Julian felt the wrongness before he knew where it was coming from.
It was not a sound exactly, not at first. It was pressure. Like weather changing, but it came from inside his ribs. A slow tightening, the way air felt right before a thunderstorm shoved itself over an open field. His steps on the stone path toward the central building slowed without him thinking about it.
"…You feel it as well."
Nightmare-Eyes' voice slid into his mind as cleanly as breath. Not words in the conventional sense: each syllable carried a whole texture with it, but his brain translated on instinct now.
"Yeah." Julian murmured. The afternoon air of Duel Academy was still. No wind rustling through the trees, no waves loud enough from beyond the cliffs to justify the way his shoulders wanted to hunch. The sky had that washed-out island blue that said everything's fine.
It lied.
The smaller spirits clustered around him like anxious children. Watapon pressed against his ankle, cottony body trembling. Skull Servant's cloak fluttered although there was no breeze. Petit Dragon circled above his shoulder, wings beating in fast, clipped arcs, eyes narrowed toward the main dueling complex.
"Source…" Nightmare-Eyes said. "Ahead. The disturbance is localized."
Julian exhaled slowly through his nose. "Any chance it's just a power surge somewhere?"
If Nightmare-Eyes could have looked at him, he was pretty sure the deadpan silence that followed was the look.
"Right. Stupid question."
He was supposed to be taking it easy. Sheppard's mandated three-day rest from classes had technically ended yesterday, but Fontaine had been very clear that "taking it easy" did not include chasing after stray spiritual phenomena across campus.
On the other hand, Fontaine had also been very clear that if he felt anything odd: any dizziness, any pressure, anything more than the lingering fatigue, that he should tell someone.
Consider this him telling someone. That "someone" just happened to be the seven-foot mass of nightmare plating floating half a step behind his shoulder.
The pattern is unfamiliar, Nightmare-Eyes added. Not of the Well, not of your own essence. Something foreign. Aggressive.
Julian's mouth went dry. Foreign he could have handled. Aggressive, less so.
The closer he drew to the arena block, the thicker the air became. That was the only way to describe it. The sunlight on the open practice courts looked normal, but it felt like he was walking underwater, every motion meeting resistance. A faint buzzing grew in his ears, the kind that usually meant a bad overhead light was dying, except it was everywhere and nowhere at once.
Watapon made a small, strangled noise and buried its face in the hem of his jacket. Happy Lover hovered in front of him, wings beating frantically, like it wanted to push him back. The rest of the little spirits huddled even closer, their usually bright chatter quieted to fearful murmurs.
"Yeah." he whispered. "I know. I don't like it either. Something is wrong."
From this side of the complex he could see the big central arena with its grand stands and polished metal doors. That one was quiet, the display board off and no odd-feeling coming from it. A little to the right, tucked slightly lower against the slope, sat one of the smaller arenas: Arena Three, if he remembered right. It was supposed to be open for casual weekend duels. Students booked blocks there through the system or barged in if nobody had reserved.
Today the glass above its sliding doors was jet-black. Not dark from window tint or an off-screen: pure black. Like every light inside had died at once.
The buzzing in his ears sharpened as his attention locked on it. Now he could sense a second note underneath, like a high-pitched whine sitting on top of the distortion, almost out of human hearing. Every hair on his arms stood on end.
"There." Nightmare-Eyes confirmed. No urgency in the tone, but the weight of the word settled into Julian's bones.
He picked up his pace.
As he descended the last set of steps to Arena Three, the world around him seemed to fade a little around the edges. Not visually, his vision remained sharp, but the ambient noises of campus muted. Laughter from a distant path, the metallic clack of someone shuffling a Duel Disk, the caw of a seabird riding the wind. All of it sank beneath the static.
The little spirits clung tighter to either Julian or their guard. At the bottom of the stairs, the glass doors of Arena Three stood shut. The panel next to them, which normally glowed with status indicators, was dark. No green band to show 'available', no blue 'in use' and not even red for 'unavailable' or 'In maintenance'. Just nothing.
Except, up close, Julian could feel the hum through the metal frame itself. He reached out and brushed his fingertips against the edge. Heat prickled up his skin, the soft sting of a live wire that shouldn't be live.
"Great…" he muttered. "Haunted and a safety hazard."
He leaned close to the glass. The inside of the entry corridor was a smear of shadow, shapes too indistinct to make out. Normally the motion sensors would have triggered lights; the dark told him those bulbs were either blown or starved.
"Anyone in there?" he called, knowing how stupid it sounded, but saying nothing felt worse.
No reply. Just the static.
He stepped back, eyes narrowing. "Nightmare-Eyes?"
"Obstruction." the spirit replied. "The boundary has been reinforced. Not naturally."
"Reinforced how?"
There was a brief pause, like the spirit was sampling the field again. "Electromagnetic interference overlaying spiritual pressure. Crude. Effective."
"So… spiritual lock with a side of jammed automatic door." Julian scrubbed a hand over his face. "Of course it is."
The sensible thing to do would be to get an adult. The Chancellery tower wasn't that far. But every instinct screaming from Nightmare-Eyes down to Watapon's trembling body told him that waiting would be a mistake.
And if there was one thing Duel Monsters had taught him, it was that running from things to look for authorities, especially ones that "officially did not support that kind of prerogative" did not tend to end well. The best duelists usually solved their issues with their own decks.
Julian rolled his shoulders once, set his feet, and wrapped his fingers around the sliding handle.
Heat bit into his palm, sharp enough that he hissed through his teeth, but underneath the burn he felt something yield. Like pushing through heavy curtains instead of steel.
"Your presence disrupts the pattern." Nightmare-Eyes observed, almost clinical. "Your resonance is… incompatible with the imposed field."
"Good." Julian said between his teeth. "Let's be incompatible harder."
He pulled.
For a second the door fought him, force pressing back from the other side as though magnets had been reversed. Then there was an audible snap, more felt than heard, and the door jerked along its track with a protesting screech, opening just wide enough for a person to slip through.
A rush of air hit him in the face, stale and charged, like breathing in the moment just after lightning struck too close.
Watapon squeaked and pressed itself even smaller against his neck. Petit Dragon hovered at his shoulder, eyes wide but resolute.
"Stay behind me." Julian told them on reflex, because it felt like the thing he was supposed to say.
He stepped through.
The corridor into Arena Three was short, but in the dark it felt longer. Only the emergency strips along the floor gave off a faint, sickly glow, each one blinking like a heartbeat that could not decide whether to continue. The static in his ears became a physical sensation here, vibrating against his teeth and the back of his eyes.
"Shield." Nightmare-Eyes murmured, and an invisible weight settled over his shoulders, like a cloak of cool water. The worst of the prickling eased, leaving his mind clearer.
"Thanks." Julian whispered.
At the end of the corridor the main arena opened up: a circular dueling space ringed by steeply tiered stands meant for maybe a hundred spectators. Normally the place felt almost cozy compared to the main stadium. Now it felt like a drained battery. Every overhead light was dead. Only the emergency lines low along the walls threw thin bands of illumination, painting everything in anxious orange.
For a heartbeat, Julian's brain refused to parse what he was seeing.
Six figures clung to the railing of the lowest tier, pressed as far from the center of the arena as possible. Alexis, hair disheveled, Obelisk jacket hanging off one shoulder like she had been yanked suddenly. Mindy and Jasmine half-behind her. Bastion and Syrus on the other side, shoulders tight, eyes wide. All of them pale, breathing too fast. The raw spiritual pressure on the place was clearly too much for their unbaptized bodies to handle. If it was a strong static for him before Nightmare-Eyes shielding, for them probably it would be much worse.
