Chapter 2, Road To Revolution
"GET out of my way! Actually, give me that deck first!" a person yelled at the crawling kid, who was desperately trying to flee the area.
The man grabbed the deck the boy was holding and began tearing the cards apart, one by one.
"NO! STOP! 'Haah'..."
The boy cried, weeping bitterly as he lunged at the man who was still actively destroying his cards.
"GIVE THEM BACK!"
He tackled the man, forcing him to the ground, and gathered all the teared cards he could take back.
"You BRAT!"
The man snarled, grabbing the boy by his collar and slamming him hard against a crumbling wall.
The boy let out a sharp gasp as blood began to pool from the back of his head.
The man stepped forward to beat the boy further, but the heavy sound of approaching footsteps echoed from behind. Before the attacker could even turn his head, his body crashed to the floor, unconscious, with foam bubbling from his mouth.
"Are you okay, Edo?!"
"Yeah. Thanks, Barret, Amon."
Without wasting a second, the three of them crawled frantically away, keeping low to hide from the dangers around them.
Once they found a safe place behind a massive pile of concrete rubble, the boy began examining his damaged cards.
"Aghhh... they aren't the most important ones, but they are completely torn apart."
"?" Amon looked over, trying to comfort him. "Edo, these cards aren't as important as "that" card, right? Then it's fine."
"I know, but still, these are 'my' cards. And he just trashed them."
Amon adjusted his glasses, a fiery intensity burning in his eyes. "Do these cards become trash only because they are destroyed? Or is it because you don't use them? Isn't it practically the same thing if they just sit unused?"
"Yeah... you're right." Edo muttered, looking down. "I'm just furious at myself because I couldn't do anything to stop him."
"We had better stay hidden and keep quiet rather than worry about cards right now." Barret suggested, keeping his eyes on the perimeter. "I know how much you treasure the cards your dad gave you, Edo." Barret replied softly. "But this is the not the time let alone best to worry about them. We can't fight back against those Darklords, no matter what we do."
Amon glanced back toward the path they had just taken. "Barret, is the perimeter clear? You're the best at hiding your presence—go take a look."
"Sometimes a gift is a curse, huh?"
Barret originally intended to climb the mountain of shattered concrete, but decided peering around the side was a safer approach, even if it limited his field of vision.
He crept forward, ensuring his boots made no sound, and carefully scanned the area.
The landscape was apocalyptic. Entire blocks had been reduced to a hail of rubble, the rocky roads were split into cracked rocks, and the sky was filled with heavy gray clouds. Wherever he looked, people were being assaulted and dragged away.
Barret crept back to Edo and Amon to tell his report.
"If we stay absolutely silent, we might be able to slip away unnoticed. If we're lucky, that is. We can use the building debris as cover, but moving through this scrap metal without making a sound won't be easy."
"It's a solid plan." Edo said, turning to Barret. "But keeping quiet is going to be the hardest part. This metal and rock are so unstable that a single mistep could cause a landslide. We'll have to be incredibly careful. It's not impossible, though. Great thinking, Barret."
"Save the gratitude for later."
The three teenagers nodded in unison and began to crawl forward, hyper-aware of their surroundings.
Suddenly, the crunch of approaching footsteps echoed nearby. Judging by the heavy but deliberate thud of the boots, they instantly concluded it was an enemy.
They held their breath. Fortunately, the footsteps began to fade into the distance after a few seconds that felt eternity to them. The trio let out a grouped sigh of relief.
Then, a massive jolt of lightning erupted right in front of them.
Blinded and startled, the three boys acted purely on survival instinct, covering their faces and scrambling away toward safer cover.
The concussive blast caught the attention of the passing person, who immediately turned and ran back toward the source of the noise.
The colorful lightning flickered one last time before vanishing completely. As the smoke cleared and the dust settled over the shattered rocks, a man stood in the center of the crater. He looked hurried and anxious, yet his facial expression remained eerily stoic—as though he were utterly detached from fear. He turned his head, scanning the ruined environment until his eyes locked onto the teenagers.
