"Brother Manjome surrendered?"
On the stands, junior lackey A and junior lackey B were both filled with disbelief.
As classmates in Duel Academy's Middle School, they both clearly understood Brother Manjome's strength. It was no exaggeration to say that even in the elite-filled Middle School, Manjome was absolutely the top dog among his peers.
And such a Manjome, was actually so casually defeated by a newcomer participating for the first time?
Is this newcomer a monster?
The red-haired girl next to them was also surprised for a long time, then turned to look at the two: "Your big brother seems to have lost."
The two lackeys exchanged glances, pondered for a moment, then spoke.
"Ah, we just recognized the wrong person. This guy looked a bit like him at first glance, but upon closer inspection, it turns out he's not our big brother." Lackey A said.
"Yeah, yeah, he really looks alike, haha," Lackey B also said.
The red-haired girl squinted: "So even the name is the same?"
"Right, right."
The two lackeys insisted, gritting their teeth.
"What a coincidence."
"..."
This upset caused the audience to be quite surprised. However, perhaps no one felt more like spitting blood than Manjome, who was the party involved.
Losing is one thing, but the key is that he even had a strange feeling, as if the opponent hadn't even exerted themselves.
The entire match gave him a sense of effortless mastery, as if the opponent, standing across from him on the dueling field, had a casual feeling of "just playing around with you," not taking it seriously at all.
The opponent didn't even summon a single high-level monster!
Manjome believed he had a strong board presence and exerted sufficient pressure. But the opponent handled it with such ease, as if casually deflecting his full power—no, to be more precise, it felt like punching cotton.
Throughout the entire match, Manjome felt like the atmosphere had been building up, setting the stage again and again, all to the point of being on the verge of exploding, yet it just couldn't be unleashed.
In short, he had never encountered such an infuriating duel.
"Wait."
He couldn't help but call out as the opponent retrieved their duel disk and turned to leave the field.
Yugen paused, then turned back.
"Who exactly are you?" Manjome gritted his teeth, asking unwillingly.
Yugen glanced at him, only smiling.
"Just a passing one-star duelist."
He then turned gracefully and walked away, but Manjome only felt as if his heart had been stabbed again, just wanting to spit blood.
One-star?
What kind of ridiculous system, ridiculous evaluation mechanism, do you call this motherf*cking Rank 1?
Regardless, Manjome stopped at the Top 8 this time, and who knows how his two older brothers would scold him when he returned. Moreover, if he had lost to Ryuzaki, it would have been one thing, but he lost to such an unknown nobody, and the key is that this duel was so infuriating...
He must have had eight lifetimes of bad luck to run into this guy.
Aside from everything else, one thing Manjome was sure of.
He never, never, never wanted to meet this cunning bastard again in his life.
Yugen reviewed his matches from the past few days, gaining experience and summarizing lessons from real combat with local duelists.
Although he hadn't encountered any tough opponents so far in this competition, the matches made him realize a slight oversight in his previous thinking.
That is, he couldn't directly substitute the real card environment of that era into the anime environment.
Hand destruction decks, although they dominated tournaments back then and had strong suppression power here, could only defeat some ordinary duelists. If he encountered masters from the anime, their effectiveness might be reduced.
Firstly, in the anime, there are god-tier card drawing engines that don't exist in real cards. It's not impossible for one card to accelerate drawing five or six cards.
Secondly, for strong duelists in the anime, even with an empty hand and field, turning the tide with one card is commonplace. This isn't mysticism; there's a saying for it. As the original work puts it, this is called "for a true duelist, everything is inevitable; even card draws can be created."
Like Judai Yuki in the later stages of the anime, he always had his beautiful eyes in tough duels, and that wasn't just for show. Judai in his Supreme King form could have a higher level of "god draw" ability than usual, and in the anime's supernatural system, he belonged to the high-tier strongmen.
Judai in his Supreme King form, even with forty random off-meta cards drawn from a card pool, might still be able to crush an ordinary person with a top-tier deck.
"It would be great if I could get some god-draw skills if there's a chance," Yugen sighed.
At first glance, transmigrating into Yu-Gi-Oh seems easy as long as you know how to duel, but without some supernatural background, it's really not easy to survive in the later stages where gods and demons fly everywhere.
Everyone knows that in Yu-Gi-Oh, the simplest and most direct way to reach a supernatural level is not through cultivation, but by trying to find a spirit to possess you. But as far as he knows, most of the spirits in the original work are already taken. Where would he go to trick one?
For now, he shouldn't think about these things. All he can do at the moment is to thoroughly research the environment, optimize his deck, and improve his strategy as much as possible.
Yugen is still in the stage of real combat and exploration, and his deck is not yet fully finalized.
His next opponent is named Kajiki Makoto, a duelist of Rank 5. His background shows several public match records, also marked as a true disciple of the "Psychic Duel Dojo."
Psychic style. Yugen thought hard about this.
If he remembered correctly, the GX anime seemed to have briefly featured this style in its later stages. It was in a competitive relationship with Ryo Marufuji's Cyber Style Dojo. In the end, the anime even had a master of the Psychic style, Menkyo Kaiden, come to challenge the dojo, playing Jinzo.
Half a day before the match, he watched recordings of his opponent's recent public matches. Kajiki Makoto seemed to be using a deck centered around "Machine King," which was a series of ace monsters from the "Big Five" villains who rebelled against Kaiba Corp in the DM anime.
According to the Psychic style duelist who challenged Ryo Marufuji in the anime, their ace monster should be Jinzo, but Kajiki Makoto's deck obviously didn't have it.
But that made sense. Cyber End Dragon was said to be the ace of the Cyber Style, but there was only one copy in the dojo, passed only to the sole legitimate successor of the style, also serving as a proof of the style's identity.
Kajiki Makoto was only a Psychic style apprentice, so he obviously wasn't qualified to inherit the style's ace monster yet.
After watching the recordings of his opponent's previous matches, Yugen had a good grasp of his opponent's strategy. He had also adjusted his counter-deck.
He did one last check of his deck before the match, confirming everything was correct. He stood up, inserted his deck into the duel disk, put it on properly, and walked through the dark passage to the dueling arena.
The host had already finished warming up the crowd and introducing the program. Yugen walked up the stairs onto the stage, only to see his opponent already appearing on the opposite side of the field. Their eyes met across the air, sparking invisible flames in the mid-air.
Yugen stood firmly on the field, his duel disk activated.
He felt this match should be no big problem.