Chapter 321: The "Thunder" After the Bad Blood
"No!"
Kozuka Yoka dropped straight to her knees, throwing her head back in a wail of grief.
"Class rep!"
Nanki'in Sakuya's defeat had clearly hit her hard.
Amano Rei patted Kozuka Yoka's shoulder. "Don't cry, Kozuka. It was just one campus queen duel. Runner-up isn't bad at all."
"Of course you'd think it's fine! Class rep, you and that redhead from Fusion Academy get along so well, aren't you secretly thrilled she won?"
Secretly thrilled was probably too strong a word for it, but if even Kozuka Yoka had managed to read between the lines of that duel, then things really were done for.
The two people who'd actually been in it, of course, had already seen straight through the truth: that Amano Rei had been helping both sides at once the whole time.
If he'd known it would end up like this, he might as well not have helped either of them at all.
Then again, if he hadn't helped either of them, Duel Academy's history books would be missing out on one campus queen showdown genuinely worth recording for the ages.
"That was a genuinely brilliant duel." Rin Seiya couldn't help but marvel. "Are all the freshmen at this academy monsters these days?"
Given how tight Seiya-senpai's own allowance was running lately, she'd only been able to afford a discounted back-row ticket.
Having watched the whole thing from start to finish without catching a word of the two duelists' private conversation, Rin Seiya had absolutely no idea about the whole bad-blood undercurrent running beneath it.
Though the final card, The Wicked Dreadroot, was one she happened to know quite well.
After all, it had been inside Rin Seiya's own mind room that Amano Rei had defeated the con artist and both Wicked Gods, right in front of her.
That god card had, in a very real sense, been the deciding factor in this entire campus queen duel.
But how in the world had that card ended up in Finesse Wein's hands?
Rin Seiya crossed her arms, tilting her head, confused. "If that card came out of my own mind room, shouldn't it belong to me?"
Back with Class 1-E, Nanki'in Sakuya's expression gave away absolutely nothing. Not even Amano Rei, who was usually so good at reading her deadpan, quietly endearing face, could tell what she was feeling right now, which itself was proof that, in this moment, she genuinely felt nothing at all.
"That's really a shame, class rep, you were so close!" Having wiped away her tears, Kozuka Yoka forced herself back to a cheerful tone to offer comfort.
"Nothing to be ashamed of. She really was stronger, that's all." Sakuya, for her part, came across as remarkably calm.
If anything, a little too calm, calm enough that it left Amano Rei with an uneasy sense of the quiet before a storm.
"I simply wasn't skilled enough."
Sure enough, the moment she finished saying that, Nanki'in Sakuya let her flat, level gaze settle on Amano Rei.
"So, Amano, would you mind coming to the infirmary with me for a bit? Alone?"
"What's with the 'would you mind'... class rep, since when did you get so formal with me?"
"Can you?"
"S, sure, I can."
Miss Kangetsu, the academy nurse, was once again absent from the infirmary today, business as usual.
Made sense, really. With self-healing pods installed in most buildings across Academy City, Amano Rei genuinely couldn't imagine what a school nurse's day-to-day job even consisted of besides slacking off.
Once the infirmary door swung shut, the enclosed space held nothing but Amano Rei and Nanki'in Sakuya.
Backing herself against the door with her own weight, Nanki'in Sakuya's eyes finally showed the faintest flicker of hesitation, as if she were steeling herself to confirm something.
"Amano, that card, did you give it to Finesse Wein?"
"Yeah. I did give it to her." That much Amano Rei couldn't deny, especially not while facing Sakuya's own upward gaze fixed on him like that. Lying his way out of this one felt genuinely impossible.
If it had been Kikawayu asking instead, she wouldn't have gotten a single honest word out of him for the rest of the conversation.
"I see." Something in Sakuya's eyes visibly dimmed, a stark contrast to the blue light that had been flickering across them up on the dueling stage earlier.
"But it's not like I gave her that card specifically hoping she'd beat you." Amano Rei hurried to explain further.
"That D-Force, honestly, I'd already been planning to hand it over to Finesse for a while now. It's a card built specifically to work with her deck. It just so happened to land right before the campus queen duel. It was never meant to target you specifically, I swear..."
"That's not the card I'm asking about." Nanki'in Sakuya cut him off.
"Huh, then what is?"
"The Wicked Dreadroot. That card, you won that in a Dark Game, didn't you, Amano Rei."
Oh. So Sakuya had been asking about the god card all along.
That made sense. Back then, the con artist had projected the entire duel across the night sky over the Middle District as his own backdrop, and pretty much every Synchro Academy student pulling an all-nighter for evening study had ended up watching that Dark Game against the Wicked Gods play out overhead.
Even though the image reflected across the sky had only shown the Wicked Gods and the monsters fighting them, never the actual duelists themselves.
But anyone who knew Amano Rei well enough could tell exactly who'd been dueling the moment Eve showed up at the very end of it.
"Would you mind telling me how that card ended up in Finesse Wein's hands?"
