The next day, Amano was in the middle of coasting through class when the system notification appeared in front of him. He spent three full minutes not recovering from it.
[Kaiba Chiha] [Affection 30]
What had gotten into the little gremlin?
Had the Puppeteer scrambled her brain so badly it reversed her personality entirely? She was gaining affection points for him now. Thirty of them at once.
[Kaiba Chiha] [Affection: 40]
Still below average. But jumping from 10 to 40 in one go was technically a positive developnt, probably.
Was it actually a positive developnt?
He could not think of a single reason Chiha would spontaneously develop thirty points of goodwill toward him. The old saying covered situations exactly like this one. When soone offers unexpected kindness for no visible reason, they are either plotting sothing or stealing sothing.
He decided not to spend further ntal energy on it. Class was more important. Or at least, class was sothing that was currently happening.
Synchro Academy's dueling curriculum was content Amano could process without attending to it. That freed up significant ntal bandwidth for other activities. As the class's designated Duel Representative, he had a reasonably good view of how everyone else in Class 1-E filled the ti.
Sakuya, deep in a shounen manga.
Kozuka Yoka, filling pages of what appeared to be a mysterious observation journal.
Soone in the back row eating their lunch early.
Soone in the middle of the room sleeping in the dead zone where teacher sightlines didn't reach.
A cluster near the wall having a conversation at a volu they believed was quiet.
There were reasons this group had been sorted into Class 1-E, and the reasons were on full display.
Compared to the rest of them, Amano felt his own thod of passing ti was considerably more defensible. It was at least tangentially related to dueling.
He opened the Academy City card shop interface and browsed the available cards. Part window-shopping, part actual budget planning for which card to redeem next.
Today, for the first ti in recent mory, the browsing was not purely aspirational.
The scholarship had arrived.
[Available Points: 132,000]
One hundred and thirty-two thousand points. One hundred thousand of that was the scholarship fund Kondo had promised, the portion Synchro Academy was granting him as discretionary purchase credit. Kondo had guaranteed it would clear the sa evening he ntioned it.
It had taken three days.
Even Kondo, the dean of students himself, had apparently underestimated whoever was responsible for processing these approvals at the administrative level.
The remaining thirty thousand ca from the Duel Chronicle run. Kondo had been correct that the Chronicle system rewarded academy ranking points in addition to cards. Amano had not expected a single Chronicle clear to generate thirty thousand points of it. He was not sure whether that was a normal yield or sothing unusual about his specific run, and he was not going to ask Chiaki for a comparison. Her Chronicle situation was not a topic he wanted to prod.
The thirty thousand had pushed his total accumulated ranking to one hundred and seventy thousand, lifting his placent in the academy rankings to five hundred and twentieth.
Higher rankings unlocked more card options in the exchange shop. The HERO section in particular had expanded significantly since the Chronicle run, as if the system had noticed what he had been doing and updated the available inventory accordingly.
The first card that stopped him cold was listed at twenty thousand points.
Elental HERO Bubbleman.
The GX-era draw engine that had carried Jaden Yuki through more desperate situations than any other card in that series. When summoned while your hand and field were empty, draw two cards. A living Pot of Greed in hero form. The actual Pot of Greed cost two hundred thousand points at current exchange rates. Bubbleman was doing the sa job for a tenth of the price.
He did not deliberate.
"Incredible value. Buying."
Elental HERO Bubbleman acquired.
The next card on the list was fifteen thousand points.
Elental HERO Blazeman. On summon, search one Polyrization from the deck. For reference, Fusion Sage, a card that did approximately the sa thing, was selling for ten thousand Eva Points at market price. Blazeman ca with a body attached.
"Practical. Buying."
Elental HERO Blazeman acquired.
The last high-value HERO at eight hundred points was Elental HERO Clayman. Four-star vanilla, 1500 ATK / 2000 DEF. The card description called it a sturdy hero crafted from clay, famous for its defensive strength. Its DEF was actually 100 points lower than Eve's.
Eve materialized briefly to register this information.
"So you're saying my chest is harder than a clay block."
The structural integrity argunt was gaining supporting evidence from multiple sources.