The three boys prepared to bolt, abandoning any thought of confronting the stranger, but the voice that echoed through the ruins stopped them in their tracks. It was incredibly familiar.
"RYO?! It's Ryo!" Barret shouted, his cautious demeanor momentarily breaking under a wave of sheer relief.
"Ryo...?" the man muttered, turning his gaze toward the boy.
The person the teenagers were shouting at was indeed a teenager with dark blue hair, dressed in a clean white shirt and blue pants. The older man quickly deduced with that boy's appearance that this "Ryo" was likely a student from a prestigious academy, but the surrounding devastation left him deeply perplexed.
Had his machine teleported him to a war-torn continent, or was this truly an entirely different dimension?
Because he had used an untested prototype, his calculations carried no weight until he could confirm the true nature of this world.
He watched the kids sprint toward the blue-haired boy, their panicked expressions giving way to relief. When the man began walking toward them, however, the boys instantly reverted to a defensive stance.
They gripped pieces of jagged rock and scrap metal from the debris. They knew they had the advantage in numbers, but they couldn't let their guard down. The stranger facing them was a dark-bronze-skinned, bald man who looked physically exhausted, yet radiated the intense, unhinged aura of a madman. His inflamed, bloodshot eyes and visible body nerves only made matters worse; the boys internally panicked, wondering if they were standing in the presence of a Sovereign.
Ignoring their hostility, the man checked the digital device fastened to his left wrist. The telemetry signals were functioning correctly, though the dimensional readouts were entirely alien.
He lowered his arm and addressed the defensive boys. He could tell they were terrified, poised to run at any second, yet waiting to see what his true intentions were.
"I only want to know what this place is." The man said calmly. "I have no reason or intention to harm any of you. I am simply searching for someone."
Though they remained deeply skeptical, the raw sincerity in his voice convinced them that he was telling the truth about his search.
Ryo stepped forward, deliberately shielding the younger boys behind his back. Accompanied with Barret.
"What do you want to know first? If the person you are looking for is missing, you might as well forget about them. They have probably already been carded."
"Carded? What do you mean by that? And what exactly is this world?"
Anger would typically have flared within the boys at such absurd questions, but they had just witnessed this stranger materialize out of a localized lightning strike. Enduring this hellscape had evolved them to become experts at reading people, and this man genuinely had no understanding of the tragedy that had veiled their world.
Before they could formulate an answer, a deafening roar soared through the sky, causing the very ground beneath them to tremble and crack.
The heavy gray clouds split apart as a monstrous, demonic entity descended. Its skeletal, bone-like structure was inlaid with blinking black orbs. It gnashed its razor-sharp teeth, swinging a massive tail capable of crushing mountains.
The creature lacked legs, but its elongated, blade-like hands looked capable of slicing through solid steel. They were sharp to very tip.
Perched proudly upon the beast's back was a man with a military posture, looking down at them with the smug satisfaction of a hunter trapping prey.
"Ho... you rats certainly make our job easier. It would save us a lot of trouble if all the rebel scum gathered themselves into neat little piles like this."
"A Sovereign..." Barret growled, clenching his fists as he glared up at the sky. "We were idiots to waste time talking to this crazy old man."
Overcome by sheer terror, Edo and Amon lost the strength to stand, collapsing to their knees.
Seeing the boys paralyzed by fear, the bald man stepped forward.
"What is your problem, old man?!" Barret snapped, projecting all his terror and rage onto the stranger. He lunged forward, tightly grabbing the fabric of the man's lab coat at his chest. "Why are you standing there so expressionless?! Why do you act like none of this matters?!"
Ignoring Barret's rage, the man brushed Barret's hands off his chest, completely ignoring the outburst. He walked past the boys, heading directly toward the towering beast, and spoke over his shoulder.
"I am neither mad nor mistaken, and the person I seek was not abducted. I will never let any harm fall on them. I will find them on my own terms." The boys stared, utterly failing to grasp the weight of his words.
"And one last thing—my name is Leo Akaba."
Leo closed the distance between himself and the monster, stopping a mere two meters away.
