DOMINO CITY

KAIBA CORP. TOWER

1st DECEMBER 2001

01:03 a.m.

Seto Kaiba strained to hear over the cacophony of heavy rain on the roof high overhead. Somewhere nearby, his opponent was stalking him. Measuring his capability. Testing him. Seto's eyes flit in a panic from wall to wall. In this corridor there were seven doors, not counting the one he had just walked through. Every door was open. From any one of those doorways, the shadowy figure that had attacked him earlier could lunge at any minute. He hefted the weight of the pistol in his hand, training it from doorway to doorway, ready to take a shot at anything that dared to emerge.

As his breath turned to mist ahead of him, he took stock of what had happened.

The police had been sniffing around a little more closely than he had liked. It had happened before, but he usually had enough of the force in his pay to get them to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Now though... This new detective, he was trouble. He'd managed to locate and manouevre around any rogue elements in the officers within a few months, getting most of them caught into the bargain. It would take Seto years to get another handhold on the Domino City police, and it was all time spent going over the same steps as before. This was just wasting precious time. As investigations into his business partners had started to increase, he'd put together a plan to get rid of the troublesome Detective Mutou and his close, pain-in-the-neck companions.

He'd located the Detective's only local relative, his grandfather. A frail old hermit, he'd easily been overpowered by Seto's men, beaten until he was a quivering mass of purples, blacks and reds, and dragged to the top of the Kaiba Corp. Tower. The ransom note Seto had left for the detective instructed that he come alone and inform no-one of what was going on.

It had worked, or so it had seemed at first. Seto was sure that he had seen Mutou's car pull up near the tower. It was a plain black civilian car. Looked like he hadn't come as a police officer. Gun loaded and ready, Seto had started on his way downstairs to greet his new guest.

Then it had started.

The security cameras had each in turn shorted out, every display turning to an empty, foreboding blue. The lights had all switched off. A minute or so after, the heating had died off. This wasn't a power outage, something was very deliberately shutting down parts of his H.Q. piece by piece. His security guards failed to respond, cold static greeting any attempt to get a handle on the situation. This wasn't Mutou. He was one of the Good Cops. One of the last few Good Cops left in this city. This sort of shock and awe tactic wasn't in his nature. Someone had clearly decided to throw a wrench into Kaiba's meticulous works. With a hiss of frustration, he tugged back the slide and cocked the weapon, charging out of (What he later realised was) the safe, defensible area of his office.

Now he was roaming the building in the dark, guiding himself by touch and by the dim light of the moon and streetlights that filtered in. Once or twice he had caught sight of the intruder. He'd almost fired, but it had disappeared before he had a chance to take the shot. It was playing with him. Sticking to the shadows and slinking behind him, doubling back on itself so it could always come at him from an unexpected angle.

"You think you can keep this up all night?" Seto shouted into the blackness. "You're gonna mess things up sooner or later. You're fast, I'll give you that, but I've got a feeling you're not going to be able to dodge a bullet when you make that inevitable mistake." He grinned. His confidence was coming back to him. Panic wasn't in his lexicon. He walked to the end of the corridor, keeping his eyes jumping from one doorway to the next. He reached the end of the hall, open doorway leading to the stairway. He stepped inside, cautiously leaning over the bannister that overlooked the flights of stairs, hands gripping the gun so tight he was sure it would take only a little more effort to snap the thing in half. He watched. There was nothing down there. No-one creeping up or down the stairs. No-one waiting for him to make his way down there before-

And then he was aware of it. Breath against the back of his neck, the sound of leather creaking. How had it managed to sneak up on him? It stepped in a little closer. He could feel it press against the back of his legs. He knew that he should straighten up, wheel around and take a shot. This close, there was nowhere it could run. He was paralysed. He couldn't even turn his head to look the thing in the eye. He heard a rustling and then it was right by his ear. It spoke to him, and in his fear-haze, the only thing Seto could think of was how strange it was that no mist came from between those thin, slightly upturned lips.