The reason to redeem Clayman despite its underwhelming stats was simple. Eight hundred points. It carried the HERO type, it could serve as a wall, it could be used as Fusion material, and it could replace a fixed vanilla slot in the deck. The cost-to-utility ratio was genuinely excellent.
"Cheap. Buying."
Elental HERO Clayman acquired.
After this run of HERO purchases, a faint ethical discomfort had settled sowhere in Amano's chest.
He was sitting in Synchro Academy's classroom, using Synchro Academy's scholarship points, to reinforce his Fusion infrastructure. This was a repeated pattern and he was aware of it.
The discomfort reminded him of his original plan for the scholarship. The card he had mapped out from the beginning.
Blue-Eyes Chaos MAX Dragon. Exchange cost: 80,000 points.
Soone might ask at this point why Blue-Eyes Chaos MAX Dragon, a Ritual Monster belonging to the main deck, qualified as a legitimate Synchro Academy expenditure.
The reasoning was airtight.
Synchro Summons worked by adding stars together until reaching the target Synchro Monster's Level. Ritual Summons worked the exact sa way, adding stars together until reaching the target Ritual Monster's Level. The underlying mathematical operation was identical.
Eve reappeared.
"Those are completely different chanics."
Irrelevant. The point was Chaos MAX Dragon, and Chaos MAX Dragon was extrely cool. He had been planning this purchase since the scholarship was first ntioned. Spending a hundred thousand points on miscellaneous smaller cards instead of biting down and getting the one he had actually wanted from the start was the kind of decision he would regret later when the opportunity didn't co around again.
"Expensive, but worth it. Buying."
[Blue-Eyes Chaos MAX Dragon] [Exchange Successful]
[Available Points: 16,000]
He would need to redeem Chaos Form, the companion Ritual Spell, from the remaining balance. Whatever was left after that could go toward smaller utility pickups.
He held the card and looked at it.
Two lifetis of playing this ga, and the satisfaction of holding a card like this still landed the sa way every ti.
Then a voice reached him that was familiar and not familiar at the sa ti. A girl's voice. Ethereal in a way that made it imdiately distinctive.
"Wonderful, Amano Rei. I like it very much."
That voice.
He had heard it exactly once before. The first ti he had summoned Blue-Eyes White Dragon, sothing had spoken near his ear in that sa register.
He reached into his card case and pulled out Blue-Eyes White Dragon, setting it on the desk next to Chaos MAX Dragon.
No spirit manifested. Sa result as the first ti. One appearance, then gone.
"Are you actually a spirit or not?"
He tried calling to the card in a low voice for a few repetitions, until Sakuya glanced over from the next seat with the specific expression that ant she had questions about his current behavior.
"Amano," she said quietly. "Are you that repressed?"
"How did you arrive at that interpretation?"
"Dragon-sexual?"
"Who taught you that word?"
"Yukki."
Nanki'in Yukki. The girl who had been possessed by Onikiri and lost all her mories of her previous life in the process. She was currently living with the Nanki'in main family, effectively as Sakuya's cousin in practical terms.
The depth of vocabulary they had apparently developed between them in the ti since was notable.
That was between the two of them. Not Amano's concern.
What he did keep thinking about was the Millennium Key sealed inside Yukki's Eva Terminal. Onikiri had set so kind of password protection on it before everything ended. The hope was that Yukki might rember the password if her mory ever recovered, because losing one of the legendary seven Millennium Items to a permanently locked terminal was a genuinely unfortunate outco.
Near the end of class, Sakuya passed him a note.
"Amano, do you want to grab sothing to eat before evening study?"
"Class rep, I actually have sothing on tonight."
"What is it?"
"Personal matter. I'll get your howork to you over the weekend."
"Okay." The disappointnt in her voice was audible even kept as flat as she kept everything else.
Sakuya's attachnt had been developing a kind of gravitational persistence lately, but when he gave her an honest answer she was reasonable about it. She was already aware he had the evening study exemption, and she had still been coming by on her own ti to copy work. Pressing him further than that was sothing she apparently recognized was not appropriate, even by her current standards.
The thing he had told her was not an excuse.
Rin Seiya had been absent for two days.
Yesterday she had told him via VSN it was a minor cold. Last night she had apparently passed out before she could update her usual evening post. This morning he had checked in again.
