Chapter 171: Is It So Wrong to Want to Be Kept?
"What do you mean Kaiba Chiaki took the video?! What is that even supposed to mean?"
Mizuki had been waiting. She had her entire evening blocked off, ready to pull an all-nighter editing a fresh Yu-Gi-Oh! video for her subscribers.
Then Rin Seiya's message came in.
Was there something in that duel that was bad for Kaiba Corporation? Was that the problem?
It was infuriating. She had been so close to content. Three days without an upload and she could feel the restlessness building in her bones. And she had already put out an update announcement.
She could not fall back on old footage as a filler post. Using the Red Dragon Archfiend / Right Red Mark duel from before would be too obvious a downgrade.
Mizuki was starting to wonder if her bloodline had some ancient grudge with Kaiba Corporation. How else could she explain this level of consistent interference?
Rin Seiya, for her part, felt exactly the same.
Getting outranked in the Academy City competitive ladder by Kaiba Chiaki on a regular basis was one thing. She had learned to live with that. But to finally catch Kaiba Chiaki without her Blue-Eyes White Dragons, only to have her own Synchro Summons banned by the Chronicle's historical physics, lose the duel in an embarrassing rout, and do all of that in front of Amano...
Her dignity as an upperclassman had taken a direct hit.
And now there was the rumor that Kaiba Chiaki was actively interested in recruiting Amano. Not just to Fusion Academy, but into Kaiba Corporation itself.
Thinking about the Chronicle sequence she had just lived through, where Amano had been recruited by Kaiba Seto personally and then escorted alone into the executive office... if Kaiba Chiaki had the same kind of thing in mind, Rin Seiya did not want to picture what she was planning.
If even a male CEO was this much of a hazard, what did a female one look like?
It was getting to the point where Kaiba Chiaki felt more dangerous than Finesse Wein.
Why did all the rich girls from powerful families keep hovering around someone as broke as Amano?
Thinking about it that way, Rin Seiya suddenly found herself with a new appreciation for Nanki'in Sakuya, who appeared perfectly harmless by comparison.
At that exact moment, Amano's Vsn notification began going off in rapid succession.
He opened the app to find out who had just sent him a burst of messages.
It was from the perfectly harmless Nanki'in Sakuya.
[Save me.]
[Save me.]
[Save me!]
[Save me!!]
[Save me!!!]
Ten messages. All identical except for the escalating exclamation marks.
Amano's stomach tightened.
Had Sakuya run into danger? A dark duelist? But she was supposed to be inside the academy right now. Based on where Dark Game incidents had occurred so far, the academy grounds should be one of the safer locations available. The duelist concentration was too high, and several of the teaching staff had notable competitive histories. Kondo might look like every other middle-aged teacher who had gradually lost the battle against gravity and hairline over the years, but by all accounts he had been genuinely formidable when he was younger.
"Class rep, where are you right now?" He typed back quickly.
He had already started calculating whether to trigger the Hacker Intrusion skill remotely if she was caught in something serious.
About fifteen seconds passed. Then her reply arrived.
[I am in Kondo's office.]
"...?"
Was Kondo a dark duelist?
That seemed unlikely.
Actually: before leaving this morning, Amano had walked out of the academy and left Sakuya behind in Kondo's office specifically to finish the homework she had not done over the weekend and had not found time to copy during morning classes.
Whatever was happening, he was going over there.
Nobody who was operating at a normal stress level sent ten copies of the same message. Whatever corner Sakuya had been backed into, she must have run out of other options.
"Chiaki-senpai, Seiya-senpai, something came up. Heading back to school."
"Next week's Chronicle. Don't forget." Kaiba Chiaki slipped in the reminder as she turned to leave.
Rin Seiya, still crouched on the ground collecting her scattered cards, looked up. "What's so urgent all of a sudden? Amano, you don't have evening self-study tonight. Come do some D-Wheel riding later, I was thinking we could go out and ride around and... hey. Where did he go?!"
By the time she got the words out, Amano was already gone.
