Chapter 86: Judai Yuki Goes to Jail

"No way!"

The same realization hit Jaden like a wall. His face crumpled. He grabbed his own head with both hands and nearly folded in half.

If his deck had cards that activated after being banished, he could at least work with it. There were ways to turn banishment into a resource. But his HERO deck had nothing like that. Not a single card.

Rowan had sealed away even the simple pleasure of drawing.

Jaden stood there, completely and utterly done.

He genuinely wanted to ask Rowan whether a human being with a functioning conscience could actually put something like this together.

[Ding. Jaden Yuki Emotion Points +1000.]

"My turn ends."

Rowan listened to that wonderfully pleasant chime and ended his turn with a thoroughly satisfied expression.

Bladedge was still on Jaden's field at 2600 attack points, and with two Dark Laws at 2400 and a Defender sitting in defense, Rowan had no clean way to run over it this turn and clear out Jaden's remaining 400 LP. Not yet.

But he wasn't worried in the slightest about a comeback.

...

As Rowan passed the turn, Alexis, Bastion, Professor Crowler, and most of the surrounding student body all slowly, wordlessly turned to look at Jaden's side of the field.

Zero cards in hand. One face-down that was almost certainly useless at this point. One Bladedge that couldn't attack without walking into the trap still sitting on Rowan's field. And two draws coming that were going straight into the void the moment he pulled them.

It was waiting to lose. Nothing more.

"My turn. Draw..."

Jaden said it like a man walking to his own execution. His hand trembled just slightly as he reached for the deck.

The pure, uncomplicated joy he used to feel pulling a card off the top of his deck was gone. Completely gone.

He drew two cards.

Dark energy immediately bloomed across both of them, radiating from the two black-armored figures standing across the field.

"Activating M-HERO Dark Law's special effect," Rowan said brightly, snapping his fingers. "When the opponent adds cards from their deck to their hand outside the normal Draw Phase, I randomly banish one card from their hand. I have two Dark Laws on the field, so the total number of cards banished is two."

The snap echoed across the field.

Both cards disappeared from Jaden's hand in a wash of dark light before he'd had a chance to read them.

Jaden went completely still.

He finally understood, in a way he hadn't before, why every person who had ever dueled Rowan ended up with their blood pressure through the roof.

Even the students watching from the stands felt it. A collective full-body shudder moved through the audience. Brains quietly vibrating with secondhand suffering.

"If there's no way to break out of this, then I'm putting everything on this one attack."

Jaden thought it over, bit down, and made his decision. His fist closed tight.

"Here I come, Rowan! Bladedge, attack the first M-HERO Dark Law! Bladedge Impact!"

Bladedge launched from the field in a burst of jet propulsion, golden wrist blades raised, hurtling straight toward one of the black-armored figures across the field.

Everything Jaden had left, every last shred of hope and accumulated frustration, was riding on this one charge.

From the stands, Alexis shook her head quietly. Bastion and Professor Banner did the same.

None of them thought it was going to work.

There was something almost theatrical about the whole picture, some quality of it that felt faintly scripted. But that face-down card on Rowan's field had never been a bluff, and everyone watching knew it.

"Opening face-down. Trap card, Widespread Ruin."

Rowan raised his hand with complete calm and gestured toward his last remaining face-down as it flipped up, revealing the image of black demonic figures bearing down on crumbling armor.

"Activated when an opponent's monster declares an attack. That attacking monster is destroyed."

A black beam shot from the trap and caught Bladedge mid-charge.

The golden metal figure detonated with a single sharp crack and dissolved into scattered particles.

Gone.

[Ding. Jaden Yuki Emotion Points +800.]

...

Zero cards in hand. Zero monsters on the field. A Graveyard with nothing in it that could activate. And 400 LP left.

The outcome needed no further commentary.

On Rowan's next turn he drew, sent both Dark Laws straight at Jaden, and ended it cleanly.

"That was a good duel."

Rowan said it to Jaden, who had gone down on one knee from the residual shockwave of Dark Law's final strike, wincing through the light sting of it.

Then, while Jaden was still kneeling there, Rowan walked over and hit him with the exact same pose Jaden had struck over him after their very first duel. Right back at him, delivered with a perfectly straight face.

"..."

A long black vein throbbed across Jaden's forehead. A drop of cold sweat ran down his cheek.

He suddenly felt, with great clarity, that befriending this particular person had been the single largest mistake of his entire life.

Although, at this point, the friendship was already a done deal. There didn't seem to be much he could do about it.

...

Kaiser Zane watched the final moments of the duel from across the venue, his eyes settling on Rowan's distant figure. After a long pause, he spoke quietly.

"Rowan is... a genuinely formidable opponent. Though I'm starting to think I may need to reconsider whether challenging him someday is actually a good idea."

He had noticed something during this duel. That impulse he'd felt before, the one that had reignited his competitive drive when he'd first watched Rowan duel, the urge to face him across a field himself.

It was looking considerably less appealing now.