Link VRAINS's SOL Headquarters, approximately time-has-stopped-ticking past I-forgot-what-time-it-was-anyway in the after-morning-noon. There is nobody around, footsteps resonating inside the empty white buildings filled with data diamonds and other unknown fancy digital effects. While the Ignis Warfare is taking place outside, Ema, or rather Ghost Girl, has her own side-mission to accomplish. This is why she is here and not by Aoi, or rather, Blue Maiden's side. She trusts this girl and her partners, the ever-so-victorious Playmaker and Soulburner along with their pro-humanity Ignes, to win against the hardships waiting for them. She cannot really help them win against Lighting anyway.
She may not be able to do that, but she can do other things to shift the balance around. She has to do something to reverse the tide in the right direction.
Ghost Girl finds herself anxiously walking around the premise, the echo of her footsteps being the only noise around her, white walls and ceiling almost blinding her by their sheer purity that just hides how shady SOL Technologies truly are. There is exactly one sane man in that building and she's here to prevent his conversion to data by some lunatics with too much incompetence and free time on their hands. Converting him into data won't be useful for any of them: is she throwing herself into the jaws of that company? Most certainly.
The question would rather be: why does she throw herself into said jaws? She knows they're a trap waiting to vanquish her. On that the question changes: is it worth knowingly risking herself in an obvious trap? To that she would usually hesitate to answer, but there she was with a bold and confident "yes" to throw at it.
Ghost Girl eventually meets a regal corridor leading to what she can only assume to be a throne room. The fancy palace aspects are quickly wearing down on her: the person waiting at the end, the one who caught her main hirer and ex-teammate, has to have an ego bigger than hers. In a way, that's better: she's always preferred crushing pretentious people than winning against fellas with a low self-esteem.
Instead of knocking on the wooden door with golden decorations she eventually finds herself meeting, the huntress kicks it wide open, emergency programs ready to be used against the eventual menace in case it'd get too dangerous. She, however, doesn't plan on backing down until she has won: if she leaves, it's to get backup, technical or human.
Plus, Akira would have preferred her to have these with her.
The quite literal queen is sitting in her throne with a smug look Ghost Girl has an unforgettable need to remove from her face. Dressed like a business woman in a regal palace, she matches what little about his boss Akira would tell her: short blue-and-green hair, proud, cunning, fierce and merciless. If she wasn't meant to smash Queen's face onto the floor for being a terrible human being, she would have commented on her beauty. Instead, she gets mentally ready to duel her.
"If it isn't Ghost Girl, Zaizen's favourite bounty huntress…" Her voice resonates in the empty room as an eerie smile makes her onto her face.
"I'm sure I don't have to tell you why I'm here," she simply and drily replies. She doesn't wait to ask her main question. "What did you do to Zaizen?"
"Perhaps I should tell you would you win over me in a Master Duel, Ms Bessho."
Goddammit. She still prepares out her Duel Disk and her spirit. This a duel she cannot lose.
"Then Duel it is."
This may just be the duel of her life.
Queen has a royal-themed deck, because of course she would have one. The issue is to judge what level she is at Duel Monsters: it's safe to assume she isn't the first newbie one ca come across in Link VRAINS. It relies on Spell and Trap cards to summon monsters, only to Link Summon what Ema assumes to be her aces. There doesn't seem to be another summoning method to her deck, but that's to be seen. Skills are out of the question: this is already something she can put on the side and not worry about. She is willing to trade not being able to use Secret Cure for taking off one factor to take in account.
Ema has to keep it at least a bit safe. Her Altergeists aren't known for being the safest monsters to play on the field despite how easy her Hexstia and Dragvirion combo feels like to pull off. She needs to be careful and not waste a single opportunity. This may be a Duel with vital stakes at play: she cannot let herself get panicked or else it'll end terribly for everyone involved, not just her. SOL needs to be slowed down if not stopped if they're as unreasonable as that woman's ends and ways to get there: there is always a point where one needs to stop throwing everyone under the bus.
