Atem's idyll is interrupted by a man with his rival's exact face: Priest Seto, three thousand years into a one-man administrative shift Atem walked out on. A calculator produces the number 0.5% — Atem's total lifetime labour set against the Priest's — and Atem, cornered, panic-confesses love for Kaiba as an escape route. Neither Seto is fooled for a second. What Atem gets instead is a job.
This is a translation of an originalArtificial Intelligence work.
Original Title: 04 五厘王
Original Author: Gemini with 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
This day was no exception.
Sitting on a bench in a Domino City square, gazing at the screen of his newly purchased smartphone, Atem was waiting for the time he had arranged to meet Yugi and the others. He straightened the collar of his leather jacket and enjoyed the mild breeze of the living world. And then—
Someone sat down smoothly in the space beside him.
At first Atem was about to return his eyes to his phone without thinking anything of it — but the extraordinary pressure radiating from the person forcibly dragged every cell in his body back into combat mode. It was different from Seto's. Older, stricter, a sacred aura heavy to the point of obsession.
"…I have been searching a long while for you, my King."
A low voice, cold and creeping along the ground, set Atem's eardrums shaking.
"…!"
When Atem turned, fearfully, to look beside him, there sat a man in blue and white priest's robes, dark-skinned, with a sharp light in his eyes. A priest of ancient Egypt, and the man who had inherited the throne after Atem's death: Seto. In a modern Domino City square, in a state of cosplay so out of place it was almost aggressive. Real, however.
Seto fixed Atem with a glare, veins standing out at his temple, and delivered his words in a low voice.
"On that day, when the door from the living world opened and word came that the King had at last returned to the Underworld, we of the priesthood were making preparations to welcome you. …And yet. A note left before the throne, reading Popping over to the modern age. Leaving the rest to you. What precisely did you intend by that. I have gone on acting in the King's stead — through the three thousand years you were sealed in the Puzzle, through the Egypt that followed your death, and through the administrative duties of the Underworld's new regime."
"S-Seto…! Why are you in the living world—?!"
"It is you who escaped by exploiting a hole in the Underworld's security! Now then. Three thousand years of accumulated administrative documents are waiting for you. You will come back quietly."
The anger of a former priest with three thousand years of overwork behind it was ferocious enough to surpass Zorc himself.
"Y-you must be joking! I am not working any more!!"
Atem sprang up from the bench, sent a King's pride cleanly to the Graveyard, and bolted like a hare.
"Do not imagine you can escape…!"
At that precise moment, Yugi, Joey, Téa and Tristan arrived from across the square — "Ah, Atem! Sorry we're late!" — and witnessed Atem sprinting towards them at full pelt with his colour gone, pursued by a man in extremely suspicious clothing.
"Eeeh?! What — what's happening?!"
"I don't know! But it's bad regardless! Run, Aibou!"
Running, Atem worked his phone and checked Seto's current position by GPS.
…Head office! I have no choice but to go to him!
In modern Domino City, there was no shield capable of stopping this ultimate pursuer from the Underworld other than that man's arrogant authority. Atem sprinted flat out into KaibaCorp headquarters, dragged Yugi and the others along behind him, and hurled himself into a lift.
"Oi, Atem! Who the hell is that cosplay guy?!"
"He is my cousin from my life before, my successor as King, and the living embodiment of the Underworld's brutal labour conditions!"
"That makes no sense at all!!"
The lift chimed at the top floor, and Atem burst through the heavy automatic door of the president's office, more or less literally.
"Kaibaaa! Help me! It's a trap! A pursuer has come from the Underworld!!"
"You're being loud, Atem. What blessed light has descended upon my office now… and Yugi as well. What is this."
The instant Seto looked up from the holograms at his desk with a dubious expression, Atem rounded the desk without hesitation and hid behind that broad back, shaking. He was being treated entirely as a shield. Yugi and the others tumbled into the office too, out of breath, and watched the door warily.
Several seconds passed.
And then came a knock — quiet, dignified, and thoroughly unsuited to the president's office.
"…Excuse me."
The door opened quietly, and Priest Seto walked calmly into the office.
A man who had breached the KC head office building, which boasted the finest security in Domino City, as though strolling through his own garden.
And the instant that Seto raised his face, the air in the president's office froze solid.