[Kaiba Chiaki] [Affection +5] [Kaiba Chiaki: Affection 68]
The notification caught him as he was mounting his D-Wheel.
The last Chronicle had generated a +10 jump. This time, only five.
Kaiba Chiaki was turning out to be the most difficult to develop of anyone he had encountered so far. Even slower than Sakuya had been in the early stages.
By comparison, Kuroshio Nagi this morning: unlocked a meteorite skill and then used that skill to hit Kaiba the same day. Rapid affection growth, driven by the idol filter and the weight of the Yugi Mutou prophecy she had been carrying.
He had started to piece together a pattern in how the system worked. Breaking through a fixed affection threshold to unlock a skill seemed to require an external trigger, like a special event in a rhythm game. Daily ordinary interaction could raise numbers but struggled to punch through the gaps between milestones on its own.
Case in point: Yui. Childhood friend. Over a decade of growing up together in District 32 = 69 points. No more. The number did not move past that until the day Amano left District 32 and made a promise to come back, and only then did it cross into 70.
The Synchro Academy buildings came into view. He parked, moved fast, and reached Kondo's office in fifteen minutes total from the login point.
Inside the office, Kondo looked like a man who had been spending the last hour wondering whether he had accidentally started a diplomatic incident. When he saw Amano walk through the door, the tension in his expression visibly unwound.
Amano had become something of an institution at Synchro Academy. The student who had been worth a significant financial commitment to retain. Both the principal and the administrative staff had quietly designated him as the future face of the academy, expected to eventually take over the role Rin Seiya currently held once she graduated. Some had begun to speculate he might actually exceed Rin Seiya's ceiling and take the academy somewhere new entirely.
Even as year-group head, Kondo was not going to be strict with someone like that.
"Kondo, what's the situation?" Amano asked directly.
Kondo exhaled. "Since you're here, Amano, go ahead and take Nanki'in home. As for the other matter I mentioned, you two should talk it through privately."
Sakuya's expression upon being effectively pardoned could only be described as someone walking out of a sentence that had been commuted. She nodded several times in quick succession.
Amano walked his still-confused class rep out of the guidance office like a parent collecting a child from the principal's office, Sakuya's head angled so far downward it was practically buried in her own collarbone.
"All right, class rep. I think it's time you told me what actually happened."
"Amano. There was... a problem. With the work."
"Which problem?"
"All of them."
That explained everything.
This was probably the first time Nanki'in Sakuya's academic performance had actually been visible to anyone with authority over it. In normal circumstances, Amano handled both tests and assignments for her as part of his daily routine. But last week he had spent two days recovering from Dark Game overexertion, and then this morning Rin Seiya had pulled him into a film session and he had completely let the weekend homework slip from his mind.
That gap was enough for Kondo to notice the anomaly. From Kondo's perspective, the Nanki'in family heir, the class representative who had always submitted excellent work and performed consistently well in tests, had suddenly sat in his office unable to complete a single problem. The mental picture that had formed in Kondo's head for the first two minutes of that session had probably involved the possibility that the Nanki'in family was making a statement about something.
When the truth eventually became clear that she genuinely could not do any of the problems, that was a different kind of alarm.
"Kondo said if I cannot place in the top ten of the class in the monthly exam, he will remove me from the class representative position."
"And what do you want to do about that?"
"I absolutely will not allow that."
The look that crossed Sakuya's face was one of those rare flashes of undisguised emotion: complete, non-negotiable conviction.
She clearly cared about that position deeply.
In Amano's internal assessment, the top ten requirement was generous to the point of being a face-saving gesture on Kondo's part. Not the top ten of the year group: the top ten of Class 1-E. The students in Class 1-E, with a few exceptions, had roughly the same relationship to academic study as Sakuya did. With minimal preparation, Sakuya filing in answers mostly by guesswork would likely still land in the top ten.
"Then why did you need me specifically?"
That was the one part he still had not figured out. What had Kondo reacted to when Amano walked in the door?
The question hit something. Sakuya went quiet, the words not coming easily.
"Class rep, I can't really help you if you don't tell me the whole story."
