Chapter 134: Keep This Little Gremlin Away From Me
"Push harder, Mana! You can do better than that!"
"Hah... hah... hahhh..."
The Dark Magician Girl pressed the back of her pale wrist to the corner of her mouth, wiping away a bead of sweat as she shook her head with a tired sigh.
"It's not going to work, Amano. This Dark Game barrier is way stronger than I expected. My 2000 attack points just aren't cutting it."
"It's even tougher than the Millennium Key's barrier?"
That was saying something. When the Millennium Key's dark barrier had sealed off a space capable of transmitting souls, Mana had blown straight through it without a second thought. And yet this barrier, the one the Puppeteer had erected for tonight's Dark Game, was on a completely different level.
It looked like the Puppeteer was finally taking things seriously.
The wall was too thick. Amano's Hacker Invasion skill couldn't punch through it no matter how he tried. All he could do was stand outside and listen to the wrenching screams tearing through from within.
He told himself, at least, that those screams didn't sound like they were coming from Kikawayu.
Inside the barrier, the duel was over. But the pain wasn't.
The agony that had burrowed all the way down to the soul hadn't faded. It kept burning, relentless, and the Puppeteer could do nothing but roll across the ground inside Kaiba Chiha's body, unable to stop the convulsions.
"Screaming on your own time is fine," Kikawayu said, her voice carrying absolutely no warmth. "But it still counts toward your total."
She looked down at the Puppeteer from above, and if the Puppeteer had any capacity left for aesthetic appreciation, it would have noted that the girl's face was genuinely beautiful. Instead, what registered was something else entirely. Staring up at that pale, flawless expression and that faintly unhinged smile curling at the corners of her lips, the Puppeteer felt nothing but terror. It was the face of something that had no interest whatsoever in mercy.
Kikawayu's black-soled boot came down hard on Chiha's right hand.
"There we go. That's the one."
What she was pinning to the ground wasn't just Chiha's hand. It was the thread. The line of control the Puppeteer had been running through Chiha's limbs like wire through a marionette. The sole of her shoe pressed it flat, and something in the connection frayed.
"Interesting technique," Kikawayu said, tilting her head with clinical curiosity. "I've never seen this particular method before. Not brainwashing, not the Millennium Rod's control. You're using the Eva Network's data infrastructure as a medium. You wove control over a human consciousness through remote access. That's actually impressive."
"You can see that?"
The Puppeteer, despite everything, managed to sound alarmed. And then the calculation shifted. The situation had become genuinely dangerous. Even if cutting the connection now meant dragging this soul-deep pain back to its real body, staying any longer was the worse option. Something far more dangerous could happen if it lingered.
Time to go. It needed to go right now.
"...Why can't I leave?"
"Did you think this was a hotel?" Kikawayu said pleasantly. "Check in whenever you like, check out whenever you feel like it?"
The other boot came down on Chiha's remaining free hand. Two more threads snapped. Half the puppet's strings were gone.
"Ahhhh! You crazy woman, stop it!"
The pain was clear and sharp, reaching the Puppeteer's soul even though it was Chiha's body taking the hits. Kikawayu waited. Methodically, patiently, she worked until every last thread connecting the Puppeteer to Chiha's four limbs had been severed. When she was done, Chiha's small body hung completely limp, the strings cut, like a broken toy that no longer knew how to stand. Kikawayu reached down and hauled her up by the collar.
"Now then," she said, holding Chiha at arm's length and studying the slack face. "Even after the Dark Game ends, you shouldn't be able to get out of this body. Not anymore."
The Puppeteer laughed.
It was not the sound of something that had given up. It came out jagged and exhausted, but it was still a laugh.
"You underestimated me, Kikawayu."
Something on Chiha's wrist caught the light. The Eva Terminal, hanging loose against her limp arm, had started glowing. Not the ordinary soft glow of a functioning terminal. Something stranger.
The Puppeteer's voice dropped to just above a murmur.
