Three days slipped by and the island pretended nothing unusual had ever happened. Dawn still poured itself along the seawall in a pale ribbon; the bells still cut the hours into tidy segments; students still moved like schools of color along the walkways, blue streaming toward the north buildings, yellow pouring downhill, red threading the lower paths by the cliffs. The academy excelled at routine. It absorbed shock and smoothed it into schedule.
Julian kept his bargain and his mouth shut. When Jaden leaned across a cafeteria table the morning after the lake and asked. "So what did happen in that nightly ambush, dude? You got the guys ambushing Sy?" Julian met him with a small, steady smile.
"Let's just say it's handled." he said. "Better not to get into details. It touched on the Obelisk girls' dorm. I'm not going to make their business public."
That was enough for Jaden: curiosity even tugged at him for a beat more, then the gravitational pull of a sandwich won and the subject was put to rest. Bastion accepted the boundary with a simple nod, understanding that some things are better solved in private. Syrus, slower to let go, searched Julian's face for one extra cue.
"You're fine, mate. No need to worry." Julian added quietly.
Syrus's shoulders eased. The conversation drifted to safer waters: homework loads, rumors about the week's sparring rotations, the tragic state of the vending machine near Banner's lab.
If anything had shifted in Crowler, it hid behind polish. In lecture, his chalked diagrams were surgical: clean circles, underlines that snapped to a halt like they'd hit a wall, polished asides about historical rulings delivered with the pleasure of a practiced storyteller. When he called on 'Mr. Ashford' there was, once in a while, a fractional compression at the corner of his eyes: a recalculation, a filing adjustment from promising nuisance to promising variable. Not warmth. Recognition. While he kept his promise, Julian would take it.
He filled the days as the schedule demanded: Banner's odds-and-ends science, the alchemy syllabus that claimed to be chemistry but kept veering into the mathematics of luck, then Crowler's game theory, to practical blocks in the hologrid rooms where the light lattices hummed faintly and the field projectors threw a warm glow across the edges of cards. On the Ra balcony that faced the sea, he kept the quiet routine he and Syrus had built. Wind brought salt and the faint lemon of some industrial glass cleaner to their table. Syrus would fan out his deck; they'd talk through sequencing and contingency and the difference between "I can" and "I should". He was experimenting with some other strategies in some exercises, trying to find his own path, but, like Julian, still held onto his comfort whenever needed. The boy still tangled himself some days, but he no longer froze. He spoke through his turns now, and the words steadied his hands.
"Confidence is a resource like any other." Julian said after one of their sets, sliding cards into tidy piles. "If you use it all at once, it becomes bravado. That's also bad, makes up do stupid mistakes facing unnecessary threats. The key, like most of the things in the world, is balance. Brave enough to act when needed, but wise enough to hold when it matters."
Syrus puffed a laugh and tried not to glow too obviously. "I… get that."
"Then let's try to find that middle ground. You're overcorrecting."
At night, Ra's common room dimmed to soft pools of lamp light, and the sea's hush took the edges off the building. Julian's desk became a square of order: Banner's problem sheets (an exploration of variance dressed as a lab), Crowler's flow trees diagrammed by hand, and, at the upper right corner, a single sleeved card that he separated from his deck for proper reflection — Chaos Dragon Levianeer.
He hadn't told anyone how often that card had decided games in the last forty-eight hours. He hadn't even meant to play that often. But once the sparring rotations started, challenges came as if the island had noticed he was trying to keep his head down and wanted to see how he handled headwinds.
The pattern would have annoyed him if it hadn't been so… consistent. Annoying and consistent: a combination that made some part of his brain itch. His opening hands looked like hands he would have mocked if he'd drawn them in a casual sim back home: two spells that didn't meaningfully talk to each other without a third piece, a small body that did nothing into a particular trap suite, a defensive tech card with little no no use in that exact matchup. Then, by turn three or four, right where tempo turned to pressure: Levianeer would arrive with the calm inevitability of a tide. Three monsters aligned in the grave from fights he deemed necessary due to his poor hand.
Two DARK and a LIGHT for a ripping hand break that collapsed the opponent's plan around their ears? Or the three-LIGHT mode to bring back the necessary tribute to clear the opponent's backrow with his tech Mobius and finish the game against a annoying burn strategy before losing all of his life points? It kept happening. Not "always". Nothing in this world was "always." But enough to train his senses: the feel of a duel starting to slant, his deck on a mockery statement of brick after brick, the moment a reactive line too-clever-by-half needed to be replaced with something truly surgical, and then with almost petty punctuality: Levianeer.
On paper he could chalk the wins to discipline: he pitched correctly, he traded correctly, he built asymmetries and preserved his life total and forced turn cycles where his opponent's best line still snapped short of lethal. And yet when he looked at those games afterward, pencil hovering over the diagrams, he felt the tiny grain of grit that refused to be sanded smooth. The pattern wanted to be explained by sequencing alone. Something in it wasn't.
He picked the card up now and again without meaning to, the foil catching a thread of lamplight. The weight wasn't physical. It sat under the breastbone, a reliable tug that sounded like Syrus's voice promising: 'One day I'll beat you for real'. In his other life, he'd called moments like that symbolic. Here, where holograms roared and sometimes something behind them answered, the word felt like an apology for not having better language. He'd told Syrus cards are tools. It was still true. But tools could also be vessels. That didn't make them sacred. It made them capable of carrying things worth not dropping.
People were tools too, in the plainest sense: and the thought didn't shock him the way it once might have. A person acting toward a purpose is a tool relative to that purpose. So is a team, a class, a friend group: a network of leverage. The error was never in using. The error was in reducing: pretending a person was only a function, a spirit only a mechanism, a bond only a chord you plucked when convenient. He'd spent most of a life in rooms where strategy and empathy were pitched as opposites. This place, inconveniently, punished you for believing that. The island wasn't sentimental. But it noticed things, and it bent back at you in kind for her own whims.
He set Levianeer down with care and returned to Banner's problem sheet. Numbers steadied him. The way they behaved, the way they bifurcated into branches you could prune. He finished the last section, boxed the answer, and realized forty minutes had gone by without his thinking once about the lake. Apparently an advanced degree didn't meant much when your head was entirely elsewhere.
