Chapter 42: Warring Identities
Yami followed Marik silently from the blimp. The overhead announcement came just as they exited, and he heard the words fade behind him. Joey had waited so long to duel Kaiba; Yami had never imagined missing it. He'd also never imagined surrendering his title without a fight.
Of course, Yori was the most unimagined thing of all. And Yami was afraid to know the lengths he'd go to in order to save her; they might have no limit.
"It'll be beachfront after all." Marik licked his lips just as the whitecaps licked the beach.
"When I win—" Yami started.
"Win first," Marik said harshly. He grinned. "Then choose who to save from the shadows. Remember you save only one."
Yami's jaw tightened. He remembered the spirit of the ring's taunt, but he would find a way to save Yuugi and Yori both.
He had to.
Marik lifted an eyebrow. "I see you've come unarmed."
Yami's Duel Disk was still with the crew for cleaning. There'd been no point in reclaiming it. Not when he knew exactly how this battle would be fought.
He waited in silence.
"Despite your refusal to play along," Marik drawled, "I'll find my amusement all the same."
The Egyptian unlatched his own Duel Disk, tossed it aside. The wing kicked up a spray of sand and came to a stop half-buried.
Marik raised the rod. The Eye of Horus glowed.
Yami's puzzle responded in kind.
"To the dark we go," Marik purred.
The roar of ocean waves disappeared into the roar of shadows, and the world turned black. Beneath Yami's feet, the sand shifted, tumbling into a pit that opened to swallow him as well. He stilled the panic with a calm breath, and he let himself fall. It was a slow descent, like dropping with a parachute, until it was barely falling and more floating.
Sounds filtered through the darkness: the rhythmic, low chant of a dozen voices; echoing steps on a stone floor.
And then the light filtered in, too. The ground solidified.
Yami stood in a temple. That was the only word for it. Incense along an altar sent smoke heavenward, and a line of priests bowed before it, still murmuring their chants. Yami stood above them, at the flat peak of a staircase. Every wall of the temple was checkered with stone tablets, and most of the tablets were carved with grotesque figures.
Three looming figures stood out, a set of carvings five times the size of any neighbor and familiar to Yami from a different tablet, one in a museum. The three god monsters.
Yami waited for the shadows to whisper the rules of this game. Then he felt a weight in his hands.
He looked down to the open pages of a book. Though it was not a modern text—each page was solid metal, hammered thin and engraved like the tablets, hinged together on metal rings—he recognized it as such. He couldn't read the hieroglyphs, but the whispers of the shadows came at last, pressing the images and messages to his mind.
A formula. To craft seven mystic items, imbued with the power of the gods.
The Millennium Items.
Yami shivered.
"What game is this, Marik?" he murmured, but he received no answer. His opponent was nowhere in sight.
Yami carefully lifted a page, worked it along the metal rings until it settled into place and he could read the recipe's ingredients.
Then his blood truly chilled.
99 souls, the shadows whispered. Fresh in harvest. Dark in purpose.
"High Priest Akhenaden," someone spoke from behind him.
Yami stiffened and turned to meet the bowing speaker. The unfamiliar man wore a white robe and a black wig, the hair cropped close around his jawline.
"Speak," Yami said after a moment.
"My lord, I have found a suitable village. It stands at our borders, a hideout for murderers, robbers, and the equally unseemly. Since the pharaoh has given his blessing, we wait only for your command."
"Where am I?" Yami asked.
But the man only repeated his dialogue word for word, acting all the while as if it wasn't strange.
A roleplaying game. Ryou's favorite, but so far with none of the personality or flexibility he would have brought to the table as game master. Yami had never directly participated in a campaign even outside of the shadows, but he'd been witness to plenty through Yuugi. Interesting that he had not been cast as the pharaoh—he wondered if that decision had been made by Marik or the shadows.
"My command to do what?" he tried.
This time, the man lifted his head. He swallowed, and when he spoke, his voice had lowered. "To carry out the sacrifice, my lord."
Yami looked down at the book in his hands, which seemed to grow heavier under his attention. At a glance, he had been cast as a high priest, and his objective was to craft the Millennium Items. Marik, no doubt, would be acting in direct opposition.
