Chapter 209: Jaden Yuki: So This Is What a Reliable Teammate Feels Like
In the spectator stands, Rin Seiya beat the announcer to it by a full second.
"He crashed! The wipeout happened right in front of us!"
Nanki'in Sakuya edged slightly away from her. The people sitting nearby were already looking over, and she did not particularly want to be included in whatever was happening.
"Senpai. Please calm down."
"I cannot calm down even a little, Nanki'in. Do you understand what you just watched? A live performance of the legendary wipeout! In person!"
"Is that what a wipeout is?"
Sakuya was fairly certain she understood the duel. She had found it impressive. What she was less clear on was why anyone would be this excited about the losing side's D-Wheel crashing into the prep area. She had simply been watching Amano's Synchro Summons and thinking about how confident he looked when the Dragon Mark lit up.
The announcer caught up eventually. His voice echoed off every surface in the stadium.
"An unprecedented reversal! KING Amano has delivered a Synchro comeback for the history books! Congratulations to Team KCZero on taking the first match! And now, with the pressure of that four-dragon board waiting for him, the call goes to Crow Hogan of Team 5D's!!"
Back in the KCZero prep area, Amano was still racing and only half paying attention to the announcement.
The Chronicle end-condition notification had come through while he was still on the D-Wheel. He already knew the rating.
Chronicle Clear Rating: SS.
High-rating reward: choose two cards from the drop list.
Same as the Battle City Chronicle against Kaiba Seto, two hidden conditions had been met, so the total was still two free selections. That part was familiar.
What was not familiar was the hidden reward itself.
Every card in the full Assault Mode series.
Amano spent a few seconds turning the implications over. The Assault Mode cards were not flashy on their own. They each required their base Synchro Monster on the field and a copy of Assault Mode Activate to deploy, and the resulting Special Summon monster would typically be destroyed without Assault Mode Activate's protection trigger. The ceiling could be very high and the floor could be a dead hand.
But dead hands were not something he typically had to worry about.
He ran through the list. Stardust Dragon, Assault Mode. Junk Warrior, Assault Mode. Black Rose Dragon, Assault Mode. Red Dragon Archfiend, Assault Mode. Scar-Red Nova Dragon, Assault Mode. Almost every Assault Mode variant in the set corresponded to a Synchro Monster he could already put on the field.
The strongest restriction on Assault Mode cards was that you needed the matching Synchro. He had a full Dragon-type Extra Deck. Matching restrictions were not his problem. This reward would strengthen the entire 5D's portion of his Extra Deck for regular duels going forward, not just this Chronicle, not just critical moments.
The upper end was lower than a single-use Obelisk the Tormentor. The lower end was considerably higher.
The crowd roared again from outside.
He came back to himself. The D-Wheel was still moving. The duel was still happening.
Right. Still in the Chronicle.
Crow Hogan had already taken the track, Black Bird accelerating into the Speed World field with the speed counters Jack's eliminated D-Wheel had left behind. Seven to eight before his first turn was finished, the advantage of inheriting a late-duel counter balance from his predecessor.
"Don't count on Team 5D's rolling over for you, KCZero!"
Crow's voice carried across the track with the resignation of someone who had seen the board they were inheriting and was going in anyway.
In the KCZero prep area, Kaiba Seto had already made his assessment.
"Amano's position is remarkable," he said, "but his LP is at one thousand. Crow won't keep him long. Be ready, Jaden."
Jaden looked at the field display and then back at Kaiba. "Already? But the board is so impressive!"
"His life points are one thousand. The moment Crow has enough Speed Counters for Speed World 2's effect, Amano is gone regardless of what dragons he has in the air. Get to the staging area. And you."
Kaiba turned.
Kikawayu looked up. "Me?"
"Help Jaden with the D-Wheel prep."
"Why am I the one doing that?"
"If you won't work, leave the prep area."
"Fine, I'll do it!"
Jaden and Kikawayu disappeared toward the garage section. The prep area went quiet.
Kaiba Seto turned toward the one person remaining beside him.
Kaiba Chiaki had grown up navigating rooms full of people who wanted things from her and hiding what she actually thought about any of it. She was good at it. It was practically reflex at this point.
In front of this man, every reflex failed.
"We've met before," Kaiba Seto said. It was not a question.
"That is, um."
She had no idea how to finish the sentence. She knew that was embarrassing. She could not seem to stop anyway.
"Thirty years ago. At Kaiba Corporation. You appeared alongside Amano Rei, only once."
The memory assembled itself immediately. The Chronicle she and Amano had run last week, the one in the Battle City timeline. The rooftop. The Duel Disk test. Kaiba Seto at that point had barely glanced in her direction, fully occupied with Amano and the duel.
And yet thirty years later, he recognized her immediately.
The two Chronicles shared a continuous timeline. What had happened in the Battle City arc had not been erased when that session ended. It had persisted into the WRGP arc as history. The same Kaiba Seto who had stood on that rooftop was standing here now, three decades of time between those two moments, and he had carried the memory across all of it.
Chiaki felt something shift in how she thought about the Chronicle system entirely. It was not generating isolated simulations. The world inside was accumulating its own coherent past.
"I had a feeling about you even then," Kaiba Seto said, "but that day you were a passing face in someone else's duel. Blood does not lie, though."
He looked at her for a moment and then, unexpectedly, laughed.