One other thing plagued his mind since that day at the lake: Nightshroud. Darkness with a capital D: more philosophy than person until it decided to wear one. In the stories Julian knew, the supernatural entity called itself a savior and preached the mercy of nullification: strip away hope and despair and you free people from suffering.
In GX's timeline, that idea had finally chosen a mask at the start of the Shadow Rider's arc — Atticus Rhodes — and moved like a cold front through the academy's heart. But this wasn't a show cycling toward its next scheduled beat. Possession was a method, not a guarantee. The elements from the manga already caused changes, not to mention his own presence. One thing was risking an ambush at night to get a professor, toying with people's souls was on a entirely different scale. Waiting for the "right" episode, the "right" host, wasn't a plan. It was a poor man's alibi, one that he refused to offer Alexis even if he had how to explain it.
Which meant his approach had to be built from what the island admitted in daylight: logs, outages, statements people were willing to sign, and the little inconsistencies they didn't realize they repeated. If Nightshroud was there, if that hunger for quiet endings had nested again, it would leave human fingerprints before it left supernatural ones. He could look for those. He would look for those. And if the script diverged so far that Atticus wasn't the vessel this time, he still needed a way to find the crack before something else wore it.
Next, the social approach. Trust was a resource, like confidence and life points. It regenerated slowly and could be spent in a sentence. If he wanted to ask for what Alexis had already gathered, he needed legitimacy that wasn't conjured from thin air. He needed to enter her orbit the same way he entered a duel he intended to win: with respect for the edges. He could offer fresh eyes, not omniscience. If she let him read her notes (if she had notes, collected like a private case file) he might catch a hinge detail she had seen too often to notice. And he knew the actual cause, he only needed a thread to connect the dots. Making the connection between two known lines was much more simple than finding a needle in a haystack like the girl.
He listened for a chance to say it aloud. The academy delivered one the second afternoon, between classes, on the breezeway that cut wind like a ship's narrow deck. Alexis was leaving the north building with Mindy and Jasmine, heads together. She caught sight of him and changed course by a degree or two, meeting him halfway at the rail where the bay was a wide breath of light.
"Alexis." Julian said, tone neutral, respectful. "Do you have a minute? You know about what. With or without your friends, whatever you prefer."
Mindy and Jasmine traded looks that said 'we stay', but Alexis only lifted her chin. The message was clear and concise: 'speak'.
"This is about what I said at the lake." Julian went on. "About helping. I know you've been carrying that search for two years. You've done more than anyone else here. If you'd be comfortable with it, I'd like to look at what you've collected: logs, notes, anything. Another pair of eyes sometimes notices a pattern the first pair has worn smooth."
Mindy's brows climbed. "Hold on—you told him?"
Jasmine's voice was softer, but the surprise was real. "About… your brother?"
Alexis didn't flinch. "I asked for help," she said, plain and steady. "He earned a chance to look."
Mindy's mouth pressed into a line, then she nodded once. "Okay. Then we're here."
Jasmine glanced between them and stepped a half-pace closer to Alexis, as if bracing a shoulder. "We stay. We listen. If you say stop, we stop."
Mindy's mouth opened on instinct, the beginnings of a defense of their captain's thoroughness. Alexis flicked a glance that calmed her by a fraction.
"Okay… You think you'll see what I haven't?" Alexis asked. Not hostile. Just sharp.
"You see things from angles other people miss. You notice patterns. You find truths you shouldn't have access to." Julian's voice mimicry'd Alexis' in a manner not convincingly enough to pass out as her, but well over the threshold for the three girls to understand his intent. "I told you, I don't have a crystal ball, hun. Connecting the dots is what I do. For that, I need a canvas with lots of dots, aka research. You probably already did that." Julian said. "Also, fresh eyes and different priors make different conclusions. Sometimes the lack of assumption lets you catch an out-of-place comma. Either way, it's honest work. I won't speculate, won't judge."
Jasmine squinted at him. "You make asking for homework sound romantic."
"Quite the opposite, actually. Believe me, if romance was my plan, I would have a better date plan than picking fresh wounds." Julian smiled, then turned to Alexis with a serious face. "If you say no, that's fine. I know what those files mean to you, I'll do the background legwork anyway. That would just save time."
Alexis studied him for a second that stretched long enough to become a test. "I won't show my folder at public." she said at last. "But I can let you read what I compiled. Names. Nights. What faculty said, on the record and off. That's all I have left of my brother, if the faculty takes it from me, preoccupied I'm putting myself at risk, I would be back at square one. You get one sit-down. Then I decide if there's a second."
"That's fair." Julian said. "Thank you."
It wasn't a victory. It was permission to try, framed as the favor it was. He would take it and pay for it with care. Her words were absolutely true, if the effort was made by the academy in recovering the boys and failed, the administration directive would change to cover up the whole mess, as a way to hide and forget their failures. Making too much of a fuss about that would be tantamount to poking a hornet's nest. Her evidence would be apprehended and she would be told to forget about it: that it was too dangerous.
The hours continued to pass in the ruthless march time had when things were piled up. In Crowler's class, the professor diagrammed timing windows with the satisfaction of a man describing an excellent watch. In Banner's, a lab on random distributions masqueraded as an excuse to make copper turn green. Between blocks, the island practiced its smiles and talks. And then, always, somewhere in the middle of the ordinary, came the duels.
Practice matches were the prime way to make money and improve one's deck at the academy. For someone who didn't knew what would be his true strategy, hoarding funds was very important. But he didn't schedule most of them. They arrived, his name and wins spreading the flames more than he himself could ever do.
One challenger after the next, all thinking they could show that the previous duels were a fluke: at the east practice balcony as the sun tilted, in the south hall's practical room where two instructors were grading forms and gave a shrug that meant don't scratch the walls. Raizou (Chazz and Taiyou's other friend) wanted the sting of the previous night eased by a different result. Two Ra first-years with borrowed confidence came in head up and left with heads still up, which he respected. An Obelisk he didn't know by name but recognized by the weight of his jacket wanted to test the "yellow who talks like a blue." Fine.
The strange thing wasn't the opposition. It was the hands.
