(4.1k WORDS!!!!!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!
Chapter 163: The Girl Who Died of Shame in the Street
"Amano-kun won! I knew he would!"
"It wasn't a Synchro finish, but honestly? No complaints whatsoever!"
"Our student rep is undefeatable!"
"Actually, who even was that on the other side? She had the nerve to challenge him right at our school gate?"
"Hard to tell with that eye patch. The look is kind of familiar though."
[Ranking Points Gained: 61,000]
[Rank Updated: 520 -> 299]
Kuroshio Nagi, ranked tenth in the Academy City competitive ladder, could certainly be counted on to spray out an impressive number of points. Though as it turned out, points were not the only thing that ended up getting sprayed.
Kuroshio Nagi had collapsed onto the ground in a sitting heap, her screams of agony transitioning into full-throated sobbing. She clearly had no intention of standing up anytime soon. The one saving grace was that the Synchro Academy students watching from the gate did not seem to recognize her behind the eye patch.
Then Rin Seiya snapped her fingers, a light bulb going off above her head as a buried memory surfaced.
"Wait, I remember now!"
She clapped her hands together.
"That's Kuroshio Nagi! The second-year genius ranked third at Xyz Academy. I saw her at the Joint Duel a while back. I cannot believe she came right up to our school gate to start something!"
Well done, Seiya-senpai.
You have just stripped away the absolute last shred of cover Kuroshio-san had left.
"WAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAH!"
The moment her identity was announced to the crowd, Kuroshio Nagi's crying only got louder.
"She's from Xyz Academy? Then she deserved to lose!"
"Stop playing the victim. Our student rep went easy on her by any measure."
"Our student rep is a certified sigma male. Everyone knows his favorite hobby is demolishing beautiful girls in duels!"
You people need to stop pinning bizarre labels on me.
Watching Kuroshio Nagi collapsed on the ground while the Synchro Academy crowd piled on without mercy, Amano Rei felt his guilt compound by the second.
The girl in front of him was, by any measure, someone who had supported his duel videos.
Even if the whole Dark Game was born out of a misunderstanding, the fact remained that he was the one who had done this to her.
"All right, settle down. Morning drills are starting. Everybody clear out."
He put on his student rep voice and dispersed the Class 1-E crowd. The rest of the onlookers, taking the cue from the departing students, gradually drifted away after them.
Amano walked up to Kuroshio, pulled off his school uniform jacket, and draped it over the girl's shoulders.
That should cover things a little, at least.
Even at close range there was no detectable smell, so the odds of exposure were low.
"I... I..."
Kuroshio Nagi looked up at Amano through tear-glazed eyes. Her one good eye, the right one, swirled with a complicated tangle of emotions caught somewhere between mortification and something else entirely.
As for what to actually do next, Amano had no idea.
A situation like this, a person experiencing the ultimate public social humiliation right on the street, was something his combined memories from two lifetimes offered absolutely zero guidance on.
Kuroshio Nagi's face burned red as she pressed the case. "It was only a tiny bit. Really, truly, barely anything. Practically nothing!"
"Come on. I know a place. Let me sort this out."
A solution had surfaced after a moment of thought. The club building closest to the academy had its own free showers, kept available for the sports clubs. That would do.
He turned back toward the school gate. "Class rep, can you tell Kondo-sensei I'll be out for morning classes? Something came up."
Sakuya's eyes went faintly wide. "Where are you going? I'll come too. I'll take leave too."
Rin Seiya planted both hands on her hips and inserted herself into the conversation. "Junior. You are standing right in front of me, taking an Xyz Academy girl away to parts unknown. Are you seriously telling me you have that little regard for the number-one-ranked beauty at Synchro Academy?"
Amano had honestly seen this coming the moment both of them showed up at the gate. Getting Kuroshio out of here alone was already a lost cause.
"Then you both come. I'll explain the relevant details as I go."
Only the Dark Game and the Millennium Puzzle fragment. Those were the parts worth explaining.
The rest of it, the other thing, the thing that could never be spoken aloud in polite company, Amano resolved to carry that secret to his grave for the sake of his little fan's dignity.
He helped Kuroshio Nagi onto the back of his D-Wheel and rode hard. Ten minutes from the school gate to the club building at full throttle.
