Chapter 60

[Ding. +600 Emotion Points from Titan.]

Rowan blinked and looked across the field at the unconscious figure crumpled in the black trench coat.

Still generating Emotion Points while knocked out cold.

He nodded slowly, genuinely moved.

The warmth and joy he'd spread had truly reached deep into this man's heart.

The ritual space hadn't collapsed yet, so Rowan drew his card and activated the remaining Stealth Bird's Flip Summon effect as a precaution, trimming the last 600 Life Points from Titan's already unconscious total.

The bird swept one final gust of blade-cold wind across the field.

Then the world came apart.

The moment Titan's Life Points hit zero, the ritual space shuddered.

Pandemonium fractured and began to fall, the demonic cathedral collapsing in on itself piece by piece.

And from the cracks in the ruin, the dark orbs came flooding back, pouring toward Titan in a torrent and forcing themselves into him the same way they had before.

"Good lord..." Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley watched with expressions that had gone thoroughly pale.

So that was what losing a Shadow Game looked like.

Even setting aside whether it was life-threatening, the image of being swallowed by that many dark orbs was deeply unpleasant on its own terms.

Rowan's expression was one of mild distaste.

If it had been a swarm of Dark Magician Girls, he reasoned, he might have found something to appreciate about the situation.

This, unfortunately, was not that.

"There's no time to stand here staring. Rowan, this place is coming down."

Alexis's voice cut through, sharp and urgent. "We need to go. Now."

"Kuri kuri!"

The Kuriboh had already materialized on Rowan's shoulder, pointing.

Jaden, Chumley, and Syrus finally registered the state of their surroundings and started looking around in a mild panic.

"Stop looking. That crack with the light coming through it is the exit." Rowan was already moving, not particularly hurried.

He snapped his fingers.

The two Stealth Birds, still holding their physical form in the last moments of the ritual space, responded.

One swept down and lifted Rowan and Alexis. The other collected Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley, and both birds banked hard toward the glowing fissure in the collapsing wall.

"They still have physical form..." Alexis said quietly, sounding genuinely surprised as the bird carried her.

She studied the creature at arm's length. It was not, she concluded, a particularly attractive monster.

She had no impulse whatsoever to reach out and touch it the way she had with the little Kuriboh.

Even Rowan himself didn't seem to have any such impulse toward his own Stealth Birds.

"This is the first time I've actually touched a spirit!"

Jaden, predictably, was having a completely different experience on the other bird.

He was running his hand curiously through the blue feathers on its head, nearly getting his fingers sliced in the process.

"It's a bit small, isn't it?" Chumley said, with the strained voice of a man doing frantic mental arithmetic.

The three of them were stacked together on a monster that was visibly laboring under the weight, and the crack of light was still ahead of them.

"I really feel like we're going to fall off before we make it through..."

The Stealth Bird held together. Just barely.

Right up until the last possible moment.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

The instant they cleared the ritual space, both birds dissolved.

Jaden and Chumley came down in a heap, and Syrus, at the bottom of the pile, absorbed the full impact of both of them landing on him simultaneously.

His eyes went wide in a way that suggested something had nearly left his body.

A short distance away, Rowan had read the timing exactly.

He'd stepped off the bird a half-second early, dropped the modest distance to the floor with quiet ease, and caught Alexis around the waist as she came down without warning beside him.

"...!"

Alexis startled at the sudden weightlessness, then registered where she was and went red immediately.

She extracted herself, stood up straight, wrapped one hand around her own arm, and turned slightly to one side.

She didn't look at him.

Rowan cleared his throat and touched his nose.

Textbook, he thought.

An absolute masterclass in the particular brand of flustered dignity that a certain type of composed, too-proud young woman defaults to when caught off guard.

He had a word for it, a very specific word, and the only reason he didn't say it out loud was that he had a reasonable sense of self-preservation.

The air between them became slightly charged.

"Bro. Chumley. Get off me. I'm dying."

Syrus's faint, strangled voice drifted over from nearby.

It worked perfectly as a subject change.

Jaden and Chumley scrambled apart, looked down, and hauled Syrus upright before he fully expired.

"We should get out of the dorm and back to our rooms before anyone wakes up."

Alexis had already pivoted, practical and brisk, as though the previous thirty seconds had not occurred.

"It's nearly dawn. If anyone finds out we came here, it's going to cause problems."

"Hm."

Rowan glanced at the windows.

The sky outside had gone the particular blue-grey of early morning, right at the edge of light.

They hadn't felt like they'd been inside long at all. But the night was essentially gone.

Time moves differently in a ritual space, he thought, turning the idea over quietly.

It explained something he'd always wondered about. In the original story, Jaden seemed to regularly pull off all-night duels without it being treated as particularly unusual.

Now he had a reasonable theory for why.