Miracull: *places a recording device on the table and hits the button*
Recording: Welcome, readers, to the second chapter of Numbershot 64. Vile himself cannot be here today. He was more tired than he thought he would be today, so the chapter has been uploaded according to a preexisting schedule. He hopes you enjoy the second chapter, and he will rejoin you at the start of Chapter 3.
Numbershot 64: A Trial Across Time
Chapter 2
Through the timestream blue and pink particles of energy flew, eventually emerging on the other end at a completely different city, one spread out among five different areas, one of which was a small island not far from the mainland. The energy gathered together on a rooftop with a clear view of a tall silver building emblazoned with two large words: "Sigma Corp", along with their own symbol of the capital Sigma letter. Converging into two separate but close points, the energy morphed back into the humanoid forms of Chrono and Ourano, the former sitting on a piece of ventilation sticking out of the roof. The two let out breaths from their trip before looking at each other, grins creeping onto their faces before they burst out into combined laughter, high-fiving each other. When they finally calmed down, Ourano spoke. "I can't believe he actually bought it."
"I doubt he did. He probably set us up." Chrono said before holding up the card he received. "Still, this will have its use." He flipped the card around to its blank side, tilting his head as he looked at it. "Just... gotta figure out how to use it."
Ourano pulled out a dark pink D-Controller and typed on it. After waiting a bit for the Gamepad to collect data from the card, Ourano began reading what the screen displayed. "…The Numbers. 'A set of 100 special Xyz Monsters discovered in Heartland, there are unlike any other, with almost no relation to each other unlike other Archetypes.'" He skipped down a few lines, not finding the skipped lines useful nor interesting. "'According to accounts given by Yuma Tsukumo and Kaito Tenjo, two of the heroes who protected Heartland, these cards possessed the ability the influence the mind of whoever touched them, driving them to fulfill their greatest desires while simultaneously taking forms that reflected those desires.'"
"Makes sense." Chrono mused, looking at the card some more. "We're gonna have fun either way."
"You really think this is gonna work, Chrono?" Ourano asked, his eyebrow raised.
Chrono shrugged. "Not sure, really. What I do know from most of my time-watching is that the smallest thing can bring the biggest change." He replied. "And if my hunch is right, the change that could come from this little thing will be enough to make the boss real happy."
"So what do we do? Play the waiting game to see if this thing actually does something?" Ourano said as he hopped off the ventilation and took the card from his friend. Still skeptical, he placed his D-Controller on his wrist and began fiddling with it, causing Duel Mode to engage despite not having an opponent. Placing the card on his disk, Ourano stared at it intently, Chrono just staring at him in turn. Minutes passed, but the card remained completely blank. Eventually, Ourano swiped it off the disk and gazed at it, flipping and turning it across all angles. "What's with this stupid thing? Is it defective?"
"Maybe it isn't working because, y'know...?" Chrono said, lightly gesturing to the tech across his right arm, from the glove to the shoulder pad.
His message seemed to be understood by Ourano, but it didn't make him any less annoyed. "That's no excuse. You'd think this thing would work on anything with a sapient brain, or at least DO something."
"Part of it could also be Vector and Distributor's doing. Still, honestly, I didn't really think it would work for us that way."
Ourano scoffed. "Call it what you want, but I vote we've been tricked. He saw through us like he had X-ray vision."
Chrono took the card back from him. "True, but think about it, Ourano: How many Numbers did Vector and the Distributor have a direct connection to? How many did Astral and Mia themselves actually make?"
Ourano's face scrunched in pure disgust. "Then we went all the way to that timeline for nothing." Swiping the card again, he scoffed at it. "Thanks for the white elephant, Distributor. Good riddance to bad rubbish." He then tossed the card off the building without any hesitance, the wind carrying it into parts unknown.
Chrono watched the card float away, and a grin crept onto his face. "And now the plan sets into motion."
Hearing this, Ourano spun back around and looked at him with raw confusion. "What do you mean?"