During the ride, Kuroshio Nagi was visibly uncomfortable about sitting behind him.
"I'm worried I'll get your D-Wheel dirty."
"Something like that just wipes off."
"It wipes off, sure, but..."
The mental image of what exactly Amano would be wiping off made Kuroshio feel considerably worse.
She wanted to disappear.
On the other hand, the fact that this absolute disaster of a situation had somehow resulted in her sharing a D-Wheel with the streamer she had followed for ages made her feel considerably less like disappearing.
Maybe this was the price someone like her had to pay to earn a slice of happiness.
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection +1] [Affection +1] [Affection +1]
Interesting. Every point of Kuroshio Nagi's affection climbed in single increments. Each one individually.
That specific quirk was giving Amano a mild sense of unease. He had heard that the high-intensity delinquent aesthetic sometimes came packaged with deeply obsessive personality traits. He genuinely hoped Kuroshio was just into the look.
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection: 67]
On the other hand, her affection was climbing very quickly. Was this just how the idol filter worked? The way fans forgave everything when it came to someone they admired?
Out of everyone Amano had encountered so far, she was shaping up to be the easiest to get along with.
Outside the club building showers, Rin Seiya studied Amano with wide-eyed suspicion. Sakuya stood beside her, expression thoughtful and unreadable.
Amano had carried Kuroshio on his D-Wheel, so Sakuya had naturally ridden with Rin Seiya to keep pace.
"Junior." Rin Seiya's voice dropped into an exaggerated scandalized whisper. "The very first thing you do after finishing a duel is bring a girl to the club building for a shower? If you are going to pull this kind of thing, at least spring for a hotel room. Are you seriously too cheap to pay for one, you absolute menace."
"Stop teasing me, senpai. You already figured it out."
"Busted, I guess." Rin Seiya grinned and stuck out her tongue. "It was faint, but that was definitely a Dark Game. Stardust Dragon confirmed it for me."
Being bonded to the card spirit of Stardust Dragon had its advantages. What the others might have dismissed as an unusually heavy morning fog, Rin Seiya could read immediately.
"So what was the price for losing the Dark Game, and why does it involve a shower?"
"On that point, senpai, please stop asking. What I can tell you is that the price was serious."
Inside the shower room, a hesitant head of blonde hair poked back out through the door.
With her eye patch removed, the faint pinkish burn scar near Kuroshio Nagi's left eye was clearly visible.
"Um. My idol. Could I ask you to grab something for me?"
"What do you need?"
"..."
Right. Washing up solved one problem but not the other. There was the obvious alternative of going without, but Kuroshio had clearly not chosen that option. Sending Amano, an adult male, to buy women's underwear was a task essentially equivalent in difficulty to buying contraceptives from a pharmacy.
"Leave it to me, junior."
Rin Seiya, perceptive as ever, spotted his predicament and volunteered herself for the mission without hesitation.
The moment Rin Seiya left, Sakuya spoke quietly. "This Kuroshio Nagi. She is the girl that both the Nanki'in family and the Wein family have been searching for."
"You knew, class rep."
Unlike Rin Seiya, who had no particular backing or resources, the Nanki'in family heiress naturally had full awareness of the recent surveillance operations both families had been running on suspected dark duelists.
And the one target who had gone completely dark, managing to evade tracking entirely, was a name Sakuya had quietly memorized.
"So after dueling her, do you think she is a dark duelist?"
She was certainly a dark duelist in the literal sense, capable of opening a Dark Game using a Millennium Puzzle fragment. But the impression she gave both during and after the duel did not match the profile of someone operating with the Puppeteer or any affiliated organization.
"Let me keep watching." Amano was not ready to commit to an answer yet.
Unless her entire performance was a fabrication, down to pretending to be his fan and enduring that spectacularly undignified finale in the street, just to dismantle his defenses. If she had gone to that length, all Amano could say was: respect. You are a better liar than the Soulswindler.
Rin Seiya returned at a light jog, cheerfully swinging a pair of plain white underwear from one hand.
"I'm back, junior!"
"That was fast. How is it that fast, senpai?"
The nearest convenience store to the club building was a solid ten-plus minutes on a D-Wheel round trip. Rin Seiya had been gone less than three.
Senpai, you are not secretly teleporting.
