Chapter 131: Give It Everything You've Got
The Over Limit Junk Punch came down from the sky like a meteor strike, and the entire Riding Duel venue shook with it.
The impact radiated outward to all seven other courts. More than a few duelists mid-ride had no warning before the sudden violent tremor hit, and went straight over their handlebars.
When the vibration settled, Rin Seiya's D-Wheel went quiet and her Life Points hit zero. The second Riding Duel of the night on Court A was officially over.
Fiona had assumed the crowd peaked when Amano absorbed Shooting Star Dragon's five-hit combo during his Accel Synchro. She was wrong. The punch he'd thrown on his following turn sent the cheering to a level that nearly took the roof off the building.
"Seven thousand eight hundred attack in one hit!"
"That thing could kill a God Card!"
"What a duel. I lost money on this and I don't even care!"
"Worth staying for. Worth every minute!"
The crowd said it better than anything else could. Amano and Rin Seiya's Riding Duel had carried the energy left over from the Emperor's match and ran with it, all the way to the end.
And then the destined battle drew to a close...
Except it didn't. Not even slightly.
The moment Rin Seiya called out "again," the destined battle got a forced extension. Apparently when she'd said she wanted to duel him regularly, she hadn't been joking at all.
Amano LP: 4000 to 0.
"NOOOOOOOO!"
Inside the practice arena attached to the venue, Rin Seiya dragged Amano into two more duels. Not Riding Duels this time. Standard standing duels, since all the tracks were booked for the night.
He lost both.
The Riding Duel had been close because both duelists were working from Speed Spells, which narrowed the gap between their decks considerably. That evening field had worked in Amano's favor.
In a standard duel, his cheap Spell lineup ran headlong into Rin Seiya's fully developed Synchro engine, and his win rate dropped to almost nothing.
Then again, she was Synchro Academy's top-ranked student. Losing to her was perfectly reasonable. Winning would have been the unlikely outcome.
Amano had assumed Riding Duels were his weak point given he'd never done one before. Turned out they were his strong point, precisely because poverty became irrelevant when everyone was running Speed Spells.
"That's two to one. The destined battle score is still in my favor, junior." Rin Seiya put her Duel Disk away.
She was surprisingly stubborn about it. One win back wasn't enough. She'd insisted on best of three.
"I don't mind dueling you anytime, Seiya. But maybe we skip the contract stakes?"
The Riding Duel venue sat outside the academy city's jurisdiction, which meant student duels here weren't subject to academy rules and didn't affect ranking scores. But the Eva system's contract duel rules still applied anywhere, which meant something had to be wagered.
Back in District 32, when Shio and Kikawayu sparred, they'd bet on who did the dishes. That kind of casual friendly wager made sense for practice duels between people who knew each other.
"Skip it? We can't skip it. Not fulfilling a contract wager is a rules violation. Sin Points go up. Come on, I'm ready."
Rin Seiya dropped onto a nearby bench and knocked her shoulder with her fist.
"Riding Duels are a lot of fun, but my left shoulder always locks up afterward. You spend most of the ride steering one-handed while holding your cards with the other. Come on, dig in."
It was true that Riding Duelists were notorious for developing unusually strong left hands from exactly this.
Before the duel, Rin Seiya had tossed out her wager: a five-minute shoulder massage.
Since Amano had lost twice, that came to ten minutes total. One minute short and Sin Points might actually tick up.
He walked around to the back of the bench, moved aside the faint-smelling white hair resting over her shoulder, and got to work.
She was wearing her school blazer, so nothing about the situation was particularly awkward. What surprised him was how small her frame actually felt under his hands. The bones were lighter than he'd expected.
So this is what a girl's build is like.
Fragile enough that he felt like too much pressure would snap something.
"Harder. Right there, yes. Oh wow, that's tight."
That answered that. Amano had clearly underestimated her physical durability. This was the same girl who had taken a direct hit from a Dark Synchro Giant during a Dark Game and walked away without a scratch. The delicate frame was not the whole story.
