Chapter Ten

Manjoume closed the back door leading out of the Fourth Dorm's main lobby with a tired sigh. He could not wait for this day to be over already. After Genji and Naoki had left, he had returned to Osiris Red only to find more members of the Morality Committee waiting for him outside his room. They forced him to hastily repack and escorted him here, to the Fourth Dorm, where he had been assigned a room on the second floor just at the top of the stairs. As if that was not bad enough, they had also threatened him with expulsion if he refused to wear his new uniform.

Looking down at the clean black coat, Manjoume had to admit that it could have been worse. At least this uniform would hide his soy sauce stains. Still, he missed his North Academy jacket; it was currently hanging up in his new room, in all its smelly, grimy glory.

Another sigh escaped him, and Manjoume shoved his hands deep into his pockets and walked further away from the building towards the line of trees that marked the end of the main campus and the beginning of the island's wilderness. He had not heard from Juudai or any of the others since the assembly had gotten out; he wondered if they had also been forced to move out of their usual dorms. He was tempted to send the school's hero a message about his planned infiltration of Doom's headquarters tomorrow night, but did not. It would take a lot of monosyllabic words and perhaps a few colorful charts and graphs to fill Juudai in on what was going on with Duel Academy's token cultists.

His fingers brushed against a slip of paper in the bottom of one pocket, though for the life of him he could not remember putting anything in there today. It was a new jacket, after all. Manjoume pulled the piece of paper out into the light to inspect it critically; written on it was a set of simple numbers, divided into sets of two, three or four by dashes. But he knew immediately what it was:

That was Asuka's new phone number, the one he had gone through hell and a whole week of Juudai to get. And he still had not called her.

He did not know what he had been planning on saying to her, but he wanted to call her anyway, if only to hear her voice again. Maybe he would get the answering machine, and then he would not even have to open his mouth and embarrass himself like he always did. He really hoped he would get the answering machine.

Manjoume's hands were shaking as he reached into his other pocket and picked up his black cell phone. It was also new, and had just recently come into his possession after his last one had been accidentally crushed while packing up for the new school year. He still had her number held tightly in his opposite hand, carefully putting in each digit out of fear that he would misdial. Taking a deep breath, he silently prayed that he had copied the right country code down and that he had not inadvertently called while she was sleeping. Manjoume brought the small device to his ear and waited for her answering machine to pick up.

"Hello?" her voice was bright and, thankfully, wide awake. His own seemed to crawl down deeper into his throat and tie itself into a knot. She had sounded a little confused in that single, adorably accented English word. Of course, his number was new too, so she must not have recognized it, Manjoume reasoned. He wondered if she would have answered had she known it was him. At the long silence, she tried again, this time with a touch of annoyance. "Hello?"

"A-ah. . . T-T-T-Tenjoin-kun!" he finally managed to stammer out her name, and he cursed his clumsy heart when he realized just how foolish he must have sounded. But he pressed on anyway, hanging onto that thin hope that she might actually still want to speak to him. Occasionally. Sometimes. Maybe. "H-Hi. Uhm, th-this is—"

"I know who this is." Manjoume flinched at the icy tone, at the completely frigid and monotone nature of it. He had not heard her speak like that since she had been in the Society of Light last year, and it had not been quite this cold since she had blocked out all sounds but that of Saiou's voice. He remembered the dead look in her eyes and the soulless way that she had moved, like a pretty puppet on the White Order's strings. After her duel with Juudai, though, she had seemed all right; she had gone back to smiling and having pride in being the top girl in Obelisk Blue. She had spoken to him like another human being instead of some putrid stain, and had even teased him a little before leaving the island last year. He wondered what had happened to her in the weeks that had passed since then, but could not find the courage to ask her directly.

"Ten-Tenjoin-kun—" he began, but Asuka soon interrupted.

"Why are you calling me, White Thunder?" she did not say it mockingly, but with all seriousness, as if that was really his only name. Manjoume swallowed hard, and let her continue. "Did you think I had forgotten everything that happened, the way that you did? Did you think that maybe it didn't matter because a few months had passed? You cannot wash away your sins so easily."

"Th-That's not it at all. . ." his words were as helpless and aimlessly directed as he felt right now, but Manjoume did not know what else to say, or even if there was anything else to say. When Asuka was the White Sun of the Order, she was protected by an impregnable shield of ice that surrounded an even colder heart. Manjoume's gaze dropped to the ground, and he shuffled his feet uncertainly.

