The classroom door opened suddenly with a bang, like it had been kicked in, and Manjoume dropped from his seat in the backrow to the floor on instinct. He heard footsteps, two sets sure and lockstep — Morality Committee boots on the tile — and another stumbling, like the person was being dragged. Manjoume kept his head down and held his breath, and a moment later, the door opened again, this time more sedately.
Jesus God, was he going to have to listen to another execution? Manjoume had just been looking for an empty room to study in during his free period.
"Leave us," he heard a man say in German, and even in a different language he recognized the sound of Raphael's voice. After the sermon in the barracks, he didn't think he would ever forget it. Manjoume crawled behind the seats to peer around the corner of the aisle-side desk in time to see two Morality Committee guards throw up salutes and exit the room.
"Someone is trying to open the Door," Raphael went on, but from his vantage point Manjoume could not see the other individual; the guards must have dropped him or her on the floor down there and the other rows of desks and seats were in the way. "Where are the Items?"
"On the island, somewhere," the answering voice was young, male, and vaguely familiar. Manjoume knew that he had also heard it before, but the source escaped him without a visual to go along with it. Raphael folded his arms over his chest and glared down at the unseen speaker.
"And the Tablet?" At this, the boy on the floor scoffed loudly.
"I'm not alerted every time it's read from, if that's what you're after. I'm well-connected, not lo-jacked."
A pale hand reached up to grasp onto Raphael's jacket, bringing a long lavender sleeve and the shoulder of an Obelisk Blue underclassman vest into Manjoume's view. His stomach dropped as the boy pulled himself to his feet, all wild hair and green eyes, his normally beaming mouth twisted in a disapproving frown.
"Also, we really need to work on your subtlety, Raph," Johan said. "You can't pull me out of class like that."
Raphael seemed to ignore this criticism and the oddly familiar nickname. "You're sure he brought them all?"
"No, I— look, what part of, 'I am not a GPS locator for dark items' are you struggling with?" Johan snapped, shoving at Raphael's chest. The big man rocked back from the applied force, but held his ground. "I don't even think he knows there's a door to open! The key piece is here, I've seen that, and it's the only one you really need to worry about, anyway. That's what activated last night."
"You're getting distracted from the mission—" Raphael began to scold, but Johan interrupted him.
"Whose mission? Not mine!" His hands spread wide in a demonstrative gesture. "I'm not Leviathan. I don't work for you, remember? You're a. . . A temple guard, okay, and your entire job is to stay out of my way. The Warrior of Darkness has already started the journey. He is coming, and nothing your little 'order' does is going to stop that. Because you are not a general or an apostle or the Warrior of Light! So in the grand scheme of things, nothing you do is going to matter."
"I've been to an apocalypse before," Raphael informed him, an amused smirk playing on his lips. "And one man can make all the difference in these kinds of fights."
"This isn't man's fight anymore. Look around, Raph: God left this island to the monsters a long time ago," Johan said, shaking his head. "I appreciate your help, really, I do. I couldn't have gotten this far without you. My deck, the Academy. . . But you need me a Hell of a lot more than I need you right now. So I'll just make this as clear as possible: you don't interrupt my work, and your goons do not pull me aside like that ever again. If you need to pass a message, you send Eatos to my dorm room after school. And if you keep bothering me with your pointless plans and stupid deadlines and other crap that I don't care about, I will make you seriously regret it." Johan paused, his eyes narrowed as they glared at one another. Raphael said nothing and made no effort to show he took the threat sincerely.
Johan pushed the blond aside as though he weighed nothing this time, his broad back slamming into the wall as the much smaller boy strode past him to the door. Manjoume ducked back behind the desks, his heart pounding. Neither of them seemed to have realized that their conversation had been overheard. What did that all mean? Some of it Manjoume could piece together from what Naoki told him, and what he already knew from freshman year. The items Raphael mentioned could be the golden objects originally belonging to the Seven Star Assassins; the Dark Door was the gateway between this world and the Khenti that Doom protected and kept closed; the tablet they discussed could only be Amnael's book, the Emerald Tablet.
Juudai was the Warrior of Darkness. Manjoume knew that was what the Neospacians had called him, so how could he be coming if he was already here on the island? The Warrior of Light that had been brought up in passing was another source of confusion. He would have thought they had dealt with that last year, with the Society and the White Order. And who the Hell did this make Johan really, that he could talk to the lord and founder of the Morality Committee that way?
Raphael waited until the Obelisk student had disappeared and the door swung shut behind him before brushing himself off; he paused in straightening his jacket to pull a radio from his pocket. He pressed a button and held it up to his ear:
"Le séraphin ne coopère pas. Surveiller la Porte. Une fois que nous savons ce que le Guerrier a fait avec la clé et la tablette, nous n'aurons pas besoin de lui plus."
