ACTIVATE – MATERIAL:02: CARETAKER

Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shall keep thee:

To deliver thee from the way of the evil man, from the man that speaketh froward things;

Who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness;

To deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the stranger which flattereth with her words;

Which forsaketh the guide of her youth.

– The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 2, Verses 11-3, 16-7a, KJV

XVII

Leo Duel School

"Asakuma-san?"

A shorter woman in her mid-thirties, Asakuma was hardly the poster child for up-and-coming management, but she had distinguished herself during the Infernoid incident as acting chief technician in Nakajima's stead. Her efforts—as brief as they were in comparison to the LID's service that fateful night—had been vital in ensuring the survival of students, staff, and school alike. Now, months later, she had now been promoted to full assistant, and was second only to the man himself in the vast control room beneath LDS. With Nakajima out of town at present, however, this meant that she was fully in charge of overseeing the sensor grid in front of her, continually monitoring the energy signatures of foreign Fusion Summons—the precursors to another possible invasion of Maiami City.

She turned away from this grid to see who had roused her attention: a young intern whose black hair was so slick with moisture that he looked as though he'd just been spat out of college.

"Yes?" She'd learned enough from Himika to know the shortest questions usually demanded the longest answers.

"T-there was a package in the evening post," he said, holding an envelope as though he was worried it might cut him to the bone. "It was addressed to the headmistress. N-no return address … no other name."

Asakuma tilted her head. The moisture suddenly registered—the intern was sweating; profusely, too. "You didn't open it, did you?" she asked suspiciously.

The young man shook his head. "It wasn't even sealed. I found that out when my supervisor had me check the mail. I pulled out the envelope, and … w-well … "

He swallowed, and held out a thin, familiarly rectangular shape. "This fell out."

Asakuma took the card, and promptly felt her eyebrows vanish into her brown hair. The image of Markus Streiter stared back at her, his eyes wide with a fear that someone of his age and ferocity ought not possess.

"Check it," she said tersely, brandishing the card at the technician nearest her. "Himika-san already tore up one fake card of him. If this really is Streiter, I want to know now." The last thing she wanted to do was call her before they found another fake. And if it turned out to be the genuine article … well, Asakuma thought with a smirk, it wasn't as though they were short of deep dark holes to hide this particularly nasty bit of business.

The technician passed Streiter's card under a scanner. He exhaled. "It's real, all right—real, and recent. According to the data log, it was printed less than an hour ago—" He broke off abruptly.

"What?" Asakuma hoped she'd put enough urgency in the word to warrant another long explanation.

"You'd better see this." And the technician slid backward in his chair, allowing Asakuma a closer look at the screen that had been reading Streiter's card. He too, she only just noticed, was sweating as much as the intern.

The reason why was staring her right in the face: fingerprints, illuminated in the neon glow of black light, dotted the edges of Streiter's card. In their midst had been printed a series of graceful, meticulously printed calligraphy that Asakuma needed slightly more than a few seconds to realize was English:

Does he dream of you,

the way he dreams of me?

She read the short message three times—each one in quicker succession—before she registered the thundering noise coming from inside her breast, and realized that she, too, was sweating in fear.

"Check the security cams outside the mailbox," Asakuma whispered, unable to speak any louder. "I want to know who delivered that message, how, and when." I have to be sure it's who I think it is.

The intern looked as pale as she felt. "The package was addressed to Headmistress Himika," he said, as if in a daze. "I-if that's who this message is for … then … "

But Asakuma was already acting. "Get me a priority line!" she cried at no one in particular. "Nakajima—Himika—anyone who's in charge!"

Nobody answered her. "A-Asakuma-san," stammered the technician, "Nakajima and Reiji-san already passed the second checkpoint—security procedures are in place; their communications have been deactivated. And Himika-san is out of town as well—I can't get anything from her phone but static!"

Asakuma felt lightheaded. I'm the one in charge, she thought, white with dread as the implications sank in. "Keep trying," she could only say. "Call them every ten minutes—every five if you have to! We have to warn them all!"

"Of what? Are the Ædonai attacking again?"