"Did you call because you thought that you could stop me?"

Manjoume's head jerked up at this, and he narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. What was she talking about? What would he need to stop her from doing? The question hung in the air between them for almost a full minute before he finally found a response to it:

"What?"

"I've already told you," she was calm, certain, and unshakable in her beliefs as she answered. He thought he could detect a hint of that underlying smugness and elitism that she had so often carried with her. Manjoume longed to reach out to her, to let the warmth of his feelings melt away that cold heart to the bright and vibrant Asuka the White Order had hidden away. "I will become His temple on Earth forever. Only I am pure and untouched by darkness, and so only I am fit to be the final and true vessel of the Divine Light."

"All people cast shadows, Tenjoin-kun," he replied tersely, his expression darkening. He was scared, in a way, of this strange and blind fanaticism. Manjoume had never fought with another member of the Society of Light – let alone the White Order – and certainly not over anything that he had, at one point, believed. That lump was back in his throat, but this time it was not made of his voice but of tightly knotted doubt and fear. He prayed that she had not bought into the New-Age, transcendentalist wave that had swept through their ranks just prior to his crisis of faith and self. "No one lives without darkness."

"I am a monument to the White Sun, and there is no place in my heart that the Light cannot reach. When Saiou-sama returns—"

"He didn't go for a walk, Tenjoin-kun, he is dead!" Manjoume shouted the last three words into the phone, his free hand clenching into a fist. It hurt to finally admit that his prophet was not coming back. Yes, he had often likened Saiou to Christ, and had even wondered if he would rise again after Juudai had confessed his misgivings over the summer, but this was all wrong. This did not feel like faith. It felt too obsessive, too self-important to really be about saviors and God. Like everything else connected to the Society of Light around and after the time of Manjoume's departure, this had nothing to do with the organization's original purpose. This was not about Saiou, not about the Divine Light or saving people from darkness; it was not even about burning the world clean. This was about Asuka and her need to feel special, perfect, and elite. This was about the fear that they had all been very, very wrong to follow Saiou last year. "And nothing anyone does or says can ever change that! No amount of prayer is going to bring Saiou back, and your faith in a dead man—!"

"You left us!" she screamed back at him, and Manjoume almost swallowed his tongue when he realized that she might have been crying on the other end. "What would you know about faith? You left us to watch everything we'd worked so hard for crumble down around us. You left us to fail, because you knew that we couldn't do it without you! Where was your faith then?

"Don't you talk to me about faith, Manjoume. You left me. You betrayed us all. You were His Judas, and I'll be damned before I let you stop me from reviving the Society of Light."

She hung up, leaving Manjoume staring ahead into the forest without really seeing as he realized that he didn't have a comeback for that, anyway.

Juudai looked away from where he could see Manjoume standing with a cell phone clutched in one hand, pressing his back against the side of the Fourth Dorm building. He had meant to grab his friend and lament the horrors of being forced out of Osiris Red and into Ra Yellow, but had instead stumbled upon the end of Manjoume's conversation just in time to hear him yelling about bringing Saiou back. His heart seemed to stop at those words, his pulse dead in his throat as his skin paled at the insinuation.

Was it possible to bring Saiou back from the dead?

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was unspeakably dry as he realized that there was a small chance that he had not really succeeded at all. Even if Saiou was dead now – which he did not know for sure, because he was still getting that awful blind feeling without the amulet – it did not matter, because Asuka was going to bring him back. The unrealistic nature or impossibility of it all be damned: Saiou was Saiou, and if anyone could come back from the dead to be creepy and weird and try to light the world on fire, it was him.

Although, it would not have been that surprising if he did not come back alive, per se. Juudai had seen plenty of dead people up and walking around since coming to Duel Academy: Carmilla, Sara, Amnael and Daitokuji, Abydos, and even Fubuki could have been considered dead in that deep coma of his. He put his hand over the amulet he wore beneath his shirt, rubbing fitfully where the cold metal touched his hot skin. The light hissing of snakes at the contact was the last thing on his mind.

There had to be something that he could do! Surely, somewhere, he could find a way to stop her. But why was Asuka planning this? She had seemed so normal and distinctly not-crazy after he had dueled her last year. . . was it possible that he had not beaten all of Saiou's influence out of her? Had he only defeated her icy cards? It was hard for him to imagine an important card game like that boiling down to just a mere card game. Juudai shook his head as if to clear it of competing thoughts. He needed to focus! Her reason for doing it – or even how she was going to do it – was not important. The only thing he needed to know was that she could not be allowed to succeed. But how? He didn't even know where to begin looking. . .

