Chapter 218: The Saint Escapes: I Didn't Steal Your Card!
"Fusion Academy's Silver Stage."
"It was cleared."
"We just witnessed history."
In that single moment, the atmosphere of the entire Academy Challenge Tournament reached its peak. The roar from the spectators threatened to finish off what remained of the already-shattered Silver Stage platform.
Ranking Points Awarded: plus 150,100.
Amano Rei. Ranking: 96th.
Likely a consequence of the staggering overkill damage combined with Ryoushuu's original standing at fourth overall in the academy rankings, the points she bled out exceeded what Amano had earned from destroying Kaiba Chiha in the entrance exam. He had cracked the top one hundred. Fusion Academy's second-ranked duelist had been brought down by a rank-250 student in an overkill finish that would make it nearly impossible for her to reclaim her previous standing.
From below the stage, Masayo stared upward at Ryoushuu on her knees in the wreckage, and at Amano still standing.
"He really won."
Yesterday, when she had asked him directly, all he said was that he wasn't sure he could.
When the duel started, he had told her to give him a minute.
But when the duel actually happened, he broke through a stage that had stood undefeated for a hundred years. He went somewhere no one had ever gone before.
Masayo thought she was beginning to understand why Nanki'in Muramasa, and Nanki'in Sakuya, and the Nanki'in family as a whole had set their attention on this man.
With ability like this, he could maintain the Nanki'in family's prosperity for a century.
And he had told Ryoushuu to her face that he wanted nothing to do with someone who made their little sister cry.
Jinguuji Masayo. Affection plus fifteen. Affection: 75.
Affection exceeds 70. Romance skill unlocked: Sisters at Odds.
Amano blinked at the notification. Watching him drop Masayo's own older sister to her knees in the most humiliating fashion possible had somehow produced a fifteen-point affection surge.
It was not hard to see why. Whatever Masayo was feeling toward the outcome of this duel, she clearly had not been at peace with what had happened to her before it.
He glanced at the skill name. Sisters at Odds. Why was Ryoushuu in the skill name? She had no affection value displayed in the system at all.
Curiosity got the better of him before he had even left the arena.
Sisters at Odds: Receive White Ecclesia, the Virtuous and Phantom Eye Swordsoul Mage in the Main Deck. Unlock Black Dragon Ecclesia and Three Champions Swordsoul Mage in the Extra Deck.
Amano stared.
Masayo used a Mayakashi deck. As far as he knew.
And yet the cards this skill was producing were unambiguously connected to Ryoushuu's Dogmatika archetype, not Masayo's at all.
He had raised Masayo's affection and received Ryoushuu's cards. Somehow. In a skill explicitly named after sisters.
The system had stopped even trying to pretend this was not exactly what it looked like.
Previous deck-injection skills had at least gone through the formality of saying "Before the start of a duel, add the following card to your Main Deck." Now the skill description just read "Receive card" as if that was a perfectly normal thing to say.
Amano felt the Duel Disk shift as something new appeared in the deck. He pulled the top card out.
It had materialized there without ceremony. A cute blonde girl with the same mark on her forehead that had always appeared on Dogmatika Ecclesia. But this version of the card had a different name, a different color scheme, and a completely different energy.
White Ecclesia, the Virtuous. Sitting in his hand now.
The strange part was that less than ten minutes ago, a version of this card had been standing on the other side of the field, working against him.
The feeling was unmistakable. This felt exactly like he had taken something that was not his.
"AAAARGH."
Ryoushuu had apparently checked her deck at the same moment.
From across the ruined stage, her shriek was audible even over the crowd noise. Amano watched her stare at a card in her hand as its face very slowly and very visibly went blank, fading to white until there was nothing left on the surface.
Dogmatika Ecclesia, the Virtuous. The search cornerstone of her entire Dogmatika engine. A soul-bound starter card. A card that by every rule of the system could not be taken away from its owner by any method whatsoever.
It had just vanished out of her fingers.
The physical toll of the duel had already left Ryoushuu unable to stand properly. The additional shock of watching her signature card disappear from her hand was too much. Her knees buckled and she collapsed entirely, folding onto the stage floor with the look of someone whose last remaining energy had been pulled out of her.
Amano, watching this development from across the arena, immediately turned on his heel and left.
This was not his card. He wanted to be nowhere near this situation.