The pattern continued. He could say it without drama because he'd written it down: openers that looked like the deck had shuffled itself against him. Lines that should have converged into pressure collapsing into dead angles because two reactive pieces decided to sit next to each other and glare. He managed the mess. He planned risk, rationed life points, took body blows where they would teach him something, walked a thin ridge between "patient" and "passive." And then, right on the border between "this will get away from you" and "now," Levianeer would arrive as a savior.
The first time, he'd said lucky. The second, he'd said pattern. We were at the twentieth already. He said nothing at all, because the word forming under the others was one he didn't like to use unless he had to: destiny. He preferred distributions. Destinies didn't factor nicely.
After the last of those matches closed and the practice deck's holo-grid guttered to dark, he stood with Bastion at the rail that separated the platform from the slope below. The island had put on its amber lights; the lines along the walkways had woken up in neat rows. Far off, the girls' dorm threw twin reflections back at the water like two coins someone had stacked carefully and then refused to spend.
"You are tracking draw quality." Bastion said, not a question.
"I am." Julian admitted.
"And?"
"It's unhelpful." Julian said. "Statistically plausible. Emotionally suspicious." He unfolded his notepad and tapped the column that summarized the last five games. "If I didn't know better, I'd say the deck noticed I was about to get my nose broken and decided to fix it."
Bastion had three probability curves open on his tablet, color-coded by duel length. "You're blaming variance." he said. "These are fair distributions. If your draws feel hostile, that's confirmation bias."
Julian leaned on the table. "Maybe. But bias doesn't explain repetition this clean. Every time the board state locks, the same cycle appears: brick, stall, surge, recovery. It feels less like chance and more like something testing consistency."
Bastion considered him a moment, then flicked his eyes at the sleeve poking out of Julian's pocket. "And always with the same card. Your new investment may be paying dividends."
"It's Syrus's promise with edges." Julian said. "And a card that's somewhat an ace for my current list. But still, it shouldn't be the answer at every match."
Bastion exhaled, amused. "You're just anthropomorphizing randomization."
"Call it interference, then." Julian answered evenly. "Duel spirits, luck bursts: whatever name you pick. If they can touch the game, they'll leave fingerprints. And if there are fingerprints, there's a pattern. If there's a pattern, I can find it."
"So you want to quantify divine mood swings." Bastion said, skeptical.
Julian shrugged. "People once called lightning a god's temper, comets bad omens, and sickness a curse. Then came charge differentials, orbital mechanics, germ theory. Eclipses stopped being prophecies the moment we could predict them to the minute; St. Elmo's fire turned into plasma physics; Magnets weren't witchcraft once we had fields and vectors." He glanced toward the duel disks stacked on the shelf. "I don't deny that the mystical is real. The Battle City recordings, especially Joey's semifinal, are proof enough that Duel Monsters intersects with something we don't fully grasp. But 'supernatural' is just a placeholder for 'not yet explained by science.' If it leaves a trace, we can read it. If we can read it, we can quantify it. And once it's quantified, a model can predict it."
Bastion smirked. "Very cryptozoologist of you, chasing ghosts with a clipboard. I'll stick with my math, thanks. Just increase your sample size and the variance will even out. It always does."
Julian cocked a brow. "Has it evened out on Yugi? Kaiba? Go ahead, build me a model that predicts them. Especially the king, that man's a walking statistical outlier."
"That's survivorship bias." Bastion said, a little too quickly. "We remember the miracles and forget the mundane. Over enough trials— "
"— the law of large numbers rescues you, I know." Julian folded his arms. "But only when the trials are independent and identically distributed. If the process is nudged, be it by deck construction that's deliberately non-ergodic, by player decisions that create path dependence, or by… other factors, your nice IID assumptions evaporate. You get fat tails, clumping, streaks that aren't 'luck' so much as system behavior. And if duel spirits even slightly bias state transitions? Congratulations, your deck just became an adversarial distribution."
Bastion tilted his head, intrigued in spite of himself. "So your answer is… metaphysics breaks probability?"
"My answer is model mismatch breaks probability." Julian said. "If the world injects structure we haven't accounted for, the 'math' you're relying on is the wrong math. We adapt the model or lose to ghosts we pretend don't exist. If the model doesn't fit the problem, a larger model is also a solution. Complex numbers, relativity, do I have to keep going?"
Bastion's fingers drummed on his tablet. "Fine. Suppose I humor you. What would adapting the model look like? Beyond poetry."
"Bayesian priors that update on observed 'pressure states'—tempo swings, life thresholds, spirit-linked triggers." Julian said. "We tag games and see if draws correlate with specific board narratives more than they should. If they do, we stop calling it luck and start calling it a feature. Meanwhile, on the practical side: redundancy, tutors, compression. I build for robustness and reliability, but the combinations are still the few odd points. It's not just bad luck, it's like my deck does not like something and it's working against me."
A slow grin crept onto Bastion's face. "A pre-registered experiment, then. Controlled sets, decklists locked, you and me alternating pilots. We log every draw, board state, and decision point. If your 'pressure states' have signal, we'll see it."
"And if they don't." Julian said. "I owe you a week of 'I told you so.'"
"Make it two days of cafeteria cleanup duty." Bastion extended a hand.
Julian shook it. "Deal. And if the signal's there?"
Bastion's eyes brightened. "Then we write the model that explains the ghosts." He hesitated, softer: "And we make sure it wins."
Julian nodded. "That's the part I care about."
Bastion had laughed off the exchange, but Julian's precision lingered with him. His vocabulary didn't sound like a duelist's: half the third years would've needed a glossary to understand the exchange.
Julian's background made sense of it. Before he ever woke up in this world, his life had been steeped in equations and systems: tools he wielded as naturally as others did a duel disk. Here, that fluency translated into something useful: a language Bastion respected.
Outside the classroom, Julian wasn't the kind of person to see the world as a graph or a set of parameters. He could enjoy silence, instinct, the texture of a moment. But with Bastion? This was the leverage that worked. In the anime, the boy had ended up a walking punchline after the first season: a mind so precise it broke against the absurdity around him. If Julian could make him believe in the impossible without breaking his logic, help him see that reason and wonder weren't mutually exclusive, then maybe Bastion wouldn't become a cautionary tale. Maybe he'd reach higher than canon ever let him, and solve his own deck problem in the process.
