XXXII

Shiun'in Sora stared in complete disbelief, his eyes riveted eastward to a desert he could no longer see—blocked off by the walls of the Ædonai fortress he and his companions were in the process of infiltrating. Only a minute ago, he had heard the unearthly rumble beneath the paws of the Des-Toy Scissors Wolf that served as his steed, turning into a mechanized shriek that tore at his heart with cold steel jaws. He couldn't help but think the choice of words appropriate, considering what that shriek had belonged to—and which Duelist had brought it into the world.

Now, the Lancer Commander heard only silence. The only sound that his ears could pick up were echoes; the last remnants of the fighters who'd been swallowed by the dunes and sealed beneath a fast-dissipating cloud of sand—never to see face or form of their destroyer, and the metal monster that had wiped them out. Both sides had gone utterly quiet for the second time in the battle today, and Sora could not blame them.

"W-what was that?!" Shingo demanded—though the tremble in his words threw all hope of demand out the window.

"That sounded a lot bigger than a Chaos Giant," said Shun from atop his Raid Raptors – Blaze Falcon, far too quietly. Blood was trickling from his lower lip from how hard he'd bitten into it. "It must have been underground this whole time … "

Mieru and Noboru were each as pale as the other. Though the latter was starting to regain his composure—no doubt thanks to his Steadfast Dueling training—his eyes were wider and more fearful than Sora had ever seen them. Both of them were struggling to form words; the Divination Duelist especially looked as though she'd seen a ghost. And she might not be far off, he thought—if a force like the Ædonai could turn back time on all the progress they'd made because of Sakaki Yūya, then it would take slightly more time and effort to try and raise the dead.

Marufuji Ryō, Sora could only think to himself. The name was like a broken record in his brain; stuck on repeat as it replayed the name and the exploits of Academia's most recognized alumnus over and over again—the brains of Dr. Grimm and Markus Streiter, those graduates of equal infamy, wrapped in more ferocity than half the Decks of the entire Obelisk Force, all stuffed inside a body determined to burn bright for what little life it had been granted.

Marufuji Ryō, who entered Academia two whole years before the compulsory conscription requirements. Marufuji Ryō, who brought within its halls a Deck of his own design—whose raw power was without equal then, and still is today. Marufuji Ryō, who single-handedly revolutionized our entire approach to Dueling in a way that even Akaba Leo could not. Marufuji Ryō, who left such a big footprint behind that we all came to expect the same from his little brother Shō, the day he joined us. Marufuji Ryō, who never lost a single Duel in all the days he was enrolled.

Marufuji Ryō—laid low at the height of his prime, by the source of his own strength.

Marufuji Ryō—who we all thought had died, cursing his brother for a traitor.

Marufuji Ryō. The Hell Kaiser.

Marufuji Ryō … a Duel Hunter?!

With every repetition of the name, Sora felt the cold sweat on his neck spreading over more and more of his body. Already he suspected that their entire mission had failed before they'd even seen Yūya and Yuzu—let alone tried to rescue them. He himself was almost certainly a carded man walking; Dennis would be lucky to earn a less sticky end than that. And all the Duelists they'd brought with them …

After the Lancers' fight with Z-ARC, and the brief peace that had come with it, Sora had listened to the stories that had grown around the LID, and all that they'd done to earn their name. He'd been especially interested in how his fellow Fusion Duelist seemed to come up with winning strategies all the time, by thinking of gemstones hidden in the rock. Lately he'd found himself trying to emulate Masumi's train of thought, though a connoisseur of precious stones he was not. And it hadn't been until Masumi had managed to topple Markus Streiter himself that he'd finally stitched together an equivalent—almost literally.

You started with skin and stuffing, with needle and thread. A basic idea of how to shape that skin into a body, and the extent to which you wanted it stuffed. Most times, that would be enough—but hardly when you were Dueling for your life, and never with Shiun'in Sora. With how many times the Ædonai had come to defy his imagination in the way they Dueled, he knew his own strategies needed more than just button eyes and plush bodies. So in much the same way his Edge Imps took to his Furnimals when he pulled off a Fusion Summon, he'd remake them to suit his new needs—razor blades for fangs and claws, scissors for reinforced limbs, and so on would it go. Indeed, from the moment this battle had started, Sora's brain—overclocking all the while—had constructed almost as many such strategies and counter-strategies as there were Des-Toys in his Extra Deck.

The arrival of Marufuji Ryō had hit them with all the subtlety of a flamethrower—reduced skin and stuffing to ash, and all their refinements to so many hulks of melted metal. Almost every single one of them now littered his headspace with their smoking ruins.

They were useless to him now—all of them. They had almost no hope of helping the Lancers out of this jam.

Almost.

There was a way, Sora knew—still one way left to them. The only way he could think of. But even as he explained their predicament to the Lancers—and the one he'd known longer than any of them—Sora knew he wouldn't like it.

"I've got Edo," Dennis McField said after a long while. He was so focused on reaching his former commander that the faces of Kachidoki Isao and Tanegashima Yūzō hardly registered in his peripheral vision. "Asuka's already locked in to the Tylers—maybe I can scramble some help, Sora, but I can't help but think that against what those two just did—"

"Then I'll take Ryō."

Dennis could almost hear his brain slamming on the brakes—but Shō talked over him anyway. "No—listen to me. I know his Deck better than any of you. I know him better than any of you. It has to be me who stops him today."

"That goes both ways, Shō." Maeda Hayato sounded worried. Perhaps he was right to be. "Jim's probably already told him you're here. He'll go after you next—and he won't be picky about who he has to swat out of his path."

"Better me than you. Any of you." Yet the quaver in his voice made Dennis wonder if even Shō believed the things he was saying. Or—and he gulped—maybe he didn't believe them … but neither did he care.

"Then I'm going with you," said Hayato. "Let Rei handle Jim. Tyranno can handle himself." As well he probably should, Dennis kept himself from adding. "If Sora wants his team to press on into this fortress, I say we let them."

"He can't be serious!" Shingo was heard to hiss from next to Sora. "Whatever it was this Ryō guy Summoned, it'll be picking them both out of its teeth!"

"I heard that," Shō sniffed. "And you're lucky I've got too much else on my mind to care. Yūya needs you, Sora—he needs everyone he's ever called his friend before. So don't waste any more time—get in there and get him and Yuzu out!"

"Wait," Gongenzaka Noboru abruptly cut in. "Do you hear that?"

Dennis stiffened, listening—half expecting his Duel Disk to light up with the same notice of OUTSIDE ACCESS DETECTED that had already spelled doom for a sizable fraction of Ryōzanpaku's fighters. But he heard nothing.

"Must be something your end," he shrugged.

"It is." Sora's voice was suddenly an urgent hiss. "Time we weren't here—we have to move! Now!"

The line went dead before Dennis could even ask what was going on. But he had a good idea of what it might be. He looked up at the dozen dogfights unfolding overhead—the common points around which they were clustered—and bit his lip, uncertain as to what he'd prefer to happen next.

Sora could tell at a glance that the new soldiers who'd streamed out from behind the stone pillars either side of them weren't soldiers at all. He doubted they were even Ædonai. Were they in any other part of the world, he might have found some relief in that, but not here—not now. And especially not while they outnumbered them all five-to-one.

Some were male; others were female. Many were larger than he, and older—but a few looked smaller, and younger to boot. All were dressed more simply than even the Ædonai—loose cloaks to a one, black all over but for a single purple eye above the hood. The garments hid all flesh save for their jawlines, set tight beneath taut skin too brown to be merely tan. Whether their left arms carried Duel Disks beneath their broad sleeves, Sora could not determine.

Not that he was in any mood to find out; the wicked-looking blades he saw them carrying in their right hands would do the job just fine.

"Who are these guys?!" Mieru was already backing away, trying to put as much distance between her and them.

"Run." Sora had an idea—and for half a second, he was tempted to take his chances with the Hell Kaiser. "RUN!"

None of them stopped to protest. Sora felt his legs propelling him at speeds he'd never thought were possible, even with the training he'd endured in his Academia days. The notion of not simply being sealed into a card, but outright slain, lent even more motivation to their westward flight: the Fusion Duelist soon found himself outstripped by Shun and Shingo, with Noboru and even Mieru pulling even with him.

"Ancestral tomb-keepers!" he did his best to explain through the gathering stitches in his chest. "The Ædonai didn't just build this fortress here. All they did was build around! We must be in one of the old necropoli—the cities of the dead, where they buried the ancient pharaohs!" I'd even thought it looked like one of the old Egyptian ruins when I saw it, too, he added to himself, thinking back to when he and Shun had reduced a whole platoon of Antique Gear Devils to rust and rubble. He'd scouted beyond the wall only briefly, seen the expanse of weathered stone, and wondered where the rest could be—

"Didn't they used to call those places holy cities?" Shingo wondered out loud.

Sora wasn't about to consult a history book to find out. But the rising shouts from the cloaks behind them—Arabic, he guessed, and as openly harsh as the desert around them to boot—let Shingo's implication speak for itself.

He searched for ways out, and found one—only one: a door that looked like it had been carved out of heavy stone. "Kurosaki—up ahead!"

"On it!" The Xyz Duelist made a fist with the arm that carried his Duel Disk, and jumped off his Blaze Falcon only seconds before it let fly with a barrage of missiles from its armored back. Half of them streaked towards the tomb-keepers as they attempted to rush the Lancers down, exploding in a burst of flame and smoke that obscured them all. The rest blew through the door, sending bricks and a plume of dust twenty feet high.

The Fusion Duelist was already jumping from his Wolf before the wreckage had started to fall. "Quick—before they get smart!" Sora screamed. Such was his leap that he almost made it through the remains of the door by the time his feet hit solid ground. Shun and Mieru were right behind him, while Noboru and Shingo brought up the rear.

"This is a bad idea," Shingo was saying all the while, over and over again as the Steadfast Duelist yanked him from where he stood and hoisted him over one shoulder as though he were a sack of grain. "This is a bad idea—this is a bad idea—this is a bad idea-a-a-a-a-a!"

His cries of protest echoed in the sudden silence long after the Lancers had disappeared into the blackness beyond.

