Chapter 198: Gene Identification, the Awakening of Yui and Amano
The District 31 Duelist Service Center was as lively as ever.
For a bottom-level district facility, it carried a certain prestige. It was the only Service Center serving multiple surrounding areas, and even with the bottom floors' generally sparse duelist population, the lobby was packed with people and the wait queue stretched just as long as the last time Amano had been here.
Fortunately, the Eva network managing District 31 was running smoothly. Given that this place drew the highest concentration of duelists in the surrounding areas, any breakdown in order would have been catastrophic.
Yui had already checked in at the front desk and was now waiting to be called.
"I'm so nervous, Amano." She pressed a hand to her chest and took a slow, deliberate breath, forcing herself to stay calm. "Was it like this for you the first time?"
"Probably worse than you," Amano admitted honestly.
Her situation was incomparably better than his had been. She had the shop owner covering her expenses at no charge, a reliable childhood friend at her side, and Chiha watching over her like a devoted little sister. Even if Yui's gene identification turned out to be unremarkable, the connections she had already built would see her through academy life without serious trouble.
Back when Amano had stood in this same center, he had been all alone, betting his last handful of savings on a single chance to change his fate.
"Don't worry, Yui-nee," Chiha said brightly. "Whatever comes out, I'll look after you in the mid-level district. I can support you for life!"
Even so, Yui could not quite shake the anxiety. "What if the monsters I get aren't particularly cute? My shopkeeper image would take a serious hit."
So that was what she was worried about.
The cards' power level mattered less to her than their aesthetic appeal. That was a very Yui thing to be concerned about.
About twenty minutes later, the Service Center finally called her name. Yui slapped both cheeks lightly and shook her head. Her pink twintails swung with the motion.
"Alright. Here I go!"
"Do your best, Yui-nee."
"Relax. It'll be over before you know it."
The door to the identification pod sealed shut, leaving Amano and Chiha alone outside to wait.
Chiha said, "Amano Rei, which summoning method do you think Yui-nee's field will lean toward?"
This mattered to Kaiba Chiha enormously. She wanted to share the same academy as Yui.
It was already hard enough that her own older sister had been separated from her at a different academy due to their different summoning methods. Chiha was desperately hoping Yui's field would be Xyz-related.
Amano considered it. "My guess would be Fusion, most likely."
Chiha made a face. "Ugh. Could you occasionally say something that actually goes the way I want, Amano Rei?"
You were the one who asked me to guess.
He did have a reason for the guess. Yui possessed the Fusion Mastery skill, after all. It stood to reason that her archetype would lean toward Fusion.
Of course, he could not rule out the possibility that the remaining two skills were Synchro Mastery and Xyz Mastery respectively.
"But regardless of the summoning method," Amano continued, "I don't think Yui's field will be weak."
The shop owner had mentioned her potential before Amano left District 32. The man was suspicious from head to toe and rarely spoke a straight word, but the fact that he knew how to repair Eva network bugs made it clear he was not someone to underestimate. His decision to personally sponsor Yui's enrollment at a mid-level academy was rooted in a genuine assessment of her talent as a duelist.
Though after spending two days around that masked oddball, Amano had concluded the shop owner's stated reasons for sending Yui away were mostly cover. His first reason had been that she was lonely. His second was that he did not want her potential to go to waste. His third, mentioned almost as an afterthought, was that he did not want Kaiba Chiha to keep lingering in District 32.
Looking at those three reasons now with fresh eyes, the third one was almost certainly the only real one. The shop owner had likely done something to earn Kaiba Chiaki's enmity at some point, and was worried that Chiha staying in District 32 would eventually draw her older sister down to personally demolish his little shop.
Speaking of Kaiba Chiaki, with Chiha beside him and the retrieval task nearly complete, Amano decided now was a reasonable time to check in.
"Chiha. About your sister. Your actual sister, not Yui. Are you still angry with her?"
"From the moment I nearly got killed, my one and only older sister has been Yui-nee!"
Her answer came out more resolute than any previous version of it. She had clearly given the question real thought, knowing she was about to return to the mid-level district.
"As for Kaiba Chiaki, I don't know who that is."
"Alright," Amano said, shaking his head. "I'll pass that along word for word."
"Wha?" Chiha's expression flickered with unmistakable panic. "You don't need to actually go and say something like that. It's not really that important..."
She had caved in about three seconds.
Honestly, it was none of his business how the two sisters sorted things out between themselves. As long as he was not made a pawn in whatever game they were playing, he was content to stay out of it entirely.
"Ahhhh!"
A sharp scream pierced through the wall of the identification pod.
The soundproofing in these things was just as terrible as he remembered.
"Yui-nee, are you alright?!" Chiha slapped her palm against the door in alarm.
