Chapter 210: The Deep-Eyes Light Passed Down Across a Thousand Years
The virtual environment dissolved, and all five of them landed back in Eden simultaneously with completely different things on their minds.
Amano: "Jaden, what did you use for that Tribute Summon?!"
Kikawayu: "Does that person actually know how to play cards?!"
Kaiba Chiaki: "A code? He left something buried in the system three thousand years ago?!"
Rin Seiya: "No, I don't want to leave! Yusei hasn't even entered yet! Let me back in!"
Nanki'in Sakuya said nothing.
She looked at the other four people in the virtual room with the specific expression of someone who had remained fully aware, for the entire duration of the experience, that they had been inside a computer simulation. This was something Nanki'in Sakuya had known clearly and continuously the whole time.
It was a virtual image generated by Eva's system. Even Sakuya understood that.
She was apparently the only one.
A few seconds passed. Everyone became quietly and mutually aware of what they had just sounded like. By unspoken agreement the group simultaneously pretended none of it had happened.
"Ha, reward time," Amano said, pivoting cleanly.
"Right, rewards, rewards are important." Kikawayu latched onto the subject with visible relief. "Very rewarding rewards."
The SS rating had earned two free card selections. The drop list presented four options: Assault Mode Activate, Red Dragon Archfiend, Assault Mode, Scar-Red Nova Dragon, Assault Mode, and True Red Nova.
The full Assault Mode card series had already come in as the hidden reward. One copy of each card was enough for the build he was running. Pulling additional copies of either Assault Mode monster was pointless since those cards were specifically designed to never appear in the opening hand. The math was straightforward.
True Red Nova went into the first slot. The Trap Card only required any Level 8 or higher Synchro Monster to activate, not exclusively the Red Dragon Archfiend line, making it usable across a broader range of board states. Its second effect returned it from the Graveyard whenever a Dragon-type DARK Synchro Monster was Synchro Summoned on his side, which meant it cycled back without spending resources. He had tried once before and confirmed that selecting the same card twice was not allowed. One copy was the maximum.
For the second selection, another copy of Assault Mode Activate. Not exciting. Functional.
Then the random selection.
"Huh. It disappeared." Kikawayu tapped the screen experimentally. The cursor had been moving at a speed that was difficult to track, and then it had simply ceased to be visible. "Where did it go?"
The next moment it reappeared and had already made its choice.
The selected card was not on the original drop list.
Absolute Authority. A Spell Card. The illustration showed exactly what it looked like: Red Dragon Archfiend executing its signature attack, rendered in the familiar visual language of the 5D's era. The effect matched the image. Target one Red Dragon Archfiend you controlled, and for that turn's battle phase it gained a thousand attack points, the opponent could not activate any Spells, Traps, or monster effects in response, it dealt piercing damage through Defense Position monsters, and all battle damage that battle was doubled.
Roughly useful. The practical benefit was that Absolute Authority contained "Red Dragon Archfiend" in its activation requirements, which meant it would be accessible to Red Dragon King's search effect the next time Red Dragon King hit the field.
The weekly Chronicle was done, completed with two days to spare before the Academy Challenge Tournament began. The Assault Mode card series was now in his deck. The session had been productive.
"I have company business. I need to go." Kaiba Chiaki was already standing.
She left with the energy of someone who had been sitting still for too long and had a backlog waiting on the other side of a commute. The other four watched her go.
After she was out of earshot, Kikawayu turned quietly inward.
"Yubel. You were unreachable inside. What happened?"
The answer came in Yubel's unhurried tone. "I caught up with an old friend."
"Old friend."
"Do not worry, Yuu. I am on your side. I will definitely help you get Amano Rei."
"I was never worried about that," Kikawayu said.
Rin Seiya had still not fully recovered from being removed from the Chronicle before Yusei entered the match. She made several requests over the next five minutes, escalating from verbal petitions to dramatic postures, and got nowhere.
On the walk back, she pulled up her Chronicle footage and reviewed it. She skimmed through the early exchanges and slowed down for the Dragon Mark sequence and the Crimson Dragon Quetzacoatl summon. Then she reached the moment of Jack Atlas's D-Wheel crash and let it run at normal speed.
Twice.
Her mood lifted.
This clip would do very well. She sent a preview to Mizuki along with a note about her twenty percent cut on whatever revenue it generated.