That was, admittedly, a long story.
It started with him going to visit Seiya-senpai when she was sick, moved through getting caught red-handed by Finesse, then ran into a shady Dark Game duelist who'd forcibly dragged Finesse, who couldn't even ride a D-Wheel, into a Dark Riding Duel, and ended with Amano Rei leaping off his own ride to swap souls with her, adding the god card to Finesse's deck just to guarantee they'd win the Dark Game, only for him to never quite get around to taking it back afterward.
Aside from glossing over the blurry, awkward part about getting caught red-handed while visiting Rin Seiya's sickbed, Amano Rei told Nanki'in Sakuya the whole truth about everything else.
Amano Rei remembered that after that whole dramatic Dark Riding Duel, the entire Nanki'in family had come rushing over as a group as well.
"So that's when it happened." It seemed the whole incident had left quite an impression on Sakuya herself, her lips pressing together lightly.
"Is that where I lost, then. If I'd been the one to find Amano first, back then, maybe things would have turned out differently."
"Huh?" Amano Rei was genuinely caught off guard, half flattered, that Sakuya's final verdict on her own loss hadn't ended up pinning the blame on him at all.
"I lost because my bond with you, Amano, wasn't deep enough!"
His own brilliant, sharp-witted class rep had arrived at a conclusion Amano Rei couldn't have dreamed up in a thousand years.
"I'll admit, Finesse Wein has known you longer, shares a deeper bond with you, and you owe her a debt of gratitude besides. But none of that is a reason for me to back down."
The fact that Amano Rei had been brought up out of the lower districts by Lady Finesse herself wasn't exactly a secret either; there was no way it could have slipped past the Nanki'in family's own intelligence network.
"So that I can beat Finesse Wein someday, let's deepen our own bond!"
"Deepen our bond?"
Deepen it how, exactly? Was that the kind of thing you could just decide to deepen on a whim?
The very next instant, though, Amano Rei understood exactly how, and exactly why Nanki'in Sakuya had kept her own weight braced against the door behind her this whole time after closing it, simply to make sure no one else had a chance to walk in.
Something soft, carrying the faint scent of lemon, pressed itself right up against Amano Rei's lips.
After all that build-up, turns out his class rep had just been working up the nerve to kiss him.
No wonder, even with that whole deadpan, quietly endearing composure of hers, that flush of red creeping across her fair cheeks had gotten harder and harder for her to hide by the end of it.
This time lasted far, far longer than the first time, so long that Amano Rei genuinely started struggling to breathe, his head spinning.
Not until Nanki'in Sakuya, cheeks burning bright red, wiping at the corner of her mouth, wobbled her way out of the infirmary in a daze, did Amano Rei, pinned firmly against the sickbed, finally get a precious moment to catch his breath.
Since when had his own pure-hearted class rep gotten this bold?
The very first time she'd worked up the nerve to try kissing him, she'd been so shy about it that it had barely lasted a second, over practically before it began.
And this time, she'd gone in hard enough that Amano Rei had nearly been caught completely off guard.
It left Amano Rei genuinely wondering whether Nanki'in Yukihime had been secretly coaching her own daughter on the subject since then.
Come to think of it, though, Nanki'in Sakuya's whole performance in today's duel had already exceeded Amano Rei's expectations by a wide margin too.
Not only had she opened her own Extra Monster Zone and Link Summoned a Sky Striker mid-duel, she'd also delivered that razor-sharp line about "no future" between him and Finesse.
The old Nanki'in Sakuya would never have managed any of that. It would have been unthinkable.
How strange.
Out in the infirmary hallway, fingers still resting against her own lips, replaying the sensation, Nanki'in Sakuya broke into a smile entirely unlike her usual deadpan, quietly endearing self.
Deep within her once-dim, dark brown eyes, that faint blue light from her merger with Eva's network still flickered, on and off.
Sakuya herself was honestly startled that she'd actually gone through with something like that.
But ever since her consciousness had briefly merged with Eva's network earlier today, she'd suddenly found herself gripped by an impulse: that as long as it was for Amano Rei's sake, there was nothing she wasn't capable of doing.
Whether that impulse had come welling up from somewhere deep inside her own suppressed heart, or from some lingering influence of Eva's, she honestly couldn't say.
Lying on the sickbed, Amano Rei stared blankly up at the pure white ceiling of the infirmary.
After that whole bad-blood duel, even his own class rep had evolved into this startlingly aggressive new state.
As for that lip-read threat to kill him the lady had apparently mouthed at him, Amano Rei didn't even dare imagine what kind of retaliation might be waiting for him at home.
Especially with Finesse having Summoned a Wicked God card on top of everything else. Amano Rei was genuinely worried she might end up corrupted by the god's own will, the same way it had happened to Tenma Yako.
Maybe he should skip evening study tonight and just head straight back to the villa to check on her.
"See, I'm completely fine."
On the couch, cradling a cup of black tea, Finesse smiled gently at him, nothing at all like the sudden storm of thunder and fury Amano Rei had been bracing himself for.