"No." She felt desperation clawing at her insides. "I think they're doing something much worse."

Akaba Leo finally put aside his pen, stretching back in his seat with a grunt and staring at the ceiling of the study without really seeing it.

He'd lost track of how long he'd been writing this latest chapter in his memoir. Ever since word had reached him from a conversation two of his maids were sharing—the news of Markus Streiter's defeat, his own extradition all the way to the Netherlands, and the forthcoming trial that would take place there—he had found himself in the midst of a feverish, frenetic pace of creativity that he'd not experienced since his Arc Area Project. The hours had seemed to melt away, and so had the daylight, before he'd even been aware of any passage of time. By then the dim glow of dusk had settled into the study; night would be falling soon.

Reiji would be here in a matter of hours, he thought—before his mouth suddenly split wide open in a massive yawn. Instinctively Leo knew there was no point fighting the inevitable—he needed to get plenty of rest for what he knew was coming. He reached for the metallic band on his desk, taking care to slip it over his head, before striding a few paces off to his right, where a length of rope hung from the ceiling. He pulled it, and heard the far-off noise of a single bell, tolling a long bass note throughout the hallways of the house.

A few moments later, the voice of a young woman crackled from the speaker grid in the ceiling—too far away to be affected by the EMP generator that wrapped around Leo's ankle. "Yes, sir?"

He recognized the voice of one of the maids in tonight's rotation. "Jayme? I'll be retiring in an hour," he said. "A little bit of night air first, though, I think—before the long flight ahead."

"Understood, sir. We'll unlock the door to the garden. I'll ready your bed in the meantime. Will that be all?"

Leo didn't answer. He had just taken a closer look at the paper he had been writing on. Perhaps it had been a trick of the light, but its surface had looked oddly blank for a moment. Even now, as he focused on the calligraphy, each letter seemed to swim before his eyes, the black ink fading in and out in the glare of twilight.

He took a long look upwards, deep in thought. "Yes," he said, half to himself, waving aside the strange notion that had entered his brain for the time being. "Yes, I think it will."

The air was blessedly cool, and there was just enough light illuminating the expansive courtyard that Leo could see where he was going, while also being able to make out the first lights of the stars in the cloudless sky. He wished it would be a little bit darker, so that he could see more of them, and in greater detail as well.

He had a feeling he would never get this unobstructed of a view of them for the rest of his life.

Aimlessly, Leo strode out into the darkening outdoors, closing the door behind him without a sound. There was no other noise he could hear but his own footsteps. Not one bird sang, not one cricket chirped. He found the silence a tiny bit unnerving—but still he walked on, making his way towards the distant fountain that served as a centerpiece to the garden. Off to his right gleamed one of the mansion's swimming pools—a square slice of blue that glowed unnaturally alien in the gathering dark. Not one ripple could be seen on the water's surface.

Leo made it as far as the first row of hedges before he finally stopped where he stood. He bowed his head, but did not turn around.

Then: "You might as well show yourself," he spoke to the night, loudly and clearly. "I already know this isn't real."

Silence. For a moment, Leo wondered if perhaps his suspicions had been for naught—and then he heard the noise. The faintest of them, nothing that would have startled him in any way: a flutter of fabric, moved by a breath of wind that wasn't kissing his face; the crunch of shoes against sandstone gravel that wasn't under his feet—and finally, the faintest of shadows, cast by starlight that wasn't shining above him.

He'd left it all behind, he knew. But Leo accepted all this with the quiet exhale of a man resigned to his fate, and now he gazed at the opposite end of the garden, and the woman he knew had not been there even a second ago.

Dr. Gwendolyn Grimm stared back at him, fifty feet away—and yet the distance that separated her from him felt closer still. Her tall, slender figure was almost totally concealed by the fountain that burbled silently between them. Only the Psychic Duelist's green hair, tied within its ponytail and drifting with the occasional zephyr—and the frayed, patched overcoat that never left her shoulders—kept her from looking like just another sculpture here.

But Leo was too drawn to her face to care about anything else. Any hope that this was real had been swept away the moment he had seen her eyes. Not the one—she had both her eyes once more, gleaming like twin emeralds in the night. They stared hungrily at him, not blinking and not moving even one iota—drinking him in and savoring every glance like a fine wine.