The setting was clearly ancient, but Yami did not for a moment trust his surroundings to give him clues to his past. Whatever had truly happened would never be revealed by the monster inside the Millennium Rod. The beast was only interested in his own twisted retelling of events.
So Yami clenched his jaw, closed the book and set it on the altar before him.
"Take me to this village," he said. He would scout the board and the pieces before he took decisive action in this game. Considering its architect, expecting a twist at every corner was only reasonable.
The man bowed deeper, pressing his forehead to the floor, then turned and shouted as a herald: "Make way for the high priest!"
At the foot of the staircase, the chanters cleared. Yami followed the man down the stairs and past the pillars of the temple. Though he asked for a name, he received only silence in response, so he returned the silence just the same. The game would unfold at its own pace and no sooner.
Outside the temple, the world was pure light. Even squinting, Yami's eyes watered, and the heat pressed upon his skin with a weight that dried his lungs straight through his chest. Buildings stretched ahead of him, the evidence of a civilization, but why anyone would want to build their home on the surface of the sun was beyond him.
Yet even in the scorching light, at the edge of his senses, he heard the gleeful murmurs of darkness.
"Egypt," Yami said helpfully.
His NPC guide gave no response.
Then, licking his lips, Yami tried, "Home."
But the word burned his tongue just as the sun burned his skin.
The guide led him to a waiting army, a cavalry unit already saddled and waiting to ride. Each soldier wore plain linen uniforms, faces shadowed by hoods and turbans, and for all their visible personality, they may as well have been true pieces on a board.
Despite having never ridden, Yami swung into a saddle with confidence. Sure enough, his character could ride; he felt the muscle memory he'd never built, the nudge of instincts he'd never developed. The reins felt natural in his hands.
"We ride with High Priest Akhenaden!" the guide shouted from his own saddle. "We do our duty. For our pharaoh! For our kingdom!"
"For our pharaoh!" the soldiers echoed as one. "For our kingdom!"
And Yami's blood chilled once more as he remembered Yori's shadow game against Marik, remembered watching ancient images flash across a black dome. He looked at the soldiers around him with new eyes.
Whatever awaited him in this narrative, he knew it would be a tragedy. Marik would not have it any other way. But the only way out was up.
So he snapped his reins, and with a borrowed army, he entered an unfamiliar desert.
Joey stood at the top of the Duel Tower, and the air was too thin for his lungs. It left him lightheaded. He couldn't remember exactly how he'd gotten here, just a blur that started with reclaiming Red-Eyes and ended with a referee announcing the final, championship match of the Battle City tournament between Seto Kaiba, Japan's former national champion, and Joey Wheeler, King of Games.
Joey Wheeler, King of Games.
Joey Wheeler, King of Games.
jOeY wHeELeR, kINg oF gAmES.
The air was so damn thin. No matter how he tried, Joey couldn't catch his breath. He might have passed the trip up the tower in a blur, but his throat was tight with the memory of every step in the tournament before that. No, further back. To Duelist Kingdom. And before that, to the first time he built a deck and begged Yuugi to teach him. He'd barely had money to spend on trading cards, but Gramps had let him pick booster packs at quarter price. The shopkeeper had said he needed to clear out old stock to make room for new, and Joey knew an excuse when he heard one, but he wanted to play so bad he let the gratitude burn out the pride, and he bought every pack he could. Then he picked through the cards and built a deck of every single monster that looked tough as nails.
His ears burned now to think of it, and there was enough distance he could smile at himself, the way Yuugi had.
"Joey," his best friend had chided, "a good deck needs more than monsters."
Yuugi helped him go back through the boosters for support cards, even donated a few of his own, and they played practice games late into the night and during every break at school. Every good thing he knew about dueling, he learned from Yuugi.
Scratch that.
Every good thing Joey knew, he learned from Yuugi.
He wished his friend could be here now. Wished it so bad his ribs pinched in on his heart. But Joey would do right by his title.
And when he won Battle City—
—he knew Yuugi would cheer the loudest to hear it.