And unlike Nanki'in Sakuya's own quietly suppressed calm, Amano Rei genuinely felt like Finesse seemed no different from usual at all.
Even though she'd literally just Summoned a Wicked God card that afternoon.
"Are you really okay? I mean, with today's duel and everything..."
"Relax. Is that really the kind of petty person you think I am?" Finesse waved a hand, smiling.
"I thought it over afterward. Nanki'in Sakuya's your class rep, right? If she asked you for help tuning her deck, there's no way someone as much of a soft touch as you could've said no. It's really not that big a deal. Besides, I won, didn't I~"
Whoever said flat-chested girls always held grudges clearly never met anyone but Eve.
Mom Finesse could be flat-chested and big-hearted, all at the same time!
Still, Amano Rei couldn't quite shake his worry. Hadn't Finesse been looking straight at him up on stage the moment she Summoned that Wicked God, mouthing something like "I will kill you"?
What if she was acting all breezy and calm right now, only to actually murder him in his sleep tonight?
"What, that I said I'd kill you?" Finesse thought back. "I'm pretty sure what I actually said was 'thank you.' If it hadn't been for that card of yours, Amano, I probably would have lost."
Ah, of course. Amano Rei wasn't some trained secret agent. There was no way he actually had any real skill at reading lips.
He'd just pieced together some wild guess, mixing the possibility of Wicked God corruption with the whole tense, bad-blood atmosphere of the moment, and landed on something completely off base.
Looking at it that way, his lady really hadn't been touched, not even slightly, by the Wicked God card's corrupting will.
And yet, that outcome was exactly what left Amano Rei with a nagging, uneasy sense that something was off.
Going by everything established in the anime and manga, using a god card without consequence required being the actual bearer of a Millennium Item, or at the very least, like Kaiba Seto, being a reincarnated descendant sharing blood with someone who once held one.
Otherwise, the result was exactly like what had happened to Tenma Yako in the manga, or to Shigatsu Ichi within Eden: your own will slowly consumed by the Wicked God's corruption, growing more and more unhinged over time.
Amano Rei himself had the Millennium Scale plus a fragment of the Millennium Puzzle backing him up. So what about Lady Finesse? Did she happen to be carrying some Millennium Item of her own too?
Once Finesse realized Amano Rei had completely misread her lips, she arched an eyebrow, sly and mischievous, the corner of her mouth curling into that same bewitching, wicked little smile she'd worn while Summoning the Wicked God.
"Oh? So you actually thought I said I'd kill you, Amano? Sounds to me like you've been a little pent up lately. Is that what you're hoping happens tonight, that I'll finish you..."
"Big brother, you're home so early tonight!" Probably drawn by the sound of Amano Rei's voice, Shio came bursting excitedly out of her room, cutting off whatever shameless thing had been about to leave the lady's mouth.
"Sister Finesse, what were you just saying you and big brother were going to do tonight?" Amano Shio blinked her big, innocent eyes.
"Kh, khem, kem!" Probably to cover her own embarrassment, Finesse launched into a sudden fit of coughing.
But partway through the coughing, Amano Rei suddenly noticed Finesse's complexion go pale, and then, without warning: "Blergh!"
"You're, you're coughing up blood?" Watching red liquid seep out from between the fingers Finesse had clapped over her own mouth, Amano Rei's mind went blank with panic.
Of course a god card Summon couldn't have come without consequences after all!
Except what Amano Rei hadn't expected was that whatever was affecting Finesse wasn't a corruption of the mind or will at all, but something happening to her body instead.
Otherwise, how could his lady, normally blessed with monstrous strength and an ox-like constitution, suddenly start coughing up blood out of nowhere like that?
"Ca, call an ambulance!" Shio shrieked, panicking right along with him.
"It's tea!" Finesse nearly choked laughing at the two siblings' reaction.
She'd spat out a mouthful of black tea, and somehow gotten mistaken for coughing up blood.
"Tea?" Amano Rei dabbed a fingertip in the liquid on the floor and gave it a sniff. "Huh, so it is."
"Don't sniff it, you weirdo!" That finally pushed Finesse over the edge into actual laughter.
"Sorry about that. I haven't really been feeling like myself lately, keep getting this... blergh!"
Having caught the warning signs in time this round, Finesse bolted urgently for the kitchen sink instead, sparing good old Mr. Floor another mouthful of tea.
"I keep getting this random wave of nausea for no reason. Maybe it's just a cold coming on with the weather turning cooler."
"Haven't you gone to the medical pod?" Amano Rei asked, concerned.
"If I ran to the medical pod over every little cold, that'd just put unnecessary strain on my body from the medication. Better to just tough it out."
Fair enough, honestly. With a constitution practically on par with a superhero's, a minor cold should clear up for his lady on its own in no time.
Only Amano Shio, glancing between Finesse standing at the sink and her completely oblivious big brother, hesitated, then finally spoke up.
"Big brother, do you think maybe it's not a cold?"
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