After the duel, Hikaru stepped toward the place where Sayer had fallen. He bent down and picked up the Duel Disk that had rolled to the floor.
Although most of the cards were useless to him, there were still some things worth examining.
His gaze fell upon the one card still slotted in the Disk.
"That card…" Jack's face hardened.
"It really does look like he said, an Artificial God."
As Tierra explained, Hikaru picked the card up carefully.
Thick, visible black smoke coiled from its surface, streaked with erratic green lightning arcs.
Hikaru silently reached out with his Duel Energy to sense it.
When he'd once dueled the mind-controlled Rhodes, the residual energy afterward had been so immense it nearly knocked him unconscious.
Now, though the dark energy was still overwhelming, it no longer fazed him as it once had.
Still, the power within this card was unmistakable. It was Darkness's power.
Just like before, the card Psychic End Punisher bore the same eerie aura as the cursed mask card that had once tormented Rhodes.
Hikaru cautiously took out the Emerald Grimoire and sealed the card inside.
This was valuable alchemical material, after all, his previous card-forging experiments had relied on similar samples of Darkness's essence.
It was thanks to that energy that he'd successfully fused El Shaddoll Winda back then.
He had once sought out the Seven Stars duelists to harvest their Duel Energy for his research, but few of them, not even Professor Crowler, possessed such power.
And now, Darkness had reappeared.
But unlike before, this time Darkness had learned from its failure.
Perhaps it had realized that it lacked true dueling talent, so instead of fighting directly, it had chosen to guide humans to destroy themselves.
From a certain perspective, that approach had worked rather well.
In this world, the existence of "Artificial Gods" was recognized.If Sayer had been left alone to keep developing his "salvation cult," then when the end times finally came, he might have deceived a large portion of humanity, especially those desperate souls who'd already given up on life.
Tierra folded her arms and shook her head.
"A pity. The card itself is complete, but the so-called 'god' was only a prototype."
She could see immediately that this card wasn't something Sayer himself had created.
Its energy was eerily similar to what they'd once encountered from the cosmic entity Light of Destruction, but the resonance was inverted.
To make such a being truly divine, far more was required. Even a full laboratory like this could never produce a real god.
To raise an "Artificial God" to true divinity, it would need countless minds bound into a shared mental world. Ten, twenty people, that was nowhere near enough.
And now that the mental demon had been physically bisected in the duel, its power was shattered.
It would never ascend again.
That, Tierra noted, was the fundamental flaw of any "Artificial God."
Hikaru's eyes drifted to Jack and Carly.
If in this world both the Signers and the Dark Signers were destined to converge because of the "One God" phenomenon, then anyone trying to artificially create a god would inevitably collide with those chosen by fate.
In the original timeline, Sayer had used his psychic powers to hurl Carly off a high-rise, killing her, only for her to be resurrected as a Dark Signer chosen by the Earthbound Gods, returning to destroy him in a shadow duel.
Things had turned out differently here, but Carly was still present, and this time, Jack had been with her.
Perhaps even if Hikaru hadn't intervened, Sayer would have faced the same fate at the hands of countless duelists.
Unless, by some miracle, he'd defeated every Signer and Dark Signer, then maybe he could have truly become the herald of the "One God."
But even without reaching that point, this card alone was valuable.
Once dismantled, its core could serve as the base material for Tierra's greatest creation, Lilith, and the excess fragments could be recycled into other alchemic constructs.
"How are the children?" Hikaru asked, stowing the grimoire away.
Jack, standing protectively in front of Carly, replied, "They'll be fine."
"That's good." Hikaru nodded.
"You should have enough resources in the Upper City to find proper shelter for them, right?"
In his memory, almost every male protagonist from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's was fond of children.
Yusei had taught the Satellite kids; Crow took in orphans to earn a living; even Jack, though a self-proclaimed bum, was famous as the "King of the Kids," adored and idolized by them.
"You're… Hikaru from the F-Dimension, right?"
"Hah, why does everyone like starting conversations that way? Crow from the Lower City opened the same way."
"You met Crow? Wait..." Jack suddenly recalled a news report.
Though he'd been confined to the hospital ward, he'd never stopped tracking Yusei's whereabouts. "Don't tell me… that interdimensional duelist Yusei rescued, was that you?"
Hikaru nodded once.
Jack immediately rushed forward, grabbed him by the collar, and demanded sharply, "You've seen Yusei!? Where is he, what is he planning!?"
"Jack! Don't be so rude!" Carly cried out, flailing her hands, too scared to step between them.
Hikaru calmly pried Jack's hand away.
Even though Jack could normally take on ten men at once, Hikaru could tell right away that his body wasn't in perfect shape, still strong, but clearly weakened.
Even so, when Jack realized Hikaru could actually resist his grip, his eyes widened slightly.
"Sorry," Hikaru said evenly. "Even if you ask me, I don't know. I only met him once."
"Tch…" Jack released him, frustrated.
Of course.
Even Leo and Luna hadn't heard from Yusei. Not Jack, not Crow, not Akiza.
He'd vanished from the public eye entirely. Whatever Yusei was doing, there was no way he'd tell an interdimensional stranger he'd met once.
Jack sighed, then looked at Hikaru's left hand, where the crimson mark gleamed faintly.
A Dark Signer…?
But, considering he'd gone out of his way to challenge Sayer and even Yusei had helped him once, he probably wasn't evil.
Seeing Jack relax, Hikaru smiled faintly and gestured toward the ruined lab.
"Let's walk and talk. First, we should check who's still alive in there."
Jack nodded. "Right."
Jack suddenly understood and strode forward in long, powerful steps. Carly hurried to keep up beside him.
Hikaru followed them into the laboratory.
Inside, he saw a honeycomb-like maze of white cells, each one connected by narrow pipes that extended out to the rest of the facility.
Sayer, that bastard, hadn't even bothered to give the children proper rooms. To save money and space, he'd crammed them into half-height transparent cells stacked together in small sub-labs.
Hikaru's expression darkened immediately.
He and Jack moved toward the main control area. On the floor lay several groaning guards, clearly the ones Jack had knocked out earlier while freeing the children.
They looked pitiful. Jack had obviously pulled no punches, yet in a twisted way, they were the lucky ones.
If they'd still been conscious during the battle, the psychic demon might have eaten them alive.
Carly kept taking photos, documenting every bit of evidence she could.
Hikaru turned to the lab's main console and noticed something unusual, a Duel Monsters card embedded in the connection port. He carefully slid it out and examined it.
"Huh?"
His eyes widened.
Looking around the room again, Hikaru spotted more of the same kind of cards.
Each sub-lab, each major conduit point, had one inserted, like nodes in a psychic network.
As expected of Darkness… How generous.