Dennis bit his lip at the SIGNAL LOST that had appeared on his Duel Disk. He wanted so desperately to cheer—it meant that Sora's team had found a way into the fortress. But it also meant he had no idea of what was waiting for them inside. He couldn't help but think it might be worse than what they were facing out here.

"Allen! Anna!" he called out to the pair through his Disk. "Use your emergency beacons and get yourselves home! You can't do any more good up here! You got us into that fort—and I'm willing to count that as a win if you are!"

"I won't count it as a win until I see us get Yūya out!" Allen shouted back—he had to over the noise; Dennis felt a chill race through his spine as Anna and her cannon continued to roar in tandem. "I won't leave you!"

"Your home needs you more than we do!" said Dennis. "Gauche would have told you the same exact thing!" The lie burned his throat with every word—he didn't know what the man would have thought about this in the slightest. But damned if he was going to be cavalier about keeping these two kids in a war they had no business fighting—

KROOM.

A thunderous noise rolled overhead, rattling Dennis' bones and slowing him as he looked upwards. "What the—?!"

It took a second for him to realize that he hadn't heard the peals of an actual thunderstorm—this sounded more like the shockwave of an implosion. Not an explosion—Dennis had been involved with Academia long enough to know the difference, and long enough to know what he'd feared was about to happen was happening right now.

That was the only reason he covered his eyes … and the only reason he was lucky enough to see one of the crystals overhead—still charging with inter-dimensional energy—suddenly fulminate in a flash of light. Lightning snaked down to the desert, impossibly fast, grounding through sand and rock beneath, and any Duelists nearby. Dennis didn't bother looking to see how many of the Ædonai had been caught in the barrage of bolts. He was too busy looking at the spire and the pair of dragons that had been circling it.

Or rather, where they'd all been.

Nothing was there: no spire, no Galaxy-Eyes Dragons, no Ædonai—not even cloud or sky. Nothing … except for a point; a single, simple, perfectly dimensionless point of perfect blackness, suspended in midair for an instant Dennis would see in his mind forever. Then he blinked, and suddenly the void was gone too—with a CRACK of lightning that sounded more final than anything he'd heard all day.

The sudden pit in his stomach felt infinitely larger. Kaito … Haruto … He felt his mouth work, but the words had jammed in his throat as he took in the all-too-clear skies above him. His eyes had been so busy taking in the sudden lack of Galaxy-Eyes monsters that he'd only just now noticed another conspicuous absence.

Mikiyo. Dennis bit his lip—the Sanctuary in the Sky that she and the rest of her Duel Girls Club had conjured to use as their own personal mobile base was nowhere to be seen. Of the two girls that had been fighting with her—and all the winged horses they'd commanded—there was no sign.

Isao had skidded to a halt beside him. "Where the hell did they go?!" he demanded.

"They just … disappeared … " Yūzō had lost his hat in their sprint. The Surprise Duelist was shining with sweat and gulping oxygen like there was no tomorrow. "One of … the bolts … I saw Jack for … just an instant … before it … before it went … right through … through his Wheel of Fortune … "

Dennis struggled to believe what he was hearing. " … Jack got taken out, too?"

Isao could only nod silently. "His D-Wheel just … it's just gone," Yūzō managed to gasp, before finally dropping to shaking knees. "He's gone … "

"No." Dennis forced the pit in his stomach further down. "They've jumped."

The Hell Kaiser here. And The Duel King gone, he thought. This changes everything. He took a look around, and felt another dull blow in his stomach when he realized the Kōzukis, too, were no longer among them. Whether they had taken his advice and left while they'd all been distracted … but Dennis shook his head. No—if they had gone the same way as Jack, he'd been close enough that he would have heard the result himself. Still … perhaps they'd have been safer with him instead of back home in Xyz.

"Jumped? Where?!" Dennis didn't answer Isao, nor did he want to. Even if he did, he wouldn't have had the time.

KROOM. KROOM. KROOM.

With each distant implosion, the second-in-command of the Lancers Combined felt his heart sink further and further into his bowels. He whirled round to see what he already knew he could not stop: three more crystal spires flanking the fortress, Dragon Cannons swarming amidst them by the dozen—and not one Lancer in sight—flashed and flared into white in the blink of an eye.

And then—CRACK—white stars became black holes, and then nothing at all.

Dennis felt numb. This is bad.

Isao's Duel Disk shrilled in warning just then. "It's Umesugi," he grunted, glancing at the screen and furrowing his brow. "Something about his satellite connection … "

—very, very bad.

Château Pique-Diamant

For such a small noise, the chirp of Kōtsu Masumi's Duel Disk almost made her jump out of her shoes in the tense atmosphere. Angel-IQ's three-dimensional display of downtown Maiami City, dominated by the pinnacle of LDS, still shone in front of the LID—and the three figures atop its highest point still lorded over the skyline.

But the most recognizable of the trio had started moving again.

Dr. Grimm, her black cloak billowing in the wind, had started tapping her foot and bobbing her head—just enough for the Fusion ace to see it reproduced in Angel-IQ's 3D hologram. Then she'd begun tapping at her Duel Disk for a few moments, and that had been right as Masumi's Duel Disk had buzzed on her forearm. Thinking Himika had sent them a message, she'd quickly checked it—only to be perplexed at the contents of what she'd received.

Backdoor cracked, we don't need a key

What the hell? "Q—are you seeing this?"

The hologram flitted over to her right as a second bubble blipped onto her screen: We get in for free—no VIP sleaze. Definitely not something Himika would send, Masumi thought—and definitely why she was suddenly feeling much more uneasy than ever.

Angel-IQ's blue eyes zoomed over the message—and instantly locked onto the figure of the Psychic Duelist. "That is … not good," she said, as grim as a supercomputer could sound. "I believe Dr. Grimm is piggybacking our Duel Disks' messenger function."

Masumi's mouth fell open. "What—are you saying she's hacking me?!"

"No. She is hacking me." Masumi barely saw more messages buzzing on her Disk, but only in the corner of her eye as the hologram continued to talk, very fast now—a muttered staccato that might have hinted at agitation. "I am to blame—I did not expect she would attempt to access such a low-priority system as my messenger fun—"

The hologram broke off. "I am detecting multiple Fusion radiation surges in downtown Maiami City," she abruptly said. "Sectors AB-01 and BA-19, confirmed. BA-01 and AB-19, confirmed." She was silent for a long moment. "Energy signature matches verified: inter-dimensional rift. The Leo Duel School is under attack."

"Under at—?!" But the Fusion Duelist felt her outburst of shock curdle in her chest; she had just seen what was happening on the simulacrum Angel-IQ was projecting. The slim figure of the Psychic Duelist, dead center of the display, was moving much more fluidly now, swaying in the wind and twirling on her perch of LDS as though—

No, a dumbfounded Masumi thought—she actually was.

Yaiba's bamboo shinai was almost splinters from how tightly he was gripping it. "Is … is she dancing?"

Words shimmered into the hologram now, superimposed in front of the Ædonai trio. Masumi read them, and bit her lip until she tasted blood.

It's time to kill the lights and shut the DJ down

"She can't be serious." Hotene looked disgusted. "There's no way she's—"

Rika was staring at Dr. Grimm's minute figure as though she had regurgitated something very unpleasant. "She is."

Tonight we're taking over, no one's getting out

But the Fusion ace, breath frozen in her lungs at the sight of the growing rips in the sky, had already felt her eyes flick to the tall woman beside the Psychic Duelist, half-swallowed in the ripping edges that lined her armor from head to claw. The iron tail had stiffened in an upward curve, and every muscle she could see was taut and tensed. She had only a split second to liken her to a cat, ready to spring upon an unsuspecting bird—

—and then, as far too many things happened at once, she saw the first of them splash itself onto her eyes forever:

THIS PLACE ABOUT TO BLOW

The second epiphany happened less than a minute before the world turned upside down.

The first had happened less than a minute after hers had turned inside out.

Dr. Gwendolyn Grimm had been no stranger to the Standard Dimension—well, the Pendulum Dimension now, she amended, feeling a corner of her lip twitch at her errant thought. Her shadow-op in those days had been such a deep dive that it had allowed her to experience Maiami City as a home she'd genuinely believed to be her own. To see it so radically altered in the days that followed the downfall of Academia frustrated her in a way she could not readily explain. She had moved among its people as though she'd truly been born there; she'd eaten its food, conversed with its shopkeepers, and cooed over its babies who'd yet to grasp the magic of the technology that awaited them.

And yes, there had been fragments of dreams—a precursor, perhaps, to who she was and what she'd been all along. But she had largely been ignorant of her true origins until Sora and Shun, in their fateful clash, had released Leo's lock upon her memories. In one fell swoop, the insider had become an outsider.

A frisson caressed her spine at the thought of him, traveling from her skull and well into her core. Ah, Leo. It took all the Psychic Duelist could muster to keep from shaking her head in pity. Did he have the faintest idea of what he was doing, even those long years ago? Had her creator truly understood the masterpiece of body and mind that he had unleashed upon the universe?

He had seen the first signs of it, when she was but a child, wracked by pain and fear that knew nothing of control—

—control—

—they made her sing, forced her to dance—

—every shriek had to be pitch-perfect, every convulsion a grand jeté—

The malady of Mind had been the ballet of forces she'd been too young to understand, given music and chorus in her dreams, even as she'd fled deeper and deeper, chased in every direction that even sounded like Away. They'd chased her through her mother's house as she grew older, and the endless rolling fields that surrounded it; stalked her in the corners of shops and the gleam of babies' eyes even as she yearned to explore their depths; they had followed her all the way across the great sea, beyond even the furthest hill she'd ever climbed in her childhood …

… until the fog had lifted, and they'd reached the castle, far beyond the sight of any other land in the world.

Even from miles away, its spires and buttresses of stone and crystal—some twisting in midair and others swooping out of the very rocks from which they'd been hewn—loomed over her. By the time she'd torn her eyes away from gawking at the sight, a great toothless mouth had yawned open in front of her, swallowing her boat as if her meager flesh and blood might prolong its life for one more day.