On the dueling platform, sprawled on his back with his Duel Disk dead against his arm, lay Torrey. One of the smug Obelisks from the betting incident, except all that arrogance had been scoured from his face. He looked as if someone had unplugged him. His chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths.
Above him hung Jinzo.
He was not card art Jinzo, not precisely. The proportions were right: plated armor, metal clamp over the mouth, spikes along a segmented torso, but in person he was too tall, edges blurring into the air as though his outline could not decide to exist. Flickers of blue-white current ran over his armor, racing along engraved lines like circuit boards. Where his eyes should have been, twin pits of deep red glowed through the goggles, not like fire but like distant warning lights, barely constrained.
He was only half here. From the waist down his form broke apart into tangled cables and vapor, rooted in nothing. But the weight of him pressed against Julian's skin.
A cable of pale energy ran from Torrey's chest up into that mass, thin and frayed but still connected. As Julian watched, a pulse traveled along it into Jinzo's core. The glow in Jinzo's "eyes" brightened a fraction.
Julian's stomach lurched.
Alexis saw him first. Her head snapped toward the entry corridor, eyes huge.
"Julian!" Her voice cracked, equal parts relief and warning. "Don't—!"
Jinzo's head moved.
It did not turn like a human neck. The upper half of his body pivoted as one unit, a smooth mechanical swivel, until those dim red lenses were focused squarely on Julian. The feeling of being under an X-ray slammed into him. A scan, searching, cataloging.
Behind him, the form of the little spirits huddled even more to Nightmare-Eyes, like the minimal distance between himself and the guardian behind him would be of significance to avoid the power of the monstrous machine on the other side of the room. To his shock, they were not half-transparent anymore. Skull Servant's ragged cloak snapped as if in real wind. Happy Lover's wings left faint trails of light. Watapon's cottony texture cast a soft glow on the floor.
More than that… the others could see them.
Syrus' gaze flicked to the cluster at Julian's feet and widened impossibly further. Mindy made a choked sound and clutched Jasmine's sleeve. Bastion's lips parted in a quiet gasp, his eyes darting between Julian and the spirits as his rational brain fought to find a word that fit.
"It… they're…" Syrus stammered.
"Later." Julian cutted, voice steady only because it had to be. "Are any of you hurt?"
"No. Not physically." Bastion answered, the mathematician in him bizarrely precise even while shaken. "Torrey collapsed at the end of his duel. We… haven't been able to reach him."
"Or leave." Alexis added tightly. "The doors won't open. Our Duel Disks died when his did."
Julian glanced at his own. The indicator lights were faint but still alive, flickering as if under strain.
"Field status." he muttered. "Localized. Nightmare-Eyes?"
"The entity is monopolizing ambient energy." Nightmare-Eyes replied in his mind. "Electrical. Spiritual. Emotional. A gluttonous circuit."
"Great." He swallowed. "Can you cut it off? Or at least buffer and shield them?"
There was a sense of consideration, like someone flexing a muscle in a foreign limb. "Protecting you is no problem. Extending it to the others will dilute its strength, but… yes. If I root the field to your core."
The wording made Julian's skin prickle, the meaning of the declaration more than clear: tethering the connection to his spent core was like connecting a high output drain onto a low battery. Functional, but short-lived and dangerous. However, glancing at his friends, the decision was made. He nodded almost before he thought better of it. "Do it."
The cloak-sensation around his shoulders deepened, then pushed outward. A subtle shimmer spread from where his boots touched the ground, like heat mirage across asphalt, washing over Alexis, Bastion, Syrus and the others. Their shoulders eased fractionally as the suffocating pressure lifted a bit.
Jinzo's lenses narrowed.
The thin cable between him and Torrey flared, pulling another pulse of energy. The spirit's form solidified by a hair's breadth. Small flecks of light came away from Torrey's body with the pulse, evaporating into the air.
Julian's hands clenched at his sides.
"He is incomplete." Nightmare-Eyes said. "He requires more. When he finishes consuming the boy, he will look elsewhere. The nearest sources will be…"
"Us. All of us." The words came out flat. Not a question.
"Yes."
Alexis met his eyes across the arena. She did not need to know the specifics to read the situation in his face. Her jaw tightened.
"This thing," she said, voice just loud enough to carry. "It talks inside your head. Says it needs more power. We tried to run. The doors…" She gestured helplessly at the sealed exit on the opposite side. "It's like the whole room decided we were batteries."
Syrus nodded, throat working. "I thought I was just… panicking, but I couldn't even take a step forward. It's like my legs forgot how."
Julian looked back up at Jinzo. "You're not done yet, are you."
The spirit did not answer with words in his mind, the way Kuriboh talked to Jaden, the way Nightmare-Eyes spoke to him. Instead, the static shifted pitch. For a second, the noise resolved into something like a voice run through too many modems, grinding and metallic.
"...not… enough…"
The phrase came from everywhere at once. The walls, the floor, the dead screens ringing the arena. Torrey's body twitched at the echo.
Julian's teeth clenched.
"A parasitic loop." Nightmare-Eyes supplied. "He will continue drawing until the host collapses entirely. There are two more tethers leading outside of the arena. Not enough yet for a spirit of his caliber."
"Yeah. I got that part."
For a moment Julian forgot how to breathe. Not because of the shock, or Torrey collapsing, or even Jinzo's half-formed mass of static violence filling the room. Because he knew this scene.
Not like déjà vu. Not like a dream. Once again, like memory. In the anime, this should have happened months from now, during winter break, when the school was nearly empty, when no one from this room should have been anywhere near it. No Alexis. No Jasmine or Mindy. No Bastion. Not here. Not now. And certainly not with him standing in the doorway. The realization hit him with a force almost as heavy as Jinzo's aura: his presence had already pushed the world off its rails more than he could imagine. The story he thought he knew was starting to distort around him, his previous knowledge more and more unreliable.
His heart hammered, but his thoughts sharpened rather than scattering. There was a beast in the room, and it was hungry, and there were people he cared about between its teeth and the exit. That was a problem with a shape. One problem that he could fix now and knew how to do so. The trick was not dying while he did it.
He took one step forward onto the dueling platform. The emergency lights along the wall flickered in response, as if the room itself held its breath.
Nightmare-Eyes drifted closer behind his left shoulder, spectral form towering, one gauntleted hand hovering inches from his back. To the others, he would look like an imposing guardian: plates of dark armor, chains curling toward the floor, eyes a luminous green burning in the darkness. To Julian, he was equal parts shield and amplifier, a focus where his fear could go and not leak out of his voice.
"Can you tell what exactly happened here?" Julian asked inwardly, eyes never leaving Jinzo. "Details matter. I need to know what I'm dealing with."
"Yes." Nightmare-Eyes replied. There was no hesitation. "The room is saturated with impression. Their emotions stained the field deeply. I can read it."
"Then show me."
He wasn't sure whether he meant that figuratively or literally until Nightmare-Eyes' hand settled carefully, strangely gently, against the back of his neck.
Cold flooded his spine, then spread through his skull, not painful but sudden, like someone had yanked open a window in his mind and let in a night wind full of foreign stars.
"Do not resist." Nightmare-Eyes' voice said, closer than ever. "This will be… compressed. You will experience more than this body could perceive alone."
The arena blurred.
The static he'd been hearing all this time surged, resolved, shattered into a thousand overlapping signals, each a different flavor of fear, greed, curiosity, ambition. They stacked and intertwined until they formed a pattern, and then the pattern began to move.
