Death, as it turned out, was significantly less dramatic than Marcus Chen had always imagined it would be.
There was no tunnel of light, no chorus of angels, no life flashing before his eyes in some sort of cosmic highlight reel. There wasn't even the common decency of a dramatic final moment—no saving a child from a runaway bus, no heroic last stand against impossible odds, no tearful goodbyes surrounded by loved ones.
No, Marcus Chen, age twenty-seven, died because he choked on a piece of celery while watching a documentary about penguins.
Celery. Of all the vegetables in the entire produce section, celery was the one that did him in. Not even something with dignity like a steak or a chicken bone. Celery. The vegetable that was essentially crunchy water pretending to have nutritional value. The universe, it seemed, had a sense of humor, and that humor was pointed directly at Marcus Chen like a cosmic spotlight of embarrassment.
The last thing Marcus remembered before everything went dark was the narrator's soothing voice explaining how emperor penguins huddled together for warmth, and then suddenly he couldn't breathe, and then he was falling off his secondhand couch, and then the narrator was saying something about how the males kept the eggs warm on their feet, and then there was nothing.
Just... nothing.
For what felt like either an eternity or approximately three and a half seconds—time became somewhat meaningless when you were dead, Marcus would later reflect—there was simply an absence of everything. No sight, no sound, no sensation. Just Marcus Chen, or whatever remained of him, floating in a void of complete and utter nothingness.
And then, just as suddenly as the nothing had begun, it ended.
Marcus became aware of several things all at once, and none of them made any particular sense.
First, he became aware that he was lying on something hard. Concrete, maybe, or possibly asphalt. Whatever it was, it was extremely uncomfortable and doing absolutely nothing to support the curve of his spine. His chiropractor—if he still had a chiropractor, if he still had a spine, if he still existed in any meaningful capacity—would have been horrified.
Second, he became aware that someone was yelling. The yelling was distant at first, like hearing your neighbor's television through a thin apartment wall, but it was getting progressively louder and more insistent. The words were muddled and strange, as though they were being spoken through a filter of cotton balls and mild confusion.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, he became aware that he was not dead.
Or, at the very least, he was significantly less dead than he had been a moment ago.
This realization struck Marcus with all the force of a freight train made entirely of confusion and existential crisis. His eyes, which he had not been aware he still possessed, snapped open with the kind of sudden urgency usually reserved for people who had just remembered they left the stove on or had a presentation due in ten minutes.
Above him stretched a sky that was blue in a way that seemed almost aggressive about it. This was not the soft, muted blue of a normal sky, the kind of blue that had been worn down by years of pollution and cloud cover and the general malaise of modern existence. No, this was a blue that had looked at other blues and decided they weren't trying hard enough. This was a blue that meant business.
Marcus blinked several times, his brain desperately trying to process the information his eyes were sending it and failing spectacularly.
"What," he said, or at least tried to say. What actually came out was more of a wheezing croak, like a frog that had been left out in the sun too long and had developed opinions about it.
The yelling, Marcus now noticed, had gotten significantly closer. Close enough, in fact, that he could finally make out what was being said.
"—out of the way, you absolute moron! Do you have any idea who I am? I am the regional champion of the Southern Domino City Preliminary Semi-Finals, and I will not be delayed by some unconscious vagrant lying in the middle of the— wait, are you awake now? Oh good, that saves me the trouble of kicking you. Now MOVE!"
Marcus turned his head—an action that took considerably more effort than it should have and sent a spike of pain shooting through his neck that suggested his body was not entirely pleased with recent developments—to look at the source of this charming monologue.
Standing above him, silhouetted against that aggressively blue sky, was a teenager.
This, in and of itself, was not particularly unusual. Teenagers were, after all, a relatively common occurrence in most populated areas. They roamed in packs, communicated primarily through sighs and eye rolls, and generally made life more complicated for everyone around them. Marcus had been a teenager once, and he distinctly remembered being absolutely insufferable about it.
What made this particular teenager notable was everything else about him.
For starters, his hair. Oh, his hair. Marcus had seen some impressive hairstyles in his twenty-seven years of existence—he had lived through several fashion decades, after all, and had once attended a concert where the lead singer's mohawk had actually caught fire and he'd just kept singing—but nothing, nothing in his entire life, had prepared him for this.
The teenager's hair appeared to be defying several laws of physics simultaneously. It jutted outward in multiple directions, forming shapes that should not have been possible without significant amounts of industrial-strength hair gel and possibly some sort of internal scaffolding. It was blonde at the tips, darkening to a deep brown at the roots, with several streaks of what appeared to be electric purple thrown in for good measure. The overall effect was less "hairstyle" and more "explosion at a paint factory that somehow achieved sentience."
The hair was attached to a face that wore an expression of supreme irritation, which was attached to a body that was wearing what appeared to be a school uniform crossed with something from a cyberpunk fashion magazine. The jacket was too long, the pants were too tight, and there were buckles in places where buckles had no business being. Around his arm was strapped a sleek duel disk that gleamed in the aggressive sunlight, its surface polished to a mirror shine that probably cost more than Marcus's entire previous apartment.
"Are you deaf as well as homeless?" the teenager demanded, his voice cracking slightly on the word 'homeless' in a way that suggested puberty was still fighting a valiant rearguard action. "I said MOVE! I have a tournament to get to, and you're lying in the middle of the sidewalk like some kind of... of... sidewalk-lying person!"
