[fic] to the victorious tomorrow
Jul. 17th, 2021 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositeto the victorious tomorrow
fandom: prince of tennis, yugioh arc v
ship: niou&/kirihara
rating: g
word count: 2.6k
a/n: this is a yugioh arc v au but like umm built on so much convoluted headcanon that i don't think this is even comprehensible to anyone who happens to know both tenipuri and a5. i'm so sorry please just absorb the vibes as you read. the basic premise is that rikkai have declared war on the entire universe and are systematically invading and murdering their way through the various dimensions, and kirihara is a vanguard scout sent to infiltrate seigaku to prepare for invasion.
for the record: standard dimension = seigaku, fusion dimension = rikkai, xyz dimension = fudomine + higa, synchro dimension = hyotei (neo domino) + shitenhoji (satellite). soon after the events of this fic, xyz refugee fuji is about to arrive in seigaku and end kirihara's entire career lol
written out of rage and spite and haterism at the nioukiri erasure in evil the movie. i wish all t******* y**** a very die.
--
There’s some exchange students arriving at Seigaku today. Oishi must have mentioned it earlier, since Kirihara’s remembering it now, but at the time Kirihara had probably classified it as Not Relevant To Duelling and therefore not his business, and banished it from his mind. Looks like half the school’s decided to make it their business, though, judging by the way there's a battalion's worth of people blocking the corridor. Kirihara is once again going to be late to Advanced Fusion Theory. Well, later than usual. The class is kiddie shit he could do in his sleep; you can’t even get past the entrance test at Academia without knowing all these techniques this lameass dimension apparently considers advanced, so what Kirihara actually means is that he’s going to be late to his scheduled midmorning naptime.
He’s about to spin on his heel and take the long way to the Fusion classroom wing, when, through the miasma of students buzzing around the shiny new things, Kirihara glimpses an uncomfortably familiar head of silver hair. That’s a colour he’d recognise anywhere. Even in the identical Academia masks, the identical Academia red uniforms before the official formation of Rikkai Force and their special yellow blazers Yukimura had personally designed. Only one glance across the carnage of what had formerly been one of Fudomine’s main roads and Kirihara knew exactly who the figure sitting on the shoulder of the Ancient Gear Golem that had just bulldozed through the passage, hair shining white in the sun, was. No. No fucking way.
Like he can sense Kirihara’s incredulous gaze, the exchange student in question glances up. He zeroes in with laser accuracy right on where Kirihara's standing half-hidden by shadow on the stairs, seriously, does he have fucking x-ray vision or something, and Niou Masaharu, Major-General of Academia and major pain in Kirihara’s ass, an entire dimension away from where he’s supposed to be, lazily makes the Rikkai Force hand signal for all clear at Kirihara. Reflexively Kirihara makes the understood hand signal back. Then he registers what he’s doing and scowls, dropping his arm.
He doesn’t recognise the other two people with Niou, so either they’re random scrapings off the bottom of the Academia barrel or they really are exchange students. It’s not like it matters. Kirihara storms down the stairs, shoving the Seigaku crowd aside, fires off something like, “Yo I’m second-year ace Kirihara Akaya I just transferred here too welcome to Seigaku let me take you around,” and yanks Niou away by the wrist.
Or tries to. Don’t all these kids have classes to go to? As Kirihara’s attempting to disentangle them from their audience Niou says, brightly, “I simply love your blazer, Kirihara-kun, what school did you say you transferred from again?” So not only is Niou here running interference on Kirihara’s mission, he is also apparently in Yagyuu mode. Two major pains for the price of one! Kirihara might as well have never left Academia at all.
As well as being depressingly outdated compared to the Rikkai-exclusive facilities back at Academia, Seigaku’s solo duel simulators are weirdly and inefficiently roomy, which makes them disconcerting to practise in but perfect for discreet meetings. Obviously Kirihara checked them for surveillance cameras the first week he got here, he’s not stupid. Kirihara drags Niou to the nearest block, pushes him in, and slams the door to the duel simulator shut after them both. Overhead, the automatic lights click on, warming the room with a pleasant and extremely unatmospheric glow.
Then Kirihara whirls around to face Niou. “Niou-senpai,” Kirihara hisses, “what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I missed you too,” Niou says dryly. He leans back against the simulator control panel like he gets bundled into foreign training facilities every day of his life and tilts his head. “I come all this way across dimensions to see how our young one is doing, and for such a warm welcome…”
“Why? Did Sanada-fukubuchou send you?”
