As the dust settled on the duel, Ryan Valerio let out an anguished scream atop the altar.
His whole body convulsed violently, as if something invisible was being torn out from inside him, dissolving into a hazy, indistinct shadow before vanishing.
In just two seconds, every ounce of strength drained out of him.
He collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, dropping stiffly onto the stone surface of the altar, and didn’t move again.
Yushin figured that whatever dark god this cult worshipped, it was at least fair about the rules.
They lost the ritual duel, so it went right ahead and took their own Ritual Arbiter without complaint.
Not picky, apparently.
Down below, the cultists all stood frozen, expressions blank, completely at a loss.
Wait, their own arbiter had actually just been sacrificed?
Honestly, for as long as their cult had existed, the so-called ritual duel had always just been a formality.
An arbiter actually losing was an absurdity that had never happened before, and no one knew what was supposed to happen next.
And Arbiter Ryan himself had made the wager out loud: if the sacrifice won, the position of Ritual Arbiter would be handed straight over to him.
So now that the sacrifice really had won, wasn’t he the new Arbiter?
So did that mean they were supposed to be kneeling and paying respects right now?
Right as the crowd descended into confused chaos, a scream suddenly rang out from among them.
One black-robed cultist dropped to the ground without warning, convulsing, showing the exact same symptoms as the recently-deceased Arbiter Ryan.
The strange phenomenon spread like a chain reaction, screams erupting one after another across the vast chamber.
Every cultist collapsed in turn, bodies twisting and convulsing, until the unbroken wailing turned the sealed cavern into something like a living hell filled with agony.
In under thirty seconds, every last cultist lay sprawled across the ground, without a shred of life left in them.
In no time at all, Yushin was the only one left standing on the massive altar.
That was more than he’d expected.
Thinking it over, he figured everyone present today must have been bound up as part of the sacrifice ritual itself.
With the ritual collapsing, the sacrifice killing the arbiter instead of the other way around, the whole thing effectively counted as a failure, so whatever dark god they worshipped had probably just wiped the whole bunch of failures out in one go.
Either way, the immediate danger seemed to be over, at least for now.
Beating the boss meant it was naturally time for the loot run.
Yushin didn’t waste the opportunity, going through the pockets of every cultist scattered across the cavern and cleaning out every card he found, not leaving a single one behind.
Since he’d transmigrated into some version of the Yu-Gi-Oh!
world, Duel Monster cards were basically equivalent to power, the single most important core resource in this world.
There was no way he was going to skip out on any of them.
Yushin went through the whole cavern brimming with anticipation, only to end up thoroughly disappointed.
Barely any of these cultists had actually been carrying a deck at all.
He thought back to how they’d kept calling him “Satellite trash,” acting like they were something special.
Yushin had been fully expecting to walk away with a haul of great cards, something to upgrade his starting trash deck into real firepower, but it turned out that wasn’t the case at all.
Honestly, even counting Arbiter Ryan’s own deck, the cards these cultists carried were technically stronger than Yushin’s original all-vanilla lineup, sure, but to a modern card game addict like him, it was basically the difference between a stone spear and a pitchfork.
Not much of an upgrade either way.
Disappointed, Yushin glanced down at Arbiter Ryan’s lifeless body at his feet, and gave the corpse a vicious kick.
“Damn it, and here I thought you were somebody.
With a deck this trashy, what were you even so smug about?” Yushin gathered up every card he’d collected, then followed the damp draft through the cavern until he found a moss-covered exit.
The instant he emerged from underground, dull gray daylight pressed down on him, and the view was filled with crumbling, weather-worn old buildings.
He walked slowly down the cracked asphalt road, the outline of the streets carrying a faint, familiar feeling.
Yushin tried digging through whatever memories remained in this body.
But probably because its original owner was already dead, the fragments were like scraps of shredded paper, jumbled and clinging together in a mess.
Pulling anything useful out of them took real effort.