The card currently in his hand was White Ecclesia, the Virtuous. The card that had vanished from Ryoushuu's hand was Dogmatika Ecclesia, the Virtuous. These were two different cards with two different names. He had not taken anything.
The system had apparently handled whatever just happened entirely on its own.
A voice suddenly rang clear and bright in his ear, as crisp as a bell.
"This has nothing to do with that. This was my own choice."
Amano almost missed a step. A card spirit. Already talking.
Ecclesia: "Amano Rei. I can sense the presence of someone I once knew, coming from you. And there is something else I need to tell you. The Jinguuji family has already begun to be corrupted by the Death Prison Realm. I need to find a way to fight it."
Someone she once knew. That would be Fallen of Albaz, presumably.
Amano did not have deep knowledge of the story surrounding these cards, but his memory for card effects and power levels was immaculate. Unfortunately, Fallen of Albaz was not a card he currently possessed.
And the spirits on his side of things were, in terms of raw power, a somewhat inconsistent bunch.
Eve: "I heard that rude thought, Amano."
Ecclesia: "We're all in the same deck now. I hope we get along."
Eve: "Seeing Ecclesia feels weirdly natural somehow. She's way more likeable than Mana. I feel like we're the same sort."
Mana: "Don't try to lump yourself in with her, Eve. Ecclesia might not be the most impressive upstairs but at least she has more going on than you do."
Ivaliss: "Cards with no power worry about card art."
Ecclesia: "Your deck is really lively, Amano."
That was a polite way to put it. After Ecclesia's arrival, the headcount had grown again, and lively was one word for it.
He tuned out the introductions happening somewhere in the back of his mind and returned to the crowd where his companions were waiting.
Something small and warm hit him from the front and wrapped both arms around his waist.
"Brother, that was so cool."
"Shio. When did you get here?"
Shio tipped her head back and gave him the most cheerful grin she could manage.
"About when you said you didn't want anything to do with someone who made their little sister cry."
He had said that out loud in front of a full tournament audience. There was nothing to be done about it now. It had been genuine, and if he had been embarrassed by it he would not have said it on stage.
"So that's his little sister."
Masayo and Yukki had spent considerably less time around Shio than Finesse had. Watching her press into her brother without any embarrassment, completely at ease in front of a crowd, produced something in both of them that was hard to name exactly.
There was a thought forming at the back of both their minds about the relative merits of having a brother versus a sister. The comparison was not flattering to anyone they could think of on the sister side.
After the historic first clearing of the Silver Stage, the tournament continued.
The Gold Stage challenge queue had opened and an unusually large number of students had registered all at once, drawn by the prospect of finally being able to attempt a run at the academy's top rank.
They were regretting it.
Kaiba Chiaki appeared to be in a poor mood. Three Blue-Eyes White Dragons and Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon were delivering the kind of lopsided defeats that could cost the average student half a month's living expenses in lost ranking points. The overkill margins were extreme.
Amano had registered for the Gold Stage challenge as well. He had a destined confrontation with Chiaki to fulfill, and there was no reason not to queue up now. But between the rush of challengers that had flooded in the moment the stage opened and the time already consumed by the Silver Stage duel, today's turn was not going to come. The tournament ran for three full days. He had time.
Rather than watching Chiaki methodically reduce the queue to rubble, Amano pulled up the point exchange shop and got to work on his remaining 169,100 points.
Two hundred thousand points would have unlocked either Pot of Greed or Graceful Charity. He was still roughly thirty thousand short of that threshold.
Most of those early points had been spent on strengthening a deck that had started from almost nothing. In hindsight, if he had been more disciplined about accumulating from the start, reaching the top hundred would have meant having either of those cards in hand already. That explained why every highly ranked duelist seemed to have one. It was not that they were impossible to obtain. It was that earning enough points required being good enough to climb high enough to earn them.
His current deck had no shortage of monster firepower. The Tuner count was comfortable. What was missing were the kind of universal Spell and Trap cards that could turn a field situation around regardless of context, the kind of cards other duelists took for granted. Black Hole. Heavy Storm. Harpie's Feather Duster. Mirror Force. Tools that could reverse a losing board in a single activation.
The selection in the point exchange shop, once he started actually looking at it, was enormous. Monster exchange unlocks required owning the relevant archetype first. Universal Spells and Traps had no such restriction, and the shop offered hundreds of them.