The amulet made things weird for Juudai in the aftermath of its. . . Activation? Was that the right word for it? He spent hours scouring the pages of Amnael's book, but nothing he read seemed to make sense. There was nothing he could find about undoing whatever had happened that night, and no explanation for why the golden snakes had slithered off the medallion and into his chest.
Juudai rubbed at the metal hidden under his shirt thoughtfully. Last night had been filled with squirming, the snakes coiling and sliding beneath his skin, and his muscles ached now from the pressure and displacement. Every time he tried to sleep he thought he could feel them moving around. When he looked, though, they were always back in place, half on the medallion and half submerged in his body, red eyes glinting in the artificial light of his dorm room.
"What did you get for number four?" Johan asked, leaning into Juudai's space to peer at his untouched Chemistry homework. Juudai groaned, loud enough to cover the soft hiss the snakes sometimes made at another person's proximity, and shoved the paper toward the underclassman.
"I don't know, I don't pay attention in Fubuki's class."
Johan took the sheet with a chuckle and that soft, secret smile of his. "I know," he whispered conspiratorially, as if the other boys were unaware that Juudai was a huge slacker with zero chances of graduating this year without their help. "Do you want to see what I got?"
Juudai glanced to his other friends around the library table, and upon seeing that they were all diligently engaged in their own studies, shrugged. "Sure."
Manjoume, who must have been less focused on his Duel Theory essay than Juudai had originally thought, snorted from his seat at the end. He didn't raise his head or pause in his writing, but he did mutter, "Oh, yes, emplease/em. Astound us with your academic prowess," under his breath.
Johan rolled his eyes and slipped his own homework in front of Duel Academy's hero.
In the space provided, Johan had drawn a sloppy, grumpy faced caricature of Manjoume. Juudai could tell because of the bad hair and what he assumed was Manjoume's black uniform jacket flowing majestically behind him. Above his frowning face was a speech bubble that said, 'I hate fun!'
The resemblance was uncanny.
Juudai erupted into snickers, grabbing his unused pencil to add his own artistic flair to Johan's drawing. He sketched in a little Winged Kuriboh and a Ruby Carbuncle next to the depiction of Manjoume with some rectangles to represent a mat game between them. Johan leaned against him, resting his chin on Juudai's shoulder as he watched the work progress.
"You're good at this," he noted, quiet and impressed like they didn't share an art class this semester.
One of the snakes bit him then, metal fangs scraping his collarbone. Juudai jerked at the sudden pain, accidentally slashing a long dark line through the bit where he was drawing two crying Ojamas falling out of Manjoume's jacket before the lead snapped. He clenched his jaw to keep from saying anything and took a deep breath in through his nose. He dropped the pencil.
"I'm just better at it than you." Juudai leaned back in his seat and forced a grin that felt like a rictus as the snake eased its teeth out of him. Apparently this was a thing now; not just hissing when someone got to close, but biting, too. Great. "No time to practice when you were busy wrestling polar bears to survive, huh?"
"Guess not," Johan agreed. Juudai opened his mouth to begin a story about how he used to draw his own Duel Monster cards when he was little, when Manjoume looked up and cut in.
"Didn't you take art at North Academy?"
"No," Johan replied, shrugging. "I took Japanese."
Manjoume's eyes narrowed. "Funny," he said, though he didn't sound like he thought it was at all amusing. "North Academy didn't offer Japanese when I was there."
Johan paused, his smile going tight for a moment. "North Academy is run by a Japanese guy."
"Yeah, in Northern Europe, and Principal Ichinose doesn't teach any classes," Manjoume pointed out. Shou and Kenzan looked up from their textbooks, glancing back and forth between the former transfer students like they were following card chain combos in a particularly riveting duel. Juudai got the distinct impression that he was missing the point of this discussion. Why would it matter what Johan took while he was at North Academy? "Juudai said you rose to the top of the Academy. But you weren't a freshman when I was there, which means you transferred in sometime after I left, and transfer students have to duel for admission. So, who'd you have to duel to get in?"
Manjoume was smirking, his mouth twisted up with condescension, and Juudai recognized it as the look Manjoume got when he felt like he was being especially clever. Like he was catching someone at something and was about to humiliate them. It was a mean look, and Juudai didn't understand why it made his blood race or why his chest suddenly felt warm under the unnatural cold of the amulet. He forced himself to keep looking at his drawing, at the homework directions, at anything at all that kept him from turning to stare at Manjoume's mouth like he wanted to.
