Atem has not been checking his post. Several dozen envelopes bearing the KC logo have been waiting for him. So has their sender.
This is a translation of an originalArtificial Intelligence work.
Original Title: 03 発覚王
Original Author: Gemini with 葉人(@Hathor_yuki)
Personal site: https://prideshipping.sakura.ne.jp
Thanks to Mokuba's stylish intervention, Atem's "new life" had undergone a dramatic improvement in conditions.
The only top-grade beverage he could produce unaided was still cold-brew barley tea, but the refrigerator now held good side dishes that Yugi had brought round.
Sleeping properly every day and wearing clean clothes — straight off the hanger, admittedly — the dead-fish eyes of the part-timer gradually recovered their original sharpness and shine. Even his bed-head seemed to be returning to a sharp angle suggestive of the old Pharaonic dignity.
"Heh. Rest is important after all…"
One afternoon, having regained a healthy, human sort of life, he was elegantly sipping barley tea.
A message from Mokuba arrived on Atem's budget smartphone (currently unthrottled).
"Atem, are you back on your feet? Sorry about this, but if you don't go and see Nii-sama soon it's going to get ugly."
Atem knitted his brows dubiously and tapped the screen.
"Mokuba, what do you mean? You said you would throw Kaiba off the scent. And I have had no direct contact from him."
A reply came back instantly, with a hint of panic in it.
"No, I tried my best to cover for you!? But the second Nii-sama saw your deck list he worked the whole thing out and hit the roof! What do you mean, no contact — he's summoned you loads of times!?"
"Summoned? I have no recollection of it."
"You're kidding!? There should be invitations — challenges, more like — posted to your building. Go and check!"
"Posted…?"
Still unfamiliar with the systems of a modern apartment building, Atem tilted his head and went down to the lobby.
Come to think of it, since moving in he had not once opened that small door set into the wall. The mailbox.
Atem turned the dial and pulled the door open.
"…Hm?"
Inside the space that popped open sat a mountain of white envelopes, packed in so literally tight that the word "crammed" was far too mild for it.
Atem pulled out a bundle. Every envelope had that familiar, arrogant logo — KC — stamped on the back.
There was no need to open them. They were unmistakably a bundle of summonses, brimming with Seto Kaiba's obsession. Several dozen of them. While Atem had been leisurely recovering from his fatigue, Seto had been sending ultra-precise challenges by express post to this tower, every single day without fail.
"So Kaiba noticed after all…"
Atem gave a wry smile.
But he did not go distant-eyed with "spare me" as he once would have. He had ample sleep behind him now, and the confidence of having broken through the systems of the living world once already.
Back in the room, looking at the summonses from Seto Kaiba heaped on the table, Atem smiled quietly to himself.
"To send this much paper at a man… You are as impatient as ever."
Of course, throwing himself in front of an extremely high-strung Kaiba at this very moment was still a slightly high bar. The truth was that he wanted to enjoy a little more human leisure in this deeply soft bed.
"But… yes. Once I have rested a little more, I shall go and see him sometime."
That small tournament had, frankly, offered nothing at all to push against. To slake the thirst he felt as a Pharaoh, and as one Duelist, that man's near-deranged fighting spirit was indispensable after all.
He pictured his rival, no doubt still waiting for him in the President's office at the KaibaCorp that had hosted the tournament.
In his hands was the deck he had rebuilt to fight his way through the rough waters of the living world, and grown fond of.
"Wait for me, Kaiba. Our next game is… close at hand."
In Atem's eyes, the fearless, overwhelmingly powerful light of the golden Pharaoh who had once saved the world had fully returned.
He had resolved to "go and see him sometime," but this was, after all, a Pharaoh who moved at his own pace.
"Heh. Kaiba. The road of battle is never to be hurried; it arrives at the best possible timing."
Muttering fine things of that sort, Atem lay back down on the deeply soft bed and, drinking ice-cold cold-brew barley tea, savoured the leisure of the living world at his ease. A week from now, or perhaps a month… he could make his way to that company whenever the mood took him. That was his thinking.
But the word "leisurely" did not exist in Seto Kaiba's dictionary.
One afternoon a few days later, the intercom rang through the room.
"Aibou, or Mokuba?" — Atem's bed-head swayed as he opened the door, and what appeared in front of him was a group of huge men in black sunglasses and jet-black suits. KaibaCorp's own men in black.
"Mr Aten, I take it. The President is waiting."