"Senpai, how are you feeling?"
"Not great, kouhai."
That was not a reassuring answer.
"If you have ti, could you pick up a few things from the supermarket for ? I'll transfer you the money."
That was probably a request to visit. He said yes on VSN and started planning his route.
When her address ca through, he understood what had happened that night. After they had parted ways following the Riding Duel, Rin Seiya had not gone back to the dormitory. She had ridden the new D-Wheel straight ho, which ant she had noticed sothing was wrong with her body early and made a practical decision about where she would rather be sick.
She had managed one day of family care before her parents had been called in to work. Both of them, apparently required to put in overti through Friday and into Saturday. Archaeological fieldwork schedules did not accommodate convenient timing.
So she was alone at ho and Amano had a free evening.
He wondered briefly whether she had other female friends who might have been more appropriate for this. There were privacy considerations involved in visiting a sick girl in her ho. Going into her bedroom as a male acquaintance carried a certain awkwardness. Then he thought about it practically and recognized that everyone else at Synchro Academy had mandatory evening study, and he and Rin Seiya were the only first and third years with the exemption. The scheduling had made the choice for him.
After school he stopped at the largest chain supermarket in the mid-district, a place called Value-G whose na suggested comprehensive inventory and a pricing model that rewarded volu shoppers. He pulled up the shopping list from their conversation.
Fever patches. Electrolyte water. Instant synthetic congee.
Her parents had apparently left the house without stocking anything. Busy was one thing, but forgetting to arrange food for a sick family mber was a particular level of occupied.
Three flavors of Maris lollipops, five of each.
He recognized the brand. She was always eating those. Sick and still craving them. Understandable, actually. Illness made people want sweetness. He picked up fifteen lollipops without complaint.
Steam eye masks, two packs.
She slept with eye masks. Good for sleep quality. Reasonable.
He read the next item.
He put his phone in his pocket.
He did not buy that one.
Rin Seiya lived in a high-end apartnt block in the mid-district, the kind of building that put it in the upper residential tier without quite reaching the level of private villas with courtyards and pools that the genuinely wealthy maintained. It was significantly better than standard student housing and an entirely different category from the lower district.
She had sent a door code. He entered it, took the elevator to the sixth floor, and rang the bell. The lock disengaged automatically.
He changed into the guest slippers left by the entrance and moved carefully into the living room.
The apartnt was a two-story loft unit. More space than the exterior had suggested.
At the foot of the stairs, holding the wall for support in a white sleeping set, was Rin Seiya.
"Senpai, what are you doing up?"
"I was worried you might not find my room, so I ca down to et you."
She managed a weak smile. It cost her sothing visible.
He had never seen her like this. The version of Rin Seiya he had grown accustod to was energetic and precise and present in every room she walked into. This version had flushed cheeks and disheveled white hair and an unfocused quality to her gaze that made her movents seem slightly disconnected from her intentions.
There was sothing different about it. A fragility that the usual Rin Seiya never allowed to show. The kind of thing that made a person want to do sothing about it.
The brief trip downstairs had already used up most of what she had left. Her breathing had gone uneven.
He guided her firmly to the living room sofa and sat her down. Then he went to the bag and started unpacking the congee.
"You haven't eaten, right? I'll get the congee started."
She leaned over and pulled the shopping bag toward herself, rifling through it with the focus of soone checking for a specific item.
"You got them, right? I cannot function without those."
"The Maris ones. Got plenty. But if your throat is sore you probably shouldn't have too much sugar."
She was not listening. She had already located the strawberry milk lollipop, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth with the relieved expression of a person reuniting with sothing they had been separated from too long. Three days of abstinence finally resolved.
She continued searching the bag. After checking it twice, she looked up.
"Kouhai. You forgot sothing."
"I didn't buy the weird item."
"It's not weird." She moved the lollipop to the corner of her mouth. "I was just being prepared."
She could not explain to herself why she had included it on the list. The most she could say was that sothing about the past two days had felt unusual, and the feeling had started the night of the Riding Duel, and she had been operating on instinct since then without fully understanding where the instinct was coming from.
***
love sickness? op reference
***
40 advance chapters at patreon/Eatinpieces
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