Niou snorts. “Sanada doesn’t tell me what to do.”
“So go back!” Kirihara seethes, crossing his arms. “I don’t need a babysitter, this is my mission, I have it handled—”
“I’m here on assignment directly from the mouth of the Child of God."
Each syllable is crisply rounded off as it leaves Niou’s mouth. Kirihara’s heart rockets into his throat. “Yukimura-buchou woke up?”
“Just for a week. It was right after you left.” Niou’s eyes lid. “Long enough to restructure our strategies, quash a couple Xyz blitzes, make Sanada’s life hell…”
Kirihara swears under his breath. Yukimura woke up, and he hadn’t been there. Before he’d been chosen for the Seigaku infiltration mission he used to visit Yukimura’s wing of the medical bay almost daily, even as Yukimura’s spells of lucidity grew sparser and sparser. Sometimes he’d just sit by Yukimura’s bed and hold his hand and try to push whatever vitality animated his own body into Yukimura. And wasn’t that the core of Fusion? Strength flowing to strength to generate a newer, greater self.
They’d been at an Xyz outpost, all eight of Rikkai Force, coming off a skirmish with some rebels from the Higa branch. One moment Yukimura was laughing at something Marui said, the next he was puddled unmoving on the ground. That first collapse is the only part Kirihara remembers in vivid detail; the rest is a disjointed scatter of sensory impressions. The nauseous rush back to Academia, the agonising wait outside the medical centre. Turned out it was some rare dormant strain of summoning sickness. Yanagi said it was probably triggered by the dimensional crossing. There was nothing that could be done, not even with all the medical technology at Academia’s disposal.
The whole thing was so gutwrenchingly unfair it made Kirihara sick to his eyeballs. That Yukimura Seiichi, the Child of God, the strongest general Academia had ever had, the only general Kirihara had ever had, could be snuffed out by some genetic accident. Just like that. Not even the dignity of going out in battle, and Kirihara hadn’t gotten to beat him yet, and it was so stupid and wrong and evil, all of it, this slow and demeaning degradation, the immense crackling force of Yukimura’s presence whittled down to a single slight figure in the hospital bed. Yukimura was supposed to be something more than human. He wasn’t supposed to fall ill, he wasn’t supposed to die—
Kirihara grits his teeth and swallows down the old rage. “How was buchou? Did he look okay?”
“He’s not doing worse than he was before,” Niou says.
“But he’s not doing better,” Kirihara mumbles.
“If there’s a cure, the strategist will find it,” Niou says. And it’s Niou saying it, and it’s Yanagi working on it, so Kirihara has to believe it. “Besides, I’m not actually just here to check up on you. I have my own mission.”
Kirihara deflates. “Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so? What is it?”
“Not telling.”
“Ehh? Why not?”
Niou smirks. “Se-cret,” he says, separating out the syllables.
“Aww, come on! Please? I wanna know!”
“Speaking of secrets, you’re not trying very hard to stay undercover,” Niou says, gesturing at Kirihara’s Rikkai uniform.
“No thanks to you, senpai, what was all that about my blazer,” Kirihara grumbles.
“Seigaku’s captain looks like a stick-in-the-mud, I’m surprised he’s letting you stay in your… old school uniform.”
Kirihara has seen Seigaku’s so-called ace Tezuka Kunimitsu in person a grand total of once, the time he’d tagged along with Echizen to the Seigaku regulars’ practice. If he’s got a problem with Kirihara’s outfit choices he certainly hasn’t said anything about it. Kirihara is kind of uncertain whether Tezuka speaks at all; he seemed to have challenged Echizen to a duel via externally-impenetrable telepathically-communicative stare that made Kirihara abruptly, viciously homesick. “It’s not like anyone here knows what the Rikkai uniform looks like anyway.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Niou says, yawning. “If there’s any Fudomine or Higa rebels who managed to escape here they’d know.”
“Good,” Kirihara says. “They better try to challenge me, I’m bored as fuck. I’ll crush them!” He lifts his hand and curls his fingers into a fist to demonstrate. Niou looks faintly entertained. “Anyway, senpai, did you bring your Fusion deck? I miss duelling properly. The Fusion users here all suck ass. Except Echizen, but that’s only ‘cause I’m teaching him how to…” Kirihara trails off. “Oh, shit, don’t tell fukubuchou—”
“It’s really buchou you should be worried about.” Niou arches an eyebrow in a way that tells Kirihara he’s totally planning to tattle to Yukimura as soon as he gets the chance.