They don't speak to each other during the duel. Queen seems to do so out of spite and a want not to leak anything out. Ema is doing so as to keep her focus: if she can win this, then she will have a chance at getting her answers and freeing Akira from wherever he's kept in their real world. If he's trapped here, then that's even more of an opportunity not to mess up.
She doesn't let the questions she could wonder about prevent her from summoning the right monsters and playing the right cards at the right time against the right targets. The situation is too risky and too narrow between them to allow her to do so, to taunt or to show too much pride. She sets her own ego on the side for once: if she wins this Duel, then she will pride herself in it and tease Akira about it for about forever.
Ema gains a momentum by bypassing Queen's ace Monster, a Link-4 luminous queen thing (doesn't have the luxury to compliment that one either) and inflecting direct damage to her opponent. Queen herself is a mighty force to reckon with, of course, but she has watched Akira lose to her with all the frustration she could have felt from it. She has, technically, seen how her deck worked, but every duel is different for everyone, thus why she prefers to make sure she doesn't forget about the cards she could have changed or the optional strategies she may have in store.
Altergeists have to win where Tindangles have lost.
The sudden eerie smile on Queen's face doesn't reassure her in the slightest. There is a cold sweat running down her back as she waits in anticipation what is to come. A Flip card gets turned on by her own gestures, as an attempt to destroy it with Hexstia when the monstrous queen on the field can't be attacked, and there comes the worst. Ema cannot decide herself whether or not this is humiliating or sadistic towards Akira, but in all cases, she doesn't want to face that monster now.
She doesn't want to be facing Tindangle Hound here and now.
It's like fighting against Akira when he isn't here to control the beast. How much has this "queen" stole from him, to use one of his cards like that?!
"Is… Is this a sick joke of some sort…?" her voice is hesitant but asks anyway.
"I simply took the spolia opima that were to come back to me after my previous victory."
"You have to know this monster is… This is twisted!"
Ema feels rage boiling in her entire body. This isn't like her to get upset over a monster in a deck, but this can't be all there is to it. The smile on Queen's face, Akira's unknown whereabouts after his defeat against her and the use of that stupid Latin term all make her rage beyond reason.
Okay, she has to admit, Akira may be more than an ex-teammate for dirty jobs online and her main employer. There is quite obviously something more to it, more to her determination to win than to punish some asshole who put in so much danger someone as young and mentally fragile as Go Onizuka for fucking money, who vivisected and put inside a chip a living being made out of data but with a digital soul, who now uses a card of one of her subordinates to play a duel against someone who came here to, theoretically, save said subordinate.
What it is, she doesn't have many words to put on, but these feelings are here, they are intense, and she isn't backing down to determine what they are exactly. She owes him salary, potential blackmail material and maybe other stuff. She came too far to lose, she has her own side-mission and it's just become uncomfortably personal between that pseudo-monarch corrupted by money and her.
Ema switches perspectives for this duel. There isn't time to screw around and try to predict what is going to happen next. She has to be careful about Tindangle Hound's effect to lower her own Monsters' ATK if they're Link. A good thing Dragvirion isn't affected, she thinks, because her methods are about to become stomp-down when her deck isn't even made for that. She has to destroy that hellish dog before Queen can summon Tindangle Angel and rub salt into the wound on-top of enforcing these two's lines of defence.
These feelings are very personal, and she won't let them spill onto the floor for that very reason. She will win against that Queen without a shred of mercy, extract all the information from her even if she has to use her own non-log-out virus against her and then reunite with her fallen partner in crime. She won't back down. She presses a button on her Duel Disk, hoping its stealthy sides will allow it to go unnoticed, and resumes her turn.
This ends now.
Her plan somewhat works. Queen's deck has never been made for the Tindangle archetype: her pride will be the loss of her, what an ironic turn of events she cannot not love witnessing. Bypassing a Trap card through Monster effects, using a Spell to break through another barrier, she manages to beat Tindangle Hound without meaning to. She quickly consoles herself by thinking Akira wouldn't have wanted to see his Monster that way, in that deck, before finishing the duel off by destroying the light monarch on the field.
