Chapter 135: Kaiba Chiaki and the Duel Chronicle
"What exactly is going on with this skill?"
Amano did not notice the system change until morning roll call was done and he was back in his seat. Right there beneath the Longing to be Yusei Fudo entry, a new line had appeared.
[New addition: Once per duel, before the duel begins, add one random Timelord monster card to your deck.]
Timelord cards.
Those were the cards Zone used. The final boss of the 5D's story arc. The Timelord series drew from Kabbalistic mythology, specifically the Kabbalah Tree of Life and its eleven circles, each circle corresponding to one of the Timelords. Zone's mythology deck in its completed form.
The system had helpfully attached individual card descriptions alongside the notification, which was fortunate, because Amano's memories of 5D's were eighteen years old at this point and he would not have trusted himself to recall every Timelord's effect with complete accuracy.
What the system showed him was this: every single Timelord was a Level 10 monster. Ten stars, and yet each of them carried a shared effect.
[This card can be Normal Summoned without Tributes.]
[This card cannot be destroyed by battle or card effects. Battle damage involving this card becomes 0.]
A Level 10 monster that required no Tributes, could not be destroyed by either battle or effects, and reduced all battle damage to zero. In Eden Tower's environment, even just slotting one into a deck as a supplementary wall was strictly better than relying on Priestess Who Receives the Star Chalice for defense. At least a Timelord took a hit and did not flinch.
That was just the defensive profile. But a deck built around pure defense did not become the final boss's signature lineup.
Most Timelords had zero ATK and zero DEF. What they had instead were unique trigger effects that activated after they attacked. And the gap between the strongest and weakest of those effects was enormous.
On the stronger end: Gabrion the Timelord. After attacking, every card on the opponent's field returned to the deck. A single attack wiped the board clean.
Stronger still: Sandaion the Timelord. The only Timelord with actual ATK, sitting at 4000. After attacking, it dealt an additional 2000 points of effect damage to the opponent.
On the weaker end: Hailon the Timelord. After attacking, it dealt damage equal to the difference in both players' current LP totals. In the wrong matchup, that was nearly useless.
The catch was the word "random."
Random meant Amano had no say in which Timelord appeared. He could draw Sandaion, or he could draw Hailon, and he would not know which until the card materialized in his deck before the duel. The upside was unquestionable. The downside was that he could not plan around it.
Still, even worst-case Hailon behind zero battle damage and full destruction immunity was a better wall than most of what he currently ran. The skill was a positive addition without question.
What he kept coming back to, though, was the flavor of it.
Rin Seiya's skill had shifted. After the Riding Duel last night, something had changed in what that skill was keyed to. It had started as a Yusei Fudo reference and turned into a Zone reference overnight.
"Longing to be Yusei Fudo." Zone. The man who had longed so completely to become Yusei Fudo that he had gone through with the appearance and the thought patterns, had rebuilt himself from the outside in. In all of 5D's, no one had wanted to be Yusei Fudo more than Zone had. And Zone had done it to try and stop a future that was always going to end in destruction.
One of the greatest antagonists in Yu-Gi-Oh! history, honestly.
So. He had assumed Rin Seiya was some Yusei Fudo parallel. Now the system was telling him she was a Zone parallel instead.
From his perspective, it did not change much. Rin Seiya was Rin Seiya. Not Yusei Fudo, not Zone, just the reliable and extremely capable senior student at Synchro Academy. The system could categorize her however it liked.
A mechanical pencil tapped against his arm.
"Amano. Amano."
Nanki'in Sakuya had turned in her seat and was looking at him with the specific expression that meant homework was overdue.
"Did you finish? If I don't copy it now I'm out of time."
"Oh, right, right. One second."
He had gotten completely absorbed in the system update and forgotten entirely. After last night, with Sakuya having apparently spent the whole evening panicking about him and even putting together backup plans to send reinforcements, he did not have the heart to tell her that going forward he no longer had evening study obligations or assigned homework. There would have been no tactful way to deliver that information.
So he sat in first period and caught up on the work instead, which was not exactly a hardship. The academic content at Synchro Academy was foundational dueling theory, and foundational dueling theory was something Amano could work through in his sleep. Twenty minutes into a forty-minute class, he passed the completed assignment sideways.
