Chapter 145: Dark Rin Seiya?
Amano had noticed that the tunnel connecting to each person's soul room looked different every time.
Finesse's had been a pale crimson. Sakuya's was deep blue. Rin Seiya's was pure white.
Based on his previous two experiences, he had prepared himself for the obvious. Both Finesse and Sakuya's soul rooms had greeted him with their occupants in a state of complete candor, and the environments had been completely different from each other. He had no reason to assume this would be any different.
There was another difference from those two occasions that he was keeping in mind.
Both previous uses of Hacker Invasion had been life-or-death situations. Finesse and Sakuya had each understood the circumstances well enough that the system's affection penalty had essentially been offset. The invasion had been necessary and they had known it.
Rin Seiya's case was not like that.
From her perspective, she simply had a fever. From her perspective, there was no reason for anyone to be entering her body.
Explaining to anyone, including the police, why a man had entered a girl's body to treat a fever caused by a curse was not something Amano was looking forward to.
He did not have long to dwell on it. The white light at the end of the consciousness tunnel opened up, and he arrived.
The first thing he felt was recognition.
He had just been here.
Rin Seiya's soul room was laid out in an exact one-to-one reproduction of her actual bedroom. Same furniture placement. Same wall decorations. Same desk in the corner. The soul room and the real room were identical.
Consistent on the outside and on the inside. That was exactly the kind of person she was.
Unexpectedly straightforward, actually.
The room was empty, though. He had braced himself and now there was no one here.
He scanned the room.
Something burst out from under the bed.
A small figure, white twin-tails swinging, came charging directly at him with her fist raised, having apparently timed the ambush for the moment his eyes moved away.
She had slightly miscalculated the reach of her own arms relative to the distance involved.
Amano's hand came up on reflex and caught the small head, holding it in place. Short arms and short legs swung at the air in front of him without making contact.
"Senpai?"
Small, significantly smaller than usual, but the distinctive face was unmistakable.
"That voice." The swinging stopped. "Amano? When did you get so tall? You startled me. I thought someone was breaking in."
Who breaks into a soul room?
Based on his previous two experiences, the person whose soul room this was generally did not immediately understand they were inside their own mind rather than their actual room. The environment was too familiar to feel wrong.
Even accounting for that, Rin Seiya's current state was unusual in a way the prior two experiences had not prepared him for.
First: they were both fully clothed. Amano made a point of noting that he had absolutely no feelings about this one way or another.
Second: why was she so small?
She looked nothing like a university student. She looked like a child.
"I see. So that's what's happening."
The miniature Rin Seiya processed his explanation and got there reasonably quickly.
"So you sensed I'd been cursed by the Puppeteer's dark power, and you used your special ability to enter my soul and find the source?"
She was tracking the situation clearly, unlike Sakuya, who had essentially given up on analysis and gone with the flow.
"Amano-kouhai, you have so many protagonist settings. A skill like this too, why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"It's not really a fun skill."
"It's incredibly fun! Which means my body can be controlled by you right now! That's basically like a second Puppeteer. Good thing I know you're a good person, or I'd have to hit you."
He appreciated the vote of confidence.
On the subject of controlling her body, he had already tried the moment he arrived and found it was not working. Something about her current state was blocking the takeover. Probably connected to the same problem.
"Senpai, do you know why you've shrunk?"
"Shrunk?"
She had not noticed. She looked down at her chest.
"Wait, I actually have? What happened?"
"Not that. Come here."
He carried the miniature Rin Seiya to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room and held her up to face it.
She stared at her own reflection.
"Oh, I'm adorable."
"Be serious."
"This looks like me at ten years old. Did I age backwards?"
"Based on what I can observe, senpai, I think your soul might not be complete right now."
"I'm incomplete? That's a terrible thing to say to a girl, kouhai."
Amano's assessment was that the incomplete element might include more than her soul.
He set aside the commentary and continued.
"The curse has probably separated part of your soul away from the rest. That's why I can't take control and why your form here is reduced."
"Then where do I find the missing piece?"
"If there's a curse, there will be something abnormal. This is your room. You'd know better than anyone if something doesn't belong here."
Rin Seiya looked around with a duelist's eye for the irregular.
"If you're asking about something that doesn't belong." She pointed directly in front of them. "I don't have a mirror in my room."
That was exactly as obvious an answer as it sounded. The clue was sitting right on the surface.
Amano had only been in her room once, so he could not have noticed the absence himself. She would know.
He reached out and touched the mirror. His hand went through.
He took a breath and stepped inside. The miniature Rin Seiya followed immediately.
The mirror world was a spatial inversion of what lay outside it, everything flipped. Beyond the edges of the reflection, where the mirror's surface could not reach, there was only pure white. A white that extended without a visible boundary in any direction.
Running along the white floor, threading out toward the unreachable distance, were black lines. Thin and dark against the unblemished white, extending toward wherever the space ended.
Amano and Rin Seiya looked at each other at the same moment and said the same thing.
"The Puppeteer."
They followed the black lines.
Walking through the white space, Amano worked through the logic out loud.
"The Puppeteer's ability targets the dark side of a person's heart. If it wanted to control senpai, what it would need to do is isolate her dark side and manipulate it separately."
"My dark side? So that's why my soul split. But do I even have a dark side? I think of myself as a good person."
"Everyone has some darkness in them. But the fact that senpai wasn't fully controlled means your sense of justice outweighs your darkness."
Rin Seiya exhaled.
"Good. If I'd been controlled into challenging you to a Dark Game, I would never forgive myself."
"Don't worry about it. Even if that happened, I'd find a way to bring you back."
"So dependable, kouhai!"