A moment later, the lock disengaged and the door swung open. Yui stepped out with tears pricking the corners of her eyes, her face crumpled in unmistakable distress.
"What happened, Yui?" Amano asked. "Was the field unusable?"
"The monsters I got..." Yui sniffled. "Are not cute at all."
She held out all ten of her soul-bound starter cards for Amano and Chiha to inspect.
Amano stared at the first card.
He could see why a girl like Yui would not find these particularly cute. But this was D/D/D. Different Dimension Demon.
The moment he registered what he was looking at, the Hacker Invasion skill started whispering at the back of his mind.
D/D/D Doom King Armageddon. Rank 6 DARK Fiend-Type Xyz Monster. Requires 2 Fiend-Type Level 6 monsters as Xyz Materials.
Effect 1: When a monster effect, Spell Card, or Trap Card that includes an effect to Special Summon a monster is activated, detach up to 1 Xyz Material from this card to negate that activation and destroy it. After that, this card and 1 D/D monster you control can each gain 1800 ATK until the End Phase.
Effect 2: When this card is sent from the field to the Graveyard, add 1 Contract card from your Deck to your hand.
An Xyz Monster right out of the starting ten. And not just any Xyz Monster. D/D/D Doom King Armageddon was the kind of Extra Deck staple you could deploy at almost any point in a duel and get real mileage out of it.
The contrast hit Amano somewhere personal. His own starting ten had been a wall of blank vanilla monsters with no effects. The Eva system had clearly not distributed its generosity evenly.
His sister had Cyber Dragons. His best friend had the Three Phantom Demon Lords. Now his childhood friend had D/D/D.
Was the vanilla archetype genuinely the weakest field to come out of District 32?
Though wait. If the first card was an Xyz Monster, had he read the situation incorrectly? Was Fusion Mastery actually unrelated to Yui's identification?
Chiha, for her part, was having a great deal of difficulty keeping her expression neutral. If Yui's identification had produced an Xyz Monster, that meant she could enroll at Xyz Academy. She could become Chiha's junior. The idea of having her beloved Yui-nee as her kohai at the same school was almost too good to be real.
But Amano was not ready to draw conclusions yet. "Yui, what are the other cards?"
"All of them are here." Yui spread the remaining cards out for them to see. "The only one that comes even close to cute is this one."
D/D/D Oracle King d'Arc. DARK Fiend-Type Fusion Monster. Requires 2 D/D monsters.
Effect: As long as this card remains in the Monster Zone, any effect that would inflict damage to you instead restores your LP by that amount.
There it was. A Fusion Monster, exactly as Amano had predicted. His reasoning about Fusion Mastery had been right after all.
And among the remaining starting cards, there was also D/D/D Gust King Alexander. A Synchro Monster.
D/D/D Gust King Alexander. WIND Fiend-Type Synchro Monster. 1 D/D Tuner plus 1 or more non-Tuner monsters.
Effect: Once per turn, when another D/D monster is Normal or Special Summoned to your side of the field while this card is in the Monster Zone, you can Special Summon 1 Level 1 or lower D/D monster from your Deck.
Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz, all in the same starting ten.
Exactly as he had suspected. Yui did not have one Mastery. She had all of them.
In his memories from his previous life, D/D/D was one of the rare archetypes in the game's entire history capable of working with every Extra Deck summoning method. Fusion, Synchro, Xyz, Pendulum, Link. Five methods, and D/D/D could navigate every single one.
In Eden Tower's academy structure, the Extra Zone had not yet been unlocked and the Pendulum mechanic had never existed. Even so, Yui still had access to D/D/D's Fusion, Synchro, and Xyz lines.
The urge crossed his mind to joke that Yui was essentially the protagonist of one of those stories about a duelist who masters all three summoning methods at once.
"Yui," Amano said, "with D/D/D as your archetype, you can technically enroll at any of the three academies. It comes down entirely to personal preference."
Yui gave it quiet, serious thought before answering. "I don't really understand the differences between the academies or the summoning methods. But if it's possible at all, I want to be with everyone."
You have picked the one answer that is completely impossible to deliver on.
Shio was at the middle school. Kikawayu was at Fusion Academy. Amano was at Synchro Academy. Kaiba Chiha was at Xyz Academy.
A perfect four-way scatter across every available institution.
That wish of yours to be with everyone is not something even D/D/D can fix.
With the gene identification done, the next step was straightforward. Yui needed to keep pulling cards from the Service Center until her deck reached forty. Standard procedure.
Which reminded Amano that he had not run a real gacha pull in quite a while. Not buying individual cards, not exchanging academy ranking points, but a genuine pull from the Eva Terminal, drawing from his own vanilla archetype pool.
He had mostly stopped for two reasons. First, spending 1,000 Eva Points per card on blank Normal Monsters with no effects had an objectively terrible return rate. Second, every attempt he had made at Academy City had come up empty, and after enough disappointments he had simply let the habit go.
