AN: I have lost all sense of appropriate chapter length. So I thought I'd take a page from oriflamme's book and add some structure to this chapter, instead of my usual third-person omniscient willy-nilly perspective changes flying all over the damn place.

I'm playing a little fast and loose with exactly when most of this is meant to take place? Just lump it all in the category of "within an hour of where the last chapter left off", and don't worry too much about which scene is before or after another.

Warning: Some fairly graphic violence ahead.

Disclaimer: I'm flattered you think so, but no.

Chapter Ten: Millennium Sword

"There's a place so dark, you can't see the end.
Skies cock back and shock that which can't defend.
The rain then sends dripping, acidic questions
Forcefully—the power of suggestion.

"Then, with the eyes shut,
Looking through the rust and rot and dust,
A small spot of light floods the floor
And pours over the rusted world of pretend,
And the eyes ease open...
And it's dark again."

—Linkin Park, "Forgotten"

In an old Roman cathedral, a young woman prayed.

She was very tall and gangling, with wavy ash-blonde hair and thick black glasses offset by a ghostly white face, gone slack with terror. She silently begged God to let this be just another nightmare like the many she'd had before, but she knew in her heart that it wasn't so. In her dreams, most of the people in this church with her were faceless; only individuals she knew personally retained facial features. Now the entire town was here, perfectly real and very frightened, but gathered together to try and figure out what to do. True southern small town solidarity, she thought.

The pastor read from the Book of Revelations, painting the scenes with great detail—the rapture, the seven seals, the lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, Satan's revivification and the battle between heaven and hell. In her life, she had met many people who insisted that the end of the world was nigh, and not all of them were the mentally ill street people one might imagine. All too often they were normal suburban dads, PTA moms, teenagers with something to prove, or elders who wished damnation on whatever was young and new. Aside from it not really being any of her business, she was never sure how to react to that sort of thinking. It had always seemed... somehow wrong to her, to vote against peace treaties and environmental protections just because, on some level, you sincerely believed the Earth would be abandoned by humans within your lifetime. Even now, it felt wrong, but then so did everything.

No guardian angel is coming to save us, she thought, on the edge of despair. Not from this.

Her oldest childhood friend, a rather fat young woman just a year younger than her, with fine brown hair that fell past her waist, was sat in the pew in front of her, and looking around with a frown gathering between her brows. "This is..." She swallowed, hazel eyes wide. "This is your dream, isn't it?"

The blonde's face crumpled as she nodded, tears falling down her cheeks as a choked sob escaped her. "We're going to die..." she whispered.

"No, we're not," her friend said firmly, though her face betrayed fear.

"I've seen it every night for years, and then it stopped for a while and I thought... But this is it. All the faces are full. It's really happening, oh god..."

"So we'll just leave."

"But that's how it starts—"

With a crash the largest of the stained glass windows, just behind the altar, shattered into pieces as an enormous black wolf jumped gracefully through. A few people toward the front gasped, and the pastor backed away and off of the dais, eyeing the creature. It turned its strangely short nose up and sniffed the air. The young woman squeezed her eyes shut and felt her friend clasp her hand tightly.

The wolf suddenly stopped, dropped its jaw, and gave a long howl that echoed through the sanctum and sent waves of icy fear shivering down her spine. The young woman forced herself to open her eyes, and the sight of the monster filled her with half-remembered revulsion. Its fur was matted and coming away in wet clumps, showing dark translucent skin and ribs you could count even at a distance. It stood up clumsily on its hide legs, and its limbs almost comically long in proportion to its body, with lines of blood and shadow dripping from its sythelike claws like smoke.

As if that one howl was a signal, every other window in the cathedral simultaneously shattered as another grotesque wolf-thing bounded through each one. And then, just to prove their pastor right, all hell broke loose.

Each one of the disgusting beasts yowled and leapt forward, fangs eager to tear human flesh with an insatiable hunger needing to be satisfied.

Not everyone ran. Not everyone even screamed. Some were so frozen in terror that they couldn't move. Others paused only for an instant, unsure what to do, but that moment of indecisiveness cost them dearly. People nearest the windows were slaughtered, disemboweled, even eaten. The remainder tried to get out of the building by any means necessary, from climbing out the shattered windows to making a mad dash for the door, trampling anyone in their way. One of the wolves leapt toward a nearby boy, someone she knew from school, if only by face. He didn't even have time to scream, because in a single gruesome instant the wolf's fangs pierced his throat, literally tearing it out of his body and messily severing his head along with it. The young woman whimpered at the sounds of crunching bones and wet tearing filled her ears. She backed away, covering her mouth in horror and fighting her rising nausea.

Her best friend grabbed her wrist again, and she allowed herself to be pulled, blinded by tears. The screams continued, panicked bodies pressed in all around her, and before she knew it she was outside. Parishoners fled in every direction, most to the parking lot or the surrounding woods, but her friend lead her to the road where a silvery van was parked. A handful of others met them there, the young woman's sister among them, and she about collapsed with relief. White-faced and shaking, her sister fumbled with the keys until the sliding door opened, and everyone hurried in.

Her friend punched the gas, and she was slammed backward into her seat. Panic was setting in in earnest now, and the blonde started hyperventilating as the van's other passengers cried or hugged their loved ones.

One of them screamed, and she looked back to see another wolf-demon running behind their van, steadily shortening the distance between them. A flash of movement outside her window, and she looked to see another of the grotesque creatures running along just beside her. She shrank back from it, not out of revulsion this time, but because of the intelligent glint in its eye. It looked directly at her, meeting her eyes, meeting her soul, and what she met there was an unending abyss of silence and fury that swallowed all thought, all feeling, until only reflex remained. The mind there was not an individual but a swarm, one they could never hope to match.

She had seen what happened next in her dreams so many times that her vision seemed to double, the present overlapping with her memories. The wolf next to her slammed itself into the van hard enough to rock it sideways off its wheels, and the one behind them sprinted forward to pounce on it at its apex, knocking it the rest of the way over. She fell sideways as gravity abruptly shifted direction, slamming into the driver's seat without the seatbelt she hadn't had the presence of mind to buckle. Her friend groaned underneath her, but didn't otherwise react. She was unconscious from the crash.

