Chapter 4: Bad Guy Magic

Mokuba tried to talk Seto out of it. He thought the murder pod argument was self-explanatory, but no matter how many times he repeated it, Seto only nodded to acknowledge he'd heard and continued walking toward his own death. He examined one of the pods, the blue light casting harsh shadows across his face as he squinted at whatever was invisible to Mokuba. Even if he saw causes murdery death written in plain letters, he would probably still do what he was going to do because Seto was as stubborn as a rock.

Well, Mokuba could be too.

"I'm going in!" he declared, shooting a glare between Seto and Zigfried and waiting for one of them to protest.

Zigfried lifted one shoulder in a shrug. Seto said nothing.

"I said I'm going in!"

Seto pointed to the pod he'd finished examining. "Use this one, then."

Mokuba sputtered a moment, but he was too embarrassed to ask why Seto wasn't fighting back, so he just said, "Fine! I will!"

While Seto began examining the next pod over with the same deliberateness, Mokuba crept toward the glowing blue monster, peering into its murdery guts. It looked like a giant oyster, mouth gaping open and waiting for something to chomp. It looked like a mimic, glowing with treasure but just waiting to sprout teeth.

Mokuba looked at Seto.

His brother finally met his eyes. "It's just a virtual system, Mokuba. You've tested the one at KaibaCorp."

The one at KaibaCorp didn't have anything enclosed. It just had nice cushioned chairs to sit in and a clunky helmet that covered even his eyes. Most importantly, Seto had made the one at KaibaCorp.

Mokuba turned to fix Zigfried with his fiercest stare. "Is it safe, Zigfried?"

The pink-haired man blinked, as if surprised to hear his own name. After a moment, his gaze flickered toward Seto, and it hardened.

"It will reveal ze truth," he said at last.

After chewing on that for a moment, Mokuba decided it was probably safe. In the past, Seto's enemies had never been shy about death threats when they meant it. Pegasus didn't wait for a conversation before snatching Mokuba's soul, and it hadn't taken ten minutes after their first meeting for Marik to chain everybody to an anchor. Then there was Alister with the immediate flaming gargoyle, so . . .

"Seto, what happened with the chess game?"

From across the room, Mokuba hadn't been able to see anything strange besides pieces moving, but Seto had gone rigid like he'd seen a ghost.

"That's what we're going to find out," Seto replied.

Mokuba watched his brother slide into the pod and pull the lid closed. He waited another moment, chewing on his lip, and then he hooked his knee over the edge and pulled himself into the evil blue oyster.

Which was surprisingly comfortable.

The curved sides cradled him like a hammock, and it carried a thin padding to cushion him, like a layer of foam across an otherwise-hard floor. Mokuba wiggled for a moment, adjusting his shoulder blades beneath him. He looked up at a dull metal ceiling. Then he took a deep breath, reached up to grab a canvas strap, and pulled the curved blue lid down over him. It swung slowly on resistant hinges, then settled. He'd closed his own coffin.

The blue light dimmed, turning a soft pink, and a faint humming echoed beneath Mokuba's head. He could hear his own breathing, too loud with a lid just three inches above his nose. Out of curiosity, he bent his knee a little, until it rose enough to bump against the enclosure. He wondered if he should close his eyes, and just as he did, a circle appeared above him, with a countdown at its center.

5 . . .

4 . . .

This was definitely a mistake.

3 . . .

2 . . .

If he flung the lid back now—

1 . . .

Would it even open?

The circle flashed white and vanished, taking the pink glow along with it, leaving everything lightless. At the same moment, the ground dropped from beneath him, and he gasped, grabbing for the lid, the strap—

Both gone. Everything was gone.

But Mokuba wasn't falling.

He was floating.

Before he could really panic, the ground settled beneath his feet—

—and a new world appeared.

It was as if he'd opened his eyes, emerging from sightless darkness into a familiar room. Only this room wasn't familiar. It was a small office, maybe ten feet by ten feet, with a single tall bookcase, a wooden desk, and an open closet. All of them empty.