Standing before the desk, Seto in his long white coat.
Standing before the door, Priest Seto in his priest's robes.
Across three thousand years, two Setos with exactly the same face and exactly the same arrogant soul had, in a room built of the height of modern technology, finally met each other's eyes head-on.
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHH?!?!"
The screams of Yugi, Joey, Téa and Tristan harmonised beautifully across the office.
The four of them could not believe what was in front of them and looked back and forth, over and over, between Seto standing before the desk and Priest Seto standing before the door, in complete panic.
"Th-there are two Kaibas—?! No, one of them's wearing Egyptian clothes, but — the face, the face is exactly the same!"
"Oi oi oi! Twins?! No — Kaiba's secret kid?! He's not old enough for that, what is this, one of those doppelgänger things?!"
While Joey clutched his head and shouted, Seto himself did not move an eyebrow at the sight of a suspicious intruder with a face identical to his own. Only those blue eyes gave off a light of absolute cold.
"…Hmph. What do you want, ancient ghost. The rule in this building is that anyone entering my office without permission is thrown off it by our men in black."
Seto delivered the threat in a low voice, and Priest Seto produced a fearless smile at precisely the same angle. The arrogance of the attitude, down to the tone of the voice, was a mirror image.
"I am Seto, of the priesthood. …I have some slight business — no. Business of immeasurable depth — with the Predecessor hiding behind you."
At the word Predecessor, spoken with the full menace of a man in complete and unconcealed fury, Atem let out a small squeak from behind Seto's back and began to shake harder.
"Atem. Don't make such a pathetic noise."
Seto glanced back over his shoulder and prompted him.
"Who is that man. And why are you this frightened."
"Kaiba…! Hear me out."
Atem clutched at the hem of Seto's long white coat, eyes wet.
"That is Seto — my regent in life, the man who commands the officials of the Underworld. He has come to drag me back to that pit of Underworld desk work!"
Priest Seto took a step forward and fixed Atem with a glare.
"Naturally! This man abandoned his duties as King of the Underworld and absconded illegally to the living world — he is a criminal of the first order! I have come to collect him and return him to his desk!"
"Don't be absurd!"
Atem poked his head out from behind Seto's back and argued his case with an expression of pure catastrophe.
"I fought for three thousand years! And after I was revived in the modern age it was Shadow Games without end! Why must I go back to the Underworld and fight administrative documents and urban development plans as well?! This is overwork, plain and simple! A total collapse of labour standards!"
Atem pressed his argument, holding overwork up as a shield.
Priest Seto's eyes, however, were pure ice. He drew from inside his robes an ancient papyrus — no, for some reason a modern calculator, presumably acquired somewhere along the way — and began to state his case coldly, tapping out numbers as he went.
"…Overwork, is it. Hmph. Do not make me laugh. Very well, let us discuss it in concrete figures, Predecessor."
"Wh-what did you say?"
"The period during which you were sealed in the Millennium Puzzle, sleeping soundly and at your leisure — approximately three thousand years. During that time I governed Egypt in life, maintained the systems of the Underworld after death, and handled every piece of administration single-handed until your return. My total working hours: in excess of three thousand years."
Tap, tap. The cold sound of a calculator rang out in the president's office.
"Against which. One self-styled Atem Muto. Your effective working hours. Your reign in life: a scant few years. Even totalling in the entire period of your elite Pharaonic education as a child, your cumulative working hours come to — fifteen years at the outside."
"F-fif— fifteen…?!"
"Three thousand years without rest for me, against a mere fifteen for you. One two-hundredth. In what sense is that overwork? As far as I am concerned, your paid leave went into the negative long ago. Unless you return to the Underworld at once and clear paperwork like a carthorse for the remaining two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five years, the figures will not balance."
Presented with an argument this unanswerably correct, and a difference in working hours this overwhelming, Atem choked on his words. "Ngh… guh…!"
"Th-three thousand years, single-handed…"
Listening beside them, Joey found himself turning a look of genuine sympathy on Priest Seto.
"Oi, Atem… mate, that's worse than the boss of an exploitative company, seriously…"
"It isn't! I suffered mentally inside the Puzzle as well… probably."
A predecessor in modern-boy clothing, defending himself desperately.