The wolves continued to slam into the vehicle, leaving spidering cracks in the tempered glass and digging their claws into the asphalt and metal siding for purchase. Inside, the young woman could only lay there and sob. This was always how she would die; she had known it since she was a child. It was only a matter of moments before they broke through and laid into her, into all of them...

"Hey," cried her sister, shaking her shoulder frantically. "Hey wake up! Wake up, please!"

She gasped at the realization. Her sister had never been in the dream. She wasn't supposed to die, she couldn't die, not here! No!

Lights like yellow and white sunspots exploded into her vision. Something tall, glowing, and dressed in flowing white appeared outside the car and leveled its crescent-like scepter at her attackers.

Oh, she thought as the music of eternia filled her mind. Maybe I have a guardian angel after all...

-o-

He tumbled through the dark, falling forever, and it hardly mattered next to the burning agony suffusing his entire being. His mind convulsed under the strain, doubling down on its own actuality as the shrieking dark tried to dissociate his very component atoms. Whether he was screaming was likewise irrelevant, because absolutely nothing could be heard over the roar of an impossible wind. It wore away at him, inescapably loud, flaying his soul layer by layer until a powerful river of light at his core met this force and screeched like an exposed nerve, flaring outward—

A sound like a chime, a flash of golden light, and—

Silence.

The pain stopped, or perhaps it was merely tucked away, manageable enough to forget for the moment. A landscape spread itself out before him, outlined in gold and shaded in violets and reds, with millions of pinpricks like tiny brilliant suns scattered throughout, flowing and dancing around one another in a pattern too broad to comprehend.

Yugi's eyes slid slowly open, and the world was dark. He closed them again, trying to see the map behind his eyes, but it was already fading, a distant memory of something impossible, something inevitable, or maybe—

His hand twitched, and he became aware of the ground underneath him—he was lying facedown in the dirt. A groan escaped him as he struggled to rise, and he could hear it, though the sound was strangely muted and directionless. His body still ached as though it was recovering from a grand mal seizure, but that too was subsiding.

For a few moments, he just breathed.

Finally, with a grunt of effort, he pushed himself upright, and opened his eyes.

Slowly, his sight adjusted to the darkness, or maybe it was that his surroundings seemed to bear a faint glow, a barely visible teal that outlined the trees, stones, even individual blades of grass. He was in a forest of some kind, with gnarled and stunted pine trees bearing that same glow down to their needles. Twining between them and surrounding him as far as the eye could see was a deep purple mist so dark it was nearly black, impenetrably thick and swirling sluggishly on a nonexistent breeze.

Yugi swallowed. He knew the darkness of the Shadow Realm better than most.

He felt a brief moment's panic, but the pain he felt before did not return; it seemed that whatever weakness he still had to the darkness wasn't causing him harm at the moment. He couldn't begin to guess at the reason why, or how long such immunity would last, but was absurdly grateful for the reprieve.

What in the world just happened!? Yugi struggled to recall, but there was something else buried in the shadows' depths that dug at him, an undulating moan that rose and fell at irregular intervals like a crowd of voices all crying out in loneliness. He frowned, trying to hear more.

There came a low growl just behind him, and he whipped around, eyes wide.

Dark shapes stepped out from behind the trees, far too large to have hidden behind the thin trunks. They shambled on all fours, emaciated and gangling, baring entirely too many teeth and claws that ripped at the earth they walked on. Yugi took a step back, and then another, and felt his own fear intensify by orders of magnitude until he was nearly paralyzed. More and more wolves appeared out of the darkness, eyeing the one living soul among them with insatiable hunger. The one nearest rose up on its hind legs, impossibly tall, and Yugi couldn't move. It lunged—

—and was knocked back by a flare of white hot light.

Yugi shielded his eyes against the burn. When he looked again, there before him, hovering an inch or two off the ground, was a tall woman with pale hair, blood red robes, and a matching scepter.

Suddenly the pieces clicked into place. It's a shadow game! Of course! One hand slid automatically to his jacket pocket, where he kept his cards and a few other keepsakes. The Millennium Puzzle flashed, and he knew without looking that he had the correct card in his hand. The shadowy wolf in the lead had landed hard after the sorceress' first attack with a canine whimper of pain, but quickly stood again, snarling. Its companions behind it—dozens of them now—closed in.

"Silent Magician!" he called, and the sorceress turned slightly to smile at him as he brandished the card. He sized her up as she did so, and was fairly certain of her level. "Diffusion Wave-Motion! Silent Burning attack!"

She lifted her scepter high, and crescents of blinding white light flew from its tip in all directions, striking every shadow-wolf in the vicinity. When Yugi could see again, they were alone in the forest once more.

He staggered as the spell took its toll, translated in a shadow game as a direct knock to his ba. It wasn't painful, but a surge of weariness came over him and lasted several moments.

Silent Magician remained before him, awaiting a command.

"...Okay," he said to himself when the moment passed. "If this is a shadow game, then what are the rules?"

The question wasn't necessarily directed at her, but Silent Magician shook her head from side to side.

"Is that a 'no' as in 'there are no rules'? Or 'no' like 'that's the wrong question to ask'?"

She simply looked at him.

He sighed and bit his lip in thought as he looked around them at the misty dark. Experimentally he put a hand out and watched quizzically as diaphanous tendrils of shadow curled and played about his fingers. "Alright, here's another question then. Why am I okay? I'm..." He paused, then admitted quietly, "I'm too weak to survive the shadow realm. I always have been. What's different now?"

Silent Magician reached down and touched a slender index finger to Yugi's forehead. Memories flashed behind his eyes—that abrupt feeling of a shift in gears when he lifted the Millennium Puzzle from the Odion's briefcase, and the image of his soulroom door lost amid the many doors of the Puzzle's internal labyrinth. Only... not lost, hidden. Sheltered.

He looked down at the the inverted pyramid hung around his neck, breaking the image, then back up at his monster. "The Puzzle's protecting me?"

She nodded.

But something wasn't adding up, and he couldn't help the note of incredulity that crept into his voice. "But... why didn't it do that before?" he asked her.

Once again she touched his forehead to communicate, and Yugi was swept up in a powerfully familiar image—that of a fiercely protective presence standing before him, facing away from him, taking the brunt of whatever darkness came their way.