He reached out to touch the bookcase, expecting his fingers to pass through like a hologram. They stopped instead. Mokuba blinked. He rubbed his fingertips fiercely back and forth, feeling the wood, the friction, the heat.

It felt real.

"Whoa," he murmured.

The room had a single door. Mokuba grabbed the doorknob, twisted, and threw the door open. It swung with real weight.

He jumped out, expecting a hallway.

Instead, his sneakers hit a street paved with orderly, worn stones. The buildings in either direction were all pale colors—pink, white, cream—made of stone and stucco. The glass windows reflected yellow streetlamps and a faded-blue evening sky.

"Where's this?" Mokuba craned his neck, looking up at sharply slanted rooftops and blotchy gray clouds.

"Munich, Germany," drawled a voice near him.

He turned to see Seto examining the door he'd just come out of. When Seto opened it, the room beyond had changed, full of chairs, rugs, and a large, open space. Mokuba grinned. Despite his earlier misgivings, he could never be truly scared with Seto nearby.

Plus, this was awesome.

"Of course you have all of Germany memorized," Mokuba said, just to rib him.

Seto snorted. "I asked that NPC."

Mokuba whirled to see a man he hadn't noticed before, quietly sweeping the street beneath a canopied overhang. The man wore a white apron and adjusted chairs as he worked, rearranging them neatly around circular tables.

"Is that a café?" Mokuba demanded. "Can I eat here? It won't make me, like, eat my tongue in the real world?"

Seto scowled, which Mokuba imagined had to do with the fact that his virtual system still lacked tactile interaction; Seto complained about it whenever the program was discussed, something about the difficulty of interfacing directly with the human brain. Seto's program looked real, but it didn't feel real.

Not like this.

"There's no wind interaction." Seto held one hand out, testing the air, then pointing at the greenery lining the windows above.

The plant leaves bobbed in an invisible wind, but the air Mokuba felt against his skin was stale, without movement.

"No temperature correction, either," Seto added. "With an evening sky like that, it should be cooler than it is."

Mokuba raised an eyebrow. "Now you're just being sour. Those are minor glitches."

Seto's scowl gave the confirmation. "I'll be sour if I please while I figure out how that throw pillow managed this."

"It's not like you couldn't!" Mokuba protested. Seto could do anything.

Seto only grunted in response. Together, they explored the street, opening doors, speaking to the handful of people they found. The NPCs were not particularly impressive; they answered simple questions, but up close, there was definitely something off about them. When Mokuba looked in their eyes, he saw something empty, and the weirdness of it prickled the back of his neck.

It bothered Seto too. He heard his brother grumbling about the contradiction between a "near-perfect environment" and "zombie people."

At one point, Seto stopped beside a door and told Mokuba to test the exit system. "Just go quickly out and back in. I already tested mine."

Mokuba blinked.

In response, Seto smirked. "You haven't opened your menu yet?"

"How do I even do that? I didn't get a tutorial!"

"Neither did I."

"Obviously you can figure things out without one. You're Seto."

He'd thought that would make his brother smile, but for some reason, the older boy's expression darkened instead.

Quietly, he said, "I'm not sure who I am, Mokuba."

The street around them stood eerily still. Though they'd spent enough time exploring that the sky should have darkened, it stood unchanging, without even movement in the scattered clouds. The street lamps glowed without flicker or variation. The NPCs looped in their routines of sweeping streets or tidying shops. No life. Just the illusion of it, which Mokuba found less convincing now than before.

"What does that mean?" Mokuba asked in a small voice.

Seto shook his head. His shoulders lifted in a deep sigh, and he straightened. Mokuba hadn't even realized he'd been slumped until he stood tall once more. He sure looked like Seto, dressed in his familiar black turtleneck and pants, with a silver belt that buckled in the shape of the KaibaCorp logo. KC. Seto never wore anything that didn't have that logo on it somehow. He made himself a walking billboard for KaibaCorp because the company was the symbol of his success.