The miniature Rin Seiya bounced slightly and clapped him on the shoulder.
They kept moving. Eventually, at the far end of the black threads, a figure became visible.
She was standing still in the white space, and she looked exactly like Rin Seiya. Same face. Same proportions. No miniaturization.
The only difference was her hair. Where Rin Seiya's was a shining white, this version's was an equally luminous black.
"That's... my dark side?"
The miniature Rin Seiya looked at her own chest, then at the full-sized version across the white space.
A long pause.
"This is a problem, Amano-kouhai. My dark side seems to be significantly larger than my bright side."
"Size doesn't indicate anything about which one wins."
Amano slowed his approach and moved carefully toward the black-haired figure. She had been completely still until he came close. The moment he entered some invisible radius, her eyes opened.
Black irises. Where Rin Seiya's star-shaped pupils were distinctive and warm, this version's had the same star shape rendered entirely in black.
Dark Rin Seiya looked at Amano, and her lips curved into a smile that carried a completely different quality than anything the real Rin Seiya had ever aimed at him.
She walked directly toward him.
His hand moved to his card case on reflex.
If this was the Puppeteer's puppet, the next step would be a Dark Game.
Could you even initiate a Dark Game inside a soul room?
The question turned out to be hypothetical. No Dark Game opened.
Instead, the black-haired Rin Seiya walked up to him, raised both arms, and draped them over his shoulders, pulling herself close.
"Let's not duel, kouhai. Let's do something more fun with senpai."
Miniature Rin Seiya went completely rigid.
"What is she doing," she whispered, struggling to form words. "What is she doing what is she doing what is she doing."
The dark version glanced over at her smaller counterpart with something approaching disdain.
"You really want to claim you've never thought about it? That you only ever wanted to duel your kouhai? That everything you did was just about restoring the character you admired? After what happened two nights ago?"
"Two nights ago, the night..." The miniature Rin Seiya went red from her cheeks to the back of her ears and could not immediately produce a counter-argument.
The memory of her heartbeat during the Junk Warrior summon was apparently too recent to argue against cleanly.
Amano registered that the balance of the room was shifting in a direction he had not planned for.
The dark Rin Seiya's lips came close to his ear. The warmth of her breath was deliberate.
"Once I take control of the body, kouhai, you can do whatever you want with it. Senpai's treat."
Amano became aware that his own sense of virtue was under more pressure than he would have preferred to admit.
This opponent was formidable.
Then something clicked.
He pushed both arms away firmly and stepped back.
"Women are a hindrance. Get out of my way."
The dark Rin Seiya blinked.
"What are you saying, kouhai?"
"You don't know what I just said, do you?"
The miniature Rin Seiya had been moments away from losing the internal argument. She snapped back to full alertness.
"That line! That's Jack Atlas's line! Women are a total hindrance!"
"Exactly. You have no idea what I'm referencing." Amano pointed at the dark-haired figure. "Because you're not actually Rin Seiya-senpai."
The logic was clear enough once he had it.
If something had been following and attempting to take control of Rin Seiya since the night of the Riding Duel, it would have observed that night's events closely enough to construct a believable imitation. It would know about the duel. It would know about the character recreation that Rin Seiya cared so much about. The performance just now had been convincing enough to almost work.
But Rin Seiya had never once asked Amano to perform that specific scene.
"I will become number one in the world. Women are a total hindrance!"
The reason was simple. Rin Seiya was a woman. Whatever her dedication to authentic recreation, she had no interest in hearing Amano say that line to her face. Even for the sake of character accuracy.
A fake who had never watched 5D's would not know that particular line was the one she had deliberately excluded from their recreation sessions. The shared vocabulary of anime fans who had watched the same series was not something an outsider could fake on instinct.
"I was just excited and it slipped my mind," the dark figure said.
"I would never forget that line if I tried," the miniature Rin Seiya shot back through her teeth.
The figure had almost worked. What had actually broken it, in a way Amano found somewhat embarrassing to acknowledge, was not the Jack Atlas reference first. It was something else.
Rin Seiya had a smell. The one he had noticed on the sofa this evening. Not a product or a perfume, just something that was hers, something that registered as comfortable and grounding in a way that apparently reached into the soul room too. He had caught it faintly when he carried the miniature version to the mirror earlier. Five senses apparently transferred.
When the dark figure had pulled herself close to him, what he had smelled was sharp and artificial. Nothing like the real thing.
"Your smell is completely different from senpai's actual smell."
The miniature Rin Seiya, who had just started recovering her composure, immediately turned scarlet again. She pulled her collar away from her neck and tried to discreetly smell herself.
"Is it because I didn't shower yesterday? How embarrassing."
"The performance is over," Amano said, looking at the figure directly. "Puppeteer."
"You're just as difficult to deal with as always, Amano Rei. You got most of it right. But you're wrong about one thing. I'm not the Puppeteer."
The figure reached to her side and drew out an identity card, the same kind the Puppeteer used, and flicked it toward Amano. He caught it cleanly.
He turned it over.
Printed on the surface was a mask, and below the mask, a title.
Soulswindler.
"The Puppeteer's card is temporarily out of commission, thanks to your girlfriend. This is my card instead."
"The Soulswindler. Pleased to meet you."
She finished the introduction with a smile that had nothing in common with Rin Seiya's.
Dark energy rose from beneath her feet.
"A Dark Game? You can actually open a Dark Game inside a soul room?"
"Oh, so you thought this was a soul room. Then Eva has been deceiving you too."
She spread both hands wide, the smile settling into something that fit the space around it better than anything Rin Seiya's face should have been able to produce.
"Welcome to the divine domain. Now then. In the name of an evil god, stake your souls and duel."
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