Chapter 285: Does Your Daughter Know You're Doing This?
Defeating a Lost Duelist apparently also awarded Spacetime Points. Fifteen of them, three times the reward for sheltering one.
[Spacetime Points: 19]
Nineteen. And there it was.
One point short.
To send both Saotome Rei and Kaiser Ryo home, he needed two Return Tickets at ten points each. Twenty points total. He currently had nineteen.
The point he was missing, he reflected, was the exact point he had spent impulse-buying Jaden's card pack.
Serves you right for having a gacha addiction.
"Ryo-sama!"
Dusk had replaced the sunset overhead, and the Nanki'in estate's paper lanterns were beginning to glow along the courtyard eaves. Tsukiyu Yukishiro pushed past everyone to reach Kaiser's side, the alarm on her face unguarded.
Kaiser's physical state was visibly poor. Almost certainly the back-side Cyber Dark stream's feedback taking its toll on a body that was still technically in recovery.
Even so: thanks to the treatment he had received in Eden, the outcome was considerably better than what the anime had shown for this moment. There, Kaiser had dueled with Cyber End Dragon's power and afterward collapsed unconscious under the sunset, and ultimately had to conduct the rest of his dueling life from a wheelchair. Here, Kaiser was on one knee, breathing hard but upright, clearly uncomfortable but not incapacitated.
"You pushed yourself too hard, Ryo-sama. The doctors said your heart hasn't completely healed yet..."
"I'm fine. The duel took a lot out of me. But I don't regret it."
Even after an eight-thousand-point End Phase hit from his own Power Bond, Kaiser had gotten what he came for. He looked up at Amano through the discomfort, finding a smile somewhere behind it.
"Dragging you into something this unreasonable: I'm grateful you put up with it, Amano."
"No. This was a great duel, Kaiser."
"It really was something to watch, Zero-sama." Nanki'in Yukihime turned her folding fan in her hand with the satisfied expression of someone who had just been reminded why she used to love this game. "It's been a long time since a duel gave me that feeling. That feeling from when I was competing professionally. Amano, have you considered entering the professional circuit?"
"I'm a first-year student. Wouldn't I have to wait until I graduate? Isn't that a firm rule?"
"The professional circuit runs on pure ability. Rules for the willing tend to have exceptions. If you ever have any interest, please do consider letting the Nanki'in family sponsor you."
Professional duelists in Eden apparently operated similarly to how e-sports had worked in his previous life: tied to sponsors, following a commercial framework. The GX anime had shown the same thing. A mature professional ecosystem with its own established business model.
For now, Amano had no particular interest in going professional. Academy life was already fully packed. Classes consumed most of the day. Two club memberships. Weekly Chronicle sessions with Kaiba Chiaki on a standing schedule. Weekends that were supposed to be free but consistently turned into something like this.
Somehow, at eighteen years old, he had developed what could only be described as a time management problem, and the sensation of being fully booked every hour of every day had become entirely normal.
And now, on top of everything, he had the added assignment of figuring out how to return two Lost Duelists to their original era.
On the subject of returning Lost Duelists: one of the two needed to be sorted out sooner rather than later.
Amano pulled Tsukiyu Yukishiro aside and asked her directly about Kaiser's physical condition. The heart treatment, specifically. She was initially guarded, but something in the way he asked settled her down and she answered honestly.
Kaiser's situation had been genuinely dire even before the alternate world journey. Even the best medical facilities in the GX era had given him a discouraging prognosis. Three thousand years of medical advancement had at least made treatment possible, but not instantaneous. The realistic estimate was around one year before his heart was fully restored.
Which meant Amano could not send Kaiser home yet. Returning him now would mean returning him to a body that was still failing and to doctors who could not do what Eden's medicine could.
In a strange way, becoming a Lost Duelist might have been the best possible outcome for Kaiser Ryo. At the end of this year, he would leave Eden with a working heart, and for the first time in years, he would be able to duel without counting the cost.
With Kaiser off the table for now, the one who could go home was clear.
Amano drew Saotome Rei aside to a corner of the courtyard while the lanterns were still the only light, far enough from the others that their conversation would be private.
"Rei. There's a way to send you home. Back to your original world."
"Back to the Academy?" Saotome Rei went wide-eyed. "That's actually possible?"
She was not dim. Skipping grades to enter Duel Academy at eleven was the kind of thing that did not happen by accident. She had already worked out on her own, long before anyone explained it to her, that the city she had arrived in was not her city, the year was not her year, and the person in front of her now was not the Amano Rei she remembered from the GX timeline.