"It's not as though I left my deck behind. But to think I would actually have to waste my time using it against a mindless animal radiating artificial darkness... You are not worth the data."
Leo raised his wrist, activating the advanced interface of his device against the eleven-meter-tall behemoth.
"Is he seriously going to duel a Sovereign?!"
"It's suicide! It's beyond insane. He's throwing his life away!"
"I don't know..." Ryo countered after a long, tense pause. "Is cowering in fear and living as their slaves any better? At least he's fighting on his own terms."
"But it's no different from suicide!" Barret yelled back. "He's ending his life! That Darklord is going to vaporize him. Demanding freedom when you're clashing yourself with certain death, that isn't a revolution; it's just stupidity!"
Leo tapped a sequence of buttons on his wrist device. At the same moment, the Sovereign riding the beast barked a command.
The creature unhinged its massive maw, its jagged, skeletal teeth glistening as it lunged downward. Leo's fingers never stopped typing; it was a race against time.
The monster's teeth grazed Leo's forehead, drawing a thin line of blood that dripped onto the dry earth. In that exact microsecond, Leo's interface detonated with a blinding, absolute flash. A dome of pure flash consumed the entire sector.
The boys shielded their eyes by raw reflexes, overwhelmed by the blinding light.
When they finally opened them, they were met with a sight that defied the established laws of their grim reality.
The Sovereign, who just moments before had been sitting arrogantly atop the apex predator, was now sprawled flat on the dirt. He was aggressively rubbing his eyes, unable to comprehend how his reality had been inverted in a fraction of a second.
Standing in front him, Leo calmly caught a card that drifted down from the sky. It possessed a distinct purple border, and the artwork depicted the exact same skeletal creature—only far more terrifying and bound in chains.
The enemy soldier scrambled to his feet. Recognizing that his monster was gone, he relied on his massive physical frame and raw strength. He took out a knife from his belt and sprinted at Leo with a speed he had never utilized before.
It was a monstrous, heavily-muscled soldier charging on a physically exhausted, bald man with visible body nerves, who looked like a madman.
Barret tried lunged forward to help, but the confrontation resolved itself before he could even take a step.
With a swift, clinical movement, Leo redirected the soldier's momentum. The massive man was slammed violently into the ground, the breath driven completely from his lungs as his eyes rolled back. Leo looked down at the defeated soldier for a brief second before slotting the card into his device.
"How... how did he do that?" Edo whispered, his voice trembling on the verge of cheering, held back only by sheer disbelief.
Ignoring the boys' astonishment, Leo kept his gaze fixed on the soldier.
"Your eyes told me that you seek destruction, and when you cannot find it, you create it. Is inflicting terror and watching human beings drown in despair truly your concept of pleasure? You had absolute confidence that you could kill me. But I have seen the true apex—the ones we ourselves created to satisfy our own inner beast.
"The darkness we craved, the devil humanity birthed, and the absolute distruction he left in his mere transient. Compared to the world he forged..." Leo paused, surveying the gray clouds, the dark sky, and the endless fields of broken concrete and crumbled structures. But no darkness had covered this world. "...this place is heaven."
"What did he just do?" Barret asked, utterly dazed.
"He bypassed the Sovereign's punch entirely and used basic physics and leverage to slam him into the dirt." Edo explained, his shock giving way to analytical awe.
Leo turned back to the teenagers, his voice shifting back to a commanding, clinical tone.
"I will ask you one final time. What is this place?"
"This is Domino City... on the newly established Sovereignty Continent." Ryo said, stepping forward. His voice carried a trace of hesitation.
"The Sovereignty Continent...?" He didn't asked more about this topic. It carried no meaning and value to him. "Tell me, how many summoning methods do the duelists of this world utilize?"
"How many? There is only one true method: Fusion Summoning. Tribute Summoning exists, but it's completely trivial."
"I see..." A simple, knowing smile cracked onto Leo's face.
"Are you... not from around here?" Edo asked.
"No. I came to this dimension to find someone. Now, tell me exactly what is happening to this world."