And, now that it had been brought up again, Juudai realized with a start that when he wasn't freaking out about the weird cultist bling embedded in his chest that was maybe alive through the power of botched evil magic, he had been thinking an awful lot about Manjoume – and his mouth, and the subtle curve at the base of his spine where Juudai had rested his hands – since they hugged in the bathhouse.
Which was, y'know, weird. And confusing.
"You think in a school that big you're going to recognize a name after being gone for two years?" Johan scoffed, folding his arms over his chest. "Fine. I dueled Hugo to get in, and he ran a magician deck."
"That's. . . one of the most common deck themes in the world," Kenzan said.
"Sure, but I thought you had to duel your way through everyone at North Academy," Shou said.
And he was right. Juudai remembered Manjoume talking about having to build a deck from the junk cards he found out on the ice flows and then duel his way through a gauntlet, starting at the lowest ranked student at North Academy and working up to the King at the top. They didn't have dorms or set times in the school year to advance the way Duel Academy did. The gauntlet determined your place in the school hierarchy.
"Yeah, well, Thunder-san also said he punched a shark for a card," Juudai reminded them, which made Shou and Kenzan laugh. Manjoume flushed, his cheeks and ears bright red with embarrassment.
"I never said that! You said that!" He snarled. All around them, the other library patrons shushed them. Manjoume swayed in his seat toward Juudai, his voice dropped low to continue like he was speaking only for the hero's benefit. "How does he get to be the top-ranking student at North Academy if he doesn't know how the hierarchy works?"
"Oh," Johan said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. "I just. . . I must have misheard. I thought you were asking who I dueled for the top spot."
Juudai suppressed a shiver and licked his lips. The snakes were hissing again, a soft incessant sibilance that he couldn't ignore. He could feel it vibrating against his sternum, and when Juudai swallowed he thought that he could taste copper at the back of his throat. He tipped his face closer to Manjoume's and murmured, "I thought I told you to play nice?"
"I'll be nice when your pretty friend stops lying to us," Manjoume whispered back fiercely. It wasn't the first time Manjoume had referred to Johan as pretty, and Juudai didn't know how he felt about it anymore. Last time, he just shrugged it off. Juudai thought Johan was cool, and he enjoyed hanging out with him and talking to him because Johan was fun and familiar. They had a lot in common and were really good friends and that should have been the end of it.
But that was not the end of it. He knew it shouldn't have mattered but Juudai couldn't help it. Things were different now, and he did not know if it was because of the amulet or because of something Manjoume had done, but boys weren't pretty and the idea of Manjoume thinking Johan was sat like an uncomfortable weight in his gut.
He was supposed to be figuring out what had happened with the amulet and what he was going to do about Asuka and the Light, and instead here he was getting distracted by stupid stuff. It felt like that crazy messed up thing that girls did to make the guys who liked them get dumb, and Juudai didn't have a lot of smarts to spare.
Besides, Manjoume wasn't a girl and even if he had been, he was Juudai's friend and he wouldn't curse Juudai with his wiley girl magic. If he'd had girl magic. Which he didn't.
"Let's take a break," Johan suggested. He was already reaching for his deck case. "We could go outside, play a game or something."
Juudai shook his head, rubbing at his chest. "Nah, but we could hit up Tome-san's for snacks," he said. "Anybody got any requests?"
"Hey, Rei! Before I forget, let me walk you to your classes tomorrow," Kenzan told her as she plopped into the empty chair between him and Shou at the table the boys had commandeered in the library, her book bag thumping to the floor beside her feet. Her face was flushed, her long hair was a mess, and she was breathless from running late. They had all agreed to meet after their respective last class, but Rei was still struggling with the school's layout, and her locker, and navigating the sometimes crowded hallways. Everyone else had already settled in; Misawa was at one end of the table, reading a textbook, and Manjoume was at the opposite end, alternately working through his calculus problem sets and glaring at where Johan was giving whispered commentary on Juudai's latest notebook doodle.
"Huh? Why?" she asked after a moment. She was so tired. . . High school was a lot harder than she thought it would be. Everyone was older than her, and had had more time with the material, and she always felt like she was coming up short. Like she would have known what everyone was talking about if she hadn't skipped those grades to get to Duel Academy faster. Shou's look mirrored her own confusion at the Tyranno's request.
"Yeah, what's the big deal about tomorrow?" he asked, tapping his pencil against the page of his own textbook.
"Last Friday of the month?" Kenzan prompted the smaller duelist, trying to jog the other boy's memory. He tried again, "Y'know? Last Friday of the first month of school?" There was still no recognition. Kenzan sighed and finally elaborated further, "It's Freshman Friday, Shou-saurus."