The Puzzle had protected him before. It had given him Atem.

"Oh," he whispered.

A scream ripped through the air, and they both whipped around at the sound. Yugi instinctively ran towards it, but only got a few steps before he realized that the direction of the sound have moved somehow—off to his left instead of directly in front. He frowned and headed in that direction, but then the sound was to the right again, and then behind him. Moreover, the scenery of the shadow realm seemed to change with every step he took. Though he couldn't see much through the darkness, it had seemed like the forest went on for miles in every direction. Yet as soon as he took a few steps he came across a dirt road. He ran down it, seeking whoever was in trouble, but didn't get far before both the road and the forest were gone, replaced with a flat grassy meadow.

He stopped running. Whoever it was was still screaming, but it was faint now. Whatever else was happening, he was getting further away.

Think about this, Yugi told himself sternly. It's just like navigating the Millennium Puzzle, isn't it? Direction and distance don't make sense, so you have to focus on what you do understand, and let it guide you.

Yugi closed his eyes and listened very hard to the sound of the scream until it filled his mind. Very slowly, making sure that each step landed on something solid before committing his weight, he walked forward... and abruptly the source of the scream was right next to him.

Yugi opened his eyes to see Jason Lugh writhing on the ground, shrieking in obvious pain.

He rushed to the man's side and attempted to still his contorting limbs before he hurt himself, but it was useless. Lugh probably had a good 80 pounds on him, and continued flailing and clawing at himself despite his best efforts.

Is he having a seizure? Yugi wondered in rising panic. Or is he reacting badly to the shadow realm?

Lugh screamed and screamed, and Yugi was pretty sure you couldn't do that while seizing. And then he couldn't help but wonder...

He had been distracted at the time, and hadn't given the Millennium Eye back to Odion back at the temple, only absently shoved it into his pocket as they were hurried along. And if Lugh was having a similar reaction to shadow magic that Yugi usually had, and ownership of a Millennium Item protected Yugi from that...

It was a risk, to be certain. He barely knew this man, and to entrust him with a power like the Millennium Eye might well be foolishness in the extreme. But there was no one and nothing else in sight, no help coming for them, no spell he knew that could protect from this kind of degradation. Lugh was going to die if Yugi didn't do something, and do it now.

He placed the Item in Lugh's hand and closed his fingers over it, praying that just holding the Eye would be enough.

-o-

Téa was running in circles, but didn't know how to stop. She wasn't afraid of the dark (though by rights she ought to have been by now), but the heaviness of the air like running through thick syrup induced a sense of claustrophobia that kept her wired at the least.

She knew something was following her. The shadows moved, twisting into half-imagined shapes in the corner of her eye, and every rustle or crack of a branch counted for so much in a place where sounds did not travel as they should. What did carry was a low, constant moan, somewhere between a growl and a sob, continuous and omni-directional. That sound swamped her, prickling the hairs at the back of her neck. Her eyes dilated in fear as she turned, and turned, feeling constantly like she was about to be grabbed from behind.

She tripped over a fallen branch that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago, caught herself, then bent over and hefted the thing in her hands. It was thick and unwieldy, but would hit hard, and she felt her breathing slow as she grasped it tightly.

Something else was breathing behind her, out of sync with her own.

Téa swung the improvised bat around, the weight of it almost throwing her off balance, and in the darkness something four-legged and sinewy leapt out of her way. It growled at her from the shadows, long and low, and she felt rather than saw it stalk closer. Then it lunged into the open, all long white teeth and dripping shadows like acid from its fur, and all she could think to do was shove her branch in the way of those teeth. Téa was slammed onto her back by the force of the impact with the wolf's jaw stretched wide around the branch as she held it away from her... and kept stretching, back and back into its skull, distending and expanding until it seemed like it should have bisected its own head but still it kept stretching. The creature's snapping, struggling maw crept closer to Téa's face, and down its throat she could see the abyss, echoing and infinite and screaming...

"Dark Burning!"

Black heatless fire engulfed the wolf, and it was gone. Above her was someone Téa knew very well—a blonde sorceress in blue and pink clothes, with a blue and gold wand and a red gem engraved with a pentacle over her heart. With a satisfied smile, Dark Magician Girl floated down and and extended a hand to help Téa up from the ground.

Téa stared at the place where the wolf had been with eyes the size of saucers, and realized she hadn't breathed in quite some time. She gasped a few breaths and tried to calm her shaking nerves, then looked at the Dark Magician Girl above her.

"I... You..." She swallowed, and tried again. "Your name was Mana, right? Thank you."

Dark Magician Girl tilted her head and frowned slightly for a moment, then said, "Oh! That's right, you were there with the king!" She floated down until she was eye level with Téa and smiled indulgently. "I suppose I understand the confusion. We look similar because the bond I had with Mana was very strong; I've never encountered another quite like her. But Mana never merged her soul with her guardian spirit the way her master did, so I am not she. I am simply the guardian of all fledgling female magicians."

Téa stood there and processed that for a minute, heart still racing from the earlier fight. Then the meaning of those words sunk in.

"Wait," she asked. "Female magicians?"

"Yes."

"And now you're—"

"I'm your guardian now, yes."

Téa reeled backward, astonished. "But... I'm not... I've never—!"

"Then what would you call this?" And she took Téa's right hand and gestured over it, making echoes of the lines she had drawn there so many years ago flash briefly gold.

-o-

Joey came awake all at once, jumping to his feet and scanning for attackers in all directions. But there were none, and after a moment his breathing slowed, if only slightly. His experiences in the shadow realm—what it did to him, what it did to Mai—weren't ones he'd soon forget.

The Door slammed open, blowing everyone backwards, and he instinctively stepped in front of Serenity to shield her from the blast. But something or someone—he thought Rebecca—crashed into him from behind, knocking Serenity out of his grip. He swung wildly, trying desperately to reach her, but he couldn't see anything, couldn't feel anything anymore except the sensation of falling and falling...

He tried to gather his bearings. He was at the bottom of some kind of mesa, the rock layered in what should have been shades of orange and gold if not for the total lack of light anywhere. There was a glow though, mostly around the twigs and scrub-brush, or a faint teal glitter in the cracks in the dirt. Not enough to see by, exactly, but enough to tell the general shape of the landscape around him for a few meters or so in every direction.