They parted at the crossroads where Ra's path peeled downhill. When Julian reached his room, the lamp circle felt like a small theater set: stage quiet, props in their places. He put Levianeer in the upper-right corner of his work square, a ritual he hadn't intended to ritualize. He did not pretend it warmed or hummed. It sat. He knew what it weighed in grams. The other weight he didn't measure in those units.
He drafted a message to Alexis and deleted it twice before sending one that was only logistics: Time window tomorrow? I bring coffee; you bring notes. Her reply came eight minutes later: After last block. Lounge by the east stair. No coffee. Paper only. He smiled despite himself. Paper only sounded like her.
He slept well that night for the first time since the lake, until the sun poured across his bed in a stripe that ignored the blackout curtains, as if the island had decided decoration should not defeat morning. He woke to it and laughed and dressed and met Bastion in the common room.
"You slept?" Bastion asked.
"Like a baby." Julian said. "Until dawn punched through my window and informed me that interior design is a lie."
"That would be an issue of room orientation." Bastion said gravely. "The punishment for hubris is a south-facing window."
"Strangely specific aphorism." Julian said.
"It's in the Ra handbook. Page forty-two." Bastion did not smile, which made Julian laugh harder.
They crossed to the main building. In the north hall, Crowler's lecture on timing windows was as crisp as a new blade. He called on Julian once, got a precise answer once, and moved on. In Banner's block they drew distributions longhand until their wrists complained. Lunch was a clatter and a scrape and the soft swell of conversations that tried to be about cards and turned into talk about everything else that mattered to seventeen-year-olds: a good sandwich, a good joke, a good rumor that didn't hurt anyone who couldn't handle it.
In the afternoon, the practice room was busy enough that an assistant instructor took names. Julian ended up against a second-year Ra with a thoughtful face and a nervous set to his shoulders. The young man's opener curved into the kind of midrange the island favored: reasonable, disciplined, solid. Julian's hand looked like a dare. He took it, because that was the exercise, and walked the knife-edge between patience and passivity again. When the midpoint came: the exact beat where he'd been saying annoying but consistent — Levianeer arrived with the posture of a unit that had perfectly understood its briefing. The game collapsed his opponent's plan and ended with a clean lesson for both of them.
"Your sequencing was good." Julian said afterward, meaning it. "Your plan respected the turn cycle. Your flex slot is pretending it's a meta call, but it's actually a comfort pick. Go one step more honest with yourself and tune."
The second-year stared, possibly uncomfortable with the loss in the hand of a first year. More problems, perhaps. Then, out of nothing, he laughed with something like relief. "Yeah." he said. "You're right. Thanks, man."
By the time the last bell dismissed the day, the island had exhausted its outward surprises. Which made room for the quiet ones.
Alexis was already at the east stair lounge when he arrived: back straight, hands stacked on a folder thick with paper, hair pinned with the exactness of a girl who controlled what she could control. Mindy and Jasmine flanked her like parentheses. The blue jacket made her look, as always, like a standard the dorm had planted and dared others to measure against.
"Chaperones." Mindy said, that first syllable an arched brow.
"Witnesses." Jasmine amended.
"Readers." Alexis said, and placed the folder on the low table between them. "You asked for a look. This is version six. Dates. Names. Statements I could get faculty to make on record and some they made when they forgot to check that I was listening. If I say stop, you stop."
"All right, all right." Julian said, raising his hands. He sat, angled so that all three of them could see what he did with his hands, and opened the file.
It was what a year and a half of refusing to believe a silence had won looked like. Clipped incident reports with whole lines blacked out. Maintenance requests for fences and lights around the old dorm signed by a rotating cast of night staff. A list of upperclassmen who had been caught trespassing in the general area and what punishments they'd received. Officer's notes that said nothing and, by saying nothing, admitted that something had happened they didn't have language for in an official capacity. At the back, a map Alexis had drawn herself by memory of where security had stood at the first rumored sweep: small x's like stitches.
Julian read in the way he read a complicated board: first for shape, then for hinge points, then for anomalies. He asked no questions for ten minutes. When he did, they were boring.
"Did this night coinciding with this outage ever get explained?"
"No." Alexis said. "The explanation got rescheduled twice and then evaporated."
"Has Fontaine ever put in writing that the old dorm perimeter is off-limits for reasons other than structural integrity?"
"Never in writing."
"Do you have attested times from security on this sweep?"
"Attested? No. Three versions that disagree by fifteen minutes. The one that makes them look busiest is the one they repeat now."
He nodded, and when he reached the end he closed the folder and sat with his palms on the cover like a promise.
"Thank you." he said. "You were right to keep it close. You've done more than any adult on this island."
Mindy and Jasmine both made small, involuntary sounds at that. Alexis's face did not change, but something behind her eyes shifted half a degree, a recalibration of what counted as respect.
"Do you see anything?" she asked, very low.
"I see places to push." Julian said. "Not with magic. With questions that have to be answered in a context where pretending not to hear them would make the person doing the pretending look foolish. And I see a perimeter that's not only physical. People have been taught not to name things. You've been walking right up to that line for two years. I'm going to stand on it with you and see if the ground wobbles."
Mindy's gaze flicked to Jasmine. Jasmine looked like she wanted to say finally and didn't.
"I'll bring you anything I produce that's safer to share." he added. "If you say no more, I stop. If you say keep going, I keep going."
"On paper only." Alexis said, and it almost sounded like a joke with the double meaning.
"Only if you wish so." Julian winked at the girl mischievously, drawing laughter from the entire group.
They parted with nothing dramatic said, which struck him as the right kind of promise. Outside, the light had tipped toward gold, the walkways had put on their quiet. He cut through the quad and felt, for a long breath, the exact wrongness in the air he'd been trying to formalize: a slant, a hush that wasn't silence so much as attention. The island wasn't watching. That would have been paranoid. But the island noticed. He had begun to believe that much.
Back in his room, he set Levianeer in the corner of the desk without thinking and smiled at himself for the habit. He'd told Syrus cards are tools. The sentence still stood. His own words and thoughts came back once more. 'Cards are tools—containers for choice. People, too.' The error wasn't in acknowledging utility. The error was in amputating everything else a human contained: loyalty, fear, joy, pride, tenderness, the stubborn decision to do what was right even if you could not yet justify it. Spirits, if they were there, probably didn't like being pressed into delimited gear slots any more than people did. And yet, more and more, he could feel the way noticing changed the room. You didn't have to bow to a miracle to behave as if attention mattered.
