Chapter 213: The Hidden Sister-Con
The top thread on the academy forum at noon had a clear winner: "Kaiba Chiha Clears Fusion Academy Bronze Stage in Record Time."
The angle the student body had landed on was the one about relationship dynamics. Nobody had imagined the famously devoted Kaiba sisters would ever reach a point of open hostility. But then, on reflection, how close had they actually been?
Kaiba Chiha's reputation as a dedicated sister-con was common knowledge around campus. What received less comment was the other side of that dynamic: Chiaki, by most accounts, had always maintained a consistent coolness toward everyone, her sister included. The popular theory circulating through lunchtime posts was that Chiha had finally tired of loving someone who never gave it back. One-sided devotion curdled into something harder, and she had decided to make her position clear on the largest stage available.
One other point of general agreement: knowing Kaiba Chiaki and her untouchable CEO composure, she almost certainly did not care. There was even a rumor, surfacing in multiple threads simultaneously, that Chiaki had at some point considered arranging Chiha's marriage to Karl Wein as a convenient way to remove a perpetually troublesome family variable from her day-to-day concerns.
Fewer Chiha, simpler life. That was the theory.
*
The academy cafeteria at lunch was not a place where quiet was available. Amano had accepted this. What he had not fully anticipated was the specific configuration of famous faces that had accumulated around his table.
"I am exhausted. I feel like I aged six months in one morning."
Rin Seiya was sitting on the bench rubbing the small of her back with both fists, expression thoroughly defeated.
"You did not duel at all today," Amano pointed out. "You have been standing on the Gold stage."
"That is exactly why I am exhausted. Standing there being observed like a decorative statue while everyone below gets to actually do things. If the academy is going to make us wait on the Gold stage, the minimum requirement should be a chair. I am formally requesting a throne. Something with armrests."
"A throne might be a bit much."
"For the academy's strongest? I think it fits perfectly."
Across the table from her, Kuroshio Nagi put her elbows down and sighed in a way that communicated genuine physical depletion. The dark circles she had been sporting this morning had deepened appreciably over the course of the day.
"If we are talking about who is actually tired, I have a claim."
Amano could not argue with that one. Nagi had been defending the Xyz Academy Bronze stage all morning. That meant a continuous rotation of challengers with no predictable endpoint, every match a genuine effort.
"My Kaijus have been absorbing so many monsters all morning that Gameciel the Sea Turtle started hiccuping by the last few rounds."
He was not entirely sure how a sea turtle Kaiju produced hiccups, but the image arrived unbidden and lodged there.
Kikawayu tilted his head helpfully. "You could always just lose on purpose. Fusion Academy's Bronze fell already. If you go down now, you are not even the first stage to drop. Nobody could call that shameful."
Nagi gave Kikawayu a long, flat look across the table.
"You absolute little pretty boy. You are Synchro Academy. Your Bronze stage is still standing. Very easy for you to suggest I give up."
"Little... pretty boy?" Kikawayu blinked.
"The Xyz Academy's honor matters to me, thanks." Nagi turned away. Whatever she thought of the idea, it had not changed her expression to anything resembling agreement.
Amano appreciated the competitive spirit more than the fatigue behind it. Despite the complaints, she was not going to fold before anyone else did, and that counted for something.
The table they were at had drawn predictable levels of attention. Whispers moved through the cafeteria in steady rotation.
"That table has an absurd amount of firepower. Synchro number one, Xyz number three."
"The red-haired girl is the one who defeated the Wicked God in the broadcast, isn't she?"
"Keep your voice down. Antagonizing that group is not a productive life choice. There is a yakuza heiress in the mix."
Under other circumstances Amano would have preferred a quieter table. Both Rin Seiya and Nagi had arrived uninvited, and the single large cafeteria meant there was nowhere else to eat. He made a mental note to warn Yui before she arrived. She had messaged earlier saying she would come for the afternoon session to watch the duels. Walking into this particular crowd of names without preparation might give her pause.
That afternoon session was also the reason Amano was eating faster than usual. With Fusion Academy's Bronze stage already cleared, the Silver stage was about to open for challenges. Jinguuji Ryoushuu and her Dogmatika deck were next. The registration queue was going to be long, and at rank 250, Amano's probability of early selection was decent but not guaranteed. He needed to be registered before the crowds built up.
His pace must have been visibly different from normal, because both Kikawayu and Finesse reached over to his plate without comment and transferred portions of their own food onto it.
Neither of them said anything. Neither appeared to have coordinated it. It was simply a reflexive thing, and Amano accepted it as such.
The table's ambient murmur increased noticeably. He looked up, expecting some new development from the tournament boards.
It was not the tournament boards.
Kaiba Chiaki had walked into the cafeteria and, scanning the available seating with the calm efficiency of someone who did not waste time deliberating, had identified the last empty chair at Amano's table and sat down in it.
No tray. She was not here to eat.
"Kaiba... senior?" Amano set his chopsticks down.
Chiaki's expression was composed, which was its default state. When she spoke, her voice was controlled in the way it always was, but there was something in the direction of her gaze that was not quite its usual distance.
"Chiha. What is going on with her? Amano, you knew something about this before I did."
The honest answer was yes. He had known before telling Chiaki, and he had chosen what to leave out when he briefed her on Chiha's time in District 32. The specific detail he had omitted: Chiha's turn away from Chiaki was not random estrangement or post-incident disorientation. It was deliberate. It was rooted in specific things Chiaki had done.
"She hasn't returned to the corporation," Chiaki continued. "She doesn't answer my messages. And today she went and challenged Fusion Academy's stage."
A cold CEO with sharp eyes would not have missed what those data points added up to. She hadn't.