The last thing Julian saw clearly in the physical world was Jinzo's tilted head and the thin cable of energy between the spirit and Torrey flashing again.
Then the floor fell away.
Julian's body remained standing in Arena Three for a couple seconds, knees locked, eyes unfocused. The dark around him didn't clear so much as thin, like fog burned away from the inside out.
Shapes came next. Not solid at first. Suggested, as if someone had sketched the room with trembling lines and only now was deciding which parts to ink in. Then, slowly, the details bled in:
The Occult Research club room.
Or at least, what remained of it in memory. Nightmare-Eyes wasn't showing Julian objective reality; he was stitching together echoes: Torrey's bravado, Grant's nerves, Fuller's constant low-grade dread, combined into something that looked like a place and felt like a mistake.
There was a circle on the floor.
Drawn in chalk, white and uneven, like someone had copied it from a blurry textbook diagram. The lines weren't straight. One sigil was obviously redrawn over a smudge. Wax had dripped over a curve and hardened there, like a scar.
Candles: short, mismatched, the kind sold in bundles at the campus shop… Burned on plates around it. Their flames were too small to justify how heavy the air felt.
Julian wasn't standing there, but he felt like he was.
That was the imprint: Torrey's adrenaline pounding in his ears, Grant's jittery excitement, Fuller's instinctual sense that this was a bad idea.
The three Obelisk boys gathered around a beat-up Ouija board laid on a low table beside the circle. Torrey set the Jinzo card in the center like a crown jewel.
"Okay," he said, trying to make his voice land somewhere between announcer and priest. "One more time. Properly."
Grant rubbed his hands together. He was absurdly eager; Julian could feel his thoughts racing ahead of him: real spirit, real power, we'll have something to brag about.
Fuller shifted his weight from foot to foot, staring at the candles like he was counting down reasons to leave.
"I still say Banner meant all that soul stuff as a metaphor." Fuller muttered.
"He said Duel Spirits can come to life under the right conditions." Torrey shot back. "This is the right conditions. Quiet room. No distractions. Focused intent."
"Focused stupidity." Fuller murmured, but he didn't leave.
They each placed two fingers on the flimsy plastic planchette.
From where Julian existed — folded into their nerves via Nightmare-Eyes — he felt all three sets of fingers: humid, slightly trembling, fighting the urge to press harder and force something to happen.
Torrey cleared his throat.
"On three," he said. "One… two…"
Their voices overlapped in a ritual Banner probably would've rolled his eyes at, if he'd heard it.
"From vapor to flesh…
From a wind to a roar…
Come, Jinzo, from the land of yore!"
Nothing happened.
The candles continued their modest burn. The room stayed the same too-warm temperature, Ouija board sat in the middle, stubbornly inert.
Grant's shoulders slumped. "Maybe we did it wrong again."
"You moved too fast." Torrey said, defensive. "Your timing was off."
"Timing? I said it with you!"
"You rushed the last line. Spirits need rhythm."
Fuller snorted softly. "Right. Spirits are picky about metrics now."
"Shut up and focus." Torrey snapped.
They tried again.
Same words. Same cadence, more forced this time. Same result.
Nothing.
The planchette didn't twitch, much less glide.
The imprint pressed in. Embarrassment and frustration lacing through Torrey's chest. He'd bragged about this. He'd talked himself up to his friends. He'd hinted in Banner's class that 'some people' were going to test theories for real.
And now the stupid piece of cardboard was making him look like an idiot.
"Come on." he muttered under his breath, more to the empty board than to his friends. "Do something."
Grant nudged the planchette with the tiniest intentional shove.
Fuller's head snapped up. "Hey! Stop faking it."
"I'm not!" Grant protested, cheeks flushing. "It just… it slipped."
Torrey shot them both a murderous look.
"Hands still." he ordered. "Nobody pushes. Nobody cheats. Got it?"
Grant nodded, abashed. Fuller sighed, resigned.
The three of them tried to settle.
Outside the room, the Academy would have been quiet, weekend quiet, the kind that belonged to extra study sessions, club meetings, and students wandering the grounds aimlessly. In here, though, the silence pressed harder. The only sounds were the soft buzz of the overhead lights and the slight crackle of candle wicks eating through cheap wax.
"Last time." Torrey said. There was a tremor in it now, smoothed over with stubbornness. "Then we call it."
They didn't chant this time.
They just waited.
One second. Two. Three.
The board stayed still.
Four. Five.
"See?" Fuller started, trying for gentle, missing. "It's just a game, Tor…"
The planchette moved.
Not much. Not dramatically. Just a tiny scrape under their fingers.
Grant jerked. "Okay, seriously, don't…"
"I didn't." Torrey said, eyes widening.
All three of them froze. Julian felt the moment they realized it.
Their muscles had tensed. Their fingers were locked. And yet the planchette was pushing subtly against them, not dragged by any of their hands but insisting from beneath, like something underneath the plastic wanted out.
It glided. Slowly. Purposefully.
G.
Grant's breath hitched audibly. Fuller's heart rate spiked hard enough that Julian felt it echo in his own chest. The planchette moved again.
I.
Torrey swallowed. He tried to laugh, but it came out thin.
"Okay," he said, voice too loud in the small room. "Okay, see? It's working. Don't freak."
The board didn't care about his attempt at control.
V. E.
"Give…" Grant whispered. "Give what?"
They were all pressing down now. Not to guide it, but to slow it, to test whether it really had its own momentum, if it was really real. The plastic oval fought them with unnerving steadiness, like a hand sliding from beneath theirs.
It paused for a heartbeat. Then slid again.
M. E.
"Give me…" Fuller said under his breath, throat gone dry.
Torrey's bravado flared back for a moment, covering fear with excitement. "A message." he said. "This is a message. This is exactly how it's supposed to work."
The candles stuttered, one bending sideways as if caught in a draft that wasn't there.
Julian could feel the rough edge of something entering the room. Not fully. Not yet. Just pressing along the walls from the outside, like fingers testing paper for weak points.
The planchette continued.
3.
Three. Grant's mind jumped instantly: tributes, cards, offerings… three of something. His thoughts were chaotic, but they all revolved around the same axis: this will make us strong, this will make us special.
Torrey heard one thing only:
Conditions. A bargain. A rule. Something that meant their ritual counted.
"Three what?" Grant breathed.
"Three cards." Torrey said immediately, almost gratefully. "It's obvious. Every strong monster needs tributes. He's telling us the cost."
Fuller licked his lips. "We could… just stop."
The board disagreed. The planchette pulled again, faster now, like something had found its feet.
A. N. D.
The air grew heavier. Julian could feel their lungs working harder, their breaths skimming over the edge of panic.
I.
One of the candles nearest Grant flared bright, then shrank back to a sickly little nub.
W. I. L. L.
The temperature dropped a few degrees.
Sweat cooled too fast on the back of Torrey's neck.
B. E.
Grant's pupils were huge. His fingers twitched but didn't pull away. The thrill had mutated into something more complex: part awe, part nausea.
F. R. E. E.
The planchette stopped.
"Give me three." Grant said, voice faint. "And I will be free."
They all heard the sentence differently. For Torrey, it was just cool. Dangerous. A line from a story where he got to be the protagonist. For Grant, it was intoxicating. A spirit talking to them. Them. For Fuller, it was a cold hand closing over his spine.
"We should shut this down." Fuller said. His voice fought to stay level and lost. "Now."
"Are you serious?" Torrey gaped at him. "This is what we wanted!"
"It's not what I wanted." Fuller snapped, and there was enough naked fear in it that even Torrey flinched. "This isn't some club game anymore, Tor. This is…"
He didn't finish.
The candle nearest Grant went out.
Not gradually. Not with a flicker. Just gone, leaving a thin curl of smoke that twisted toward the ceiling like something escaping.
Then the air snapped.
Grant's imprint plunged straight through Julian's senses.
Julian's own chest seized. His knees went weak. For a heartbeat, he couldn't tell which body was collapsing: Grant's or his.
The blue gasped once, like someone had punched all the air out of him. A thin white thread tore free from somewhere deep inside and shot upward. Julian saw it, in this half-world of impressions: a line of light being reeled in by nothing his eyes could track.
Grant's fingers slipped off the board. His eyes rolled back. He hit the floor, half across the chalk circle.
"Grant!" Fuller shrieked.
Torrey stared at his friend, the Jinzo card, the board that had just spelled its price. His bravado shattered around the edges, leaving something raw and stubborn underneath.
Behind them, in the corner where the candle smoke drifted, the shadows began to stack.
Not just deepen. Not just darken. Condense. Lines of metal ribbing appeared in midair, then disappeared. A flash of a plated chest. A flicker of a rounded helm. Something like goggles burned red in the dark for a fraction of a second before going out.
That was all. And it was enough.
Fuller grabbed Torrey's sleeve. "He wasn't talking about cards, he wasn't talking about rituals, he was talking about…"
"RUN!" Torrey shouted, finally listening to something other than his own ego.
They ran.
The imprint fractured into a smear of panicked movement. Nightmare-Eyes dragging Julian through it, smoothing three different flights into one long, desperate sprint.
The hallway outside the club room stretched ahead of them, each fluorescent light a checkpoint between them and safety.
The first light flickered. The second buzzed and dimmed. The third blew out with a sharp pop.
Fuller looked back. He shouldn't have.
Jinzo's form wasn't fully visible yet. Just a tearing in the shadows where the emergency lighting didn't quite reach. But he saw enough:
The curve of the metal casing around its head. The jut of its shoulders. The dead red glow of eyes that weren't eyes at all, just lenses hungering for input.
Fuller's fear spiked hard enough to burn. He stumbled. His heel slipped on smooth tile. His back hit the wall. The static caught him.
It rolled down the corridor like invisible thunder, fuzzing out the edges of everything. Julian felt it slam through his borrowed senses: a low electric thrum that made thoughts stutter.
Fuller jerked as if strings had been yanked.
His energy thread ripped free, thinner than Grant's, stretched further before it snapped, inexorably drawn toward the half-formed thing stalking them.
He crumpled to the ground. Torrey didn't look back again, he just ran.
Julian's chest burned with him. His legs felt the ache of muscles that weren't his as Torrey pounded down the hallway, shoes slapping tile, breath ragged.
One more corner. One more turn. The arena doors.
He hit them full force with his shoulder.
They didn't budge.
He clawed at the handle. The lock panel was dead—no light, no beeps, no click. Just dead plastic and a steel shutter refusing to move.
Behind him, the corridor darkened completely.
The emergency lights sputtered out as if something was sucking the power straight from the wires.
The hum of the building itself changed pitch, sliding down into something low and wrong.
Torrey turned.
Jinzo stepped into what little glow remained.
It stood half-there, half-not. Its torso defined, arms plated and rigid, the clamp over its mouth like a muzzle designed to hold back sound too dangerous to release. Its lower half was a tangle of indistinct shadow and cables that never quite resolved into legs.
Its eyes burned behind metal lenses, taking Torrey in the way a machine took in data.
Julian felt the contact.
It was not curiosity. It was not hatred. It was need.
Torrey lifted his Duel Disk because there was nothing else left to lift.
"I…" his voice cracked and he forced it louder. "I agreed to the sacrifice!"
His heart slammed against his ribs. Nightmare-Eyes let Julian feel every beat.
"But I never said it would be free!" Torrey shouted. "If you want what's mine, you duel me for it!"
There was a beat in which the world held its breath.
Then Jinzo's head turned with a precise series of clicks, as though adjusting focus. The red glow in its lenses sharpened.
A sound tore through the air. A digital shriek throttled down to something like words.
"A—CCEPT—ED."
The spiritual pressure in the corridor spiked. The doors behind Torrey sealed in more ways than one: the lock dead, the handle cold, the metal humming with the same wrong pulse as the walls.
Julian didn't see him as if wearing Torrey's eyes. It was more like standing beside him inside his own terror, watching the duel through the echo of every heartbeat.
The Duel Disk on Torrey's arm flickered, light stuttering along the frame. His fingers were white around the edge of the disk, knuckles aching. Sweat made the grip slick.
Across from him, on the far side of the field, Jinzo's form was half-hologram, half-spirit.
The projection was what the system knew: a humanoid machine, metal plates, cables, the smooth dome of its head and those empty red lenses. But layered over it, visible only in the imprint, was the real presence.
A thicker outline. A second body of dense, humming air, more solid than before, but less than what he saw in the real world. A distortion in the space it occupied, like heat haze bent into the shape of something that should never walk.
Julian felt Torrey's stomach twist at the sight. Every Duel Monsters fan knew Jinzo as a card. A walking royal decree against traps, strong attack, a card you respected. But this wasn't the logic of game text and rulings. It was a living spirit with wishes of their own.
Torrey drew. The sensation of pulling the top card wasn't tactile so much as emotional: a desperate hope flaring and dimming in the same second.
He slapped a monster onto his disk. The precise plays of the duel were not marking of impactful enough to Torrey, not with the terror from the duel itself, so the intel of the plays was hidden from Julian as well. Not even play-by-play, only flashes of highlights were shown in a uncertain scenario, showing the stuff that made stimuli strong enough to be grasped by Nightmare-Eyes.
A static hologram burst up on his side of the field. From its form, not something particularly strong or weak, the kind of card a solid Obelisk student might rely on if their nerves weren't shot.
Torrey's voice came out thin in the imprint.
"Attack!"
Julian didn't hear the monster's name. What he heard was the quiver in that single word. Saw the way the hologram lunged, some sort of claws extended… and saw Jinzo barely react.
The spirit didn't even bother feigning surprise. It didn't need to. The aura around it pulsed once.
The attack hit, but it felt like punching into water.
Nightmare-Eyes translated the backlash into sensation that crawled along Julian's own spine. Jinzo's LP dipped only slightly. Torrey's brief flare of hope evaporated.
Then it was Jinzo's turn.
Julian didn't see the card movements clearly. Even then, the imprint wasn't recording strategy, only impact. A card hit the field. Something else activated. A series of mechanical, decisive motions.
Then pain. The first real hit didn't feel like numbers. It felt like punishment.
When Jinzo's attack connected, Torrey's body jerked as though a live wire had been clamped to his spine. The shock wasn't cinematic lightning or dramatic fire, it was a deep, crawling surge that dug under his skin and burned outward. His vision snapped white. His teeth clicked together hard enough to cut his tongue.
Julian felt it too… not fully, not directly, but as a warped echo running up phantom limbs he didn't have.
Torrey tried to breathe. His chest refused.
Every nerve tingled in the wrong direction, a thousand pinpricks pushing inward, not out. His knees buckled, and only sheer stubborn terror kept him from collapsing on the spot. His Duel Disk vibrated violently, emitting a crackle of static that bit into his arm.
The shock didn't stay physical. It went deeper.
Nightmare-Eyes transmitted the second layer with frightening clarity: a pull at Torrey's center, a sensation of something being unhooked and siphoned. His LP counter dropped, but the real loss was something Julian perceived like a fading pulse, a warmth torn away from the boy's core.
Torrey choked. A sound between a gasp and a sob scraped out of him.
Fear hit him next. Raw, unfiltered.
Not the abstract fear of losing a duel. The primal, animal fear of something reaching inside him and taking what it wanted.
Julian staggered inside the imprint. He could almost feel fingers. Metal, intangible, impossible… raking through Torrey's spiritual center, leaving it trembling and thin.
Torrey's thoughts blurred. He didn't think 'I might lose.' He thought 'I might die.' And the worst of all: he was right.
His next breath was a desperate gulp of air that didn't fully fill his lungs. His legs twitched. The smell of scorched fabric from the cuff of his blazer reached him a second too late.
He tried to raise his head. He barely managed.
Jinzo stared back at him with those unreadable red lenses: cold, empty, and utterly indifferent to the horror it had caused.
Torrey's heart hammered so hard Julian felt the phantom echo in his own ribs.
The attack wasn't designed to kill him in one blow, for all its potence. Jinzo was playing with its food.
Torrey went on the defensive. Julian felt the switch: panic trying to think, trying to turn itself into calculation. He set a card. He summoned something he hoped could survive. Each action was a plea: last one more turn, last one more turn. His playstyle went from confident to survivalist, trying to avoid the pain.
The imprint buckled. The screaming color, the metal tang of panic, the echo of Torrey's pain—all of it collapsed inward like a whirlpool. Nightmare-Eyes pulled Julian through it, cutting away the boy's terror, severing that thread and hooking onto another.
A different emotional signature flared to life. Not sharp like fear. Not hollow like dread. Warm. Steady. Focused. A mind that held fast when others shook.
Alexis.
The world reformed around him: less violently, less jagged. Her emotional landscape wasn't raw chaos; it had structure, but it wasn't mechanical. She didn't think in cold equations. She thought in triage. What matters first. Who needs help. What can be done now. And beneath it, braided in every thought, every breath, was the kind of instinctive compassion that never shuts off.
The first thing Julian tasted from her imprint was concern. Not panic. Concern sharpened into movement.
It began in one of the campus walkways outside the academic building. The afternoon was dying early, clouds rolling in, shadows lengthening across the stone tiles. Alexis walked with Jasmine and Mindy, the three of them chatting about nothing more urgent than weekend plans and whether the general cafeteria really served better shrimp than the Obelisk one.
A joke, a laugh… and then all three froze.
The hallway lights flickered once. Then again. Then died for a full second before sputtering back to life, dimmer than before.
Jasmine clutched her arm. "What was that?"
Mindy frowned up at the ceiling. "Storm?"
"No." Alexis stopped walking. "This wasn't weather. It felt like…"
She didn't have words for it.
Not until another wave rolled through the corridor: a pressure, low and heavy, like standing too close to a transformer. Her skin prickled. Her breath hitched.
She had felt something faintly like this once before, far away from the academy. Two years ago, on the night Atticus vanished. It wasn't the same, but it lived in the same family of wrongness.
Her feet were already moving.
"Lex, slow down!" Jasmine called after her.
But Alexis was already half-running toward the source of the pull, instincts screaming that something was happening—something bigger than a fuse box failing or a storm approaching. Something dangerous.
The closer they got to the south wing—the one with the club rooms—the worse the air felt. Hotter. Charged. The lights grew more erratic.
Then they heard it.
A sound between a gasp and a cry choked off mid-breath.
Mindy paled. "That…That was a person."
Alexis didn't hesitate. She sprinted the last stretch of hallway, the other two girls right behind her, until they reached the double doors of the smaller arena attached to the building. The glass panels rattled under her palm when she touched the handle.
Locked. Not mechanically, stuck. Like the metal itself didn't want to let her open it.
"Someone's inside," she said. "Help me push."
The three of them pressed their weight against the door. It groaned but didn't budge.
Inside, through the narrow glass slit, Alexis glimpsed light. Not the crisp blue-white of Duel Disks. Something more unstable. Coppery. Crackling. Alive.
Another cry sounded, longer this time, full of pain.
"Torrey." Jasmine whispered, recognizing the voice.
That was all Alexis needed.
She stepped back, planted both hands on the door, and shoved with everything she had. The frame trembled: still sealed, but no longer perfectly so. She grit her teeth and pushed again.
A loud metallic click thudded from deep within the mechanism.
And then the door wrenched open just enough to let them squeeze through.
Nightmare-Eyes carried Julian through Alexis's first sight of the scene.
The arena was dim. No lights overhead. The only illumination came from the duel holograms, except they weren't behaving like holograms. They flickered in slow-motion distortions, as if the images had mass, as if they were straining against the very air that tried to pull them apart.
Torrey stood alone on the field's far end, swaying, barely upright. His sleeve was scorched. His knees shook. He stared at his opponent like he was trying not to collapse.
And across the field, no longer a clean projection, hovered a shape. Jinzo.
Semi-solid, semi-etherial, like a nightmare halfway through forming. His metal plating shimmered like wet oil. His red eyes burned with a focused hunger.
Mindy gasped, stumbling backward. Jasmine's hand flew to her mouth.
But Alexis? Alexis stepped forward. Her terror didn't hit as screaming static the way Torrey's had. Hers unfolded like a cold tide: fear, yes, but controlled, processed, pushed behind urgency.
Is he alive? How badly is he hurt? How do we stop this?
Nightmare-Eyes shifted the focus, not away from Alexis, but around her: widening the emotional frame just enough for Julian to feel the two girls anchored at her sides.
Where Alexis's emotional signature was structured urgency and controlled fear, Jasmine's hit him like a struck tuning fork: high, quivering, bright with adrenaline.
Her imprint carried quick breaths, sharp edges, a body ready to bolt even as her feet refused to move. Jasmine was lightning-fast emotion: fear that flashed, ricocheted, then stabilized only because it collided headfirst with loyalty.
She was scared. Terrified, actually. The kind of fear that climbs up your spine before you even name it.
But beneath it, braided into her heartbeat, was something she didn't even verbalize: Alexis stepped forward. So Jasmine did too.
She gripped Alexis's arm because she needed the contact; but she didn't cling. She wasn't trying to pull her friend back. She was steadying herself so she wouldn't let go.
Julian felt it as a physical sensation through the imprint. Heat, tension, but refusal to break.
And then there was Mindy.
Where Jasmine was sharp, Mindy's fear was deep: a sinking weight in her stomach, a trembling coldness in her fingers. Her imprint reminded Julian of a lantern in a storm: the flame shook, guttered, nearly went out…but never did, trembling weakly within the winds.
Mindy's heart hammered, her knees threatened to lock, her throat closed with the beginnings of a sob she refused to let out.
She was the one who whispered "Oh my god" under her breath. She was the one whose mind immediately leapt to worst-case scenarios: not because she was pessimistic, but because she cared so much it physically hurt. But Mindy did not run.
She stepped in closer to Alexis's other side, forming a small human barrier around their friend without thinking about it.
Julian felt her imprint pulse with a single, desperate, protective thought: If Alexis is walking into danger, we walk with her. No matter how afraid I am.
It wasn't bravery in the way duelists talked about bravery. It was something quieter. More intimate. The courage of someone who wants to cry, who wants to flee, who wants to be anywhere but here… and stays anyway.
Because friendship demanded it. Because Alexis needed it.
Nightmare-Eyes played back their emotions with brutal clarity: Jasmine's shaking determination leaned sharp and bright; Mindy's courage trembled like a reed in wind but held rooted, strong in its own way.
And together? Together, the three girls stepped through that half-jammed arena door, into flickering lights and a spirit they couldn't name or imagine.
Alexis led. But Mindy and Jasmine followed because they chose to. Not weaker. Not lesser. Just different kinds of brave.
And Julian felt it, deep in his chest: a ripple of respect for them that surprised even him.
They weren't duelists of legendary the reincarnation of mythical kings, priests or pharaohs. They weren't spiritual prodigies, not trained to face monsters.
They were teenage girls walking straight into something that felt wrong on a level even most adults would instinctively avoid.
Because their friend moved forward. And because someone was screaming like that didn't show itself in the arena. It showed itself in dark hallways, shaking hands, and steps taken despite fear.
"Mindy, check if there's anyone else inside." she ordered, voice tight but not cracked. "See if there's a teacher nearby. Jasmine, stay close."
She didn't look away from Torrey. Not for a second.
Jinzo's presence washed toward her: raw psychic pressure, like someone crushing a metal sheet around her chest. Her breath stalled. Nightmare-Eyes showed Julian exactly how it felt in her body: the instinctive fight-or-flight surge, the tremble beneath her skin, the spark of nausea at the spiritual wrongness of the entity before her.
And yet, she held her ground. Her empathy didn't make her weak. It made her anchored.
"Torrey!" she called, trying to reach him without stepping into the dueling space. "Can you hear me? Torrey!"
He blinked. Slow, dazed.
Jinzo's head turned. Just a fraction. Just enough. The psychic pressure doubled.
Alexis staggered a step back, jaw clenched, every muscle in her body screaming at her to run. But she stayed, even as her legs shook. Mindy and Jasmine pressed into her sides, terrified, but they didn't break either. Alexis kept their hands in theirs, grounding them as much as herself, even as something inside her cracked at seeing Torrey so badly hurt.
"Please," she whispered, voice trembling. "Please stop."
It wasn't a command. It wasn't a strategic call. It was a human plea—to anything still capable of mercy.
Jinzo didn't have mercy.
But Nightmare-Eyes showed Julian a spark inside Alexis: something bright, warm, the same fierce determination she'd shown when standing alone in front of the Obelisk girls defending Syrus, the same fire he'd seen in her duels on the screen.
She didn't know what was happening. She didn't understand spirits. But she understood people and injustice.
Torrey was partially collapsed, knelt on the floor. However, refusing to play in that game was tantamount to a forfeit. Clenching his teeth, the boy draw one more card, as the surge from the memory flow changed once more.
Nightmare-Eyes shifted the imprint again.
The texture of the fear changed. Less sharp than Torrey's panic. Less luminous and empathic than Alexis's.
This one tasted like logic cracking under pressure and beneath it, a softer, quivering thread of courage stretched tight, trembling but unbroken.
Bastion and Syrus.
Their memories didn't appear separately. They overlapped, like two transparencies projected onto the same screen, each filling the gaps the other left behind. Like threads from a story built from different points of view into a single narrative.
Julian let the imprint take him.
It began quietly, in the study lounge. Nightmare-Eyes gave Julian a fragment of Bastion first, not as a point of view, but as a sensation: the mental rhythm of someone thinking in clean, orderly lines.
Bastion sat at a study table, notebook open, running probability trees for deck optimization. Syrus sat across from him, trying to follow along, nodding too quickly whenever he thought he'd understood something.
It was peaceful. Normal. Bright with the soft frustration and earnestness Syrus always carried when trying to improve.
Then the air changed. A burst of static: small, almost imperceptible.
Julian felt it hit Bastion's senses first: a ripple of discontinuity, like a formula suddenly producing the wrong result. The overhead lights flickered. The hum of the AC stuttered.
Bastion paused mid-sentence. Syrus looked up from the page, confused, pencil hovering above his notes. "Did… did the lights just?"
Bastion frowned. "Yes. And that wasn't a voltage drop. The frequency of the flicker was wrong."
Julian felt the shape of Bastion's next thoughts: curiosity, hypothesis, recalculation.
Then another pulse. Stronger. The lights dimmed… then brightened too fast, like a gasp from the building's electrical system.
Something brushed the edges of their awareness. Not physical, not visible, but heavy, as if the air itself recoiled.
Syrus gripped the table. "What is that?"
Bastion stood. He didn't have an answer. He hated not having an answer.
The imprint flickered, letting Julian taste that discomfort. Not fear, not yet, but a scientist staring at data that refused to make sense.
Syrus rose too, slower, uncertain. They looked down the hall. The building seemed normal… too normal. The quiet kind of normal that felt staged, as if the air itself was holding its breath.
Bastion spoke first. "We should check the breakers."
Syrus blinked. "We? As in right now?"
"We are the only ones here." Bastion reasoned. "Better to confirm than leave an unresolved anomaly." He didn't add: Better I check it now so it doesn't bother me all day. Nightmare-Eyes gave Julian the emotional translation anyway.
Syrus hesitated. He wasn't brave. He knew he wasn't brave. But he was trying… Trying so hard these days. And something in that static felt wrong. Wrong enough that he didn't want his friend going alone.
"…Okay." he whispered. "I'll come."
The imprint vibrated faintly with the shape of Syrus's resolve. Fragile, yes. But real.
They followed the hall out of the lounge. Nightmare-Eyes threaded their emotions together as they walked: Bastion's analysis layering over Syrus's fear, Syrus's empathy linking to Bastion's certainty, two opposite forces pushing the boys forward.
With each step, the static grew. A prickling sensation along the spine. A faint metallic taste in the mouth.
Somewhere far off, a noise: half electrical crackle, half… scream?
Syrus stiffened. "Bastion… that's..."
Bastion's pulse spiked.
"Yeah." he said quietly. "Someone's hurt, let's go."
They followed the sound. Down the corridor, past the staircase. Toward the arena.
Julian felt every step through them. The rising dread, the tightening breath, the way the air got thicker, heavier, wronger.
When they reached the corner, Alexis's imprint briefly bled into theirs. Nightmare-Eyes stitching their perceptions together like cloth.
The girls had arrived just minutes earlier.
Bastion and Syrus felt their panic like warmth left in the air. The sliding doors slammed shut behind them the moment they touched the arena threshold, not softly, but like a magnetic lock engaging.
Both boys jumped, then they saw it. Jinzo. Half-formed, half-solid. Floating above the duel platform, its red eye burning through the dust-thick air. Torrey stood across from it, barely conscious, clothes scorched.
Alexis and her friends stood farther back, trapped like birds in a cage. The imprint let Julian feel all six emotional signatures at once in a storm of terror, disbelief, pain, protective instinct.
Julian felt the instant Bastion stepped into the range of Jinzo's aura as if a brilliant, organized library inside the boy's mind suddenly hit a wall of static.
Bastion's thoughts always ran structured, elegant, crystalline. Equations, probabilities, cause and effect braided into neat intellectual threads.
Bastion's brain blue-screened. There was no other way to describe it. Not from fear, from contradiction. Nightmare-Eyes played the moment perfectly:
A faint red flicker caught the corner of his vision. A cry-cut short. A smell like metal and burnt.
His mind paused. Not in fear. In analysis failure.
Julian felt it slam through the imprint like the mental equivalent of a software crash: a sensation of pages flipping too fast, formulas misaligning, labels coming off drawers inside his head.
A column of thought toppled like dominoes: Electrical surge… No, the breakers should have prevented that. Hallucination? Group hysteria? No physiological trigger. Light projection? But the shadows are wrong, impossible. Then…then…
The imprint shuddered with a single thought that Bastion rarely allowed into words: I have no model for this.
Fear crawled in only after that admission. Measured fear, contained fear, but undeniably there.
Bastion wasn't fearless. He was disciplined. Fear didn't vanish from his system; he simply folded it into a mental drawer and locked it, a technique Julian recognized instinctively. Because it was one he used too.
But the lock Bastion used wasn't perfect. Not against this.
Nightmare-Eyes hit Julian with the sensation Bastion suppressed:
A spike of dizziness, a tightening throat. A strange, instinctive desire to run.
This can't exist. This is not real. This violates physics, biology, chemistry… everything.
He forced himself not to faint. Next to him, Syrus was shaking so hard his duel disk rattled against his forearm. Jinzo turned its head. Just a fraction. Just enough to acknowledge new prey. Syrus stopped breathing.
Mindy whimpered. Jasmine stepped in front of her. Alexis threw an arm out as if she could shield both groups at once.
Torrey groaned, barely conscious, LP falling fast.
A blast of psychic shock rolled outward from the duel.
Julian felt it hit them, a sensation like an invisible hand pressing on their ribs hard enough to bruise.
Syrus staggered. He didn't run. He held Bastion's sleeve, but not to hide behind him. To stay standing.
"B-Bastion…" he whispered, terrified. "What do we do…?"
Bastion forced his breath slow. Tried to rebuild his mind brick by brick.
Not logic. Not analysis. Priorities.
"First." Bastion said, voice trembling but functional, "We don't panic."
Syrus let out a weak, incredulous laugh. "Bastion, I'm trying… But that thing is…"
"Yes. I know." Bastion swallowed hard. "But if Torrey falls, if he dies… then this gets worse."
Syrus stared at him. "You're… scared too."
"Yes." Bastion whispered. Then, louder: "But we act anyway."
Julian felt the shape of that courage in the imprint: clean, sharp, bright.
Syrus straightened his spine. His knees still knocked together. But he stood.
"I'm with you." he said quietly.
And it mattered. It mattered so much.
They crossed the arena: slow steps, deliberate, hearts pounding.
As they approached, Alexis turned, relief washing briefly across her fear-framed thoughts.
"Bastion! Syrus! What are you...?"
"There was something wrong with the lights." Bastion said quickly. "We came to check the breaks."
"Then we heard the scream." Syrus added, voice cracking. "With the lights and everything…"
"You shouldn't be here." Alexis hissed, eyes cutting toward Jinzo. "Stay back. If Torrey falls, it will target anything that moves."
They stopped just a few feet away.
Mindy was crying silently. Jasmine's jaw was clenched hard enough to hurt.
Syrus stepped slightly in front of them a tiny, instinctive gesture of shared fear, not bravery… but there was bravery in it anyway.
Torrey barely seemed aware they were there.
His focus was glued to his cards, his survival instinct wrapped totally around the idea that as long as the duel continued, there was a structure to follow. Rules. Phases. Turns.
"When I beat you." he rasped, voice shredded. "You… you let us go. All of us."
Jinzo's lenses burned brighter.
There were no words back. The spirit's agreement came as a simple, oppressive weight: fine. Not acceptance of a fair bargain, recognition of a game with one outcome. Nightmare-Eyes let Julian perceive the next turns in broken pieces.
Torrey setting a card, trying for defense, waiting for a proper answer. Jinzo casually tearing through it. Another attack. Another jolt of pain. Torrey's body swaying.
And Alexis watching, helpless, every fiber of her wanting to intervene, with no idea how.
Her soul flared against something inside her chest, like a door rattling on locked hinges.
She wasn't the only one.
Bastion and Syrus arrived at the back row of seats just as Torrey's last, fragile defense was crushed.
Up until this point, duel spirits had been rumors. Campfire stories, whispered anecdotes from Professor Banner that everyone always filed under metaphors and legends to enrich the card game. But this wasn't a metaphor.
Julian felt it through all of them at once, the shared realization: this is real, this is happening, this is not supposed to exist like this.
Jinzo turned its head toward the newcomers.
The weight of its attention swept across them like a spotlight. Its aura washed over the room, thickening the static until every breath felt like breathing through wool. The overhead fixtures hummed in protest.
That was the moment everything opened.
Julian felt it as a sudden, almost painful expansion, like additional senses snapping into place in each of them.
Alexis's perception sharpened, edges of reality outlined finer than they had been seconds ago. The spirit's aura resolved from an indistinct "wrongness" into a presence with texture, weight, distance.
Jasmine's awareness spiked, flaring in a jagged pattern, her fear now carrying information with it. Mindy's sensitivity bloomed more softly, but no less real, emotions reaching further out like fingers brushing the spiritual field.
Bastion's mind, so used to operating on abstract models, grudgingly admitted a new variable: this was not just psychological trickery. There was an extra layer overlaid onto the world, one he could sense without fully understanding.
Syrus's awakening was the roughest, and Julian felt that one the hardest.
It was like a door had been punched open from the outside. His heart pounded, but his concern for Torrey, for Alexis, for Bastion, for everyone, refused to let him shut down. Fear and empathy fused into a new sensitivity that let him see the way Jinzo's coil of energy reached for them.
Nightmare-Eyes, inside Julian, responded instinctively, its own essence flaring in protective irritation at the predatory field. The imprint shook.
On the arena floor, Torrey drew one last time. His hand barely obeyed him. His LP count, whatever the exact number, might as well have been written as "almost nothing."
He tried something, finally achieving his missing piece. Some combo, some last-ditch attempt at forcing a misplay, at squeezing out a single surviving turn.
Jinzo crushed it. The finishing blow didn't come as a dramatic, cinematic blast in the imprint. It came as a snap.
The instant Torrey's LP hit zero, Julian felt the spiritual tether between boy and body jerk, stretch, then slacken. Torrey didn't die, the imprint told him that much… but his consciousness dropped out like someone switching off a light. He crumpled to the floor.
Alexis lunged a half-step forward before instinct made her freeze. Whatever had attacked Torrey wasn't visible as a blade or beam, but she felt the psychic impact like a shockwave.
Syrus choked out something. A broken sound that was half name, half breath. Bastion's hand tightened painfully on his all stood there, shocked, exposed, still half-new to the fresh sharpness of their awakened senses.
And Jinzo, now almost fully manifested, shifted its focus.
Away from the boy it had drained. Toward the others in the room.
Its lenses glowed brighter, red light pooling in them like thick liquid. The aura around it swelled again, tasting of hot metal, burnt circuits, and hunger.
Nightmare-Eyes pulled Julian just far enough back from the imprint to keep it from crushing him, but not all the way to safety.
He could still feel Alexis's fear locking into resolve, Bastion's trying to think around panic, Syrus's instinctively putting others before himself even while trembling.
He could feel Jinzo's attention sweep over them, evaluating. Measuring. Choosing.
The imprint cracked at the edges. First as hairline fractures of light spreading like ice across a pane, then as a full shatter. And as the fragments fell inward, Julian saw something he recognized: himself.
His own silhouette, just a breath earlier, at the threshold of the arena doors.
The imprint folded over the moment he had first entered, matching its edges to reality like a perfect seam.
Torrey struck the ground again, this time in the real world, his Duel Disk sparking weakly as the last of his LP drained.
Alexis gasped—
Syrus lurched forward—
Bastion caught him—
Mindy clutched Jasmine's arm—
and Jinzo turned its lenses toward the group like a predator deciding which deer to take first.
Julian stood ten paces inside the room. The imprint collapsed fully into him, settling like embers behind his eyes.
Words were exchanged between them, words he already remembered, he lived them.
But now he knew. He knew everything that had happened. And he could feel his own reaction refracted through Nightmare-Eyes: rage not hot but cold, controlled; the instinct to protect sharpened into purpose.
