KaibaCorp Headquarters.
"The energy storage unit is functioning properly."
Mokuba standing at the control console handed Kira's Duel Disk back to him.
He had just performed routine inspection and maintenance on Kira's Duel Disk, and adjusted and installed several new components.
Half a month ago, Kira had come specifically for a certain special component—the energy storage unit just mentioned.
It wasn't a common device, but the technology wasn't exactly rare. Its operating principle resembled the Bio-Band Professor Thelonious Viper forced all the students and staff at Duel Academy to wear in the early part of the anime's Other Dimension arc.
In the show, the professor required everyone to wear his issued wrist device, which later turned out to be part of his scheme. Once worn, it couldn't be removed. Every time a person dueled, the device would absorb the energy produced by the duel, siphoning off the duelist's life force as well.
The endpoint of that energy extraction was in the secret lab the professor had built on the island. All the energy from the entire academy's duels would be absorbed into the body of a Duel Spirit stored in that device.
That spirit was Yubel.
At that time, Yubel had returned from the stars through great hardship, grievously weakened—her power was a mere fraction of what it once was, and she couldn't even manifest a physical form. So she manipulated Professor Thelonious Viper mentally and used him to collect energy to fully revive herself.
Inspired by Yubel's method, Kira looked on the dark web and checked with Mokuba for devices with similar functionality. He actually found one.
"Incredible," Mokuba said in surprise after testing the energy storage unit mounted on Kira's Duel Disk. "In just half a month you've collected this much energy… What kind of intense dueling have you been doing?"
"Haha, not that bad. Maybe the duels were just high quality," Kira chuckled.
Still, he had indeed been dueling frequently—active in the Spirit World every night, and fighting the Shadow Riders in reality. Most of those were dark duels.
A single dark duel generates many times the energy of a normal duel, and since he'd had a lot of matches, the energy piled up quickly.
"I've logged all the data, and the Duel Disk tuning is about done—did some maintenance while I was at it," Mokuba said with a grin. "It should be as good as new now."
"Thanks."
Kira took the Duel Disk back and strapped it on.
"Haha, no problem. I should be thanking you," Mokuba replied. "The product is still in testing. What you've gathered is invaluable test data—it'll help a lot with future development."
He paused, then asked curiously, "But why the sudden interest in collecting duel energy? What do you need so much for?"
"Well…"
Kira smiled mysteriously. "Once I'm done, you'll know."
He was collecting energy for the Sacred Beasts.
As mentioned before, the seven keys sealing the Sacred Beasts were a smokescreen. The real way to break their seal was through dueling. In the original story, it was the students' dark duels with the Shadow Riders on Academy Island that awakened the three Beasts.
In theory, if you collected enough duel energy and poured it all at once into the Sacred Beasts' sealing array, you should be able to break the seal as well.
When that time came, even if he couldn't find Kagemaru, as long as he got to the Sacred Beasts before that old fox, the geezer would be left staring, slack-jawed.
"By the way, how are those victims doing?" Kira asked casually.
Mokuba blinked, then understood. "Oh, them."
He meant the souls Kira had rescued from the underground market on the dark web—those sealed into cards.
Although one could release the seals with dark power, returning the souls to their bodies, many of those souls had been separated from their bodies for years. Their bodies were empty shells, ownerless for quite some time. Even if the souls returned, recovery wouldn't necessarily be smooth.
Like Joey in Battle City waking from darkness by the bonds of friendship and sheer willpower—such cases were one-in-a-million, the chosen few. Not everyone could so easily shrug off the darkness with such resilience.
"Most of them have been located, and KaibaCorp is providing the most advanced medical care. Several have already woken up.
But many are still comatose. The medical team is doing everything they can."
"I see."
"You are really surprisingly righteous," Mokuba said with a smile. "Not everyone would step in for strangers' souls."
"I just happened to pass by. If President Kaiba had passed by, he wouldn't have stood by either."
Kira waved as he headed out. "All right, I've got to get back. I still have class tomorrow. Ping me if anything comes up."
"Got it."
Watching him leave, Mokuba smiled faintly, feeling an inexplicable sense of relief.
Perhaps having a new King of Games like this was a blessing for this world.
…
Done with his stint as Revolver, Kira returned to the academy and went straight to bed that night. Nothing else happened.
The next day, after finishing classes, he was halfway through dinner when Jaden had already pinged him several times in rapid succession.
"Done eating yet?"
"Why are you still eating?"
"Come on, log in."
"…"
Under Jaden's barrage of urges, Kira finished at a leisurely pace, returned to his room, and logged in with Jaden.
Link system, start!
Back to the Spirit World. The two mounted chocobos and continued forward.
With the Vampire Fraulein—a local—as their party member, they finally had a native guide for directions. They didn't have to find a random passerby to interrogate every few steps like before.
With her guidance, they found a gateway out of that dimension. Passing through, they entered a higher layer of dimensions, one step closer to the Supreme King's Castle.
They walked through a dazzling dimensional gate, a flash of blinding white light and a bout of vertigo, and upon landing, a wave of scorching heat washed over them.
When their eyes adjusted, the dark wasteland was gone, replaced by a boundless desert.
The sky was a vast blue, the sun blazing overhead as if it were turning everything to gold. Fine sand rolled like a golden ocean, wave after wave stretching to the horizon with no end in sight.
"So hot!"
Jaden hopped up, looked around, and muttered, "You sure the Supreme King is in a place like this? His taste in real estate is awful."