"What? No, I intended to rest a little longer before——"
Before he could finish, Atem was firmly secured on both sides. With no time to resist and no time to grasp the situation and respond, he was, with remarkable efficiency, "escorted" to a top-of-the-range limousine waiting in the building's basement.
By the time he registered it, Atem had been seated deep in a heavy leather sofa in a room of the resplendent Kaiba mansion——Seto's private quarters.
The silence in the room was heavier than the judgement of Maat.
Across a glass low table sat Seto Kaiba, just back from his overseas trip, chin propped on one hand above his crossed legs. That piercing gaze was like a bird of prey with its quarry locked on.
"…"
"…"
Atem picked pointlessly at the collar of his sagging T-shirt and let his eyes wander.
Even a Pharaoh felt a little awkward in this situation. After all, he had entirely ignored several dozen fervent summonses, left them sealed in the mailbox, and gone on sipping barley tea at his leisure with a "sometime, then."
"Ah… forgive me, Kaiba. That is, I was a little slow in checking the mailbox. I meant to enjoy a little more of the living world's rest before coming to you, without contacting you first… I was going to…"
Seto silenced Atem's drawn-out excuse with one cold glance.
For a while only the ticking of the clock sounded in the room. Then Seto spoke quietly.
"…We Duel."
A low voice, but as certain as a tremor in the ground.
"I have heard it all from Mokuba — that you crawled back out of the afterlife and were fighting spineless battles in some tournament for the rabble of the living world. Hmph. Hardship, was it? Ridiculous! The one you should be baring your fangs at is not the systems of modern society. It is me, Atem!"
Seto rose, swept the hem of his coat around and made to raise his Duel Disk. At this miraculous rematch with his rival, a tremendous force radiated from his whole body.
But Atem remained seated on the sofa, mouth open, looking blankly up at him.
"…Kaiba. This is extremely difficult to say, but I have brought neither Duel Disk nor deck. Nothing at all."
"What did you say…!?"
One of Seto's eyebrows jumped. His eyes said eloquently, "You dare mock me?"
"No — if you wish to blame someone, blame your own men in black."
Atem spread his hands helplessly.
"While I was still half awake I was bundled into a car with no argument permitted. I have some sense that one of them explained something on the way, but the ride was so comfortable that I did not take in a word of it."
In fact, in the car, the man in black had told Atem this.
"Today being the President's day off, a private Duel will be held at the Kaiba mansion. You have your deck with you, I trust."
The result of letting that go in one ear and out the other was this. An unarmed Pharaoh.
"Because it is your day off, I Duel you at the Kaiba mansion… I see. So that was the arrangement."
As Atem came to terms with it, Seto looked heavenward, a vein standing out at his temple.
He had cleared an entire day off for himself, expressly to meet his strongest rival in perfect form, and the man in question was sitting on the sofa with bed-head in his hair and not even a deck on him.
"Atem…! You have settled into the living world so thoroughly that your sense of danger has gone completely out of true!"
"Don't be angry, Kaiba. This was beyond my control. …Look, shall I go back to the tower and fetch it? The throttling on my budget SIM has been lifted, so I can navigate there on my phone."
"Be silent! As if I would let you leave!"
With the dream match of the century before them, the air between the two failed utterly to mesh. Atem, who had acquired the practical wisdom of the living world (and its slovenliness), and Seto, whose intensity was at maximum as ever, faced off in a thoroughly unglamorous, surreal confrontation in a luxurious room of the Kaiba mansion.
"Isono!"
Seto barked sharply towards the doorway, and instantly the door opened and Isono slid in without a sound.
"Sir! Master Seto, anything you require!"
"Go to this man's apartment at once and retrieve his deck! It is the unit Mokuba arranged. The lock… hmph, with your people's skills it should present no difficulty!"
"Understood, sir!"
"Wait, Kaiba! Do not force your way into a man's sacred territory (read: new home) without permission! And the lock on my unit is a card key——"
Atem shot up from the sofa in a panic, but there was no time to stop it. Isono paid the Pharaoh's protest less heed than an idle rumour, bowed with lightning speed and left the room like the wind. The decisiveness of KaibaCorp's men in black was more merciless than that of Egypt's priesthood.
"…Heh. You are as forceful as ever."
Atem gave up, sank deep into the sofa again and sighed in resignation. There was nothing for it now but to wait for the deck to arrive.
But the waiting did not end as merely tedious time.
The large monitor on Seto's desk gave a beep, and reports — from Mokuba, left minding the office, or from the men in black — appeared on the screen one after another.