"Rei: this is not your original world, and I am not the Amano Rei you know. You should go back."
"...waaah!"
Amano had expected relief. Possibly reluctance. Not this.
Big, immediate tears, rolling down the girl's cheeks with no warning and no sign of stopping.
"What's wrong? Going home means seeing your family and friends again. That should be good news."
"I know. I know it already, and I knew it before you said it." Rei scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, which accomplished nothing because the tears were not slowing down. "The senpai here and the senpai I know aren't the same person. I know that."
The lantern light was low enough, and the corner of the courtyard far enough, that nobody across the estate could clearly see what was happening. Amano had timed the conversation well, at least.
"But the senpai here is so gentle. He doesn't ignore me, he doesn't treat me like I don't matter. He made sure I had somewhere to live. He brought me out today. Compared to the senpai in my world, the senpai here is... he's actually better!"
So his GX self had apparently operated with a particular minimum of social warmth toward Saotome Rei. That tracked with the fact that she had ended up in the category of "memories that didn't stick." The years had apparently rounded off the edges that a thirteen-year-old in Duel Academy had probably found too pointy to approach easily.
Rei's tear-bright eyes looked up at him. "So... can I stay, senpai?"
Fine. One person who refuses to go home.
He was going to need to grind for card packs at this rate.
"Alright. When you want to go back, tell me and I'll send you then."
Rei's expression flipped from watery to beaming in approximately one second. "I knew senpai was kind! Now I want to marry you even more!"
The real reason for the reprieve was practical: Kikawayu had been glancing over at the two of them every thirty seconds or so since Amano had said he wanted a few minutes alone with Rei. Those "few minutes" had run considerably longer than expected. If Kikawayu crossed the courtyard to check on them and found Rei with red eyes and tearstains, the explanation that followed would require more creative energy than Amano had available after the duel.
The Return Ticket had no expiration. When the girl started missing home, she would make the choice herself.
The evening was well into its second hour by the time Amano realized that leaving graciously was no longer an option. Nanki'in Yukihime had extended dinner with the kind of warmth that did not actually take no for an answer, and a home-cooked meal from a household of this caliber was not an invitation anyone in the group was particularly eager to refuse.
"Amano: I still have something I want to discuss with you privately. You haven't forgotten what I said when we parted ways at the Heavenly Chalice Dragon Pavilion last week, have you?"
The thing Yukihime had specifically flagged at the end of the Nanki'in-Jinguuji farewell banquet. The one topic she had made a point of reserving for later.
That had only ever been one subject: the Millennium Items.
In the week since, the Nanki'in family intelligence network had presumably done the work of finding out how Jinguuji Domitsu had acquired the Millennium Rod's abilities. If Yukihime had answers, Amano had every reason to stay and hear them.
"We'll take you up on dinner as well, then. Thank you."
"Oh, wonderful. Don't hold back."
The smile behind the folding fan had something in it that Amano could not quite read.
"This way, Amano-bro."
Ryuuma led him through the estate to Yukihime's study before dinner. When Amano pushed open the door, he understood immediately why the invitation had been framed as before dinner rather than during or after.
This was not a study.
Or rather: the room contained books and shelves along one wall, but the dominant feature was a low lacquered dining table flanked by decorative screens on two sides that drew the space inward and focused the soft pearl light on the food arranged across the surface. Rose petals scattered across the tatami. A lit incense burner in the corner perfuming the room with something warm and slightly sweet. The temperature was carefully comfortable.
A Japanese-style candlelit dinner. Set for two.
From where Amano stood at the door, he could see a woman already seated at the far side of the table with her back to him, wearing a formal kimono of obvious quality.
Something about this was not right even as a setting for discussing Millennium Items, let alone as a setting for anything else.
Does your daughter know you're doing this, Yukihime-san?
He was already considering reversing out of the doorway when he discovered the door had been locked from outside.
Trapped.
The noise of the door opening had evidently reached the woman at the table, because she began to turn.
Her face resembled Yukihime's: the same bone structure, the same composure in the features. But on this face, the mature quality that had made Yukihime who she was had been replaced with something younger and less practiced. Clean and lovely in the way that youth always was, but visibly uncertain in the way that experience hadn't had time to settle into confidence.
"Amano?"
"Class rep?" The word came out before he could stop it, along with the immediate recollection that Sakuya had specifically asked him not to call her that inside the estate.
"Where is Yukihime-san? Didn't she say she wanted to talk about the Millennium Items?"
