Once the dust settled, Ryan Valerius let out a piercing scream from atop the altar.
His entire body convulsed violently as though something invisible were being torn out of him.
A hazy silhouette seemed to separate from his flesh before dissolving into nothingness.
Within two short seconds, all strength left his body, and he collapsed onto the stone altar like a puppet with its strings cut.
Then he stopped moving.
Yusuke still had no idea what kind of evil god this cult worshipped, but he had to admit the thing was surprisingly fair about its rules.
Ryan had lost the Duel during the ritual, so the god had apparently gone ahead and accepted its own Ritual Arbiter as the sacrifice instead.
It certainly wasn’t picky.
The cultists below the altar stood frozen, completely at a loss.
Their own Arbiter had actually been sacrificed?
Ever since the Order was founded, these ritual Duels had been little more than formalities.
A Ritual Arbiter losing was so absurd that no one had ever considered the possibility, which meant none of them had the slightest idea what they were supposed to do next.
And there was another problem.
Ryan himself had declared before the Duel that if the sacrifice defeated him, he would surrender both his place as the offering and his position as Ritual Arbiter.
Now the sacrifice had actually won.
Did that mean this guy was technically their new Ritual Arbiter?
Were they supposed to kneel and salute him now?
While everyone was still staring around in confusion, a scream suddenly came from the crowd.
One of the black-robed cultists collapsed without warning, his body convulsing exactly as Ryan’s had moments earlier.
Then the same thing began happening to the others.
Like a chain reaction, screams spread throughout the cavern.
Cultist after cultist dropped to the floor, their bodies twisting and spasming as agonized cries echoed from every direction.
In a matter of seconds, the sealed underground chamber sounded like some hellish pit filled with the wailing of the damned.
Less than half a minute later, every cultist lay scattered across the ground.
None of them showed any sign of life.
Yusuke was the only person left standing around the massive altar.
He certainly hadn’t expected things to develop this way.
After thinking it over, he could only assume that everyone present had been part of the sacrificial ritual itself.
The ceremony had completely fallen apart when the intended sacrifice defeated the officiant, and perhaps whatever evil god they worshipped had simply decided to cut its losses and dispose of the entire group of failures at once.
Whatever the explanation, the immediate danger appeared to be over.
And once the boss fight was finished, there was only one natural thing left to do.
Loot the bodies.
Yusuke wasted no time.
He searched every cultist in the cavern, and whenever he found cards on one of them, he took every last one.
If he really had transmigrated into some version of the Yu-Gi-Oh!
world, then Duel Monsters cards were equivalent to strength.
They were one of the most valuable resources he could possibly acquire, so there was no reason to leave anything behind.
Unfortunately, after searching the entire cavern with considerable enthusiasm, Yusuke came away thoroughly disappointed.
Very few of the cultists had even been carrying Decks.
The way these people had constantly thrown around phrases like “Satellite trash” had made them sound as though they belonged to some elite organization filled with powerful duelists.
Yusuke had expected to walk away from this place with enough good cards to completely overhaul the miserable starter Deck he had inherited.
Reality was nowhere near that generous.
To be fair, the cards he found were better than the pile of vanilla Normal Monsters he had started with, especially the ones taken from Ryan.
But from the perspective of someone who had played modern Yu-Gi-Oh!
in his previous life, the difference was less like upgrading from primitive weapons to firearms and more like trading a stone spear for a pitchfork.
An improvement, certainly.
Just not much of one.
Yusuke glanced down at Ryan’s lifeless body and, unable to resist, gave it an annoyed kick.
“Seriously?
You were acting that smug with a Deck this shitty?” After putting away everything he had collected, Yusuke followed the damp current of air flowing through the cavern until he found an exit covered in moss.
The moment he emerged from underground, dim gray daylight pressed down around him.
Everywhere he looked, old buildings stood in various stages of collapse, their walls weathered and crumbling.
Yusuke followed a cracked asphalt road through the ruins, and there was something vaguely familiar about the shape of the streets.
He tried digging through the lingering memories inside this body.
Unfortunately, perhaps because the original owner was already dead, those memories were badly fragmented.
Searching through them felt like trying to separate sheets of paper that had been left soaking in water—everything was blurred, torn, and stuck together.
After considerable effort, Yusuke finally managed to recover two useful pieces of information.
The original owner of this body seemed to have been named Fujishiro Yusuke.
And somewhere in the jumble of memories was a vague address in Satellite that appeared to be his home.
Following half-remembered landmarks, Yusuke eventually found the place.
It was a squat, two-story concrete building.
Almost all the paint had peeled away from the exterior, exposing dark, unfinished cement beneath.
The window frames had nearly rusted through, and the railing along the stairway was covered in corrosion.
Yusuke went inside and searched the cramped kitchen.
The only food he found was two pieces of hardened rye bread.
It was probably the worst bread he had ever seen.
The texture was dry and coarse, and it was hard enough that chewing it almost hurt his teeth.
Yet the moment Yusuke took his first bite and swallowed that stale, painfully dry mouthful, an almost overwhelming sense of satisfaction washed through him.
It felt like the first thing he had eaten after spending an entire lifetime trapped inside that damned temple.
Even the cheapest, roughest bread from the slums of Satellite somehow tasted like a feast.
That was also when Yusuke realized something else.
He could actually share this body’s sense of taste.
During the Shadow Duel at the altar, however, he hadn’t felt any of the pain that should have accompanied the damage he received.
Curious, Yusuke experimented for a moment and soon figured out how it worked.
Whether he synchronized with the body’s senses appeared to be entirely under his control.
When he wanted to, he could experience everything the body experienced.
When he didn’t, he could simply disconnect from any of its senses, including pain.
Yusuke continued eating his long-awaited food while sorting through everything he had learned.
The cult’s officiant had said this place was Satellite, and this was obviously a world where dueling played an absurdly important role in society.
That made Yu-Gi-Oh!
5D’s the most likely setting.
What he still didn’t know was whether this borrowed body and his real body inside the temple even existed in the same dimension.
If they did, where exactly was that temple located in this world?
And more importantly, how was he supposed to free his real body from it?
The mysterious octahedral artifact he had discovered inside the temple allowed him to project part of his consciousness outward and possess another body, which at least gave him a way to escape the maddening loneliness for a while.
But his actual body was still trapped.
If there was any way to release it from that temple, Yusuke definitely intended to find it.
There was another issue as well.
If this borrowed body really was somewhere in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!
5D’s, then figuring out where he was on the timeline was extremely important.
In the anime, a group of lunatics known as the Dark Signers eventually tried to summon beings called the Earthbound Immortals.
The problem was that those monsters required enormous numbers of human souls as sacrifices whenever they appeared.
And the residents of Satellite had been unfortunate enough to end up as the victims.
When the Earthbound Immortals descended, the souls of people throughout Satellite were consumed.
Yusuke had finally obtained a body he could use to move around freely and escape the boredom of the temple.
The last thing he wanted was to be minding his own business one day, look up to see the mark of an Earthbound Immortal spreading across the sky, and suddenly have this body get its soul sucked out.
That would be an incredibly stupid way to lose his only means of freedom.
To make matters worse, while controlling Sakuma’s body, Yusuke had also tried experimenting with the octahedral artifact through the portion of his consciousness that remained in the temple.
The thing had stopped responding entirely.
It was almost as though possessing this body had drained whatever energy the artifact had stored.
Which meant that until Yusuke figured out how the artifact actually worked, Sakuma’s body was the only “account” he currently had access to.
If he carelessly got this body killed as well, he would be right back where he started, trapped in that empty temple with absolutely nothing to do.
Yusuke promptly drew up a mental list of priorities for his new life.
Collect cards.
Get stronger.
Find a way out of Satellite before this place turned into a supernatural disaster zone.
And…
Oh, right.
Eat.
Definitely eat!
Being trapped in the temple had left him desperate for anything with an actual taste.
At this point, he didn’t care what it was.
If it counted as food and had some kind of flavor, he wanted to try it.
Yusuke was still chewing on the bread and organizing his thoughts when a quiet sound reached his ears.
Click.
It was faint but unmistakable: the metallic scrape of a key sliding into the lock, followed by the soft turn of the mechanism.
Yusuke stopped chewing for a moment.
‘Someone’s coming home.’