She took a step forward. "What gave it away?" Her voice was almost as quiet as the space they shared.

Leo fought hard to keep himself from smiling. "No one's called me sir since Academia." His voice, much deeper than hers, felt unnaturally louder because of it, and he unconsciously found himself trying to dial it down. "Every maid in this house calls me Master Leo. Not Headmaster—just Master. Sometimes I think they do it to remind me how close I was to greatness. How far I had left to go—like they're mocking me and my failure every time."

He mirrored her movements, and inched forward a pace as well. "There were other signs, too. I couldn't read my own handwriting just now. And I was sure I saw the paper I'd been penning my memoirs on turn as blank as the day it'd been printed. But I chalked that up to fatigue. You've probably guessed I don't sleep too well these days."

"You don't seem too disturbed to see me at all," Dr. Grimm said mildly. "If it weren't for all these measures your own family was making you take in the name of your security, I'd say you were almost expecting me to show up."

"Nothing they did would have stopped you," said Leo. "There's an old saying that blood runs thicker than water—that family matters above all else. But there is nothing quite so resilient as the bond between teacher and student. No one in my family—not my wife, or even my son—could have shared the relationship that you and I possessed back then. Maybe that's why I didn't tell them the truth. I think they guessed, in the end, that the precautions they laid out would only be a stopgap at best—that sooner or later, you would make an effort to reach out to me again, when you knew I would be unprotected."

He sniffed. "I suppose that's when you did it, huh? I gave in to the limitations of my own body—I can only assume I dozed off in the middle of my writing, before I had a chance to put that REM band on my head, and block out your powers. Now here I am, in your dream. Our souls finally did what our bodies and minds could not."

Dr. Grimm blinked languidly. "What makes you so sure this is my dream?" she asked, smiling fondly at him.

Leo couldn't help but smile back in kind at that. "If it were," he replied, "you'd be younger." He said nothing more than that, but tapped at his right cheek knowingly.

That wiped the smile off the Psychic Duelist's face. For a moment, Leo thought he saw a flash of purple flame in the eye he knew had been irreparably damaged by Kōtsu Masumi. But it was here and gone before he could blink, and before it had registered in full, Dr. Grimm was speaking as though it had never happened.

"Of course you'd say that," she muttered, looking away from him towards the swimming pool for a brief moment, its aquamarine light shining on her pale face. "There was no other way you could have seen me. Not that I minded, at the time. I knew you loved me too much to have me as anything besides the student any teacher could ever have desired in their classroom. Voraciously intelligent"—Leo nodded—"blindly loyal"—and again—"and just unique enough to become more than a mere student … but a piece in the puzzle of some grander purpose."

But even before she'd finished speaking, Leo had seized on her words: at the time. "Do you miss those days?" No, said a voice in his head. No, that wasn't the right question to ask.

"I miss what could have been," Dr. Grimm spoke after a while. "Every day I spent at Academia was the happiest of my life. You don't often hear that said about anything compulsory. Most boys and girls don't like being forced into anything—certainly not school. But then, I wasn't most boys and girls even before I enrolled, was I?"

She smiled again. But it was a far different one than what Leo had seen on her face before. He knew all too well that the right smile could conceal in shadow what another one could bring into the light. The thin, bladelike lips of the Psychic Duelist flickered with shadows of unimaginable pain.

"You certainly weren't," he could only agree. "And I know that's one part of your life you don't miss."

"Very true," said Dr. Grimm. "But just because I don't miss my childhood doesn't mean I don't regret being a child at all. Those days define us until the end—if we forget how simple life was like when we were younger, then really, what business do we have living as adults?"

"It was never simple with you."

"We both know that's not true," the Psychic Duelist said, the barest of edges to her voice. "You remember the state I was in, when I first came to your school. You saw a girl in great pain, and took pity on her. That was it. That was all. From that moment, I was never alone again."

"There's that past tense again," Leo said dryly. "You're not telling me you feel alone now, do you?"

