Chapter 76: The Price of an All-Nighter
"We have to stop, senpai."
Amano put his hand over Rin's before she could swap in the next episode.
"Already?" She looked genuinely bereft. "But we were just getting to the good part."
"It's almost three in the morning. I have no idea how I'm going to explain this when I get home."
What was he supposed to tell Shio?
That he'd been in a club room watching anime with an upperclassman until nearly dawn? That wasn't even a convincing lie. That was the kind of story where the police would raise an eyebrow and ask him to try again.
"Fine." Rin clicked the television off, not bothering to hide her disappointment. "I'll accept it. For tonight."
Without the screen's glow, the room felt immediately darker. The corridor light outside the door was the only thing still on in the entire club building. Everyone else had gone home hours ago.
"Tomorrow though. We continue tomorrow, junior."
"Tomorrow..."
Amano was already mentally negotiating with himself. Two episodes a night had been the original plan, and that was a reasonable plan. The problem was that two episodes had turned into ten because neither of them had said stop, and if tomorrow followed the same pattern he was going to end up sleep-deprived on a school night for the foreseeable future.
And beyond his own sleep schedule—Finesse and Kikawayu were going to start asking questions if he kept rolling in at three AM. The conclusions they'd jump to would be wildly inaccurate and extremely difficult to correct.
They left the club building together. The whole structure was dark, the automated city systems keeping the corridor lights on but nothing else. At least the mid-level district's infrastructure kept running regardless of the hour. Getting home at this time would have been genuinely impossible in the lower districts.
"See you tomorrow, junior!" Rin put a pointed emphasis on tomorrow that made it sound less like a farewell and more like a contract.
"Yeah, tomorrow—"
"AAAAAHHH!!"
The scream split the silence like a crack of glass.
Both of them spun toward it. A few buildings over, near one of the other club towers, something was collapsing—the unmistakable visual burst of a Duel Monster shattering, the afterglow of a projection dissolving into dark residue.
A duel. At three in the morning. Near the club buildings.
That was already wrong. But the scream and the darkness settling over the area made the wrongness a lot more specific.
Amano and Rin reached the source in under a minute.
A girl lay unconscious in the middle of the path. Synchro Academy uniform. The air around her still carried that particular heaviness—the pressure that clung to a location after something genuinely dark had happened there.
"Dark Game," Amano and Rin said at the same time.
Amano recognized it from Finesse's duel against the Puppeteer. Rin apparently recognized it from a different reference point entirely.
"We literally just watched the Dark Signers arc," she said.
Fair enough. More efficient than his reasoning.
The girl on the ground—Amano looked closer.
He knew her. Class 1-E. She sat a few rows over and had a habit of cheerfully needling him about his relationship with Sakuya whenever she got the chance. Kozuka Yoka, he was fairly sure.
What was she doing out here at this hour?
"The injuries aren't just physical." Rin had already pulled up the medical scan on her Eva terminal and was moving through the readouts with practiced speed. "Dark Game. Mental damage on top of everything else. This is bad."
"Do we call an ambulance? Report it?" Amano didn't know the mid-level district procedures for this. Lower district protocol had been entirely different.
"No time. There's an emergency medical bay inside the club building—the automated systems should still be active. Get her there first."
Eva had apparently anticipated that a building full of students running unsupervised clubs might occasionally produce medical emergencies. The automated first aid installation was a quietly thoughtful touch.
Amano moved to lift Kozuka Yoka—
And felt his feet stop.
He looked down.
Threads. Dense, fine, and unmistakably strong, wrapped around his ankles and locking him in place. The same silk-thin restraints he'd seen before.
He turned around slowly.
A figure emerged from the treeline at the side of the path. Moving with that particular wrongness—limbs slightly out of sync, the gait of something being worn rather than walked in.
The Puppeteer.
And the duelist being puppeted—Amano recognized him too. Yesterday's joint duel. Fusion Academy's fourth-year representative. Ranked eighteenth in the academy standings. The Ancient Gear user who had lost to Rin.
Bart Scar.
A duelist of that caliber, and the Puppeteer had still gotten to him.
The expression on Bart's face was barely human. His mouth moved and the words that came out were wrong in the way possessed people's words were always wrong—the obsession of the host bleeding through whatever the Puppeteer was using him for.
"I shouldn't have lost. If I had won yesterday, Fusion Academy would have won. Fusion is the highest form of summoning. I need—stronger Fusion—I have to find—"
Losing to Rin in front of the whole venue, dropping a match that mattered for his academy—and the Puppeteer had found that specific crack and pried it open.
If Bart had faced anyone else in the fourth-year round, his rank would have made him the heavy favorite. He'd just had the bad luck to draw Rin Seiya.
"Bart." Rin's Eva terminal was already lit up, Duel Disk priming. "Do you want me to beat you a second time?"
"Senpai—wait." Amano held up a hand. "Take Kozuka-san to the medical bay. You go."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm the stronger duelist, I should be the one who—"
"I can't move." He looked down at his feet with a grim smile.
That was the calculation. Normally you'd send the stronger fighter and have the weaker person handle the evacuation. But the Puppeteer had specifically targeted Amano. The threads had locked onto him the moment he'd tried to pick up the injured girl. He was already in it—the Dark Game cage was forming around him whether he chose to duel or not.
If both of them stayed to fight, Kozuka Yoka would be lying here alone with critical injuries and no one coming.
There was no version of this where the math worked out well.
Rin stood still for two full seconds. Then she shifted Kozuka Yoka onto her back, the girl's weight settling across her shoulders.
"Hold on. You have to hold on until I get back, Amano." She was walking already, moving fast. "I'm coming back. Don't you dare lose before I get there—Amano!"
She'd dropped the 'junior.'
"I know what I'm doing, senpai." Amano turned to face the Puppeteer and the thing wearing Bart Scar's face. "I've done this before."
He waited until the sound of her footsteps faded.
Then he raised his Duel Disk.
The Dark Game locked in around him like walls closing—that specific pressure, that particular quality of wrongness that meant the damage here would not be simulated.
"Third time we've met, Puppeteer."
"Amano Rei." The voice from Bart's mouth was not entirely Bart's. "You have the same ability I do. As long as you exist, I can't rest easy."
By acknowledging it as their third encounter, Amano had implicitly confirmed that the Finesse duel had been his doing. Substitute users recognized each other. That was apparently the nature of it.
[FORCED DUEL INITIATED]
[DUEL MODE: DARK GAME]
"My turn—draw!"
Amano took the first move.
This was different from Ruiz, the bounty hunter in the lower districts who had been a wild card with a grudge and a low-tier setup. The Puppeteer was running a top-twenty ranked duelist. Bart Scar had earned his position. His Ancient Gear deck was a real threat.
And unlike the duel against Chiha, there were no summoning restrictions on the field. No limits. Whatever Bart's deck could do, it would do it.
The one actual advantage Amano had: his own deck was stronger now than it had been at the start of the semester. The joint duel wins, the ranked shop unlock, the new cards—all of it had added up.
"Spell card—Unexpected Dai!"
[Unexpected Dai] [Spell: If you control no monsters, Special Summon 1 Level 4 or lower Normal Monster from your Deck.]
He snapped the card off the top of his deck with the practiced ease of someone who knew exactly where it was.
"Special Summon—Attack Position—Chosen by the Star Chalice!"
The newest addition to his lineup hit the field, standing ready.
Brand new. Eight hundred points spent in the ranked shop earlier that evening.
Time to see what it could do.
***
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