The skeleton of a dead fairy tale, she'd thought sadly to herself as the guards ordered her to disembark. It would not be until much later, well into the course of her meteoric rise to power, that she learned the comparison had not been hers to make at all, not at first …

That rise had been twenty years in the making. Much of it had been with a Deck now lost to thought and time, and the one Duelist who knew it as well as she did had not been far behind. But that had not been the true focus of her education—though the mandate of her Dimension had done much to maintain the masquerade, Leo had seen much more than a Duelist inside the block of rough wood in which she'd been encased. The vision was in front of him; he had just needed the right tools to begin whittling away—

—with the first strike of the chisel, he'd sewn the first stitch—

—the first thread that linked her to him, and him to her—the first means of control—

She'd thought so little of it at the time. She'd had other things to think about every day she spent at that school—other things to be thankful about, thankful to never need to feel again. All they'd asked of her was to entice and recruit, to show who she was to a world united by one idea, and a universe to be reunited by another. Slowly but surely, and then by leaps and bounds, the school became an army—many, children enticed by the power of play; others; warriors recruited by players in power.

And still others—with grim disappointment—hound dogs that she'd forced into muzzles.

They were like her once, she'd told herself every time; perhaps one day, they would be like her again—disorganized thoughts, given order by purpose. And so the words had rung in her ears, when mechanical bird and monstrous bear clashed that night—when she remembered the assignment given to her long ago, to seek out more such Duelists who lived in a distant land, and teach them of the future: to entice, recruit … and, if need be, to muzzle … control …

ÆMÆTH

It had been so simple. A single Word, planted in the brain of a single, simple Duelist. The Duelist had obeyed her, blindly loyal to the commands of a Shadow whose face she could not—yet—see. More had followed her, enticed by a dream and recruited by a girl driven to see the truth, driven by a wish to know—

And then, when it came time to lift the veil, the girl learned—and began to resist.

How futile her efforts had been! How pleasurable it had been, to muzzle the undisciplined children who had no way to defend against control! With the fullness of her memories restored to her, she'd felt the ease with which she had subdued them all—one, two and then three, worn down by the endless tide of puppets she commanded—

—she'd made them sing, forced them to dance—

—tempted them with their wildest dreams—

—still she resisted, still she fought on—

—and then came the unthinkable.

For the first time, the muzzles had been broken. The threads had been severed—control had been lost—

MÆTH

—the pain, the sharp, stabbing pain, had blasted her out of the one world she knew, and into another she no longer did. She had no memory of fleeing the Leo Duel School, only of the shame of her childhood, of all the times she'd run Away, that flooded her upon her return. One eye had stared into Leo's two, and a pair of lips she could not feel stammered out words she could not believe—

—she had failed him, her Professor—

—she could not control—no—

—she had no control—

It had come to her then, that first epiphany. His command and her demotion rang in her ears even hours after he'd left; she'd lain in bed for a full day, unwilling to eat or drink, unsure whether to sleep or to think. Then, on a morning where the sun rose in a scarlet sky, a voice in her head had said: was a puppet that controlled another puppet truly a puppet at all?

Was that not who she was—the masterpiece of a modern Geppetto, freed from the pine and given her own thoughts? Had a life not been her heart's desire from the day she was born, denied her by every day of pain and night of terror? The Psychic Duelist had had no answer to the words that had tolled through her head like a cathedral bell, not even when Leo sent her on her next mission some time later. Perhaps he himself had been aware of the question she was entertaining. That mission had been much easier for her to complete … she had almost laughed at how much easier it was to control a wormhole than many human beings …

… how much easier one human being—and through them, many human minds …

But the moment of triumph had not lasted. Leo's vision for the future had turned against them all. The dimensions he had been hoping to reclaim had proved to be much stronger than anticipated. Even his backup plan in Standard—someone she knew to be under her orders, her control—was going off the script. He, too, would be foiled by the girl … he, too, would be left broken and defeated …

… but not before she'd had to go off script herself.

It was the only way, Dr. Grimm had told herself, and had told Leo after. Schools could be destroyed. Armies could be defeated. Dreams could not. Compromises were made, bargains were struck, and quick as that a new hand had begun to guide her—one older and wiser, more patient and cunning. And yet, even through Markus, she had sensed a second trying to wrest away the strings from the hands of her Geppetto.

One puppet guided by two hands—coveted by two minds—controlled by chaos.

Her Duel last night had settled that question once and for all. And yet, when she'd woken up this morning to deliver her report, there had been no celebration of victory, no melancholy of watching the circle complete itself. The man who had taken a husk of a girl and made her a weapon of war had become no more than a husk himself—the poisoned prize in a tug-of-war she'd been telling herself even now that she could not control, had no choice but to fight—

—choice—

And with that single word, the second realization had hit her like a blow from her own Nephilim. It wasn't that she had the choice now. She'd always had the choice—to be puppet and puppeteer, her last words had been to him, to be truth and death. She could be whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. More powerful, more personable, more than a woman who moved and lived through control, more than a woman—more than flesh, than blood—

—more.

I could be more, she'd whispered to herself—and in a voice she strained to hear against the thin scream of the wind, the voices from three decades' worth of suffering and success had whispered the words back.

The girl in the farmhouse, the Professor, the soldier, the prodigy, and the Shadow of the Word had all reached into her body with the strings that gave her purpose. She could reach back to them now—oh, how she dreamed to touch their hands, bring them to this world and give them shape and form—but those thoughts were futile. She had not crossed the dimensions once again to fulfill mere fantasy. The wish she had made—the string that bound her tightest of all, made her most powerful of all—still rang in her ears.

But she was not yet above indulging herself; for the time being, she could afford one moment of whimsy. The blast of cold air that enveloped her upon their arrival had brought back old memories; the old skyline of Maiami City—seen from much further above than even she'd ever dreamed—brought a shiver of anticipation that she had not bothered to conceal from her cohorts. For this time, if no other time, she was finally free to take pleasure in it.

The Psychic Duelist was well aware—even before he had opened his mouth to voice the disbelieving question—that he would never truly comprehend why she was dancing at all, and to a song only she could truly hear. He would be no more understanding than Agent 223—far too absorbed in her own chaos to care. And though they'd both bought her claim of taunting the enemy—of reminding the LID, those children, that for all their strength, they would never be free of the strings that still bound them to her—even this had not been the entire truth.

For thirty-two years, she had been forced to dance that endlessly shifting ballet of between. Now—as dozens upon dozens of holes opened in the sky, in the corners of her eyes, and mechanical monstrosities dropped from them all into the storm of laser fire that exploded all around them; as she felt her two teammates tense at the chaos that had dropped right on top of the focus of an entire Dimension—now she felt the pendulum beginning to reverse its swing.

The precipice stretched down the skyscraper beneath her, its primary Dueling arena yawning a thousand feet below like a sightless mouth, ready to swallow her at last. At first she did not see the armored blades and tail of the Duel Hunter striding up beside her. She still felt the fear—though only for a moment, as she felt the weight of the Duel Disk against her wrist. Just one more string, she told herself—one last tether, to the worlds I left and leave behind.

Now, she heard, before they stepped out into the waiting abyss—and in the ten seconds that elapsed from the world turning upside down, to the wings of her Midrash catching her just low enough to kiss the western road, one dance reached its end, and the silence that awaited the next one screamed in her ears, and drowned out her laugh of joy.

For this ballet was hers to conduct, and hers alone. They would sing and dance for her, and her alone.

And Gwendolyn Grimm—for the first time in her life—was finally in control.

Leo Duel School

The best that Himika could say about what happened next is that everyone had had plenty of time to see it coming.

Each of the three Ædonai—yes, even the last of them, who stayed right where he was; the headmistress had thought over what Hokuto had told her earlier, and knew there could be no doubt as to gender and station—had enough pull behind who or what they were that she knew intercepting them would require a lot of Duelists. The Civil Defense Forces had gladly provided the bulk of them, and they had wasted no time in enclosing the intruders inside a net nearly half a mile wide, to head them off if they so much as twitched.

But they had stilled themselves as Grimm had begun to dance—tauntingly, she'd thought in fury after ordering any trace of that hacking job to be expunged from Q's mainframe with dispatch—and in retrospect, that had been the only sign she knew something was wrong. You didn't come out all this way to just taunt—

Then she'd taken another look at that infernal message the Psychic Duelist had sent through Q, and the enormity of it all hit her like a collapsing building. In less than a second, she was screaming through her mobile at Nakajima to get everyone with a Duel Disk locked in at once—and before she'd finished, he in turn was bawling weapons free, repeat weapons free, fire at will at anyone within radio contact.

One second later, the place did exactly what Dr. Grimm had said was about to happen—and blew.

Inter-dimensional portals rumbled overhead with the force of an electrical storm, rattling the transparisteel windows of Himika's office. They darkened and shrank into holes in the sky—and as if they'd been spewed out from within, dozens upon dozens of monsters shrieked out from those holes at terminal velocity, making a beeline straight down for solid ground. Mechanical golems, every single one of them—somewhere between dragons and tanks, plated in red, gold, and blue—and in unison, they brought cannons to bear and flared with white-hot energy.

In less than a second, the Ædonai's assault had begun.

It was a testament to the desperation in the headmistress' orders—and the bone-jarring volume with which her aide had relayed them—that the Civil Defense Forces reacted as quickly as they did. The holes in the sky had scarcely vanished from view before the air was suddenly so thick with ice-blue laser bursts that anyone caught inside it at that moment would have experienced near-zero visibility in an instant, and total blindness an instant after that.

From the nearest skyscraper, Himika could see a crimson-armored robot materialize next to a CDF Duelist, who had positioned himself just behind the building's HVAC for cover. His Summon—a Rescue-ACE Fire Engine, said the display produced from the circuitry that ran through her window—brandished its four arms at the nearest monster, blasting away with the wrist guns mounted on two of them (Level 7: ATK 2500 » 3000/DEF 2500 » 3000). Even as she looked on, a second, smaller mech appeared by its side; aiming shoulder-mounted cannons high and blanketing the sky in suppressing fire (Level 4: ATK 1800 » 2300/DEF 1800 » 2300). Not far off, a sleek red-white jet fighter (Level 6: ATK 2200 » 2700/DEF 2200 » 2700) and a warrior in blue-gold armor and a jetpack (Level 4: ATK 1700 » 2200/DEF 1700 » 2200) hovered in between his teammate for a moment before they sped off in a blur, turning the already chaotic skies into the beginnings of a dogfight.