Two men with identical faces, glaring at each other across the president's office over Atem's labour issue. The situation was developing into a grand debate on the ancient and modern lines of death from overwork — one more sordid than any Shadow Game the modern age had to offer.
"Ngh…!"
Three thousand years against fifteen. Faced with that overwhelming labour differential, the figure on Priest Seto's calculator — 0.5% — carried enough destructive force to shatter any trap card Atem could set in the way of an excuse.
At this rate, that comfortable Kaiba mansion bed, the daily delivery pizza, the streaming services on his phone: all of it would vanish like foam, and it was back to the desk-work hell of the Underworld.
(I… I still want to laze about in the living world!)
Cornered, Atem's brain cells went into full rotation in the face of unprecedented crisis, and in an extremely peculiar direction. In the next moment he sprang out from behind Seto's back, pressed both hands to his chest, and turned on Seto the gaze of a tragic heroine.
"…There is no help for it. I shall tell you the true reason, Seto. It was not only to escape from the paperwork that I wished to remain in the living world, even at the cost of abandoning the Underworld!"
"Oh? And what is that."
Priest Seto glared at him coldly.
Atem swallowed hard and delivered the lie of a lifetime. An extremely slapdash lie of a lifetime.
"I… returned to the living world and realised something. That my soul has come to love Seto Kaiba, who lives in this world…! It was with that single desire — to be at his side — that I crossed the wall between dimensions!"
"…Haaah?!"
A second enormous scream, of an entirely different kind, went up in the president's office.
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHH?!?!"
Yugi's eyes very nearly left his head; Téa covered her face with both hands and went scarlet; Joey's jaw came close to dislocating with the shock.
"A-Atem…?! You — Kaiba — you love— eeeeh?!"
"Are you serious, oi oi oi! A confession of love, from his own rival?!"
Atem's pure-hearted friends were taken in completely by the desperation on his face and fell into total panic.
However.
"…"
"…"
Seto, whom Atem had employed as a lifeline, and Priest Seto, his pursuer, were not moved by a millimetre. If anything, the two men with identical faces looked down at Atem with exactly the same freezing, coldly rational eyes.
To two men who shared a soul, the fact that this was a slapdash escape manoeuvre, fired off on the momentum of the moment purely to defend a NEET life in the living world, was entirely transparent.
"Hmph…"
Seto snorted in exasperation and folded his arms.
"Atem. The footage from this company's security cameras shows nothing whatsoever except you devouring crisps in sweats every day and shouting at a game screen. The only reason you have ever come to my rooms was a phone. …And this is love?"
"Guh…!"
Without a pause, Priest Seto struck his calculator with a snap and moved in to press Atem further with cold, correct logic.
"Precisely! Predecessor, do not imagine you can talk your way out of this with pleasant-sounding words like love! To begin with, if you loved this man, why is it that you sleep like the dead in his house until past noon while he is at his company working himself to the bone?!"
"Th-that is jet lag—"
"Furthermore, the sequence of your absconding and your alleged infatuation is contradictory, and I will add this: if you genuinely wished to be at the side of a man you loved, you would not, the instant he came home, be relaying to the staff a demand of the purest kept-man variety — Kaiba, have them make my hamburger steak a large portion tonight! What you love is not this man. It is the enormous assets and comfortable Wi-Fi environment that this man possesses!"
"Th-that deduction is too good…!"
Joey came within an inch of breaking into applause at Priest Seto's reasoning.
"Ugh… Seto, you — you utter—!"
His true nature exposed completely, Atem sweated profusely and began edging backwards behind Seto once again.
The King's do-or-die confession of love had been nullified in an instant by a flawless double logical harassment from the Setos of the modern age and the ancient world alike.
"Th-that's not it! It's true! I'm not lying — Kaiba, look me in the eye!"
With his line of retreat entirely severed, Atem was past choosing his methods. To defend the glorious slack life of the living world — games, pizza, and the right to a second sleep lasting until past noon — he flung himself at Seto's waist and seized the long white coat with all his strength.
"Get off me, Atem! What do you think you're doing!"
"I will not! You of all people must understand this burning pulse of my soul, Kaiba!"
Confronted with his rival at his most desperate, Seto wore the most thoroughly disgusted expression he had produced to date — and, under it, an exasperation past all bearing — and attempted to shove the spiked head away from him.