"Time's up. Want me to keep going?"
Ten minutes of this and his own hands were sore.
It had started with Rin Seiya making various small sounds whenever he found a knot, but somewhere around the halfway mark she'd gone completely quiet. When he asked if the pressure was okay, she gave vague sounds of acknowledgment and nothing more.
"That's enough," she said, voice even. "Give me a minute."
A minute?
Amano's private worry was that he'd gone too hard somewhere toward the end and actually hurt her, and she was too proud to say so. Though a shoulder massage wasn't exactly hitting a pressure point on the foot. There wasn't much to be proud about there.
"Haaah." Rin Seiya let out a long slow breath from the bench.
Something felt strange about her today. She'd assumed it was the Riding Duel adrenaline, but the feeling had carried through the standard duels afterward, and was still there now, sitting on a bench getting a shoulder rub.
She turned it over in her head. The conclusion she arrived at was uncomfortable: whatever was strange about her today was connected to Amano Rei.
Her heart was going too fast.
Every time she thought about his dueling during the Riding Duel, it sped up without permission. It had escalated to the point where just looking at him triggered the same response.
It hadn't been like this before. The two of them had stayed up all night watching anime in the club room together, and she'd felt nothing out of the ordinary then.
'It's because of Stardust Dragon...'
She thought back carefully. The moment she'd lost control of her own heartbeat seemed to trace back to a specific instant.
"Accel Synchro. Come, light. Stardust Chronicle Spark Dragon."
The moment Amano had summoned a Stardust Dragon.
She couldn't explain it at all.
She'd been chasing the destined battle against Jack Atlas. So why had seeing a Stardust Dragon made her feel something she had no name for?
Did she have some kind of thing for the Minotaur?
Rin Seiya began questioning her own tastes.
No, that couldn't be it. She only ever read pure romance.
With no answer available, she shelved the question. Maybe by tomorrow the feeling would be gone.
"All recovered. Let's head back, junior."
They still had D-Wheel business to finish. Time to blame the Riding Duel loss on poor D-Wheel performance and squeeze Fiona for a bigger discount.
Rin Seiya walked back to the garage block with Amano, scheming quietly.
They hadn't made it to the shop door before noticing the commotion outside.
A small crowd had gathered. Amano and Rin Seiya pushed through to find the source: a man standing at the entrance to Fresh Bloom Mechanics, looking thoroughly uncomfortable, while Fioré's furious voice came from somewhere inside the shop along with the occasional clang of flying metal tools.
"Is that," Amano said, recognizing him at the same time as Rin Seiya, "the Riding Emperor?"
Neither of them had seen his face before, but the white cape embroidered with a gold family crest was unmistakable.
Why was the most famous Riding Duelist in the venue standing at Fioré's shop looking like he'd rather be anywhere else?
Fioré's voice cut through again: "Get out, Kai. I told you I don't want to see you anywhere outside that track."
"Fioré, I just want to know why you gave away the card I gave you."
"I give my stuff to whoever I want. None of your business."
"Who is that man to you..."
Before he could finish the question, a metal wrench hit him square in the head and stopped him mid-sentence.
"He's nobody to me. That's the whole point. Kai, I don't want to see your face."
He was actually quite good-looking, in a very standard blond-handsome-man sort of way. Why Fioré didn't want to see him was something Amano and Rin Seiya both understood completely.
Amano quietly sidled deeper into the crowd to make himself less visible.
The card the Emperor had mentioned was obviously the Star Junk Synchron Fioré had handed him right before the duel. He hadn't done anything wrong. And yet somehow he felt like an affair accomplice.
Cornered by Fioré's barrage of projectile tools, the Emperor eventually retreated with what dignity he could salvage. Amano watched the white cape drift away and found it hard to reconcile the sight with the man who had Synchro Summoned a God Card on that track an hour ago.