Was he just upset that a stranger had managed something KaibaCorp hadn't?

Mokuba set his jaw. "It doesn't matter if some German guy invented true virtual technology before you did. You're still Seto. When you get to it, you'll do it better. You'll have wind and temperature and no zombie people. Because you're the best, Seto."

Seto stared at Mokuba for a moment, his blue eyes bright against the dim sky. The very corner of his lips quirked in an almost-smile, and he reached one hand out and placed it on Mokuba's head. Mokuba thought Seto would muss his hair like he always did when they were kids. He could count on one hand the number of times his brother had done it since taking over KaibaCorp.

But Seto didn't. He just rested his hand there, and then he said, "Touch here for your menu."

He lifted his hand, and after a moment of frowning, Mokuba bopped himself on the head, feeling silly all the while.

A screen appeared in the air before him, like a window. He jumped. But before he could even scan the options, a new voice spoke behind him.

"The best, Set-o. You're the best. What a st-andard."

Mokuba whirled. His menu was still up, and it hid the new person from view until he quickly bopped himself again to make it disappear.

Then he saw a boy about his age standing in the middle of the street. The boy's thick hair obscured his forehead and the edges of his ears, cropped at his neck. For a moment, it distracted from the rest of him because it was an unnatural green—the green of a command interface, like Seto had used to play chess. The green of a cracked screen struggling to display an image. Beneath that shocking green, his eyes were a similarly unnatural purple-blue, the hue flickering darker and lighter at any given moment, like a glitch.

He wore a crisp uniform, one that might be used at a boarding school—a buttoned white jacket with long sleeves above white shorts and long black socks. The collar and cuffs of his jacket flickered at the hems, shifting from white to that same digital purple.

"Um . . . I think this NPC is broken," Mokuba said hesitantly.

"He's not an NPC," Seto said. He raised his voice slightly, echoing it down the street. "Are you?"

The boy smiled, the expression flickering in the same way as the lines of his jacket. There and gone. There and gone.

"Seto Ak-iyama." His voice chopped in places, staggering the sounds like a radio with interference. "Sharp as a t-ack. St-ill dumb enough to ent-er my domain."

"Who are you?" Seto asked before Mokuba could.

"I thought you knew everything, S-et-o. The b-est."

Mokuba squinted, trying to see past the strange colors, the strange glitches. Had there been someone else hiding on the ship, just waiting to enter the system? Zigfried's brother, maybe? Whoever he was, clearly the system didn't like him, since it had half-digitized his appearance.

Then Seto spoke again, and what he said dropped Mokuba's jaw.

"Gozaburo."

Mokuba gaped at his brother. Seto had that steely-eyed, clenched-fist stance that said he was absolutely certain. But Gozaburo was dead. And even when he wasn't, he'd never looked like that—Mokuba took another look at the slim-shouldered boy, standing with his hands in his uniform pockets, slouched in a casual, friendly way.

Gozaburo had been a brick of a man, square shoulders and rigid stance, square face with a square mustache. Every line of him stiff and intimidating and awful.

The boy on the street didn't look awful. He just looked broken.

But the boy didn't deny Seto's accusation. He smirked. "We have a lot to t-alk about, Seto. Unfortun-ately, n-either of us like to talk, do we? So we'll let the syst-em talk for us. That's what it was built for."

"Gozab . . ." Mokuba couldn't even finish the name. He took a step back, bumping into a window ledge where it jutted from the building, the corner of it spearing into his ribs. He winced.

Pain. He could feel pain here. Mokuba swallowed hard.

The boy's purple gaze fixed on him, a worse spear than the window ledge. Mokuba flinched away from it.

"Enj-oy the ride." Pulling his hands from his pockets, the boy revealed both palms glowing that same purple.

The street around them twisted and warped, buildings pulled like taffy into the sky, the road swerving into a gray vortex. Mokuba turned, grabbing for Seto. But Seto was already gone, and so was the boy.

The ground slanted beneath him, and for the second time, Mokuba fell.

