When the dust finally settled, Itagaki remained frozen where he stood, stiff as a mannequin.
His eyes had gone completely blank.
All the aggression seemed to have drained out of him, leaving behind nothing but vacant confusion.
The Duel was already over, yet he looked as though he could barely remember where he was.
One of his lackeys assumed the boss was simply having trouble accepting his defeat and hurried over with a sly, ingratiating smile.
“Boss, we don’t have to count this one,” the man whispered.
“Nobody else saw it.
As long as we scare these two brats into keeping their mouths shut—” Without warning, Itagaki kicked him squarely in the chest.
The lackey hit the ground with a pained grunt and immediately curled in on himself, not daring to say another word.
Inside, however, he was completely baffled.
He had no idea what he’d said wrong.
Wasn’t he supposed to be helping the boss save some dignity?
Itagaki turned his heavy gaze toward Yusuke.
“I lost.” His voice was flat and dry, without any of his previous arrogance or resentment.
He spoke as though he were merely stating an undeniable fact.
“According to our agreement, I’ll cover your protection fee for this month.” Yusuke thought about that for a moment.
“Actually, I just did the math, and something doesn’t seem right.” Itagaki looked at him.
“You said that if I lost, I’d have to pay double the protection fee—four thousand DP.” Yusuke continued in a perfectly reasonable tone.
“But now that I’ve won, you’re only covering two thousand for me.
Doesn’t that mean I’m still two thousand short?” The lackey who had just managed to climb back to his feet immediately exploded.
“Don’t push your luck, brat!
You think you can make demands like that without even considering who you’re—” Itagaki kicked him again.
The poor man went tumbling across the ground for the second time.
Every other lackey promptly shut his mouth.
They stared at their boss in bewilderment, none of them understanding what had gotten into him.
Itagaki looked back at Yusuke.
“You’re right.
I’ll transfer the remaining two thousand DP to your account later.” Silence.
The Fang Gang members exchanged stunned looks.
Losing a Duel was one thing.
It happened all the time.
But Itagaki had always been overbearing and aggressive, the kind of man who refused to accept even the smallest disadvantage, even when dealing with his own gang.
Why had he suddenly become so obedient that he almost seemed frightened?
They scrutinized Yusuke from head to toe.
No matter how they looked at him, he was still just a skinny, underfed young man from Satellite.
They couldn’t understand why their boss seemed so terrified of him.
After watching one unfortunate idiot get kicked twice for questioning Itagaki, however, nobody was eager to become the third example.
Even Yusuke was a little surprised.
Card games really were unbelievably useful in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!.
These guys were an armed gang with overwhelming numbers, yet once their representative lost a Duel, they actually honored the result without resistance.
Then Yusuke felt something strange.
It was only an intuition at first, but the feeling was remarkably clear.
Right now, it seemed that no matter what he said or what he asked for, Itagaki would obey.
Almost without thinking, Yusuke said, “You’ve got a pretty nice Deck.” He meant it.
Star Blast, which Itagaki had used earlier, could reduce the Level of a high-Level monster and let him bring it out far more easily.
Copycat was also an excellent low-Level monster that had seen use in strong Decks during the early eras of the game.
By the competitive standards of Yusuke’s previous life, cards like these had long since been left behind by power creep.
Here in resource-starved Satellite, however, they were genuinely valuable.
One of the lackeys immediately seized another opportunity to flatter his boss.
“Well, obviously!
Boss Itagaki’s Dueling skills are famous around here.
His Deck is one of the best in this whole—” He never finished.
Itagaki silently removed the Deck from his Duel Disk and held it out toward Yusuke.
“It’s nothing that special.
If you like it, take it.” The lackeys stared.
“…?” Every member of the Fang Gang looked at their boss as though he had suddenly grown a second head.
What the hell had happened to him?
Was he possessed?
Itagaki’s Deck might not have been the absolute strongest in Satellite, but it was unquestionably high-grade by the standards of this district.
Converted entirely into DP, its value would represent a fortune far beyond the reach of most Satellite residents.
And he was just…
giving it away?
This was the same Itagaki who had never hesitated to take advantage of anyone.
Usually, he was the one stealing other people’s cards.
Whenever someone in Fang Gang territory owned a card Itagaki wanted, there were generally only two possible outcomes: they settled it with a card Duel, or they settled it with fists.
Either way, Itagaki ended up with the card.
It had happened more times than anyone could count.
Apparently, turnabout really was fair play.
After spending so long taking other people’s cards, Itagaki had finally reached the day when someone walked away with his entire Deck.
And somehow, he was handing it over willingly.
Only then did Yusuke become certain that the strange feeling he’d had—that Itagaki couldn’t refuse him—wasn’t his imagination.
This was the power of a Shadow Game.
