Chapter 144: Do You Need Hacker Invasion Just to Look After a Sick Person?
"My shoulders are so sore. I can barely lift them. What do I do, Amano?"
"Fine, I'll feed you."
"My feet are sore too, even though I've barely walked anywhere. What do I do, Amano?"
"Alright, I'll massage them."
"It's been so long since club activities. I want to watch a couple of episodes. What do I do, Amano?"
"Senpai, there are limits to how much you can push this. I can't exactly go back to the club room and pick up the recordings for you."
The Rin Seiya who carried herself through every ordinary day with complete self-sufficiency had, it turned out, a very different relationship with being waited on when she was sick.
"Actually, you don't have to go that far. I have some in my room. I brought back a dozen or so episodes last weekend. I was planning to stay home and work through them slowly."
"That's not an unreasonable request then. Which room is yours? I'll go up and get them."
"The one at the far right end of the hallway. Pink door. That's mine. Sorry to trouble you, kouhai."
"No trouble. Rest on the sofa."
He followed the direction she indicated and went up to the second floor.
In practical terms, this was probably the first time Amano had entered a girl's room. Shio's did not count. And the soul-level mind spaces he had accessed through Hacker Invasion did not count either.
He pushed open the pink door.
Rin Seiya's room was neater than he had expected. Everything had a place, the same clear organizational logic she applied to the club room. Card and D-Wheel merchandise on the walls. A shelf on the desk near the corner holding several figures of anime girls he did not immediately recognize.
It matched what he would have guessed a standard room belonging to someone like her would look like, fairly precisely.
The only imperfection was the unmade bed, blanket left where she had thrown it back in a hurry coming downstairs.
The recordings she had brought from the club room were in the storage organizer on the desk. He checked the episode numbers. Already past episode 140, approaching the final arc. He had jumped a significant way ahead of what he had seen with her before, but he still had the memories from his previous life to fill the gaps.
He counted the episodes and noticed something missing.
Going by his recollection, the last two episodes of 5D's were Yusei Fudo versus Jack Atlas. Those were present. But a few episodes before that were gone.
The second-to-last major duel. There was no Zone arc content here.
"Senpai, are you missing a few episodes?"
"Missing some? Oh, the episode count being off. Yeah, those were never there to begin with. I asked my dad and he said he hasn't been able to find them either."
Her voice carried up through the stairwell, slightly muffled and quieter than usual.
When Amano came back downstairs, Rin Seiya had given up on sitting and was lying flat on the sofa with what remained of her energy.
She had been performing wellness for his benefit. The moment he was out of the room it had dropped.
He reached over and touched the cooling patch on her forehead, just under the white fringe. The fever had climbed enough to start neutralizing the cold from the patch.
"Senpai. You should really be in bed resting properly."
"No. I've been in bed for two days. I'm done with it."
She pushed herself upright again with visible effort, then patted the cushion beside her the same way she always did in the club room when she wanted him to sit down.
"It's fine. Watching something counts as resting. Just sit next to me and let me lean."
"Alright. Tell me immediately if you feel worse."
He was not going to be responsible for making a sick person sicker by visiting them.
"Of course." She smiled, small and tired and genuine.
The television in the Rin family's living room was considerably better quality than the club room's budget set. The picture and sound were noticeably sharper. Every Synchro Summon sequence looked genuinely impressive.
Amano found it difficult to focus on the screen.
Rin Seiya had settled against him on the sofa and was transferring what felt like most of her body weight onto his shoulder. She was not heavy, but she was close enough that he could feel her breathing. And she had a particular quality of warmth at this distance, something that was not quite a scent and was not quite not a scent, something that landed somewhere between comfortable and difficult to stop noticing.
Two days of fever and no bath, and somehow the smell reaching him was not unpleasant. He could not identify it as a shampoo or any product. It was simply hers, and it was something he could see becoming habitual very easily if he were not careful about it.
One episode ended.
He was preparing to ask whether she wanted to skip the ending theme.
Rin Seiya's breathing had gone even. Her eyes were nearly closed. She had fallen asleep without announcing her intention to do so.
He carefully shifted her horizontal on the sofa, then went upstairs and came back with a pillow, which he tucked under her head so she would not wake up with a stiff neck.
He looked at her face, relaxed and quiet in a way her waking face never quite managed.
He considered his options.
If he left now, she would wake up alone in the living room at some point in the middle of the night, and that particular brand of solitude while sick was genuinely unpleasant. On the other hand, if he stayed until morning and her parents came back from their overtime to find him here, that was a different kind of uncomfortable entirely.
"Amano... Amano..."
She had started talking in her sleep.
He waited to see what direction it was going to go.
"Contraception... safety first..."
That was not sleep-talking. That was delirium.
He decided not to examine the content of that dream any further.
He would stay a while longer. If she settled into a deep enough sleep and looked stable, he could leave quietly in the middle of the night.
Half an hour later, her breathing had become noticeably faster.
He checked her forehead. The cooling patch had gone from cold to faintly warm against his fingers. The fever was climbing despite the patch.
It was getting worse.
He changed the patch for a fresh one from the bag and tried to think of what else he could do, which did not produce many answers.
Then Dark Magician Girl floated up from the deck in spirit form and drifted over to Rin Seiya, studying her with careful attention.
"This isn't looking great, Amano."
"What do you mean?"
"This girl isn't simply sick. You can't see it with human eyes, but if you look with spirit sight, there's a dark presence faintly surrounding her. Something is wrong beyond a regular illness."
"Dark presence. What kind of thing is that?"
Mana turned the question over.
"Something like a spell, a virus, a curse. One of those categories. The point is, her being sick right now is most likely not natural. Someone did this."
Someone did this.
Amano thought back. That night, not long after parting ways with Rin Seiya, he had encountered the Puppeteer. The Puppeteer had been using Kaiba Chiha on a D-Wheel, which meant it had been following him from the Riding Duel venue. If it had been trailing him, it might have crossed paths with Rin Seiya first.
As for what kind of curse the Puppeteer could deploy, its power system operated completely outside the Millennium Item framework. Its capabilities were strange enough that almost anything was plausible.
"Mana, can you treat it?"
"Not me. But you might be able to, Amano."
"I can?"
He was not a magical girl. Dispelling curses was not a skill he had ever developed.
Mana held both hands up in front of her chest, fingers forming a triangle shape.
"Don't you have that Millennium Puzzle skill? That one could actually work here."
"You mean... Hacker Invasion?"
"Yes, exactly. This curse is clearly targeting her soul. If you send your own soul into her body right now, you might be able to locate where it's coming from."
That was not as implausible as it sounded.
Rin Seiya's affection level also met the skill's activation requirement.
He looked at her face. Her breathing was coming faster.
He made his decision in the way one does when the options are limited and doing nothing is the worst of them.
He found a comfortable position on the sofa and settled in. Two hours was the duration, and he needed to be stable before going under.
He had used Hacker Invasion for dueling purposes more than once at this point. Using it for something like this was a first.
"System, activate skill."
[Warning! Using this skill may significantly reduce the target's affection level. Please proceed with caution.]
"Let it drop. I'll just have to ask forgiveness later, senpai."
He confirmed the activation on his Eva Terminal.
He did spare one thought, in the moment before it engaged, for what Rin Seiya had said in her sleep.
He sincerely hoped he was not about to walk into anything strange.
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