Yori preferred blimps to helicopters. The last (and only) time she'd ridden in a helicopter had been when Seto took her to the hospital after the docks. She'd been unconscious.

Now she was glad of it.

The helicopter roared like a monster—even if her headphones had deceptively hidden the noise—and she marinated in the belly of the beast. She should have at least taken a back seat, but Joey was back there with Krisalyn. Instead, Yori had a copilot's seat behind a crystal-clear windshield.

With a crystal-clear view of just how much nothing separated her from the ground.

They flew over an endless blue ocean, with only wisps of clouds above. She tried not to think of how every movie with helicopters always had them spin uncontrollably through the air before crashing in fiery explosions. Would it still be fiery in the ocean?

"Everyone alright?" Roland asked, his voice buzzing slightly in her headphones.

In response, Joey whooped. Even his loud enthusiasm couldn't cover the background hum that made up the blades overhead. Three flimsy metal blades—the only things holding them in the air. Fewer blades on the helicopter than people in it. Surely that should be illegal.

"Hey, how much does one of these babies cost?" Joey demanded. "I got me some fancy Battle-City-champion winnings to spend!"

Yori glanced at Roland beside her. The man kept his hand steady on the control stick, sunglasses fixed on the sky ahead. There was a distinct note of amusement in his voice as he answered.

"This one? You'd have to win five more tournaments, Mr. Wheeler."

"Five?!" Joey made a sound like he was choking.

Yori would have loved to make a quip, but she couldn't think of anything.

"You alright, miss?" Roland cast her a glance.

I'm not afraid of a little height, she wanted to say. She'd dueled in the finals atop the blimp, without even a windshield to guard her. The blimp had just felt much . . . sturdier. And she hadn't been able to see the ground directly beneath her.

She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped, because she could practically feel Shada's eyes on her still, from wherever he was in his magical afterlife-Egypt.

A pot is not waterless because it contains nothing, the pestering spirit whispered in her mind. It is waterless because the water which once filled it has been emptied. So, too, a fearless path is one in which fear has been faced and emptied.

Drawing in a slow, deep breath, Yori fisted her hands on her knees.

"It scares me," she admitted into her headset.

Immediately, she felt like a child. Weak. Vulnerable. She may as well have stood in gang territory without her switchblade, waving a hundred-dollar bill for anyone to come take.

She waited for Joey to call her a coward. Waited for Roland to say she should have given her seat to one of the KaibaCorp employees, someone who wouldn't sweat at just sitting. At least Krisalyn wouldn't say anything; the girl had made it clear from the start that she couldn't hear them well enough over the radio. She'd given Roland the destination coordinates and fallen silent after that.

After barely a pause, Roland said, "I find distraction can be an effective tool in facing fears such as these. My brother suffers anxiety regarding flight as well. Rather than looking at the ground—or lack thereof—you could peruse your dueling deck. If you left it behind, I'm sure we could find something else."

"I never leave my deck behind." Yori managed a small smile. He thought she was normal. As normal as his own brother.

How would Yami have reacted to her silly fear? She felt torn between simultaneously wishing he sat next to her and hoping he would stay far away. In order to help him regain his memories, win a battle against the gods themselves, Yori needed to be stronger than she'd ever been.

Instead, she felt cracked at every joint. Barely holding herself together.

"Forget the deck," Joey piped up. "Answer me a question—how do you have a freakin' dragon? A real one? You said 'long story,' but now we got nothin' but time."

"Eh, I don't want to freak Roland out." Yori smirked, then realized perhaps teasing Kaiba's bodyguard was going a bit too far.

But the man said, "I work for Seto Kaiba, miss. Now that you've revealed your beast, it will be my job to determine how one is acquired. Particularly if it comes in a blue-eyed, white-scaled variety."

"Good point, sunglasses! I wouldn't mind havin' one neither, so long as it's cheaper than a helicopter. And better than Rich-boy's. Spill the beans, Yor."