It took Yushin a good while before he could barely dredge up the body’s name: Fujishiro Sakuma, if he remembered right.
Along with that came a fuzzy address somewhere in the Satellite, probably the original owner’s home.
Following the vague landmarks from that borrowed memory, Yushin found the place.
It was a squat, two-story concrete building, its outer walls stripped of paint down to blackened raw concrete.
The window frames had rusted clean through, and the stairwell railings were caked with rust.
Yushin pushed the door open and stepped inside, and rummaging through the cramped kitchen, found the only food left in the place: two stale, rock-hard chunks of rye bread.
It was probably the worst bread he’d ever encountered, coarse and dry, chewy enough to threaten his teeth.
But crude as the food was, the moment he bit into it and let the stale, dry bread slide down into his stomach, an overwhelming wave of satisfaction welled up inside him.
It felt like the first bite of food after a lifetime trapped in that godforsaken temple.
Even something as cheap and crude as the driest, shriveled-up bread from the Satellite slums somehow tasted, to him, like a feast fit for a king.
It was also right then that Yushin realized something: he could apparently share this body’s sense of taste.
And yet during the Shadow Game duel on the altar earlier, he hadn’t felt any of the pain the body should have taken.
Once that thought occurred to him, a bit of testing quickly confirmed it: whether or not to sync with this body’s senses seemed to be something he could actively control.
When he wanted to, he could sync with everything the body felt.
When he didn’t, he could cut off every sense, pain included.
Yushin sank into the comfort of food he hadn’t tasted in ages, his mind working through everything at the same time.
The cult’s ritual presider had called this place the Satellite, and combined with the fact that this world clearly ran on card duels above all else, this world was most likely built around the Yu-Gi-Oh!
5D’s anime.
The only question was whether the place this body currently inhabited was even in the same dimension as the temple his real body had transmigrated into.
If it was, then where in this world was that temple, and how was he supposed to get his real body free?
Right now, thanks to the octahedron artifact he’d stumbled onto in the temple, he could split off part of his consciousness and get some air as a spirit riding shotgun, which went a long way toward easing that mind-breaking loneliness, but his actual body was still trapped.
Given the chance, he definitely still wanted to find a way to free his real body from that temple.
On top of that, if this side-character body of his really was in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!
5D’s, then figuring out exactly where along the timeline this world currently sat was going to matter too.
In the anime’s story, there was a group of lunatics called the Dark Signers who intended to summon down gods known as the Earthbound Immortals.
But those gods were nasty business: their appearance required a mass sacrifice of souls.
And the poor, low-level residents of the Satellite had, unfortunately, been chosen as the unlucky ones for the job, with every soul in the Satellite devoured whole by the Earthbound Immortals.
Now that Yushin finally had a side-character body he could actually use to move around freely and get some air, if some Earthbound Immortal’s mark suddenly showed up in the sky one day and sucked him in without warning, that would be seriously unlucky.
Meanwhile, back with his real body, he’d taken a moment to fiddle with the octahedron artifact in the temple again, only to find it had gone quiet, as if it had run out of fuel.
It felt like this whole spirit-riding-shotgun trip had drained whatever energy the thing had stored up inside it.
Which meant that until Yushin figured out exactly how the artifact worked, this one side-character body was all he had to work with for now.
If he carelessly got this Sakuma kid killed too, he’d be right back to his boring days alone in the empty temple.
So Yushin quickly ran through a mental checklist of main objectives for this side character.
Collect cards, get stronger, find a way out of this troubled patch of ground called the Satellite…
…Oh, right, and eat well.
The days in the temple had really done a number on him.
Right now, he felt like anything would do, as long as it actually had a taste, he wanted to eat it.
Yushin was gnawing on bread and sorting through his thoughts when he suddenly heard a faint sound.
Click.
It was a light but perfectly clear scrape of metal, a key sliding into a lock and slowly turning.
Yushin’s movements paused.
Seemed like someone had just come home.