Chapter 54

"Physical form?!"

Alexis went still, something suddenly wrong with the picture.

She had touched it. An actual Duel Monster.

Syrus and Chumley had noticed the same thing. Not just the Kuriboh beside Rowan.

The winged one that had shot out of Jaden's deck was solid too.

They'd both watched the two creatures physically scatter the dark orbs.

"What exactly is happening right now?"

Jaden scratched his cheek, glanced at the winged Kuriboh tucked back inside his deck, then looked to Rowan.

"The Shadow Game ritual triggered some kind of temporary dueling space. It's probably letting certain Duel Monster spirits take physical form for the duration."

Rowan pried his Kuriboh, which was squirming with great indignation, free from Alexis's hands, and gave his rough assessment.

He set the little creature on his shoulder.

"So then..." Alexis started to ask something else.

"AAUGH!!"

A familiar kind of scream cut across the room.

On the far side, the dark orbs were swarming back toward Titan in force, including every one that had been driven away moments ago.

They poured into him through his open mouth, dense and relentless, like concrete being pumped into a mold, and kept going until the last of them had disappeared inside him.

For a moment he just stood there, glassy and absent.

Then the eyes behind his black bat mask went red.

Something radiated off him. A weight. A darkness that settled against the inside of the chest.

"Come and duel me, boy." Titan raised his right arm, the cylindrical dueling device gleaming at his wrist, and fixed his gaze on Rowan.

"As you said yourself, the ritual has begun. There must be a winner and a loser."

His voice had changed.

Deeper. More certain.

"The one who loses will be consumed. Completely. By the darkness you saw just now."

"Rowan!"

Alexis, Syrus, and Chumley all turned to him immediately, ready to argue.

"Let me take this one."

Jaden had already pulled a duel disk out of Chumley's bag and was stepping forward, putting himself between Rowan and Titan.

Rowan stopped all of them with a single calm motion.

"He named me specifically. In a ritual space like this, that means the duel is set. It's me and him. There's no substituting."

He paused, then smiled slightly.

"Besides, I've been looking for a decent test subject for my new deck."

New deck.

Test subject.

The words landed, and something shifted in the room.

Alexis, Syrus, Jaden, and Chumley all went quiet at the same time.

Their eyes drifted, almost involuntarily, to Titan standing there on the other side.

Something like pity crossed their faces.

A new deck. From Rowan.

Which almost certainly meant another soul-crushing, hope-dissolving, morale-obliterating collection of cards that would make the opponent question every decision that had led them to this moment.

And he was planning to use it in a Shadow Game.

Against a man who had just been possessed by ancient darkness.

The group's fear of the Shadow Game had, quietly and without announcement, dropped several notches.

"Duel!"

"Duel!"

Rowan stepped forward.

Both voices rang out at once. The duel disks snapped open. Five cards each, drawn in a single motion.

The life point counters appeared beside them.

4000 LP

"I'll go first."

Titan pulled his top card from the auto-feed mechanism of his cylindrical deck holder and added it to his hand.

Then he played.

"I summon, in attack position, the Infernalqueen Archfiend!"

A pulse of dark light, and something lurched into being on his field.

Broad-shouldered, draped in purple robes, bone wings jutting from its back. Ugly in a way that felt deliberate.

It let out a sound that sat somewhere between a howl and a groan.

It didn't look like a projection.

It didn't feel like one either. Rowan could sense the weight of the creature, the texture of its presence, the way sound shifted around it.

Infernalqueen Archfiend Level 4 / FIRE ATK 900 / DEF 1500

"He's running a dedicated Archfiend deck!"

Chumley said, recognizing it immediately. As someone who wanted to design Duel Monster cards for a living, he kept up with the theory.

"Archfiend monsters tend to be powerful, either in stats or effects," Alexis said, her tone measured.

"But the tradeoff is that you pay Life Points during each Standby Phase just to keep them on the field."

Rowan's expression became slightly complicated.

A Life Point-bleeding Archfiend deck.

Against a deck built from the ground up to drain the opponent's Life Points.

That was the dueling equivalent of a man already on fire running headfirst into a furnace.

"The Standby Phase cost, you say." Titan had apparently heard Alexis.

He pulled a card from his hand and fed it into the cylindrical disk.

"With this card on the field, that cost no longer applies."

"I activate the Field Spell, Pandemonium!"

BOOM.

The stone chamber shook. A deep, rolling rumble passed through the floor and walls like something enormous had been set in motion beneath them.

Then the room changed.

The rough stone was gone. In its place rose a vast hall in deep crimson and black, walls shaped like the ribcages and reaching claws of enormous demons, cathedral-scale and suffocating.

It wasn't a projection.

Rowan pressed the toe of his shoe against the floor and felt it. Solid. Real.

The ground beneath him had actually become the floor of Pandemonium.

He could feel the texture of demonbone under his feet.

He looked around slowly.

Something genuinely curious moved through his expression.

"So this is what a real Shadow Game feels like."