With this, all things are possible.

Juudai's head jerked up and to the side, as if searching for the speaker of those ominous words. But they had not been spoken, only remembered from a long time ago. Wasn't that what Amnael had said when he held his book up for Juudai to take back in freshman year? Hadn't he said that it contained all the secrets of alchemy, and the answer to every question ever asked?

Quickly and quietly, Juudai turned away from where his friend was still staring off ahead into the woods and left the Fourth Dorm, heading back to Ra Yellow. Halfway there, he broke into a full sprint and ran the rest of the distance. When Juudai finally arrived, he was panting breathlessly as he pushed open the doors and jogged down the hall and up the staircase leading to the third floor. His new room was at the end of the next hallway. Juudai cursed the size of Ra Yellow as he paused outside of his dorm room, taking the moment to catch his breath. He shoved the door open and stepped inside.

His roommate – another senior, though he did not know the older boy – was already there, laying on one of the beds with a book held up over his head. Juudai let the door fall heavily against the wall behind it, causing the unsuspecting boy to look up in alarm.

"Jeez, Juudai-kun. . . you scared me. Something up?"

"I need the room for a little bit," Juudai blurted out, bringing a hand up to rub at the back of his neck awkwardly. He did feel a little bad about kicking his roommate out like this, but the fate of the world was kind of at stake here. And the more he danced around trying to be nice about it, the closer Asuka was getting to bringing Saiou back. And when Saiou got back, things were going to get weird, and scary. "You mind?"

His roommate looked confused and worried for a minute, a frown pulling down at the corners of his mouth. He did not seem too keen on the idea, and when Juudai thought that he was about to protest, he slammed his fist into the doorframe with a resounding thud.

"I said, get out," it was not snarled or growled or angry sounding at all. Juudai could feel that cold emptiness spreading out from his chest as the hollow adulthood rushed through him. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the – suddenly, very young-looking – boy disapprovingly. Now was not the time for childishness. Now was the time to Grow Up, and get things done. This was, after all, very, very serious. "Now."

The other boy stood uncertainly, murmuring something about the dorm lounge as he passed Juudai on the way out the door, leaving the brunet in relative solitude. After all, Juudai was never really alone. Winged Kuriboh floated up from his deck case, cooing fretfully as it fluttered over to his book bag and waited.

Juudai closed the door behind him as he moved deeper into the room, making sure that it was locked and the curtains were drawn before following the spirit's lead. He opened the bag, reached inside, and pulled out a book wrapped in a dirty white t-shirt that seemed to be breathing.

Truthfully, Juudai had meant to leave it at home. He had not wanted to climb back down that old elevator shaft to retrieve it once Manjoume had left Rintama. But there was something powerful about Amnael's book, something dark and comforting about the knowledge that he knew was inside it. He had worried that he might need it, or one of the other items he had gotten from the Seven Stars, this year. So he brought them all, and kept them nestled deep inside the book bag he never opened.

Juudai took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He gave the fluffy spirit a wink, as if to reassure them both that Grown-Up Juudai would only be used as needed.

He unwrapped the book and ran a hand over the skin-bound cover, fingers lingering on the metal plate where the golden eye had once been. Slowly, cautiously like it might just bite him if he acted carelessly, Juudai walked over to the desk with it, sat down and placed it on the wooden surface. He gingerly popped the clasp on the front. It opened with a sick, wet organic sound that made him grimace. He held his breath as he lifted the inner panel, eyes locked on that familiar sun symbol until it left his vision.

But, Juudai realized with some shock, the inside of the Emerald Tablet was not quite as creepy as he had thought that it would be. Sure, it was probably written in blood and not red ink, and yeah, the pages still felt too thick to be made of paper, and they were awfully soft and had a strange, smooth and almost leather-like texture to them. But really, that was it. The font was not a diabolic scribble or done in alchemic shorthand. It was written in plain Japanese with easy kanji that he readily recognized. The sentences were clean and to the point, and each phrase completed itself in a three by three inch block of text that fit in with his normal reading style. All in all, it wasn't that bad.