Marcus, whose brain was still desperately trying to catch up with the situation at hand, opened his mouth to respond.
And then closed it.
Because something very, very important had just occurred to him.
He had no idea who he was.
Not in the philosophical sense—he knew he was Marcus Chen, age twenty-seven, death by celery, penguin documentary enthusiast. He knew all of that. What he didn't know was who he was supposed to be right now, in this moment, in this body that was clearly not his own, in this world that was clearly not Earth, talking to this teenager who was clearly not operating under the same laws of physics as everyone else.
If he was in some kind of... situation—reincarnation, isekai, fever dream brought on by oxygen deprivation, whatever this was—then blurting out "I just died and woke up here" seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. At best, he'd be labeled as insane. At worst... well, he didn't know what the worst was, but he was fairly certain he didn't want to find out.
So instead of saying anything revealing, Marcus did what any sensible person would do when confronted with an inexplicable situation and an angry teenager with physics-defying hair.
"Sorry," he croaked, his voice still carrying that lovely frog-in-distress quality. "I... fell. Must have... passed out. Low blood sugar. You know how it is."
The teenager did not, in fact, seem to know how it was. His expression suggested that he had never experienced low blood sugar in his entire life and considered it a personal failing of those who did.
"I don't care WHY you're lying here," the teenager snapped. "I care that you're IN MY WAY. Move, or I'll move you myself, and you won't like how I do it!"
Marcus, deciding that discretion was the better part of not getting kicked by an angry teenager, slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position.
His body protested this action with a symphony of pops and creaks that suggested it had been lying on the concrete for considerably longer than was advisable. Everything hurt. His muscles ached, his joints complained, and his stomach was making noises that suggested it had given up on the concept of food and was now running purely on spite and desperation.
As he moved, something shifted against his chest.
Marcus looked down.
There, hanging from a frayed piece of string around his neck, was... something. It looked like a duel disk, if you squinted and were very generous with your definition of "duel disk." Where the teenager's device was sleek chrome and polished technology, this was... well, it was trying its best. The casing was cracked in several places, held together with what appeared to be electrical tape and optimism. The screen flickered intermittently, displaying nothing but static. One of the card zones had a piece of cardboard taped over it, suggesting that whatever mechanism was supposed to be there had long since given up on existence.
"What," the teenager said, his voice taking on a new note of horror, "is THAT?"
Marcus looked at the device. The device, somehow, looked back at him. He wasn't sure how a device held together by tape and prayers could look at anything, but this one was definitely managing it.
"My... duel disk?" Marcus said, the words coming out more as a question than a statement.
"That's not a duel disk," the teenager said, his voice cracking again. "That's a tragedy. That's what happens when technology gives up on life. That's—" He stopped, apparently unable to find words sufficient to describe the crime against engineering currently hanging around Marcus's neck. "Whatever. I don't have time for this. Just stay out of my way!"
And with that, he turned and sprinted down the street, his physics-defying hair bouncing with every step, his too-long jacket flapping behind him like a cape made of poor fashion choices.
Marcus watched him go, then slowly, carefully, took stock of his situation.
He was sitting on a sidewalk.
The sidewalk was in a city.
The city was... wrong.
Marcus looked around, really looked, for the first time since he had regained consciousness.
The street he was sitting in the middle of was clean—too clean, really, for any street that existed in the real world. The buildings lining either side of it were a bizarre mishmash of architectural styles, as though someone had taken every type of building that had ever existed and thrown them into a blender set to "aesthetically pleasing chaos." A traditional Japanese shop sat next to a gleaming skyscraper that sat next to what appeared to be a medieval castle that sat next to a structure made entirely of what looked like crystallized light.
People walked past on the sidewalks, and every single one of them had hair that defied physics in some way or another. Spikes and swirls and gravity-defying peaks in every color of the rainbow and several colors that Marcus was fairly certain didn't exist in the normal spectrum. Many of them carried duel disks of varying quality and design. Some had strange glowing cards floating around their heads. Others were followed by what appeared to be tiny holographic monsters engaged in various activities.
A small creature that looked like a brown furball with eyes and tiny limbs—a Kuriboh, some distant part of Marcus's brain supplied—floated past, making a cheerful "kuri kuri" sound.
A massive holographic Blue-Eyes White Dragon soared overhead, leaving trails of light in its wake, apparently just... existing, not attached to any duel, just flying around because it could.
Two children were having what appeared to be a heated argument on the corner, and between them floated the ghostly image of Dark Magician, frozen mid-pose as it waited for commands.
Marcus's brain, which had been doing its best to process all of this information in an orderly fashion, finally gave up and sent him a simple message:
YOU ARE IN YU-GI-OH.
"Oh," Marcus said, very quietly. "Oh no."
This was bad.
This was very, very bad.
Marcus had watched Yu-Gi-Oh. Not religiously, not obsessively, but enough. His college roommate had been a fan, and Marcus had absorbed enough episodes through osmosis to understand the basic premise. Card games. Ancient Egyptian artifacts. The fate of the world being decided by trading cards. Hair that defied all known laws of physics. Teenagers with attitude problems and access to god cards.
He knew enough to know that being in this world with no resources, no connections, and a duel disk held together by tape was approximately the worst possible situation he could be in.
This was a world where card games determined everything. Your social status. Your worth as a human being. Your literal soul, in some cases, if the more dramatic arcs were to be believed. And he was apparently at the very bottom of the hierarchy, judging by his current state.
