. Which was exactly why the Wein family had added her to the list of suspected dark duelists.
Whatever the case, now that he had found her, Amano could not simply ride past.
He held her gaze for a moment, then slowly killed the D-Wheel's engine and stepped into the alley to make contact.
The girl's reaction was immediate. Her eyes went wide with panic. She stared at the approaching Amano as if he were a threat closing in, and the cigarette dropped straight from her lips. She spun around and bolted.
So she is running rather than standing her ground. Interesting.
She definitely has a guilty conscience.
Could she really be a dark duelist?
Amano felt fully recovered after two days of rest. Dark duelist or not, she was a missing suspect who had just run straight into his path. He was not letting her go.
Even with the system flagging her as an affectable target, that did not rule out her involvement in the Puppeteer's organization.
He accelerated after her.
Thinking about it briefly: if Kuroshio Nagi had a professional dueling identity, what would it be? A Landmine Specialist?
The problem was that the alley was narrow and full of turns. He could not ride the D-Wheel through it, which was the only reason this chase was still a chase.
Sensing Amano gaining on her from behind, Kuroshio Nagi drove her legs harder, the white skin below her black lace skirt flashing above frilled socks as she sprinted with genuine effort.
"Damn dark duelists, stop chasing me!"
She cursed while she ran, and her one functioning eye welled up, tears threatening to spill from sheer frustrated urgency.
Wait.
Amano thought he had misheard her.
Had Kuroshio Nagi just called him a dark duelist?
Someone who smoked regularly was not going to have peak physical conditioning. A few hundred meters was all it took before Kuroshio Nagi ran out of breath entirely, her lungs burning as if the air itself had caught fire.
She burst out of the alley exit onto the street on the far side, bent double with both hands on her knees, dragging in ragged gasps.
Between labored breaths, she managed to throw a hand up in a halt gesture at Amano as he caught up.
"Okay, okay, hang on, wait, I know what you're after."
Amano stopped, mildly confused.
This girl did not feel like a dark duelist.
Kuroshio Nagi dug a hand into the pocket of her frilled corset and produced a small golden object with an unusual shape.
"I know you want this. Right?"
"What is that?"
Amano had never seen it before.
The Millennium Scale sitting in his Eva Terminal wrist device resonated the moment it detected the strange object in her hand.
Resonance? That thing is a Millennium Item?
At the same moment, Dark Magician Girl materialized out of Amano's deck in full physical form, hand pressed over her mouth in surprise.
"That's a Millennium Puzzle piece! Well, a fragment of one!"
"A fragment of the Millennium Puzzle?"
The moment Mana said it, something clicked. The Millennium Puzzle in the anime had not started out as the iconic inverted pyramid. Yugi Mutou had assembled it piece by piece, which was exactly why it was called a puzzle. The complete form was built by fitting the fragments together.
So it requires assembly. Of course it does.
The fragment currently pinched between Kuroshio Nagi's fingers was one of those pieces.
In other words, this girl with the delinquent aesthetic was apparently about to hand over a piece of the Millennium Puzzle.
Maybe he had misjudged her after all.
Maybe Kuroshio Nagi genuinely was not a dark duelist.
In the instant Amano let his guard slip, Kuroshio Nagi, freshly recovered, showed her teeth in a small fanged smile at the corner of her mouth. The expression was unmistakably the satisfaction of a trap that had just worked. Her fingers closed tight around the golden fragment.
"Like I'd ever hand it over to someone like you. Say your prayers."
A faint dark aura pulsed outward from her feet.
It was a weak aura, but weak or not, it was enough to forcibly expand Amano's Eva Terminal into a Duel Disk configuration.
That is actually a Dark Game.
She genuinely tricked me. She is a dark duelist.
What was particularly strange, though, was how openly it was being initiated, right here on a public street in broad morning light, and how the Dark Game's barrier seemed off as well.
Dark Game barriers varied considerably in strength. The strength could be read directly from the barrier itself.
A standard Dark Game barrier prevented outsiders from entering. A stronger barrier blocked information entirely, making the interior invisible to anyone on the outside.
Kuroshio Nagi's Dark Game, by contrast, had a dark aura so thin that the barrier had almost no visible shape at all. It was barely more than a slightly thicker morning mist. A pedestrian who happened to walk past would not feel anything stranger than an unusually foggy morning.