The next morning began like a clean equation. Once again, the blackout curtains failed to black out. He laughed in realization, got up and met Bastion, taking the long way to class so the sea could clear whatever his sleep had left. In Crowler's lecture, once again a single question, answered to perfection. Crowler simply stated 'correct' without sarcasm and continued the explanation.
In the afternoon, the practice room fed him another skewed opener. He recognized it now like weather: annoyance wrapped around a shape you could navigate. He stepped correctly, and when the midpoint came Levianeer arrived with its clean, inevitable gravity. Once more, once more. Afterward, the student he'd beaten wanted to talk through lines. Julian did. He always did, because the game wasn't only what the board showed. It was what you learned after.
That night he spread some of his own notes on his desk, based on the things he learned with Alexis' data: she never said he couldn't write his own binder on the subject. A map of the academy's island was on the side marked with the tiniest pencil ticks and marks, and a draft for a list of requests that sounded like sensible data pulls rather than a boy asking after a ghost. He would give her a copy of those and get her approval before start digging.
A second list was also on the side, this one for his eyes only: the public list (for Alexis' eyes) had lines from the start into the unknown, the private one the lines from the answer to the start. It was a matter of connecting both with data. Fence panels with repeated maintenance would have scratch patterns. Flashlight bulbs replaced twice in a week indicate someone who got spooked and over-checked. People who cover for other people do it in consistent ways: phrases they use as blankets. Find blanket phrases.
He sat back and rubbed the heel of his palm against the ridge under his breastbone where the weird little tug lived when he thought about the lake, about Atticus, about the way Levianeer had gazed back from the desk without moving.
"You're an engineer in a place that keeps handing you poetry." he told himself, amused and a little tired. "Fine. Translate both ways until something stops being a lie."
Out the window, the sea kept its unending conversation with the island's stone. Inside, his room held the practical sounds of a boy making a plan: the slow turn of paper, the scratch of a pencil, a card quietly set back in its place, not because he revered it, but because he meant to be careful with what it carried.
Saturday came with a slower light. A face mask finally did the trick the blinds were unable to. The bay lay a flat sheet of pewter beyond the cliffs, and the breeze had that mildness that made the palms whisper rather than rattle. The campus felt different on a weekend: emptier in the ways that mattered and busier in the ones that didn't. Instead of the pulse of classes and bells, there were pockets of motion: runners on the paths, a faculty member carrying a stack of exam booklets, a few duelists already setting up friendlies on the practice courts.
Julian and Bastion took a corner table in the Yellow dorm's common room and turned it into a lab bench.
No duel disks. No blaring summoning calls. Just a felt mat, two tidy piles of sleeved cards, notebooks open, pencils sharpened to knife-edges, and a deck box of pre-shuffled control samples. They were doing "duels combined," the way tournament judges ran reconstructions: cards face-up after the first reveal, decisions verbalized, branches recorded. It wasn't about beating each other; it was about mapping probabilities and testing triggers. It was about collapsing the fog of "luck" into lines you could trace.
"Again." Bastion said, already writing out the setup in a neat block script. He'd labeled the page: Trial 12: Controlled Openers, Two-Draw Window.
Julian cut his own deck precisely, then fanned five cards, face-up between them: Mystic Tomato, Prohibition, Pot of Greed, Book of Moon, Old Vindictive Magician.
"And the two off the top if we were in a live state," Bastion prompted.
Julian drew two to the side: Heavy Storm and Denko Sekka.
Bastion whistled silently. "That's already a pressure set. But we're not measuring strength, just incidence." He dealt across his own mat, then squared the hands so they aligned with the grid he'd sketched: positions, orders, draw indices. "The dependent variable is whether the 'out' shows in a two-draw horizon when we seed the initial five without an out. What are you outs now?"
"Exactly four." Julian said, tapping the notebook heading he'd written for himself. "Typhoon, Storm, Dust to crack-up your face-up floodgate or Levianeer as a black-swan reset if I can assemble the GY attributes."
"Not black swan." Bastion corrected on reflex, then paused. "Actually… Maybe black swan."
"Feels like it, you know that." Julian said, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "Run it."
They ran it.
Openers that "should" stall rolled into two-draw sequences where one of the out-paths arrived more often than their formulas said it ought to. They split the test: ten sequences with an implicit out already in the opening five, ten without, then another ten where the out was on top of the deck and "should" be seen by any reasonable player. They controlled for order, for shuffling style (Bastion insisted on using the same seven riffles and a box cut each time), for mulligan-like redraws as a separate batch. They wrote down every line: source hand composition, turn order if this were live, what the "best line" would have been under perfect information, and whether the next two cards bridged it.
By Trial 19, Bastion had stopped talking.
He watched Julian flip the top two in another "no-out" opener and reveal Pot of Greed into Mystical Space Typhoon. He circled the result, jotted the percentages, then simply frowned at the page like it had insulted him.
"Now you see it." Julian said quietly. Not gloating, inviting.
Bastion set his pencil down, then picked it up again. "If this were a single sequence, if we were judging, say, a suspicious stream clip — this pattern would suggest manipulation." The word sat there between them, clinical. "But the control samples behave. Mine behave. When I cut your deck, it behaves. When you cut your deck, it…" He stopped, as if the next word had to be weighed. "does this."
"Out of range." Julian said.
"Not impossible…" Bastion amended, because he was Bastion and he'd die before he misused 'impossible'. "But… far from the mean. A tail event that refuses to stay rare."
They ran five more, because not running them felt like superstition. Trial 20 ended in a neat little bow: Messenger of Peace appeared as draw-two on the one turn line where it converted the board from a likely lethal to a locked state. Bastion stared at the card, then exhaled through his nose. Two more turns later, Levianeer brought back the advantage and finished the game.
"In an isolated case, I would accuse you of stacking, palming your deck." Bastion glanced up, brown eyes deadpan. "And you would accuse me of being an idiot for saying so."
"I'd accuse you of being thorough." Julian said. "Then I'd show you my sleeves."
Bastion actually smiled. "If it were anyone else, I might suspect collusion with Dorothy to load your packs with weighted cards."
"Don't drag Dorothy into this." Julian said. "I like Dorothy."
"I like Dorothy's prices." Bastion said, and checked the time.
The Yellow dorm clock ticked patient seconds around its cheap, cheerful face. Voices bled in from the hall — someone complaining about lap counts, another groaning about the curry rotation. At this, both of them looked up.
"If I eat the headmaster's curry four nights out of five again" Bastion said, "my stomach will stage a coup."
"Cheap and quality meals in a single pot, perfect for masses of students. He's proud of that recipe." Julian said.
"My stomach is not." Bastion said, packing his pencil. "Come on. Syrus said the Slifer commissary is serving them even worse than us."
"Jaden dueled for himself, he can pay a meal in the plaza. Syrus…" Julian said, standing. "Well, he's doing what I asked nicely, I suppose I can cover his meal. Fine. Let's go prevent your insurrection."
They reset the table with muscle memory: decks squared, mats rolled, notebooks snapped shut. Julian slid the stats page into the folder and felt a small, private hum under his skin. It wasn't satisfaction, not exactly. It was the relief of not being crazy. He didn't have a model yet, the numbers still refused to line up in ways that would convince anyone but a hopeful mind. But Bastion had felt the skew. He'd watched the coin land on its edge just enough times to frown.
They stepped into the corridor where sunlight braided over the worn carpet and the air held the faint chemical bite of floor polish. Second-years moved in little herds, less eager than the first-years, more possessive of their weekend hours. A couple of the older Yellow students lifted a hand toward Bastion. A few lifted one toward Julian, too, which still felt new.
"It's just faces." Bastion said when Julian glanced at him. "People read the scoreboard."
"And the rumor board." Julian said. "Two more duel invitations already since lunch yesterday. I had work to do at the dorm, scheduled them for next week."
"Make it three." Bastion said. "Someone slid a note under your door this morning asking for a 'gentleman's duel' at the north court. No name. Very dramatic."
"Ah yes." Julian said dryly. "In Obelisk letterhead, nonetheless. The secret society of Obelisk avengers attacks again."
They cut across the courtyard, heat curling up from the paving stones. The Obelisk halls flashed their blue glass teeth above the trees; the Slifer bungalow peeped from its spot near the rocks, laundry strung like flags on a breezy balcony. The smell of frying curry reached them before the commissary sign did.
They found Jaden and Syrus outside, sitting on a low wall under the shade of a ficus. Jaden had his duel disk open in his lap like a makeshift table; Syrus had his notebook open, the pages already occupied by Julian's tidy diagrams from their last session.
"You're late." Jaden said by way of hello. "Syrus almost ate without you. I saved his burger from his own mercy."
"I was in a meeting with probability." Julian said. "We got into an argument."
"The twins fighting?" mocked Jaden.
"Math." Both yellow students answered, simultaneously, then looked at each other and laughed.
"So… a normal Saturday." Syrus said, smiling faintly. He looked better: sleep had washed the last of the gym-class embarrassment from his face, and the pledge he'd made days ago sat in him like a little anchor. He touched the notebook. "I… I tried the thing with counting my outs first when I played Watanabe this morning. I actually waited on playing the Bond and he set a Mirror Force. I mean, he popped it later, but if I'd done it early I would've… you know."
"Self-destructed." Bastion supplied.
"Exactly." Syrus said.
Jaden grinned. "That's my guy. Delayed gratification. Grows character."
Syrus blushed. "I was gonna say 'grows win rate,' but… yeah. That too."
"Using the card versus played the card. Now you get the difference. And, as your brother said, you felt it now in your own skin." explained Julian. "See? I told you my method is better."
They stood to go inside when a shadow fell across their little group. Not a cloud, something nearer.
"Julian Ashford?" a voice asked, crisp but not hostile.
The newcomer wore Obelisk blue like it was made for him. Broad-shouldered, a clip on his vest that indicated second-year, hair clipped close at the sides like he preferred things aerodynamically neat. His uniform jacket sat just-so, not a wrinkle in sight, and his duel disk: an older model, maintained to a mirror — hung at his hip.
"Daigo Sorano." Bastion said under his breath, with the air of a man citing a textbook. "Second-year. Regional champion last spring in the amateur division. He won the final in six turns, his opponent was a puppet at his hand."
Julian turned to face him. "That's me." he said by way of introduction. No flinch, no bow, just the polite neutral he'd perfected.
Daigo nodded once. "I've been meaning to meet you."
"Likewise?" Julian offered, with a question mark because it was true in an unplanned way.
Daigo's gaze flicked over the small group. Bastion's composed attention, Jaden's curious grin, Syrus's half-swallowed nerves. He settled back on Julian. "Word circulates." he said. "You upset an upperclassman in controlled conditions two nights ago." He said "upset" the way a chess player said "sacrificed material". A precise term, value-laden but not emotional. "You've collected two more wins since."
"Practice courts." Julian said. "First weekend jitters. People test fences."
"And you challenged the Kaiser." Daigo added, blandly.
Syrus's mouth opened. "Actually…"
Julian lifted a hand. "Zane and I had a conversation. He set terms. I intend to meet them."
One corner of Daigo's mouth moved the smallest fraction. It might have been respect. It might have been nothing. "Good. I prefer ambition to noise. The academy is full of both."
Jaden leaned in just enough to be heard. "Is this guy…?"
"High-rank Obelisk." Bastion murmured. "Last year's King in the internal ladder for a month before the final exam block."
Daigo glanced at Bastion, acknowledging the data like an adult reading a dossier. "You're Misawa. Word says your work is tidy."
"Thank you." Bastion said, pleased despite himself.
Daigo returned his attention to Julian. "You've made an impression on people who don't impress easily." He said it flatly, without preamble, without the heat most Blues wore like perfume. "I don't especially care about dorm gossip. I care about reality on the mat."
"Likewise." Julian said.
"Good." Daigo said again. He drew a small square of university stationery from his inner pocket, as if even his challenges had a letterhead. "This is me offering you something more useful than murmurs. A formal duel. Spectators acceptable. No ante. No tricks. I sent you a challenge letter this morning, but since we're both here…" He met Julian's eyes. "Prove the noise isn't louder than the signal."
Syrus's head jerked up. "H-Hey, that's not... He just..."
"Sy." Jaden said softly.
Julian didn't look away. "This sounds like you're doing me a favor." he said.
"I am. If you win, your reputation skyrockets. If you lose, I'm the top rated student at second-year, you gain a lesson without shattering your reputation." Daigo said. "It's a favor to me as well. I'm bored. I like meaningful work."
Jaden grinned, because of course he did. "Wow. Nice, an Obelisk who knows how to ask someone for a match."
Daigo ignored him. "I've seen too many first-years flame hot for a week then ash out. If you're going to orbit the Kaiser's gravity, I'd rather learn the vector now."
Bastion murmured, "That was almost poetic."
"Almost." Julian agreed, and there was the smallest humor in it, shared on a frequency only Bastion would hear.
"Then?" Daigo asked, businesslike. "Do you accept?"
Julian glanced down at the stationery out of reflex, though it didn't say anything but the Obelisk crest and the date with space for a name. He understood the optics and the man was right: a loss here might cost his title of absolute and unbeatable prodigy, but didn't hurt his chances for promotion. And in the state his previous duels were going, it would be a perfect chance.
"Let's limit-test our theory." Julian said, looking at Bastion. "I accept."
Syrus made a strangled sound. Jaden elbowed him, delighted. Bastion's eyes had the bright steadiness he got when numbers lined up.
"In a couple hours, then." Daigo said, like he'd already mapped out practice blocks and rest cycles. "Four o'clock. We meet in the Arena's north court. I'll file it right now so it's public. You will bring your best. If you don't intend to bring your best, withdraw now and we call it a misunderstanding."
Julian shook his head. "You'll get my best."
Finally—finally… Daigo smiled, the barest unsheathe of teeth. "Good." he said for the third time, and then he lifted two fingers in a minimalist goodbye and was gone, moving with that spare economy that said he didn't fidget and didn't waste.
Syrus exhaled like he'd been holding his breath since the greeting. "Julian—are you sure? He's not only a second-year, but a serious candidate for King or Kaiser after my brother graduates."
"If someone wants to be a pro, dueling with the best is the bare minimum." Julian said. "You still take the jump."
"That's not comforting." Syrus said. "What if you lose?"
"If I lose, I lost. Fair and square." the dirty-blonde replied. "This is a school, you know. Learning is part of the process."
Jaden clapped Julian on the shoulder. "That's the spirit! And I like that guy." he said of Daigo. "He talks like a loading screen, but he seems cool."
Bastion was watching Julian's face, not Daigo's retreating back. "You wanted a clean data point." he said. "There it is."
"Mm." Julian's mouth had gone a little dry, but he felt good—present, awake in the way a crisp morning made you awake. "Two hours…"
"Later." Jaden said, digging into his bag. "Right now we eat. A burger strengthens the soul."
"As long as it is not curry, I'm fine with it." Bastion muttered, but he was already moving toward the commissary door. "And if I have to smell it, I might as well consume it."
They cut across the central plaza, past the fountain and the stone duel disk, toward the campus fast-food joint KaibaCorp had branded within an inch of its life: Blue-Eyes Byte. A chrome dragon head arched over the counter, neon eyes pulsing as the menu cycled: White Lightning Fries, Ultimate Triple Stack, Azure Burst Shakes. Dorothy always said Kaiba could sell air if he painted it blue.
"Four Ultimate Stacks with soda refills." Jaden told the cashier.
"Five. And a bucket of fries." Julian corrected, already tapping his card to the reader.
Syrus blinked. "Five?"
Julian shrugged. "Bigger frame needs more fuel." Up close it was obvious: for a first-year, he was nearly Zane's height, all long leverage and not enough bulk yet to match it. "The fries are to share, though. My treat."
They took a booth beneath a mural of a roaring Blue-Eyes, trays clattering, the plaza breeze carrying salt and fryer heat. Conversation slid easy while they unwrapped burgers and demolished fries: Jaden narrating some wild idea for a fusion line, Syrus asking follow-ups, Bastion poking holes in the math, Julian countering with adjustments between bites. Refills hissed at the self-serve station. For twenty minutes, it was just four kids, good grease, and a dragon logo watching over them like a weirdly benevolent mascot.
They lingered in the booth a little longer than their trays warranted, refills sweating on the table while the plaza thinned and refilled with the slow tide of students. When Syrus finally leaned in, it was with the earnest hush of someone asking for state secrets.
"So… side deck." He glanced at Julian's deck box like it might answer. "What are you bringing? Daigo's a second-year. His list is probably public."
Julian wiped his hands on a napkin, thoughtful. "Half-and-half. Some generic tools, some pointed tech for him. If I go hyper-targeted, he'll expect it and pivot into a line that punishes my assumptions. People already know I tech specifically against them, so I can't bring something too specific, he could just change his list and fuck me up."
Bastion nodded. "Minimax play. Assuming he'll use his main list, but keep it generic in case he doesn't."
"Exactly. The baseline on Sorano is a control shell that shepherds Horus the Black Flame Dragon up its line and then locks the ground with Royal Decree." Julian explained. "Once LV8 hits, he flips Decree and we're in the desert: no spells because Horus says 'no,' no traps because Decree says 'no.' You're left with raw combat math and on-board effects. Pair that with a couple of defensive tools and he's quite formidable."
Syrus winced. "So… what do you do?"
"Make sure both parts of the vise don't close at the same time." Julian tapped the table twice: Decree and Horus. "I want outs at different speeds. Dust Tornado that I can chain when he commits Decree. Mobius the Frost Monarch as a clean answer if the game slows: tribute, pop the lock. Prohibition also, obviously. He'll know and prepare for it, of course, but it's still effective. If I draw it early, naming the Royal Decree forces him to win through real interaction. If I see it late, I name Level Up! or Horus LV6 and stall his ladder."
Bastion tilted his head. "And if he opens Decree and keeps you off all traps before Mobius is online?"
"Then the plan shifts to pressure. D.D. Warrior Lady to trade with a boss through protection. Exiled Force so an effect removes on tribute. No spell activation, no trap resolution. Those work under both of his locks just fine. I'll keep Smashing Ground in the main as an 'if he stumbles' line; it's dead into LV8, but it's excellent before he gets there."
Jaden, who had been diligently turning a fry into an improvised sword, perked up. "And if he tries to big-brain you? Like, fake you into it and buying time to find the answer and then climb Horus anyway?"
"Then he spent time not advancing the real lock." Julian said. "Any second a full control deck is not controlling is a win for me. I'll trade that every time."
Syrus chewed on the idea. "So… generic tools are for your deck's weak spots. The pointed ones are for his game plan."
"Right. Think of it like packing for weather and for the terrain." Julian said. "Umbrella and hiking boots."
"Boots and math." Bastion murmured, evidently satisfied.
Jaden leaned back, grinning. "You sound like you already won."
"I sound like I have a plan." Julian corrected, but the corner of his mouth made room for Jaden's optimism. "A perfect plan only works until it finds a single obstacle. He will prepare for me as I did for him. That's why we bring defensive tools as well."
They cleared the trays and stepped into the sun. The plaza clock read 14:02. Two hours until go-time.
They cut north, past the library's sailglass and the atrium of the labs where first-years were learning to calibrate duel disks. Word moves faster than people in a campus like this: by the time the four of them crested the rise that looked down on the arena complex, clusters of students were already angling that way, the promise of a sanctioned match in the arena humming the air. A pair of Obelisks held a conversation in stage whispers as they walked. Two Ra girls compared side deck notes out loud in the way that meant they were both trying to guess Julian's techs and to be overheard guessing.
"North entrance." Bastion said, consulting habit more than need. The north gate was already propped open; two attendants in academy polos were checking names off a list and scanning ID bands. A faculty proctor stood a few paces back, clipboard in hand: neutral, watchful.
Inside, the arena was exactly as it had been the night Jaden upended the practical director's pride: a bowl of seats stepping down to the dueling dais, the projectors sleeping like great lamps until someone told them to wake and show gods. The main screen above the platform cycled the match tile:
JULIAN ASHFORD (RA) vs. DAIGO SORANO (OBELISK)
SANCTIONED EXHIBITION — 16:00
"Your name looks good up there." Jaden said.
"It looks temporary." Julian said. "Let's earn it."
They found a row high enough to see every angle and low enough to feel the stage. Syrus pressed forward to claim the aisle seat; Bastion sat with the posture of someone who would be taking notes even if he didn't have paper. Julian set his deck box on his knee and didn't open it yet.
Heads turned as blue trim moved along the opposite aisle. Alexis Rhodes took a seat with Mindy and Jasmine two rows across, the Obelisk girls crisp as always, Alexis's gaze coolly scanning the floor, then briefly finding Julian. It was the sort of brief that still managed to register as a nod from across twenty paces. He returned it with the smallest lift of chin, then looked away before the exchange turned into a conversation they didn't need to have yet.
Another ripple moved through the bowl. You could always tell when status arrived — not by noise, but by the movement of people making space with their bodies. Zane Truesdale came down the center steps with the economy of someone who did everything with exact effort. He didn't look around to acknowledge anyone and still acknowledged everyone by standing there. He chose a position neither front nor back, hands at his sides, gaze composed. Even the Obelisks stopped performing for each other and recalibrated their faces into something closer to attentive.
Chazz's crew filtered in late, Chazz himself wearing the kind of stormcloud expression that said he was here to watch the universe correct a ledger in his favor. He took a seat a few clumps over from Alexis. If he noticed her, he didn't show it. If he noticed Julian, he narrowed his eyes and pretended he hadn't.
Dorothy was here too, cheerful even in the hush, whispering something to one of the attendants and pointing at the scoreboard with proprietary pride, as if the rectangles of light were a display case she'd stocked. The steadier faculty faces rounded out the edges: Dr. Crowler in the shade of a column, expression unreadable; Professor Sartyr visible up in a supervisor's box, hands folded, as neutrally supportive as a dorm head could be when one of his own was taking a very public swing.
The lower gate opened. Daigo Sorano stepped out first, blue jacket crisp, duel disk already booted. He had the patient stillness of a player who preferred to decide when the pace happened. When he looked up, his eyes tracked the bowl with a professional's interest, not an aristocrat's disdain. He made a small show of checking the platform's array, habit or theater, and then took his mark.
Julian rose to the corresponding gate when an attendant gave him the nod. There was a tiny lift in the room, an almost inaudible sound that wasn't a sound at all — expectation settling. He walked the tunnel with the same rhythm he'd walked onto the exam platform days earlier and stepped into the light without looking up at the screen. The projectors hummed awake over his head, throwing his and Daigo's data into clean fonts. He crossed to his mark and, for a beat, let himself look around.
He found the faces he cared about: Jaden leaning forward like a coiled spring; Syrus with his hands in fists on his knees; Bastion measuring angles even from a seat; Alexis composed; Zane unreadable; Chazz trying to pre-celebrate. The rest became a blur on purpose.
Daigo inclined his head the way polite combatants had since humanity figured out you could test your will without spears. "Ashford."
"Sorano."
"You've made yourself interesting in two days." Daigo's tone was frank, not taunting. "Time to check if the value checks out."
"Trying to keep pace." Julian said, which earned him the smallest almost-smile.
An official stepped between them just long enough to set the table. "Sanctioned exhibition. Standard rules. No ante. No externals. You both signed the deck lock earlier, if you need to reference the list for a judge call, you'll do it through me. Any questions?"
"No, sir." they said, almost in unison.
They slotted their decks. The disks whirred, edges flashing to life; the center circle pulsed once in readiness. The arena's light shifted, a subtle dim toward the seats and a bright clean focus on the platform. Wind from the vents played across the floor just enough to make hair lift at the temples, to make the air feel like weather rather than climate control.
"Here we go." Jaden whispered, grin irrepressible.
"Observe closely." Bastion said, and it wasn't a joke.
Across the bowl, Zane's eyes narrowed by the width of a thought.
Julian drew his opening hand and let his eyes register the shapes without letting his face say anything. Mobius wasn't there, fine — he hadn't expected him to be. He saw interaction, tempo, a way to see more cards if the first exchange went sideways. Still bricky, but good enough. Better than what he had in the last few days. The top of the deck felt right under his thumb, which didn't necessarily meant anything mystical, but still wasn't nothing.
The official raised his hand. "Players ready?"
Julian lifted his disk. Daigo mirrored the motion.
"Begin."
Both voices hit the same note across the circle, practiced and clean.
"Duel!"