Marcus looked down at his body—really looked—and felt his heart sink even further.
He was thin. Not "I've been dieting" thin or "I run marathons" thin, but "I haven't eaten properly in a very long time" thin. His clothes were several sizes too large and looked like they had been rescued from a dumpster that had lost a fight with a lawnmower. His shoes had holes in places where shoes really shouldn't have holes.
And his hands.
His hands were not his hands.
They were smaller, younger, with long fingers that looked like they belonged to someone who had never done manual labor in their life. No calluses, no scars, no evidence of the twenty-seven years Marcus had spent living in his original body.
He was in someone else's body.
Someone young.
Someone poor.
Someone who, judging by the general state of things, had been having a very bad time before Marcus showed up.
"Okay," Marcus muttered to himself, keeping his voice low so the passing pedestrians wouldn't hear him talking to himself. "Okay. Stay calm. Assess the situation. Don't panic. Don't—"
Something in his chest pocket moved.
Marcus froze.
Slowly, very slowly, he reached into the pocket and pulled out a deck of cards.
The cards were... well, they were cards. They had the approximate shape and size of Duel Monsters cards. But where most cards he had seen were pristine and well-maintained, these were battered and worn. The edges were frayed, the surfaces scratched, and several of them had clearly been bent and unbent multiple times.
He looked at the first card.
Watapon.
A tiny, pink, fluffy creature with big eyes stared back at him from the card art. Level 1. Light attribute. Fairy type. 200 ATK, 300 DEF. Effect: When this card is added from the Deck to your hand by a card effect, you can Special Summon this card.
Cute. Useless in combat, but cute.
He flipped to the next card.
Mokey Mokey.
A small, rectangular fairy thing with a perpetually neutral expression. Level 1. Light attribute. Fairy type. 300 ATK, 100 DEF. Effect: None to speak of. Just... Mokey Mokey. Existing. Being rectangle.
Marcus was beginning to see a pattern.
He continued flipping.
Skull Servant. Level 1, Dark, Zombie. 300 ATK, 200 DEF. A basic skeleton in a purple robe. No effect. Just a skeleton who was presumably very good at serving skulls.
Jerry Beans Man. Level 3, Earth, Plant. 1750 ATK, 0 DEF. A bean wearing armor with a sword. Slightly more respectable attack points, but zero defense meant it would crumble the moment anyone looked at it funny.
Ojama Yellow. Level 2, Light, Beast. 0 ATK, 1000 DEF. A small, yellow... creature. With a speedo. And a very unsettling expression. Marcus decided not to think too hard about Ojama Yellow.
Baby Dragon. Level 3, Wind, Dragon. 1200 ATK, 700 DEF. An actual dragon, finally, even if it was a baby one with stats that would make most serious duelists laugh.
Petit Dragon. Level 2, Wind, Dragon. 600 ATK, 700 DEF. An even smaller dragon. Because apparently his deck believed in a quantity-over-quality approach to dragons.
Kuriboh. Level 1, Dark, Fiend. 300 ATK, 200 DEF. When your opponent's monster attacks, you can discard this card to make the battle damage 0. Actually useful! Marcus felt a small spark of hope.
That spark died immediately when he saw the next card.
Larvae Moth. Level 2, Earth, Insect. 500 ATK, 400 DEF. A cocoon. Just a cocoon. Waiting to become something better. Theoretically.
Thousand-Eyes Idol. Level 1, Dark, Spellcaster. 0 ATK, 0 DEF. A small creature covered in eyes. Required for summoning Thousand-Eyes Restrict, which was an extremely powerful fusion monster. Did Marcus have Thousand-Eyes Restrict? He flipped through more cards.
He did not have Thousand-Eyes Restrict.
He had Thousand-Eyes Idol, which was useless without its fusion counterpart, just sitting in his deck like a monument to unfulfilled potential.
Marcus continued his archaeological excavation of terrible cards.
Penguin Soldier. Level 2, Water, Aqua. 750 ATK, 500 DEF. Flip effect that could return two monsters to the hand. Actually decent!
Skelengel. Level 2, Light, Fairy. 900 ATK, 400 DEF. Flip effect to draw a card. Card advantage was always good.
Man-Eater Bug. Level 2, Earth, Insect. 450 ATK, 600 DEF. Flip effect to destroy one monster. A classic. Reliable.
Morphing Jar. Level 2, Earth, Rock. 700 ATK, 600 DEF. Flip effect where both players discard their hands and draw five cards. Chaotic, but potentially useful.
Magician of Faith. Level 1, Light, Spellcaster. 300 ATK, 400 DEF. Flip effect to add a spell from the graveyard to the hand. Excellent for recycling resources.
Hane-Hane. Level 2, Earth, Beast. 450 ATK, 500 DEF. Flip effect to return one monster to the hand. Useful, if less impressive than Penguin Soldier.
The pattern was becoming clear. His monster lineup was composed almost entirely of weak, low-level creatures, with a handful of flip-effect monsters that could potentially cause problems for opponents if they didn't immediately destroy them. It was a deck that screamed "I found these in a bargain bin and hoped for the best."
Marcus moved on to the spell cards.
Dark Hole. Destroy all monsters on the field. A classic. Powerful. The first genuinely good card he'd found.
Raigeki. Destroy all monsters your opponent controls. Even better. Two board wipes in one deck was actually respectable.
Monster Reborn. Special Summon one monster from either graveyard. Another staple. Things were looking up.
