Vampire Fraulein’s dark-red eyes shimmered with confusion, as though what she was seeing had exceeded the processing limits of her tiny ghost brain.
“Wait…
both of them feel like the same Master, but there are clearly two of you…” The more she tried to explain it, the more tangled she became.
Her eyes practically seemed ready to turn into the spirals anime characters got whenever their brains crashed.
Fraulein clearly had no idea what was going on.
Yusuke, however, understood.
As a Duel Monster Spirit, she seemed able to sense the spiritual bond connecting her to the duelist who possessed her card.
That was why she could tell that both the person standing before her and the person inside the temple were her owner, even though her eyes were telling her they were two completely different bodies.
Hence the supernatural brain overload.
“If you can’t figure it out, don’t think about it,” Yusuke said after a moment.
“Also, you don’t need to call me Master.
My name is Yusuke.
Just call me that.” Mostly because “Master” sounded a little strange coming from a girl dressed like her.
Combined with the Gothic outfit, it was starting to evoke a completely different kind of roleplay.
“Oh, okay.” Fraulein nodded obediently.
“Understood, Master.” Yusuke stared at her.
“…” Whatever.
It wasn’t important.
What interested him far more was the fact that Vampire Fraulein had apparently teleported all the way from the temple to his body in Satellite.
Perhaps that was a unique ability of Duel Monster Spirits.
Maybe they could use the duelist they were bonded to as an anchor and freely move between locations connected to that person.
There was another obvious difference.
Here in Satellite, Fraulein looked like a ghost.
Her body was translucent, she had no physical substance, and she seemed unable to interact with anything around her.
From what Yusuke remembered of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Monster Spirits in this state could usually only be seen by rare duelists with unusually high spiritual affinity, such as Jaden Yuki.
Ordinary people probably couldn’t see or hear them at all.
An idea occurred to him.
“Can you go back to the temple?” “Sure.” Fraulein nodded.
Then— Whoosh.
She vanished from Satellite.
A moment later, the pale girl in her Gothic dress materialized once again inside the magnificent golden temple.
So she really could teleport back and forth whenever she wanted.
Yusuke was honestly a little jealous.
He desperately wanted to know how she could casually slip out of the enormous prison that had trapped him for so long, but unfortunately Fraulein herself couldn’t explain it.
She could simply do it.
That was apparently the full extent of her understanding.
Inside the temple, Yusuke reached out and gently pinched one of her pale cheeks.
Soft.
Slightly cool.
Surprisingly pleasant to the touch.
Fraulein took two steps backward and covered her cheek.
“Mm!
Master, what was that for?” Yusuke didn’t answer.
He was thinking.
Inside the temple, she possessed a fully physical body.
He could see her and touch her normally.
But the moment she traveled to Satellite, she became an intangible spirit.
Was there some fundamental difference between the two environments?
Fraulein waited for a while, then tilted her head and leaned around behind him.
“What’s wrong?
Is there something I can help you with?” Yusuke snapped out of his thoughts and smiled at her.
“Plenty.” He looked her up and down.
“Looks like neither of us is getting much sleep tonight.” Fraulein blinked.
“…?” …
And they really did spend most of the night experimenting.
The main thing Yusuke wanted to determine was simple: whether Vampire Fraulein was safe for him to use and whether the supposedly cursed card posed any danger to him.
At first, no matter how many times he summoned Fraulein through a Duel Disk or tested her monster effect, Yusuke couldn’t feel any noticeable consequence.
For a while, he wondered whether the life-draining phenomenon had only been an unconscious passive ability while Fraulein was dormant.
Maybe awakening her had somehow disabled it.
Another possibility was that testing alone wasn’t sufficient, and the curse only activated during a real Duel against an opponent.
Further experimentation soon ruled both possibilities out.
When Yusuke concentrated carefully enough, he eventually noticed something.
Summoning Vampire Fraulein and using her effect didn’t leave him completely unaffected.
An extremely faint stream of vitality really was being drawn from his body and transferred into Fraulein.
It was simply so insignificant that even when he focused on it, the loss was difficult to detect.
