Chapter 239: Decade vs. Legendorga!
The HYDRA agents in the monitoring room had opinions about the gold suit.
"Is that real gold?"
"Obviously not — you couldn't move in real gold."
"Still. Imagine the resale value."
"The name is extremely arrogant."
"The name is legendary. That's the point."
"I still prefer magenta."
"It's crimson—"
"It's magenta—"
Pierce cut through it with a look. The agents redirected their attention to their equipment. He turned back to the screen and watched Ethan Cross standing across from Tsukasa Kadoya in a form that didn't exist in any HYDRA intelligence file.
Where are these coming from, he thought. And who is giving them to him.
He filed the X Consortium question and kept watching.
Ethan stood in the Legendary Legendorga form and took a moment to actually feel it.
The System's knowledge delivery was always like this — complete on arrival, already integrated, requiring only the seconds to settle into awareness. He closed his eyes briefly and let the Legendorga parameters come through. The scope of it was — considerable. Not just Decade's card-copying mechanic but something that operated on a different level entirely, the accumulated weight of every Rider's history available as a resource.
So that's how it works.
He opened his eyes.
"For you," he said, "let's start with this."
He pulled the gold card, ran it through the Driver.
"KAME RIDE—"
"GLORIOUS!"
The transformation resolved into Decade's own form — same armor, same magenta, same exact suit — with one visible difference: a gold shoulder piece that hadn't been there on the original.
Tsukasa looked at himself.
Then at Ethan.
Then at himself again, reflected back through Ethan's form.
In his very long career of copying other Riders, of arriving in worlds and taking their identities for temporary use, he had never once been on the receiving end of this. He stood across from his own form worn by someone else and felt something that took him a moment to identify: the specific disorientation of having your defining trick turned around.
"Well," he said.
"Welcome to the other side," Ethan said.
Something in Tsukasa's expression shifted — the arch superiority dropping into something more honest, which for him looked like genuine pleasure. He'd been doing this across a hundred worlds. He hadn't expected to find this.
He attacked.
The fight that followed was nothing like the Tony fight — that had been a demonstration, this was something different. Two Decade forms with different foundations: Tsukasa's built on years of traveling the Rider universe and learning every system's logic, Ethan's built on the Legendorga framework that had absorbed all of it simultaneously. The collision between them produced a rhythm that Tony, watching from the side, could follow only in fragments.
They moved through Decade and then—
Without conferring, without signal, both of them reached for a card at the same moment.
"KUUGA!"
Two identical Kuuga forms appeared in the room.
They looked at each other.
Tsukasa made a sound that was almost a laugh.
They went back at it.
Tony's head was moving back and forth. He'd told JARVIS to record everything. He was watching two people cycle through the same transformations in perfect synchrony and trying to understand whether this was tactical or — something else. The forms kept matching. Different cards, same card, it didn't matter — they were pulling the same choices.
"AGITO!"
Black and gold, both of them, the light coming off the forms at such intensity that Tony had to filter his visual systems.
"Why," he said, squinting, "is there a high-beam situation happening—"
"RYUKI!"
Red and black. The dragons materialized behind both of them simultaneously — twin red constructs, circling, adding the particular atmosphere of a fight that had exceeded the room's original design specifications.
Tony watched two dragons circle two identical Ryuki forms and accepted that his data collection today was going to be extremely comprehensive.
"Change again," he said, to no one in particular. "I want to see how many you've got."
He absolutely did not expect to be taken seriously.
Both of them reached for cards again.
The forms cycled.
Faiz — silver and red, the Orphnoch-tier power living in the armor's joints.
Blade — blue, deliberate, the Royal Straight Flush held in reserve.
Hibiki — sound as a weapon, the resonance filling the facility's corridors in ways that made the remaining S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in adjacent rooms profoundly uncomfortable.
Kabuto — the clock-up engaged, both of them moving at a velocity that made Tony's tracking system briefly give up and file an error report.
Den-O — and here the synchrony broke slightly, because Den-O had the particular energy of multiple personalities arguing for priority, and Ethan's expression under the armor shifted in a way that suggested something internal was happening.
Kiva — Ethan's castle dropped into existence in the corner of the room. Tsukasa's didn't. Minor difference. Noted.
W — and here Ethan paused, because W was the one he actually knew from the inside, and the return to it in this context felt different than it had before.
"You hesitated," Tsukasa said.
"I know this one."
"I know," Tsukasa said. "I can tell."
They held the W forms for a beat longer than the others.
Then, together —
"OOO!"
The three-medal combination sounded through both Drivers and the room filled with the particular resonance of Greeed power, which Tony catalogued as extremely weird but scientifically interesting.
Tony looked at his data log. He looked at the number of forms recorded.
"Eleven," he said. "Eleven different Riders in—" He checked the timestamp. "Fourteen minutes."
Neither of them acknowledged this.
"You're not going to run out," Tsukasa said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Not before you do," Ethan said.
Tsukasa was quiet for a moment. Then he did something Ethan hadn't expected: he dropped his transformation entirely.
He stood in the facility in his black suit, slightly dusty, looking at Ethan with an expression that had shed the performance.
"I've been traveling the Rider worlds for a long time," he said. "I break them and rebuild them. I've met every primary Rider. I've fought most of them." He paused. "I've never met anyone outside those worlds who could do this."
"The System," Ethan said again.
"I understand that's your answer," Tsukasa said. "I'm saying what it means — you're not supposed to exist. Not in this framework." He tilted his head. "Which is either very good or very bad, and I haven't decided which."
Ethan dropped the Legendorga transformation. The gold faded.
"Stay for a while," Ethan said. "Figure it out."
Tony looked between them. "Is that an alliance or a threat?"
"Both," Tsukasa said.
"Both," Ethan agreed.
Tony filed this as situation unclear, monitor.
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