Chapter 22
"You okay, Syrus?"
Jaden asked, caught somewhere between concern and barely suppressed laughter as he tried to console his friend.
Though in truth, he didn't think Rowan had been dishonest.
All three duels had ended in one-turn kills, sure, but Syrus had genuinely shown some improvement along the way.
His instincts were sharpening. The bond between a duelist and his deck was growing.
What Jaden had mostly noticed, though, was Rowan's ability.
"Rowan, you're seriously incredible!" Jaden's eyes lit up with enthusiasm.
"That feeling I kept sensing from you -- I knew it! You can see Duel Monster Spirits too, can't you?"
Right on cue, a small fuzzy creature with two white wings slipped free of the deck at Jaden's hip in a flash of pale light invisible to anyone else.
It hovered in the air like a ghost, barely there, more feeling than form.
Syrus noticed nothing. Heard nothing.
Rowan, on the other hand, saw it perfectly.
"So that's what Winged Kuriboh actually looks like," he murmured, raising an eyebrow with quiet interest as the little spirit drifted toward him.
He had seen it countless times in his past life.
But seeing a Duel Spirit with his own eyes, in the flesh -- or whatever passed for flesh -- was something else entirely.
Genuinely novel.
And if he ever managed to redeem the ability to materialize Spirits from the System, to physically touch them, to actually use their power in the real world...
That would be something else.
"I knew it! You can see my partner!" Jaden said, delighted.
"Big bro, what partner? What are you looking at?"
Syrus glanced between them, then around the room, completely lost. He saw nothing.
"If you mean that," Rowan said, nodding toward Winged Kuriboh where it hovered just ahead of him, watching him with curious black eyes, "then yes. I can see it."
His expression stayed calm.
It had to. He had nothing of his own to show.
No Spirit at his side, no deck with any kind of awakened presence.
The Dark Magician OTK build was five Exodia pieces and two libraries -- not a single soul among them.
He would need to choose his next deck carefully.
...
Which also raised a mildly puzzling question.
Jaden was, by nature, the kind of person who would challenge anyone with a strong dueling aura to a match on pure instinct.
Yet somehow, from yesterday through today, he still hadn't asked.
Rowan had actually been prepared for it.
He had been quietly working out what excuse to use if Jaden suddenly got the itch, how to stall until he had figured out which new deck to redeem.
But the challenge never came.
Odd.
What Rowan didn't know was that Jaden had thought about it -- briefly, the previous night, right after watching Rowan dismantle Chazz.
He had turned the idea over in his head and then quietly set it aside.
Because he had already seen how the duel would go.
Against that Dark Magician OTK deck, if he didn't specifically counter it, he'd just stand there watching Rowan explain card interactions until his life points hit zero.
And if he did build a dedicated counter and happened to draw it going first, then he'd win automatically.
A coin flip. No tension, no exchange, no fun.
For someone like Jaden, who dueled for the joy of it, that wasn't a duel worth having.
He would wait. Wait until Rowan switched decks, until there was something real on the line.
Because someone who could see Spirits and duel at that level -- letting that pass without a proper match would be a genuine waste.
Rowan, unaware of any of this, was simply noting to himself that he would need to find the right moment eventually.
Give the chosen one of this dueling world a taste of genuine suffering.
See what kind of Emotion Points that produced.
...
That afternoon, in the health education classroom of Duel Academy.
A figure in a blue professor's coat, sporting a distinctive mushroom-shaped mane of golden hair, crept along the wall toward the shoe lockers with the energy of someone who absolutely should not be trusted near personal property.
He checked left. Checked right. Then began sliding locker doors open one by one until he found what he was looking for.
The moment he confirmed the target, he let out a low, conspiratorial giggle, and slipped an envelope inside -- one bearing a very deliberate, very obvious lipstick mark on the seal.
"That slacker boy is going to fall right into it," he muttered with a smug grin.
"And then my revenge will finally begin."
Another furtive look around to confirm no witnesses, and he was gone.
...
Inside the classroom, Rowan sat half-listening to the health teacher at the front -- large hair, very white coat -- and felt the memory surface like a slow tide.
Right. This was that arc.
He recalled it clearly now.
In the original timeline, Crowler had used that wide mouth of his, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Pot of Greed, to forge a love letter stamped with Alexis Rhodes's lipstick.
The letter would be planted to lure Jaden -- Crowler's prime target for expulsion -- to the Obelisk Blue girls' dormitory.
Crowler would photograph the whole thing, frame it as voyeurism, and have Jaden expelled before he could explain himself.
It had all unraveled into a complete farce in the end.
But now Rowan was here.
And Rowan was also on Crowler's list. Arguably higher on it than Jaden, given how much more provocative his presence had been.
What if Crowler had redirected the scheme?
The thought sat uncomfortably in his mind.
He turned it over as the lesson wrapped up and free activity time began.
Then, under a convenient excuse, he slipped out of the room alone and made his way to the shoe lockers.
He opened his.
Sitting on top of his outdoor shoes, with a smear of lipstick pressed into the envelope's corner, was a love letter.