"Here you go, class rep."
"Yes! Finally!"
Sakuya received it with both hands, cradling it with a reverence that was almost touching, and began transcribing it with the focused intensity of someone copying sacred scripture.
Amano had another matter to pursue today. Yesterday he had tested out the Riding Duel access. Today was the second privilege Kondo had unlocked for him: the Virtual World System. He had almost no idea what that actually meant in practice, which meant he needed someone who did.
[Hey, senpai. Are you free this afternoon?]
His first instinct was to ask the most reliable and knowledgeable person he knew at the academy.
[What's up, kouhai? Something wrong?]
Rin Seiya replied almost instantly, which meant she was absolutely not paying attention in class either.
[I wanted to try out the Virtual World System the academy opened for me. Could you walk me through it?]
There was a longer gap this time. About five minutes passed before her reply appeared, and when it did, it carried a slight hesitation that her messages did not usually have.
[Sorry, kouhai. I'm actually feeling a bit under the weather today. I stayed home. I probably can't help you. Sorry.]
[Nothing serious, I hope?]
[I think it's just a cold from the temperature changes yesterday. A day of rest should fix it. I'll have to cancel tonight's club session too, I'm sorry about that.]
[Don't worry about it. Rest up. I'll figure it out on my own.]
[Okay. Going back to sleep then. Good afternoon.]
He had misjudged her. She was not skipping class to scroll her phone. She was genuinely sick and managing messages from bed.
That left him without a guide for the Virtual World System. He could go to Kondo, but going to a teacher's office always made him feel like he was operating under observation. Too many eyes, not enough room to move naturally.
"Hey, class rep. Do you know anything about the Virtual World System?"
Sakuya, mid-transcription, looked up with genuine blankness.
"The what? That sounds like an online game."
"Never mind. Keep copying."
"Got it." She returned to work without missing a beat.
According to what Kondo had told him, the Virtual World System was not accessible until third year at the earliest, and even then only to students who met certain criteria. It barely appeared in any online searches either, which gave it the quality of classified academy information rather than standard curriculum.
Outside of Rin Seiya, Amano did not know any upperclassmen at all. Not from his own academy and not from any other.
Hmm. Other academies.
The little gremlin's face surfaced in his mind before he could stop it. He dismissed it immediately. Absolutely not. Not that one.
The face that replaced it was Kaiba Chiaki's.
Kaiba Chiaki was fifth year. And he still had her VSN contact from the banquet at the Sky Cup Dragon Hotel, added that evening when she had suggested it herself. At the time Amano had figured that a connection like hers was too valuable not to accept, even if he never actually used it.
[Hey, Kaiba-senpai. Are you free at all today?]
He sent it and immediately felt slightly ridiculous. Asking one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Eden Tower to come show a first-year how to use a school computer system was an objectively strange request.
But the system had categorized Kaiba Chiaki as someone with a positive affection score and a place on the approachable roster, and Amano also had the outstanding promise of an academy tournament challenge between them. She had reason to maintain the contact. Whether that translated to showing up in person for something like this was another question entirely.
He honestly expected a staff member from Kaiba Corporation to appear in her place.
Near the end of class, her reply came.
[Free in the afternoon.]
Oh. She actually had availability.
[Do you know anything about the Virtual World System, Kaiba-senpai?]
The next reply took the rest of the morning.
[After school. 5:15 PM.]
A map location followed. Southeast of Academy City, marked as a Virtual Network Login Point.
That was it. No additional explanation, no confirmation request. Just a time and a place.
Extremely efficient. Entirely consistent with everything he had observed about her.
The moment the bell rang for dismissal, Amano grabbed his D-Wheel key and was halfway out of his seat when a hand caught his sleeve.
"Amano. Where are you going?"
Sakuya.
He had not finished forming an excuse before she had already made her decision.
"I'm coming with you."
"...Alright."
There was no practical way to refuse. Sakuya's attachment to him had been developing a certain gravitational quality lately, and even a clean refusal would probably have resulted in her following at a short distance. At least this way it was acknowledged.
He was not doing anything that required secrecy. This was legitimate academy work.