"The true darkness of Eden runs deeper than any Dark Game. Deeper than anything that can simply take a life."
Kikawayu's eyes narrowed.
"Eva Network. Administrator mode. Activate."
The Terminal flared.
A beat of silence. Then Chiha's head lolled sideways, and the body went completely slack against Kikawayu's grip.
The light died. Whatever had been animating Chiha from the inside was gone.
"...It destroyed my Puppeteer card," the Puppeteer said, in the last fraction of a second before its presence vanished entirely from Chiha's body. "You'll pay for this, Kikawayu."
And then there was nothing left. Just Chiha, unconscious and boneless, hanging from Kikawayu's hand. Kikawayu let go and dropped her unceremoniously back onto the ground.
"It escaped through the network," Kikawayu said.
Yubel materialized nearby, wings half-folded, wearing that ancient and slightly amused expression that meant she had already thought three steps ahead.
"Not quite escaped. It used administrator-level access to delete itself from the session. There's a difference."
"It deleted itself? That's suicide."
"That's what I'd think too," Yubel agreed. "But something that cowardly, something that hides behind puppets in a safe location rather than ever fighting directly, doesn't choose to die. Not from pain alone. What it deleted was probably just its presence inside the network. The core is still out there somewhere."
Kikawayu looked down at the unconscious Chiha for a moment. Then she reached down and picked her up again, holding her by the back of her collar like an unwanted cat.
"So what do we do with this useless thing?"
"Not entirely useless." Yubel's gaze drifted to the Duel Disk still strapped to Chiha's arm. "She's carrying a substantial volume of high-value cards. If you fuse them into my spirit deck, it might let you awaken before you turn twenty."
The disinterest on Kikawayu's face evaporated instantly. Her head snapped up.
"Really? If I have those cards, I could actually awaken before I'm twenty?"
"I said might."
But Yubel already knew how this was going to go. When there was even a one-percent chance of something Kikawayu wanted this much, she had never once failed to chase it. Yubel had watched that suppressed, contained, quietly ferocious nature building for years. It was honestly worse than Yubel's own history, and that was alarming to contemplate.
She found herself genuinely hoping things would turn out all right for Amano Rei in two years. That the shape of what Kikawayu had been holding back for so long would land somewhere it could be received.
Yubel only hoped this particular love story would end better than her own had.
For now, though, there were cards to deal with. And Chiha's deck was genuinely stacked. Three copies of Pot of Greed, three copies of Graceful Charity, staple after staple after staple, the kind of lineup that only existed when money was not a concern. Monster Reborn, Dark Hole, assorted high-rarity Spell cards scattered through the rest. Even setting aside the Galaxy-Eyes engine Chiha used personally, the supplementary cards alone were worth a small fortune.
Kikawayu stripped every last one of them out using Super Polymerization, the card that could fuse anything and everything, folding Chiha's valuable collection directly into Yubel's spirit form rather than into any registered deck. Because Super Polymerization didn't work through normal channels, there was no record of transfer, no trace for the Eva system to track. Even if Chiha woke up tomorrow and filed a theft report, the investigation would find nothing pointing back to Kikawayu.
"I did save her life," Kikawayu said reasonably. "This is just a reasonable service fee."
With Chiha thoroughly cleaned out, Yubel spread her demon wings and wrapped them around the small, limp body.
"I'll find somewhere in the lower districts to leave her. We saved her life once. Whether she makes it back on her own is her problem."
The two of them disappeared from the Dark Game space together, taking Chiha with them, and the barrier was suddenly very quiet.
Kikawayu stood alone in it for a moment.
Then she straightened her jacket, smoothed her collar, and reached up to check the fall of her bangs. She was almost at the wall's edge before she caught herself.
"Wait. What am I doing."
She could not walk out there like this.
She was still in her real form.
With a quiet exhale that was half exasperation and half something harder to name, Kikawayu pulled out the illusion card. The familiar construction settled over her again, the slightly taller frame, the sharper jaw, the look that everyone around her had always simply accepted as Kikawayu. It locked into place. She checked it twice.
