As the dust settled, Itagaki stood frozen in place, stiff as a puppet.
His eyes were hollow, as if every trace of edge had been drained clean out of him, leaving nothing behind but blank, dazed stillness.
It looked like the duel had ended and he genuinely couldn’t tell where he even was anymore.
The lackey beside him assumed he was just having trouble accepting the loss, and hurried over, voice full of ingratiating cunning.
“Boss, this one doesn’t have to count,” the lackey said.
“Nobody else saw it happen anyway.
As long as we scare these two brats into keeping their mouths shut…” Without any warning, Itagaki lashed out with a kick and sent the lackey sprawling to the ground.
The man grunted in pain, quickly shrinking down and clamming up, not daring to say another word, though inside he was utterly baffled, unable to figure out what he’d done wrong with that particular bit of flattery.
Itagaki’s heavy gaze settled on Yushin.
“I lost.” His voice was flat, no defiance in it, no bitterness, like he was just calmly stating a fact.
“As agreed, I’ll cover your protection money for this month.” Yushin thought it over, then said, “Actually, I just did the math, and something feels off.
See, you said earlier that if I lost, I’d owe double the protection money, a full 4000 DP.
But now that I’ve won, you’re only covering 2000.
Doesn’t that mean I’m actually down 2000, in a sense?” The lackey who’d just gotten back up off the ground bristled instantly, snarling, “Don’t push your luck, kid!
Trying to shake us down like that, you have no idea who you’re talking t—” Before he could finish, Itagaki sent another sharp kick his way, and the lackey went tumbling back to the ground.
The rest of the lackeys all held their breath, staring at their boss in complete bewilderment.
Itagaki said, “You’re right.
I’ll transfer the remaining 2000 DP to your account shortly.” Dead silence fell over the whole group.
The lackeys exchanged glances, every one of them looking like they couldn’t believe what they’d just heard.
It was just a card duel.
Losing was losing, that was all.
But their boss, who was normally domineering and ruthless, who wouldn’t take even the smallest loss lying down even within his own gang, was acting so meek today it practically bordered on cowardice.
Why?
Doubt churned through every one of them, and they studied Yushin carefully from every angle, but no matter how they looked at it, all they saw was a scrawny, malnourished-looking kid.
They genuinely couldn’t understand why their boss was this afraid of him.
Of course, with the unlucky guy who’d just been kicked twice serving as a fresh example, none of them dared to voice their doubts out loud.
Even Yushin himself was a little caught off guard.
Cards really were useful in this Yu-Gi-Oh!
world.
His opponent had numbers, muscle, an entire violent gang behind him, and yet losing a single duel had left him this completely obedient.
Suddenly, a subtle instinct welled up inside him.
Yushin abruptly got the sense that right now, whatever he said, whatever he asked for, the man would just…
go along with it.
As if some invisible hand nudged him, Yushin blurted out, “Your deck’s pretty good, huh.” He genuinely meant it, too.
The Spell Card Star Blast his opponent had used in the duel could instantly rush out a powerful high-Level monster, and Mimic Illusionist had been a regular in top-tier decks back in the early era too, a genuinely solid low-Level beater.
Sure, by the standards of the competitive environment Yushin remembered from his past life, these cards were long-outdated relics from generations past.
But in a resource-starved place like the Satellite, they still counted as genuinely rare finds.
Immediately, another lackey chimed in.
“Heh, obviously.
Everyone knows Boss Itagaki’s dueling skill.
His deck’s top-tier for this whole district…” But before he could even finish, everyone watched, dumbfounded, as Itagaki silently pulled his deck out of his Duel Disk and held it out.
“It’s not really that impressive.
If you like it, take it.” The lackeys: “???” Every last one of them stared at their boss, eyes wide with shock.
Wait, was their boss possessed by something?
Was this actually happening?
His deck might not have been the absolute best in the Satellite, but it was unquestionably top-tier.
If you converted the whole thing into DP, it’d add up to a fortune far beyond what an ordinary poor kid in the Satellite could ever hope to touch.
A deck this valuable, and he was just giving it away, no hesitation at all?
Was this still the same boss who’d never once taken so much as a favor without giving something back the hard way?
After all, up until now, Boss Itagaki had only ever been the one taking cards from other people, never the other way around.
Anywhere in Fang Gang territory, if someone happened to own a card Boss Itagaki had his eye on, they’d settle it either with a duel or with fists, but one way or another, Boss Itagaki was always walking away with it.
It had happened more than once or twice before.