Smaller shapes could be made out against all of these, Himika saw—and with a stab of anger she saw the helmets of even more Ædonai, pulled down over grim faces and protecting them from the glare of the pitched battle. The flaps of their wing-suits—more camouflage-patterned lavender amid silver, white, and black—billowed from their limbs as they coasted towards the nearest landing site they could find. Bolts screamed past them, both friend and foe alike, and each side found marks in the other as one by one, the Ædonai found purchase, pulled up, and landed atop where those unlucky CDF had fallen.

All of this—from incursion to entrenchment—had happened in a matter of seconds. It took almost that long for the LDS headmistress to force back the rush of blood to her head, and remind herself that all of this was but diversion in the face of a much bigger problem. Sure enough, right as it occurred to her to patch herself into LDS' ground forces and have them move in to reinforce, that much bigger problem was dropping as well—right past her window.

Two slender figures—each female, each neck-and-neck with their partner—plummeted in identical swan dives, their arms spread out and their legs locked, carrying them into a ninety-degree, terminal drop. They were impossible to mistake from each other; Himika had no trouble recognizing the ironclad tail of that nameless, mindless Duel Hunter from up above. But her gaze was laser-focused entirely on the other figure, the navy sword that projected from her violet Duel Disk—and the green hair and narrow face that crossed her gaze for the split-second it was there, before it vanished from view as quickly as it had come—and between her lips, the crescent glint of triumph—

She bared her teeth in a silent snarl. That goddamned Psychic Duelist was smiling at her.

By the time she'd rushed to the edge of the window—the traitor's smirk burned into her mind forever—she'd heard the faint cry of a dragon beneath, and the last she'd seen of Gwendolyn Grimm was a streak of dark violet, racing westward along the main road—too fast for any of the forces she'd placed along its length to even attempt to stop. Half a dozen of those dragon-tanks peeled off and followed her, and by the time Himika saw them, her precious dispersal fields were worse than useless—they'd already sliced right past the last of the generators before they'd finished deploying.

Damn it! She thumped the window with a fist. The transparisteel did nothing but make her knuckles throb.

"Q." The single letter came through gnashed teeth, mixed with pain and fury. "Tell the LID Grimm is on the move. They've done all they can with the twins at the Château—and we may need them back sooner than we thought."

"… Are you sure?" Masumi's voice came through before Angel-IQ's had a chance. Even through the speaker grid, she sounded shot through with nerves. "I don't know if any of us are ready to face her again this quickly."

"She's right," Yaiba piped up from next to her, every word hissed through gritted teeth. "We head back now, we'd be heading right for her. And all that would do is put time on her side."

Himika thought. Her fingers played over her window's circuits for a few seconds, pulling up maps left and right.

"North and then east," she finally said, "the same route you took to get to Ryōzanpaku yesterday. Grimm will have to waste precious time trying to keep up with you if you're on the move. Once you reach the Duel School, sweep south and don't stop until either you reach Maiami City, or she reaches you."

"Is she alone?" Hokuto asked.

"No." They never seem to be, even when they are, Himika thought, remembering the monsters that had attempted to form up with the Psychic Duelist. It had to be assumed they'd caught up with her by now.

A few seconds of tense silence followed. "All right. Pack up in five, everyone," Masumi was heard to say. "Kiku, Kikyō, you too. Go with Fuyu—his monster can carry you. Everyone else—"

"More interdimensional portals detected," Angel-IQ cut in all of a sudden, and instantly Himika tensed. "Localized to the city stadium, sector SD-17. Another in the outskirts of the western residential zone, sector XE-95—one more in the tech district, sector KT-46—"

Himika swore. Ten seconds of checking her displays confirmed what she already knew—all of those had emerged far outside of the CDF's cordon, and too far for her second division to intercept them.

And then—"Himika-sama! They identify friendly!"

What?!

Angel-IQ sounded as though she was having trouble believing it herself. "Confirmed—three Duel Disks in SD-17, registered to the Duel Girls Club!"

Mikiyo, the headmistress belatedly realized. She'd returned from Giza, with some help as well—no; all of them, even the Ædonai, must have come from the battle her Lancers had been fighting in Fusion! She felt a smile steal across her face—this was the first big break they'd had all day!

"Nakajima—get me a direct line to every Duelist who just showed up here!" she cried. "Have them meet at—"

But the aide was already shaking his head on the video display. "I can't reach them. They must've had a rough ride back—I'm not getting anything but static out of their comm. link!"

"Keep trying!" Whoever had come back from Fusion, they'd be blind not to notice any of this, Himika knew—but the sooner they came to her, the better. Until then, she'd have to trust their better judgment.

Nakajima tensed just then. "Second platoon—say again?" A frown stole over his face. "Headmistress—we may have a problem. It's that Duel Hunter."

Himika bit her lip. The turn of events had made her forget all about that iron monster. "What about her?"

The aide swallowed. "You need to see this for yourself," he said, tapping at his phone as a new video feed blew up on Himika's window. "There's no other way you're going to believe it … "

Bus 98-36 had been empty for a long while. Every student and office worker who'd hoped to use it in the course of their daily commute had heard the first alarm, known what it meant, and vanished for safer refuge before the second had blared through the city. Only when the last of them had disappeared from view had the driver fled with them.

By sheer bad luck, this bus had been abandoned next to the pavilion that overlooked one of the Leo Duel School's five secondary practice fields, on the other side of the RSV generator beneath the campus' primary Dueling arena. As Japan relied much more on mass transit than it did personal automobiles, this meant that it was the only vehicle in sight on the deserted streets.

Which meant that, fifteen seconds after the Second Interdimensional War had turned the skies of Maiami City next to inside out, Bus 98-36 had been one of the first casualties of the ensuing battle.

WHUMP.

The metallic missile had come from out of nowhere; the force of the impact had been enough to fold the entire bus at its midsection by almost a full forty-five degree angle, bringing front and back ends up almost to the height of a man for a few seconds, before gravity inevitably reasserted itself. What few windows had not smashed from the first blow were shards moments later as the half-crushed bus crashed back to the road.

Everyone in sight of it had other things to worry about at the time. No one was nearby to see what had hit the bus.

And no one heard the growl from inside.

» SYSTEM REINITIALIZING

» DAMAGE REPORT: SYSTEMIC LACERATIONS/CONTUSIONS

» BEGIN MORPHINE INJECTION/NANOSALVE ADMINISTRATION

that

» VITAL SIGNS STABILIZING

pain that

hurt

» SENSORIUM MATRIX STABILIZING

no

more no

» ALL HEALING FACTORS RESPONDING

» ALL NEUROKINETICS NORMALIZING

» ALL MOTOR FUNCTIONS NOMINAL

more pain

» MORPHINE RESERVES: 83%

» NANOSALVE RESERVES: 86%

much

better now

» SEROTONIN INJECTION DISENGAGED (PROTOCOL: -WILDJÄGER-) UNABLE TO REGULATE

cannot

get out

» WARNING: AGGRESSION OUTPUT LEVEL 80% … 85% …

trapped

in here

» ACCESS SECONDARY WEAPON SYSTEMS

» ACCESS GRANTED PER PROTOCOL: -WILDJÄGER-

hate

being

trapped

» DANGER: AGGRESSION OUTPUT LEVEL 90%

have to

…

free

…

have to

get out

…

» EXERTION DETECTED (UPPER EXTREMITIES DELTOID-BICEP-TRICEP-EXTENSOR)

» NEUR-AMP SYN-AMP ADREN-AMP TARGET AND RESPOND

must get out must

not stop no

not stop

…

stop must get out

get OUT GET OUT GET OUT

» AGGRESSION OUTPUT LEVEL —100%—

» SECONDARY WEAPON SYSTEMS FULLY CHARGED

Château Pique-Diamant

Masumi knew what she was seeing was holographic—too far away to hurt her directly. That hadn't stopped her in the slightest from backing away from the scene playing out in front of them.

"Bù kěnéng de … " Shen's neck was shiny with sweat. Fuyu was shivering, almost wrapped around Hokuto.

"That's not … " Rika whimpered, shaking her head. "That's not human … "

Hotene's blue eyes were wide, and her voice was a bare squeak. "How are we gonna stop that?!"

Masumi felt Yaiba's hand grasp her own, and hoped against hope that they themselves wouldn't have to. Even an approaching Psychic Duelist hell-bent on vengeance seemed only a passing thought next to this Duel Hunter now.

Leo Duel School

Nakajima was right: Himika had to see it to believe it. But connecting the dots in between would take a long time.

No one could have survived that, she'd thought upon seeing the wreck of the bus below. No one should have …

But the LDS headmistress had watched in horrified, fascinated shock, unable to look away, as two scything blades shoved themselves through the remnants of the bus, and began carving their way through as if the crumpled metal frame was no more yielding than cardboard. The smooth, laser-sharpened metal brimmed briefly with red energy—slowly they wiggled back and forth, like a stuck pair of scissors trying to—

—and then she'd taken a step back as the Duel Hunter had actually ripped the bus in half. The sound sensors within her office window, now dialed to near their maximum, had recorded the RUNCH of torn metal and smashed glass as if she'd been right beside it. That had drowned out most of her swearing—and the roar that had drowned that out a second later almost blew out the speakers in her walls.

Himika had heard that roar once already. She knew it had to be her, this Duel Hunter—that half-human, half-jaguar, half-hyena howl of insane bloodlust, concentrated in a body she thought had been too frail to contain it, driven even further down the brink by a need to escape, a need to inflict its torment upon anything and anyone within reach.

Both halves of the bus had been flung in opposite directions, skidding all of ten feet along the road before impacting the concrete pylons that separated LDS from the surrounding streets. The front of them had gone straight through the grille—and the fuel line with it, judging from the small but blinding explosion that flared a second later.

The blast blew the Duel Hunter's silver-blonde bangs over her face, ruffling the remnants of her cloak and jostling the cables that hung from behind her hair. But she did not even flinch as she walked onto the street's dividing line, her back turned to Himika. The talons of her three-toed feet—and just behind those, the spikes of her swishing tail, crackling with electricity—scored the asphalt and left deep furrows in its wake without any sign of wear and tear.