Then she reached out and swept the dark wall aside.
The instant the barrier came down, a concentrated burst of pink magical energy screamed directly at her face.
"Dark! Magician! Burst! Break!"
Kikawayu lurched sideways and barely got clear of the blast, and in that split second of completely unplanned evasive scrambling, the illusion that had not quite fully stabilized shivered. Something underneath it flickered through.
"It worked!" Mana cheered, wiping her forehead. "I knew that one would land!"
"The Dark Game just ended," Kikawayu said flatly, pressing one hand to her chest to check the illusion's integrity. "That was what you were waiting for?"
"Oh," said Mana, looking slightly sheepish. "Is that what happened."
Amano stood a little ways back. He hadn't seen the attack's origin, only the aftermath: Kikawayu stumbling out of nowhere, dodging frantically, something about the movement slightly wrong in a way he couldn't immediately name.
He had seen something, though. In the exact moment the barrier collapsed and before Kikawayu recovered, for a fraction of a second, there had been someone else standing there. Someone shorter. Someone with a different silhouette entirely. Someone who looked, in that brief impossible instant, like a genuinely beautiful girl rather than his childhood friend pretending to be one.
Then the image had locked back into Kikawayu, and he was fairly certain he'd imagined it.
He put it away. There were more pressing things.
"Uh, sorry about that." He reached over and quietly pocketed the Dark Magician Girl card while Mana made herself disappear at high speed. "I just got worried about what was going on in there."
"Rei!" Kikawayu turned on him, looking equal parts frazzled and indignant, though she recovered quickly. "I win one Dark Game and I almost get killed walking out of it. You know, you're more dangerous than the Puppeteer."
"So you actually won? You beat Kaiba Chiha?"
Amano knew what Kikawayu ran. The Three Sacred Beasts build was not a deck that had any business beating a Galaxy-Eyes Xyz setup of Chiha's caliber, especially not from someone using the full Extra Deck. The Puppeteer must have been drawing absolutely nothing tonight. What catastrophic luck.
"Where's Chiha, then?"
In his experience, when someone lost a Dark Game, the host body stuck around regardless of what happened to the one who had been doing the controlling. He should have been looking at Chiha passed out on the ground somewhere nearby.
"I don't know." Kikawayu scratched the side of her head and produced her most blank and guileless expression, the one that had convinced everyone around her of everything for years. "After the duel ended she just sort of... whooshed. And was gone."
"Whooshed."
"Yep."
"You're sure she whooshed."
"Mm-hm."
Amano stared at her. Something was off, and it was more than just the whooshed part, though the whooshed part was doing a lot of work by itself. Chiha getting possessed by the Puppeteer was strange. Kikawayu beating Chiha was strange. The screaming inside the barrier had been a specific kind of strange that still hadn't been fully explained.
"Kikawayu." He leaned forward, closing the distance, looking at her face carefully. "Is there something you're not telling me?"
"Absolutely, completely, one hundred percent no." Kikawayu went very still as Amano's face came close enough that she could catch the faint warmth off his skin, and she found herself suddenly fighting something in her chest that was making it unreasonably difficult to stand at her normal height. Her feet felt slightly disconnected from the ground.
"Rei, I think I'm a little tired."
She reached out and caught herself against his shoulder.
"That's fair," Amano said.
He stepped back from the interrogation immediately. He had been leaning on Kikawayu to answer questions right after a Dark Game. What kind of person did that. Kikawayu had just burned through what must have been a brutal duel under conditions specifically designed to hurt, and here Amano was poking at him like he owed explanations. That was inexcusable.
He found a spot at the bridge railing, sat down, and settled Kikawayu alongside him so that leaning over was easy.
"Rest for a bit. I'll take you back when you're ready."
"Mm. Take your time..."
Kikawayu rested her head against Amano's shoulder. She was not, in any meaningful sense, tired. But she was fighting very hard to keep her expression under control, because the corner of her mouth kept trying to do something she could not afford to let it do.
