Chapter 142: Amano Rei's Dueling Legacy
Everything hurt. Every bone in her body was sending signals she had not known bones could send.
Her stomach had contracted into something small and furious.
Was this what hunger felt like? She had never experienced it before. Not once in twenty years. She had not known it would hurt like this.
Am I dying?
I'm the Vice President of Kaiba Corporation...
"Grandpa, come quick! There's a little girl who collapsed over here!"
"Poor thing. Look at her, covered in injuries. Those illegal duelists again, I'd bet."
"What do we do, Grandpa?"
"Bring her inside. If we leave her here she'll probably die."
After that, Kaiba Chiha drifted in and out of awareness. She felt herself being lifted. Someone's back. The gentle sway of being carried.
Then nothing.
When she opened her eyes again, the ceiling above her was something she had never seen in her life. Old and cracked and marked by time in ways that expensive renovations had never touched. A ceiling fan hung from it, the kind of outdated model that had not run in a very long time. The temperature in Eden Tower had been dropping since late October, but the fan's stillness was not about the season.
"Grandpa, Grandpa! I gave her some water and she woke up, just like you said!"
A small girl's excited voice. Close by.
Chiha turned her head, which took effort, and looked around.
Was this actually a place where people lived?
The simplicity of the room, the age in the walls, hit her in a way that nothing in her life had prepared her for. The world she had always occupied did not contain spaces like this one.
The small girl appeared at the bedside, holding a bowl of something Chiha had never seen before. A dense, slightly pale liquid with a faint warmth rising from it. The girl was beaming.
"Do you have the strength to eat? I can feed you if you need."
"Is this... food?"
The smell reaching her was faint and she would not have described it as anything remarkable. But her body made its own assessment independently of her opinion. Some reserve she had been entirely unaware of surfaced and pushed her upright before she had consciously decided to sit.
"I can manage. I'll feed myself."
She took the bowl and the spoon and ate.
The warmth of it moving down through her and spreading was the most complete feeling of relief she had ever experienced in her life. She ate until the bowl was empty and came back to herself to find she had no memory of the last several swallows.
"Did you not have enough?"
The girl was watching her with a small, satisfied smile.
"Grandpa said you went too long without eating. You need to have small amounts more often. Can't do too much at once."
Chiha looked at the scraped-clean bowl.
"How much does this cost. I'll pay for it."
"Oh, this doesn't cost anything."
"It does. I insist."
She was the Vice President of Kaiba Corporation. She did not accept charity. Whatever this unfamiliar dish was, the ingredients were clearly something exceptional if they could produce this result. The price had to be significant.
She still had some balance in her terminal from selling a Galaxy Cyclone card the previous day. A few thousand Eva Points at least.
She opened the terminal and her expression flattened into several simultaneous layers of reaction.
Where was her money?
She had no memory of what had happened the night she ended up here, but before whatever it was, her terminal had shown over two thousand points in balance. Now it showed eighty.
The girl counted on her fingers.
"It's just regular synthetic congee with a little artificial protein mixed in. Five points should cover it."
"Five."
Not five thousand. Not five hundred. Five.
An amount Chiha had never used as a unit of measurement in her life.
She thought of something Karl had once said to her.
"Chiha. Do you know that ten thousand points is enough for an ordinary person to live on for a month?"
Five points bought a meal that had made her feel like she was alive again.
She looked around with new attention.
"Where is this place?"
"District 35."
District 35.
That was the lower levels. The second-lowest district in all of Eden Tower's thirty-six ground-level zones. Notoriously ungoverned territory. If District 11 operated outside Eva's jurisdiction because of its underground location, District 35 operated outside it because of its extreme geographic position at the edge of the tower's footprint. More than half the district fell outside the Eva network's reach entirely. It had developed its own law, its own power structures, and a reputation that reached all the way up to mid-district discussion forums.
"You're awake." An elderly man appeared behind the girl, stooped with age.
Yuigen. The grandfather the girl had mentioned.
"Don't call me little one. I'm twenty years old."
"Twenty?" The girl stared. "But you're barely taller than me."
The old man's eyes carried something quiet and sad.
Twenty years old and that small. She must have been malnourished for most of her life. Not enough food, not enough of anything that growing required.
He shook his head slowly.
"Let me get you something more to eat in a little while. Don't worry, there's enough left."
He turned and walked out toward the back of the dwelling.
The girl settled her elbows on the edge of the bed, resting her chin in her hands, interested.
"You're twenty? That's older than my cousin. What's your name, big sis?"
"Kaiba Chiha."
"Kaiba Chiha. Chiha. That's a pretty name."
The uncomplicated sincerity in the girl's smile did something unexpected to the tightness in Chiha's chest.
