‘Okay, either I got up too fast…
or Vampire Fraulein is lying in my bed.’ The stone chamber was utterly silent.
The girl lay asleep on the stone bed with an almost elegant grace, like Sleeping Beauty from a fairy tale.
The deathly pallor of her skin and the solemn Gothic dress she wore, however, gave the scene a distinctly eerie edge.
Yusuke felt both nervous and excited.
The excitement was easy to understand.
Ever since becoming trapped inside this temple, he’d endured nothing but endless emptiness and solitude.
This was the first time he’d seen another living being here.
The girl’s complexion was almost completely bloodless, yet beneath the fabric of her Gothic dress, her chest rose and fell in slow, shallow, perfectly regular breaths.
She was definitely alive.
Which meant she was probably what the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!
called a Duel Monster Spirit.
Cards in this world possessed spirits of their own.
Most Monster Cards were little more than projections carrying faint traces of spiritual power, but a small number genuinely housed conscious spirits.
The strange part was that Yusuke had acquired Vampire Fraulein’s card while acting through Fujishiro Yusuke’s body all the way over in Satellite.
So why had her spirit appeared here?
After thinking it over, Yusuke could only come up with one explanation.
Perhaps the bond between a Duel Monster Spirit and its duelist existed at the level of the soul.
In that case, even if he’d acquired the card through Yusuke’s body, the connection itself would naturally have attached to Yusuke’s true self.
It wasn’t entirely unlike how the Pharaoh’s soul could possess Yugi Muto’s body while still wielding the three Egyptian God Cards.
As for why Yusuke felt nervous…
That was also understandable.
An enormous abandoned temple.
A pale vampire girl sleeping in silence.
A card supposedly burdened with a curse.
Put all of that together, and this looked much more like the opening scene of a horror movie than anything involving a card game.
Still, Yusuke wasn’t especially frightened.
By now, he knew that his true body inside the temple possessed supernatural authority of its own, and he had begun to suspect that whatever he had become occupied a fairly high position on the supernatural food chain.
One Monster Spirit probably wasn’t going to threaten him.
Besides, this was Yu-Gi-Oh!.
Even if Sadako herself crawled out of a well, she’d probably have to put on a Duel Disk before she was allowed to kill anyone.
While Yusuke’s thoughts wandered, he suddenly noticed the girl’s long eyelashes tremble faintly.
She woke up.
The girl in the Gothic dress silently sat upright.
There wasn’t a trace of emotion on her pale face.
Her expression was so cold and lifeless that she might as well have been a beautifully crafted corpse.
She reached for the parasol leaning beside the bed, opened it above her head, and rose gracefully to her feet.
A broken skylight high above the chamber allowed a narrow shaft of gray-white daylight to fall through, cutting a lonely strip across the surrounding darkness.
The girl slowly walked toward Yusuke beneath her parasol.
With the dim canopy shielding her from the light, her figure looked ethereal and ghostly, carrying a deeply unsettling pressure.
That terrifying atmosphere lasted about five seconds.
Snap.
The locking mechanism on the parasol suddenly gave out.
The canopy folded shut by itself.
The girl was immediately exposed to the sunlight falling through the skylight.
Her entire body stiffened.
Her arms and legs locked in place as though someone had pressed pause, leaving her standing there like a wooden doll.
The cold elegance on her face shattered instantly.
Panic spread across her deathly pale features.
Her slender chest rose and fell rapidly as her soft red lips struggled to form words.
“H-Help…
h-help me…” Yusuke stared.
“…” When she opened her mouth, he could even see two tiny pointed teeth.
Presumably, those were supposed to be the signature fangs of a vampire.
Unfortunately, they were so small and delicate that they looked more like an adorable pair of little canines.
The horror-movie atmosphere collapsed on the spot.
The entire scene became ridiculous instead.
And at that moment, Yusuke suddenly had a strong intuition.
This legendary Vampire Fraulein, bearer of a cursed card…
might not be especially bright.
…
A few minutes later, after Yusuke helped the vampire girl escape the sunlight from the skylight, the two sat facing each other.
The elegant young noblewoman maintained perfect posture, but her pale hands were unconsciously gripping handfuls of her long skirt, betraying just how nervous she actually was.
“So,” Yusuke said, “you’re telling me you basically don’t remember anything?” Fraulein nodded.
“That’s right.” “I heard your card is called a cursed card,” Yusuke continued.