"Oh, I didn't buy these." Rin Seiya smiled with cheerful mischief. "These are mine."
Amano inhaled wrong and spent several seconds in a coughing fit.
So what was currently sitting in his hands was a secondhand, personally pre-owned pair?
Then again, based on the temperature, they were not fresh off the body.
"Why do you have a spare pair here, senpai?"
"They're in my club room locker. Sometimes I stay up too late watching footage and I cannot be bothered walking back to the dorms, so I sleep in the club room. I keep a change of clothes there for exactly that."
Completely reasonable. Perfectly logical.
Amano had taken his mind somewhere it had absolutely no business going. He owed himself a personal penalty for that.
He passed them through the gap in the door without looking, and that particular crisis was resolved as cleanly as it was ever going to be.
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection +1] [Affection +1]
The girl who emerged from the showers looked like a different person. Clean, visibly lighter, an actual human being again. Amano found himself wondering whether she had gone days without access to a proper shower while on the run.
"My idol. One more favor, if that is okay."
The shift from the mortified voice through the crack in the door to the one speaking now was night and day. She stood with her short skirt, her delinquent posture fully reassembled, and produced a slim cigarette from her skirt pocket.
"Want one?" She held it out.
Kuroshio-san, you have a certain energy about you.
All three of them declined.
"Nobody? Then I will pass too. Making people breathe secondhand smoke is bad manners."
A little blond delinquent punk with a sense of consideration for others. Noted.
"Could I also ask you to find me something to eat? I have not eaten anything for two days. I am genuinely starving."
"Two days without food?"
That explained a great deal about what had come spraying out earlier. Two full days of nothing going in, and something still managed to come out. Honestly impressive in the worst possible way.
"Food we do not need to buy. The club room already has some."
The club room in question was Mizuki's streaming club. She spent more time there than in her dorm during most weeks, which meant her stockpile of crackers and instant noodles had grown into something respectable. It was a little early in the morning for her to be there, since she was probably still in class, but Amano had the door code as a registered club member.
He sent Mizuki a quick message on Vsn explaining the situation and asking permission to raid her supplies.
The reply came back almost immediately with her trademark enthusiasm.
[Absolutely yes, bro, go wild, I'll restock after! Also tell me what flavor of instant noodles you like and I'll get extra next time!!]
Mizuki was flourishing lately. The split from Kaiba Chiaki's donation that Amano had passed along, followed a short time later by Nanki'in Muramasa's contribution, meant they had each received sixty thousand points as their half. There was more money than either of them had figured out how to spend.
"Mmm. Finally alive again."
Kuroshio Nagi slurped the last of her noodles, set the cup down, and pressed one hand against her slightly-full stomach with visible satisfaction.
"Kuroshio-san. Not eating for two days, I assume this is not a diet situation."
At her level of competitive ability, no matter how badly things went, going hungry in the Academy City was not something that should happen through lack of resources.
In his previous life Amano had read passing mentions of some circles where looking skeletal was treated as an aesthetic standard, but looking at Kuroshio Nagi as she was right now, he thought she looked perfectly fine. Better than fine, honestly.
"Diet? No. Nothing like that." She waved the idea off.
"The truth is, I have been running from a strange organization for the past two days. I know how that sounds, but it's real. I used Dark Games to drive them back when they cornered me, but no matter how many I pushed off, more kept appearing. So I changed approach. Fight, fall back, go to ground, repeat."
That explained everything about why the Nanki'in family operatives had filed their target as completely lost. Kuroshio Nagi's Dark Games were devastatingly difficult to see coming. Most people who walked into one probably could not even identify what had happened to them after the fact. And once the duel ended in defeat, losing control of your body in an extremely public and humiliating fashion made continuing surveillance physically impossible. The Nanki'in family's footsoldiers were rough-edged enough that not one of them would ever put what actually happened into a written report.
Amano found himself briefly sympathetic toward those operatives.
"Last night I managed to slip into a convenience store around midnight. Grabbed a pack of cigarettes. Before I could get to anything to eat, they were on me again." Kuroshio shook her head with a small sigh.
"That tracks." Amano nodded.
It all made sense now. Why she had been crouched in an alley at dawn with a cigarette. Why she had bolted the instant she spotted him approaching. Why, when escape was impossible, she had activated a Dark Game without a second of hesitation. She had run this same cycle so many times over the past two days that it had become her default state.
