Disclaimer: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V

Author note: longest oneshot yet.

Day 16: Timeskip

Ute, Shun and Ruri knew that their classmates were afraid of them.

As it had turned out, once you were carded you entered into a come-like state with no contact with the outside world whatsoever. While you were a card, nothing changed, nothing moved. Not even time.

But the Resistance were not a bunch of innocents who were turned into cards. They were war veterans. They had experienced at least three continuous years of war under conditions so ugly that none of the wars which had preceded could compare with it. And the people who were once cards could not comprehend what they were seeing, why the people whom it felt they had just seen yesterday were so much older, so much harder, so… dead.

The Resistance, the Lancers, everyone had tried to explain the situation. Nobody believed them. Everyone was in denial, and it seemed that soon every memory would be buried and forgotten.

There had been an issue with school. Everybody considered it only logical for the teenagers to continue their schooling. Except that the Resistance members had not been at school for three years, nor were they in the mood to be in the same class with kids three years younger than themselves. Even if they were old classmates. There was just no way.

In the end, they all agreed to study their hardest until the start of the school year and try moving up as many classes as possible. Thankfully, the school principal was understanding, having to deal with all sorts of teenagers for more years than he could remember, and Ute, Ruri and Shun, all of them having been top students back them before the war, managed to move up two years, thus being in the same Middle School. Shun was even continuing his studying hoping to enter High School this year. Better than Elementary School in any rate.

However, even with the – thankfully – smaller age difference, that, along with the fact that they still wore their bright-red Resistance bandannas, made them stand out greatly among the crowd.

Within a few weeks all the minor problems had been solved. But then, trouble just had to knock (down) the door. And said trouble came with a pillar of green light, a roaring engine, and a short temper. Poor Math's teacher almost had a heart attack.

"Oi, Ute!". There was Hugo in all his glory, with the white Duel Runner with the spiraling lights, the classroom door currently underneath the front wheel – since probably Hugo had not even noticed its existence (or did not care) – and the trademark sounds of the Duel Runner, along with the fact that Hugo looked near identical to Ute, only served to freak out their classmates even more.

"It's finally time we settle the score! Well? Duel me! I don't have all the time of the world! And there is no way I lose to you in one-on-one!".

What followed was without a doubt the most insane Synchro vs XYZ match ever. The two duelists had taken the duel to the back yard where they could both lash out freely without worrying about breaking anything. To the rest of the students who had never seen the two duel before, the whole ordeal was downright weird.

For starters, the fact alone that the holograms were created by Solid Vision and thus there was no need for D-Gazers was incomprehensible. Hugo as usual, was performing various extreme stunts while dueling (what is a fourteen-year-old boy doing on a motorcycle!?) and his Synchro Monsters, while easy to figure out after a demonstration or two, were still a foreign concept to the duelists from the XYZ Dimension.

Thankfully nobody had noticed how strange Ute's Duel Disk was. This Duel Disk, like all the other Duel Disks from the Resistance, were equipped with a Real Solid Vision system – not that Ute needed it, the turn-people-into-cards program, the Dimension travelling program, and a laser-heat radar like those in war ships and airplanes. Not that their classmates needed to know all that.

What their classmates did find out however was that both duelists could deal real damage while using holograms, and were not holding back in the slightest. That, in addition to the beyond top-class dueling skills that they both had developed while fighting Academia, made for a hell of a show.

In the end the duel had no result because Ruri had decided to interfere and Hugo ended up back to his dimension, but the next day some students overheard the principal saying that he received a strange phone-call from a girl apologizing for the white biker's behaviour. How in the world had Rin managed to call the principal of their school, while she herself was in a different dimension, Ute and the Kurosaki siblings would never know.

This was not the last time that the Heartland middle school received visitors from different dimensions. It was only a month after the previous incident when a no older than twelve years old boy had stormed into the school grounds and demanded from someone to bring Kurosaki Shun.

The sword-and-shield shaped Duel Disk should have been the first warning. This was not a rivalry like the one Ute and Hugo had. This was pure hatred.

Kurosaki Shun and Shin'uin Sora were officially trying to kill each other. As simple as that. And while the people of Heartland had always been familiar with Fusion monsters, even before the invasion (they did exist; it was just that very few people were using them), they had never seen Fusion Monsters like these. Every single card in Shin'uin Sora's Extra Deck looked like it had came out from a horror movie, and everybody who knew Sora knew that his sanity was rather questionable. Both Shun and Sora were using Real Solid Vision, and by the time the duel had escalated to the point where Shun was using Action Cards (a function in his Duel Disk that had been installed after he joined the Lancers), someone had already called the police.

From time to time news about horrible crimes would be reported on TV. Usually the victims were highly wanted criminals, death-row convicts, infamous drug dealers, mafia, or even elite military units. There was no pattern in the attacks other that this: all those people were considered untouchable. Once, one of the victims said something about a pink-eyed demon and a clown. When they heard that on the news, Ruri, Shun and Ute – who had been called over their house – exchanged a glance. "At the very least those two get to put their skills into use.", grumbled Ruri, she and the two boys knowing all too well that the two culprits were Joeri and Dennis Macfield.

Their parents decided not to ask. They knew better than to question their children about their new acquaintances. They had long since concluded that that place called "Standard", was the only place inhabited by sane citizens.

The big highlight was the Resistance reunion that took place on the anniversary of the start of the war. Everyone had put on their old clothes, masks and glasses/goggles included, and had gathered at the central park. To say that they were attention catching would be the understatement of the century. With everyone wearing dark, ragged clothes, red scarves and bandannas, along with all sorts of accessories, Resistance looked like terrorists.

And they really were some sort of terrorists. Resistance had turned into a vigilante group that made every single problem not dealt by the police their own business, thus having trouble with the law all the time. Someone joked that the Synchro Dimension had rubbed on them too badly. Nobody disagreed.

But the worst of all were the gym classes at school. That was because everyone had to show their scars while changing clothes. Scars from broken bones and wounds that were never healed properly, burns from hot metallic gears and slashes from steel fangs, along with the bony bodies that made their lean but extremely hard and tense muscles more obvious than ever, everything about them screamed the tale of a war.

The teacher, very much troubled by the terrified looks the boys and girls were giving Ute and Ruri respectively, he asked the two students to have a spar with the kendo shinais. The sword turned hand-to-hand fight was beyond their imagination.

Because, no matter how much Heartland's wounds were helaed, they would never be able to accept their was veterans.