But today felt different.
Amano had always trusted the strange pull this particular building seemed to have on his luck. Every usable vanilla card he owned had been drawn in the bottom-level districts. Blue-Eyes White Dragon. The vanilla HERO pair. Dark Magician. All of them had come from here or somewhere nearby.
He was a firm believer in gacha superstition, and right now that belief was louder than it had been in months.
Seeing Yui's starting ten produce D/D/D had only made the feeling stronger. Something was pulling him toward those machines. He could feel it clearly.
Amano stepped into an available gacha terminal pod, sealed the door behind him, and keyed in his archetype.
The pod filled with pale blue data streams flowing in slow rings around him. The familiar enclosed atmosphere settled over the space.
"Oh my, how interesting. So this is what a gacha pull looks like."
Apparently experiencing this for the first time, Ivaliss materialized out of his deck and drifted through the data currents with obvious curiosity.
"I wonder if I can rig this for you~" She tilted her head with a scheming little smile. "Come on, tell Ivaliss-nee what card you want. I'll see if I can pull it straight out of the Eva network for you!"
Self-service card selection? Sure, he would bite.
"I want Divine Arsenal AA-ZEUS - Sky Thunder, or Calamity Star - Typhon. Super Magical Dragon Knight - Red-Eyes Dragon Knight would also be acceptable."
Whatever she could or could not actually do, he might as well put in an order.
"Ohhhh," Ivaliss hummed, floating in a slow circle with her eyes narrowed in exaggerated contemplation. "Those cards..."
"Never heard of a single one!" She stuck out her tongue cheerfully and vanished.
Then what did you come out here for?
No use dwelling on it. Amano entered ten thousand Eva Points into the terminal.
Current balance: 114,000 Eva Points.
If he was going to pull, he was going to pull properly. Ten at once or nothing.
The pod responded to the input. Ten card backs erupted from the flowing data streams and arranged themselves in the air before him, hovering in a loose arc and waiting to be flipped.
He had been right to come here. He could feel it in his hands.
Back at Academy City, every vanilla pull had returned nothing but cards he could not use. But here in District 31, the cards had always come through for him. This place recognized something in him that the mid-level district did not.
And right now, one of those ten floating cards was radiating a low golden glow. The same deep color as every legendary pull he had ever made. The same warmth that had announced Blue-Eyes White Dragon. The same resonance that had introduced Dark Magician.
A fifth Blue-Eyes seemed unlikely. But Red-Eyes Black Dragon, the Dragon of Possibility, felt entirely plausible. That would make sense. Victory's white dragon and possibility's black dragon, side by side in the same deck.
"Come on. Red-Eyes Black Dragon."
He reached out and flipped the glowing card.
The dragon staring back at him stopped him cold.
It was not Red-Eyes Black Dragon. It was not a fifth Blue-Eyes White Dragon. It was not even a true Normal Monster in the strict sense of the word. The card in his hand bore an effect.
But the condition for that effect was completely inseparable from Normal Monsters. The Eva network had apparently decided that a card bound this tightly to vanilla deserved a place in the vanilla pool, and Amano was not going to argue with that classification.
Because the moment he saw what it was, every ounce of envy he had accumulated melted away completely.
His sister's Cyber Dragons. His best friend's Three Phantom Demon Lords. His childhood friend's D/D/D.
None of it mattered anymore.
From this moment forward, the vanilla archetype was beginning its own awakening.
One card was enough to represent what that awakening meant. One card was enough to show what the vanilla field actually contained beneath its surface. Even a monster with no effects at all could burn with a brilliance that made it impossible to look away.
Gem Dragon - Imperial Topaz Dragon. Level 6. EARTH Attribute. Dragon-Type / Effect.
ATK 2600 / DEF 0.
This card can only be Tribute Summoned by Tributing 1 Normal Monster.
Effect 1: Once per turn, during the opponent's Main Phase, you can reveal this card from your hand to Tribute Summon 1 Gem Dragon monster.
Effect 2: When this card is Tribute Summoned, each of the following effects applies. Negate the effects of all face-up monsters your opponent controls. Banish all opponent's monsters that share either a Type or Attribute with any Normal Monster in your Graveyard.
A monster that could only reach the field by offering a vanilla card as its Tribute. A monster whose full power only activated through that same Tribute Summon. Every part of this card lived and breathed Normal Monsters. Every part of it was built around vanilla.
And the moment it hit the field, it could strip the effects from every opposing monster in one clean sweep, then erase an entire Type or Attribute from the opponent's side of the board, stacking further banishments for every matching Normal Monster already waiting in the Graveyard.
This was the potential hidden inside the cards that everyone else had thrown away.
This was the light that a raw, uncut gem could produce.