To anyone outside, the two of them simply looked like a pair of duelists whose itch to play cards had struck at an inconvenient hour.
Mana tilted her head with casual observation: "This is a very weak Dark Game. Even if you lost, the penalty would barely qualify as a stomach ache."
A stomach ache. Inconvenient for his dueling committee image, but not catastrophic.
But however weak, a Dark Game was a Dark Game. When two duelists locked eyes and the conditions were met, there was no walking away.
[Forced Duel Initiated]
[Dark Game]
Amano's Duel Disk lit up first through the morning fog, granting him the first turn.
"My turn. Draw!"
Weak penalty or not, Amano had no intention of playing carelessly. This was, after all, a second-year student who had climbed into the academy's top ten by replacing Kaiba Chiha.
Granted, the recent string of life-or-death duels had made him forget, occasionally, that he was technically a first-year student.
One additional consideration: the dorm district counted as part of the academy grounds. Which meant a victory here would strip Kuroshio Nagi's hard-earned ranking points. The current tenth-place holder's score was very much in play.
"I activate the Spell Card Magic Wardrobe! I pay 800 Life Points and flip the top four cards of my deck face-up. Each Normal Monster of Level 3 or lower among them is Special Summoned!"
Amano LP: 4000 to 3200
The Dark Game's feedback speed was genuinely impressive. He had barely finished paying the Life Point cost before a dull discomfort settled into his stomach.
He flipped the four cards.
Yuyu.
Yuyu.
Priestess Who Receives the Star Chalice.
Timaeus the Knight of Destiny.
Setting aside the one card with no immediate role to play, the remaining three were all Level 2 or lower Normal Monsters and met the Special Summon condition.
His luck was running particularly well this morning. Three summons from a single card was exceptional value.
"I Special Summon both Yuyu copies and Priestess Who Receives the Star Chalice! Then I Normal Summon the final Yuyu from my hand!"
Four cards slammed onto the Duel Disk in quick succession. Four pillars of summoning light ignited across Amano's field.
The physical form of Eve appeared, juggling all three Yuyu spirits in her arms as if performing a street act.
"Let's go!" Amano played the cards out and let his fingertip sweep across all of them, triggering the Synchro trail.
"I treat Priestess Who Receives the Star Chalice as a Tuner and tune her with all three Yuyu!"
A Synchro Summon requiring no dedicated Tuner.
Eve, her expression one of determined enthusiasm: "Here we go!"
She launched all three Yuyu into the air at once and dissolved into the twin Synchro ring, threading upward through the three airborne spirits.
Level 2 plus Level 1 plus Level 1 plus Level 1 equals Level 5.
"Let the wishes of those born from humble origins tune into the starlight!"
"Synchro Summon! Star Chalice Divine Child, Eve!"
[Star Chalice Divine Child - Eve] [Level 5 WATER]
[Spellcaster / Tuner / Synchro / Effect]
[ATK: 1800 / DEF: 2100]
Wings of transparent light unfurled as Eve descended from the sacred Synchro brilliance with a grace that was entirely at odds with her usual personality.
Every time Amano saw this form, he found it genuinely difficult to reconcile. This elegant, luminous figure and the comedic card spirit he knew every day were demonstrably the same person.
On the other hand, Star Chalice Divine Child Eve had recently received a meaningful upgrade in Amano's deck.
She could finally activate her first effect. The long-dormant search was online.
"When Star Chalice Divine Child Eve is Synchro Summoned, her effect activates!"
[When this card is Synchro Summoned: Add 1 "World Legacy" card from your deck to your hand.]
"I add World Legacy, the Star to my hand!"
The card delivered as a reward from the Eva mainframe's executor mission. Its arrival finally filled the gap in Amano's deck: he now had a "World Legacy" card to search with the effect that had previously had nothing to find.
"I set two cards face-down. Turn end."
Whatever the state of the board, one thing was certain: Kuroshio Nagi was staring.
The reason was not hard to identify.
"A Synchro Summon without a dedicated Tuner. Does that mean you are Amano Rei?"
Kuroshio Nagi narrowed her one working eye, actually looking at him properly for the first time.
In fairness to her: she had mild myopia to begin with, and with only one functional eye, struggling to make out faces at a distance was entirely understandable.
