Chapter 3: The First Battle

The initial deck brought over from another world was thus complete.

After checking it over and confirming there were no mistakes, Yu Xuan naturally began to feel his fingers itch.

There was no card player alive who would not want to test a freshly finished deck.

So, with that in mind, his first stop was the dojo where his former self had been affiliated, planning to find a random fellow student there and let him bring the pleasure of dueling.

Upon arriving at the dojo and stepping through the door, he saw a crowd of trainees gathered around one spot, making a racket.

"That’s Sato for you, actually made it through the thunder tribulation!"

Yu Xuan raised an eyebrow and looked over with some curiosity.

In the middle of the group stood a blond-haired fellow with a hairstyle that practically screamed that he knew how to play cards. He sounded modest, but could not quite hide his pride. "Oh, it was nothing, just got to three stars by luck. Nothing special, haha..."

"Three stars! Brother Sato must be the first three-star duelist in our dojo, right?"

"So strong..."

Yu Xuan frowned and searched through the memories of his former self before finally understanding what they were talking about.

The Duelist Star system was an ability-rating index devised by Kaiba Corporation, adjusted in real time according to each duelist’s record registered in the company system. It was the same system that appeared in the anime.

Normally, the duelist star range ran from one to eight, eight ranks in all. In the Duelist Kingdom arc of the anime, both the Duel King Yugi Muto and Seto Kaiba himself were rated at level eight.

However, it was also clear that the system was by no means absolutely authoritative; at times, it carried a certain personal bias as well. For example, Joey Wheeler, the man Kaiba contemptuously called a "commoner."

Joey was described by Pegasus as the "world’s third duelist, after Yugi and Kaiba," yet in Kaiba Corporation’s system he was only level two, which was basically amateur tier.

It would be hard to say Kaiba’s private grudge against the commoner had no influence there...

But that was a matter from the Duelist Kingdom era. By now, Joey Wheeler had long since been adjusted to level eight, the highest tier among ordinary duelists, known to the world as one of the "Legendary Duelists."

And President Seto Kaiba, in his usual obnoxious fashion, had raised himself to level ten.

In the present world, there were only two level-ten duelists left. One was Kaiba Seto himself, and the other was Yugi Muto, who had long since put away his cards and retired.

That arrangement, on the one hand, reflected Kaiba’s belief that he stood above all existing duelists; on the other, it also meant that Yugi Muto was the only opponent in the world Kaiba recognized as worthy of being his equal...

...Well, saying equal was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. After all, it was common knowledge that throughout his life President Kaiba had challenged Duel King Yugi Muto countless times, yet to this day had never won once.

As for Yu Xuan’s former self, his rating in the system was...

...one star.

A total scrub among scrubs.

Yu Xuan: (´ヘ｀;)

Apparently, because his former self was both awful and addicted to the game, he often went to the arenas under Kaiba Corporation to queue for matches, losing far more than he won. Over time, his star rating naturally plummeted straight into the abyss.

Ordinary people had to raise their stars by playing matches in the arena, but it seemed that the arena queue could only raise one as high as four stars at most; after that, to go further, one had to enter public competitions.

Only then did he remember that, when he had previously looked up the enrollment requirements for Duel Academy, there had been a rule saying that a duelist certified by Kaiba Corporation had to be at least level three.

In this system, levels seven and eight were either legendary duelists or top-tier professionals. Most professional duelists were level six, with a few lower-ranking professionals at level five.

Most amateur duelists clustered around level two. Level one was for novices below average, while level three already counted as skilled.

So requiring at least three stars for enrollment in Duel Academy was already quite strict.

But that was only natural. At this stage, duel education in this world was still in its infancy, and there were not many schools to choose from. Kaiba’s academy was among the very best, and its quality and enormous investment of resources were there for all to see.

At the start of GX, the principal also mentioned in his speech to the entire school that admissions were highly selective, so every student there was an elite. Even the nameless background students in the anime, including the dead-last underperformers in the Slifer Red dorm, were, in theory, better than most duelists out in the world.

"So if I want into the academy, I need to climb the ranks first..." Yu Xuan’s mouth twitched.

The trainee surrounded by the others was named Sato Koji, and he was already the big brother of this small dojo. It seemed he had been lucky this week and reached three stars, so everyone was crowding around to congratulate him.

Yu Xuan happened to be looking for someone to challenge, and at that thought he decided he might as well challenge this big brother and see what happened.

Although the nameless background characters in the anime all seemed pretty weak, Yu Xuan understood well that practice was the only path to real knowledge. One could not jump to conclusions based on stereotypes without testing them firsthand.

Just right for gauging the strength of duelists in this world.

The dojo encouraged students to duel and spar frequently. At this moment, with Sato having just gained a great many points and feeling especially cheerful, there was naturally no reason for him to refuse a challenge.

When the students scattered throughout the dojo heard there was a card game to watch, they immediately gathered around the dueling area to observe.

"Seriously? That Yu Xuan? Challenging Brother Sato?"

"Wasn’t he only at one star? Isn’t that just asking to get wrecked..."