Not the controlled sound she would have expected from the man who had been composed and focused for every moment of this Chronicle. A genuine, full laugh, the kind that suggested he had been carrying something for a long time and had just found out it had not been wasted.
"So you're a Kaiba as well. I thought as much. What is your name?"
"Kaiba Chiaki."
"Chiaki." He said it once, considering it. "Good name."
The heaviness he had been wearing since they entered the Chronicle had not vanished, but it had loosened. Whatever this confirmation meant to him, it mattered.
"Chiaki. Since you are standing here, Kaiba Corporation still exists three thousand years from now. That means my plan succeeded. That is what I needed to know."
"Your plan?"
His expression shifted into something that was not quite urgency but moved in that direction. Outside, on the track, Crow Hogan had reached his Battle Phase and was already in motion.
"Listen carefully, because time is short. This is a battle that spans a thousand years. Amano Rei's role is essential, but no single person finishes a war like this alone. You have what you need to help, if you know where to find it." He paused once. "In Kaiba Corporation's control system. There is a code. Input it, and what is waiting inside will be available to you."
Chiaki forgot to be intimidated. "What code?"
"Deep-Eyes."
She stared at him. "Deep-Eyes? Not Blue-Eyes?"
"Use that power, and win the future that belongs to you."
On the track below, Crow Hogan had entered his Battle Phase.
The Primal Being Token stood at four thousand six hundred attack points in Defense Position on his side of the field. Defense Position meant it could not attack. He changed its position.
"I switch the Primal Being Token to Attack Position and attack directly! I'm crashing through the stardust!"
Four thousand six hundred points of formless grey mass collided with Majestic Shooting Star Dragon and the outcome was not close. Majestic Shooting Star Dragon shattered on impact, stardust and light scattering in every direction across the track.
Majestic Shooting Star Dragon was destroyed.
Amano LP: 1000 to 400.
"End of Battle Phase. I Normal Summon Blackwing - Zephyros the Elite in Defense Position and set two cards face-down."
The small Blackwing settled into position beside the Fortune Wheel.
Crow checked his counter display and raised his hand toward Speed World 2's activation panel.
"I activate Speed World 2's effect. I remove four Speed Counters and reveal a Speed Spell from my hand to deal eight hundred points of damage directly!"
Crow's Speed Counters: 8 to 4.
The card he turned over was Speed Spell: Synchro Restitution.
The high-speed wind hit Amano's LP like a wall.
Amano LP: 400 to 0.
The D-Wheel lost acceleration under him the instant the LP reading hit zero. He brought it around, redirected the machine toward the KCZero staging area, and pulled in as Jaden was already fully suited and positioned to launch.
Before Amano's D-Wheel had even fully stopped, two voices reached him at the same moment.
"Great duel, Amano!"
He looked up. Jaden and Kikawayu were standing three feet apart. They had said the exact same words in the exact same tone without any coordination between them, and they were now looking at each other with the specific expression of two people who have just discovered they have something in common that neither of them wanted.
Jaden recovered first, grinning without any particular self-consciousness. Kikawayu's recovery was slower and considerably less graceful.
"I'll take it from here!" Jaden held out his fist.
Amano knocked knuckles with him. The engine of Jaden's D-Wheel cycled up from idle.
"Hey, Amano. Before I go." Jaden's voice had lost its easy warmth for just a moment, replaced by something older and more considered. It reminded Amano of the same voice he had heard at the end of the GX Chronicle, the one that had not quite sounded like a Chronicle NPC. "Every journey through every era you travel has meaning. The power you've gained on those journeys was not given to you from outside. It was always yours. So use it without hesitation."
He said it like he meant it as more than encouragement.
Then the grin was back, and Jaden shot into the track like something that had been waiting all duel for this moment.
He hit the Speed World field and looked at what Amano had left him. Three Dragon Synchro Monsters still in the air above the track, Red Rose Dragon and Red Dragon Archfiend Tyrant and Crimson Dragon Quetzacoatl hovering where they had been for the last several turns.
"What a board!" The excitement in his voice was completely genuine. "This is what it feels like to have a reliable teammate! I love it!"
The Chronicle had been winding down since the clear condition triggered. Amano could feel it the way you feel an ending, a particular quality of attention when things are about to change. He had been through this enough times to recognize it.
He watched the track anyway, because he was not quite ready to stop yet.
Jaden was brilliant in a duel. He always had been, through every match Amano had watched in his previous life, every comeback and every impossible hand. He had earned the board in front of him by virtue of being someone you could hand a board like that to.
The Chronicle around the track began to dissolve at the edges.
And just before it went entirely, just as the shapes of the stadium and the crowd and the speed-lit track were fading into the disconnected light of the virtual room, Amano caught Jaden's summon call from the middle of the track.
"Born new from the cosmos, let this hero emerge! Tribute Summon! Elemental HERO Neos!!"
Amano blinked.
He looked at the space where the track had been one second ago and tried to do the arithmetic. Jaden had three Synchro Dragons. Neos was a Level 7 monster. A Level 7 Tribute Summon required two monsters to release.
Jaden had used two of those dragons as Tribute fodder for Elemental HERO Neos.
The Chronicle finished collapsing. Amano was back in the virtual room.
He stared at the empty space in front of him for a moment.
"Jaden. What exactly did you just Tribute Summon with?"
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