A laugh came from the bishounen. "The plan was never for us to USE the Number, Ourano. It was merely to bring that time anomaly here."
Ourano tilted his head. "And remind me what that accomplishes?"
Chrono stepped forward and stared in the direction the card flew. "The Numbers have long since been out of play. And the boy is not going to have anything that can counter the power of that one card." The card drifted through the streets of Sigma City, its appearance hiding its true nature. "Like Vector himself said, we'll surprise him with something he's never seen before and our hands will never get dirty." Chrono's eyes became transparent yet visible over the Number. "A single grain of sand can cause an entire dune to collapse. That out-of-place card is the grain…" The Number vanished from the scene, bringing the view back to Chrono. "…and the future of Kohaku Yudin is the dune."
Clearly satisfied with his comrade's explanation, Ourano smirked. "I like the way you think, pal. This IS gonna be fun to watch."
However, the noise of something opening behind them got their attention, but the minute either of them turned around, Chrono found himself blasted in the chest by a cyan-colored shot, knocking him back a bit. "Ow… That actually hurt me!"
"Of course it did." A voice said. The two of them saw that some kind of strange futuristic-looking gun was pointed at them… being held by Zaman, who was staring at them with a look of irritation. "I just shot you with a concentrated blast of temporal energy, harnessed directly from Cross-Time itself. Even beings that can control time like you or me can't handle its power." Blowing the residual energy off the gun's barrel, Zaman pointed it at them again. "Now then, I'm going to cut to the chase. Who or what are you, and how do you have control over the time stream?"
"Uh… Chrono? I thought you said no one has powers like ours?" Ourano said, taking a step back, clearly unnerved at this new character.
The blue-garbed man of the duo dusted himself off as his shoulder pad began glowing ominously. "They don't. This poser just got a lucky SHOT!" He immediately fired off a beam of blue energy from his arm. However, Zaman merely held out his arm and caught the blast with his hand, and despite having to hold his arm there from the sheer force the blast was giving off, nothing else seemed to happen to him. Chrono clearly noticed this, as he quickly ceased the laser while staring at Zaman in fear. "B-Bakana! That laser should have aged you so fast that you would be reduced to dust!"
Zaman checked his hand, noting that it was alright, and snapped his fingers. "It was a rather useful time-acceleration beam. However, it's useless against beings who exist outside of time like me." He then pointed his gun squarely at Chrono, not even keeping Ourano in the sightline. "And unless you want to face the power of someone stronger than you in controlling time, I suggest you never try that on anyone else."
Chrono stared at the barrel that was pointed right at his face, clearly showing that he was scared. However, before he knew it, a pink portal opened under his feet, causing him to look down before he fell through it, the portal closing immediately after. "Eh?!" Zaman cried. He then noticed a light glow off to the side, looking to see that Ourano's shoulder pad was glowing, and his arm was pointed where Chrono once was.
"You're good for someone who's not one of us." Ourano replied, bringing his arm back to in front of him. "Somehow your abilities even let you cross over space as well as time." Clenching his fist, his shoulder pad began to glow even brighter. "…Nowhere near my level, of course. Hrrah!" Swinging his arm, Ourano created another pink portal right in front of him, a barrage of pink shots firing from it.
Caught off-guard but not without any options, Zaman immediately grabbed his watch with his free hand and clicked it, causing a low clock chime sound as a red wave washed over the area, slowing down time to less than a single frame of animation per second. The shots flying toward him had completely stopped, some of which had zinged right past him. "That was almost too easy." Having all the freedom he needed, Zaman began walking around the shots as if walking around support beams in a house while approaching the frozen Ourano. "So, he has the power of spatial manipulation, just as his friend has temporal manipulation. But that just makes the mystery all the deeper. There's no record of them in the timeline… who are these two?" When he finally got near Ourano, Zaman merely sighed. "Well, I'll figure that out later." With that, he took advantage of his frozen foe by punching him a few times, his body barely reacting. After giving him a satisfied beating, Zaman clicked his watch to return time to normal. All the impact from the hits smacked Ourano at once, causing him to land on the ground. He tried to get up with a groan, but he was stopped by having Zaman's gun pointed at him again. "Even raw space obeys the laws of time." Zaman told the space warper. "Now, where did you send that card? It's not supposed to be here!"