If his body had been represented by a game interface, the HP drain was probably slower than his passive regeneration from simply breathing.
To Yusuke, it was negligible.
Fraulein, however, was having a very different experience.
As the tests continued, the deathly pallor of her cheeks gradually disappeared, replaced by a healthy flush.
Every now and then, she even let out one or two strange little breaths.
When Yusuke asked what was happening, Fraulein couldn’t explain it properly.
She only kept saying that her body felt increasingly strange.
After questioning her for quite a while and piecing together her clumsy descriptions, Yusuke finally understood.
The amount of life force that felt almost nonexistent to him was already far too much for her.
Her body was effectively screaming one message at her.
‘Too much.’ ‘Way too much.’ ‘I’m completely full.’ That finally allowed Yusuke to reach a conclusion.
The reason Vampire Fraulein had earned a reputation as a cursed card probably wasn’t because she deliberately killed her owners.
Her previous wielders had simply been too weak.
For an ordinary human, repeatedly feeding the card enough vitality to summon her and activate her power could eventually drain them dry.
Yusuke didn’t appear to have that problem.
His vitality felt like an endless ocean.
Vampire Fraulein, by comparison, was little more than a narrow drinking straw.
Even if she somehow consumed enough to stuff herself until she burst, it wouldn’t make any meaningful difference to him.
Confirming that only made Yusuke even more curious about the identity and nature of his true body.
‘Seriously…
what the hell am I?’ He had spent what felt like an eternity trapped inside that enormous temple without becoming thirsty, hungry, or exhausted.
Now he’d discovered that his life force existed on an entirely different scale from that of an ordinary human.
At this point, it was starting to sound disturbingly close to immortality.
Still, that was hardly bad news.
…
The night passed.
Before long, Yusuke reached his first morning in Satellite.
After taking control of his body there and getting out of bed, he went to the bathroom for a quick wash.
When he passed the dining table, he noticed a note pinned beneath a small object.
[Brother, breakfast is ready in the kitchen.
I’m off to school!
—Yukine] Yusuke stared at it.
“…” Did sisters like this actually exist?
While eating the breakfast Yukine had left for him, Yusuke began planning his day.
Going back to factory work was out of the question.
Absolutely not.
After discovering just how profitable robbing— No.
Finding cards could be, why would he voluntarily return to a factory in Satellite and work himself to death for pocket change?
In Satellite, people generally played whatever cards they could get their hands on.
Now that Yusuke had acquired Vampire Fraulein and an entire collection of Zombie cards the previous night, he had already begun considering whether he could build his Deck around Zombies.
Zombie strategies had actually enjoyed several periods of competitive success during the early history of Yu-Gi-Oh!, with a number of highly splashable cards regularly appearing in strong Decks.
Even during the 5D’s era, real-world Zombie Synchro had at one point become one of the dominant competitive strategies of its time.
Though now that he thought about it…
Why did almost everyone who used Zombies in the anime seem to be a villain?
Not that it mattered.
Cards themselves weren’t good or evil.
It depended entirely on the duelist.
And someone as handsome, cheerful, and wholesome as Yusuke obviously couldn’t become a villain just because he played Zombies.
While he was thinking, a familiar voice suddenly reached his ears.
“So this is human food?
It tastes awful.” Yusuke quickly realized that the voice was being heard through his true body inside the temple.
He shifted his attention there.
Vampire Fraulein stood elegantly beneath her parasol, holding a piece of hard rye bread in both hands.
She was delicately nibbling at it in tiny bites while simultaneously giving it a terrible review.
“This is called bread,” Yusuke said casually.
“And this particular kind is pretty low-grade even by human standards.
It’s not representative of food in general—” Halfway through the sentence, he froze.
Then his head snapped around.
In one swift motion, he grabbed the partially eaten bread straight out of Fraulein’s hands.
The vampire girl stared at him blankly.
Hadn’t he just said it was low-quality food?
Why was he snatching her crappy bread away?
Yusuke forced down the sudden surge of excitement in his chest and asked in a low voice, “Where did you get this bread?”