Pot of Greed. Draw two cards. The single most banned card in competitive play for being too good. How did he have this?
Polymerization. Fusion Summon using monsters from hand or field. Standard fusion enabling. But did he have any fusion monsters worth summoning?
Book of Moon. Flip one face-up monster face-down. Versatile, useful, good for triggering his flip effects or disrupting opponents.
Swords of Revealing Light. Opponent can't attack for three turns. Stalling. His deck seemed to like stalling.
Mystical Space Typhoon. Destroy one spell or trap. Backrow removal, always valuable.
Scapegoat. Special Summon four Sheep Tokens that can't be tributed. More stalling. More tiny, useless creatures. A theme was emerging.
Creature Swap. Exchange control of monsters with your opponent. Give them one of his terrible monsters, take something good. Actually synergized with his awful creature lineup.
Then the trap cards.
Mirror Force. When opponent attacks, destroy all their attack position monsters. Devastating if it resolved.
Magic Cylinder. Negate an attack and deal damage equal to the attacking monster's ATK. Another classic.
Trap Hole. Destroy a summoned monster with 1000+ ATK. Conditional, but useful.
Sakuretsu Armor. Destroy an attacking monster. Simple, effective.
Gravity Bind. Monsters Level 4 or higher can't attack. Excellent for a deck full of Level 1-3 weaklings.
Waboku. Take no damage and monsters can't be destroyed by battle this turn. More survival.
Call of the Haunted. Revive a monster from the graveyard. Versatile recursion.
And finally, the Extra Deck. The fusion monsters. The theoretical ace cards.
Flame Swordsman. Level 5, Fire, Warrior. 1800 ATK, 1600 DEF. Fusion of Flame Manipulator and Masaki the Legendary Swordsman. Did Marcus have either of those cards? He checked. He did not.
Fusionist. Level 3, Earth, Beast. 900 ATK, 700 DEF. Fusion of Petit Angel and Mystical Sheep #2. Again, he had neither component.
Dragoness the Wicked Knight. Level 3, Wind, Warrior. 1200 ATK, 900 DEF. Fusion of Armaill and One-Eyed Shield Dragon. Still missing components.
Darkfire Dragon. Level 4, Dark, Dragon. 1500 ATK, 1250 DEF. Fusion of Firegrass and Petit Dragon. He had Petit Dragon! That was half of a fusion! He just needed... Firegrass. Which he did not have.
Thousand Dragon. Level 7, Wind, Dragon. 2400 ATK, 2000 DEF. Fusion of Baby Dragon and Time Wizard. He had Baby Dragon! Now he just needed Time Wizard. Did he have Time Wizard?
He did not have Time Wizard.
Charubin the Fire Knight. Level 3, Fire, Pyro. 1100 ATK, 800 DEF. Required monsters he didn't have.
Flower Wolf. Level 5, Earth, Beast. 1800 ATK, 1400 DEF. Required monsters he didn't have.
Marine Beast. Level 5, Water, Fish. 1650 ATK, 1550 DEF. Required monsters he didn't have.
Marcus stared at his Extra Deck.
Eight fusion monsters.
Zero possible fusions.
His deck had given him cards that referenced other cards he didn't own, like someone handing you a phone charger for a phone that doesn't exist. It was almost impressive in its uselessness.
"This is fine," Marcus said, in the tone of someone for whom nothing was fine. "This is completely fine. I have a deck of forty cards, half of which are weak monsters, a quarter of which are flip effects that require me to not die long enough to use them, and an Extra Deck of fusions I cannot summon. This is a perfectly reasonable situation to be in."
He took a deep breath.
Then another one.
The aggressive blue sky continued to be aggressively blue above him.
"Right," Marcus said to himself, shuffling the cards back together and returning them to his pocket. "First things first. Figure out where I am. Figure out who I am—who I'm supposed to be, that is. Find food. Find shelter. Try not to die. Again. The dying thing is something I'd like to avoid repeating."
He pushed himself to his feet.
His legs were shaky. His body was weak. His stomach was protesting the lack of food with increasing urgency. Everything about this situation was terrible.
But he was alive.
That counted for something.
Marcus started walking, picking a direction at random and hoping it would lead somewhere useful. The city stretched out around him in all its impossible glory—too clean streets, too colorful buildings, too much hair gel per capita. Holographic monsters flitted about in the distance. Duelists of all ages walked past, their duel disks gleaming, their decks presumably full of cards that actually worked together.
As he walked, Marcus tried to piece together what he knew about this world.
Yu-Gi-Oh. Card games as the ultimate form of conflict resolution. Ancient Egyptian magic mixed with holographic technology. Multiple generations of protagonists with gravity-defying hair and the ability to believe in the Heart of the Cards hard enough to alter probability.
But which Yu-Gi-Oh was this?
The original? GX? 5D's? ZEXAL? ARC-V? VRAINS? Each series had its own era, its own mechanics, its own level of absurdity.
He looked around for clues.
No D-Wheels—the motorcycle duel disks from 5D's. That was something.
No overlay networks or XYZ monsters floating around visibly. Probably not ZEXAL.
No indication of different dimensions or Pendulum summoning. Probably not ARC-V.
No virtual reality interfaces or Link monsters. Probably not VRAINS.
But he had seen a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, which was associated with the original series, and the teenager who had yelled at him had mentioned "Domino City," which was also original series.