"Mother said she had something to discuss with Tsukiyu Yukishiro..." Sakuya's gaze moved to the candles on the table, then to the rose petals on the tatami, then to the screens, and the particular coloring of her cheeks in the candlelight was not something that could be attributed to the candlelight. "So she asked me to keep you company for dinner in the meantime."
Amano understood the situation completely.
Nanki'in Muramasa's daughter through and through. The strategic sophistication was the same, with the only visible difference being that the patriarch had been more comfortable with direct force and the matriarch preferred this sort of arrangement. Either way, the Nanki'in approach to getting what they wanted did not appear to have changed much across generations.
If she had actually wanted Sakuya to do what the room's atmosphere implied, Ryuuma would not have locked the door from outside. Locking the door was a test. The test, apparently, was whether Amano would take advantage of the situation.
"Did Yukihime-san give you any other instructions? Any notes about what to do or what to pay attention to?"
Sakuya's lips parted slightly. On most people that expression would pass without notice. On Sakuya, whose face moved so little on ordinary occasions, it registered clearly.
"How did you know?"
"What did she tell you."
"She said to take good care of you."
After saying it, Sakuya reached up to fold her sleeve back from her wrist, baring one pale forearm, and picked up the small flask from the table to refill the cup at Amano's place setting.
This was the first time he had seen her in this style of dress. The school uniform was Sakuya's default: jacket, black short skirt, the katana-type Duel Disk strap at her hip, the overall impression of a fighting-arts beauty who happened to be enrolled in school. The formal kimono was something different, and the candlelight did things to the quality of it that the school environment would never have occasion to produce.
The honest assessment was that she looked genuinely beautiful, in a way that the daily school context had never fully surfaced.
"Sit down, Amano. If I don't look after you properly, Mother will have things to say about it tonight."
Their Sakuya, in her pure and unworldly state, had taken "take good care of you" to mean exactly what it sounded like at face value: make sure the guest was well fed and comfortable. The romantic architecture of the room had simply not registered for her as anything other than how the room had been set up.
Which meant the result she was going to produce for Yukihime would be the results of a perfectly ordinary dinner between two people, and Yukihime was going to have words about it.
That was a conversation entirely between the two of them, and not Amano's problem.
Amano sat down.
The Nanki'in family's home-brewed flower wine was something he would have preferred to appreciate at a more leisurely pace and in a context where driving home afterward wasn't an eventual consideration. What he could confirm in the first few sips was that everything expensive was made to deceive: it tasted almost entirely of flowers with a light sweetness, nothing like what the label "wine" implied, and he had completely misjudged what two or three cups of the thing would do to him.
"There's actually something I've been meaning to apologize for, Amano."
"Apologize? What did you do?"
"Last week at the hotel, when you weren't paying attention, I..."
The candlelight put Sakuya's face in clear view from across the table. Whatever she had been about to say, the color in her cheeks made it clear this was not a minor thing she had been carrying. The red had reached her ears.
Whatever came next, Amano did not hear it. The room had gone soft at the edges. The candles seemed to be doing something unusual with the light, and his ability to process what he was seeing and hearing had begun to fall behind what his eyes and ears were reporting.
He was not a person who drank. He had known that about himself. He had simply not correctly applied that knowledge to a cup of liquid that tasted like flower juice.
The last thing Amano registered before his thoughts went quiet was the warmth of Sakuya moving to his side, her hands steadying him with more care than he had been expecting, and the soft resistance of her shoulder as she guided his head into place against it.
Typical. Even when completely unprepared for a situation, our class representative thought of someone else first.
Though: if I'm being honest, she really should have thought of a lap pillow. That's the standard call for this scenario.
...
In the familiar weightless space of a half-dream, standing on the floor of a consciousness he had visited before: a girl with long white hair, bare feet against the floor, her posture carrying a kind of careful uncertainty that did not quite match what he had expected.
This was not Eva. New visitor.
"Amano Rei..."
The moment she spoke, the voice settled it completely. The cool register, the slight hesitation in it, the quality that came through once per duel and then went quiet. He had heard it earlier tonight over Blue-Eyes White Dragon.
"Blue-Eyes? Is that you?"
"Mm. Yes."
The lore from the DM anime had always positioned Kisara as the soul of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, the white-haired girl from ancient Egypt whose soul had fused with the dragon's power. The figure in front of him resembled that description, but the impression was different in a way that he couldn't name until she explained it herself.
"I came to tell you something. About the Millennium Key and the Millennium Rod."