But she had not been wrong when she first noticed him. Back in the alley, when she and the D-Wheel rider had made eye contact at a distance, she had already felt a flicker of recognition she could not quite place.
"You know who I am?" Amano asked, not particularly suspicious. The system had flagged her starting affection at 55, which was considerably higher than any first meeting should produce.
"I know you. Of course I know you!"
There was genuine intensity in the way she said it.
"I've watched every single one of your videos. I'm a fan! You're my favorite!"
"A fan? Your favorite?"
The videos she was referring to had to be the duel content Mizuki had edited together and published. He had not particularly thought about what kind of following those might generate.
Though it did explain why Kuroshio Nagi's initial affection reading was so much higher than baseline.
"But if you're a fan, why did you run from me? I just wanted to ask you a few things, Kuroshio."
On first sight, Amano had genuinely categorized her as a dangerous suspect. But his intention had been to approach and question her, not hunt her down.
If anything, her reaction had been the dramatic one.
So this was the type that detonated at the slightest provocation. Volatile, unpredictable, and dangerous in the way that soft-looking things sometimes were.
"A misunderstanding?" Kuroshio Nagi grabbed her own head in frustration.
"I just started a Dark Game against my own favorite streamer over a misunderstanding. As a fan, that is an absolutely outrageous thing to do!"
"Do you want to call it off?"
"No, you can't call off a Dark Game. But I also... don't actually want to."
Something shifted in her single visible eye. A different kind of excitement now.
"It's fine. You probably don't know this yet, but the Dark Game I start can only cause stomach trouble at worst."
Amano kept the internal commentary to himself.
He knew.
"Getting to duel my favorite streamer is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Please, let me see this duel through."
With that, Kuroshio Nagi drew her opening hand for her second-turn start.
"Amano Rei. I've watched every one of your videos more times than I can count. The duel against Kaiba Chiha. The duel against the AI player with the weird interaction. The Destiny HERO duel. Every single one is brilliant. The way I see it, you're already the second-best duelist in the whole academy."
"Second-best. Can I ask who you've got in first?"
"Yuma Tsukumo."
Yuma Tsukumo. Currently ranked first in the academy standings with a commanding points lead and no one close to his position.
The same name as the protagonist of the Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL anime.
Amano had looked him up on the Eva Network out of curiosity. The information available on Yuma Tsukumo was even thinner than what existed for Kuroshio Nagi: one line indicating he was a fifth-year student at the Duel Academy.
But as a fellow Xyz Academy student, Kuroshio Nagi likely knew more.
"Although, Yuma-senpai is almost ready to graduate. You, on the other hand, just started your first year. When it comes to long-term ceiling, my absolute favorite has everyone beat."
Calling him "my absolute favorite" at every available opportunity, occasionally interspersed with language that would not pass any content filter. Was this just how people with her particular aesthetic talked?
"But my deck is something special."
Kuroshio Nagi selected a card from her opening hand and aimed it squarely at Amano.
"The stronger your monsters are, the more powerful my deck becomes. I'm giving you this card."
Before the sentence was finished, she had already flipped the selected card across the space between them and into Amano's hand.
The next second, through the fog of the Dark Game, a massive shape let out a low, terrible bellow from somewhere inside the mist. It drifted closer. Then, without warning, it lunged forward out of the fog and swallowed Star Chalice Divine Child Eve whole.
Eve: "WHAT IS THAT THING!"
[Star Chalice Divine Child Eve: Tributed]
Amano turned over the card that had been tossed into his hand.
The card Kuroshio Nagi had just given him: Gameciel, the Sea Turtle Kaiju.
[Gameciel, the Sea Turtle Kaiju] [WATER / Aqua / Effect]
[This card can be Special Summoned from your hand to your opponent's field in Attack Position by Tributing 1 monster your opponent controls. If your opponent controls a "Kaiju" monster, you can Special Summon this card from your hand in Defense Position. Only 1 "Kaiju" monster can be face-up on the field. When your opponent activates a Spell, Trap, or monster effect, except "Gameciel, the Sea Turtle Kaiju": you can remove 2 Kaiju Counters from anywhere on the field; negate that activation and banish it.]
Everything suddenly made sense to Amano.
The description that had circulated online about Kuroshio Nagi: "a girl who commands the power of consumption."
So that was this kind of consuming power.