There were still a few things he wanted to understand, though.
The Millennium Puzzle fragment in her possession. And the words she had thrown over her shoulder while running: the dark duelists are after me.
If it was only the Nanki'in and Wein family surveillance teams trailing her, there would not be any actual dark duelists in the mix.
She was still holding something back.
Amano activated his Eva Terminal and projected the Millennium Scale onto the table in front of them.
"Try touching this, Kuroshio-san."
Kuroshio looked at the projected image. Her right eye flickered with open shock. "A Millennium Item? You have a Millennium Item too!"
"You recognize it?"
She nodded. "Yugi Mutou told me they would find each other. Item holders are drawn together."
"Yugi Mutou? Wait. Kuroshio Nagi, you have met Yugi Mutou?"
"In a Duel Chronicle. So when I saw the video your streamer channel put up of the duel against the Yugi AI, I recognized him immediately. Someone who could beat a Yugi Mutou AI and still come out standing, that was the moment I went completely all-in as a fan."
As she spoke, Kuroshio Nagi reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out the golden Millennium Puzzle fragment.
"This is the item I carried out of the Chronicle with me."
Duel Chronicles could apparently yield more than cards on exit. Noted.
The fragment's shape was irregular, impossible to identify as any particular section of the complete puzzle. That was not surprising. The Millennium Puzzle in the original story was designed with labyrinthine complexity. Even Yugi Mutou, whose mind was built for exactly this kind of challenge, had spent eight years reassembling it completely.
The Chronicle Kuroshio had entered must have required a specific card as its key to unlock. Based on everything, that key was almost certainly Spirit Swords of Sealing Light. Which would place the setting after the Pharaoh's departure, the period covered in the theatrical film, where the Millennium Puzzle lay in fragments and Kaiba Corporation's technology was used to forcibly piece it back together.
"So you want me to touch this, right?" Kuroshio Nagi, freshly painted nails and all, reached out and gently pressed her fingers against the projected surface of the Millennium Scale.
The Scale that weighed the hearts of the living was Amano's fastest and most straightforward method of answering the question that mattered.
Even Sakuya, watching from the side, found her toes curling slightly with tension.
After a moment of swaying, the feather representing the heart drifted down and settled gently, bringing the two pans of the scale back to perfect balance.
"What does that mean?" Kuroshio asked.
"You passed." Amano let out a quiet breath.
"Oh! I passed? I don't know what I passed, but that's great!"
A balanced Millennium Scale signified a good heart. It meant Kuroshio Nagi's performance throughout all of this was genuine, not an act.
Which raised a question. If the four-layer Synchro Dark Game was not the cause of her eye injury, what was?
"I hope this is not too rude to ask, Kuroshio-san." Amano gestured toward her left eye.
"Ah, you want to know about this..."
At the mention of the burn near her eye, Kuroshio Nagi became suddenly evasive, her cheeks going faintly pink. She moved like someone who had been caught with something slightly embarrassing.
"You do not have to tell me. But if you are willing, I will trust you a little more."
Kuroshio Nagi wrestled with herself for several visible seconds. Then she nodded, firmly.
"Okay. I will tell you."
Behind Amano, Rin Seiya leaned over to Sakuya and whispered, "Did not see that coming. Junior is surprisingly good at this. That girl looked completely unmanageable and he has her eating out of his hand."
Sakuya's reply was quiet and dry. "I have noticed. He can be surprisingly cunning when he wants to be."
"This was last week." Kuroshio Nagi set her jaw. "My lighter exploded while I was lighting a cigarette."
"..."
When the Wein family had been narrowing down suspects for the burn scar near the left eye, Finesse herself had acknowledged it was an extreme edge case. Under normal circumstances you might not see one naturally-occurring injury matching that description among a million people. Which was exactly why the Wein family had listed every single matching case as a potential witness to the Dark Game involving Scar-Red Nova Dragon's four-layer Synchro finish.
But extreme edge case did not mean statistically impossible.
And sitting right across the table was living proof of the difference.
A girl who had gotten her eye singed by an exploding lighter, ended up on the Wein family's list by sheer terrible luck, spent two days not eating while being hunted through the city, and then initiated a Dark Game against the wrong person at dawn.