The students were chuckling nearby, while the two combatants had already taken their places on opposite sides of the arena.

Sato Koji was relaxed. Having just climbed in rank, coming back to the dojo now to duel, and seeing all these junior students around him, he felt rather like a man looking down upon the peaks from high above.

Right now he carried the air of an accomplished master coming to instruct the younger generation. He was no longer dueling merely to improve through sparring, but partly to give his juniors guidance and partly to satisfy his own desire to show off and bask in admiration.

...Yes, the latter was probably the larger part.

What else?

A three-star expert like him against a one-star junior—surely there was no way he could throw the match, right?

The two duel disks unfolded, and each drew five opening cards.

"Duel!" x2

[Yu Xuan, LP 4000]

[Koji, LP 4000]

"I’ll go first. Draw."

Yu Xuan drew a card from his deck.

In the anime, this was still an era when the first player could draw. In his previous life, first turns had not been allowed to draw for many years.

Turn order was generally decided randomly by both duel disks, though the player who got the first move could choose to forgo it.

With his opening six-card hand in view, he nodded slightly. It could not quite be called a perfect opening hand, but it was decent enough.

"First, this card..."

He took out the first card and slid it into the duel disk.

"Pay 1000 life points to activate the spell card from my hand: Graceful Charity's Mischievous Twin Demons!"

[Yu Xuan, LP 4000 -> LP 3000]

As the card was inserted, the three-dimensional projection of a green spell card appeared before Yu Xuan. One red and one blue little demon flew out together, each with a number floating above its head, "1" and "2."

"This card’s effect lets your opponent discard one card at random, and then choose and discard another card from their hand."

A simple, brutal hand-destruction weapon from the early tournament era. A violent one-for-two trade; once it hit the field, the opponent was down two cards from the start.

It was only natural that such a vicious thing received the same treatment as Pot of Greed. Ever since Yu Xuan had started playing, it had been a forbidden card that belonged in the dungeon forever. After all these years, this was still the first time he had personally played it.

The demons darted out and, without the slightest hesitation, snatched one of Koji’s cards straight from his hand, as if to say: hand it over.

Koji frowned and then chose another card to send to the graveyard.

After that, Yu Xuan made no further moves and instead casually drew out three cards from his hand—

—then set three cards face-down and passed.

He made a polite inviting gesture.

All right, now it was your turn to play Yu-Gi-Oh.

Any real-life card player facing those three ominous face-down cards would already be sensing the stench of doom and breaking into a cold sweat. But ignorance breeds fearlessness, and duelists raised in the sunny atmosphere of the anime had no sense of how serious the situation was.

Koji even kept that friendly senior-student smile, saying in an instructive tone, "You didn’t draw a monster card on turn one? Junior, when building your deck, you need to pay attention to the proper balance between monsters and spells and traps.

"Then it’s my turn, draw!"

"Wait."

Yu Xuan cut him off with a wave of his hand.

"The moment you draw, the trap has already been triggered. Open the set card: Trap Card - Trap of the Falling Pit!

"During your draw phase, the card you draw is sent directly to the graveyard."

Koji: "!"

He hesitated a little, then sent the card he had just drawn and had not even warmed in his hand into the graveyard zone of the duel disk. When he looked down again at his remaining hand, he finally began to realize something was wrong.

At this point, neither side had summoned a single monster. It seemed as though the duel had barely even started, yet Koji’s opening six cards were already cut in half, leaving only three.

And he also faced a far more irritating problem.

He had no monsters in hand either...

Two of the cards discarded by the twin demons included a low-level monster, and the one just sent to the grave by Trap of the Falling Pit was another. Now he had only three cards total, and not a single monster he could summon.

But that did not matter.

"Tch. In that case, I activate a spell card from my hand..."

Koji swept his hand and slapped down another of the three remaining cards.

Monster Reborn!

A revival spell that could resurrect a monster from the graveyard, revered as one of the great comeback cards from the DM era through GX, both in the real game and in the anime.

"I’ll use Monster Reborn to bring this guy back from the graveyard... Warrior of Zera, revived in attack position!"

This time, a warrior clad in green armor and wielding a greatsword appeared, standing proudly at the center of the field as the first monster to enter this duel.

[Warrior of Zera, ATK 1600]

If he had any choice, Koji definitely would not have wanted to use his precious Monster Reborn on some mediocre monster. But there was no help for it; he simply had no other cards to play. In a duel, hesitation meant defeat, and he had to seize the chance to launch an offensive rhythm...

"Open the set card: Trap Hole of the Netherworld."

Yu Xuan calmly flipped over a back-row card.

"When the opponent summons a monster with 1500 or more attack, that monster is destroyed and banished."

And so, before Warrior of Zera could even steady his footing after being brought back at the cost of Monster Reborn, he stepped straight into a black pit that opened beneath him, fell in with a boom, exploded into a cloud of smoke, and vanished without a trace.

Koji: "..."

With only two cards left in hand, the field was still completely empty.

It was unclear whether it was an illusion.

Sato Koji felt as if his blood pressure had started to rise.