Chapter 8
"Rowan, you got sorted into Slifer Red too!"
Jaden spotted the red jacket in Rowan's hands and lit up immediately, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.
"Worthy of someone who beat Professor Crowler, just like me."
"Jaden." Rowan looked at him.
"You don't actually think Slifer Red is a good dorm, do you?"
Apparently neither did Syrus, who had been wearing the same proud expression.
Jaden being clueless made a certain kind of sense. The boy had cards on the brain and little room for anything else.
But Syrus was Chazz Princeton's younger brother. He was a native of this dueling world.
How he had made it to the Academy entrance exam without knowing how the dorm system worked was genuinely impressive in its own way.
Rowan supposed it explained how the two of them had clicked so quickly.
He was also starting to worry about long-term exposure.
"Let's just go check out the dorm," he said, waving off their confused looks.
"You'll understand once you see it. No need for me to explain."
Jaden and Syrus exchanged a baffled glance, then fell in behind Rowan as he followed the map on his Academy communicator toward the Slifer Red dormitory.
They walked through the campus, past the main buildings, and eventually reached a quieter stretch near the shore.
A dormitory building stood there. Red and white, plain to the point of self-parody, with the open ocean stretching out behind it.
Low emotional intelligence assessment: rundown and bare.
High emotional intelligence assessment: unobstructed oceanfront accommodation.
Rowan kept both versions to himself.
"This is... this is so bleak!" Jaden and Syrus looked like the ground had dropped out from under them.
Both grabbed their own heads and nearly bounced off the floor in collective despair.
"You two are in the first room at the top of the outdoor staircase, right? I'm in the one next to yours."
Rowan gave them a brief nod and headed for his own door.
Inside, he looked around and took stock.
It was not as rough as he had imagined from the original story. Ordinary, certainly.
A large bed in the center, a tatami mat floor that was at least comfortable enough. Beyond that, nothing.
What he had not expected was that it was a single room.
Unlike a certain hot-blooded idiot next door.
"Rowan, we came to visit!"
The thought had barely crossed his mind when Jaden's voice came through the half-open door, and a moment later both he and Syrus appeared in the doorway.
"Wait, why do you have a single room?!"
Jaden's eyes went wide the second he stepped inside.
Syrus looked one breath away from crying out of pure envy.
"We're all Slifer Red, but the room Jaden and I got is a triple!"
The word "bro" had apparently entered Syrus's vocabulary for Jaden somewhere in the last five minutes.
Rowan was not remotely surprised. That was more or less how it had gone in the original story.
"Probably because my practical exam score was the highest," he said, thinking it through.
"I won on turn one with full life points."
Others might chalk it up to a lucky hand and a fortunate draw.
But a turn-one win with zero damage taken was still a turn-one win with zero damage taken.
The numbers spoke for themselves.
"I want that kind of luck too," Syrus wailed, right on cue.
Two perfectly curved streams of tears ran down from beneath his small glasses in a way that belonged entirely in a cartoon.
Rowan stared at them for a moment.
How. How did a person physically cry like that.
This world was truly a one-to-one reproduction of the anime.
Then an idea came to him.
"Syrus," Rowan said, adopting a casual, inviting tone. "Want to duel me? If you win, I'll think about switching rooms with you."
An obvious play. He was going to give Syrus a "smile."
The small, useful kind that came with Emotion Points attached.
"Really?!" Syrus's eyes lit up instantly.
Then the hesitation set in. He glanced at Jaden, then looked back at Rowan.
"Actually... no, never mind. I want to keep staying with Jaden."
Rowan stared at him with a deeply complicated expression.
He had not accounted for that.
The sheer depth of feeling behind Syrus's refusal was something he had not mentally prepared for.
Then again, this was a world that had been nicknamed, in certain corners of his past life, the Yu-Gi-Oh Boys' Love Edition.
Women only slow down your draw speed.
"Syrus, you really are something else," Jaden said, laughing and rubbing the back of his neck.
"Fine, forget I mentioned it." Rowan shook off the lingering discomfort and pivoted.
"I was going to go look around the campus. You two coming?"
"Yeah, let's go!"
Jaden perked up immediately, his attention swinging to the new idea with the enthusiasm of someone who had never heard the word "focus" in his life.
He had been about to suggest a duel with Rowan just moments ago, but the prospect of exploring the Academy and possibly running into some of the elite Obelisk Blue duelists was more than enough to redirect him entirely.