Rin had been holding onto Amano's left arm for most of the walk, ostensibly for Dragon Mark observation purposes. At a point when Amano's attention was elsewhere, she pushed his sleeve up and examined the length of his forearm carefully.
No visible mark. There were, however, the kind of muscle lines that develop from years of physical work, and she registered those without comment, though she did swallow once.
"Senpai, Dragon Marks don't appear visibly under normal conditions. In the anime they need external stimulus to awaken."
"Right, I almost forgot that setting. External stimulus."
Amano was also uncertain whether the Dragon Mark ring that had appeared on his wrist inside the Chronicle qualified as a real Dragon Mark at all. It had been an entire Crimson Dragon's worth of mark on one wrist. Whether Dragon Marks were a phenomenon limited to the 5D's Chronicle internally, or whether they could persist outside of it, was something he did not know.
He had not come to any conclusion about this when something wet and warm made contact with his forearm.
Amano's entire nervous system reacted before his brain could.
"Senpai. What are you doing."
Rin withdrew and looked at him with genuine academic curiosity. "Does that count as external stimulus? Any awakening sensation?"
"That is not the kind of stimulus being discussed."
Kikawayu's expression had shifted from neutral to visibly disgusted in approximately one second. "That is unsanitary. What is wrong with you?"
"Nothing unsanitary." Rin opened her mouth and showed her teeth, canines included, to demonstrate. "I brush twice a day."
"That is not what I meant by unsanitary."
"Still not enough stimulus, then."
She looked thoughtfully at Amano's forearm and opened her mouth wider in a way that communicated clear intent.
Kikawayu and Sakuya moved at the same moment.
There was a brief physical disagreement that Rin lost on account of being outnumbered.
Kikawayu's timing happened to coincide with the middle of a sentence Amano had been delivering about D-Wheel logistics.
"The D-Wheel only seats two people, so if you came along it would..." He paused, recalibrated, and continued. "It would mean one of us needs separate transport."
Kikawayu: "Yui arrives tonight, right? Shall we go meet her?"
A week had passed since the return from District 32. The message from Yui had come through two days before: she and Kaiba Chiha were leaving the lower districts and heading for the mid-level Academic City. She would arrive that evening.
"If Chiha is traveling with her, the transport should be handled," Amano said. "Chiha can arrange a company vehicle easily enough."
Kaiba Chiha, the moment she re-entered mid-level territory, would automatically resume her status as Kaiba Corporation's second daughter. A call to the company's transport division would take approximately thirty seconds.
"But I should still go." Yui was his childhood friend. She was part of the District 32 group. Arriving to a formal company reception instead of familiar faces was not the welcome she would want. There was also the question of what would happen if the two pairs of "sister" energy in his life ended up in the same room together without someone to manage the situation.
He would go on his own.
In the president's office on the upper floors of the Kaiba Corporation building, Chiaki had spent the entire afternoon working through what she had heard inside the Chronicle.
"Amano Rei's existence is necessary."
She had understood pieces of this for a while. Amano's relationship with the Duel Chronicle system was not normal. The Chronicle felt real in ways it had no reason to feel real. The timelines persisted across sessions. The person across from her today had recognized her by instinct after seeing her face once, thirty years ago in a different Chronicle arc.
The publicly accepted model of the Duel Chronicle system was straightforward: use a card as a key to unlock the corresponding historical scenario, enter, duel. Eva's mainframe generates the simulation from historical data. Players clear objectives and collect rewards.
Chiaki now believed none of that was the actual function of the system.
The Chronicle was a facade. A mechanism that looked like an entertainment feature, running in the mainframe alongside everything else, drawing no particular attention. It had not been designed to entertain anyone. It had been designed to wait. For the right person to open it properly.
The key to the Duel Chronicle was not any card.
The key was Amano Rei himself.
Only through his presence could the true history inside the system be unlocked.
Kurosaki's voice came through the communications line. "President. Preparations are complete. The majority of the company's business operations have been migrated to secondary systems. The master control computer currently has over ninety percent of its processing capacity free."
"Clear the remaining ten percent as well. I want absolute certainty before I proceed."
"Understood. Five minutes."
She had spent the afternoon arranging this. Retrieving data from three thousand years prior required more computational weight than the company's standard operations could afford to contribute without significant displacement. She had outsourced everything else temporarily. Tonight, the full capacity of Kaiba Corporation's master computer pointed at one task.
