his guard and his goaler
2.
Guilt was a double-edged sword. It saw him save a boy he'd thought he could befriend and instead led to his father entombed and turning stone-cold… and his compatriots and work and every mark he'd ever left vanishing into non-existence.
Guilt had left Ryoken alone and burdened with the knowledge that he himself had brought it all about. From the scant remains of his home and the money they hadn't thought to touch, he cast a fishing line and caught his father's soul on the brink of the abyss, but he was too young and ignorant and inexperienced to pull him back from there, yet. He needed expert help: his father first and foremost, and the men and women who'd worked with him. And he didn't have that sort of help. He didn't know where they'd vanished. If they'd met the same fate of his father, or thrown him to the dogs and run. And he didn't have time to find out. His resources were better spent trying to find a way himself.
And yet, that wasn't the only guilt he bore. He'd saved six children at the cost of all this after all. He saved a boy he'd been trying to befriend, a boy who could have been his friend, but he'd paid too steep a price and he hadn't thought things through before he'd signed on that dotted line.
It was too late now. He had to save his father.
As for that boy whose love for duel monsters had gotten him trapped in this web… Ryoken didn't quite know what to do. It was his fault for getting the other involved, and then his fault again for being emotionally invested and then ruining everything his father had worked for. But he wasn't going to forget that boy in a hurry. Not the part of him who wanted to be friends. Nor the part of him who cursed the time they'd met.
He went to visit, if only to settle those parts of him and lay something to rest.
It didn't work out that way.