The blue light from the central pedestal flared, shifting from diffuse ambient illumination into razor-sharp lines of coherent hard-light. Particles knit together in midair, crackling with static that raised the fine hairs on Ryuki's arms. The air in the vault grew heavy, charged with an ozone scent so sharp it burned his nostrils. The figure took shape inch by inch. High-collared white trench coat flared at the tails, ironed to impossible sharpness. Silver studs glinted along black leather arm straps. Piercing blue eyes sat beneath sharp brown hair, set in an expression of absolute, unyielding disdain. "A rat in my sanctuary," the voice rang out, echoing through the vault with the resonant, metallic bite of a stadium speaker system. "Stealing from the vault of KaibaCorp." Ryuki stopped breathing. His lungs locked in his chest. His tongue felt like lead glued to the roof of his mouth. He took a staggering step backward, his boot dragging hard across the polished steel floor. His heel caught the lip of a recessed panel, but he didn't look down. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the ghost standing six feet in front of him. Seto Kaiba. Not a drawing. Not an actor in a cheap convention coat. Not a digital portrait rendered on a phone screen in a cramped apartment. The physical presence was suffocating. The cold, imposing weight of the man who had built an empire out of solid light and titanium radiated right off the hard-light projection. He actually did it, Ryuki thought, his mind spinning into a sickening spiral of shock and terrifying clarity. Before he vanished... before Zero Reverse broke this city in half... he copied his entire mind into the mainframe. He digitized his own soul. "State your name, intruder," the digital Kaiba commanded, crossing his arms over his chest. The lines of his coat hummed with high-voltage electricity, throwing long, jagged shadows against the titanium walls. "You bypass my security, trip the legacy protocol, and expect to walk out with my personal property? You are nothing but a common thief crawling through my wreckage." Ryuki’s heart slammed against his ribs like a trapped bird. The crimson mark on his right forearm flared white-hot, sending a pulse of sheer agony shooting up to his shoulder. He gasped, his left hand clamping hard around his forearm. The fresh deck of Blue-Eyes cards slot into duel disk felt impossibly heavy, threatening to drag him down to the floor. Every instinct honed in his past life screaming at him to treat this figure as untouchable. Seto Kaiba was the benchmark. The legendary duelist who answered to no one, who spat in the face of ancient gods and forced the world to bend to his technology. --- For five agonizing seconds, Ryuki felt the crushing urge to drop his head. In his old life, Kaiba was an icon—an unmatchable titan of the game, a figure revered by millions who spent hours studying his playstyles. In this world, he was the architect of modern dueling, the man whose shadow stretched across every stadium, every card shop, and every duel disk ever forged. Take a knee, a coward's voice whispered in the dark corners of Ryuki's mind. You're nobody. A ghost in a stolen body, shivering in a ruined district, eating stale rations and running from motorcycle cops. Then the crimson mark on his arm thrummed again. Not with agony this time, but with a fierce, blinding heat that flooded his bloodstream with raw adrenaline. Ryuki’s jaw set. His teeth clicked together so hard his jaw creaked. His knuckles turned white around the edges of his makeshift cloak. No. He hadn't died under the crushing weight of a truck just to grovel before a computer program. He hadn't dragged himself through miles of dusty, barren wasteland, starving and hunted by Sector Security as a branded fugitive, only to bow to a dead man's memory. "A thief?" Ryuki’s voice was raspy, dry as cracked clay from his march through the outer districts, but he forced it clear and hard. He straightened his back, lifting his chin until his glare matched Kaiba's line for line. "I didn't steal a damn thing. Your system recognized me. It unlocked Vault 1 because I belong here." Kaiba’s hologram narrowed its eyes. A dark, sharp laugh echoed from the ceiling speakers, devoid of any genuine warmth. "Belong here? Look at yourself. You look like something scraped off the bottom of a rat's den. A true duelist commands respect through absolute, undeniable power—not by crawling through dusty ruins and claiming scraps from a dead era." "Then test me," Ryuki raised his wrist-mounted duel disk with full of pride. The mechanical tray snapped shut with a violent, metallic click, locking the cards in place as the board extended with a sharp whistle of hydraulics. "You want to talk about power? Stop hiding behind high-and-mighty speeches and activate the dueling frame." The phantom's expression hardened into pure, zero-degree frost. "Arrogant worm. You think possessing a glowing brand on your arm makes you special? In my sight, you are merely another pest to be erased beneath the boots of perfection." "I'm not a pest," Ryuki said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register. "I'm the duelist who's taking what's mine. Turn on the system." "Very well," Kaiba said coldly. He raised his left arm. A phantom duel disk materialized over his wrist in a flash of blinding blue light, gleaming with immaculate white lacquer and razor-edged light emitters. "I shall personally purge this vault of your delusion!" --- Deep within the central core of the KaibaCorp mainframe, miles away in a climate-controlled subterranean control room, a massive curved console flickered to life with hundreds of glowing green diagnostic lines. Mokuba Kaiba sat in the operator's chair, his small fingers dancing across a mechanical keyboard as code streamed past his eyes in relentless cascades. His brow was tightly furrowed, a bead of sweat tracing down his temple. "System synchronization at eighty-five percent," Mokuba muttered under his breath, reaching up to adjust a pair of sliding frequency toggles on the primary feed panel. "Digital consciousness link... stable. Hard-light rendering... locked." On the center console's twin primary displays, two distinct live feeds split the screen side by side. On the left feed: Seto Kaiba's digital construct. His deck was entirely virtual—a high-density data file containing the original, unyielding power of the classic Blue-Eyes White Dragon strategies, routed directly through the mainframe's supercomputing core. On the right feed: Ryuki Sato. His physical deck sat inside a mechanical card reader, the optic sensors scanning the physical card sleeves and physical cardboard printed with high-grade optical inks. "Both decks..." Mokuba whispered, staring at the telemetry readouts in disbelief. "They're both Blue-Eyes decks. But the signal profiles... they don't look anything alike." On the left feed, Seto's digital deck registered massive, raw attack metrics—heavy dragon beatdown monsters, destructive board-wiping spells, and ruthless direct-damage traps designed to overwhelm an opponent in a single, unmerciful turn. On the right feed, Ryuki's deck readout flashed with entirely modern code signatures: Tuner monsters, modern Extra Deck Synchro entities, tactical search engine cards, and complex multi-card combo chains built for resource recursion and field negation. "Two completely different eras of dueling," Mokuba murmured, his hands hovering over the emergency disconnect keys. "Seto's raw, unstoppable force against this stranger's hyper-efficient modern engine..." In the center of Vault 1, heavy steel security doors slid shut with a deafening hydraulic thud, locking both combatants inside the arena. Life point counters materialized in glowing red numbers above both duelists' heads. [SETO KAIBA: 4000 LP] [RYUKI SATO: 4000 LP] Mokuba held his breath, watching the dual systems sync up. The digital duel disk on Seto's wrist and the physical duel disk on Ryuki's arm clicked into complete alignment, two different philosophies of the exact same dragon preparing to collide.

Chapter 17: Star Struck