Chapter 179

"Atticus, do you feel like anything's come back yet? Even just a fragment?"

Rowan asked, fist raised in encouragement, his face the picture of support.

"Uh... yeah, actually. Somewhere deep down, there's this familiar feeling starting to bubble up."

Atticus rubbed at his own head as he spoke.

He was starting to recall fragments, vague pieces of that earlier Shadow Duel.

Then his expression suddenly brightened with renewed determination as he looked back at Rowan. "One more time. This time, I'm winning, and taking back the victory that's rightfully mine!"

"That's the spirit!" Rowan gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up.

All the while, his hands moved without missing a beat, swapping in his Dark Magician OTK Deck and slotting it into his Duel Disk.

"Why does this feel... so horribly familiar," Syrus muttered, sweat already beading on his face.

It wasn't just Atticus's memory getting jogged. Something deeply traumatic seemed to be resurfacing in Syrus too.

A minute later, an explosion of fire and smoke lit up the training field.

Atticus was back on his knees, staring in bewilderment at his own hand of five cards, not a single one of which he'd gotten the chance to play, and at the Life Points that Rowan's Dark Magician had wiped out in an instant.

He was starting to question the very fabric of reality.

Why was it that no matter which deck this Rowan character switched to, the only thing he ever got out of it was pain? Not one shred of an actual, enjoyable duel?

He'd barely listened to Rowan talk for thirty seconds before the Dark Magician one-shot him into oblivion.

[Ding. Atticus's Emotion Points +600!]

Watching Atticus's Life Points climb up to a fresh 4000, only for Rowan's newly summoned Dark Magician to instantly zero them right back out again, in a scene that was starting to feel painfully familiar, Chazz clutched his own head, sweat pouring down his face, feeling like some deeply repressed memory of his own was clawing its way back to the surface.

Was this supposed to be helping Atticus recover his memories, or was it dredging up a nightmare none of them ever wanted to think about again?!

"Big brother, how are you feeling?" Alexis asked over and over, clearly pained just watching.

"I think... I'm remembering a bit more now. I think I went somewhere, some Duel Spirit world where a clan of tomb keepers lived, and had a Shadow Duel there."

Atticus rubbed his head, slowly piecing together small fragments as he spoke.

"So this kind of stimulus really is having some effect!" Nurse Fontaine and Zane exchanged a glance, their eyes lighting up slightly as they nodded.

"Well then, let's try a few more rounds, shall we, Atticus?" Rowan said, grinning like the devil himself, and lifted up a whole stack of decks in his hand, fanning them out with a flourish.

The Lava Golem Deck. The Underworld Deck. The Ojama Deck...

"..." Alexis, Zane, and Nurse Fontaine all felt a single, giant bead of cold sweat roll down their faces at the sight.

Bastion, Jaden, and Chazz in particular, upon recognizing those all-too-familiar decks, each one soaked in their own personal trauma, all took a reflexive, panicked step backward, sweat pouring off them.

Every one of them shot a look of pure pity toward Atticus, still blissfully unaware of what was coming.

This poor, amnesiac senior had absolutely no idea what kind of hell awaited him.

Alexis suddenly felt a headache coming on.

If her brother kept dueling this guy, was he going to end up with his memory back, sure, but also a brand-new case of high blood pressure and a possible brain hemorrhage?!

A short fifteen minutes later.

Atticus, wearing the expression of a man who had lost the will to live, was carried back to the infirmary to rest by Zane and Chumley.

His five-round gauntlet of torment at the hands of Rowan's Underworld decks had finally come to an end.

Even Jaden, Chazz, and Bastion, who had only been watching, wore expressions too pained to look directly at the scene.

They were all about two seconds from developing full-blown PTSD from Underworld decks in general.

Rowan, meanwhile, smacked his lips, looking distinctly unsatisfied that it was already over.

Happy dueling time really did fly by too fast.

He'd only gotten through about half of the roughly ten decks he'd traded for the other day.

If only his future brother-in-law could have held out just a little longer, honestly.

Still, at least this five-round "rehabilitation" session had netted him nearly two thousand Emotion Points.

And more importantly, it had genuinely helped Alexis's brother recover most of his memories from the time he'd spent possessed by the darkness.

Catching sight of Rowan's obviously disappointed expression, Alexis didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

This man's sense of humor really was something else entirely.

Still, despite all the torment, at least her brother had gotten a real chunk of his memory back.

The only thing was, for some reason, none of his memories from before he'd been possessed by the darkness had come back at all.

"Rowan, do you think there's any chance my brother's memories from before... " Alexis had already started piecing together a theory of her own, and asked Rowan somewhat hesitantly.

She didn't even finish the sentence, but Rowan already understood exactly what she meant.

He nodded and gave her a definite answer. "If I had to guess, your brother's memories are most likely still sealed away somewhere inside that ritual space in the abandoned dorm, from back when the darkness was possessing him. It probably locked those memories away to make it easier to keep full control of his body."

"I knew it." Alexis clenched her fist, brow furrowing.

"So how do we go about getting that part of my brother's memory back, the part that's sealed away there?" Jasmine and Mindy, Alexis's two close friends who tended to follow her around, chimed in eagerly, helping ask Rowan the question.

Everyone else turned to look at Rowan with the same curiosity.

When it came to Shadow Duels and all the rumors surrounding them, Rowan seemed to be, by far, the one who knew the most.