"Feeling lucky Kaiba?" It whispered, swiftly drawing away from his ear. This was Seto's moment. He started to stand up straight, turning at the hip as he did so.

It was too late.

Whatever it was, it had gripped him around the ankles with hands like iron snares. Within a sliver of a second, it had lifted him effortlessly, shoving him forwards as it did so. Seto was spun over, sliding over the guard-rail and out into the air. With wide, slick eyes, he watched his attacker stand above him. The only thing he could make out was a shimmering golden light at the centre of its forehead. Though it cut out into the shadows of the building, it did nothing to illuminate the horrific silhouette of the creature that had gotten the better of Seto Kaiba. As the air started to scream in his ears, he struck the steel staircase, brain just registering the shattering of his legs before he blacked out.

DOMINO CITY

KAIBA ESTATE

12th August 2005

11:48 a.m.

Sunlight pierced through Seto Kaiba's nightmare, flaring over his eyelids and filling his vision with deep red, criss-crossed with veins. He groaned and slowly awoke, taking in the kind of light that always accompanies knowledge that one has slept too much of the day away. After a few moments of blinking away the fog of sleep, the light from the open window was blocked out.

"Morning bro." Mokuba's incessantly perky tone helped shake the grip of fatigue from Seto's mind, allowing him to pull himself to a sitting position, arms struggling to position his body against the headboard of the huge bed.

"Is it?" Seto croaked, rubbing his throat.

"Just about. Here, I brought your coffee and paper."

The tray was set down over his useless legs and he held in the grimace of pain. Every time Mokuba delivered breakfast in bed, he always ended up resting the tray over Seto's legs, and every time it caused a cascade of agony through the rest of his body. Seto smiled warmly, lifting his mug in a grateful salute to his younger brother, gritting his teeth so hard that he could taste the slightest tang of blood on his tongue. He cleared his palette with the hot, bitter contents of the mug before taking a look at the paper's headline story. He glared in disgust at it.

"Looks like we've finally got a new chief of police," Mokuba said, wandering to his brother's wheelchair and bringing it closer to the bedside.

Seto sneered at the photo of the newly promoted Chief Mutou and downed the rest of his coffee. "Must be a slow news day," he muttered, turning his gaze to his prepared wheelchair.

Seto pulled down on the doorhandle to his study, shoving the heavy oaken door away from him with a grunt.

"Not again bro," Mokuba's voice called out to him from somewhere down the hallway.

"I won't be long."

"That's right you won't. You've got a doctors appointment in three hours. Don't forget."

Seto said nothing, wheeling himself into the study and closing the door behind him.

It was a poorly lit room. With the amount of time he was spending here, that might go some way to explaining Seto's increasing aversion to sunlight in the mornings. He'd always been a morning person, it always meant he could get more done. Now though, with his capabilities diminished (Or at least, so his doctors said. He had no intention of giving up work for as long as they had envisioned), it was getting more and more difficult to wake up early enough each day. He looked about the room, at where the walls had once been.

They were completely obscured now. Every available inch of the small study's wallspace had been given over to sketches, newspaper clippings, photographs and notes. His eyes trailed up and down the columns of information, reliving the last few years.

All of his security personnel had died. No apparent cause of death. They had simply keeled over where they stood and ceased to draw breath. Mutou's grandfather had also passed away. His injuries too severe for his aged body to take, he had died before anyone even knew what was happening. When Seto had woken up a few days later in a hospital bed, he learned that the murders of his guards, as well as that of the old man had been pinned on a strange, dark figure seen fleeing the scene by a handful of eyewitnesses. The fall had completely destroyed his legs, shattering and twisting the limbs monstrously. While the scars, bruises and minor fractures of his upper body would heal within the year, he had been told that it was doubtful that he would ever walk again.

