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Chapter 98: The Millennium Items and the Blue-Eyes White Dragon
The heavy door of the Kaiba Corporation detention room ground open.
Kaiba Chiha had been in there for nearly a week.
The only person in the Kaiba Corporation with the authority to place their own second-in-command under house arrest was the corporation's president, Kaiba Chiaki.
"Big -- Big Sister!"
Chiha's expression, which had settled into something resembling genuine despair over the past seven days, transformed the instant the door opened and Chiaki walked in. Pure, immediate, radiant relief.
For the entire week, aside from one exceptional authorized appearance to shore up the corporation's public image in a joint duel, Chiha had not been permitted to leave the room once. Her Eva terminal's network access had been locked. The only thing available to her was her card case, which she had spent the week opening and closing and rearranging compulsively.
Kaiba Chiaki said nothing. She looked down at her younger sister with the particular expression reserved for problems that kept returning regardless of how many times they were addressed.
She had just returned from outside the Tower after an exhausting expedition. And the first thing waiting for her was the corporation's stock figures having fallen off a cliff, courtesy of her younger sister once again acting in her name.
The family business had spent a century accumulating the kind of stable footing it currently held inside Eden Tower. There were still any number of century-old family corporations circling, waiting for a visible gap to exploit. A stock collapse of this magnitude invited exactly the kind of opportunism they could least afford.
"Big Sister, I'm sorry, I really understand that I was wrong this time!"
Seeing that her sister had entered without a word and showed no sign of relenting, Chiha dropped to the floor, wrapped both arms around Chiaki's legs, and made her case through the straightforward medium of weeping.
"Chiha. Monday evening. Come with me to the South District family gathering."
"Yes! Of course!" A lifeline. Chiha seized it immediately, nodding hard enough to blur. "I'll behave perfectly, Big Sister, I promise!"
Under normal circumstances, Chiaki wouldn't attend something like this in person. Events of this type were for delegating, handled by senior executives serving as representatives. Showing up herself would be the exception.
But circumstances were not normal. With the Kaiba Corporation exposed and vulnerable and half a dozen family enterprises watching like birds of prey, only the current president appearing in person could hold the room in the way it needed to be held.
As for why Chiha was being brought along specifically.
"You have a good relationship with Karl Wein from the Wein family."
"Uh... yes." Normally, Chiha would not have wanted to admit that. Karl was exactly the kind of mutual-antagonism friendship she'd rather not have catalogued by her older sister. But the situation was what it was. Chiaki needed her for something, and right now saying yes was the only card Chiha had to play. "Yes, I do."
"Good. We'll use this family dinner to formalize a marriage arrangement between you and Karl Wein."
"Anything but that, Big Sister!"
The crying intensified dramatically.
Arranged or not, the idea of being formally linked to Karl was not survivable as a concept. Chiha would genuinely rather explore other options.
"You don't have to mean it. Just let the news circulate." Chiaki's voice carried the calm efficiency of someone who had already done the math. "A Kaiba-Wein engagement announcement is currently the most effective mechanism available for stabilizing the corporation's stock price. What happens after that is your own business."
"Big... Sister..."
Chiha looked up at her sister's face through tears. That face had always been, to Chiha's eyes, completely extraordinary. Strong, beautiful, controlled, precise, and capable of executing decisions with a ruthlessness that Chiha both admired and feared.
After removing their father from the presidency and consolidating her own authority, Chiaki had expanded the Kaiba Corporation's valuation several times over, and in the process invented an entirely new industry: Tower Exterior Exploration. At first, no one had taken the venture seriously. The Tower's exterior being permanently uninhabitable was a century-old consensus in Eden. But when Eva's mainframe system not only acknowledged the Exterior Exploration program but began actively purchasing the intelligence it returned at premium rates, every observer in Eden was forced to acknowledge that Kaiba Chiaki's instincts were extraordinary. The Kaiba Corporation was now the undisputed leading family enterprise in all of Eden Tower.
"...Alright. If you say so, Big Sister."
When Chiaki projected that particular degree of certainty, there was no room for a different answer.
Chiha looked at her sister with something that, beneath all the crying, was still unmistakably adoration. Whatever Chiaki asked of her, even the unbearable things, it was hard not to say yes to a person she respected this completely.
Which brought Chiaki, privately, to the other major problem she had returned from the Tower's exterior to find waiting for her.
The fourth Blue-Eyes White Dragon.
As a duelist in Eden, Kaiba Chiaki understood the absolute rule: soul-bound cards could not be removed from their holder by any means. Force, negotiation, purchase, it didn't matter. If a card was bound, it was bound.
She had watched the duel footage as well. Uploaded to a video platform by a user named Mizuki, already past thirty million views. The duel was real. The Blue-Eyes White Dragon that appeared on the field was genuine. A fourth card in the possession of a lower-district duelist named Amano Rei.