So probably original Yu-Gi-Oh. Maybe GX era, given the school uniforms he'd seen on some of the passersby.
Actually, now that he was paying attention, he was seeing a lot of different uniforms. Some looked like the blue jackets of Duel Academy from GX. Others looked like the more futuristic outfits he'd glimpsed in clips from 5D's. And was that a guy in the corner wearing what looked like New Domino City Security gear?
Marcus's brain, already overloaded, threw up its metaphorical hands.
"This is a combination," he muttered. "All of them. All at once. Every Yu-Gi-Oh era existing simultaneously. Because of course it is. Why would it be simple? Why would any aspect of this situation make sense?"
A Kuriboh floated past his ear, made its characteristic "kuri" sound, and continued on its way.
Marcus watched it go.
"I need food," he said to himself. "Food first. Existential crisis later. Priorities."
He checked his pockets.
In his left pocket, he found a handful of coins that added up to approximately twenty yen.
In his right pocket, he found a crumpled piece of paper with an address written on it in handwriting that was almost, but not quite, entirely illegible.
In his back pocket, he found a photograph.
Marcus pulled out the photograph and looked at it.
It showed a young man—probably around fifteen or sixteen—standing in front of a small, run-down building that might have been a shop of some kind. The young man had messy brown hair that was the most normal hair Marcus had seen since arriving in this world, brown eyes that looked tired even in the photograph, and a smile that didn't quite reach those tired eyes.
Behind the young man, partially visible through a window, was an older man. Maybe his father? The resemblance was there, in the shape of the face and the color of the hair.
The back of the photograph had writing on it: "Takeda Games - Grand Reopening - Better Times Ahead"
Marcus looked at the photograph for a long moment.
Then he looked at his hands.
Then he looked at the photograph again.
The young man in the photograph had the same hands. The same thin fingers. The same slightly too-long nails.
"Takeda," Marcus said softly, testing the name. "My name is Takeda. Or this body's name is Takeda. I am Takeda, who has a card shop, and a father, and apparently had better times ahead before something went very wrong."
He tucked the photograph back into his pocket.
He had an identity now. A starting point. A name to respond to and a place that might have answers.
All he had to do was find the address on the crumpled paper and hope that whoever was there—if anyone was there—could help him understand what had happened to the original Takeda and how Marcus had ended up in his body.
And he had to do all of that without anyone figuring out that he wasn't really Takeda.
Because explaining "I'm actually a twenty-seven-year-old from another dimension who choked on celery and woke up here" seemed like the kind of thing that would earn him a one-way ticket to whatever passed for a psychiatric facility in anime card game world.
"One step at a time," Marcus—no, Takeda, he needed to think of himself as Takeda now—told himself. "Find the address. Find food. Find answers. Don't get challenged to any card games. Absolutely do not get challenged to any card games, because my deck is terrible and I will lose immediately and probably have my soul stolen or something equally dramatic."
He started walking again, more purposefully this time.
The city sprawled around him, vast and confusing and full of people who all seemed to know exactly where they were going and what they were doing. Duelists passed him on either side, their decks at the ready, their hair defying physics, their lives presumably full of dramatic battles and friendship speeches and last-minute comebacks.
Takeda—Marcus—whoever he was—kept his head down and kept moving.
He was nobody.
He had nothing.
His deck was garbage, his body was starving, his duel disk was held together by tape and prayers, and he had no idea what he was doing or how he was going to survive in a world where card game prowess apparently determined your entire social standing.
But he was alive.
And somewhere, in the very back of his mind, in a place he wasn't entirely aware of yet, something was stirring.
It wasn't magic, exactly.
It wasn't destiny, or fate, or the Heart of the Cards, or any of the other mystical forces that seemed to drive this world.
It was something simpler.
Something quieter.
Something that had been with Marcus Chen his entire life, though he'd never noticed it, never recognized it for what it was.
Some might call it luck.
Others might call it fortune, or chance, or serendipity.
Marcus—Takeda—would have called it "why do weird things always happen to me and why do they usually work out okay in the end."
But whatever it was, it was waking up.
It was stretching.
It was looking at the situation—the terrible deck, the broken duel disk, the starving body, the confused soul—and it was doing the metaphysical equivalent of cracking its knuckles.
Because things were about to get very interesting.
Not that Takeda knew this yet.
All he knew was that he was hungry, confused, and walking toward an address that might or might not exist anymore.
But as he turned a corner and found himself face-to-face with a billboard advertising the upcoming "Domino City Unified Tournament - All Eras Welcome - Grand Prize: 10 Million Yen and a Complete Set of Rare Cards," something in his chest stirred.
Something that might have been hope.
Or might have been hunger.
Or might have been supernatural luck preparing to make his life very, very complicated in ways he couldn't possibly anticipate.
He didn't know.
He was just trying to find food.
But the universe—this universe, the anime universe, the Yu-Gi-Oh universe that had somehow absorbed every other Yu-Gi-Oh universe and was now operating on dream logic and rule of cool—had other plans.
And Marcus Chen, now Takeda, formerly dead, currently confused, soon to be very surprised, walked toward his destiny.
One step at a time.
One terrible card at a time.
One moment of impossible luck at a time.
The Kuriboh that had floated past him earlier circled back and settled on his shoulder.
Takeda didn't notice.
He was too busy trying to read the crumpled address.
The Kuriboh made a small, satisfied sound.
It had been waiting for him.
They had all been waiting for him.
But that was a revelation for another time.