He retrieved the spare helmet from the Moonlight Butterfly's storage compartment, the one that had been sitting in there since last night, and handed it to Sakuya.
"Nice D-Wheel," she said, turning it over approvingly. "It's a little like Grandfather's."
So Muramasa was a Riding Duelist. That was a piece of information Amano had not had.
Sakuya pulled the helmet on and stopped.
She reached inside it and pinched something between two fingers. Held it up.
A single strand of silver-grey hair.
"Amano. Whose is this?"
She said it with the flat, neutral tone of someone who had seen this situation in a completely different context before and was reserving judgment.
"Oh, that's Kikawayu's. He wanted to come for a ride last night, kept pestering me until I said yes."
"Kikawayu." The neutrality resolved into simple acceptance. "Okay."
She put the helmet on properly and swung onto the back of the D-Wheel, and her arms came around Amano's waist.
He sat very still for a moment.
So this was what it felt like. The same position Kikawayu had occupied countless times, but there was a meaningful structural difference he was noticing right now.
There was a softness pressing against his back that had no equivalent in his prior experiences of this situation.
"Why aren't we moving?" Sakuya asked, expressionless as always.
"We are. Right now. Hold on tight."
"I am."
This D-Wheel had been one of the better purchases of his life.
He arrived at the login point facility ten minutes before the agreed time, which he had considered early. Kaiba Chiaki was already there.
She was not difficult to spot. The silver trench coat and the bearing of someone who occupied more space than her physical dimensions technically required made her visible from across the plaza. She was standing at the entrance with both hands in her pockets, not checking anything, not visibly impatient. Simply waiting.
He had genuinely not been certain she would come herself. The more realistic scenario had seemed to be a knowledgeable Kaiba Corporation employee sent as proxy. He had not even mentioned Chiaki to Sakuya, on the theory that preparation for disappointment cost nothing.
"Is that... Kaiba Chiaki?"
Sakuya had spotted her the instant they pulled up.
"Why is she here?"
"I asked her to come." Amano dismounted and returned the helmet. "She knows about the Virtual World System."
"Amano." Sakuya stared at him. "When did you meet Kaiba Chiaki?"
The banquet had not registered for Sakuya with full clarity because Sakuya during that period had been managing the competing social catastrophe of two invitations to the same event. Completely understandable.
Amano crossed the plaza.
"Kaiba-senpai, I made it!"
He was not sure what the right register was, so he tried warm and slightly enthusiastic as a starting point.
Chiaki shifted her gaze to him.
"Don't call me that in Academy City."
"Chiaki-senpai, then?"
"That works."
It was the first time he had been this physically close to Kaiba Chiaki. She was nearly the same height as him, which he registered as creating a faint and slightly inexplicable pressure. Long legs. The proximity also revealed that the quiet authority she projected was not something she performed. It simply sat on her naturally.
Her scan moved to Sakuya, standing a step back.
"The Nanki'in heir. Come on in, both of you."
She had identified Sakuya immediately without introduction. The depth of background knowledge required to pull family heir recognition out of a first meeting was the kind of thing that came from having internalized an enormous amount of information about every significant family in Eden Tower. That was not surprising. Running what Kaiba Corporation ran required exactly that.
The facility outside had given Amano the impression of a standard service building. What it actually housed was a full-dive virtual reality infrastructure. In simpler terms: the same technology as those total immersion games he had read about, where the user's entire consciousness entered the virtual space via a neural interface. Eden Tower had multiple full-dive games in operation throughout its districts, and this network login point was one of the access facilities that made it possible. Which meant that on any given afternoon, everyone here was essentially waiting to go play an MMO.
What he had not expected was that the academy's restricted Virtual World System would require the same infrastructure. That made him significantly more curious about what it actually was.
Kaiba Chiaki pressed the elevator button for the forty-fifth floor and said nothing. The ride up was long enough to become uncomfortable, which it did immediately. Sakuya was not a person who filled silences by nature, and Chiaki was plainly cut from the same cloth. The silence had weight.
Amano found a topic.
"Chiaki-senpai, do you know about what happened to Chiha?"