"SERENITY!" he shouted into the gloom. But the sound was muffled; it didn't even echo, as though the haze of darkness was a wall about to crash over him.

But then, for a flicker of a second, he did see her—a hazy-edged shape of a girl, looking frantically in all directions and shouting something he couldn't hear. Then the darkness closed in, and she was gone again.

With increasing alarm, Joey ran in that direction, calling out his sister's name. She had been right there, and yeah, they had been knocked apart, but she couldn't have been blown that much further than he was. She should hear him calling, she had to.

He reached the spot where he was sure she was, but there was still no sign, not even footprints in the dirt. Joey looked around and noticed he had found himself at the edge of a somewhat shallow cliff. Abruptly the image of his baby sister somehow falling over the edge and tumbling down the hill, lying injured or worse at the bottom, flashed unpleasantly through his mind. Heart racing, he looked over the edge.

There was a girl down there, but it wasn't Serenity.

There, in the valley just below him, was Rebecca, a duel disk on her arm, fighting off what looked to be some kind of demonic wolf pack. Just to her right, a Sapphire Dragon was pinned down by no less than five of the creatures, roaring in pain as they clawed and bit. A sixth wolf lunged at Rebecca directly, but she moved quickly, and a red and gold Millennium Shield appeared before her to deflect the blow. The wolf bounced off the powerful shield with a clang of claws against metal, but quickly righted itself and lunged again at a new angle, trying to slip past it.

The other five wolves continued their assault on the dragon while Rebecca was distracted. With a cry, Sapphire Dragon was defeated at last, and its image shattered into pixels as it died. The wolves, deprived of a meal, turned hungrily toward the human girl in their midst for recompense.

First one wolf lunged, and then another. Rebecca gestured, and the Millennium Shield moved where she pointed, quick enough to block both strikes. But each blow knocked her backwards a few steps, as though she were holding the Shield in place with physical strength alone. They kept attacking, and she kept blocking... but there were too many of them, and she was being backed into a corner...

Joey selected the card he wanted and stayed low. For maximum effect, this would require timing, and he was all about maximum effect.

The six wolves closed in on Rebecca, and she couldn't back up any further without climbing up the mesa. The biggest of the demons, just as lanky and starved-looking as the others but taller and more built in the shoulders, made a final charge at the Millennium Shield—

Joey stood up. "Shield and Sword!" he bellowed, brandishing the card at the battle below him.

Quick as lightning, the Millennium Shield transformed, mechanically collapsing and elongating into a blood-red sword with a glittering golden edge. The lead wolf, already mid-jump, impaled itself on the blade and crumbled into ash, leaving naught but a black stain.

The remaining wolves paused briefly in shock and looked around for the interloper, not realizing they had already lined themselves up in a neat little semicircle around the duelist.

Rebecca was as surprised as they were, but quicker on the uptake. She made a sweeping gesture with one arm, and the Millennium Sword cut through the rest of the surrounding wolves in a single clean arc.

Joey skidded down the hillside to meet his young friend. "Yo!" he called as he did. "You alright, Rebecca?"

Rebecca was hunched over, breathing hard, but looked none the worse for wear. "...Holy shit," she said finally.

"Dude, you're too young to be swearing."

"Joey, all adults swear and all kids swear. Just not in front of each other."

"Not in my experience, but point taken." Joey attempted a grin and offered the girl a fistbump, which she reciprocated. "You had some nice moves there, by the way. Sorry for horning in at the end there, but..."

"It's no problem," Rebecca replied, catching her breath. "I would have done the same. Besides, it's not as though those guys were exactly playing by the rules."

"Yeah, no joke. You don't really see that kind of five-on-one stuff outside of a shadow game." Or a gang war, he supposed.

They fell silent, processing.

"...Joey?" Rebecca began. "Have you seen my grandpa anywhere? We got separated in the blast, and I'm really worried..."

He ruefully shook his head. "You're the first person I've run into. I thought I saw Serenity earlier, right around where I found you. Did you see her?"

She grunted a negation and looked down, clearly anxious for her only family.

Joey frowned slightly. It was scary how easily he could forget that Rebecca was only twelve, given how competent she was, at least when she wasn't being purposefully annoying. He considered, the knelt down so he could be at eye level with her.

"Hey," he said with a gentleness usually reserved for Serenity (though he supposed the difference between them was similar enough). "Don't worry, kid, we'll find them, and everybody else too. I mean it was just some kind of wind, right? Magical wind, to take us all to the shadow realm or whatever, but still just wind. And I found you easily enough, so how far could the rest of them have gone?"

The girl grimaced. "I think pretty far, Joey. Look at this..." She bent over to pick up a good-sized rock and threw it off the ledge. Mid-flight it vanished into thin air, and they jumped as they heard a clatter behind them—the rock had landed a good thirty feet away in the opposite direction Rebecca had thrown it.

Joey blinked, then picked up another rock and imitated Rebecca's throw. This rock too vanished, but it didn't reappear anywhere they could see.

"I was trying to figure out whether direction or velocity affected the jumps when those things attacked," Rebecca explained, sounding grave, "but so far it looks like it's just... random."

He thought for a moment. "Well... we'll figure it out." He tried to smile reassuringly. "Remember, this is the shadow realm, and shadow games always have rules. But I'll need your help if we wanna figure them out so we can find everyone, because I think we both know who's got all the brains between the two of us..."

Rebecca bit her lip, then opened her mouth to speak—

"Me," Joey finished with a completely straight face.

She gaped at him for a moment, halfway to being offended, then laughed and punched him in the arm. "You jerk!" she snickered.

Joey's mouth quirked up in a half-smile, a genuine one this time. Rebecca wasn't who he was hoping to find, but he felt glad she was there with him all the same, because it was a hell of a lot better than going it alone.

-o-

Tristan found himself lying against the trunk of a broad tree, legs splayed in the unkempt grass.

This by itself was unusual, since he was a city boy through and through, and tended to only visit his brother-in-law's family in the countryside if he was dragged kicking and screaming.

'Cept I'm not at Hitomi's, I'm in Tikal, and something really horrible just happened.

Oh yeah.

He sat up.