The question people usually asked about the fourth Blue-Eyes was whether Chiaki wanted it for the same reason the legendary duelist Kaiba Seto had in the old records: to destroy it, to ensure no one else ever held all four.
It wasn't that simple.
During exterior exploration, the Kaiba Corporation had recovered historical data. Among it, this fragment:
[The fourth Blue-Eyes White Dragon carries the power to break open the Millennium Seal.]
Chiaki did not know exactly which Blue-Eyes the three-thousand-year-old records called "the fourth." If the legendary Kaiba Seto's cards were taken as the first three, then her own should also fall within that original three.
The fourth card, the one tied to the Millennium item reference, had ended up outside the family's possession exactly as history apparently demanded.
There was nothing to be done about a soul-bound card by force. The only available approach was a different kind of negotiation.
The plan that made the most sense: invite Amano Rei into the Kaiba Corporation on a formal employment basis, salary set high enough to be unreasonable to refuse, and fold him into the exterior exploration program as a participant. Pursue the Millennium secret together from the inside.
The compensation Chiaki was prepared to offer would be difficult to say no to.
---
[SHOP CREDITS AVAILABLE: 250]
Broke.
Amano stared at the figure and felt the specific hollowness that follows a very large purchase.
He'd had over fifty thousand credits. Then the academy points shop had unlocked the Synchron monster series, and the temptation had been insurmountable. He'd spent everything. Every last point.
His deck finally had Effect Monsters in it. That was genuinely historic. A leap forward that no amount of credit expenditure could be called a bad trade for.
The buyer's remorse was still there, somehow.
When was the next opportunity to accumulate tens of thousands of credits going to appear?
He found himself idly wondering when the Puppeteer would make another move.
He killed that thought immediately. He was not going to start hoping for Dark Games as a revenue stream. That was a line that could not be crossed.
Speaking of the Puppeteer -- Finesse's investigation of the Ancient Gear Chaos Giant card had not produced any concrete leads. Whoever was behind it had made a deliberate effort to cover their tracks after the encounter. The only confirmed intelligence still on the board was that the Puppeteer was operating somewhere within Academy City.
Though Amano had thought of one more potential lead.
The Puppeteer, at the moment of being hit by Red Nova Dragon's flames during the Dark Game, had shielded their eyes with both hands. The reaction had been visceral and instinctive.
If the Puppeteer had taken burn damage near their eyes during that confrontation, there might be a duelist somewhere in Academy City currently walking around with visible burn marks near their face.
Finesse had found the idea promising. She'd already dispatched Wein family contacts to begin a systematic search across the student population.
Results from a sweep that thorough weren't going to come quickly. But it was something.
In the meantime: the weekend arrived, and with it, peace.
Synchro Academy ran a high-pressure academic schedule through the week and kept students in evening study sessions until nine-thirty, but the weekend was, against Amano's expectations, genuinely free. A full two days off, comparable to the high school schedule he'd known in his previous life.
Shio had apparently made friends in the middle school division. She was bringing them back to the dormitory on weekends with some regularity now.
"Look, this is my brother, isn't he super handsome?" Amano heard this sentence directed at different visitors no fewer than several times over the two-day stretch.
He had apparently become a required stop on whatever tour Shio gave to new acquaintances.
Shiyue appeared most frequently out of Shio's new friends, calling him "handsome big brother" every time with complete sincerity. Finesse had been right that this girl knew exactly how to make a person feel welcome.
Kikawayu, with no class to attend and nothing in particular to do, reverted entirely to their old lower-district weekend habits. Both of them horizontal on the dormitory sofa for half the afternoon without anyone expecting anything from either of them.
Rin Seiya, noticeably, had not called Amano in for any club activities this weekend. During the week she would drag him in for 5D's viewing sessions after evening study hours ended. This weekend: nothing. Someone had mentioned she'd gone home. Right, there were students in his previous life too who lived on campus Monday through Friday and went home on weekends.
"Finally, some peace."
Leaning against Kikawayu's shoulder, staring out the window at whatever blue sky was available from inside Eden Tower's carefully managed environmental systems, Amano let out a long breath.
Was it peace, though.
He knew the answer. He had known it all weekend and had been doing a thorough job of not thinking about it directly.
The weekend's calm was entirely provisional. The storm it was preceding had a name, and that name was Monday evening.
His greatest operational failure of the semester.
In pursuit of affection point gains, he had accepted an invitation from both Finesse and Nanki'in Sakuya to attend the same event. An event that turned out to be a gathering of every major family in Eden Tower, at which both women would be present and expecting him as their escort.
He had spent the entire weekend unable to produce a solution.
Even canceling on one side wouldn't fix it, because the dinner was the kind of event where being spotted by the person he'd cancelled on was a near certainty.
***
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