The Duel Hunter turned southward then, and the hinges on her wrist blades rotated them back to where they'd been before, their reinforced tips above her head. She crouched, bared her sharpened fangs in a sneer—Himika had just enough time to liken the pose to a sprinter before the starting gun—

—when the Duel Hunter suddenly launched.

There was no other word for it—no other way to describe the inhuman burst of speed that had erupted from those armored legs. She'd been there for a second, still as a statue—and then she'd been a blur, easily outpacing any bus within seconds, the average car soon after that—

—southward. Himika stiffened. She'd had lunch too many times with Shinichirō not to know where southward led.

Instantly, the headmistress had wheeled around and begun screaming orders through her mobile to anyone listening downstairs. "Fortify sectors AA-05 to AP-76—isolate all RSV generators in those sectors and route their camera feeds through my office!" The Duel Hunter had taken the bait, she was seething, the wrong target had sprung her precious trap—"I need active dispersal fields—Dueling teams—slow that freak down, whatever it takes!"

"Dispersal fields are anti-Solid Vision only—they're no good against flesh-and-blood targets—"

"Then access the RSV environment, blast you! Access the emergency terraforming functions!" Himika screeched at whichever luckless technician that was. She'd get his name later. "Get every photon inside Cross Over's domain under your control and routed through LeoCorp at once! She cannot be allowed to reach the mayor!"

By the time she'd whirled back around, her office window had been turned into a makeshift security hub: dozens of video screens showed the Duel Hunter still continuing her rampage towards Mayor Sawatari. Whole chunks of the road were being torn out from the way her talons gripped the surface. Several delivery trucks had been left in the middle of the street since the evacuation alert; Himika felt an involuntary swallow as she saw the juggernaut lash out with an arm-mounted blade at one unfortunate enough to be in her path. The force of the blow shoved the Toyota off its tires and into a streetlight that bent double from the impact. The Duel Hunter hadn't even slowed down.

FLASH. The headmistress almost jumped out of her skin; for a dangerous moment she thought one of the laser bolts from the raging battle outside had struck her school. But the burst of light was green, not blue, and coming from one of her monitors as well; LeoCorp was attempting to alter the Action Field—boxing her in till she had nowhere to go.

But even that proved easier said than done: the column of light had scarcely erupted right in front of her before she'd changed her course. She leapt to one side with more flight time than an acrobat, though none of the finesse; the wall of the storefront she'd careened into wasn't meant to absorb such high-speed impacts. Down it went, bricks and glass and mortar collapsing into a pile of rubble—and the cloud of dust hadn't even dissipated before the Duel Hunter had landed on all fours like a panther, and was tearing down the road once more without any loss in speed.

Damn, Himika thought.

"She's too quick!" another technician yelled through her phone. "We make one change to the field, and that bitch reacts to it at almost the same time! Her neurokinetics must be through the roof—no one moves or thinks this fast!"

Himika checked the map overlay. "She'll pass within two blocks of the Fire!Fire! Duel School in one minute at her current speed," she said. "Alert the nearest Duel team we have down there—then target the school and raise a cordon! Every outgoing road, one-kilometer radius—close at hundred-meter intervals until there's nowhere to go!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Three dangerously long seconds passed before Himika saw the bright green ring—its target dead center within—and forced down her smile until she could be absolutely certain. Smaller and smaller it grew—six hundred meters … five … why was she still not slowing? … three hundred … two … there!

The chevron shape denoting the Duel Hunter had slowed—and so had the Duel Hunter herself, on every camera feed still showing her. A long steaming furrow split the street in her wake as she skidded to a halt; the friction of asphalt against metal at those speeds was such that the talons of her feet were red-hot, sizzling in the air.

But she'd finally been stopped—and that was all that mattered. Finally, Himika could smile, however grimly. "Seal off at fifty meters," she said, satisfied. "Get a team on site, and dispersal fields all around for containment."

Deep breath—in and out. "We got her."

» ABORT PURSUIT CONFIGURATION (ERROR 920: POSITION COMPROMISED)

no no no NO

have to

…

go on cannot

…

stop must

not stop

» STANDBY TACTICAL PROGRAM: ASSAULT CONFIGURATION

» PRIMARY TACTICAL SYSTEMS CHARGED AND READY

{WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?}

{SOME KIND OF MUTANT CYBORG FREAK.}

{DON'T GET TOO CLOSE. LAST THING I WANT IS MY HEAD RIPPED OFF.}

» HOSTILES DETECTED POSITION TWO SEVEN ONE MARK THREE

» NEW TARGETS ACQUIRED VISUAL CONTACT CONFIRMED

{UH-OH. I THINK IT HEARD YOU.}

who

stops me

…

won't

stop can't

stop me

who is

…

who

is

…

» HOSTILES CONFIRMED LANCE DEFENSE SOLDIERS (L-D-S)

» CLASS ONE THREAT IDENTIFIED —TERMINATE MAXIMUM COLLATERAL—

[PREY.]

…

» INITIATE: BATTLE ROYALE FORMAT (RK_ΞΓ-223 LP: 4000)

» (ENEMY 1 LP: 4000; ENEMY 2 LP: 4000; ENEMY 3 LP: 4000)

» NEURO-AMP SYN-AMP ADREN-AMP STABILIZING

…

now

…

{NO SPEECHES. NO FANCY CEREMONIES. WE STOP THIS BITCH NOW. DUEL!}

…

now I

…

hunt

…

[SET FIVE. END TURN.]

Giza

Asuka nearly jumped out of her skin at the twin bursts of lightning that erupted either side of her. She had fixed her focus so intently on the Tyler sisters that she'd been ignoring her peripheral vision completely.

"Duel intrusion detected," her Duel Disk announced. "2000 LP penalty assessed. Battle Royale format: start."

She looked left and right—and then again. The two boys had enough alike between them to warrant the double take; they wore the same roller skates, white pants, and powder-blue blazer, and differed only in the color of their hair and the headband that kept it in place. Asuka had not seen them properly before, but something in the way the two boys carried themselves made her certain they were part of the same club as Naname Mikiyo.

"I'd always thought you Dueled as a group," she told them, smirking a little.

"We would if we could," said the boy to her right as he tried and failed to wipe his spiky brown hair free of sweat. "But that crystal thing took her and all our teammates with it when it disappeared. It's just the two of us here now."

"I hope you don't mind some dance partners," sniffed the sandy-haired youth to her left as he eyed the Tyler sisters. "You can't have a ball without some boys in the mix."

"These two have a reputation where boys are concerned," Asuka said. One of the wrecked D-Wheels near her—Tony's, from its build—chose that moment to rupture its fuel tank, causing a loud BANG and a burst of flames. "So how about we save the flirting for some other time and start Dueling?"

"You took the words right out of our mouth," Grace Tyler sneered from across them, plucking a card from her hand. "I activate the Spell Card: Double Fusion! By paying 500 Life Points, I can use monsters in my hand or field for not one, but two Fusion Summons! And since my sister and I are still playing under Tag rules," she added, amidst the protests of the two DGC boys, "I can use monsters in my sister's hand for those Fusion Summons! So I'll fuse the Amazoness Pet Tiger and the Amazoness Pet Baby Tiger in my hand—and then the Amazoness Princess and the Amazoness Queen in yours, Gloria!"

"Get it, girl!" Gloria whooped, holding a brace of cards aloft together with her sister as the air began to swirl around them. "All together now—Double Fusion Summon! Amazoness Pet Liger, and Amazoness Empress!"

The words dropped from both sisters' mouths in a scream. By the time their echoes had subsided, their combined LP had been reduced to 3500, and the all-too-familiar forms of their aces had materialized before Asuka: Pet Liger, growling on its haunches and baring its teeth at the trio that opposed it (Level 7: ATK 2500 » 2700/DEF 2400); the barbaric Empress, holding her broad blade aloft in a sign of clear challenge (Level 8: ATK 2800 » 3000/DEF 2400).

"Wait—where's that ATK boost coming from?" The boy on her left frowned. "She didn't play any other cards!"

"Another terrain program," Asuka explained. "It's a Field Spell effect being generated by her Duel Disk—not by a physical card."

"The Field Spell: Amazoness Village, more specifically," smirked Grace, as clouds of vapor began to drift onto the field. Within seconds the heat of the desert had become almost overpowering. "Every Amazoness monster on the field gets 200 ATK thanks to it. Maybe you'll even learn to like it, too. Sweat's good for the skin, after all—and I bet your pores will be just screaming by our next turn."

Or we will be, Asuka thought, well aware of that reputation of theirs as she inspected her hand …

In any other time and place, the platforms of Cross Over would have felt like welcome relief for Saotome Rei as she drew her opening hand. But she'd seen and heard too much in the past few minutes to feel any sort of relieved—and knowing that the dead man who'd fought her own Deck to a draw in ages past had now come back from the grave seemed like the least of them.

"Why, Jim?" she could only bring herself to say. "The Kaiser deserved to go out in peace. After all the suffering he went through as one of us, the least that he deserved was an honorable end. Whoever brought him back to life took that honor away from him."

"Honor only gets you so far in the world," Jim said, shrugging as if Rei had just told him today's weather. "I said the same thing to those two boyos earlier. It's not honor what gets you out of bed and ready to face the day—it's the chance to fight for that honor! If anyone deserves that chance, it's him!"

With that, he'd reactivated his Duel Disk, drawn his cards, and then gone straight into it—no challenge, no other preamble. "One monster face-down," he began, watching a giant card materialize before him and sink into the sand an instant later, "and then, I activate the Spell Card Specimen Inspection! By revealing this 'ere Fossil Fusion in me 'and"—he did so—"and sending a monster from me 'and to the Graveyard"—he plucked out a card and slid it into his Duel Disk—"I can call a Type and a Level, and make you send a monster of that Type and Level from yore 'and or yore Deck straight to the Graveyard!"

A smirk crossed his face—and beneath his bandages, his artificial eye began to glow. "I call … Warrior, Level 5!"

Rei grimaced. It wasn't that she had one such monster in her Deck that made her so apprehensive—it wasn't even the notion that Jim had determined this so quickly; it was the simple fact that that one monster actually benefited from being in the Graveyard. But even as she plucked it out from her Deck, she knew Jim had as good as spelled out its fate already—she wouldn't have a chance to use its effect.