Kuroshio Nagi's face was still deeply red. "I finished explaining. Can my idol trust me a little more now?"
"Yes. And to trust you completely, I just need to look at this one more time." Amano indicated the Millennium Puzzle fragment in her hand.
Sakuya tilted her head and replied to Rin Seiya in a murmur: "I see what you mean, senpai. He does have a cunning side."
Kuroshio Nagi ground through the internal debate with visible effort. Then the white-knuckled grip on the fragment slowly loosened, and she opened her palm.
"I should warn you. That thing is genuinely dangerous, not just because it can open Dark Games. Since I got hold of it, I have had more than a few dark duelists come after me trying to take it."
The fragment being capable of opening Dark Games was already concerning enough. But the deeper danger was that it attracted hostile attention from people who knew what it was worth.
That also answered the question about what Kuroshio had shouted while running: that the dark duelists were after her. If it had only been family surveillance operatives, there would have been no dark duelists in the group at all.
Honestly, at this point Amano had already decided. Kuroshio Nagi was not a bad person. The evidence was thorough and the Millennium Scale had confirmed it.
He reached out and took the golden fragment from her open palm.
The instant his fingers closed around it, his system produced a sound he had never heard before.
[Millennium Puzzle fragment detected. The Romance Development System will begin automatic upgrade in 12 hours.]
Really. Even now, you are insisting on calling yourself the Romance Development System.
You have already been exposed for what you are. "Automatic upgrade commencing in 12 hours" is a line pulled directly from a software update notification. You are running iOS.
And then, in the very next second, the Millennium Puzzle fragment in Amano's hand flickered with golden light and vanished.
"Oh?"
Hold on. He had only borrowed it to look at.
System, what exactly are you doing right now?
This was making him look exactly like a streamer who used his position to steal important items from his own fans. That kind of thing got channels flagged, reported, and buried.
"It disappeared!" Rin Seiya stared.
Senpai, you said that like you were calling out an Accel Synchro activation.
Kuroshio Nagi stared at the empty spot where the fragment had been. Her whole body had gone perfectly still, like a statue.
"Kuroshio-san. That was not intentional, I genuinely do not know how to..."
The system had pulled this without warning and Amano had no idea how to start explaining it.
He braced himself, certain the tears were about to start again.
"WAHHHHHH! WAHHHHH!"
He was right. They started.
But he had misread what the crying meant.
Kuroshio Nagi seized his arm with both hands, holding on with full force, tears streaming freely.
"My idol, you are my destined person! I finally found you! I finally found you!"
"My destined person?"
"Yugi Mutou told me. He said my destined person would gather the Millennium Puzzle pieces again three thousand years later and wake the soul sleeping within it. So I have been protecting that fragment ever since, to be ready to meet my destined person when the time came!"
Even when dark duelists were hunting her for it, she had not once considered giving it up. She had kept fighting, kept running, kept holding on, all for the sake of meeting the person from the prophecy.
And her destined person turned out to be the same streamer she had already fallen for.
Kuroshio Nagi decided in that moment that even the worst morning of her life had also been the luckiest.
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection +1] [Affection +1]
[Kuroshio Nagi] [Affection: 71]
[Affection milestone reached: 70 points. Romance skill unlocked: "Everyone Gets Liberated."]
[At the start of a duel, you may add any number of Nibiru, the Primal Being (up to 3 copies) to your Main Deck.]
Nibiru, the Primal Being
Rock / Effect
ATK: 3000 / DEF: 600
During the Main Phase, if your opponent has Normal Summoned, Set, and/or Special Summoned 5 or more monsters this turn (Quick Effect): You can Tribute as many face-up monsters on the field as possible, and if you do, Special Summon this card from your hand, then Special Summon 1 "Primal Being Token" (Rock/LIGHT/Level 11/ATK ?/DEF ?) to your opponent's field. The Token's ATK and DEF each become the combined original ATK and DEF, respectively, of the monsters that were Tributed.
A meteorite? She unlocked a meteorite skill?
Kuroshio Nagi ran a Kaiju deck, a deck built entirely around consuming and replacing monsters with massive tributes. Of course her romance skill landed on the one card in the entire game designed to tribute everything on the field at once.
System, in its own way, this was perfectly logical.
****
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