He did not find much of interest on the first few pages. There were some warnings – finish what you start, no skimping on sacrifices, do your steps in order, yada yada – and a few notations, explaining such important things as the differences between types of rituals and the level of protection needed for each one. It was a little on the boring side, so Juudai did not pay much attention to it. Instead, he began idly flipping through the pages, skimming for something that would stop Asuka and work as a weapon against the Light.

And then he found exactly what he was looking for. Hell, it even had pictures.

It had spent hours slinking through the darkening forest now that it could no longer wait for sundown. To be so close and still have to wait was beyond it; another moment of life with its prey right under its nose might have been its undoing. The creature, pale and majestic in its bestial strength, rose up from its new hiding place just below the first floor windows of the Ra Yellow dormitory, sniffing the air experimentally. It could smell him, a strong, musky scent that left its heart racing.

The monster crouched down, every muscle tight with unspent tension, every nerve alight with anticipation. It had waited for so long. . . It lunged up and forward, bypassing the first and second floor windows in favor of an open set on the third. It landed with a harsh thud, half-in and half-out of the window with its front claws dug deep into the woodwork and back paws braced against the outside wall. The entrance was not nearly as graceful as it would have liked. It pulled itself inside with a low and throaty growl.

At the desk there was a boy – the prey. He had jumped at the sudden intrusion into his sanctuary, had fallen from his seat in his haste to back away and identify his attacker. The dark book he was reading hit the floor beside the toppled chair. For a moment, there was silence between them as they sought to recognize one another, and then that pale monstrosity was padding heavily towards him. The boy was seated on the floor with his back pressed against the locked door, eyes wide with shock. It loomed over him. The boy gasped as its whiskers brushed his face, crying out in alarm:

"Tanyachi?! Is that really you?"

Misawa threw his arms around the neck of the enormous white tiger that had just broken into his room, burying his face in his lover's soft fur. Tanya nuzzled him affectionately with enough force to knock the poor boy over, and proceeded to lick him soundly until they both noticed that her rough tongue was beginning to scrape the top layer of skin off his face and had left his cheek bloody.

"Tan-Tanyachi. . . wh-what are you—" he tried to ask, but cut himself off as he watched her transform. It was beautiful and strange and not at all logical, and it left him breathless. The tiger was surrounded by a purple, resonating glow that seemed to originate from her eyes. It distorted her body, snapping bones and twisting skin to fit the new form. Her body elongated, claws turning into fingers and barrel-chest caving in on itself. The ribcage and spine reconnected; the white fur receded; her tail and ears were pulled back into her body; her muzzle sank into her face, until finally, there was only the Amazon woman that he had fallen in love with back in freshman year left. The purple light started to fade, and left her eyes last. ". . . Doing here?"

"I'm ready to accept you for both your intellect and your bravery," she said in that high, oddly girlish voice she often used. For a woman of her size and bearing, he had always expected a stronger, more mature sound, but he had learned that while Tanya preferred to speak like a much smaller girl, she could easily drop into that deeper register. She was leaning over him, one hand braced just above his left shoulder and the other down by his opposite hip. Misawa glanced down at the space between their bodies, only to jerk his head up to stare at the ceiling, blushing furiously. The transformation from big cat to big woman had not included clothes. Tanya smiled. "I'm here to take you home."

"Home?"

"Don't you remember our first duel, Misawachi?" she asked, pouting slightly. "I won you. You have to come home with me, and become my wife."

"R-r-right now?" he sputtered incredulously, meeting her disappointed gaze. Misawa placed his hands firmly on her muscular shoulders as he amended his outburst. "I-I mean. . . yes, of course, let's get married. I love you, but. . . can't I graduate high school first? Shouldn't you meet my parents? We have our whole lives ahead of us, Tanya; what's the rush?"

But Tanya only pulled him up into a sitting position, and caressed his face gently. She kissed him softly, a light tremble to her lips, before that caress turned harsh, gripping his face roughly, and her bright eyes narrowed darkly. "I'll wait for you to graduate, Daichi, only because you waited for me to be ready. But we're getting married as soon as that's over, even if I have to drag your half-dead body through the ceremony. You agreed to the terms of my duel, and you acknowledged our bond across the field of battle. You lost, and your body is mine."

There was a hungry way that she emphasized that final word, a predatory and violent undertone that lent her low voice a rough edge. Misawa's eyes went wide and he swallowed hard, nodding slightly to show that he understood. Tanya's smile returned in full force at that, her grip loosening as she leaned in to kiss him again, and whispered against his mouth:

"Besides, I want to have children before the world ends."