“Don’t tell buchou either,” Kirihara pleads. He hunches his shoulders. “Echizen’s… if he’d been ours, if he’d been Academia, I think he’d make Rikkai Force. He’s…” How to describe what it had felt like, duelling Echizen Ryoma for the first time? For a moment he’d been twelve again, winded, desperate, driven to his knees before a presence so vast and monstrous Kirihara could hardly bear the sight of it. The vivid glow of Echizen’s eyes skewering him clean through with an instinctive and marrow-deep terror he hadn’t felt since he’d decided to christen his entry into Academia by challenging the Three Demons to a duel. Not for the first time Kirihara envisions Echizen in a gold-trimmed blazer identical to Kirihara’s own; the image conjures itself so easily it’s like a memory.
“A Standard guy who’s got the attention of Rikkai’s own second-year ace, hm?” There’s a troubling gleam in Niou’s eye that has Kirihara’s hand automatically flying to his deck box just to check that it’s still there. “Well, I did bring my Performages, but we won’t be able to duel at full power anyway, the energy readings would probably overload this dimension’s sensor tech. I know you haven’t been moderating your duelling outputs, really, Kirihara-kun, why on earth did we send you out of all of us for an undercover mission?”
Niou’s voice had tightened primly into the distinct scandalised tinge of a Yagyuu lecture at the end there. Kirihara frowns. “Are you gonna be acting like Yagyuu-senpai the whole time you’re here?”
“Sure,” Niou says in his own bored drawl again. “I’m supposed to be inconspicuous.”
“Yukimura-buchou should’ve just sent Yagyuu-senpai, then. You look really dodgy, senpai.”
“Yagyuu’s on his own mission.”
“Is he acting like you? Wait, is everyone on a mission?” Kirihara demands. “I thought I was meant to be the only one.”
Niou laughs and reaches out to tousle Kirihara’s hair. “You’re still special, Akaya. Don’t worry about what me and Yagyuu are doing, it’s got nothing to do with yours.”
The answering jolt of warmth through his chest takes Kirihara by surprise; he hadn’t realised how much he missed hearing the sound of his name. Nobody here calls him Akaya. He probably wouldn’t want them to, anyway, but still. “What about everyone else? What are they doing?”
“Ehh… Sanada’s back in Academia with our strategist, thank fuck I’m out of there now… Fudomine's been pretty quiet since you took their general out, but Marui and Jackal are still in Xyz dealing with another Higa riot, Marui just overtook you again on the all-time leaderboard. Jackal’s about to beat you too.”
“I’m gonna have to do so much duelling to catch up when I’m done here,” Kirihara complains. “I won’t be able to leave Xyz for weeks.”
One of the metrics Academia uses to gauge performance is the number of enemy opponents sealed. Digital leaderboards next to the interdimensional transport hub track the card counts ranked by week, month, and all-time. Back when all of the Three Demons still did fieldwork, during Rikkai Force’s golden age, the medal-podium positions on every leaderboard never changed: YUKIMURA SEIICHI. SANADA GENICHIRO. YANAGI RENJI. The rest of the lists cycled through the remainder of Rikkai Force and the occasional Academia hopeful looking to break into the Rikkai ranks, though none of the prospects ever managed to sustain their performance long enough for promotion. Usually Kirihara would jostle for fourth with Marui and daydream about seeing his name beside #1. Niou never showed up on the leaderboards; when Kirihara asked Niou just said something airy about how he turned people into cats instead of cards so the number didn’t get recorded, and then vanished while Kirihara was trying to process whatever this was supposed to mean.
Now, of course, Yanagi rarely leaves Academia, and Yukimura hasn’t been on active duty for six months. On Kirihara’s last deployment to Fudomine before his reassignment to Seigaku, Sanada finally unseated Yukimura from the top position on the all-time leaderboard. When they arrived back in Academia and saw the updated ranking Sanada's face went blank, an unbearable kind of stillness that made Kirihara's congratulations shrivel up in his throat. Wrong, all of it was wrong. Kirihara won’t take off his Rikkai uniform because he earned his right to wear it, but even more than that, Rikkai’s lost enough already. No more losing. Once he finishes up here Kirihara will bring another victory home, and Yukimura will wake up, and he’ll call them back, all of Rikkai flung across the dimensions carrying out disparate parts of Academia’s will gathered together again. They’ll win the war. How could they not? And everything will go back to how it used to be.
“Well, that’s the tradeoff,” Niou says. “You want special missions, you give up your normal ones. You can’t have it all, you know.”
