Blake would have been lying if he said he wasn't scared the first time it happened. Being literally dragged off of the familiar streets and into a darkened alleyway had been bad enough, but when the hulking man with the fiendish grin had given him the stakes of the duel—well, Blake had wondered for a minute if his soul had already been destroyed then and there.
But the Shadow Game had ended in his victory. As the man he would later know as Panik ran off, defeated, Blake's relief at cheating death was quietly supplanted by another feeling: the feeling of an adrenaline rush fading too soon. His dreams that night were restless, and when he woke there was a hunger, a yearning, for something he couldn't describe.
Blake had promised that after the first, terrifying Shadow Game, he had no desire to play another. He avoided traveling at night for the next few days, shaken by the experience. He dueled only when it was safe to go out, dueling only those he knew and trusted. But the more he dueled his friends, the more bored he became.
It took another few days, when he lost a close match, for Blake to realize what was missing.
There was no risk involved.
No risk, no reward, no, for lack of a better term, enticement to keep dueling.
Blake needed higher stakes.
He waited until nightfall and set out, and it didn't take long for someone to jump him. He listened with rapt attention as two men, this time—Para and Dox—outlined the grave terms of the duel. He played hard, and he won. They cursed his name as they fled, and while Blake felt relief that his soul was spared a grisly fate, another part of him wanted to stop and duel them again.
He was pacified for the moment, and the next day Blake dueled solely in the morning and afternoon. But the night after that, and nearly every following night, he sought out the Shadow Game duelists.
After a particularly close game against the nefarious Bandit Keith, Blake felt his heart pumping wildly in his chest, the phantom cuts that refused to fade from his being, and realized that he had almost lost his gamble with fate. He limped home, clutching painfully at his body that seemed almost rent asunder, and told himself that this time, he would duel as they came. No more, no less.
It was only three days before the lure of the Shadow Games proved too much for him.
It was only four days before his luck finally ran out.
"You lose, punk. Time to eat dirt—six feet under, that is," Keith sneered behind his sunglasses.
The shadows paid the victor no heed, but curled around Blake in an instant. Their noise sounded more like radio static than anything else, the feel warm and soothing—and then the pain hit and never ceased.
There was the sound of rushing wind, growing louder with each second.
There was the feel of a thousand knives stabbing, carving, lifting.
There was the knowledge that this was not the first soul the shadows had claimed.
The moment Blake's life points hit zero, the moment his life flashed before his eyes, the moment just before his battered heart beat its last—that was the moment Blake realized the full meaning of what Yugi had tried to tell him.
You didn't have to have a dark heart or a weak will for Shadow Games to claim their victims.
All you needed was to keep coming back.