"Tell me what you know."
Amano weighed his options for a moment, then let them go.
"Before I do, I want to ask you something directly. Do you actually care about Chiha?"
"Of course I do."
No hesitation. The answer was immediate in a way that carried a kind of certainty Amano had not expected. He filed that away.
"Then you should probably understand something she hasn't said out loud to you. She is not just angry at you. She is disappointed in you. Those are different things." He paused. "And the Karl Wein arrangement was real."
Chiaki held his gaze. "And what is wrong with that?"
She pulled up her Eva Terminal and turned the screen toward him. A data file, clearly compiled with some care.
"Karl Wein. No vices. Consistent charitable engagement. Excellent personal presentation. Solid dueling ability. Social position compatible with Chiha's. No prior relationships, no rumors. One of the only people at this academy who sought out Chiha's company without ulterior motive and treated her with genuine consideration. As her older sister, identifying a match of that caliber for her was entirely appropriate."
Amano looked at the file. Then he looked across the table at Finesse, who was focused on her lunch with apparent neutrality.
He thought about the Karl he had encountered: the man who had called the underground duel entertainment, had been cold toward Finesse her entire time in the family, and had lost no opportunity to position himself as the legitimate heir against the illegitimate one. And then he compared that Karl to the profile Chiaki had just described, which painted a picture of someone more or less perfect.
Had Finesse been overstating the case?
"The sole identified flaw," Chiaki added, "is a tendency toward holding grudges."
The table was briefly quiet.
Amano could already feel Finesse's careful neutral expression from two seats away.
Setting the character question aside, there remained the other obvious problem. "Whatever Karl's qualities, Chiha does not have feelings for him. That should probably factor in somewhere."
"Karl accepted the arrangement with clear eyes. He has already committed to taking full public responsibility when the appropriate time comes to end it. He is aware of the terms."
She had done this thoroughly. There was something almost touching about how completely she had thought through every logistical angle while apparently missing the central human one entirely.
"What about throwing her out to fend for herself? That scared her. She nearly ran out of money."
"I had Kurosaki leave her ten thousand Eva Points."
Amano stopped.
Ten thousand Eva Points. His entire family had run on roughly one thousand a month. By any arithmetic of the lower districts, ten thousand was a year's cushion. The Puppeteer encounter was a different matter entirely; that sort of probability was lower than being struck by a truck, and the Kaiba family's longstanding empirical skepticism about Dark Games was not an unreasonable position given that such things were supposed to be impossible.
Laid out this way, the evidence pointed somewhere slightly uncomfortable: Chiha's own personality might be the largest variable in the equation.
"Oh, but you did spoil her completely rotten and that is why she turned out the way she did, and now that you're trying to correct things, you're overcorrecting in the worst possible ways."
Rin Seiya had not looked up from her food. She was using her spoon to gesture, which was a thing she apparently did when she had an opinion she intended to deliver.
"You present as cold and indifferent to Chiha. But underneath that, you have an enormous need to control her. The moment her behavior escapes what you have decided is acceptable, you do something extreme to pull her back in line. Confinement. Threatening marriage arrangement. Both of those are attempts to reassert control, not genuine concern. Your type of attachment to her is more complicated than the ordinary kind."
She finally looked up at Chiaki directly.
"You are a hidden sister-con with a control problem. You have been masking it as indifference, but it is still there. And the reason Chiha turned out the way she did is because for years everything she wanted was provided without question, and now you are suddenly trying to set limits from a position of emotional distance, and it does not work. If you want to salvage this, stop asking Amano what he knows and start asking yourself what you need to change."
Chiaki said nothing.
The expression on her face was not the cool composure of a Kaiba Corporation president managing a business situation. It was something else, quieter and more honest, the look of someone absorbing a thing they had not known about themselves.
Rin Seiya was not finished.
"You actually do care about her. Anyone at this table can see that. But caring about someone and knowing how to show it are two entirely different skills, and yours are currently quite poor. Fix that. Be a normal sister. You should have started years ago, but now is still better than later."
As a piece of unsolicited advice delivered at a lunch table, this was pointed and precise in the way that only someone who had known both sisters over time could manage.
Then, into the silence that followed, came a voice from the crowd.
Recognizable. High. Carrying that particular bright energy that had always marked Chiha's good moods.
"Sister dear, you came all the way here by yourself? You should have told me first, I would have come to meet you!"
Chiaki's head turned. Something appeared on her face in that moment that Amano had genuinely never seen there before: unguarded, open, unmistakably glad.
She turned toward the sound of her sister's voice using her name for her.
What she saw was Yui.
Yui, who had just arrived from the transit gate to watch the afternoon session, was walking through the cafeteria entrance. And Chiha was beside her, circling around her with the exact warmth and familiarity that Chiaki had just reacted to, calling her "Sister dear" and "Yui-nee" in close alternation.
The expression that replaced the moment of happiness on Kaiba Chiaki's face was something that would have required a considerable list to fully inventory. It combined shock and disbelief and the particular quality of being confronted with evidence that reality was structured differently than assumed. It layered in something that was not quite heartbreak but occupied similar territory. It wore all of this behind the practiced surface of the Kaiba family's high composure, which made the contrast precisely visible to anyone who knew what her normal face looked like.
The Kaiba family's talent for expressive reactions had not, apparently, skipped this generation.
Amano found himself thinking that watching a confrontation from the safe side of it was a genuinely different experience from being in the middle of one.
Yui spotted the table and started making her way over, smiling. Chiha fell into step beside her.
Then Chiha registered the face of the person sitting at the table.
Her feet stopped.
"Holy cow, now THAT is a scene," Kuroshio Nagi said, entirely on time.
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