"If I tell you the truth, will you help me?" She had been staring downward, but at that question she snapped her head up and looked at him with sudden intensity, the way someone grabs at a rope they have just found within reach.
The reversal was sharp enough that Amano wondered if he had accidentally promised something more dramatic than he intended.
"I'll do what I can to help with the studying side of things," he clarified.
"Then there is no problem." Sakuya's cold fingers closed firmly around his hand.
"What actually happened was, I told Kondo that the Nanki'in family was hiring you as our dedicated private tutor. That during evening self-study hours, you would be providing supplementary lessons for me. That is what prompted Kondo to propose the monthly exam condition."
The sequence of events now made complete sense.
Sakuya had announced the arrangement to Kondo as a done deal before actually confirming it with Amano. Hence the emergency messages.
This was not complicated. Tutoring the class rep in her studies was, if anything, a step up from just doing her homework for her. As the class's academic committee member, it was a more appropriate arrangement anyway.
And the Nanki'in family's resources meant the salary would not be a concern.
He had one more question.
"When you said 'we,' class rep, who else are we talking about?"
Not just Sakuya alone?
"Yukki too. Neither of us will have evening self-study anymore. Please come to the Nanki'in estate during that time to tutor both of us."
"Wait. Wait. Wait wait wait."
Something was wrong here. Multiple things were wrong.
Nanki'in Yukki was the girl who had been freed from Onikiri's body possession: a teenager who had woken up as herself again after being used as a host for years, now adopted into the Nanki'in household under Muramasa's care.
Why was Amano being asked to tutor her as well?
And why did this tutoring have to happen at the Nanki'in estate?
Entering a yakuza family's private residence to provide academic support to the heir and her memory-impaired adopted cousin was, from any angle, an unusually high-risk employment situation.
This was going to require additional compensation.
Amano did a quick mental accounting of his current finances. His savings sat at approximately 123,000 Eva Points: accumulated from the streaming donation split, plus Overkill System transfers from recent duels.
That was comfortable for daily life in the mid-level district. But if he wanted to use it toward genuinely useful tradeable cards, it fell short.
For reference: a single copy of Monster Reborn was currently selling for 600,000 Eva Points in Eden.
Which brought him to the card he had noticed in the Eva Network auction house.
Ghost Ogre & Snow Rabbit
Level 3 / LIGHT
Psychic / Tuner / Effect
ATK: 0 / DEF: 1800
Effect (once per turn): When a monster effect activates on the field, or when the effect of a face-up Spell or Trap on the field activates, you can send this card from your hand or the field to the GY: destroy that card on the field.
Someone had listed a copy, the auction had attracted modest competition so far, and the current bid was sitting at 460,000 Eva Points.
For most buyers, a low-Level monster at 460,000 was already steep. But Amano was not looking at this as a low-Level monster.
Ghost Ogre and Snow Rabbit was a hand trap. And it was also a Tuner.
Those two attributes on a single card was an extraordinary combination. The price reflected the Tuner rarity, but the hand trap utility was being undervalued by current bidders.
He estimated the final auction price would land somewhere around 600,000, roughly in line with Monster Reborn. That was still a bargain given what it actually was. Whether for personal use or resale, the margin was there.
The auction closed in ten days: right after the monthly exam.
If he tutored Sakuya effectively and she placed in the top ten, the Nanki'in family's finances could put up 500,000,000 Eva Points as a bounty for producing a family heir. Asking 600,000 as tutoring compensation to fund one card acquisition was well within the range of a reasonable request.
Why not just take the 500,000,000 outright?
Because that would make him a kept man.
And aside from actively blocking the affection development system, doing something like that would tank everyone else's numbers at the same time. Amano's personal moral standards, modest as they were, had not yet degraded to that point.
There was also the instinct, quiet but persistent: if he crossed that line once, being financially maintained by the women around him would stop being an edge case and start being the default. He would be drowning in that lifestyle before he could course-correct.
To avoid the outcome where he spent the rest of his days eating at everyone else's table while contributing nothing, today too he needed to earn his own way.
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