For now, there was food to find.
And a life to figure out.
And a deck to somehow, against all odds, make work.
No pressure.
The address on the crumpled paper led Takeda through increasingly narrow streets, away from the main thoroughfares where duelists strutted and holographic monsters flew, into a part of the city that looked significantly less maintained than the areas he'd woken up in.
Here, the buildings were older. Smaller. Some were clearly abandoned, their windows boarded up and their walls covered in faded posters advertising tournaments from years past. Others were still occupied but barely—lights flickering in dusty windows, signs hanging crookedly above doors that probably hadn't been properly opened in months.
It was, Takeda reflected, exactly the sort of neighborhood you'd expect to find someone with a deck as bad as his.
The address itself turned out to be a small building squeezed between a boarded-up convenience store and what appeared to be an abandoned arcade. The sign above the door read "Takeda Games" in letters that had once been painted cheerfully but were now faded almost to illegibility.
This was the same building from the photograph. The card shop. His card shop, apparently. Or the original Takeda's card shop, which was now his by virtue of body theft or soul replacement or whatever cosmic mechanism had landed him here.
The door was locked.
Takeda jiggled the handle, but it didn't budge.
He checked his pockets again, hoping to find a key he had somehow missed before.
No key.
He tried the handle again.
Still locked.
He was about to start looking for another way in—a back door, maybe, or a window that wasn't properly secured—when he noticed something.
The Kuriboh was still on his shoulder.
It had been there since it had landed on him, what, thirty minutes ago? An hour? He'd been so focused on finding the address that he hadn't really registered its presence.
But now he was looking at it.
And it was looking at him.
"Kuri," it said, in a tone that might have been encouraging.
Takeda stared at it.
"You're a Kuriboh," he said.
"Kuri," it agreed.
"You're a real Kuriboh. A solid, physical, apparently sentient Kuriboh that has been sitting on my shoulder for the past however long without me noticing."
"Kuri kuri."
"Is that... normal? In this world? Monsters just... hanging around? Following people?"
The Kuriboh tilted its entire body—it didn't really have a head distinct from its body, so the whole fluffy mass tilted—in what might have been a shrug.
"Kuri."
Takeda decided that this was yet another thing he was going to have to process later, when he had the mental energy and hopefully some food in his stomach.
"Right," he said. "Okay. You're a Kuriboh. You're following me for reasons I don't understand. That's fine. Everything is fine. Can you, by any chance, open this door?"
The Kuriboh looked at the door.
Then it looked at Takeda.
Then it made a sound that was unmistakably a sigh.
Then it floated off his shoulder, drifted toward the door, and phased directly through it.
There was a moment of silence.
Then, from inside the building, there was a clicking sound.
The door swung open.
The Kuriboh floated back out, looking extremely pleased with itself.
"Kuri!"
Takeda stared at the open doorway, then at the Kuriboh, then at the doorway again.
"You just... you just phased through solid matter. And unlocked the door from the inside."
"Kuri."
"That's not... I mean, that's definitely not something normal Kuribohs can do. In the card game. That's not an effect listed on any Kuriboh card I've ever seen."
The Kuriboh made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"Kuri kuri kuri!"
"I don't speak Kuriboh," Takeda said helplessly. "I have no idea what you're saying. Are you trying to tell me something important? Is this some kind of prophecy situation? Am I the chosen one? Because I really don't think I'm the chosen one. I died choking on celery. That's not a chosen one origin story. That's barely even a footnote origin story."
The Kuriboh floated back to his shoulder, settled in comfortably, and made a contented sound.
It was, apparently, done explaining things.
Takeda gave up trying to understand and stepped through the doorway instead.
The interior of Takeda Games was exactly what he would have expected from the exterior. Dark, dusty, and filled with the particular sadness of a business that had once been loved but had been left to decay.
Display cases lined the walls, their glass surfaces clouded with grime. Inside them, he could see hints of what they had once contained—booster packs, rare cards in protective sleeves, figurines of famous monsters, starter decks for beginners. Most of it was gone now, leaving only empty spaces and the occasional forgotten item.
A counter dominated one side of the room, and behind it was a door that presumably led to a back area. Living quarters, maybe, or storage.
The whole place smelled like dust and old cardboard and something else, something that Takeda couldn't quite identify but that made his chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.
Memory, maybe.
Not his memory—he had no memories of this place, no connection to it beyond the photograph in his pocket and the name on the door.
But the body remembered.
The original Takeda had spent time here. Had grown up here, probably. Had stood behind that counter and helped customers and dreamed of something better while the shop slowly died around him.
Takeda—Marcus—felt suddenly and profoundly guilty.
He was an intruder. A thief. He had stolen this body, this life, this history that wasn't his. Whatever had happened to the original Takeda, whatever cosmic transaction had resulted in Marcus waking up in his place, it hadn't been Marcus's choice.
But it also wasn't something he could undo.
So he pushed the guilt down and started exploring.
The back room was, as he'd suspected, a combination living space and storage area. A small bed in one corner, its sheets rumpled and unwashed. A tiny kitchen area with a hotplate and a mini-fridge that was somehow still running despite the general air of abandonment. A bathroom that he decided not to examine too closely. And boxes—dozens of boxes, stacked haphazardly against every wall, filled with what appeared to be old merchandise.
Takeda opened the mini-fridge.
Inside, he found: one half-empty bottle of soy sauce, a container of something that might have once been rice but had evolved into a new life form, and three energy drinks with expiration dates from six months ago.
