Chapter 53

"So it was you. My brother, everyone who disappeared from this dorm. It was all you, wasn't it!"

The moment Alexis saw the item in Titan's hand, something clicked into place.

She fixed him with a hard, certain stare.

"Alexis." Rowan shook his head, cutting her off.

"Your brother's disappearance has nothing to do with Titan."

He turned his attention to the tall figure across the room and looked at the so-called Millennium Item dangling from his fist.

"Look, if you're going to impersonate a Shadow Game duelist, at least put some effort into the prop. You're walking around with a hollow shell with a lightbulb crammed inside."

He paused.

"And for the record, a real Millennium Puzzle has two curved markings underneath the eye. Like eyebrows. Yours doesn't."

Silence.

Titan stood very still.

...Eyebrows?

He had been pulling this act for years.

Collecting fees, running jobs, fooling everyone he came across. Not once, in all that time, had anyone sat him down and described what a real Millennium Item actually looked like.

Which meant this kid had seen one before.

Which meant...

He might actually know what a real Shadow Game is.

A thread of genuine unease worked its way through Titan's chest.

Alexis, Syrus, and Jaden were all staring at Rowan too, equally baffled. The Millennium Puzzle had lore like that?

And how did Rowan know any of it?

"If... if you won't even take this seriously," Titan said, steadying his voice with effort, "then there's no point continuing this."

He turned to leave through a side passage.

Thud.

The moment his foot came down on the floor, something triggered.

Along the rough stone walls surrounding them, faint lines of light began to glow, spaced at precise intervals, spreading steadily outward.

They converged on the ground between everyone's feet and formed a shape, large and unmistakable.

A golden eye.

And beneath it, two curved lines arching outward like brows.

"That's... that's the mark from the Millennium Puzzle..." Titan's voice cracked as he stared at the symbol nearest to him, blazing gold against the floor.

Alexis and the others turned to Rowan immediately, the same question on every face.

Wasn't that exactly what he'd just described?

"I don't think leaving is an option anymore," Rowan said, something shifting in his expression as he swept his gaze around the walls.

He'd spotted them earlier. Scratched into the stone, half-hidden and easy to miss.

Ancient markings, etched there long before tonight, by someone with entirely different intentions.

Part of the reason Alexis's brother, Atticus, had disappeared.

"While you were hiding in here setting up your little dry ice fog display, you must have been stepping on these one by one without realizing it. You activated the whole sequence."

Rowan looked at Titan the way someone looks at a man who has tripped face-first into his own grave.

So this was how it was going to go. The ritual was already running.

A duel had to happen here now, between two people, until one lost.

The loser would bear whatever consequence the darkness had waiting.

Rowan did have the Mark of the Crimson Dragon's protection from the system, which made him completely immune to Shadow Game penalties.

He could lose on purpose and walk away without a scratch.

But he had absolutely zero interest in letting a wave of those writhing dark blobs wash over him, even with protection.

And even less interest in deliberately throwing a duel to bail out the man who had just tried to use Alexis as bait.

Titan wasn't going to die. He'd just have a very bad time.

Rowan decided this counted as granting the man his wish. He'd wanted to run a Shadow Game.

Now he was going to get to experience one properly, from the inside.

"...What?"

Titan stared, the word barely making it out of him.

He'd accidentally triggered a real Shadow Game himself?

Which meant...

The walls erupted.

Dark orbs poured from the gaps between the stones, each one wearing something that suggested a face, suggestions of teeth and hollow eyes, and they surged toward Titan in a single wave.

"They're coming over here too!" Syrus's voice shot up an octave as he spun around.

Rowan looked.

Sure enough, another mass of the dark shapes was rolling toward their side of the room.

"What are these things?"

Alexis recoiled, then, with visible effort, kept herself from recoiling further. She moved closer to Rowan anyway.

Not that she'd admit that was what she was doing.

Jaden and Chumley were sweating and not particularly pretending not to be.

"Kuriboh."

Before anyone could decide what to do, a small brown ball of fluff launched itself from Rowan's deck at his waist, puffed up to its full unimpressive height, and let out a noise that was somehow simultaneously tiny and extremely threatening.

The dark orbs stopped.

Then reversed course entirely, flooding back across the room toward Titan, who was already nearly buried under his own share of them.

"Kuri kuri."

Across the room, Jaden's own Kuriboh, wings and all, took one look at the situation and followed suit, fluttering out to shoo the remaining stragglers away from their group.

Job done, it turned to leave, caught the look in Rowan's Kuriboh's eye, and immediately dove back into Jaden's deck at speed.

Gone.

Rowan's Kuriboh tilted its round little head, tiny arm scratching at it with evident confusion.

Rowan put a hand over his face.

Jaden's Kuriboh had developed what appeared to be a genuine complex.

"Oh, it's adorable." Alexis's expression had completely changed. She reached out and rested her hand gently on the Kuriboh's head, stroking it with a soft laugh.

She'd seen it summoned during her duel with Rowan, but she couldn't perceive Duel Monster spirits the way he could.

An actual physical Kuriboh, with expressions, with reactions, with something clearly going on behind those little eyes. That was new.