Amano stopped. "You want to talk about the Millennium Items?"
He had come to the estate specifically to learn about the Millennium Rod. He had gotten drunk on flower wine and was apparently conducting that conversation in a dream with his Blue-Eyes White Dragon's card spirit. This was an unexpected avenue.
The Millennium Key was still locked inside Nanki'in Yukki's Eva Terminal under a password that Onikiri had set and nobody else knew. Retrievable only through whatever the next Chronicle held.
The Millennium Rod had belonged to Jinguuji Domitsu and had been used for the Dark Game. Where it was now and how Domitsu had acquired it: that was the part Yukihime's network had been investigating.
"The Millennium Key's password is hidden inside the next Duel Chronicle. And the Millennium Rod..." A pause that had some uncertainty in it. "That belongs to Seth. I need it back. It's important."
Seth: the ancient Egyptian priest. Kaiba Seto's past life. The one who had been paired with Kisara in the original DM canon, who carried the Millennium Rod as part of his role.
Which brought him back to the obvious question.
"Are you actually Kisara?"
"No." The white-haired girl shook her head, the slight awkwardness in her movement suggesting she had been hoping the question would not come. "Kisara is my older sister. And Seth is my brother-in-law. Which is why I need the Rod back."
Kisara had a younger sister.
And the soul of the fourth Blue-Eyes White Dragon was, apparently, that sister.
Amano was still processing what to ask next when a sound reached into the dream space from outside it: someone calling his name, softly and repeatedly.
The girl in front of him registered it at the same moment he did, and her reaction was immediate: the shoulders went up, the eyes went wide with the very specific panic of someone who had not been expecting company. She took two quick, barefoot steps toward the corner of the dream space, glanced back once with an expression that managed to be simultaneously startled and embarrassed, and retreated.
She was gone before he could say anything.
Amano's awareness surfaced back to the warmth of the room and the lingering scent of incense and roses.
What he came back to: a weight across his legs that had not been there before, and above him, a face that was not Sakuya's.
"Good morning, Rei-sama."
Nanki'in Yukihime, now seated beside him with her folding fan open in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, was wearing an expression of unambiguous satisfaction.
Amano processed the situation at something less than his usual speed. "Yukihime-san, how are you here? Where did Sakuya go?"
"She was so nervous sitting alone with you that she worked up quite a sweat through her kimono, the poor thing. I had her go wash up. Which means it's just the two of us for the moment: perfect for a proper conversation."
He was going to get to the bottom of this. "Was it you who locked the door?"
"That? Ryuuma accidentally locked it on his way out. I've already had him go receive his appropriate correction."
Poor Ryuuma. Running security for a household like this was a thankless career.
"Consider it a minor accident that worked out well. I also wanted to see a bit of your character for myself, Amano. And I'm glad I did. For a moment I was worried you might turn out to be the same kind of man as Sakuya's father. Fortunately, you put that concern to rest."
So it had been a test as well. The locked room, the romantic atmosphere, the daughter left alone with the guest: a completely arranged scenario to see what Amano would do. The fact that Kikawayu's particular psychological aftermath had left him in no state to approach any woman with anything other than careful restraint had served him well here, even though that had not exactly been the plan.
"You shouldn't blame the mother too much, Amano. I've made a study of people over the years, since I learned the hard way to. A man can tell you anything. What he does when you aren't watching: that's what he actually is."
A former professional duelist running a household at the top of a significant criminal organization, twenty years out, having apparently been badly burned once by someone who seemed one way and turned out another. That kind of experience produced exactly this kind of careful reading.
"The four people who came with you today: three of them have feelings for you that go beyond what friends should have. That's not something I could miss, and it's not something I could avoid worrying about on Sakuya's behalf."
Kikawayu, that deep, was evident even in male-mode. And Saotome Rei's attachment was as obvious as a person could make it. But three people?
The four who had come: Shio, Kikawayu, Yui, Saotome Rei. Setting aside Saotome Rei and Kikawayu, that left Shio and Yui. Yui carried a genuine affection that had been specifically shaped and limited by Kikawayu's interference across their entire shared history. Shio was Amano's sister and was explicitly outside the romance system.
Which meant...
Nanki'in Yukihime closed her fan and looked at him with an expression he could not easily deflect.
"Forgive my directness, Amano Rei." All pleasantness had cleared from her voice. What remained was the quiet precision of someone who had spent a long time learning to see clearly. "Amano Shio is not actually your blood sister, is she?"
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