He grabbed an energy drink, inspected it carefully, decided that "six months expired" was probably survivable, and cracked it open.
It tasted like regret and artificial sweeteners.
He drank it anyway.
His stomach, which had been threatening to file a formal complaint with whatever passed for labor unions in the reincarnation business, settled slightly.
Now he could think.
Takeda sat down on the edge of the bed—which creaked alarmingly but held his weight—and started going through his deck again.
His deck.
The terrible, awful, no-good, very-bad deck that was apparently his only asset in a world that ran on card games.
He spread the cards out on the bed beside him and looked at them.
Really looked at them.
Watapon. Mokey Mokey. Skull Servant. Jerry Beans Man. Ojama Yellow. Baby Dragon. Petit Dragon. Kuriboh. Larvae Moth. Thousand-Eyes Idol.
On his shoulder, the physical Kuriboh made a small noise.
Takeda looked at it.
Looked at the Kuriboh card on the bed.
Looked at the physical Kuriboh again.
"You're the same Kuriboh," he said slowly. "You're my Kuriboh. From my deck. You're... you're somehow physically real."
"Kuri!"
Takeda picked up the Kuriboh card and held it up next to the physical Kuriboh.
They were identical. Same brown fur, same green hands, same eyes, same everything.
"How is this possible?"
The Kuriboh didn't answer in words—couldn't answer in words, presumably—but it floated off his shoulder and landed gently on the Kuriboh card.
And then something happened.
The card began to glow.
Not brightly, not dramatically, but with a soft, warm light that made Takeda think of candlelight in a dark room.
And in that light, he heard something.
A voice.
Not the Kuriboh's voice—the Kuriboh couldn't speak human language. But something else. Something deeper. Something that came from the card itself.
We are here, the voice said. It was not one voice but many, layered over each other, speaking in unison. We have always been here. We are your deck. We are your monsters. We are yours, and you are ours.
Takeda nearly dropped the card.
"What the hell—"
Do not be afraid, the voices said. We have waited a long time for someone like you. Someone who needed us as much as we needed them.
"I don't—I don't understand. Cards don't talk. Monsters aren't real. This isn't—"
This is not your world, the voices agreed. This world has different rules. Different possibilities. Here, belief has power. Here, the connection between duelist and deck is more than metaphor. We are alive, Takeda. We have always been alive. And we want to help you.
Takeda's hands were shaking.
He set the card down carefully, as if it might explode.
The glow faded.
The Kuriboh floated back up to his shoulder and nuzzled against his cheek in a gesture that was probably meant to be comforting.
"Kuri," it said softly.
Takeda sat in silence for a long moment.
His cards were alive.
His deck—his terrible, miserable, garbage deck of weak monsters and unusable fusions—was somehow, inexplicably, genuinely alive.
And they wanted to help him.
"Okay," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "Okay. My deck is alive. My monsters are real. Or real enough. And they... want to help me win."
He picked up the Kuriboh card again, more carefully this time, and looked at it.
"How?" he asked. "How can you help me? You're..." He gestured at the spread of cards on the bed. "No offense, but you're not exactly powerhouses. The strongest monster I have is Jerry Beans Man, and he has zero defense. My fusion monsters require cards I don't own. Half my deck is flip effects that require me to survive long enough to use them."
The card glowed again, briefly.
You are thinking like a duelist from your old world, the voices said. You are thinking in terms of attack points and effect chains and optimal strategies. But this world does not run on optimal strategies. This world runs on heart. On belief. On the connection between duelist and deck.
"Heart of the Cards," Takeda muttered. "You're talking about the Heart of the Cards. That thing where protagonists draw exactly the card they need at exactly the right moment because they believe hard enough."
Yes and no. The Heart of the Cards is real, but it is not about believing in luck. It is about believing in us. When you trust your deck, when you fight alongside us rather than just using us, we can do things that the rules say we should not be able to do.
"Like what?"
Like fuse without the proper materials. Like trigger effects that should not trigger. Like survive when survival is impossible.
Takeda stared at the card.
"That sounds like cheating."
It is not cheating. The rules of this world are more flexible than you understand. They bend for those who fight with true spirit. And you, Takeda... you have something we have not felt in a very long time.
"What?"
Spite.
Takeda blinked.
"Spite?"
Pure, unfiltered spite. The original Takeda gave up. He stopped fighting. He let despair consume him until there was nothing left for us to connect to. But you... you died, did you not? You died in your old world, choking on celery, alone and forgotten. And instead of accepting that, instead of fading into nothing, you somehow ended up here. You refused to stop existing.
"I didn't refuse anything. I just... woke up here."
Do you truly believe that? Do you believe that, of all the souls in all the universes, you were chosen at random to inhabit this body? That there was no quality, no aspect of your being, that called out to the void and demanded another chance?
Takeda opened his mouth to argue.
Then he closed it.
He thought about his life. His old life. Twenty-seven years of existing without really living. A job he didn't care about. An apartment he didn't love. No close friends, no romantic partners, no real connections of any kind. Just... existence. Day after day, year after year, going through the motions because that was what you did.
And then celery.
And then nothing.
But even in the nothing, even in the void of complete and utter absence, some part of him had still been there. Still been aware. Still been Marcus Chen, who had never done anything impressive or meaningful but who also had never completely stopped.
Maybe that was spite.
Maybe that was just stubbornness.