Seto was an insomniac. If his work didn't keep him up late into the night, his thoughts did. An innovator's mind was never idle, and he certainly hadn't developed the idea for his solid vision technology while lazing at a desk during a nine-to-five. Yet despite "well-rested" being expelled from his vocabulary at an early age, he rarely felt tired. His was an active body and mind, always engaged in the current challenge, ready for the next, and preparing for the two after that.
Not now.
Now Seto looked at the world through a dull haze and thought somehow the air had never felt so heavy. Now he lacked the energy to scowl but had to muster it anyway because the alternative was to look tired, and he could never do that.
Now he wanted three things and three things only: a heavy dose of painkillers for the thunderstorm in his skull; an undisturbed, four-hour nap; and for Joey Wheeler to throw himself inexplicably off the Duel Tower.
But as Seto's eye twitched, his opponent did no such thing. Instead, he grinned like a rabid fan sneaking into a celebrity's dressing room, and he waved at the spectators like he was a celebrity himself. (One of the spectators was a KaibaCorp employee; though she'd tried to slip unnoticed through the meager crowd, Seto would have to be dead not to spot a KaibaCorp uniform in any setting. She gave a thumbs-up to Wheeler, and Seto resolved to fire the redhead as soon as he found the energy.)
The referee gave the signal, and Wheeler stepped into the center of the field. Seto didn't move.
"Just surrender." He did his best to make the words scathing rather than weary.
Wheeler's face flamed. "You wish, Rich-boy."
Seto's eye twitched again. He resisted the urge to rub it. Not that he would ever admit as much to a flea-bitten trash hound, but every time Wheeler called him 'Rich-boy,' it raked Seto's nerves like a cheese grater. As if the bumbling moron in front of him could ever understand the kind of sacrifices Seto had made in order to stand in his current place of privilege. He was not a trust-fund child. Neither wealth nor anything else in life had ever been handed to him; he had clawed every single gift out of stone with bloody effort and brazen willpower.
And now he was aware he'd done such a thing across two lifetimes.
Perhaps he was doomed to an eternal purgatory of impossible chess matches. When he finally, inevitably lost, the board would reset on a new lifetime. This one, a priest in Egypt. This one, an orphan in Japan. This one, a colonizer on Mars.
"We've played this match before," Seto snarled. "There's only one way it ends."
But Wheeler's jaw remained stubborn. "You might be the same as you was back in Duelist Kingdom—"
The same forever and ever. Lifetime after lifetime.
Gods, maybe he was in hell.
"—but I ain't, Rich-boy. I'm winning this match, and I'm winning this tournament. I'm King of Games now, and I'll prove it, to you and everyone else."
King of Games. Just hours ago, Seto had cared so much about that title. About this tournament.
Three-thousand years ago, he'd cared so much about the title "high priest." About that kingdom.
What was he supposed to care about now, when two identities warred so clearly in his mind?
Wheeler shuffled his cards. Held them out.
Seto wished for lightning to strike. Wished for an earthquake. Wished for a sniper with unknown grudges to take aim at the tower—honestly, it wouldn't even matter if he hit Seto or his opponent.
But nothing in life was ever handed to him.
So he would have to claw his way forward through stone.
Seto shuffled his cards, but he didn't step to the middle of the field, didn't trade decks.
Fuguta nervously cleared his throat. "Allowing an opponent to cut cards prevents any accusation of foul play after—"
"Nah, it's fine." Wheeler waved him off, his smile thin. "I don't want his filthy hands on my cards, neither. Just remember, Rich-boy, after I beat the pants off you, you can't cry and say I cheated."
For just a moment, Seto wished he would have claimed the rod. The priest inside him howled at the disrespect, remembered a criminal in Egypt who'd dared speak to him with the same tone, remembered how easy it had been to overtake the man's mind and order him to count nine-million steps in the desert. Priest Seth had laughed to think of the blasphemer staggering through the sand, unable to stop walking even as his legs wasted to bone, unable to stop counting even as his tongue shriveled to dust.
It would be just as easy to walk Joey Wheeler off the Duel Tower. Easier, even.
Seto shook his head. Gritted his teeth.
As if each word were a rib cracked from his own chest, he growled out, "Duel start."