It was night, or it seemed to be. Crickets chirped noisily, though the sound seemed curiously muffled past a certain point. Darkness hung heavy in the air, covering the clearing like a think blanket that blotted out the moon and stars. Grimacing, Tristan fished out his keys and clicked on the little LED flashlight attached to them.

About three feet in front of him was a wall of darkness.

With a yelp he would later deny, Tristan drew his legs back from the boundary and scrambled awkwardly away until his back hit the tree again.

He waited, but nothing seemed to happen. Slowly, he stood up. After another moment he swung his flashlight around to examine his surroundings. It looked to be a small clearing, though he couldn't see much past what little light his flashlight emitted. He looked back at the darkness, deep black and crackling with residual energy—an uncomfortably familiar sight.

"...I really don't know what I expected," Tristan muttered.

He looked side-to-side, trying to see how far the boundary extended, and realized with mild surprise that the curve of the dark wall was concave rather than convex. For the first time he thought to look up... and the darkness was above him too, like an inverted version of the domes of dark magic he'd seen Pegasus or Marik create around shadow duels. It wasn't that it was night, although it might have been regardless. It was that the shadow realm completely covered the sky.

Speechless, Tristan looked around again, almost as though hoping to find something that would prove him wrong. "H-Hey!" he shouted, his throat suddenly dry. "Is anybody out there?"

No one answered, though the crickets kept chirping, which was so laughably out of place in these circumstances that the sheer normalcy of it unnerved him.

Okay, think, he told himself. That has to be one hell of a shadow game to cover this huge of an area, and I'm betting at least some of my friends are inside it.

Which meant he had to get in there too, but the question was how. As far as he knew, shadow games, once begun, were impenetrable from the outside. But was this outside? Looking around again, the little glen he found himself in seemed more and more like like the inside of something, and whatever was past the dark wall was out.

Enough overthinking. Nothin' to it but to do it. Steeling himself, Tristan made a run at the barrier. With a yell, he passed right through it—

—into another field.

Duh, he told himself. You tried this at Duelist Kingdom, genius, and it didn't work then either.

All the same, this area had that same sense of false nighttime, of being weirdly isolated under a dome of darkness. Tristan frowned, and headed back the way he came—

Only he didn't return to the clearing. Instead he was abruptly freezing cold under a jacket far too light to insulate him from subzero temperatures. Snow crunched underfoot, and his flashlight revealed a steep incline—the slope of a mountain.

"What in the hell...?" He backed up again, and was back at the clearing where he first awoke, dramatically warmer and utterly bewildered.

Tristan tried to think back to other shadow games he'd witnessed. Their rules tended to vary, but this wall reminded him most of the bubble of darkness Pegasus had summoned back at Duelist Kingdom to isolate Yugi from the rest of the gang. They had tried a couple of times to penetrate the barrier, and failed... though failed in different ways, he realized. Téa had gotten turned around, rushing right out from the side she had entered from, but Tristan...

I just passed right through it, straight to the opposite end.

His eyes widened as he tried to calculate the distances involved, the amount of land it had to cover.

"Just how big is this thing?!" he couldn't help but exclaim.

...And how do I get inside?

-o-

Mokuba was sprawled out on a couch with a laptop, playing capsule monsters chess against the computer. They had actually written the algorithm for their computerized opponent, and it wasn't half bad in Kaiba's opinion. A little bulky in places, and of course entire swathes of code were copied directly from Kaibaland's duel monsters database, which Mokuba didn't bother to hide. But still, it wasn't a bad first attempt for someone who wasn't even all that interested in computers up until a few months ago.

By which I mean, up until they started chatting with the Hawkins girl, Kaiba thought with an internal eyeroll. Whatever. It's their business. Speaking of which...

"Mokuba," he said. "In all the excitement, I forgot to ask—what is it today?"

The pre-teen paused in their typing and considered. "I think back to 'he' for now," they—no, he—said.

Kaiba nodded and silently went back to his own work. Mokuba tended to flip between 'they' and 'he' in a fairly predictable pattern, but it still never hurt to ask.

His own work, as it happened, was the latest molecular analysis of the Millennium Rod. Ishizu had, of course, been right—whatever the material was, it didn't register as metallic for the simple reason that it had no magnetic field at all. In fact, there was a curious lack of all electromagnetic activity for about a 3-inch border around the Item, which shouldn't have been possible. Even more disturbing, the translated image on electromagnetic scanners looked exactly the same as the black anomaly from the night of the earthquake.

With a slight huff of frustration, Kaiba pulled up footage of the lab and zeroed in on the containment unit for the Millennium Rod. It was the absolute zero of electricity, of life, even, and it looked like a high-end costume prop. It hovered slightly in its gravitic field as sensors continued to measure the aura it put out, and Kaiba tapped his fingers restlessly as he thought. It was not unreasonable to assume that all Millennium Items were like this, but if that were the case, prolonged exposure should have done quite a number on their bearers' nervous systems. He could not help but wonder if intention had something to do with it, if controlled electrical manipulation of the brain was the source of the vivid hallucinations that fueled Penalty Games...

But he was not quite ready to go down that road.

At 11:08pm, Kaiba paused in his musings and looked up, not out his west-facing office window, but towards the opposite door, through the door, miles and miles past it—not noticing that Mokuba was doing the same. An automated message appeared on his screen, alerting him to the reappearance of the electromagnetic anomaly. The CEO started, then fired off message after message to relevant personnel, determined not to be caught unawares a second time.

At 11:09pm, a team of meteorologists were pouring over incoming data from satellite feeds, watching the darkness not travel in a broad line as it did before, but spread outward in all directions, until 11:11pm when those feeds abruptly ceased.

Three minutes was enough time to estimate the speed of the incursion, but no more, and certainly not enough to receive news of local effects. They could only guess based on the last time this occurred. So at 11:12pm all KaibaCorp employees were evacuated to nearby earthquake shelters. Kaiba was just about to follow suit, Mokuba hot on his heels.

What happened next was not an earthquake, but it shook the foundations of the world all the same.

The darkness came from the northeast and rolled over Domino City in a massive wave. There was no ear-piercing whine in the air, no dizziness or confusion, no sense of impact at all. One minute Kaiba was standing among a crowd of people, and the next minute—

Isolation.