Then the system chimed.
The affection notification. Amano had gotten used to these appearing at all hours, and ninety percent of them recently had been Kaiba Chiha docking points for reasons she personally found imaginative. If anyone in Eden Tower could blame someone else for stubbing her own toe, it was that girl.
He glanced at the notification out of habit.
[Rin Seiya] [Affection +1]
He blinked at it for a moment.
Why was Rin Seiya gaining affection at twelve in the morning? After the Riding Duel tonight, there had been no movement at all. He had honestly assumed she was annoyed at him for not performing exactly to her expectations, the same way she had seemed quietly unsatisfied after the standard duels she won two-to-one. A delayed notification from that felt more likely than her sitting awake adding affection points at midnight for no reason.
Unless the system had developed another bug. At this point nothing would surprise him.
He opened VSN and scrolled to her profile. She had posted a short entry.
"The wish in my heart and the wish in my dreams seem to be different."
Amano read it twice.
His professional opinion was that it was quite literary. Beyond that, he could not say much.
After Kikawayu had rested long enough to be convincingly recovered, Amano started up the Moonlight Butterfly and brought them both back to the dormitory. A brief wash later and the exhaustion that had been building since before the Riding Duel finally showed up all at once and laid him flat.
He had to be up early. Kondo had said no evening study period, but morning roll call was still on Amano as class duel rep, and having a D-Wheel meant he could sleep an extra fifteen minutes he had not had before.
He was still calculating how to allocate those fifteen minutes when the system lit up again.
[Rin Seiya] [Affection +1]
He checked the time. Two seventeen. Deep into the second half of the night.
What was Rin Seiya doing at two in the morning that was adding points to his affection tracker? She should have been asleep hours ago.
He told himself he would figure it out tomorrow, and let the exhaustion make the decision for him.
As it turned out, Rin Seiya was asleep.
She had gone to bed early by her standards, and she was not awake at all. She was dreaming.
In the dream, she was standing inside a laboratory. Cold. Sterile. Every flat surface covered in research documents stacked edge to edge, folders and printouts arranged in overlapping layers, and every single document on every single surface was about the same subject. The name appeared on all of them.
Yusei Fudo.
One computer in the corner had been left on. Its screen glowed. A folder sat open on the desktop, marked with a priority flag.
The folder was titled: "Plan to Prevent the Arrival of a Ruinous Future."
Inside it were two files.
The first file.
[Plan 1: To have myself become the hero, Yusei Fudo, who disappeared from Domino City.]
[Plan contents: Replicate Yusei Fudo's appearance and thought patterns. Lead the broken hearts of a declining world back toward a way of living worth having.]
[Plan 1: Failed.]
[The negative spin of the Perpetual Motion Reactor could not be stopped. Zero Reverse's final outcome was destruction, as it always would be.]
[Signed: Zone]
The second file.
[Plan 2: Toward a future rebuilt three thousand years from now.]
[Plan contents: I have understood that becoming Yusei Fudo alone is not enough. I have therefore taken a portion of Yusei Fudo's thought patterns and combined them with my daughter's autonomous consciousness, and preserved this within the Eva Network. Three thousand years from now, Eva will reconstruct my daughter's body and have her inherit this consciousness.]
[The girl who longs to become Yusei Fudo will gather, before destruction descends again, the hope sufficient to save this planet. I am leaving Stardust Dragon behind as the bridge through which that hope can be gathered.]
[Plan 2: Initiating...]
[Signed: Zone]
Amano was far too deeply asleep to notice the system notification that appeared somewhere around the same time, its light blinking quietly in the dark above his blanket.
[Romance Skill "Longing to be Yusei Fudo" - Effect Updated]
[Unlocks the Junk, Warrior, and Stardust line Synchro Monsters in the Extra Deck. Opens Synchron Monster card exchange in the Points Store.]
[New addition: Once per duel, before the duel begins, add one random Timelord monster card to your deck.]
****
40+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces