Chapter 287: Wait, You Actually Dueled Yugi Muto?
Kaiba Chiaki: [Chronicle run? Coming?]
Amano Rei: [Not coming]
Kaiba Chiaki: [!!!]
Three exclamation marks. Probably the sound of Kaiba Chiaki being told no at this hour of the morning.
Except: last week she had sent this message at six-thirty. What time was it now?
Five-fifteen.
The one who should be complaining was him.
The CEO was getting more aggressive about squeezing her staff. If Kaiba Chiaki's promise of an annual salary payable next month had not been sitting at the back of Amano's mind, his reply to being jolted out of sleep by this kind of message would have carried considerably more weight on the back end.
At minimum: a parting word.
Getting back to sleep after that was not happening.
"May as well take a walk."
Eden's artificial dawn was set by the mainframe Eva at six forty-five in winter, pushed back fifteen minutes from the six-thirty summer schedule. The morning run at Synchro Academy adjusted accordingly to seven. The streets outside were still dark.
An hour until daylight.
Amano walked without direction, the kind of aimless circuit that streets made sense for. Most storefronts were dark, gates down. At this hour, the only destination a person of ordinary habits could reasonably aim for was a twenty-four-hour convenience store.
Might as well pick up something to eat. Eating Sakuya's leftovers every day had started to feel like a situation he had not consciously walked into.
The closer he got to the Gather Together convenience store, the warmer and more welcoming the light in the window became: one of those things that never stopped being reliable.
Gather Together. A better name than the other chain. At least it did not make you immediately think the store had a pest problem.
As he approached the entrance, the figure crouched outside got more familiar with each step.
"Kuroshio-san?"
Sure enough: there was the blonde girl, lighter in hand.
"Ah, my oshi?" She had just struck the wheel.
The flame and Amano's face appeared simultaneously in the dark surface of her eyes, and she startled badly enough that the cigarette fell out of her mouth untouched.
"My oshi, why are you here?"
"Couldn't sleep, so I went for a walk. But more importantly, Kuroshio-san..." Amano posed the question everyone wanted answered. "Didn't you quit?"
"Oh! Ah! You're seeing things! That's a lollipop!"
"A lollipop you need a lighter for. Get me one too."
"..."
The defense collapsed entirely. Kuroshio Nagi's knees met the ground in a single clean motion.
"I have sinned!"
That was a lot to process at five in the morning. Amano had been joking, mostly. Nagi quitting was great; Nagi not quitting was her own business.
"I surrendered to temptation! My oshi, please punish me as harshly as you see fit!"
She was trying to angle for a reward. The delinquent girl had a very particular method.
Amano went into the store, bought two lattes, and handed her one.
"So why did you want to start again. Weren't you committed to being a better streamer, setting a good example for the viewers?"
"Because of the pain of my original family environment..."
"Understood, say no more."
The whole package: delinquent aesthetic, original family trauma, cigarettes as comfort, dramatic self-reproach. Classic combination.
"If the pressure is too much, you don't have to force yourself."
"No, I've made up my mind. Thank goodness my oshi showed up to knock some sense into me!"
Nobody knocked anything into you.
Kuroshio Nagi set her teeth and her feet, pulled the unopened pack from her hoodie pocket, and dropped it into the convenience store's exterior bin.
"I'll do my best! For you, my oshi!"
"You do that."
Amano had the distinct feeling that this early morning coincidence had, in some small way, adjusted the trajectory of someone's near future. He filed it away.
On the subject of trajectories and Millennium Items:
"Kuroshio-san. Do you remember the Millennium Puzzle fragment?"
"!!!" The color changed on her face noticeably. "Of course I remember. Some things you never stop remembering, honestly."
It had been the Millennium Puzzle fragment that started their whole dynamic: the fragment that had triggered the small-scale Dark Game between them, the one that had led to the situation that had permanently bonded Amano to the girl-with-the-delinquent-aesthetic in the way only shared embarrassing incidents could.
He was not bringing it up to dredge through the history.
"Do you remember which Duel Chronicle you got the fragment from? The arc's name, and which card it came with?"
Nagi getting a Millennium Puzzle fragment from a Chronicle with actual narrative content was its own impressive fact. Most people's Chronicles did not come with story attached. Nagi had specifically mentioned, in one of their earlier conversations, that Yugi Muto had personally handed her the fragment.
And the Millennium Puzzle was the one Millennium Item that existed in physical form inside Eden rather than as pure data. Even in fragment form, that difference registered.
Nagi reached toward the card case clipped to the top of her over-the-knee sock, up in the thigh high zone, and pulled out a card.
"I think it was this one."
Amano checked the card.
[Time Wizard]
This card. Really.
This was Joey Wheeler's signature card.
Kuroshio Nagi owned this.
"As for the name of the Chronicle..."
Two fingers pressed to her temples in the international gesture for active recall.
"Something like... 'Proof of Friendship' or 'The Final Battle of the Kingdom' or something like that?"
"Duelist Kingdom?"
"Yes! That's it, Duelist Kingdom!" The naming had clearly been hovering just at the edge. "The duel was on this raised platform, like a fighting stage, and the rules were strange: even high-Level monsters didn't need Tributes to Summon them."
Duelist Kingdom rules. The early period of the story. That early?
Even so: the DM-era Duelist Kingdom arc. You dueled Yugi Muto?
"Did you win?"
"No, it was a complete loss. But the win condition was 'Time Wizard lands on heads,' so I cleared the Chronicle anyway. And then Yugi Muto gave me the Millennium Puzzle fragment after the clear."
Duel Chronicles having coin-flip clear conditions was something Amano had some experience with. His own Chronicle duel against Kaiba Seto had been won not by defeating him but by earning his acknowledgment, and Amano had pushed it there by summoning a meteor and destroying a god card. The system apparently had some flexibility about how "winning" was defined.
"That catches me up. Thanks for humoring me, Kuroshio-san. I should get to school."
"No, I'm the one who should be thanking my oshi for spending time with me this early in the morning. Oh: are you going to see Rin Seiya-senpai today?"
"You already know about that?"
"Are you going right now?" Nagi's expression had shifted several notches: visibly excited in a way that had nothing to do with the previous conversation. "What time? Tell me when you're going!"
"We agreed on noon. Roughly after morning classes end."
"Noon... noon?" She was mumbling to herself, doing some kind of internal calculation. "Noon's a little... but actually maybe that's okay?"
Hard to tell what the math was. The impression Amano got was that Nagi had been unusually eager, multiple times now, to get him in the same room as Rin Seiya. The specific urgency of it was new.
Was she shipping a pairing? The kind of people who organized their social life around fictional pairings sometimes applied the same logic to the people around them.
If so: please just don't argue with the other side about it.
At noon, Amano arrived at the History Film Appreciation Club room as agreed. Getting there required a strategic early exit from the last class of the morning before Sakuya or Kikawayu could track his movements: a tactic that had worked on multiple prior occasions.
Three stand-ups to account for. Standing outside the club room door, Amano registered that he was actually slightly nervous. It was possible Rin Seiya had stored up some material.
She would not actually do anything with a friend in the room. Introducing someone and then immediately going nuclear would be counterproductive even by Rin Seiya's standards.
He pushed the door open.
The person inside the room was lying on the sofa in a posture that said she had been there for some time: feet kicked up, head dropped over the edge of the backrest, chewing something, white hair pooling toward the floor. Given that the morning classes had run until this minute, the sofa position implied a particular attitude toward attendance.
Rin Seiya registered the opening door from her upside-down perspective, spotted Amano's inverted figure, and without changing positions, hooked one foot around the bag of bread on the coffee table and tossed it toward him.
"Eat. You get a treat."
Amano looked at the sealed bread in his hand.
[Red Bean Bread: Extra Sweet. Extra Filling. Maximum Satisfaction.]
He had not eaten a complete, unstarted piece of bread in a while. The daily rotation at the villa had normalized finishing Sakuya's leftovers to the point where "whole bread, untouched" qualified as a mild surprise.
"Actually an intact one. I was expecting something you'd already gotten into."
He was two words into saying it before the full implication of what he was saying caught up with him. Eating Sakuya's leftover bread every day. Had that become the default expectation?
The Nanki'in household's domestic conditioning was genuinely something.
"So my junior has that kind of preference. You like secondhand, Rin's is right here if you want it."
Rin Seiya followed this by demonstrating the current contents of her mouth.
Whatever the Nanki'in family had done with their training methodology, it had not prepared him for this degree of escalation. Rin Seiya had cleared the bar in a single step.
Amano tucked the bread into a pocket to function as lunch and scanned the room. Narrow, comfortable, the usual club-room density of furniture and shelving.
No one else was there yet.
"Where's your friend?"
"Not here yet. You stood her up three times, you don't get to complain about one late arrival."
"Fair."
Amano was more concerned with what "late arrival" looked like in practice and how long it would stay that way before Rin Seiya decided the three missed appointments entitled her to something with his participation.
Then, from behind him:
"Excuse me, you're in the way."
In the way? This was a club room, not a corridor.
He stepped aside before he had fully processed it and turned. Someone was standing at the door frame who had apparently been blocked from entering.
Blue hair, cut at medium-short length. A hoodie with the hands settled into the front pocket. Eyes the color of deep red, looking up and down with a calm that could easily be read as indifference.
"Misaki!" Rin Seiya's whole expression changed, the lazy sprawl converting instantly to something bright. She dropped off the sofa. "You actually showed up!"
Amano's internal recognition was immediate and specific. He knew this character's face, if not from the anime, then from somewhere adjacent to it: official game content, not the animated series. The kind of character who appeared in a spin-off or a game adaptation, with enough detail in the design to leave an impression.
"Right, introductions." Rin Seiya positioned herself between the two of them with the energy of someone who had been waiting for this moment. "This is Amano Rei, my junior. And this is Nanami Misaki, my childhood friend."
"A pleasure." Nanami Misaki inclined her head briefly.
And then she did not look away. The red eyes stayed on Amano for a beat longer than a standard greeting accounted for, and her brow came together by a small degree.
"Amano junior, Amano junior, hello? You're staring."
He was. This was not about appearance, though.
[Nanami Misaki] [Affection: 51]
A new character entry had opened in the system, which was itself notable. But that was not the main event.
Before today, Amano's internal guess about who Rin Seiya's mystery friend might be had been a half-joke: Rin Seiya was connected to Z-one, Z-one's known associates in the 5D's timeline included the trio of people closest to him, so the friend might be one of them. He had said "Paradox or Antinomy" to himself and not thought it would actually land.
It had landed on something adjacent.
The character Nanami Misaki appeared in the official Yu-Gi-Oh! game content rather than the anime proper, but she had a specific canonical identity in that context: a female counterpart to Antinomy, sometimes described as Bruno's sister. In duels she underwent the same transformation as Bruno, shifting into a future-mode combat state. Her deck was the same class as his: Accel Synchro, technology-attribute.
After Yuma Tsukumo showing up in Eden as an actual person, and now this: the system's reach was apparently not limited to the animated series.
Without thinking, Amano said: "Nanami Misaki. Bruno..."
Rin Seiya grabbed his arm and went loud immediately. "Amano! How did you know?! Is it the hair color? It does look like his, doesn't it? That's exactly what I thought! Misaki is my Bruno! Even the deck matches: same Accel Synchro tech-type as the anime!"
So Rin Seiya had made the same observation and had simply been recruiting friends who matched the character profiles from the show. That explained the initial approach to Amano: she had seen him Synchro Summon Red Dragon Archfiend and immediately associated it with the corresponding character from the story she loved.
Rin Seiya had apparently been doing this her whole life: reading the people around her through the lens of the cast she grew up watching, and then pursuing the ones who fit.
Unlike Rin Seiya's very loud reaction, Nanami Misaki was quiet. Not shy-quiet. A specific kind of reserved that was closer to neutral assessment than warmth.
Something about the sound of that from Sakuya and from Misaki in the same day.
"Amano junior." The red eyes were level and direct. "Have we met before?"
"I don't believe so. First time, I think, Nanami-senpai."
"Misaki, I need a word alone with Amano junior. Could you step out for a moment?"
Rin Seiya's eyes went to her own chest: pointing at herself with one finger. "Step out? Me? You want me to leave you two alone in my room?"
"You know what you are right now? Mature."
She did not wait for a response. Nanami Misaki took hold of Rin Seiya by the arm, steered her out of the club room, and locked the door from the inside.
The door immediately began absorbing sound in the specific way that a locked door being pounded on from outside sounds.
"Misaki! Misaki, open up! You can't do this to me!"
"Misaki, we are best friends! You can't betray me like this!"
"Please don't do anything to my junior!!"
The two inside the room regarded the door, then each other.
"I know." Nanami Misaki's expression moved fractionally. "She's been like that since we were small. All noise, no follow-through. She won't actually do anything unreasonable."
"You seem to understand her very thoroughly, Nanami-senpai."
"Though 'basically' not unreasonable is doing some work." Something shifted in the red eyes: the temperature dropped a degree or two, precisely. "Have you crossed a line with Rin Seiya, Amano junior?"
She was asking what she was asking, in exactly the first minute of an introduction, with Rin Seiya's shouts still audible through the door.
Amano weighed his loyalty to Rin Seiya's reputation against the likelihood of lying successfully to someone with this energy, and arrived at a position.
"If I said yes, what happens?"
"I would tell Z-one."
Bringing Z-one into this. Threatening to report to the father who did not know he was a father, whose daughter did not know who her father was.
All right. You win this one.
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