She needed to leave. She did not know how she had ended up in District 35, but she knew she needed to get back to the mid-district. That had to be the priority.
"Keshin. Do you and your grandfather live here in District 35 alone?"
The girl nodded. "We're used to it by now. But we're leaving in a few days anyway. Cousin Yui said she'd come get us and bring us to District 32. A friend of hers has a house there that's free right now, and she said we could borrow it for a while."
District 32.
Wasn't that where Amano Rei lived? Chiha had even visited once, in a manner of speaking.
The living conditions there were not much to celebrate either, but the safety margin was in a completely different bracket from District 35.
A noise from outside interrupted the conversation. Both of them heard it. Keshin's expression changed immediately, a shift from ease to recognition of something familiar and unwelcome.
She had caught the sound of her grandfather's muffled cry.
She was running before Chiha had fully processed what she had heard. Chiha followed, the synthetic food having done enough work that her body was beginning to respond again.
Outside, a crowd had gathered. District 35 residents, unmistakably: worn clothing, visible thinness, conditions that made District 32 look comfortable. They had formed a ring around the center of the street.
In the middle stood a man who did not fit the pattern. A black vest stretched across a frame that was built deliberately and maintained carefully. He was looking down at the old man he had knocked to the ground with an expression that had no interest in the difference between confidence and cruelty.
"Grandpa!" Keshin ran to Yuigen, who was on the ground with one hand pressed to his chest.
The man in the vest crossed his arms.
"Old Yuigen. I heard you're trying to leave. You think it's that simple to walk out of District 35? There's a departure tax. Ten thousand per head. Two of you, that's twenty thousand."
"That's not a real thing," Keshin said, her voice shaking with anger. "There's no departure tax. We filed our district transfer request with the Eva mainframe already."
"The Eva mainframe?" The man laughed. "Do you know where you are? District 35 isn't run by Eva. It's run by whoever's the strongest duelist in the area. And right now, that's me."
Something ignited in Chiha's chest that she did not have a clean name for. She was looking at the old man curled on the ground and the girl who had given her food without asking for anything, and whatever it was that rose in her had no patience for categorizing itself.
The man noticed her.
"Oh, there's another one hiding back there. Departure tax just went up to thirty thousand."
Her appearance was conspicuous here. Even at her height, even in whatever state she was currently in, a face like hers in a crowd of malnourished District 35 residents was a different kind of visible. The man looked at her for a moment and swallowed.
"Or," he said, "you could work off the debt. Two thousand a night. Premium rate."
Chiha's face cycled through several colors in rapid succession.
Two thousand a night. She was the Vice President of Kaiba Corporation. In twenty years of existence she had never once been treated like something with a price tag attached.
"I'll kill you."
Her Eva Terminal unfolded into a Duel Disk before the words had fully left her mouth.
She had done her research on District 35's rules before. The dueling system here ran without Eva network integration, without formal contract terms. The physical feedback operated at levels comparable to an underground death match. A duel here could genuinely injure or kill the loser. People without decks could be forced into duels anyway, with no way to refuse.
"Don't, Chiha, please don't duel him!"
Keshin had not expected her to be a duelist. She threw herself forward trying to stop it.
"Tojima is one of the strongest duelists in this whole area. He'll kill you!"
He'll kill me?
Is that a joke?
She was ranked in the top ten at the Xyz Academy. Losing to some District 35 local was not a sentence she was willing to finish.
Chiha lifted her chin and produced her most precise smile.
"Don't worry, Keshin. Consider this my way of repaying what you've done for me. I'll handle this."
She pulled her deck from its case and slotted it into the Duel Disk.
The Duel Disk immediately produced a warning sound.
[Insufficient deck size. Duel cannot be initiated.]
Chiha stared at it.
Tojima had been slightly tense for a fraction of a second when he saw her expression. He relaxed now. He walked up to her and looked down.
"You show up with an incomplete deck and try to act tough? You almost had me worried."
He raised one thick arm and slapped her.
The impact launched her small body sideways. She hit the ground and stayed there for a moment, her head spinning, her cheek burning.
She pulled her deck out and checked it immediately, head still ringing.
Gone.
Every rare card. Every high-value piece. Gone.
What remained of her nearly fifty-card deck was thirty cards. The Galaxy-Eyes core cards, nothing supplementary. No draw power, no graveyard access, no recovery tools. Thirty cards where forty was the minimum.
Ten cards short.
No way to contact Kaiba Corporation. No money left. Stranded in the lower districts with her most powerful resource gutted and her deck unable to even activate.
If she had a full functioning deck she could fight her way out of District 35 on confidence alone. Without it she had nothing.
She was going to die here.
The fear arrived before she had authorized it, and her eyes went hot immediately.
Ten cards. That was all she needed. Ten cards of any kind and she could open a duel and fight.