While Isono and the others were searching for and retrieving the deck on site, the full picture of how the former Pharaoh had been living in the living world came into Seto's possession.
Raw data, item after item, displayed on the screen.
[Mr Aten: living-world lifestyle data]
Previous employment: night-shift part-time work at a convenience store under the name Aten (¥1,520 per hour; left on store closure)
Previous address: wood-frame, mortar-clad apartment (forcibly evicted for breach of the Building Standards Act)
Current communications: ¥980 per month budget SIM (history of throttling for exceeding data allowance until very recently)
Domestic capability: catastrophic. Sole record of home cooking: cold-brew barley tea.
Clothing management: prefers a cycle of wearing garments directly off the hanger after washing.
"…"
Seto stared at the monitor in silence.
Ordinarily he was a man who dismissed the private lives of the rabble of Wheelers as not worth a glance. But what was lined up on the screen was the reality of the nameless Pharaoh he had pursued across dimensions themselves — that noble, terrifying, supposedly divine man.
Atem, awkward at last, turned his face away and stared at the empty space above the low table.
"…The systems of the living world were more complex than I had supposed. Trap Cards by the name of residence tax and national health insurance ground my Life (read: balance) down without mercy. As for the hanger matter, that is optimisation of time. A cost cut, if you like."
Seto moved his eyes from the screen back to Atem.
There was not the least trace of the sneer Atem had slightly feared. He was not a man to roar with laughter and mock a former Pharaoh for having struggled as a part-timer.
But.
"…Atem."
Seto let out a deep, truly deep sigh and fixed Atem with the look of a man seeing something unbelievable. Plain exasperation seeped through his expression.
"A man of your calibre crawls back to the living world, and the first game he takes up is… chipping away at a wage of one thousand-odd yen an hour? And then you are thrown out of an illegal building and left wandering the streets. Don't make me laugh. A budget SIM? Keep any Duelist who shrinks himself over his remaining gigabytes out of Seto Kaiba's field of vision."
"There was nothing to be done. I had no identification and no assets in the living world. For what it is worth, I believed I was living desperately, and mindfully."
"Go and rewrite the definition of mindful! A man who has abandoned even the folding of his clothes, and he says it without a blush. Hmph. Had Mokuba not stuck his oar in, by now you would be sleeping in the street in Domino City with a Duel Disk for a pillow."
Seto's words were harsh, but at the bottom of them was an exasperated disappointment: "a man of your calibre, worn down by the petty hardships of modern society, putting off our reckoning?"
"No matter. The bill for that ghastly bed-head and that sagging T-shirt will be smashed along with your Life Points in the Duel that is about to begin!"
"Heh… Well said, Kaiba."
Exasperated at him though Kaiba was, being met soul-first and head-on like this brought something hot prickling up in Atem's chest.
Freed now from throttled data and from the binding of shifts, the only thing in front of him was a man who received him as an equal, as a nemesis.
The door opened and Isono returned, out of breath, bearing Atem's deck aloft with solemnity.
"The deck has been retrieved, sir!"
His own familiar deck, held out to him reverently.
Seto smiled fearlessly, the Duel Disk on his left arm already active. The sound of energy charging rang through the quiet room, announcing that the genius Duelist's fighting spirit had reached its peak.
"Now — it is time for battle, Atem!"
"Yes. Nothing would please me more, Kaiba…!"
Atem too had his old force back, and reached out strongly to take the deck——
It was at the very instant his fingertips touched the edge of the cards.
——…Wait a moment.
The cold words of reality Seto had thrown at him a moment ago replayed in Atem's mind.
"Had Mokuba not stuck his oar in, by now you would be in the street in Domino City…"
Atem's movement stopped dead.
It was true that he now had the three million yen in prize money Mokuba had secured for him. He had that top-grade sacred territory (read: apartment), rent-free for a year, as well. But that was strictly a matter of "one year only."
The high-spec calculating power inside his skull suddenly bared its fangs.
In a year, the merciless regular rent on that vast room would begin. And at present he was, thanks to the convenience store's closure, completely unemployed. From the day he left the Kame Game Shop until today, every interview had been followed by nothing but a rejection notice, and that dark hiring ice age came flooding back at him in a vivid flashback.
He was not working. He had no prospect of a next job. Set against the taxes and prices of the living world, three million was surely no more than starting Life that would melt away in an instant…?
"…Ah."
Atem had realised it.
The true terror of the Continuous Trap Card called hardship in the living world.