Watching this, Priest Seto's temple veins increased in number and he levelled his calculator at Atem.
"You are an embarrassment, Predecessor! Learn when you are beaten! Now come back to the Underworld quietly and work!"
"I refuse! If I go back that mountain of papyrus will be waiting for me! I am not going back, I am living here, permanently!"
"Come back! Have you no thought of showing some appreciation for three thousand years of my labour!"
"You are the regent! Do me the favour of holding out another three thousand years!"
Across Seto's back, the utterly fruitless rally of come back and work / I am not coming back was returned and returned again. Faced with a conversation between the top two authorities who had once governed Egypt that could not conceivably be taken for one, conducted in a register at once worldly and swamplike, Yugi and the others could only watch with their mouths hanging open.
"…Hmph. Be silent!"
Seto's single roar rang out through the president's office.
At that absolute force of will, both Atem and Priest Seto stopped dead.
Seto peeled Atem off him by force, straightened his disarranged clothing smartly, folded his arms and looked down at the pair of them.
"I will take charge of this matter for the time being. …Seto of the priesthood, was it. That you have spent three thousand years running an organisation single-handed in place of this spineless man is not something I, as the head of a corporation, am incapable of understanding."
"So you do understand, modern-day whelp."
Priest Seto's temple veins subsided somewhat.
"However." Seto pierced Atem with a merciless gaze. "Simply sending this man back to the Underworld would end with him absconding again within days and raiding my refrigerator. In which case, the concept of labour must be beaten into that pampered soul of his here and now."
"Wh-what did you say…?"
An ominous premonition ran through Atem.
"Atem. I am ordering you into employment at KaibaCorp."
"!!"
"Do not despair. In consideration of your processing capacity, your hours will be ultra-short — a core time arrangement in which you work a specific few hours each day. Test player for our newest Solid Vision, or an ornament seated at reception… whichever it is, I shall not treat you badly. …Well? Perform that, and I will continue to guarantee your top-grade NEET life at the Kaiba mansion and your monthly pizza. Refuse, and I hand you to this ancient ghost at once for forced repatriation."
The compromise Seto had presented was excessively realistic, and offered no way out.
"Ngh…!"
Atem produced an expression of the most abject despair available.
He had absconded wishing not to fight and not to work, he had made it to sanctuary in the Kaiba mansion — and in the end he was being folded into a shift again.
But if he refused here, what awaited him was two thousand nine hundred and eighty-five years of unbroken paperwork hell. Set against that, an environment in which a few hours of labour a day left every remaining hour free for games and videos could still be called heaven. To defend the slack life of the living world, needs must.
"…Very well. On those terms… I shall make a deal."
Atem's shoulders dropped, and he accepted with an air of profound tragedy.
"A wise decision, Predecessor."
Priest Seto returned the calculator to his robes with a satisfied hm, and bowed respectfully to Seto.
"Then, modern-day whelp, I leave the Predecessor's education in your hands for a time. I shall return to the Underworld for now and see that his desk is made ready, so that the King may return at any moment. …If you will excuse me."
His white robes sweeping around him, Seto left the president's office as composedly as he had entered it.
The office fell quiet.
And within it swirled the various thoughts of a considerable number of humans. And ghosts.
Was that… all right? I mean, at least Atem isn't going to end up on the street, and he won't be dragged back to the Underworld out of nowhere, so that's a relief, but… somehow the route where Kaiba keeps him has just been confirmed… — Yugi, watching his partner with a complicated expression.
Wow, though. Three thousand years of solo priesting, serious respect. Mind you, doesn't it look like Kaiba just wanted Atem where he could keep an eye on him? — Joey, half of him exasperated.
And Atem, hands in his pockets, let out a deep and heavy sigh.
Heh… so from tomorrow a new battle begins — a shift — as an employee of KaibaCorp. But all of it is to defend the supreme shut-in life of the living world… I will never be late!
At the back of the room, Seto took a sip of his coffee and wore a quiet smile filled to the brim with pleasure. He had placed his rival under his absolute management, and having started from a state of I don't want to work, had succeeded in imposing on him the obligation to work as well. There existed no more perfect game than this.
And so Atem's strange life in the living world — part-timer, part supremely comfortable freeloader — was at last, changed in form, beginning in earnest.