Dr. Grimm smiled again. He saw, for an instant, the pain that had graced her lips a minute ago. But just as quickly, it was gone, supplanted by a look of such radiant bliss that she might have felt like a child again.

"That's the wonderful thing about being a Fusion Duelist," she whispered, "be it part of Academia or of the Ædonai. I'm never alone, Leo. Unum in multis, multi in unum—as long as I keep those words in my head and my heart, I'll always remember how you changed my life for the better."

Leo frowned. "But it wasn't enough," he said. "I can see that much, all over your face. Even I couldn't have filled that void inside you. Otherwise you wouldn't have joined the Ædonai in the first place."

"You were the reason I joined them," Dr. Grimm spoke through clenched teeth. "I sought them out because I knew the war that you were fighting was lost. It was a war that you should never have had to fight at all. So I went to find people who could fight it in your stead. You could be free to continue your work—to unite the Dimensions, to bring back your daughter—and not have a single soul to disturb you or ruin everything you worked for."

"Except we both know what happened next," said Leo. "Z-ARC came back. You've been beating yourself up about it ever since—that if you'd been there when the tide had turned, it might have turned completely the other way. But even you wouldn't have stood a chance against him, Wendy. Sometimes people are just out of your league."

But the Psychic Duelist did not seem to hear him. "That wasn't the most galling thing about Academia's fall," she hissed. "Losing I can handle. Getting ratted out by a bunch of kids does wonders for your humility. But I could never live down the notion that I ought to have been there to protect Academia from the Lancers, when they came. I didn't care about stopping them as much as I cared about stopping them from stopping you."

Leo took one look at the clenched fist at her side, the slim knuckles bone-white, and doubted she'd gotten over the indignity of losing to Masumi at all. Nor did he think the loss of an eye and her seat of power was anything even remotely like a fair trade in her … well, her other eye.

"Is that why you cast your lot with Kagemaru, then?" he said. "You wanted him to give you a chance at revenge?"

The Psychic Duelist did not speak for at least a full minute. "I'm blind enough as it is," she finally whispered, as if to herself. "I don't need any personal vendetta to destroy LDS—LID and Lancers alike. To wipe them out for the sake of petty vengeance wouldn't give me closure—not now."

"But Kagemaru had to have given you something," said Leo. "A promise, to ensure your loyalty to him. Something even I could never have given you."

"You gave me everything—"

"Then why are you here?!"

Leo had not meant to raise his voice. The words echoed unnaturally in the dreamscape, magnified tenfold as if to mock him for saying them at all. But even as the regret rose to choke him, a sudden resolve had risen in his heart, and forced the awful feeling back into his core.

"I gave," he said, with enormous effort in every word, "a little girl the chance to live a life where the weakness that crippled her, from the day she was born, could be turned into a strength. I watched you grow strong—stronger than just about any student or soldier that walked the halls of our school, and I gave you the chance to use that strength in battle. I had Markus train you to be the ultimate soldier. Yūri was young enough to be your own son, but I still had him train you to be the ultimate fighter, because I knew no other could sculpt you into a force to be reckoned with. I did all this and more because I thought someone like you deserved every ounce of the strength at your fingertips!"

His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. And then: "I gave you the chance to know a father!"

Dr. Grimm went pale. Her right eye blazed with violet flames, charring the flesh of the eyelid that protected it into a shiny black. But Leo—even though he felt the last word burn his throat like so much chlorine trifluoride—knew he could not shrink back now.

"We each became the family that had long been denied us," he said hoarsely. "I wanted my family back … the parts of it that I'd lost. And you … well." He swallowed. "You still want yours, don't you?"

The Psychic Duelist nodded. Slowly, the miniaturized inferno flickered and died from her eye, and the burned flesh healed and flaked away. "Then I ask again," Leo said, more gently this time. "Why are you here?"

Dr. Grimm did not speak for such a long time that Leo wondered if she even had a ready answer. "Let's just say," she murmured after what felt like whole minutes had passed, "that nostalgia means different things for different people. If you were to look back on your life, Leo, would you think more of the people you met … or of yourself?"