The palace starts to worsen as the holograms disappear and Ema walks to the fallen queen on the floor, her throne having been destroyed by Hexstia's final strike. Her virus hasn't worked, sadly, since all she gets from Queen is a glare and an instant logging-out. Oh well. There is, however, an ironically stereotypical character to how her prison seems to be the room whose door was hidden by the throne. Ema's instincts never mistake her, but before she goes through the door, she must pick up the Tindangle Hound card which fell to the ground. There are Monsters who don't deserve to be left behind in a graveyard, and this palace is already becoming one.
Strangely enough, she doesn't find Acute Cerberus or Tindangle Angel near the Hound. This was, indeed, a twisted joke: separating the siblings figuratively was also rubbing salt into the wound.
The prison part of the palace is as dark as one would expect it to be: the sharp change from overwhelming white to almost complete darkness with neon blue lines hurts her eyes, maybe in a last attempt to blind her and make her go back home, but Ghost Girl doesn't back down. She never does. She's so close to freeing her fallen partner in crime, if she was to walk back, she would hold a grudge against herself for the next eternity to come.
All the other "cages", which look more like cocoons composed of geometrical pieces of metal, are empty. She would have at least expected there to be fallen bounty hunters or previous lovers with dirty on Queen to reveal to the world to be there, but there seems to only be one person and she exactly knows who because, as it stands, he is right in front of her, on the other side of the drawn-out corridor, stuck in a transparent cage. Humiliation really seems to be something Queen is into.
As she arrives in front of it, she brushes her hand against the shell. There has to be a way to open it up, she thinks as she goes past it. It has to be remote-controlled just like everything else in Link VRAINS, probably by a program in Queen's possession. Nothing she cannot hack: it seems to be less complex than Hanoi's programming, so she proceeds to open a control panel on her own disk and checks the beast out.
The programming of this thing is far weaker than she could have expected: in minutes, she finds a fatal flaw in the code that allows her to break it from the inside by causing a fatal error, making it vanish in digital fairy powder and its prisoner fall to the ground with a noticeable lack of grace. If they weren't in a virtual world, he'd have surely scratched his knees on the floor.
Before she knows it Ema has knelt right next to him, deciding whether or not it's time to truly be earnest and honest or if she should just be smug and mischievous as usual. Her heart, whom she always trusts, tells her not to be such a jackass. Her hands around his shoulders, he feels strangely fragile: he always been slender, perhaps because he has been used to eating little to survive before, but never has she had the feeling he was fragile, as though he was made of glass, before. Maybe it's not about his frame, then, but if that's the case, why does it feel that way?
He's unconscious at first, when she picks him in her arms. She is at first tempted to get him out of that pseudo-palace, hack her avatar some strength to carry him like a bride (and then tease him about it), but she doesn't have the time to do that: the building threatens to fall on them, breaking a breach at a time, and they need to get out of here fast. Wrapping his arm around her shoulder, an arm of hers around his torso right under the armpits and her other hand sustaining his arm in place where it should be. He's a deadweight, but she's not going to lose now.
Walking Akira around on her shoulders when he isn't able to walk is terribly slowing her down and she truly wishes she would have had the time to make herself stronger. On another hand, she can still wish for him to wake up and help himself up. If she isn't wrong, his own avatar hasn't been injured in any way: he'll be fine when he's going to log off too.
Remind her again why their relationship is "professional"?
The blinding white of the ceilings and walls is slowly fading into an ugly brown, mud covering the walls, moss climbing in every corner, rotting starting to infect the premise. They needed to make it out fast, before anything could break and block their way. Quick, Ghost Girl, run at the speed of sound and don't look back!
It's breathless but immensely relieved for herself that Ema eventually makes it out of that place one room at a time, the one she just exited never failing to break right after she's through with it. When the light of outside virtual sky finally appears in front of her eyes, through a door which isn't technically far but feel too distant to her own tastes and pace, she secretly hopes very much to make it out alive at that point.
And she actually does: she wins against the clock, manages to get them both out of here with no scratch on their limbs and goes back on her D-Board, sitting on it still out of breath with a man on her lap, trying to recover from the sudden anxiety and pressure to find a safe spot. In theory, she would better off log out and try finding Akira in Den City instead, but she has no idea if he's even able to log out. She hasn't detected any external program that could make it so he couldn't, but with an unconscious avatar, she can't tell for sure.