She scrambled across the ground to Keshin's side.
"Keshin. Do you have any cards? Any at all. I only need ten. It doesn't matter what they are, just ten cards, please."
Keshin shook her head, her eyes full of apology.
She lived in District 35. A single card was worth a thousand Eva Points. That was a month of food. There was not a person in this crowd who owned one.
Chiha turned to face the watching residents and raised her voice.
"Ten cards! Anyone! I only need ten! I'll repay you a hundred times over, a thousand times over, I promise, please, does anyone have ten cards!"
The crowd looked back at her with the same expression Keshin had given her. The same honest, helpless emptiness.
The cards she had always discarded without looking at them, the ones she had never bothered to examine because they were beneath consideration, were objects these people could not imagine owning.
Then a voice came from down the street. A girl's voice, clear and a little warm, and it reached Chiha's ears like something from a different world entirely.
"I have some!"
A pink twin-tailed girl was walking toward them from the end of the street, a grey sand scarf around her neck that the wind was pushing sideways, her hair moving with it. She was holding cards.
"Cousin Yui!" Keshin's voice broke open with relief.
Yui had not been expected for two more days. But her manager had given her early leave, and she had seen no reason to wait when she could get there sooner. She had been planning to bring Keshin and their grandfather to District 32 anyway, to stay temporarily in a house a friend had left empty.
She had arrived to find Chiha on her knees in the street asking strangers for cards.
The cards in Yui's hand were ones Amano Rei had left for her when he moved out. He had called it a keepsake, but she could see what they actually were. Cards his Eva Terminal had generated during pack pulls that were completely outside anything he would use. Common vanilla monsters too weak for any serious consideration.
Keeping them cost nothing. Maybe someday she would feel like putting a deck together.
Right now they had a more urgent application.
She crossed through the crowd and put the ten cards into Chiha's hands.
"I don't know who you are, but if you're trying to duel for my little cousin's sake, take these. Can you win?"
"Yes. Absolutely yes."
Chiha's cheeks had color in them again, and it was not from the slap.
She registered that Yui's voice was as extraordinary as her face. In the worst moment of her current situation, she had been rescued by someone who looked like this.
The protective power of beautiful women was apparently real.
She slotted the ten cards into her deck without looking at them. The warning sound disappeared. The Duel Disk confirmed readiness.
"A thousand times over, I promised. I'll keep it."
"Win the duel and we're even."
Yui's smile was the kind a shopkeeper gives when they genuinely mean it, and Chiha felt something galvanize in her chest.
"The cards belong to a friend of mine, by the way. If you want to repay anyone, go find him."
"Understood."
She did not care whose cards they were. Right now she only cared about putting Tojima on the ground and returning every kindness that had been passed along this unlikely chain to reach her.
Gratitude without expectation of return. That was something Chiha had never encountered in the mid-district. Not once.
The rescue. The food. The borrowed cards. Without any single one of those, she would already be dead.
She had always believed that money and power were the only currencies that moved the world. She was revising that understanding in real time.
Tojima unfolded his own Duel Disk.
"Since you want to die properly in a duel, I'll give you that much."
[Duelist: Kaiba Chiha]
[Duelist: Tojima Jiro]
[Data network accessed. Duel field generated.]
[Special Mode: Death Match]
[The duelists stake everything. Life is weighed against the outcome of the duel.]
[Duel!]
The announcement came in a voice that was not the Eva mainframe's. District 35 had its own system.
Tojima had gone first.
"My turn! Draw!"
He looked at his hand. His expression settled into something comfortable.
"Let me show you what a District 35 duelist can do, little girl. Normal Summon in Attack Position: Gene-Warped Warwolf!"
Gene-Warped Warwolf. Level 4 EARTH Beast-Warrior Normal Monster. 2000 ATK / 100 DEF.
Yui's eyes widened.
"A monster with 2000 attack points and it can be Normal Summoned?"
In her years running the card shop, she had never seen one in person. A card like this made the famous Ax Raider meta card look average by comparison. The value on this alone was not cheap.
"I set one card. Turn end."
"My turn. Draw."
Chiha pulled cards and looked at her hand. Her expression produced more lines than it had started with.
She could not develop anything.
With her rare cards stripped, the Galaxy-Eyes high-level monsters in her hand were completely immovable. No draw power, no graveyard setup, no way to clear the path for a high-level summon. Her hand was locked. The only two cards she could actually use from a six-card opening hand were the ones Yui had given her.
She looked at them more carefully.
They were oddly familiar.
Actually, they were very familiar. She had seen these monsters on the field before.
Was this not the Monocycroid that Amano Rei had once used in front of her? The machine that, after activating Limiter Removal, could deal a grand total of two hundred points of damage?
***
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