Leo's heart sank, and he heaved a sigh. As though the last word carried some immeasurably fell magic deep within its depths, the nighttime air—already cool with the setting of the sun—had sunk as well, and turned into an ominous chill. At once, he had deduced the entire reason that Dr. Grimm had constructed this dreamscape.

"So that's how it is, then." He didn't want to make it sound like a question. "I knew there was no way this could be a social call. But I would have thought he'd have more stones than this."

His lips tightened into an accusing sneer. "So tell me—was this visit Kagemaru's idea, or yours?"

Dr. Grimm shook her head. "I chose to do this before he even gave the order," she replied. "You already know that Markus fell in battle against the LID—that he was sealed into a card not long after. The Ædonai will fight on in his name—but Kagemaru knows better. Losing Markus leaves a void in our leadership that won't be easy to fill."

She stepped towards him. "You're the only person in any Dimension that could possibly take his place now," she said. "Because no one else in any Dimension was closer to me than the two of you."

"And of course Kagemaru would use that against you," said Leo scathingly. "What else would he know of the bond we shared as teacher and student, besides the bits he decided were useful to him?"

He paced to and fro, trying to keep his temper from rising much higher. "I have no illusions for why he wants me under his finger. Deep down, he could never quite get over his loss to me—how he was forced to cede control of Academia and go into exile simply because he lost at a game—never once knowing that game could be something more, if only he'd had what it took to see it."

"He didn't like the idea of sending children to do the job of adults," Dr. Grimm told him. "Certainly not in having them serve in the capacity of soldiers like me and Markus."

"Kagemaru," Leo spat, "has no vision. For all his power and skill, he does not have a child's sense of imagination. If I hadn't done anything to stop him, he would have taken my proposition of uniting the Dimensions and turned it into his own. But instead of unification, he saw only domination. He wanted Fusion to be supreme above all, and he wasn't above using armies to make it happen. Real armies—with real weapons, too. That bastard didn't give a damn about Duel Monsters beyond the cards in his own Deck. And the moment I lost my standing at Academia, he was there to swoop in, pick up the pieces, build a completely different puzzle out of them, and call it his own!"

He turned away, gazing at the back door of the Château. It might as well have been light-years away. He sighed. "You can pass off this idea as yours as much as you like, Wendy. But I cannot work under the likes of Kagemaru. Not if he promised me a hundred Rays. There's a rift between us that even you can never fix."

"You've beaten him before."

"And once was enough!" Leo snarled. "I will not permit him the dignity of allowing himself another shot at me. I have lost enough in my life as it is without him lording it over me at every turn."

"You never lost me."

Dr. Grimm spoke the words so softly that Leo could scarcely believe they had come from her mouth. Slowly, he turned around … and was astonished to see a tear trickling down the Psychic Duelist's left cheek.

"What are you saying?" he demanded.

"I'm saying that you don't have to fight for Kagemaru," said Dr. Grimm, still approaching him. "I fought for your sake, in better days. If not for his … then at least fight for mine."

She was now less than ten feet away from him. "Come with me. Fight with me."

With every word, she drew that much closer, until they were almost nose to nose. "Fight for me. Fight for Ray."

The words did not register to Leo. The mere sound of her voice had unnerved him beyond all the hell Z-ARC had wrought upon his life's work; he had not heard anything like it for over a decade and a half.

Gwendolyn Grimm—that redoubtable Psychic Duelist, who had practically built half of Academia's fighting force with the power he had helped her unlock—was scared. No, not simply scared; she was terrified, and more so than she had ever been as a child … but of what? Leo pondered. Had Masumi done even more damage than anyone could have guessed? Did Kagemaru have that much of a stranglehold upon her? He saw the old man's face flicker before his eyes, and cursed the man under his breath—but the question still remained. What had that ancient relic promised Dr. Grimm that he himself had not already given her?

And why, why did Dr. Grimm think he deserved to be by her side once more, alongside a man she knew he hated?

Five of the Fūma clan leapt from one tree to the next, making less noise than the wind that kissed their backs.