Darkness—it was already dark of course, but a more profound darkness, an emptiness so complete that Kaiba wondered for a long moment if he'd gone abruptly blind. Then light returned, slowly and minimally, as pale glowing outlines of people and objects, rather like a through-the-walls targeting system in a video game. He could see almost nothing in his direct surroundings, but those outlines continued in his sight for what had to be miles, heedless of buildings and other such structures in the city. Elsewhere, living shadows twisted and pooled, lit and gone again by flashes of static. A persistent drone rose and fell, echoing in the dark.

"Whoa," came Mokuba's soft voice from beside him.

Kaiba wholeheartedly agreed. Someone was casting shadow games, big ones. And it looked like some of the effects, whatever they were, were already taking place. Even as they watched, the human-shaped outlines he saw began to blink out in odd, uncertain tremors... Some sort of quantum displacement? Other outlines stayed mostly in place though, the shapes of hedges or wooden furniture or a few curious blobs that mystified him until he realized they were the partially filled oil tanks inside vehicles.

Anything that was once organic, was the immediate connection he drew. Interesting.

"It looks like they disappear after they try to run somewhere," Mokuba mused.

"So don't run," Kaiba replied evenly.

"Sure, but what if they're running from something?"

Kaiba didn't have an answer. Not yet at least. On autopilot, he touched the button at his collar. "Roland, come in."

To his complete surprise, there was an answer.

"Sir, I'm still with the meteorology team," his assistant promptly, if nervously, replied. "What's going on out there?"

Rather than answer him, Kaiba changed his radio's frequency to a more general line and announced, "Primary staff and emergency coordinators, sound off with your locations."

One at a time, his highest-ranking employees reported in on their radios, describing to him their locations and immediate surroundings. He had people stationed all over the city, but each new telling was more of the same: dense black fog that reduced visibility to only a few meters, save for odd green glows of varying discernability in the distance. More than once their voices cut off mid-sentence. Some returned after a moment, others didn't. Those who did reported an abrupt change in surroundings when the moved—presumably out of the radio's range, Kaiba surmised.

"What do you need from me?" Mokuba asked him.

"Don't go anywhere until we figure out what's causing people to vanish, but get on the phone with our U.S. headquarters and find out what they can see of what's going on from there."

"On it," Mokuba replied, though Kaiba barely heard him. He was listening to an NPA contact report on police response to the incursion. Emergency calls were coming in both locally and nationally, but actually sending personnel to investigate was proving to be an issue as only a fraction of officers seemed to actually make it to where they were going. Even stranger, those who managed to travel anywhere measurable tended to report back with varying degrees of frantic screaming, babbling about demons and wild animals before their comms cut out.

It was Kaiba's natural response to dismiss that kind of lunacy as panic-induced ramblings, but he knew this particular contact to be reliably level-headed. She reported nothing that wasn't either proven fact or so widely-spread that it had to be taken into account regardless of its veracity. And whether or not what these officers were seeing were hallucinations, he knew better than to underestimate how deadly the mind games brought on by the shadow realm could be.

Meanwhile, Mokuba announced, "Phone satellites are down too, Seto. Anything that used them to bounce a signal isn't getting through."

"Did you—" Kaiba began.

"Reroute to cell towers? Yeah, but the signal's not strong enough to cross the ocean." He paused. "If you really wanted we could probably hijack old dial-up cables to send a message, but not from a cell phone."

Kaiba considered. "Roland," he said, "did you get all that?"

"Yes sir. I think I can work it out, but the system will need biometrics from you or Mokuba to allow access to the priority line. Are you able to meet us here?"

"That would be exceedingly pointless," Kaiba scathed, "as the meteorology lab uses state-of-the-art wireless equipment and is entirely dependent on satellites that don't work."

Roland, to his credit, did not waver. "Then where—"

"The noetics facility," Mokuba interrupted. "They keep everything wired there."

Kaiba glanced at his younger brother somewhat dubiously. The noetics lab was a relatively old allocation of research funding he'd never bothered to remove. He'd spent several months looking into that particular branch of pseudo-science shortly after meeting Yugi for the first time—back when magic and shadow games were something to analyze and put to his own purposes, and viewed with a great deal less suspicion and avoidance. Kaiba liked to think he had since learned better, but that assertion was up for debate as of late. The noetics lab was where he'd sent the Millennium Rod for study.

"I thought I told you to leave that place alone," he said coolly.

Mokuba shrugged, unfazed. "I wanted to see how it worked."

Whether 'it' referred to the lab in general or the Millennium Rod in specific wasn't a question Kaiba wanted an answer to. Instead, he looked around again, weighing his options. They had gone outside in anticipation of another earthquake. As that did not seem to be the case, it would probably be most advantageous to return to KaibaCorp headquarters. It had a feeling of retreat to it, which irked him, but...

"Let's go," he said finally.

"What about the disappearing thing?"

"Just stay close to me." Kaiba took an experimental step forward, using what little he could see of his surroundings and the outlines of trees and hedges he recognized as a roadmap. Mokuba, who was possibly the only person on the planet who could get away with it, grabbed a trailing edge of his brother's coat and followed closely behind.

Being cautious in the dark was agonizing; strange noises kept drifting past their ears like the buzz of a mosquito pitched way down, with the same resulting instinct to flinch or bat away something that wasn't there. Worse, half of what Kaiba could hear was familiar to him, a whispered audio-only replay of his first penalty game. For a nauseating few seconds the thought occurred to him that he had simply never left that game, that everything he'd accomplished since then was the illusion, but he shoved it roughly aside. Mokuba can see it too, Kaiba told himself firmly. This isn't just in my head.

He grit his teeth, ignored it, and walked on.

There were a few people milling around the base of the tower, either still in the process of exiting the building (though someone was going to be reprimanded for lazy emergency drills if it was taking this long just to evacuate) or lingering on the property once they were out. Many of their gazes followed the brothers as they strode into the high-ceilinged lobby. Given half a minute and they would probably start asking questions Kaiba didn't yet know the answers to. Hmph. Can't have that.

"I'm only gonna say this once," Kaiba announced. "This city is in a state of emergency. As far as we can tell, so is half the country. It is not an earthquake, it's not a broken reactor, it probably includes magic."