Shadow Games had existed since the very beginning of Yu-Gi-Oh!
and remained a recurring concept throughout multiple generations of the series.
They were also the foundation behind the franchise’s entire premise of saving the world through card games.
Put simply, certain duelists could use games as a medium for supernatural power.
A victor in a Shadow Game could impose consequences on the loser that went far beyond an ordinary defeat.
Depending on the power involved, the winner might take the loser’s soul, place them under supernatural control, or enforce some other punishment or demand.
Yusuke looked down at his own hand.
Before he possessed this body, Fujishiro had been nothing more than an ordinary young man.
By sheer bad luck, he had been selected by a cult as their sacrifice and should have died today.
There was no possibility that this power belonged to Fujishiro.
Which meant it had come from Yusuke’s real body inside the temple.
He immediately thought back to the place where his true body remained trapped.
The entire temple had practically screamed ancient Egypt, and the mysterious golden octahedron he’d discovered there looked remarkably similar in style to the Millennium Items.
‘Did I transmigrate into someone much more important than I realized?’ Maybe his new body had possessed the authority to initiate Shadow Games from the very beginning.
Yusuke hadn’t deliberately started one during his Duel with Itagaki, though.
It seemed more likely that some small portion of his power had leaked out unconsciously once the Duel began.
That would explain why this Shadow Duel had been relatively weak.
Unlike the sacrificial Duel in the cavern, losing Life Points hadn’t inflicted real physical injuries.
And when Itagaki’s Life Points reached zero, he hadn’t immediately dropped dead like some unfortunate anime villain.
Once Yusuke worked that out, his spirits rose considerably.
If he really possessed this kind of power, then he had just gained an enormous trump card.
A Shadow Duelist was effectively a human being with supernatural abilities.
Naturally, there was one important condition: you still had to be good at cards.
If you started a Shadow Game and then lost the Duel, that very same supernatural power could turn against you.
Which, now that Yusuke thought about it, explained the basic career trajectory of practically every major Yu-Gi-Oh!
villain.
They could possess enough power to destroy the world, rewrite reality, or wipe out civilization, but in the end they still couldn’t escape being beaten to death in a card game by some teenager with seafood-shaped hair.
Even Yami Yugi, back at the beginning of the original manga, had used one Shadow Game after another to punish criminals and other terrible people in modern Domino City.
Generally speaking, powerful Shadow Duelists also tended to be stronger duelists than ordinary people.
There was one major reason for that.
Topdecking.
No matter how much skill a card game involved, luck still played a role, especially when it came to drawing exactly the card you needed at the right moment.
And if there was one thing the protagonists of Yu-Gi-Oh!
had always possessed in terrifying abundance, it was the ability to topdeck whatever they needed.
The various protagonists with their outrageous hairstyles were bad enough already.
Jaden Yuki in particular could seemingly pull the exact answer he needed whenever he felt like it.
And on the rare occasions when drawing the right card still wasn’t enough, some of these people would simply create a new card on the spot.
Brutal methods, really.
More importantly, supernatural power from Shadow Games could actually enhance that almost miraculous ability to draw the perfect card.
The series had demonstrated it plenty of times.
The most famous example was Atem near the end of the original story.
Once the Pharaoh regained his true name and reached the height of his power, his connection with his Deck became so strong that he could practically declare what he wanted and draw it.
There had also been an ordinary duelist in GX who offered his soul to a supernatural card and gained dark power in exchange for the ability to draw exactly what he needed.
Of course, the dark topdecking power he’d bought with his own lifespan ultimately proved inferior to Jaden Yuki’s completely natural protagonist-level luck.
Then there was Jaden himself.
When he became the Supreme King, the dark power of that state enhanced his already ridiculous affinity with his cards even further.
At his strongest, it was almost as though there were no distinction between duelist and Deck at all, giving him the kind of draw power that made him seem virtually unbeatable.
‘No wonder my draws in these last two Duels felt better than they ever did back home,’ Yusuke thought.
Otherwise, even with his superior knowledge of the game, turning around that first Duel against the Ritual Arbiter with nothing but Fujishiro Yusuke’s original pile of Normal Monsters would have been extremely difficult.
What Yusuke didn’t know was where his own supernatural power would rank compared with the Shadow Duelists from the anime.
For now, he looked at the Deck Itagaki was generously offering him.
“A Deck is a duelist’s life.
You’re being way too generous.” Yusuke shook his head.
“How could I possibly accept something this important?” As he spoke, he took the Deck from Itagaki’s hand and slipped it into his pocket.
The lackeys behind Itagaki stared in disbelief.
Finally, one of them couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Boss, that’s your most important Deck!
How can you just—” Itagaki spun toward him with a furious glare.
“I’m retiring from Dueling as of today!
I’m done with cards for good.
You got a problem with that?!”