Torrey's body slid sideways with a soft thud. The arena lights flickered once more. Jinzo turned.
Its half-solid form hissed with loose static, cables twitching as if searching for a stable connection to the physical world. What remained of its "face" tilted slightly, an animal sniffing out the highest source of energy.
Julian felt the moment Jinzo sensed him.
The spirit's aura doubled, then tightened, like a fist closing.
It stepped toward him.
Syrus cried out. "Julian!"
Alexis reached toward him without thinking.
Bastion's breath caught in his throat.
Even Jasmine managed a shaky, "Don't!"
Julian didn't move.
Nightmare-Eyes rose inside him. its presence no longer a distant echo but a massive, coiled shadow bracing his spine. The spirit's voice brushed the edge of his mind with that uncanny clarity:
Now.
Julian exhaled once. Slow. Steady.
Then he raised his Duel Disk and locked eyes with Jinzo.
"Enough." he said.
The word cut across the arena like a strike.
Jinzo's aura constricted, hesitating. Not stopping, not retreating, but recalibrating. The spirit wasn't used to being challenged by someone who knew what it was.
Julian stepped fully onto the platform.
"You want energy." he said. "You want another sacrifice. You're not touching them."
Jinzo's head jerked slightly, metal plates clicking against one another, an approximation of attention.
Its aura pushed forward like a wave. Julian held his ground.
"You want out of that half-formed body?" he continued. "Fine. I'll give you a duel."
Nightmare-Eyes expanded inside him. Not an emotion, not even power, but presence.
A surge of dark certainty. A whisper of approval.
The red glow in Jinzo's lenses brightened.
It understood. It accepted.
Behind Julian, Syrus spoke first, breath shaking:
"Julian, you… You don't have to…"
Alexis grabbed his wrist sharply, her own voice low but firm. "He knows what he's doing." But she didn't sound certain. Her pulse was a fast staccato sound to Julian's currently awakened senses.
Bastion swallowed hard. "Julian… this thing is dangerous. You saw what it did. You're still fragile, your mandatory rest just finished."
Julian didn't turn. Didn't blink.
"I did." he said. "Which is why you're all backing up."
A flare of metal heat radiated from Jinzo: impatience. Julian's fingers hovered over his deck. Nightmare-Eyes touched his mind with a thread of thought, like a hand resting gently on his shoulder: Your choice defines the field. But do not fear it. I can hold the shield for the duration of the duel.
Jinzo's wires hissed, body solidifying another inch…
And the entire arena plunged half a level darker.
Julian's friends all stumbled backward instinctively. Even Alexis gasped at the sudden shift in aura: she wasn't used to feeling a spirit's attention tighten like a vise.
Only Julian's feet stayed rooted.
"This ends with me." he said quietly. Jinzo's aura surged forward like a beast leaping.
Julian's Duel Disk snapped open with a clear metallic shing.The second sound was deeper. Heavier.
An overlaying hum in the air, like a shadow unfurling inside his bloodstream. Nightmare-Eyes.
Jinzo turned.
The static in the air thickened: no longer drifting, no longer ambient, but focused, the way a predator focuses on the only threat in the room.
Julian felt the temperature drop a few degrees. And then to the eyes of everyone in the room something else arrived.
Not from the hallway. Not from behind him. From inside.
A low, resonant pressure moved outward from Julian's sternum, like the heartbeat of something that wasn't a heart at all. A pulse of shadowlight rippled from him, sweeping across the floor like a silent shockwave.
And the room reacted.
Alexis gasped. Mindy stumbled backward hard enough to hit the wall. Jasmine swore under her breath. Syrus squeaked something high-pitched and inarticulate. Even Bastion froze, eyes widening to the point of breaking his carefully controlled mask.
Because the shadow behind Julian was not a hallucination.
It stood there. Fully. Completely. Visibly.
Nightmare-Eyes Restrict unfolded from Julian's silhouette like a living eclipse, its form tall and unnatural, its limbs forming smooth, impossible curves, its body shaped like something halfway between a spell, a creature, and a thought given weight.
Where Relinquished had been indistinct and spectral, Nightmare-Eyes was unmistakably present. Real. Dimensional. Wrong in the way a reflection is wrong when the reflection moves before the person does.
Its single ringed eye opened, not glowing, not shining, but observing With a depth that made even Jinzo's malevolence flinch backward. And behind Nightmare-Eyes, clinging to it like frightened children hiding behind a parent's coat: the spirits of the Reject Well.
All of them.
Watapon trembling like a soap bubble about to burst. Petit Dragon's wings pulled tight against its body. Happy Lover floating in frantic circles. Flame Viper coiled protectively around nothing. Even Skull Servant, jittering and half-transparent, stood there gripping the hem of the Ka's presence like a terrified toddler.
For the first time, Alexis, Jasmine, Mindy, Bastion and Syrus saw spirits. All at once. All in the open.
No illusions. No flickers. No half-truths.
Julian saw the dawning realization hit them with different speeds and intensities:
Alexis, sharp and empathic, processed it first: shock, confusion, and immediate assessment of danger from the new supernatural presences. Mindy looked seconds from fainting. Jasmine, hands clenched white, stared like she had accidentally opened a door she was never meant to touch. Bastion reeled, equations collapsing uselessly in his mind once again. Syrus just whispered:
"…J-Julian… what is THAT?"
They all stared at him, waiting for an explanation that could make sense of the impossible. Nightmare-Eyes' gaze stayed locked on Jinzo, unblinking. Jinzo hissed, a sound like wires sparking.
"Julian." Alexis said, voice low, taut, terrified. "Is that… with you?"
He didn't take his eyes off Jinzo.
"…Yes."
"Wh… how? What is…" Syrus stammered.
"Is it dangerous?" Bastion demanded, voice tight with barely restrained panic. "Is it causing this? Did you summon…"
"No and no. I'll explain later." Julian words were brief. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't snap. It was simply said with enough finality that every question in the room died instantly.
Nightmare-Eyes pulsed, forming a half-circle barrier between the group and Jinzo: not physical, but undeniably protective, its presence bending the air the way heat bends distance.
The spirits huddled closer behind Julian, trembling but trusting, drawn to him and Nightmare-Eyes as though pulled by gravity.
Jinzo took one step forward. The lights flickered violently.
Julian moved to meet it.
"Stay behind me." he told the others, just loud enough to cut through the static.
Jinzo lifted its arm, circuitry sparking, its half-corporeal body tightening with anticipation. Nightmare-Eyes leaned forward, its presence stretching behind Julian like a living cloak.
Julian drew his opening hand.
The cards slid into place with a smooth, grounding familiarity. His pulse steadied. He lifted his eyes, voice carrying across the dim-lit room:"Duel me, Jinzo."
The arena's Duel HUD flickered online. The disk registered both duelists. Two LP counters lit up with a number representing a glitching, pulsing counter tied not to a Duel Disk in a game but to their own core spiritual energy.
Alexis whispered, barely audible:
"…He's really doing it."
Syrus was shaking so hard the tremor ran through the floor beneath him. Bastion's breath was shallow, but he forced himself to stand straight, analytical mind racing, trying to find logic in the impossible.
Julian didn't hear them. He heard Jinzo.
Not words… but the intention. The hunger. The challenge. The air between them thickened, humming in a low tune. Nightmare-Eyes whispered again at the back of Julian's mind, its tone ancient and precise: 'Hold the line, Julian. I am with you.'
Jinzo's aura surged, filling its LP counter with a burst of dark light. The duel began.
"Duel!"