When Kurosaki confirmed completion, Chiaki sat down at the console.
She typed slowly. One character at a time.
D-e-e-p-E-y-e-s.
The screen held still for exactly one second.
Then the data began to move.
Blue-green light spread across the display, vivid and unlike any standard system output, filling the screen edge to edge and continuing past it as a visual quality that seemed to exist beyond the physical dimensions of the monitor. Something was being retrieved across a distance that no normal transfer protocol was designed to bridge, and it was arriving.
The light guided toward a fate from a thousand years prior. When the white dragon materialized on the other side of a system that had waited three thousand years for this specific input, Chiaki understood in full what kind of power her ancestor had left behind for her.
Deep-Eyes White Dragon. Level 10. LIGHT. Dragon-type. Zero attack points. Zero defense points.
Effect one: When a Level 8 or higher Dragon-type monster you control is destroyed, you may Special Summon this card from your hand.
Effect two: This card's attack points become equal to the attack points of one Dragon-type monster in your Graveyard.
Effect three: When this card is Normal or Special Summoned, for each Dragon-type monster in both players' Graveyards, inflict six hundred points of damage to your opponent.
Effect four: When this card is destroyed, destroy all monsters on your opponent's field.
When the card came through Eden's data materialization process and arrived in Chiaki's hand as a physical card, she held it and stared at it, and then she stopped trying to maintain any composure.
The Kaiba bloodline had its own requirements.
"Ha. Haha. Hahahaha!"
The laughter rang out clean and sharp and entirely unrestrained through a president's office occupied by exactly one person. There was nothing controlled about it. It bounced off every surface in the room and kept going.
"It's decided! Not even the mightiest Wicked God can stop me now! This is extraordinary! This blue-green depth, this light carried across a thousand years!"
She turned the card over in her hands.
"So this is what it feels like to have an ancestor watching over you."
The Kaiba family had no patience for superstition or ancestral mysticism. That kind of thinking was not how the family operated and never had been. But if an ancestor could transmit power across three thousand years through careful scientific planning, through institutional continuity and encoded data systems and precise information management, that was not mysticism. That was the Kaiba family doing what the Kaiba family actually did, at the scale the Kaiba family was capable of operating.
She examined the card without setting it down.
After today, she understood Chiha a little better. Why her younger sister had sought out Amano Rei the moment he enrolled and immediately demanded a duel. Chiha too was a Kaiba. The impulse to challenge Amano Rei probably had more than a little to do with the same drive that was currently running through Chiaki's own bloodline.
Even though Kaiba Seto had not managed to say it aloud in the Chronicle, the battle obsession transmitted through the Kaiba blood had made one thing clear to Chiaki now.
Why, the very first time she had laid eyes on Amano Rei, she had been unable to stop herself from making a challenge.
Defeating Amano Rei was the Kaiba family's thousand-year ambition.
A VSN notification appeared.
The number of people who had her direct VSN contact could be counted on one hand. She opened it.
The message was from Kaiba Chiha.
If Chiha could send a message, that meant she was back from the lower districts. The mid-level district was under comprehensive Eva system monitoring and surveillance. A hundred percent safety coverage. That had been the reason Chiaki had let her go train alone without excessive worry in the first place. Now that she was back in Eva's reach, there was nothing to be concerned about.
Chiaki's expression was settled and calm as she tapped to open the message.
Then she saw what it said.
"I'm back, Kaiba Chiaki."
She scrolled up through the chat history.
The message above it: "Sister dear, I really do know I was wrong this time. Please forgive me once more."
Above that: "Shall we have dinner together tonight, Sister dear?"
Above that: "Can I come to the office and visit, Sister dear!"
Above that: "Sister dear, I cleared the game I've been saving for ages today."
She scrolled back down to the new message.
"I'm back, Kaiba Chiaki."
The girl who had left for District 32 had used "Sister dear" in every single conversation Chiaki had with her, without exception, since childhood. The possibility that someone had stolen her phone was not zero. Chiaki set that possibility aside and considered the alternative.
Whatever Chiha had become in a month in the lower districts, that was a conversation for when they were actually in the same room. She would find out which version was waiting for her then.
Chiaki set the phone down beside the keyboard.
Deep-Eyes White Dragon was still in her hand. She looked at it one more time before placing it carefully on the desk.
The Academy Challenge Tournament was two days away.
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