Who could have guessed that karma really did come around, and the boss who’d spent so long being the one shaking others down would eventually find himself on the other end of it.
And of his own free will, no less?!
By this point, Yushin was finally certain: that instinctive sense of “this guy won’t defy me” hadn’t been his imagination after all.
This was the power of the Shadow Game!
Shadow Games, a concept that had existed since the very first generation of Yu-Gi-Oh!, running through the story across multiple series, and forming the foundation of the whole “saving the world through card duels” premise.
In simple terms, it meant certain duelists could exercise supernatural power through the act of dueling itself.
Whoever won a Shadow Game could demand basically anything of the loser: stealing their soul, or even turning them into a puppet, were both entirely on the table.
He couldn’t help glancing down at his own hand.
Before he’d taken over this body, Fujishiro Sakuma had just been a perfectly ordinary kid, one who’d apparently had the terrible luck of being chosen by some cult as today’s sacrifice.
So there was no way this power belonged to the original body.
Which meant it must have come from his real body, still trapped in that temple?
He thought back to how the temple his real body was trapped in had been dripping with ancient Egyptian aesthetics, and how the octahedron artifact he’d found there looked more than a little like a Millennium Item.
Could it be that in this life, he’d actually transmigrated as someone genuinely important, someone born with the authority to open a Shadow Game right from the start?
But Yushin hadn’t consciously chosen to open a Shadow Game just now.
It seemed more like a small leak of his own inherent authority, slipping out unconsciously the moment the duel began.
So this particular Shadow Game must have been a low-intensity one; the Life Point damage during the duel hadn’t come with any real physical harm, and Itagaki hitting zero Life Points afterward hadn’t sent him straight to the afterlife like it did to characters in the anime.
Working that much out, Yushin felt a surge of energy.
With power like this in his back pocket, he’d just picked up a serious trump card.
A Shadow Game duelist was basically a superhuman already armed with supernatural power.
Of course, that power was built entirely on a foundation of actually being good at dueling.
If your dueling wasn’t up to snuff, the power would turn around and bite you instead— —which was exactly why every world-ending final boss across every generation of Yu-Gi-Oh!
still ended up getting duel-killed by the seafood-head protagonists in the end, no matter how powerful they were.
Including the original series’ Dark Yugi, who, at the very start of the manga, punished one lowlife after another in the modern city through a string of Shadow Games.
But generally speaking, a powerful Shadow Game duelist tended to just be better at dueling than the average person too.
In a word: topdecking.
It was a card game at the end of the day, and outcomes always came down at least partly to what you drew, or what fans commonly called “draw luck.” The seafood-head protagonists across every generation went without saying, led by a certain jellyfish-haired guy from the “Yu-” naming line, who drew whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.
And if their draw luck alone somehow wasn’t enough to win, they’d just openly print a brand-new card out of thin air, ruthlessly.
The supernatural power of a Shadow Game could reliably boost that draw luck, and the story had backed this up more than once.
The most classic example: by the end of the original series, once the Pharaoh had recovered his true name and reached the peak of his power, he could summon whatever he called out for, drawing exactly what he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Or take some random background duelist in the GX anime, who sold his soul to a Death God card and gained its dark power in exchange for guaranteed perfect draws every single time…
…Of course, it turned out that even sacrificing years of his own life for that death god’s draw power still couldn’t match the raw, natural god-tier draw luck of that same jellyfish-haired guy from the “Yu-” line.
Or take jellyfish-head Jaden Yuki, who, once he tapped into “Supreme King Mode,” gained a boost from the Supreme King’s dark power, taking his already formidable draw luck to an even more effortless level, practically becoming one with his cards, supposedly unbeatable.
“No wonder my draw luck’s felt stronger than it ever did in my past life these last two duels,” Yushin muttered to himself.
Otherwise, no matter how far ahead of the curve his dueling knowledge was, pulling off a comeback against that unlucky Ritual Arbiter with nothing but a starting all-vanilla deck would have been a real uphill battle.
He just had no idea where his own dark power, post-transmigration, would actually rank by the anime’s standards.
Looking at the deck Itagaki was holding out so generously, Yushin said, “A deck is a duelist’s whole life.
This is way too generous.
I couldn’t possibly take this.” Even as he said it, he’d already taken the deck and tucked it straight into his pocket.
The lackeys behind them were all stunned speechless.
Finally, one of the lackeys couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Boss, that’s your most important deck.
How could you just—” But before he could finish, Itagaki glared daggers at him and snapped, “I’m retiring from this life starting today.
No more dueling, ever.
Got a problem with that?”