After comparing effects against prices, Amano concluded that Transaction Rollback at thirty thousand points was genuinely excellent value. He had used it from Finesse's deck before and knew exactly what it was capable of in the right situation.
Transaction Rollback. Exchange successful.
Remaining points: 169,100 minus 30,000 equals 139,100.
He was about to continue browsing when something on the Gold Stage pulled his attention away.
The sun was nearly at the horizon. In the warm amber light of late afternoon, Kaiba Chiaki's slender white fingers drew a Spell Card from her hand and held it out for the audience to see.
"Future Fusion, activated."
Future Fusion?
Why not just Fusion right now?
And then Amano read the effect.
Future Fusion. Equipment Spell Card. Select 1 Fusion Monster from your Extra Deck and send the required Fusion Materials from your Deck to the Graveyard. Fusion Summon that monster equipped with this card. The summoned monster cannot attack the turn it is Fusion Summoned. If this card is destroyed, destroy the equipped monster.
That was just a Fusion happening right now.
This was the anime version of Future Fusion from GX. The Equipment Spell version. The difference from the real card was staggering. The real card was a Continuous Spell that made you wait two turns before the Fusion went through. This version did it immediately, on the same turn, with the only restriction being that the resulting monster could not attack until the following turn.
Neo Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon descended onto the field under the amber of the setting sun, three proud heads raised against the reddening sky.
Amano opened the exchange shop and found it immediately.
He had been ignoring this card all along because he had mentally filed it under the Continuous Spell version. That had been a mistake.
Future Fusion. Exchange cost: 140,000 points.
Insufficient points. Exchange failed.
Remaining available points: 139,100.
Nine hundred points short.
He had been nine hundred points too slow in realizing what the card was. The Transaction Rollback purchase had put him just under the threshold.
Sitting with that for a moment, Amano went through what Future Fusion would actually do for his deck.
Future Fusing Master of Chaos Dragon would send three Normal Monster materials to the Graveyard in the same motion as putting the field-wipe boss monster onto the board. The effect that destroyed all Spells and Traps on the field would function like a better Heavy Storm, played for free as part of a Fusion Summon.
Future Fusing Elemental HERO Thunder Giant would send the fusion materials to the Graveyard and deliver a field-wipe effect that cleared everything in play. Better than Dark Hole, played as part of a summon.
For a deck with full Dragon-Type and HERO Extra Deck access, this was one of the highest-value Spell Cards available at any price.
He needed nine hundred points. From somewhere.
Amano looked around at the group.
After a moment, he walked over and tapped Kikawayu on the shoulder.
"Come with me for a bit."
"What is it, Rei?"
"Something fun."
"Something fun? Right now? Just us two?"
Looking at the time remaining before sunset, today's Gold Stage slot was definitely not coming. He had time.
He walked Kikawayu to a quiet back alley on the tournament grounds where foot traffic was minimal.
For something this unreasonable, Amano had looked around at everyone available and come to the conclusion that his oldest friend was the natural choice. They had been doing this since they were children. Extracting something from Kikawayu just came naturally.
"Kikawayu. Private duel. Unofficial."
"What."
"I need nine hundred points. You give me a hundred per win. Nine duels."
"That's against academy rules."
"Yes."
"..."
"I can't refuse?"
"You cannot."
"Then I don't have a choice." Kikawayu straightened up with an expression of resigned dignity. "Let's go."
The first duel ended in about forty-five seconds.
Kikawayu LP: 4000 to 0.
Spread-eagle in the back alley, lit gold by the last of the evening sun, Kikawayu lay on the pavement with her chest heaving. The corner of her mouth where the physical feedback had caught her still glistened in the fading light.
"That," she managed between breaths, "is extremely unreasonable."
"Not enough." Amano checked the total. "Get up. Eight more."
"Eight more. Eight. More. You're doing this to me eight more times."
"I told you I needed nine hundred points and I'm not apologizing."
Kikawayu pushed herself back to her feet, wiped the corner of her mouth with zero grace, and reset her Duel Disk with an expression that could charitably be described as displeased.
"Fine. Start."
Future Fusion. Exchange successful.
Achievement unlocked: Have Both Ecclesia and Eve in the Same Deck.
If you're enjoying the story, toss a Power Stone or drop a review — it helps more than you'd think.
Advance chapters → patreon.com/Eatinpieces