"Oh!" Shou exclaimed so loudly that the neighboring tables glared and shushed them. He quieted back down to a whisper for his next comment. "Rei, you should definitely let Kenzan walk you to your classes."
"Why? What's Freshman Friday?" Rei asked, still not comprehending. She looked around the table again. Juudai still had not acknowledged her presence. She tore her gaze from him, and dragged her bag up to the table to get her notes and math book out. The prospect of being walked to each of her classes by an older boy, even one as nice and friendly as Kenzan, was less than thrilling; she had enough on her plate as it was without having to deal with whatever new rumors the gossip mill churned out following that kind of protective display.
"We called it Frosh Day at my old middle school. It's the day when the upperclassmen pick on all the new students," Kenzan explained. "Or just beat them up and stick them in lockers and stuff so they understand the hierarchy."
"I spent my first Freshman Friday in a locker," Shou remarked sadly, looking back down at his open textbook. "And my second. I'm hoping I won't spend this one in a locker, too. . ."
Rei sighed, hanging her head. Great, just great. They had a whole day specifically reserved for this sort of thing. Rei understood the hierarchy at Duel Academy pretty well now that she was here; she spent the last two and a half weeks becoming intimately acquainted with that pecking order. There was a bruise on her back from her two roommates, who let her know exactly what they thought of a middle school student winning her way into Osiris Red before she could take the exams like everyone else. She barely escaped an unwanted haircut from some junior classmen on her way over here. They had said it was 'payback' for using the boys' bath house the other night, and if she wanted to be treated like a boy, they would help her look like one, too.
She didn't really want to be treated like a boy anymore, though. There had been a time, two years ago, when she snuck into Duel Academy under a false name and in drag, but that was over. What Rei wanted now was to be judged on her own merits, by her skill and her efforts, instead of by her age and gender. She only used the boys' bath house because she was afraid of the other Osiris Red girls.
"Doesn't the school have a 'no hazing' policy?" Johan asked, interrupting her thoughts and directing a kind smile toward her that felt too warm given their limited interactions. She didn't really know Johan, not like she knew the other boys. He was even more private and closed off than Manjoume, though he wasn't sullen or mean about it like the Fourth Dorm student could be. It was just. . . Johan was Juudai's friend, and Juudai ignored her at every opportunity.
"That just means the teachers have to stop it if they see it," Juudai said, not looking up from his drawing. "The key is not to get caught."
"I would think they wouldn't be doing Freshman Friday this year on account of the Morality Committee being up in arms," Misawa noted idly. Shou jumped visibly at the sound of his voice.
"Augh! When did you get here, Misawa?!" he exclaimed, and the other tables shushed them again. Even the library clerk glared at them this time. Misawa's hands clenched convulsively around his textbook, the pages crinkling under his fingers. Shou, for his part, had the decency to look embarrassed.
"I have been here the whole time, Shou," Misawa ground out through grit teeth.
"Well, active Morality Committee or not," Kenzan interjected, redirecting the conversation back to the topic at hand before it could devolve into a throttling. "I'd rather know for sure that you're safe."
Rei looked between the boys with a thoughtful expression. She knew exactly how dangerous it was being at the bottom of that crowded, bitter totem pole. On the one hand, she really did not want to spend tomorrow in a locker. On the other hand, Rei was pretty sure that having an older boy step in at this point would just give the bullies something else to use against her. Kenzan couldn't go everywhere with her, and she didn't want them thinking that when she was alone was a better time to strike. She shook her head, her mind made up. "Thanks, Shou-kun, Kenzan-senpai, but I'll be fine."
"Are you sure?" Kenzan's eyes narrowed with worry. He leaned toward her, nudging her gently with his big shoulder. "It can get bad, especially on Freshman Friday. If you need us –"
"Don't be silly!" Rei forced a laugh, and hoped it didn't sound as fake as it felt. She kind of wanted to curl up under the table and cry or just scream until the pain constricting her lungs was gone, until all the unseen bruises under her uniform had faded away. "I'll be fine!" She repeated.
"Yeah, don't worry so much, Kenzan," Juudai said, looking up from his drawing at last. Their eyes met, and Rei's breath caught. She didn't dare take another in case it would break the spell and he would go back to ignoring her. She had almost forgotten how handsome he was, how inspired she felt when he smiled at her. Suddenly, it wasn't so bad. What were a few bullies to her? Rei was tough, and capable, and she always came up stronger every time someone pushed her down. "It's not like anyone's bothering you now, right?"
"No, of course not." The lie came out easy, strong and sure, and if it hadn't tasted so sour leaving her tongue even she would have believed it. "Nobody's been bothering me."
She would be okay, she told herself as she returned his smile and opened her math book.