Chapter 63

After agreeing on a time to meet Alexis and go over tactics, Rowan headed back to the Slifer Red dorm with Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley.

By then it was noon.

The Slifer Red cafeteria was a modest room with plain wooden tables.

Several meal trays were already laid out. The usual combination of pickled dried fish and curry mapo tofu, but today something else had joined them on the table.

"Rowan! Jaden! You're finally back!"

Professor Banner, who had been sitting in the cafeteria looking like a man who had been left home alone for too long, rose from his chair the moment they walked in. He had his fat brown cat, Pharaoh, tucked under one arm.

His narrow eyes went bright with relief, and he moved toward them with unmistakably emotional intent.

"!!!"

Rowan stepped back immediately and pulled Jaden in front of him.

"Professor Banner, what happened exactly?!"

Jaden, Chumley, and Syrus found themselves enveloped in a hug and stared out from within it with matching lines of confusion running down their faces.

Only Rowan, tipped off by the Kuriboh the moment the door opened, had seen the situation for what it was in time to execute a clean retreat.

They settled back into the cafeteria. Banner wiped his eyes, still holding Pharaoh, and explained.

"After the written exam this morning, a number of Slifer Red students got their scores back, decided they had no future as duelists, and voluntarily withdrew from the academy. They packed up and left while you were all in the principal's office."

"So there are hardly any of us left?" Rowan rubbed his chin.

That explained something he'd always vaguely wondered about.

The original version of events had Slifer Red perpetually thin on numbers, and now he was watching the reason happen in real time.

A mediocre written exam had apparently been the last straw for a significant portion of the dormitory.

Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley looked to Banner for the actual count.

"To be precise," Banner said, dabbing his eyes and nodding to confirm, "there are four of you."

Silence.

"...Four," Jaden repeated.

All three of them stared.

Even Rowan wasn't quite sure where to start with that.

The entire Slifer Red dormitory, reduced to four students. It had never been large to begin with, maybe a dozen or so, enough to fill the small cafeteria with some crowding.

Now it was just the four of them sitting around a table built for considerably more.

"So you absolutely have to win that tag duel!" Banner pressed his hands together and looked at them with the earnest desperation of a man watching his professional purpose circle the drain.

"I really don't want to manage an empty dorm..."

"Professor Banner," Rowan said, gesturing at the untouched food on the table, "if you keep stalling and don't let us eat, Slifer Red might be down to zero students fairly soon."

He'd spent a whole night inside a Shadow Game ritual space, had a token amount of breakfast, and it was now well past noon.

He was, in fact, hungry.

"Ah ha ha, of course, of course."

Banner laughed it off immediately, though he couldn't quite shake the feeling that this particular student had a tendency to notice things that weren't meant to be noticed.

Including, perhaps, certain details about last night. The abandoned dorm information that had found its way to Jaden and the others.

The preparation that implied.

Banner's most favored student, the one he'd been hoping to guide, was Jaden, who shared the same rare alchemical gift.

But Rowan was not simple by any measure. And there was something else, something Banner could feel without quite placing it, a strong protective force settled somewhere around him, hidden but substantial.

What he was sensing was the Red Dragon's protection, the power that came with the Mark of the Crimson Dragon's Dragon Head that Rowan had recently acquired from the system.

Rowan himself gave Banner's situation approximately no thought whatsoever. It had no practical impact on anything at the moment, and the food was getting cold.

Today was Slifer Red's monthly shrimp tempura day. One occurrence per month, notable enough that Rowan had no complaints about eating in the dorm rather than queuing at the academy shop.

The shop's premium lunch sets would be mostly gone by now anyway.

Beside him, Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley were eating with an intensity that suggested genuine emotional release.

Several consecutive days of pickled dried fish and curry mapo tofu had apparently taken a toll.

The monthly shrimp tempura was being treated less like a meal and more like a small salvation.

Rowan let the three of them carry on and finished his own lunch at a reasonable pace.

Then he patted his stomach, stood up, and headed out for a walk toward the grassy slope near the dorm where he'd arranged to meet Alexis.

She wasn't there yet.

He looked around at the small hill, the open lawn, the single tree providing decent shade, and decided this was a perfectly acceptable place to wait.

He lay back against the tree, tilted his face into the afternoon sun, and closed his eyes.

"Kuri kuri."

The Kuriboh materialized on his shoulder and settled in beside him, equally content to sunbathe.

While he waited, Rowan pulled up the system panel and took stock of the previous night's earnings.

Name: Rowan

Skills: Still Water Clarity, Spirit Vision, Mark of the Crimson Dragon — Dragon's Head (Red Dragon's Protection, immunity to Shadow Game damage)

Current Decks: One-Turn-Kill Dark Magician Deck, Lava Golem Deck, Stealth Bird Deck (Life Point Drain)

Emotion Points: 2000