These Ninja Duelists—Aoikage, Akakage, Shirokage, Kurokage, and Kikage; each clad in the traditional armor of their clan, and a scarf over their mouths whose color served to identify them by name—had not spoken a word since the news had reached them: Grandmaster Ginkage, the head of their clan, and the second-in-command of Château security—second only to Akaba Reiji himself, who had appointed him personally—had not radioed in for five whole minutes since beginning his own patrol of the grounds. These five, who served their patriarch more unswervingly than they did any of the Akaba family—and that in itself said something—had been closest to the last known coordinates of their grandmaster's position, and were approaching it even now.

Kikage was in the lead. When he held up a hand, everyone therefore froze in place behind him, each ninja alighting on a branch some twenty feet above the ground. One second later, he raised three fingers, and aimed them to one side. Immediately, Aoikage, Akakage, and Shirokage melted into the night—leaving Kurokage with Kikage. The black-scarfed ninja saw his partner's three fingers become two, and drop them to the ground.

At once, he leapt from his perch behind Kikage. It was impossible to tell which of them made less noise than the other as they hit the grass; the sounds of the night masked any they made in their wake.

"Kare wa doko?" Kurokage murmured, wondering out loud. He knew that this had been the spot where the locator inside the Grandmaster's Duel Disk had placed him last—and he knew its biometric sensors would have registered if it had been taken from his person. That they still did meant he had to be—

"Asoko!" Kurokage tensed the moment he heard Kikage hiss the single word. He turned round in a full circle, his keen eyes zeroing in on every detail, looking for something that might be out of place—

His breath caught when he saw the sight. Grandmaster Ginkage laid at the roots of a tree, slumped and bloodied. His Duel Disk—its body and blade as silver as his name and his hair—still shone like a slice of the crescent moon.

Both Ninja Duelists made as if to approach him—but a feeble hand, raised with what must have been the last of the old man's strength, stopped them in their tracks.

"Anata wa … kite inai hazu … " rasped Ginkage. Kurokage saw then that he was wounded—half his face was one big contusion, and an arm and a leg flopped at an awkward angle. "Karera wa … mada koko … ni imasu … "

Kurokage and Kikage traded glances. "Who is still here?" Kikage demanded, from beneath his yellow scarf.

"Sore … wa … wanada … "

A trap? Kurokage tensed—and then the trees creaked, and the forest erupted with screams. The Ninja Duelist knew from their timbre that they could only be Aoikage and his comrades.

Before either ninja could leap to their rescue, however, the shouts stopped, and the forest was silent once more … save for the sound of igniting Duel Disks in the distance. Kurokage counted one, two, three—

And then, from right behind them … four, five, and six.

Kurokage had no warning but the shadows in the corner of his eye. His last conscious thought before they fell upon him, Kikage, and their Grandmaster was that nothing that big ought to be that quick, or that silent …

"This is no longer my fight."

Leo had turned away from Dr. Grimm; he was not sure he wanted to look her in the eye anymore. "All I wanted was to see my daughter and my home again. Z-ARC denied me one … and then the other. I know she lives on in Yuzu—but she is only my daughter in mind and spirit … not in flesh and blood. I can speak to her, and she to me. But I can never hold her in my arms again."

"And if we gave Yuzu to you?"

Leo's lips drew themselves into a snarl. "I don't understand why Kagemaru wants her," he snapped. "But she is not some trinket to be used like barter, Wendy. You of all people should know that."

"But you won't come to her rescue?"

A humorless laugh exploded from Leo. "Don't toy with me like that," he scoffed. "If Yuzu has as much of Ray's mind as she does her soul, then she won't need any sort of rescuing. Or do you not recall who raised her?"

The Psychic Duelist smiled. "How could I forget?"

"Then you agree with me, don't you?" Leo said simply. "This war doesn't need me anymore. I don't wish to fight for the Lancers any more than I do for the Ædonai. Better that I enjoy the rest of my life in peace and quiet. If the four Dimensions can't have that, then perhaps I can, to soothe myself with what could have been."

He sighed. "You should have reached out to me sooner," he said. "Perhaps we would have had more time to talk. Whatever you may think of me now, Wendy, I have missed you. And I regret that we never had the chance to be reunited when Academia fell. But I think very little would have changed if you had—and even that, I suspect, would have been more preferable to whatever promise Kagemaru offered you, to earn him your allegiance.