They eventually arrive in what she knows to be an empty, desert and hidden spot in New Link VRAINS. That's only then than Akira chooses to wake up (hah, took him long enough), groggily sitting back up correctly even if his back was already sat against the wall courtesy of his saviour herself. He seems lost for a few minutes as she goes to sit next to him. She doesn't feel like staying up and he looks too tired to do that. Maybe she can ask him a few questions while they're here, alone together and sitting on the same level.
"Ema…? Where are we…?" He starts the interrogation station by looking around.
"In a discreet spot in Link VRAINS."
"Ah, I… I think I see. I don't remember much from before waking up, but I know I was in SOL's headquarters and lost a duel against Queen. Wait," he looks to her with astonishment all over his features but a slight smile nearing, "that means you've won against her, right?"
"You called it! I had to escape that crumbling place with your deadweight on my shoulders. You owe me a lot, Akira Zaizen!"
"Oh… I'm sorry for that, then. I'm not sure of what happened, but I'll make sure to pay you back for this."
"I trust you on that."
She then remembers something, and another cheeky smile appears on her lips as she gets it out of her Extra Deck space.
"Ah, right, I almost forgot about that," she tells him as she gets it out of her disk.
His eyes land on the card in her hands.
"Tindangle Hound?" he wonders out loud as he picks it up again. "What was it doing in your deck?"
"Queen had stolen it from you after your defeat against her, I simply took it back when winning." She never mentions how Queen also happened to have summoned it against her, maybe another day. "Thought I'd give it back to its rightful owner!"
"Why did she have it in her deck, though? That doesn't make sense with the archetype and deck type she plays…"
"Well, huh… It really didn't match her deck to begin with. That's what caused her defeat against me in a duel where either could have won. I think it was to… intimidate me, or to remind everyone that you had lost against her. That's pretty messed up if you ask me."
"I owe you this too now… Thank you very much, Ema."
Usually, she'd have prided herself in her victory, teased him further, but they're both tired of fighting for today. Maybe she can allow herself to be honest, just this once…
"I'm sure Aoi and the other two are fighting well as we're speaking. You don't have to worry for them."
"You're right."
"By the way… would you happen to be free at some point in the following weeks? I know how you could repay me, and I need to tell you in person."
"Oh, sure. I'll make sure to have a free spot for this in my schedule."
"You're usually too busy to even tell me that, aren't you?"
"Well, to be exact… With how damaging this will be to SOL, I don't expect it to be for a few weeks. I can, however, promise you I'll think it out, if this is any better."
"I appreciate the consideration, Akira."
This doesn't prevent her from muttering under her breath, "that's why we never have dates…"; which in turn leads him to abruptly turn his head to her with zero subtlety and an awkward red flashing on his face.
"You said what I heard, right?"
"Yes…" Well, there goes her complete win over today.
"I… suppose we should consider that one day, if you think this is how I can repay you. You've done a lot for me these past months. I do, however, not really understand how this could be retribution…"
"…You owe me a date then."
She cannot tell if he's either too embarrassed to tell her this is a stupid idea (and it, frankly, would be to her if she hadn't realized that during her duel) or if he is too awkward to tell her he's on board. All she's basing herself from is the timid smile she sees creeping on his face and his suddenly very nervous gestures towards her. It's as it he forgot he could look at her directly.
"Then so be it…" he eventually spits out, looking in the distance, both of them slipping into a silence which progressively becomes comfortable.
After all, as opposed to him, he has always been more of a thinker than a rusher (except when his sister is involved: in which case, he becomes a furious beast). He needs his time to think this through, to cool down, when she's always on her feet. Oh wait, so be it. The Blue Oni he represents to her Red is a nice combination too.
As such, she can consider this timid "and so be it" a win, right? This ends in a complete victory for the bounty huntress Ghost Girl, of course: it, however, goes far past this and duels. This is a personal win and nobody can take that back from her.