Yori slouched in her seat as much as the harness would allow. She fished her deck from its pouch and began idly flipping the cards. It was much better not to stare down at that ocean, remembering the last time it had almost swallowed her.

"Every soul," she began, telling it the way Shada had told her, "has two sides."

She held up her Dante the Fire Dragon card back-to-back with Magician's Release, studying the black-uniformed magician on her spell card. Human, not dragon.

"One side of the soul is the Ba. The human side. The Ba lives in the daily world, interacts with others, displays our true form. It's the way we all see and recognize each other, the half that most people think is the only side to the soul. Then there's . . . the Ka. The monster side."

She rotated her wrist, looking into the roaring, fanged mouth of her black dragon.

"Our Ka lives within us and reflects our secret form. It's the way we view ourselves. Made of the strongest parts of us, good and bad, the Ka influences us without us even acknowledging it's there."

Tilting her hand back, she ignored the Duel Monsters cards she held and focused instead on the twisted strands of gold that made up her bracelet. It gleamed along one edge where it caught the sunlight.

Shada's voice spoke again in her mind: The bracelet reveals the true spirits of men.

"My Millennium Bracelet gives me the power to manifest a Ka in the human world."

It came with all the dangers such a thing implied—Shada had been sure to warn her of that. If her Ka were killed while manifested, it would cut her soul in half, leaving her with only a Ba. Very few people could survive such a thing, he said.

Essentially, if Dante died, she died too.

Roland gave no comment to her story, but based on the set of his jaw, she'd disturbed him. Maybe he just thought she was crazy.

Joey went ahead and said it. "That's crazy!" But just as fast, he added, "So there's a dragon inside me too? Aw, yeah, I knew it! I knew Joey Wheeler had something breathin' fire inside. Bet mine's twice as big as Rich-boy's."

"Not everyone—" Yori started.

"Hang on, though! Wait a sec. How come your dragon's also a magician dude that ain't you? You got two extra souls in there? And how come Alister had a bunch of gargoyles and cyborgs and even that three-headed freak-monster? Bad guys get ten souls? That means Rich-boy's got twenty!" Seizing her shoulder in a tight grip, he added, "Hang on again—how come your Ka's also a card you got in your deck?"

Rolling her eyes, Yori pulled a few more cards from her deck and held them up at an angle where Joey could probably see over her shoulder. All of them different monster types.

"The Millennium Eye gave Pegasus visions of people's Kas, from all periods of history. I'm sure he invented some monsters to supplement, but most of his game comes straight from real people's souls." She clucked her tongue. "At least now I know why Shadi gave me the cards he did. He probably had Pegasus make them for me."

At that thought, she smiled fondly. Shadi may have been a destiny-obsessed weirdo, but he really was her friend. Him and his dead dad both.

Boy, she had a strange life.

"Gotcha." Joey's voice turned serious. "And Alister?"

"He wasn't using his Ka. He was using magic that brought the game straight to life."

None of his monsters had come even close to Dante's strength, so she could at least rest assured the counterfeit couldn't hold up to the real thing. But the counterfeit was still terrifying enough in its own right. If she'd faced those monsters without her bracelet . . . it would have been a very different fight.

"Great," said Joey. "Very reassurin'. Bad guy magic. Any chance the rest of us can get some good guy magic? You got a spare bracelet stashed away?"

Yori thought of the shadows, of the red skulls swimming in an endless dark. She thought of their shrieks, their demands, the way her soul shivered when she accepted the deal that gave her Dante.

Shada said the item users of the past had slowly lost their minds. She'd seen what the rod did to Marik firsthand.

Joey, she thought, I have a feeling this isn't good guy magic at all.

But even so, if it was the only way for her to fight, the only way to save the people she cared about, she would use it. She'd promised Yami they would find a way to return his memories. She'd promised herself something else.

Haku had given Alister his magic. Yuugi said Haku was a god, just as he'd always claimed to be. A real one.

So regardless of where her magic came from or what it did to her, she would use it for one other thing—

She would use it to kill a god.