It was genuinely something he needed to know. Whether Chiaki was aware that her younger sister had been taken over by the Puppeteer was information that affected how he should handle the situation. And if she did not know, telling her now was safer than leaving it.
Chiaki's brows drew together slightly.
"Are you here to argue Chiha's case too? When did you two get close enough for that?"
"Argue her case?"
"This subject is closed. I've made my decision."
She said it with a finality that indicated the topic was physically done. Whatever decision she had reached about Chiha, she had reached it independently and was not revisiting it.
Amano decided to let it sit. Chiaki clearly knew something, and whatever it was, she had already processed it and arrived at a conclusion. Pressing further when she was clearly not interested in continuing the conversation was not going to produce anything useful. The Kaiba family's internal situation was the Kaiba family's to resolve. He was not close enough to the little gremlin to spend political capital on her behalf.
The elevator opened on forty-five. The floor looked similar to the lower levels at first glance, rows of enclosed single-user login pods, until Chiaki walked them past those to the back of the floor, where the private suites began.
He caught the pricing on a placard as he passed. A standard single-user pod ran one hundred Eva Points per hour. Not cheap, but not unreasonable for the mid-district.
The suite Chiaki had booked was five thousand per hour.
Once inside, he understood the difference. The room was large enough to run a raid group of fifty. The three of them occupied maybe a tenth of it. He was not going to comment on the scale discrepancy.
Chiaki gestured at the login equipment.
"Since you're asking about the Virtual World System, the academy must have already opened your access. Scan your Eva Terminal and log in directly."
Amano did. The interface that came up was crowded with virtual game options, titles stacked across the screen in a grid, until he scrolled to the very last entry in the list.
[Duel Chronicle] Loading...
The familiar synthetic voice of the Eva system filled the room.
"Duel Chronicle?"
[Please insert your deck for scanning. Once complete, the Chronicle Duels currently available to Duelist Amano Rei based on his deck will be displayed.]
He slotted his deck into the reader and looked back at Chiaki.
"What is this exactly, Chiaki-senpai?"
"Your deck is the key," she said. "Each card corresponds to a different Chronicle Duel. Which Chronicles a person can access depends entirely on the cards they carry. Most duelists unlock one or two Chronicles. Some unlock none."
That was why she had agreed to come.
She wanted to see for herself. She wanted to know how many Chronicle chapters a deck like his could open.
The scan completed.
The screen filled.
Chronicle entries appeared in dense rows, stacking from top to bottom, covering the display in an unbroken list that reflected the entire history of the Yu-Gi-Oh! animated series as if it had been condensed into a single archive. Amano scanned it quickly and roughly estimated the unlock rate at above seventy percent.
[Card: Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Chronicles unlocked: Duelist Kingdom arc, Legend of the Dragons arc, Dimension Dark Side arc.]
[Card: Dark Magician. Chronicles unlocked: Duelist Kingdom arc, Legend of the Dragons arc, Dimension Dark Side arc, Ceremonial Battle arc, Super Fusion Dimension arc.]
[Card: Elemental HERO Avian. Chronicles unlocked: Duel Academy Seven Stars arc, Light of Destruction arc, Alternate Dimension arc, Darkness arc.]
[Card: Star Junk Synchron. Chronicles unlocked...]
The list continued past what he could take in at a single look. The entries kept coming.
Every Chronicle name on the screen matched a pivotal duel sequence from the anime. Every key card in those moments mapped back to a card in his deck. His collection had accumulated through poverty and circumstance, through garbage sorting and contract wins and gene identification luck, and somewhere along the way it had apparently become an archive of Yu-Gi-Oh! history.
He pulled up two Chronicle entries at random to read the details.
[Light of Destruction arc: Elemental HERO vs. Destiny HERO]
[Difficulty rating: A+]
[Cards available as drops: Elemental HERO Neos Alius, Neo-Spacian Air Hummingbird, Neo-Spacian Aqua Dolphin, Neo-Spacian Flare Scarab]
[Legend of the Dragons arc: Final Battle with Dartz! The Triple Orichalcos Barrier]
[Difficulty rating: SS+]
[Cards available as drops: Eye of Timaeus, Claw of Hermos, Fang of Critias]
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