"Fioré, are you alright?"
Rin Seiya was through the door the moment the crowd dispersed.
Fioré still had a wrench in hand. Her breathing was sharp, chest rising and falling hard.
"Sorry about that," Amano said, stepping in. He felt at least partially responsible. "He came because you gave me the card, didn't he. I can give it back if you want."
He really didn't want to give it back. Star Junk Synchron was genuinely excellent.
"Give it back? You absolutely cannot give it back." Fioré's jaw set.
Fantastic.
"Not only are you keeping it, you're going to use it in every Riding Duel you ever play. Use it hard."
"What exactly are you going for here, Fioré?"
"I want him to get the wrong idea."
"The wrong idea being..."
You want the Emperor to think there's something between you and me? And then what? He respects your history enough not to come after you, but he's got no reason to spare me. Amano couldn't beat a God Card. Not even close.
"Relax. Even if Kai wanted to go after you, he'd do it on a proper dueling stage. That's just how he is. He doesn't play dirty." Fioré looked Amano over. "I watched your Riding Duel with Seiya. You're good. What was your name again?"
"Amano Rei."
"Alright, Amano Rei. I'm rooting for you."
She'd handed over a rare card to someone whose name she hadn't even known yet. Amano found that oddly impressive, mostly because he was the one who'd benefited from it.
One thing did nag at him. Fioré had called the Emperor someone who didn't play dirty, the kind of person who'd face a rival on a proper stage. But this was the same man who had apparently chased a God Card, abandoned his teammates, and cost them the championship. Were those two pictures of the same person?
Maybe the story had angles he hadn't heard yet.
He filed the curiosity away. He was here to buy a D-Wheel.
After some spirited negotiation between Rin Seiya and Fiona, the D-Wheel that would become Yusei No. 2 changed hands at four hundred and twenty thousand Eva Points, down from five hundred thousand.
So Rin Seiya's family actually had money. Not at the level of the Nanki'in or Wein families, but well above ordinary. A regular student who wanted to Ride Duel would borrow a school machine. Dropping four hundred thousand on a personal D-Wheel, a second one at that, suggested a very comfortable allowance. Rin Seiya had mentioned once that her father was an archaeologist. Apparently archaeology paid extremely well inside Eden Tower.
No wonder Kaiba Corporation had offered her fifty million a year.
As for Amano's D-Wheel.
"I'll sell her to you at cost." Fiona patted the Moonlight Butterfly's flank. "I picked this one up cheap to begin with. I spent a while trying to retrofit a navigation system but never cracked it. Two hundred thousand. I won't charge you for the maintenance I've already done. That's genuinely cost price."
Two hundred thousand. Exactly within reach, with forty thousand left over.
Amano felt it.
Every young man carries some version of a motorcycle dream. And this wasn't just any motorcycle. It had a semi-perpetual engine, a built-in Duel Disk, and it had just spent an evening making him look extremely good in front of ten thousand people.
Beyond the dueling, a D-Wheel meant real freedom. No more walking an entire morning to get between districts. He'd save twenty minutes every morning just on the commute to school.
He could even ride it back to District 32. He could already picture Yui's face.
He bit down on the decision.
"I'll take it."
Balance: minus two hundred thousand.
Money doesn't disappear when you spend it. It just changes form.
"Wait, I don't have a license." The D-Wheel euphoria had temporarily removed this fact from his brain. It came back the moment the transaction was done.
Fiona's tongue touched her lip. Her fingers rubbed together.
"Licenses are very solvable. You're a first-year, so normally you'd have to wait another year for proper certification. But for forty thousand, I can have one in your hands tonight. Fully legitimate."
It did not sound fully legitimate.
Forty thousand for a same-night license.
And the price happened to be exactly what he had left.
Then again, fast-track certification had existed in his previous life too. And he'd already spent two hundred thousand on the D-Wheel.
He bit down again.
"Do it."
Balance: minus forty thousand.
Money only motivates you to earn more once it's gone.
Come on then, Moonlight Butterfly. Let's go home.
Amano rode through the middle district streets at night, the D-Wheel humming under him. Cool air moved across his face. Street lamps swept past one after another and fell behind.
For the first time in a long time, something felt like living rather than just getting through the day.
"Let's split here, junior."
Rin Seiya had ridden alongside him all the way back to the academy city. Synchro Academy's dormitories were in the north block, opposite from where Amano was staying. They parted ways at the central fork between the residential areas.
Before she turned off, Rin Seiya reached across from her D-Wheel and hit his palm with hers, deliberate and ceremonial.
"Until next time, Amano."
Another scene straight from 5D's.
He was increasingly convinced he'd made the right call buying the D-Wheel.
Back at the Fusion dormitory building, Amano spotted a familiar figure loitering at the entrance. Kikawayu lit up the moment he saw the D-Wheel roll in.
"Knew it was you, Rei." He bounced forward. "I heard the engine and figured, who else would be riding a D-Wheel back to the dorm at this hour? Had to come down and see."
Still had the instincts of a wild animal, as always.
Kikawayu stared at the Moonlight Butterfly with unconcealed longing.
No man could resist a D-Wheel. That was simply a law.
"Can I ride it, Rei?"
"Sure, but can you actually ride?"
"Not even a little. But you could take me. I'll sit in the back. Let's go right now."
"Right now?" Amano checked the time. Past eleven at night.
He'd had another long day.
"Where are Shio and Finesse? Asleep already?"
"You haven't checked VSN? Neither of them are in the dorm tonight."
He hadn't checked VSN at all. The Riding Duel had taken up his entire brain.
He opened the app. Sixteen unread messages.
Two were from Shio and Finesse.
"Big brother, I'm having a sleepover at a friend's place tonight. Don't cry because you miss me too much!"
"Amano, my father has called me back to the Wein estate. I won't be at the dorm this evening."
Both out, just as Kikawayu had said.
The remaining fourteen messages were all from Nanki'in Sakuya.
And there it was. He'd known something had slipped his mind when he left the academy.
He'd forgotten his own class rep.
"Amano, when are you coming back?"
"Amano, where did you go? Evening study hall is starting."
"Amano, are you skipping evening study hall? There's a lot of homework tonight."
"I have no idea how to do tonight's homework."
"Where are you?!"
"You had better have a convincing reason ready for tomorrow morning."
The last message had come in ten minutes ago.
"Amano, are you in some kind of trouble? Reply when you see this. I can bring people."
He'd been so happy about getting out of evening study hall that he'd completely blanked on the fact that Sakuya had been relying on him for her homework. Who was she supposed to copy from now?
He sent a quick reply letting her know he was fine and to stop worrying, then put the phone away.
Kikawayu was already vibrating with impatience.
"When do we leave, Rei?"
"Well, since it's just us tonight..."
Amano put his helmet back on, swung onto the D-Wheel, and pulled a spare helmet from the storage compartment.
"Proper brothers' night out. I'll show you what this thing can do."
"Let's go!" Kikawayu took the helmet, scrambled onto the back seat, and locked both arms around Amano's waist.
"You're holding on pretty tight, Kikawayu."
"Safety first. It's my first time on one of these. Better too tight than too loose."
"Fair enough. Hold on then."
"Yeah!"
The engine roared back to life in the night, and the D-Wheel carried both of them out into the dark ahead.
At the same moment, a figure that had been silently trailing Amano since he left the venue watched him ride out of the dormitory again. The corner of her mouth curved upward.
She had assumed Amano's D-Wheel would be too fast to keep up with, that he'd slip back into the safety of the academy grounds and that would be the end of it. Instead he'd come back out on his own, and brought along a tag-along she'd need to account for.
In the darkness, a girl whose body moved as though invisible strings were pulling her from above activated her D-Wheel in stealth mode and followed.
***
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