Chapter 7- The Year Begins!

The next day Drake woke up just as the sun came up over the horizon. He had been placed in a fairly large square room, measuring about twenty feet in each direction. There was a cabinet in the corner, a small shower stall, a good desk, and a pretty nice bed. Drake wondered how good the other rooms were. He threw on some jeans and his jacket, grabbed his deck and duel disk, and left his room. He found Keith hanging around the entrance to the main building.

"Hey, Drake. What's up?" he said.

"Not much. Get a good night's sleep?" Drake asked.

"Yeah, I got a pretty nice bed. Pretty good room, too. Where's Flynn, do you think? I haven't seen him yet."

"Neither have I. Bet you that he has a better room than either of us. Do you have to share yours?"

"No. Good thing, too. I don't think I'd like to share a room with someone else. At least not here. Besides, I would probably end up making friends with him and adding to our little group. That might not be such a good thing."

"With Flynn hanging around all the time and Matt appearing at random and giving us cryptic, creepy hints? Yeah, I see your point."

"Hey, isn't that Flynn?" Keith pointed past Drake. Drake looked in the direction Keith was pointing, but all he could see was a huge mass of female students.

"I don't see-" He stopped when the girls parted a little, allowing him to see Flynn standing in the middle. The girls appeared to be very attracted to him. "Ah, now I see him. Here he comes." The mass had begun moving in their direction.

"Hello." Flynn said, appearing to be completely unbothered by the large contingent of girls surrounding him. "As you can see, I've picked up quite a female fan club."

" 'Quite a female fan club?' Isn't that an understatment?" Keith asked.

"I would say so. They saw me yesterday and only left me when I locked the door to my room last night." He looked around. "Go away." He said to all the girls surrounding him. "I don't like any of you."

"He's so hot…" most of them said in unison.

"GO AWAY!" Flynn yelled, getting angry for the first time since Drake had known him. The girls did nothing but stare at him, even more attracted.

"He's even hotter angry…" they all said, again in unison.

"HEY! STUPID FEMALES! STOP BLOCKNIG THE DOOR WITH YOU FAT ASSES!" came a loud voice. Instantly the girls ran away. Drake could now see who had shouted. It was Matt. "Hello." He said as he walked past.

"That guy is weird." Drake said. "How'd he get those girls to go away?"

"I don't know." Keith said. "I saw him a bit last night. He seems able to command nearly anyone to do anything."

"That's not the half of it." Flynn said. "I dared someone to go into his room while he was sleeping and lift up those bandages to see what's underneath."

"Did he tell you?" Drake asked, very eager to find out more about this enigma.

"He didn't tell anyone. He's dead."

"What?"

"Yeah. Died. Just like that. I watched him enter the room and heard him pull the bandages off. Then I saw him fly out of the room, hit the opposite wall, and slide down. He was dead before he hit the wall. The academy is having a job keeping this quiet."

"I would imagine." Keith said. "Now, instead of learning more about this guy, we find out we know less about him than we think."

"Yeah. What could be under there that can kill that easily?" Drake asked.

"We'll have to find out later. Class is about to start." Flynn said. They opened the doors and set off to class.

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After class they had lunch. Each was to return to his own dorm for every meal, so they agreed to meet up before the afternoon class for some fun. As they left the room, they noticed a large circle of students up ahead. As they got closer, they noticed that it was Matt who stood in the middle. The students on the outside seemed to be heckling him. Matt just stood there.

"What's going on?" Drake asked one of the students near the outside of the circle.

"We're just giving that freak what he had coming to him!" one of them said. "We know he killed that other guy, so after this, we're going to take him out back and beat him up!"

"Really?" Matt said, staring directly at the student that Drake had been speaking to. "And since when did you think I was going to let you do something like that?"

"I-I-I… uh, w-w-we… that is, er…" the student stuttered. Matt's eyes focused. Drake felt a wave of…something fly past. All of the students who had been making fun of him had been sent flying backwards up against the wall. Matt still stood there in exactly the same pose he had had before this occurrence. Drake looked at him in utter disbelief. Then Matt turned and walked away as if nothing had happened. Flynn grabbed Drake by the arm.

"We should get out of here." Flynn whispered in his ear.

"Right." Drake muttered back. They walked around the piles of moaning bodies and left the school's main building. For a while they walked in silence. Then Drake spoke up.

"You know when Matt blasted all those other guys?" he asked.

"How could we not notice?" Keith said.

"Well, afterwards, I got a good look at his face. The iris of his eye, the one you can see, it was purple. Is that normal?"

"No." Flynn said. "When I spoke to him on the docks, his eye was a sort of turquoise, somewhere between green and blue. This guy just keeps getting weirder."

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After the incident described above, no one bothered Matt again. Indeed, Flynn said that in the gold cafeteria, the dorm Matt roomed in, everyone tried their best to be as far away from him as possible. Everywhere he went he was surrounded by a large circle of empty space. Drake thought that it must be lonely.

"Actually, he really doesn't care." Flynn said.

"How do you know?" Keith asked.

"I sit by him during meals."

"Is that why all the girls started leaving you alone?" Drake asked. "Because they associate you with him?"

"Actually, no. He yelled at them again. Said they obstructed everything everywhere they went and told them to stop following me. And they stopped. I needn't say that I am very glad about this development." This took place a few weeks into the school year.

"Hey, what's that?" said Drake, pulling a sheet of paper off the wall. "5-on-5 with the other Academy! Four spots available. Apply at the chancellor's office at 8 o'clock on Monday night." He scratched his head. "5-on-5 but only four spots open? Who already got one?"

"The best duelist in the school, probably." Flynn said.

"Who do you think is the best duelist here?" Keith asked.

"Matt, hands down. That leaves three of us… hm, guess we won't take up the last spots. Wonder who the third will be…" Flynn scratched his head. "Guess we'll just have to apply tonight."

That night they all signed up to go up against the best of Duel Academy. As far as they could see, no one else had applied.

"Maybe they're scared of the Duel Academy students." Drake commented, crushing his now-empty pop can. "Still, that makes it harder on us."

"Yeah, now we all have to win." Flynn said.

"Easy enough." Keith said. "I jacked up my deck recently. I'll thrash whoever they put in against me."