"There's a good girl," Jim chuckled, playfully scratching Karen's chin. "And now–the Spell Card Fossil Fusion! By banishing the Flint Cragger I sent with me Specimen Inspection—along with your Elemental 'ERO Necrodarkman—I can Fusion Summon a Fossil Fusion monster from my Extra Deck! C'mon out!"

BOOM. The ground between them erupted in a shower of sand and bones. Rei faintly saw some of those bones clumping together amidst all the grit—two legs, then a ribcage, two more arms, and finally a pair of skulls, one in the jaws of the other—

"Fusion Summon!" Jim cried. "Level 6! Mesozoic Fossil Knight Skull Knight!"

The skeletal warrior, eight feet tall, unsheathing a wicked-looking blade from behind the gigantic vertebra that served as its shield (Level 6: ATK 2400/DEF 1100). That blade was leveled right at Rei an instant later with a tooth-rattling cackle.

Rei felt a shiver, and looked off to her side. Tyranno Kenzan was still there, massaging his hands and still trying to come down from his berserk rage. Getting him back into one so soon risked that he'd never come back from it next time by, Rei knew. But even then, she couldn't help but think that his help might be needed even before he was completely calm again.

Dennis, Yūzō, and Isao stared down their quarry. None of them trembled. None of them could afford to.

"You should never have come here," Edo Phoenix said, curling his lip at them all. "Two of you should have had at least the good sense to say it out loud. You were destined to lose the day—no matter what you did."

He flipped a switch on his Duel Disk. "Terrain program: Dark City—set on," its computer announced—and without warning, the high sun began to dim. Night flooded into the sky, and stars banished by the day began to twinkle. But even that was nothing next to the darkened buildings that had suddenly erupted from the sand, piercing through the dunes like so many blades and surrounding all four Duelists within seconds.

Isao was unfazed. "Come a little closer," he snarled, "and I'll show you what I think of your destiny. DUEL!"

There was nothing to be said after that. Dennis and Yūzō exchanged glances—and each hoped that the other would be enough to tip the balance in their favor.

"Evolution Result Burst!"

Umesugi Ken had no time to run. He couldn't even try. The sands had shifted against him from the very first word.

He had much better luck in seeing what devastated his field, and his classmates', than Makoto did mere minutes ago. The sands between him and the tall, cloaked male who'd forced them all to Duel heaved, and erupted with twisting, sinuous metal. Three snakelike, iron heads had seized Raijin the Greatbolt Star from under its feet—one by each arm, disarming him of his broad blade as they did so; while the third coiled round his head and squeezed until Ken heard the all-too-familiar crunch of bone.

Then Raijin went limp, and the last he saw of his ace monster was its boots disappearing beneath the swirling sand, dragged down by a monstrosity he'd never believed possible. By then, many more heads had leapt from the ground, five—ten—twenty—surging amidst the warriors his team had managed to Summon, tearing them limb from limb—

BANG.

Ken was lifted right off his feet from the explosion that shook the earth under him. He did not land gently; the sand was packed tighter in some places than others, and the impact against it cracked at least four of his ribs and broke a couple more. He yowled in pain—loud enough that it momentarily drowned out both the chaos and his LP gauge falling to zero.

"Onto the next," spoke the master of the mechanical horror. "And the next, and the next—and the next!"

Ken heard the screams of his companions, and saw the bright flashes of purple light in the corner of his eye—

"RYŌ!"

The sound was all the more surprising to Ken because he'd never dreamed someone as weak-looking as Marufuji Shō could scream so loudly. One final BANG split the air in two—and then dread silence settled over the field.

Shō had not come alone, however, he now saw. That big kid who looked like a koala—Ken had not deigned to offer him his name, nor ask for one in return—towered behind him with anger in his small black eyes.

"You."

But the anger they radiated was nothing to the sheer hatred that laced the single word from the cloaked man as he stepped towards them.

Ken watched as Shō took out the Deck from his Duel Disk—and then, from his pocket, he revealed a whole other Deck, slipping that inside his device and switching on the blade. His companion followed suit in short order.

The man had noticed. "So you finally decided to use those cards now, did you?" he sneered. "Do you think it will make you worthy to speak my name once more? Or for me to speak yours … baby brother?"

Brother?! Ken looked from one to the other. He would have shouted if he could—but the agony in his chest was too great.

"I have to know that it's you under there, Ryō," Shō replied. Ken noticed how much his voice was trembling. "I can't find peace until I know you've found it first. If I have to find it for you the hard way—then so be it."

"Peace … " The word hissed through the man's lips like acid. "No peace. Not for Marufuji Ryō—not for the boy you murdered. And never for the Hell Kaiser," he spat. "You fight him now. Not your precious brother."

With one swift movement—before Ken or anyone else nearby could make sense of what he'd said—the Hell Kaiser whipped off his cloak, revealing a head of dark blue-green hair, spilling either side of his narrow face and down the back of his black overcoat like the waves of the open ocean, whipped by a storm until they could topple any ship that dared to sail them. The eyes beneath pierced the distance between them with all the finesse and intensity of a laser; Ken half expected the blue in them to turn a bright red.

Shō bowed his head. The Ryōzanpaku student wondered if he might start crying. But: "Like I said before," he was faintly heard to tell his giant companion. "So be it."

And in the instant before both brothers yelled "DUEL", Ken saw the elder's arm raise a black arrowhead of a Duel Disk. There was a flash of violet light—the desert closed in around him—and he knew nothing more.

Nothing at all.

Sora knew he was lost. But neither stopping nor admitting it to his fellow Lancers was an option any longer.

The black-cloaked tomb keepers who'd been chasing them through the stone corridors of the Ædonai fortress—a labyrinth of rock that seemed to lead nowhere, with nothing but torches to light their path; wholly at odds with the high-tech ways that they'd remade themselves from the old Academia—had armed themselves with more than just knives and swords. The Lancers had found this out when the Fusion Duelist had heard their shouts getting quieter behind them, and at first he'd taken them to be the quicker. That had been Sora's first mistake: he'd looked over his shoulder, and seen that it wasn't just that he and his group were faster—theirs had been slowing down.

Three of the cloaks chasing them had pulled out ahead, hiked up their left sleeves—and in the second before he'd put proverbial pedal to metal, Sora had seen the bizarre construction: a smooth oval tablet, lined with and lashed to their wrists with what looked like rope. Fanning out from its edge were five gold wings—solid metal, not the hard light of Solid Vision. He'd never seen them before—but they couldn't have been made for any other purpose.

Duel Disks!

"I activate the Spell Card: Fusion!" The voice of the lead pursuer echoed strangely off the stone, echoing so that ten more of him appeared to speak in tandem with him. For all Sora knew, there might be even more than that in his wake. "I fuse the Guardian Slime and the Reactor Slime in my hand!"

Sora couldn't resist the urge to look back—even for an instant. But in the instant he dared, he'd seen the three tomb keepers almost swallowed whole by the amorphous walls of silver liquid they'd conjured. The torches that lighted the path ahead and behind reflected strangely off the ooze before it snuffed them out; Sora thought he could see jaws stacked one on top of the other; claws, horns and fiercely gleaming eyes; even a murderous bladelike beak—all part of the same roiling, shapeless mass that rapidly filled his vision:

"Fusion Summon! Level 10! God Slime!"

He made a hard left at the first corner he'd been able to see—and the next one after that—and finally a staircase with a downward slope so steep he'd nearly flown down to the next landing before finally touching solid ground, silently ushering the rest of the Lancers to follow his lead. Whether that shook his pursuers, Sora didn't want to know—the hard rock walls were playing tricks on his ears, making it sound like these tomb keepers—and the sloshing and slushing of the living blobs they'd Summoned—were everywhere at once.

Most of the noise was coming from above them, however; Sora suspected this staircase led under the corridor they'd run down less than a minute ago. It was fading away as well; apart from the odd rumble under their feet, everything was silent, and ten dangerous seconds passed before the Fusion Duelist judged no one had followed them.

He didn't want to linger any longer to find out. "C'mon," Sora said, keeping his voice to a bare whisper and leading them further down the stairs. "Kurosaki, take point with me. Mieru, Sawatari—watch our sides. Gongenzaka, bring up the rear." He switched on his Duel Disk, and let the blue glow of his swordblade light the way; getting the idea, the rest of the Lancers followed his lead, casting a rainbow of purple, orange, and green all over the walls.

It took a minute for them all to reach the end of the staircase. Mieru could not help but gasp at the corridor that lay ahead; it was larger by half than the ones they'd traversed up to this point, and lined with monolithic statues nearly twice as tall as any of them. Their faces were smooth with sand and time, and thrown into sharp relief by the lights of the torches lit beside them, and their own Duel Disks as well. Shingo shuddered.

"Could've sworn one of them was staring at me … " he said, when Sora asked him why. The Fusion Duelist looked off to the nearest one, and thought Shingo had a point. Most of the statues had no visible eyes, but the shadows that flickered beneath their brows made up for the lack. He swallowed, and continued on—he knew at a glance that not one of these statues was some man making play to scare them. The smallest of them looked a good eight feet tall.

"Are they nobles?" Noboru wondered. "They can't be pharaohs—we're nowhere near the pyramids. But you had to be somebody to earn a statue like this back in those days, right?"

"No." Mieru's eyes could not seem to focus on anything else but the weathered faces looming over her. "If the men chasing us were tomb keepers, like Sora said … maybe these are tomb masters. Maybe they led these guys—a long time ago. I think those guys have been doing this for generations—hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. And they had families—married and made families of their own. And then they'd die, and their families would die—and they'd all hope that was enough to keep on leading." Her voice sounded almost sad as she gazed up at the towering figures. "Like none of them had any choice in how to live. Or how to die."

Abruptly, she shied away from one of them. " … Didn't Himika say these Ædonai were a cult of some kind?"

Sora thought. "She thought that at first," he replied. "But the LID sounded pretty adamant that they were more of a political and military force than anything else. The Ædonai just really, really liked Fusion Summoning monsters and thinking they were better than everyone else because of it." He left the rest unsaid. He'd left that behind him now.