"Now, Reiji will be here very soon. When he arrives, he will want to know that I am prepared for my extradition to The Hague. My flight there will be uneventful, and what little time I have before my trial will be just enough time for me to gather my thoughts, before I start the next chapter of my memoirs. I think they will grant me enough to have enough materials and free time that I can finish them in prison. If you have anything to say about that, then I suggest you do so now. Because I know, better than anyone in any Dimension, that you are no fool."

He half turned to leave. "I hope we meet more pleasantly next time," he said. "Give my regards to Kagemaru."

Dr. Grimm said nothing. She was not meeting Leo's gaze at all. He thought he saw something drip from her eye and onto the footpath—too dark to be a tear.

«Final status report.»

Leo froze.

"552, 139," a young woman's voice echoed in his head just then. "The lights are out. We're ready to clean house." Her accent was not easy to place—European was the only adjective that Leo could conjure in the single second the thought occurred to him—but it conjured a vague sense of familiarity all the same. Had he heard this voice before?

Leo turned his head, but saw no one else in the garden save for himself and Dr. Grimm. Yet before he had time to ponder what this could possibly mean, another voice filled the nighttime—this one male, and totally unfamiliar to him, but as indistinctly European as that of his companion.

"621, 139." Every word this new voice spoke was laced with the calm, oily efficiency of a machine. There was no telling how old or young he was—he could be fourteen, or forty. "Eyes on target. Awaiting orders to engage."

«139, 552, 621,» responded the Psychic Duelist. Her lips, Leo now saw, were not moving a millimeter. «I'm in position. Phase one complete. Stand by to engage phase two. Unum in multis.»

"Multi in unum."

And as the disembodied, echoing voices of male and female alike faded from his mind, Dr. Gwendolyn Grimm met Leo's eyes at last. The acid-green gaze of Leo's former scion was no longer entirely green; flames of vivid purple licked at her right eye, and the flesh beneath was starting to char once more.

"I never wanted it to come to this, Leo," she whispered, her voice halting and shaky. "I volunteered for this mission because … because I thought it was the only way I could save you. But if this truly is no longer your war to fight … then the Ædonai have no other choice but to fight it for you. And if the Ædonai cannot have you by their side, to ensure the fullness of their victory … "

A single black tear trickled from her fiery eyeball, still in its socket. "Then by order of Kagemaru … no one will." She tensed, standing as stiffly as though a titanium rod had grown inside her spine.

«139, 552, 621.» Every syllable of her telepathy was crisp, clean, and washed over Leo like a waterfall. «Engage.»

No sooner had the last word disappeared into the silence of the night than the former headmaster of Academia felt a chill of foreboding smother his body. Instantly, within the deepest fathoms of his mind, he sensed he had become a witness to something of unfathomable scope—perhaps as draconian a plot as any dreamed by Z-ARC himself.

"Wendy?" His voice was a bare whisper that did not suit him at all. "Wendy, what in God's name have you done?"

A/N: So begins part two of (æ)donai. Short chapter here, and another short one to follow—I couldn't really combine them because I felt like it would have detracted from not only the cliffhanger I put here, but from the scene I plan on putting in the next chapter as well.

I'm looking forward to writing this bit of the story. I've got the chapters all planned out, for the most part, along with the Duels that feature in them. But it's still plain to see that this is going to be my longest story by far—and that counts everything I wrote for Skyrim, way back in the day—so I need to rest my fingers before I can fine-tune it all.

These next couple of chapters came to my mind very recently—and while the Duel that features in them is now complete, the way it's being conducted is going to be a bit weird to put to paper. So it might take a bit more fine-tuning than is my usual before I publish it. But I think you'll be pleased with how it comes out.

Also, if you haven't yet seen it, please check out duel de c(œ)urs, the new fic I released alongside this update, and which will eventually be tying into the plotline of this story. I aim to release one chapter of it alongside each one of this until the story's completion. It's a bit of a departure from my usual YGO ventures—but I think you'll be pleased with it, too.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy! – K