Either way, it was something.
"Okay," Takeda said slowly. "So you're telling me that my deck of terrible, weak, mostly useless monsters can actually win duels... because I'm too stubborn to accept that I should lose?"
Essentially, yes.
"And the fusions? The ones I don't have the materials for?"
If you believe strongly enough that two monsters can fuse, if you and your monsters share the will to combine, then the rules will bend. The fusion will occur. It may not always work. It requires true desperation, true belief, true spite. But it is possible.
Takeda looked at his Extra Deck.
Eight fusion monsters.
Zero proper fusion combinations.
"So if I'm about to lose," he said, "and I really, really want to summon Thousand Dragon, and I believe hard enough that Baby Dragon and... I don't know, Mokey Mokey can somehow fuse..."
Then Mokey Mokey might remember that it was a dragon once, in a past life, in a different form. Then Baby Dragon might recognize that kinship. Then Polymerization might decide that the rules are more like guidelines. And then you would have your Thousand Dragon.
"That's insane."
This is an insane world. You might as well be insane along with it.
The Kuriboh on his shoulder made an emphatic "KURI!" of agreement.
Takeda sat with this information for a long moment.
His deck was alive.
His deck wanted him to win.
His deck could apparently break the rules of the game if he believed hard enough and was spiteful enough about it.
This was, objectively, the stupidest thing he had ever heard.
It was also, somehow, the most hopeful thing he had heard since waking up in this world.
"Okay," Takeda said finally. "Okay. Let's say I believe you. Let's say I accept that my deck of garbage monsters can somehow become competitive through the power of spite and belief. What do I do now? I have no money, no food, and presumably I'm going to have to duel at some point because that's how this world works."
There is a tournament, the voices said. You saw the advertisement. Domino City Unified Tournament. All eras welcome. Grand prize of ten million yen and rare cards.
"I saw it, yes. I also know that I would be eaten alive in any real tournament. You just told me that my impossible fusions require 'true desperation' and 'true belief.' I can't manufacture that on command."
You will not have to. You will be desperate. Every duel you fight, with opponents who have real decks and real strategies and real resources, you will be desperate. And in that desperation, we will rise.
"That's not comforting."
It is not meant to be comforting. It is meant to be true. You will struggle, Takeda. You will suffer. You will face opponents who should defeat you in moments. But if you trust us, if you fight with us rather than just using us, we will find ways to survive. We will find ways to win. We will find ways to make our opponents regret ever shuffling their decks against us.
Takeda looked at the cards spread out before him.
Watapon. Mokey Mokey. Skull Servant. Jerry Beans Man. Ojama Yellow.
A pink puffball. A rectangle. A skeleton. A bean in armor. A yellow gremlin in a speedo.
These were supposed to be his path to victory.
These were supposed to be the monsters that would carry him through a tournament against duelists with Blue-Eyes White Dragons and Dark Magicians and all the legendary cards that defined this world.
It was absurd.
It was impossible.
It was exactly the kind of stupid, against-all-odds situation that anime protagonists always found themselves in.
And Takeda—Marcus—had never been an anime protagonist. He had never been a hero, or a chosen one, or anything special at all. He had been a background character in his own life, barely noticeable, easily forgotten.
But maybe that was the point.
Maybe being an anime protagonist wasn't about being special. Maybe it was about deciding to be special. About choosing to stand up and fight even when every logical assessment said you should stay down. About believing so hard in something impossible that the universe had no choice but to make it possible.
Or maybe that was just the caffeine from the expired energy drink talking.
Either way, Takeda made a decision.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. Let's do this. Let's enter this stupid tournament with my stupid deck and my stupid spite and see what happens. If I lose—when I lose, probably—at least I'll lose fighting. That's more than I did in my last life."
That is the spirit, the voices said, and there was something in them that might have been approval.
The Kuriboh on his shoulder trilled happily.
The cards on the bed seemed to shimmer, just slightly, as if acknowledging his resolve.
Takeda gathered them up, shuffled them back into a deck, and returned them to his duel disk.
The duel disk, still held together by electrical tape and prayers, buzzed slightly as it accepted the cards. Its screen flickered, displaying static for a moment before resolving into something almost coherent.
DECK LOADED, it said. READY FOR COMBAT.
Then, as if it couldn't resist:
GOOD LUCK. YOU'LL NEED IT.
"Even my duel disk is mocking me," Takeda muttered.
The Kuriboh laughed.
Or made the Kuriboh equivalent of a laugh, which was somewhere between a hiccup and a purr.
Either way, it was appropriately amused.
Takeda stood up, took one last look around the dusty interior of the card shop that was apparently his now, and headed for the door.
He had a tournament to register for.
A deck of living cards at his side.
A Kuriboh on his shoulder.
Supernatural luck he didn't know about yet, lurking in the background, preparing to make his life extremely complicated in ways he couldn't possibly anticipate.
And spite.
So much spite.
The universe had killed him with celery.
Now he was going to make the universe regret it.
One ridiculous card game at a time.
Here we go, the voices of his deck whispered as he stepped out into the aggressively blue afternoon. Let the games begin.
And somewhere, in the cosmic background of reality, something that might have been fate or might have been luck or might have been just the universe's sense of humor settled into place around Takeda like an invisible cloak.
He was going to need it.
He was going to need every bit of it.
But that was a problem for future Takeda.
Present Takeda had a tournament to find.
And possibly some non-expired food.
Priorities.