Mokuba clarified, "It seems to be safe to breathe outside, but there's a lot of weird stuff going on and we don't have all the details yet, so stay indoors unless you absolutely have to leave."

Kaiba nodded and looked around once again at the people beginning to gather around him. It was, oddly, somewhat easier to see indoors. He pointed at a small group of officers to his left and continued, "One of you get to security and initiate a partial lockdown. Leave the main door and all internal passages clear but seal off everything else. The rest of you go around the perimeter and escort anyone who needs shelter inside, but stay within sight of the building. You—" Kaiba motioned to someone else, a bilingual receptionist whose name escaped him. "—wrangle any civilians who come in, park them somewhere they won't be in the way. Put a team together to ready first aid supplies, water, whatever is needed. We can't count on emergency services so loot the storerooms if you need to. And please try not to let them panic like idiots." He turned as a number of employees rushed off in different directions and leveled a cold stare at those remaining. "As for the rest of you, if you can't think of something useful to do in a crisis, then either ask someone who is actually competent for orders or count yourselves among the civilians. Now—"

A broad crash was heard, then a scream and a gurgle as the person closest to the now-shattered window went down in a spray of blood. A dark, hulking shape stood over the body; others followed it inside, seeking the sounds of fear.

"What is that!" someone shrieked.

"I think it's what everyone was running from," Kaiba heard Mokuba say quietly, backing away.

Kaiba turned.

His first thought, stupidly, was, That's not a duel monster. His second thought was that his first thought was possibly a reasonable reaction to have, given the last several spates of bullshit he had endured.

His third thought as the huge lupine shape that was blacker than the surrounding darkness stalked towards the pair of them, eyes like the void, was, I have stood my ground against gods and kings and stepfathers, and you will not get past me.

"Seal it off!" Kaiba roared, and what security personnel remained sprang to obey. Metal shutters slammed down over the ground floor windows, preventing any more breakages and reducing the building's point of entry to a choke point. Officers unholstered their weapons and shot at some two dozen wolves, but the result was the same as shooting at smoke, and left only trails of dissipating shadow as the bullets passed right through. Several of the creatures pounced on nearby humans, claws out and teeth bright; some had the sense to run, others only screamed. And Kaiba—

—acted on reflex. His new upgraded duel disk prototype unfolded itself around his arm before he could think, and in an instant of practiced motion and instinctive trust, an enormous white shape all but filled the room, smashing out the glass and flattening most else in the ensuing wind of displaced air. Kaiba stood tall, and a being of light and power curved around him, wings flared, more magnificent than any hologram could produce and stronger than any game-maker could imagine.

The Blue Eyes White Dragon screeched her fury, and white lightning poured from her maw in a brilliant stream of destruction.

The nearest wolf imploded in an instant, and so did the one behind it. A third left the encounter grazed but limping, and let loose a piercing howl before it too disintegrated into ash in the next wave of attacks.

But there were more—clawing at the blockaded windows, pouring through the door, and for every demon the dragon mowed down two more seemed to spring up in its place. Further, despite the spaciousness of the tower's lobby, Blue Eyes struggled to maneuver indoors. Office workers skirted the outer edge as they tried to flee the scene, with security officers doing their best to clear a path for them. One such officer with, Kaiba noticed, a visibly damaged radio com—Did he get attacked somehow?—was trying to herd people towards the front door, possibly in an attempt to finish the cancelled evacuation. A commendably valiant effort, but ultimately counterproductive.

A playing card flung into the tender flesh between his knuckles caught his attention. "They're coming in from outside, you incompetent dolt!" Kaiba barked at him. "Escort everyone further inside the building!"

The guard nodded his understanding and immediately changed direction, ushering people toward the west staircase going up.

Blue Eyes burned a line of devastation into the tiled floor, and every wolf-demon in her path was simply gone. Others strafed and zigzagged toward the dragon's feet where she had less room to maneuver to claw and bite everywhere they could reach. They could only score shallow, bloodless lines into her thick, protective hide before she kicked them away and blasted them.

Yet another wolf broke from the fray and leapt toward the thin stream of people still making their way upstairs. "Block it!" Kaiba shouted, and the dragon's tail whipped around to slam the offending wolf to the side—

—only for it to clip sideways in the darkness mid-strike. It landed several feet off its original trajectory, undaunted, and sprinted for a teenage boy at the end of the line who could only have come in from the streets.

The guard tackled it from the side as the boy ran for the stairs, slamming the stairwell door shut behind him. They rolled once before the wolf shoved the man off and pounced again, joined by three or four of its bretherin in a jumble of matted, shadowy fur. A couple of gunshots went off from somewhere inside, then something crunched and went still.

The wolves parted and spread out again, flickering and indistinct at their edges, blending in with the darkness and moving through it, and they could not be reliably defended against in an environment like this.

"...Fuck this," Kaiba muttered, and turned on his heel to stride toward the elevator. Time to go all in.

Mokuba hurried along at his side. "What's the plan?"

"I'm leveling the playing field," he said as he punched the button to open the doors. Mokuba rushed inside; Kaiba followed and thumbed the button for one of the higher floors. As the doors slid shut, a stray wolf lunged for them through the closing gap. It disintegrated in a burst of white.

Mokuba leaned against the wall as they rose, breathing hard. "...Magic, huh?"

Kaiba remained silent.

"Fight fire with fire, I guess?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," Kaiba said.

"First time you had an actual magic artifact in your hands, though, and not, like. Tech stand-ins."

That was true enough. After his first penalty game, Kaiba had been fascinated to the point of obsession with the impact and versatility of the power he'd been shown, and sought to recreate it using his own holographic technology, which was still in development at the time. It wasn't a perfect reproduction of course. He'd had to replace the psychological triggers that locked the simulation in place with, y'know, actually locking someone in a small, tempered glass room. Oh, the things his fifteen-year-old self got away with.

Oh, the things someone like him could be tempted to do, when given the power to control others literally to their deaths.

Control came so naturally to him because it was necessary to ensure his independence, and so he used every tool at his disposal to attain it. There was a line, of course. There had to be. But, like many people, he didn't know where that line was until he'd already crossed it. And as a result he would spend the rest of his life with a blank, empty spot in his heart that still burned around the edges, even years later, like a warning.