Ourano groaned from the pain, gritting his teeth. "How the hell should I know? I just threw it without even caring!" His shoulder pad began to glow again, and a portal began to open beneath it. "You want it so bad? Go have a scavenger hunt!" The portal finally became big enough for him to fit through, allowing him to fall through and vanish.
"Matte (Wait)!" Zaman cried as he reached for him, but the portal closed before he could grab him, leaving Zaman alone on the Sigma City rooftops, making him clench his fist. "Tsk, great." Sighing, he pressed a button on a device attached to his ear. "You guys hear me ok?"
"Yeah, we've got you on visual, Zeke." Touko's voice came from the other end. From the time dimension, Touko and her friends were by the computer, able to see him.
"Good, I'm probably gonna need a little help here." Zaman replied. "Does anyone know something significant about Sigma City in this decade?"
Touko began typing on the computer, bringing up information on the screen. "Sigma City, 2060s decade. According to the system, the current time is sometime near an event where students from different schools throughout the five Districts competed against each other in a no-holds-barred Dueling event."
"I kinda remember that in Duel History. Something about a gang formed of troublemakers from each district turning an annual sign of respect into a Wild West Battle City ripoff." Shotaro mused.
"Don't believe everything, Shotaro. Having walked through time, I can tell you not all the details are always added to the history books." Zaman told him.
"It also says that this decade was also where famous Duelist Kohaku Yudin lived, with the current time not long before his rise to greatness."
"Hmm...can you play back the last bit of those guys' conversation before I showed up?" Zaman asked. Touko rewound the feed and plays back the last few lines, which Zaman could hear through his communicator. When he heard Chrono's message about using it to defeat Kohaku, he snapped his fingers. "So that's it. They're going after Yudin. They must be part of some group given the abilities they had. …Send me Yudin's coordinates, and then try and track down that card on the computer." Zaman looked out into Sigma City. "I have a feeling I'm not gonna be able to do this on my own."
As the wind blew as a light breeze, the lost Number card traveled aimlessly across the streets, barely even noticeable by the people as they went about their business. Eventually, however, the card blew into an alley with incredibly low light getting through from the sun, its eerie glow keeping it visible as it eventually came to a rest on a trash can deep inside the alley. Right next to it, a pair of eyes seemed to flash as they opened, turning to the card that appeared. "Nani…?" Slowly reaching a thin hand over to it, he grabbed it and held the blank face in front of his own, the glow illuminating his face lightly. "What brings you here…?" A slight dark aura began to cover him, but he barely even seemed to notice.
"Hey, creep!" A voice called out. The young man slowly looked up from the card to see a group of students, all of them wearing pins in the shape of the Greek letter Alpha, had entered the alley. A light suddenly flashed on from the group, fully illuminating the pale-blue-haired young man and making him cover his face with his hand, which came from a flashlight that one of them was holding. "The War's over, but we still have some unfinished business with you."
"Yeah! Our pal is still scared to death is over what you did!" Another of the group cried.
"It's payback time!" A third member growled, punching his palm with his fist.
The group slowly approached the single man as a mob, but through both the flashlight's beam and the card's glow, the man's mouth could clearly be seen forming into an eerie smile as the unseen dark aura became even stronger. "If it is the path to your fall that you seek to travel… then I will be the guide you need…"
Recording: Thank you very much to all who chose to read this chapter. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review for Vile to see when he comes back to his computer. Chapter 3 will be uploaded tomorrow as expected, so please be watchful for it. Have a good night, everyone. *Computer voice* Vile, logging out.
Miracull: *barks happily at you viewers before taking the recording device and walking out*