Mieru was very quiet. "What if she wasn't wrong, though?" she asked. "What if maybe this is that cult?"

Sora had no response to that. Nor did he have the time to think it over—a beeping noise had just issued from Shun's Duel Disk. He whirled on the Xyz Duelist, and found him intently staring at the device, its circular top opened up to a secondary screen—a radar of some kind, he judged from the layout.

"Something just pinged up ahead," grunted Shun. "I've been trying to find sources of Fusion radiation, steer us out of their way in case they belong to those bastards chasing us. Something in all this rock isn't making it easy."

"And?"

"I've got one—looks like fifty meters right in front of us." He pointed off to where Sora could see—just barely in the darkness—the outline of a heavy-looking set of double doors. But Sora had also heard the emphasis that Shun had placed on the number, and knew that was only half the problem.

"Is it alone?"

Shun was frowning. "No. There's one other. Both of them are faint, and neither of them are moving. But the stuff this other one's giving off isn't like anything I've seen before. Some of it looks like it's Fusion … but if I'm reading this right, I'm getting some of Synchro and Xyz along with it."

Sora's heart threatened to fly right out of his mouth. Yuya. That has to be Yuya—and maybe that's Yuzu with him! He couldn't think of anyone besides Reiji who knew how to Duel with all three Summoning methods in any of the dimensions. Finally—after so very long—

He overbalanced just then—he'd put too much speed into his next step, and then just as quickly halted his progress. Only a quick movement from Sawatari saved him from crashing face-first into the floor.

"I'm all right," he coughed. "Just … be careful. Whatever you're seeing up ahead … " He thought of all the tomb keepers that had been chasing them—where they could be … or where they might be going next. "I don't like this. I've got a really bad feeling."

Sora decided then, as the rest of the Lancers closed formation and followed him to the door, that a candy store would be the first place he'd go if he made it back to Maiami City alive. Any reports Himika wanted out of him could wait until after he had something sugary in his stomach. A lot of somethings, he thought to himself.

The doors that barred their way were stone as well, and heavy enough that it took Shun and Noboru together to hold them open. This time, it was Sora that stifled a gasp: the chamber that greeted them could have swallowed the You Show campus in a gulp. Round as a planetarium, its curved ceiling was lost to sight in darkness, though Sora could have sworn he'd seen some rickety bridges swaying up above, supported by the carved pillars that lined the walls.

What held everyone's attention most, however, was the floor in front of them. The stone floor was mirror-smooth, polished in the light of the brazier that swung from up above. The chamber was completely bare, with no furniture or decoration even on the columns that lined the strangely curved walls—and devoid, too, of any sign of life … least of all the two lives Sora and his Lancers had crossed whole dimensions to find.

Something's wrong. "Keep to the walls," he muttered. Everything about this smelled of a trap.

Shun's face was screwed up in consternation. "But this is the place," he said to himself, checking his Duel Disk as he and Gongenzaka rejoined the group. "They're showing as here—right there." He gazed out at the round floor, then craned his neck upwards at the bridges. "Maybe they're above us?"

There was a thud as the rock-hewn doors closed behind them—and then too many things happened at once.

The floor dropped out from under Sora at the exact moment he'd started to wonder if the walls might be any safer a place to hide than the floor itself. By then, it was too late for all of them; as he now saw, the entire outer edge of the floor had been built on an enormous ring, cleverly locked into grooves—not curves—in the wall that held it in place through locks and sheer weight alone, like the rifling inside a gun guiding a freshly shot bullet out of its barrel.

Now those locks had been released; there was nothing to stop the entire construction from completing its journey. One big bullet was about to fire straight down—and the Lancers were standing right on top of that bullet.

The light from above was growing fainter by the second. Sora saw one of the grooves passing by in the fading light, and on instinct flung out his hand. But the stone was too smooth, the angle too steep—even his wiry frame would have trouble clinging to that. Shun was next to try; his attempt didn't last any longer than Sora's own. Together, they looked at the shrinking bridges above them; the Fusion Duelist felt dismay steal across his face as he watched stone steps jut out from the floor above them and lock into the wall, sealing any hope of exit he still had. He swore.

"Below us," Sora heard Shun grunt through gritted teeth—invisible in the total darkness that enveloped them in their descent. He heard the words the Xyz Duelist didn't speak—his radar had failed to take up or down into account, and they'd blundered right into the trap because of it.

"We're trapped in here," moaned Shingo. The lime-green light from his Duel Disk's blade accented the fear all over his face. "I'm never going to see my dad again … my home … "

"Wait!" Sora wasn't simply keen to have his teammate think happier thoughts than that; he needed the noise around them. He couldn't see anything off to his right, where the floor of the chamber above them had once been. And yet, he could have sworn that the sound of the descending ring was echoing much more than it ought to, as if they'd—

There! Only the gleam of their Duel Disks let him see it; there was another chamber below them—equally sparse in decoration but for a dark statue flanked by two stone tables—both little more than rounded, smoothed, and flattened boulders amidst their ink-black surroundings. Someone was laying on top of each one, completely still; cloths had been draped over their bodies, blending so well with the sandstone beneath and the darkness around them that Sora almost thought both cloth and figure were part of the rock itself—as if they were trying to force their way out of it.

He felt a chill.

CRUNCH. All of a sudden, their descent had stopped. Everyone lurched to one side; Sora felt all the air wheeze out of his lungs as Shun—unable to stop himself in time—landed flat on his own back. A muffled "OW!" from Shingo told the Fusion Duelist that Noboru had used him as an impromptu cushion as well.

Mieru had been lucky enough to fall forwards instead of to one side, and so she was first on her feet. Sora and Shun were next, hauling Noboru and a groaning Shingo up off the floor moments later.

The LDS Duelist walked up to Sora. "Let's not keep to the walls next time," he said, a little testily.

The Lancer Commander was only too happy to match his pace.

As one, they approached the tables. The figures beneath the cloth were small—almost the size of Sora himself—and he felt his heart seize in anticipation. Only the thought of more traps awaiting him kept him from yanking them off then and there—he could almost see the spikes of their hair beneath—

WHOOM.

They'd barely made it ten paces before fires leaped up all around them. The grooves that had carried the platform downwards billowed with flame, their torches unseen and undetected until now.

And as Sora whirled around, he saw more of the tomb keepers—more than had been chasing them, more than he'd been expecting could have been in this glorified fortress. They filed out from every direction, cutting off all exits—streaming from concealed stone panels next to the flaming tracks. They made no noise, in stark contrast to the cries and shouts that had hounded them here—hounded, Sora thought; had they meant to lure them here this whole time? Had the entire chase been a ploy to trap them for good, with no avenue of escape?

He looked around, but saw none. They were outnumbered twenty-to-one, and for all he knew there were more lying in wait—they were forming a tightly knit circle, closing in with the sheer press of numbers until—

SHLCK. His stomach shriveled at the noise; all of them had rolled back their left sleeves, exposing the quintet of blades that served as their Duel Disks—gleaming gold in the firelight, unfolding like the feathers of eagles' wings—he could almost hear the dark slime of their Summons oozing through the floors, the cracks in the ceiling—

"Albaqa'i!"

—stopped and froze.

Sora heard Shingo hiss through his teeth. He'd gone very tense all of a sudden, and Sora couldn't blame him for it. Though he could not recognize the language, the Fusion Duelist knew open hostility when he heard it—but what he didn't know was where it was coming from. The single word had been barked almost out of thin air, and seemed to echo from every direction. He scanned the crowd of black cloaks that trapped them, searching.

"It's her," Shingo was whispering. His face looked deathly pale. "She's here—the one in charge, of Edo and the Tylers and all the rest! I heard her voice above ground, right before they appeared—she must be their leader!"

Laughter rippled from the black cloaks surrounding them. "Kafaa, samti," snapped the voice, and they desisted at once—but that was immaterial to Sora. He was still turning in a full circle, trying to find where the speaker could be hiding. His eyes fell briefly upon the statue he'd seen between the tables, much smaller than the monolithic figures they'd passed on their way here—kneeling scarcely at chest-level with him, carved from dark stone so smooth and polished that it almost shone—

The statue moved.

For three whole seconds, Sora did not breathe. What he thought had been dark stone had been exotically dark skin, soft but taut against the flesh. Lithe legs and a naked, tattooed back, topped by a smooth curtain of ink-black hair, unfolded gracefully into a standing position. Sleek hands and slender arms spread outwards for only a moment's balance; the Fusion Duelist heard the faint chiming of jewelry a split second before he saw the gold bangles and emerald earrings. Nothing else served as clothing save for strips of black silk—and then only for what needed to be concealed, he was too quick to notice.

Sora felt a need to avert his eyes, and received his chance an instant later. "Malabisi." At the would-be statue's command, two tomb keepers detached themselves from the ring, gliding towards her. One bore a hooded black robe—golden-eyed rather than purple, but otherwise identical to the cloaks of her servants—and pulled it over her shoulders with gentle care, leaving the eye upon the hood to stare back at the Lancers as if in silent judgment. The other carried a simple crown, little more than a band of gold, placing it atop her head with scarcely a sound.

At a silent gesture, both men retreated some distance away from her. Then, before Sora or any of the Lancers could steel themselves, the woman made a single deft movement—and whirled round to face them as if on a pivot.

Gasps and murmurs from the others—even Mieru—told him he wasn't alone in his first thoughts, but he paid them no mind; his brain was drawn to her as if by a magnet. She looked to be about twenty, and not tall—not imposingly so, like Dr. Grimm; just under six feet, if he had to guess—but firm and lean enough to suggest a long career of hard work and athleticism. Her chest heaved and fell with the subtlest of movements, her heart and lungs utterly calm and controlled beneath her tanned flesh and loose black robe, and long fingers caressed the jewelry that framed her wrists like the skin of a lover, before gliding up to her neck, and the choker that wrapped around it. A single gold-wrought eye, set between pointed fangs, stared back at them all from beneath her chin, more impassively than the face above.

If it hadn't been for that face, Sora might have found this woman extremely—impossibly—beautiful. But there were two large reasons why he could not bring himself to be completely in awe of her, and both of them were staring back at the Lancers right now: gray as solid rock and twice as hard, unblinking and unmoving as she took them all in.