“Supposedly, you drain a duelist’s life force in exchange for granting power.” Fraulein blinked.
“Huh?
That’s horrible.” Yusuke stared at her.
“You didn’t know?” “I don’t think so…” She frowned and tried hard to remember.
“Most of what I remember is sleeping.
Every once in a while, someone would call me outside for a little while, but even then I was usually half asleep.
I don’t remember much.” Her voice grew sleepier just from talking about it.
“I mostly remember being really, really tired…
and wanting to go back to sleep…” Then she suddenly slapped a hand against her forehead.
“Oh!” She looked as though she’d remembered something important.
“Now that you mention it, whenever someone called me out, I think I usually felt really full afterward…” She tilted her head.
“Is that what you meant by draining life?” Yusuke more or less understood.
So summoning Vampire Fraulein really did seem to consume the duelist’s life force, but apparently it wasn’t something she consciously chose to do.
It was more like a passive ability.
If that passive effect triggered every single time she was summoned, then Yusuke would have to be extremely careful before using her card in the future.
“Also, what’s wrong with your parasol?” Yusuke asked, glancing at it.
“Why does it randomly fold itself up?” That stupid parasol had been responsible for ruining her entire entrance just now.
Apparently, sunlight wouldn’t instantly reduce her to ashes like a traditional vampire, but it did cause her entire body to freeze up while her speech lagged like a player suffering catastrophic packet loss.
“I don’t know.” Fraulein shook her head and examined the parasol in her hands.
“Maybe it’s really old and the latch is worn out?” Yusuke stared at her.
“…” A mysterious Gothic vampire spirit had equipment failure because the latch on her umbrella had worn down with age.
Was that really how this worked?
Fraulein herself didn’t seem particularly bothered by it.
Yusuke couldn’t resist asking, “So before this, your entire life was basically eating and sleeping?” The vampire noblewoman nodded enthusiastically.
“Yep!
Pretty much!” She didn’t seem remotely embarrassed.
“It’s strange, though.
This is the first time I’ve ever felt this awake.
I was always sleepy before, so I spent almost all my time asleep…” She stood up again and began looking around the chamber with obvious curiosity, apparently finding everything fascinating.
“Does that mean you’re my Master now?” She looked at Yusuke.
“And where is this place?” Yusuke sighed.
“I’d love to know.” He stood up as well.
“But since you’re awake now, you can help me.
Our first priority is figuring out how to get out of this place.” Even if the spirit he’d acquired seemed a little…
simple, Yusuke was still genuinely relieved.
At least he wasn’t the only living thing inside this miserable temple anymore.
Over the endless stretch of time he’d spent trapped here, he’d often thought that even having a dog around would’ve kept him from going half insane with boredom.
What he hadn’t expected was for the formerly elegant—and increasingly goofy—Vampire Fraulein to tilt her head in confusion.
“What do you mean, figure out how to leave?” Yusuke looked at her.
Fraulein seemed genuinely puzzled.
“If you want to go outside, can’t you just…
go outside?” Yusuke laughed.
“Oh, really?” He folded his arms.
“Then go ahead.
Show me.” What a joke.
Yusuke had searched every last corner of this damned temple.
If leaving were as easy as simply deciding to go outside, why would he have spent so long trapped here that meeting a bunch of murderous cultists had felt exciting?
And then— ‘What the fuck?’ For a moment, Yusuke nearly shouted the strongest profanity his previous life had taught him.
Because right in front of his eyes, before he’d even finished processing his own words, Vampire Fraulein vanished.
Just like that.
Whoosh.
Gone.
Yusuke stared at the empty space.
“…?” ‘What the fuck?’ Where did she go?
She really just left because he told her to?
Wait…
Yusuke suddenly felt something.
He immediately closed his eyes and focused, reconnecting his consciousness with the body resting on the bed in Satellite.
A moment later, the body of “Fujishiro Yusuke” sat upright.
Yusuke opened his eyes.
Floating directly in front of him was Vampire Fraulein.
The only difference was that, unlike her solid form inside the temple, her body was now partially transparent, giving her the appearance of a hovering ghost.
Fraulein covered her mouth with both hands.
Her face wore the unmistakable expression of someone whose brain had completely overloaded.
“Huh?” Her crimson eyes darted between Yusuke and the body he was currently inhabiting.
“Why are there two Masters?!” Yusuke stared back at her.