After a long silence, Mokuba folded his arms around himself and looked away. "Just don't do anything dumb," he murmured.

Kaiba spared his brother a sardonic glance. "Who, me?" And Mokuba cracked a smile.

The elevator doors slid open, and the Kaiba brothers stepped into the long, dimly lit hallway that led to the noetics lab. Gunshots could still be heard from downstairs, so he wasted no time in keying in the code that allowed him entry.

The lab itself wasn't a large one by KaibaCorp standards, and it gave the appearance of being somewhat underfunded by design. However, past a series of cluttered desks and stacks of hard-copy files, a sizable chunk of the room had been recently sectioned off as evidenced by the fresh, unpainted drywall. Kaiba opened an equally new door marked only with "S-level access only" in demure letters with his keycard, and stepped into the tenebrous room beyond.

In the center of a hastily thrown-together circle of sensors and bulky equipment, hovering slightly in an airless plexiglas chamber, was the Millennium Rod. Without a word, Kaiba disabled the gravitic field, depressurized the unit, and lifted the casing off manually. And there he stopped, suddenly unsure. He snuck a glance at Mokuba, who was glancing through some of the readouts up until the cutoff point. His brother looked—resolute, perhaps. Earnest, always. But not nervous. None of the meek anxiety he always displayed when Kaiba was about to attempt something dangerous. It was both odd and reassuring.

The Millennium Rod is a tool, Kaiba.

Kaiba suppressed a groan and spent an indulgent moment just hating Ishizu—hating how well she knew him, the information imbalance between them, hating that that imbalance was largely his own damn fault. He could only assume that Ishizu gave him this power because a) she knew this was coming, and b) she placed an unreasonable amount of importance on literal ancient history, and he hated that too. But most of all he hated that, regardless of her reasons, she was ultimately right, and now he was indebted to her. A-fucking-gain.

Without preamble, he picked it up.

It hummed in his hand with what he could only describe as satisfaction, which put him off immediately.

All around them, the shadows stilled.

"...Get started in finding a way to contact the San Fransisco headquarters," he said softly.

Mokuba nodded, because of course he was already doing just that, and Kaiba swept out of the room.

The difference, at least, was immediately palpable, which reassured the CEO that he was not wasting his time here. The whispers were gone. His vision seemed clearer as the dark fog appeared to part around him like the Red Sea where he passed. Those teal outlines seemed dimmer than before... but no, they brightened up again as the elevator descended. Moreover, when he looked at them just so, there was some sort of mental readout about... something, and he put that observation in the back of his head for later too. There were no gunshots coming from the lobby, not anymore, but the building still shook with the vibrations of draconic roars and the movements of something powerful.

He stepped out of the elevator, and the motion of the omnipresent dark fog getting out of his way created the illusion of a dramatic wind as he passed, which Kaiba rather enjoyed.

Only a handful of wolves remained. Blue Eyes had stationed herself at the stairwell door to guard everyone's retreat, wings hunched up in what Kaiba recognized as defense mode. But she straightened and snapped her wings outward as soon as she saw him—and the wolves turned to face him as well. Blue Eyes immediately blasted the leftmost wolf into oblivion, and the other three scattered to avoid her, dissolving through the dark and reappearing without pattern.

Kaiba disallowed it. The hulking, insubstantial shapes snapped backward mid-stride as reality reasserted itself, and Blue Eyes obliterated another one.

Two remained, and they simply charged the human, snarling and rabid, and keeping them back was harder. A vaguely spherical shape in Kaiba's chest convulsed with the effort it took, and he was rocked back on his heels. A scaley white tail lashed out at one of them; it couldn't clip out of the way this time, and was instead launched through the air until it hit a wall, cracked open somehow, and was gone.

The last one glanced between the man and the dragon almost nervously. It took a hesitant step back—

—and ran.

Kaiba straightened with a snort of derision, then braced himself against a wall as he swayed unexpectedly. He put a hand to his radio to alert security staff that the ground floor was clear, turning to the guarded stairwell as he did so...

And suddenly any train of thought he might have had came to a screaming halt.

Slumped against the stairwell door, struggling to rise up, was a pale young woman in a baggy, rough-spun gown with long, straggly white hair falling messily across her face, and she was currently looking at him with perfect recognition in her unmistakable blue eyes.

AN: This chapter makes me think of the dub YGO intro, the part of it towards the end where they show all the main characters. I always thought it was funny that it seemed to say, "the show's about these four best friends, and also this asshole." On a related note, it takes me a truly absurd amount of brainspace preparation to be able to write from Kaiba's perspective. o_O

I am not 100% pleased with this chapter. I like parts of it, but other parts seem repetitive as I try to establish how this world works from like a zillion different perspectives. If you've got ways for me to improve this sort of thing, by all means shoot me a line, cuz we're not done with this chaos by a long shot.

-o-o-o-

In an old Roman cathedral, a young woman prayed.

—That entire first segment is based on a real recurring dream a friend of mine used to have. In many ways it was the launching point for this entire story.

He staggered as the spell took its toll, translated in a shadow game as a direct knock to his ba.

—This is a bit of the worldbuilding from the ancient Egypt arc that was more developed in the sub and manga. Essentially, the Egyptians believed that a soul had seven parts, but of note in the universe of Yu-Gi-Oh! are the ka, or one's spirit monster/soul card, and the ba, which more or less refers to your energy level/life points.

Just to her right, a Sapphire Dragon was pinned down by no less than five of the creatures...

—Sapphire Dragon and Emerald Dragon were renamed as Luster Dragon #2 and Luster Dragon, respectively, in the dub. It is popularly believed, though not confirmed, that the reason behind this switch was to avoid confusion with the Pokémon franchise, which had released the Ruby and Sapphire games during this time. I prefer the original names because they fit better thematically with Ruby Dragon (a recolor of Sapphire Dragon, appropriately) and, of course, Diamondhead Dragon.

Mokuba tended to flip between 'they' and 'he' in a fairly regular pattern, but it still never hurt to ask.

—Mokuba was so delightfully androgynous in Dark Side of Dimensions that I decided to make it a headcanon that he's genderfluid!

-o-o-o-

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
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New reviews just make my day
And keep anxiety at bay.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Your love makes writing not so hard :)