Sora bristled at the coldness of the gaze within as it roved over him. That was not the engineered hatred of entire dimensions that lurked in her eyes, the Fusion Duelist knew—not some product of Academia's propaganda. No—it was loathing; the pure, simple disgust of a woman who'd opened a cupboard and found a large cockroach scurrying over the plates inside. That prompted a shiver deep inside him. I haven't been looked at like that in a long time.

Dark lips curled in a sneer. "Kashif lahum," she breathed, and her two attendants stiffened. "Dae hawula' al'atfal yadhuqun eabath al'amli." Each of them approached a table, took one of the cloths that lay atop the rock—and yanked it off in one swift stroke.

Sora's ears rang with the shouts of his friends, but they might as well have come from another dimension. He had been expecting what—who—was beneath. It still didn't make the actual sight of them any less of a shock.

Sakaki Yūya and Hīragi Yuzu lay before them, one on each table, face-up and supine with their feet facing the dark-skinned woman. Their clothes looked no worse for wear—in fact, none of them looked as if they'd even suffered a single bruise. But their eyes were closed, and they weren't even twitching at the sudden level of noise that had filled the chamber.

"Yuya!"

"Yuzu!"

"Darling!"

Sora felt his voice strain to the edge with those of his friends, hoping they would wake up—hoping they could—

THUMP. With one fluid movement, the woman had struck her breast—and Sora felt something radiate from her, a small but invisible shockwave that disturbed the sandy floor and passed through him with a coldness that drove the air from his lungs. As if by some spell, the chamber had become deathly silent—though not nearly so silent as the two children that still failed to stir.

"We come to it now at last."

Sora remembered what Shingo said before; he had expected the woman to switch languages sooner or later. But he was surprised despite himself yet again: her voice sounded just as exotic as the rest of her looked. It curved and flowed like the edge of a scimitar—graceful, sharp, and merciless. Just like her eyes, the Fusion Duelist thought.

"This is how I have seen it," she continued, "if not how I had hoped to see it." Her fingers traced, again, the eye of the necklace that clung inches below her jaw, slowly and languidly—before her gaze flicked to the Lancers again.

"I know why you are here. And as you have seen, you are very close." The most minute of gestures indicated Yūya and Yuzu. "The quickest way will be through us."

"You think you can keep me from my darling Yūya?!" Mieru brought her already-ignited Duel Disk to the breast of her blouse, defiant. "You should've brought more soldiers for that."

"The soldiers you battled were merely told to protect the surrounding lands," said the woman dismissively. "We need them not. We are descended from those who have kept these tombs from harm for a hundred of your generations and more."

Sora had heard enough. He didn't like how Yūya and Yuzu were just laying there like that—and he wasn't keen on keeping them that way for one more second. So he took a step forward, clenching his fist. "These tombs won't be around for much longer if you keep running your mouth like that!"

It was the wrong thing for him to say: the ring of black cloaks around them erupted in cries of outrage. Even a quick wave of the woman's hand didn't dispel them at once—and a few long seconds passed before their echoes had faded into awful silence.

"'Usmik maratayn kafar." Every vowel carried the bitter breath of the northern wind. "Were I you, Shiun'in Sora, I would choose my next words with care. We do not take kindly to grave robbers—or to traitors. You are both."

Sora saw the loathing in her eyes intensify, and felt any chance of a retort curdle in his windpipe. Perhaps that was the reason Noboru sprang to his defense so suddenly. "We are not grave robbers!" he protested. "We just want our friends back. We would love for that to happen without a fight. We have fought enough already. But if that is not to be the case"—he planted his foot down on the stone hard enough to crack it beneath his sandal—"then the noble Gongenzaka still has fight in him yet!"

The woman's head tilted quizzically. "And is that what you believe?"

Something in the way she emphasized the last word gave Sora pause. But Shun was not cowed. "Every single one of us who came here has something to believe in," the Xyz Duelist stormed. "Someone to believe in. That someone is inside this very room, sitting on one of those tables. You would call them slaves—mere material to be used and expended until there was just enough left of them to serve your twisted ends. You would discard them like fodder—like just another card you had no use for, beyond one more step in your plans! We call them friends—and we will never sacrifice them for any reason! They are part of your games no longer!"

He slashed his Duel Disk through the air, to cheers from Mieru and Sawatari. "That is what we believe!"

"Hm." The woman looked off to one side. Almost immediately, a third tomb keeper stole up behind her, cradling something dark and round in his hands. This he slipped over the woman's left wrist—and an experimental wiggle secured it over one of her bangles. "As you wish, then."

She brought the object to her waist and into full view of the Lancers. What Sora saw made him tilt his head out of sheer confusion. What the—?!

Mieru was even more nonplussed. "Is … is that supposed to be a Duel Disk?"

It had the rough shape and size of one, Sora thought—but whoever designed it was either none too skilled at putting one together, or had only the faintest idea of what one looked like. He could see no touch screen or interface of any kind, no slots for the Graveyard or the Spell & Trap Zones—not even containers for the Deck or the Extra Deck. It might as well have been a chunk of rock on her arm next to his Duel Disk—

Then she shifted her arm, and Sora felt his jaw drop—that actually was a chunk of rock on her arm.

"You're kidding." It was Shun's turn to look confused. "You're seriously going to Duel us with—"

The woman brought the stone to her breast. "Jihz sifik!"

The words echoed in Sora's ears unnaturally, but he was too focused on the would-be Duel Disk—and the ice blue, ethereal blade that had suddenly lanced out along the length of her arm against all rational explanation. It fluttered and flickered like some banner in the wind, quite at odds with the shimmering sword or chevron expected of Solid Vision. This was different from all that somehow, he knew—different in a way that he could not explain in words.

Which meant this Duelist was going to be much more different than any—friend or foe—he'd ever faced.

"Let me tell you what I believe," said the woman in soft fury. "I believe that as the leader of this clan, I have a duty to protect it and its lands from filth like you—and to safeguard our ancestors, our warriors, and our pharaohs who ruled as gods made flesh, from the desecrations of your pursuits of avarice and self-adulation. Our forefathers, too, believed in their sacred duty, and held to it even in their next life because of their belief. So will I too, while I draw breath; for I, Sara Ishtar—who carries the blood of Isis in her veins, and who is named Bestatter of the Ædonai—have believed in that duty from the day I was born … and will cling to it still, in shāʾ Allāh, long after I join my ancestors in death!"

Sora swallowed as she clenched her fist; a rectangle of more of that shimmering blue glow had swirled onto the top of her Duel Disk. "I believe—and so it becomes real," the woman called Sara intoned, placing her fingers upon that tiny pool of light … and produced, again against all reason, five cards from whatever depths lay within. "I believe what you do not. And so I can do what you can not."

What the hell? Something in Sora's mind had gone slack. Manifesting a Duel Disk's blade out of thin air was one thing. But manifesting cards to use with it …

"H-how's she doing that?" Mieru murmured, wide-eyed. "Is … is she psychic, too? Is she … m-magic?"

"This is no longer a battle of minds and tricks, little girl," Sara smiled at her. "From here on, it is the belief we hold within our souls that will fight for us." A pause. "But … I have been told that certain of your kind have faced a Psychic Duelist before, and lived to tell the tale. We shall see if that was luck."

Shingo finally found his voice. "Lady, we faced a god and lived to tell the tale," he shot back. "You need to work on your insults more. And you'll have plenty of time to do that after we kick your ass and make you watch us leave with Yūya and Yuzu, too!" he added for good measure, again to cheers from the other Lancers.

"The wager is acceptable," the Bestatter said evenly, and Shingo drew back, confused. "If we should win, however, then you will receive a rare honor, one deserving of the warriors you mark yourselves to be—and may yet prove to be. Yes … I may just choose to believe that you will live."

Her thin smile peeled back in a terrible smirk. "Through your very own mummification."

"Mummification?!" Mieru and Shingo backpedaled in horror.

Shun, in a first, was right there with them. "Live through it?!"

"Oh, yes." The stone-gray eyes shone with all the promise of an afterlife far grimmer than Sora had ever imagined. "We have dealt with interlopers and infidels in generations past, but rarely so many at once … and never so brazen as to wage outright war on our lands. The modern world deserves a reminder that the name of Ishtar still rings through the annals of history. All of you shall serve as that reminder to the people who sent you here."

With a flick of her wrist, that strangely flowing blade of hers was brought to her brow in a salute, and then edge-on to them all. At once, every black cloak against the walls dropped to their knees, hands clasped to breasts as if in prayer. Within seconds, the murmurs of a sibilant chant rose from their ranks, echoing through the chamber and melting into a single, otherworldly voice.

Sora heard the Lancers mimic her movements, each of them drawing five cards from their Deck. He was the last to do so—his thundering heart needed time to calm itself. The stakes were higher than in any Duel he'd ever fought in his life. Knowing that this one might well be the last one in his life somehow seemed like the least of them.

"Come, then." Sara's challenge cut through the chanting like a knife. "Duel."

For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead.

None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the paths of life.

For the upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall remain in it.

But the wicked shall be cut off from the earth, and the transgressors shall be rooted out of it.

– The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 2, Verses 18-9, 21-2, KJV

MATERIAL:02: CARETAKER – RESOLVE

A/N: … right. Okay. I'm never doing that again. Ow.

The biggest reason for me not updating in so very long was that I had to move out of my apartment and into a new space—all in about the span of a weekend. That sapped more energy than I'd feared, and it's only recently that I've been able to dig myself out of a rut of my own making. Which, as it happens, is the second biggest reason I didn't post anything; that last chapter was so blamed long that it might as well have been two.

But I can't think of a better time to end part two of this monstrosity than at the end of 2024. Considering how glacial my pace of updates has been this year, I wonder if I may need to take a little more of a break and work on some other projects now that I have this milestone out of the way. It's plain to see I underestimated how much time it would take to not only write a bunch of chapters with a bunch of simultaneous Duels in them, but also knit them all together into something cohesive and coherent. So I'll put this on the back burner until I feel more comfortable with writing bigger chapters once more.

Thanks so much for your patience, and thanks for reading! See you all in 2025! – K

…

P.S.: To all the Ke$ha fans—I'm very, very sorry.