His attention moved onto the photographs. Still shots from CCTV cameras he had managed to aquire. None of them particularly helpful. Whatever it was that they had caught fleeing his H.Q. building, it was black on black, completely without form. If the bastard hadn't shut down his own cameras, he'd be sure to have a better start on all of this. It had been so thorough in the way it executed its plan. But what had the point been? Was it to kill him? Then why didn't it make sure it had finished the job? Was it to save the old man? Then why did it leave him to die? Unless he was already dead when it arrived. Seto was finding it hard to recollect where the hostage had been at the moment of his fall. It was entirely possible that he had died before the assailant had reached him. Is that what it had been then? A botched rescue attempt?

Finally he came to the sketches. Dozens of them. All of the same subject: A stylised eye against a black background. He had tried in several mediums to capture just what it was he had seen that night, but nothing, not ink or pencil or charcoal had resulted in the desired effect. Every sketch was missing something. Maybe there was some part of that symbol that he could no longer remember.

He pulled his wheelchair to the desk, where his latest sketch waited. Again, there was something missing. He stared down at it for the tiniest of etenities, eyes tracking every curve and dip in the shape of the symbol. Something was missing. Again. Until he could get it perfect, it would be no more a clue than a hindrance.

He sighed and picked up his pencil.

DOMINO CITY

KAIBA CORP. TOWER

14th October 2012

09:15 a.m.

The envelope had been waiting for him when he arrived that morning. It had been sitting there on his office desk all night by the looks of things. Not a single one of his employees had put it there. Not one of them knew who had, neither did they see anyone enter or leave the room in the last twenty four hours save Seto himself.

He sat at the desk, grimacing at the envelope, as if he could open through sheer disdain alone. There was no marking on it, except a hastily scrawled "F.A.O. Seto Kaiba" in one corner. It was light, rustling. Paper inside. Didn't sound like anything threatening. He groaned at his own paranoia and ripped the envelope open.

Four sheets of paper slid to his desk, all of them paperclipped together. He lifted them up and flicked the metal clip away.

The front page was a mostly blank sheet. At its centre were the words:

"Eye have the Piece to your Missing Puzzle Mr. Kaiba."

At the bottom:

"Signed: A Friend."

Seto's eyebrow raised. This amount of mystery was nothing short of irritating to him. He brushed the front page away, stunned by what the next sheet revealed.

It was a black and white photograph of the eye. That same stylised eye that he had been trying to recreate all this time. There it was, glaring out at him. Looking straight at it, it seemed ridiculous that he had spent so long trying to copy the shape of it. It was simple enough, and not far off from what he had created. And yet, it was utterly alien to those designs too. Something in its subtle differences rendered it an absolutely untouchable, indescribable original. His mouth went dry as he remembered staring up at that eye as he was hurled over the guard rail. He turned the page.

The same photograph, zoomed out. It showed where this eye was located - Rising as a detail on some sort of decorative ornament. It was at the centre of a golden pyramid that was attached at its base to a thick chain. It was like some sort of unwieldy necklace for a perpetual fashion victim. He turned to the final page.

Again, it was the same photograph but zoomed out even further. This time it showed the location of the necklace or ornament or whatever it was. It was sitting on a desk not too different from Kaiba's own. A different photograph in a different frame, a different make of computer, a different shade of colour for the journal perched precariously on the edge. A name plate stood at the forefront, just next to the golden pyramid and its hateful eye.

"Chief Yugi Mutou"

Kaiba gripped the bottom of the page until it crinkled in his grasp. He dropped it and pushed his chair back. He wasn't sure whether he should be grinning or starting a tirade of rage and bile at this new development. He did neither. He calmly placed his hands on the desk and stood up, savouring the sensation of his legs supporting his weight. It had been a long fight, but it had brought him here. He turned to the window and stared out onto Domino City in the morning. He reached for his cellphone, deftly cycling through names until he reached what he needed.

"Mokuba?" He said, his voice remaining calm, even, icy. "Bring the car to the tower. I've got an unexpected meeting to get to."