Kirihara’s temple is beginning to pulse, an inevitable side effect of spending any length of time in a conversation with Niou. “So does that mean you wanted… whatever you’re doing here?”
“Once upon a time,” Niou says solemnly, “there was a baby devil who asked too many questions, so a bigger devil came out and ate him.” He taps Kirihara on the forehead. “The moral of the story is that baby devils get eaten if they don’t watch themselves.”
“That’s a really terrible story, Niou-senpai.”
“Haven’t we been in here a little too long? People will start getting suspicious, no?” Niou stretches his arms over his head and flashes his teeth at Kirihara. “I want to meet this Echizen.”
“Like now? He’s in class…” Kirihara glances down at the time display on his duel disk and yelps. “I have class! I totally forgot… Niou-senpai, your timing sucks.”
“The same class?” Kirihara nods. Niou’s smile grows wider. “Then bring me along, I’ll vouch to your teacher that you were showing me around like a model student. Two birds, one stone.”
“Why do you want to meet Echizen so bad?” Kirihara says suspiciously.
Nothing seems to actually change in Niou’s expression this time, but somehow it’s gone glacial, a spike of ice into Kirihara’s spine that hundreds of duellists must have felt in their final moments. Niou isn’t in the Rikkai uniform but the matter of his identity, too, is unquestionable. “You’ll get eaten, remember,” Niou says. “I mean it. Be careful, Akaya. We’re counting on you.”
fandom: prince of tennis, yugioh arc v
ship: niou&/kirihara
rating: g
word count: 2.6k
a/n: this is a yugioh arc v au but like umm built on so much convoluted headcanon that i don't think this is even comprehensible to anyone who happens to know both tenipuri and a5. i'm so sorry please just absorb the vibes as you read. the basic premise is that rikkai have declared war on the entire universe and are systematically invading and murdering their way through the various dimensions, and kirihara is a vanguard scout sent to infiltrate seigaku to prepare for invasion.
for the record: standard dimension = seigaku, fusion dimension = rikkai, xyz dimension = fudomine + higa, synchro dimension = hyotei (neo domino) + shitenhoji (satellite). soon after the events of this fic, xyz refugee fuji is about to arrive in seigaku and end kirihara's entire career lol
written out of rage and spite and haterism at the nioukiri erasure in evil the movie. i wish all t******* y**** a very die.
--
There’s some exchange students arriving at Seigaku today. Oishi must have mentioned it earlier, since Kirihara’s remembering it now, but at the time Kirihara had probably classified it as Not Relevant To Duelling and therefore not his business, and banished it from his mind. Looks like half the school’s decided to make it their business, though, judging by the way there's a battalion's worth of people blocking the corridor. Kirihara is once again going to be late to Advanced Fusion Theory. Well, later than usual. The class is kiddie shit he could do in his sleep; you can’t even get past the entrance test at Academia without knowing all these techniques this lameass dimension apparently considers advanced, so what Kirihara actually means is that he’s going to be late to his scheduled midmorning naptime.
He’s about to spin on his heel and take the long way to the Fusion classroom wing, when, through the miasma of students buzzing around the shiny new things, Kirihara glimpses an uncomfortably familiar head of silver hair. That’s a colour he’d recognise anywhere. Even in the identical Academia masks, the identical Academia red uniforms before the official formation of Rikkai Force and their special yellow blazers Yukimura had personally designed. Only one glance across the carnage of what had formerly been one of Fudomine’s main roads and Kirihara knew exactly who the figure sitting on the shoulder of the Ancient Gear Golem that had just bulldozed through the passage, hair shining white in the sun, was. No. No fucking way.
Like he can sense Kirihara’s incredulous gaze, the exchange student in question glances up. He zeroes in with laser accuracy right on where Kirihara's standing half-hidden by shadow on the stairs, seriously, does he have fucking x-ray vision or something, and Niou Masaharu, Major-General of Academia and major pain in Kirihara’s ass, an entire dimension away from where he’s supposed to be, lazily makes the Rikkai Force hand signal for all clear at Kirihara. Reflexively Kirihara makes the understood hand signal back. Then he registers what he’s doing and scowls, dropping his arm.
He doesn’t recognise the other two people with Niou, so either they’re random scrapings off the bottom of the Academia barrel or they really are exchange students. It’s not like it matters. Kirihara storms down the stairs, shoving the Seigaku crowd aside, fires off something like, “Yo I’m second-year ace Kirihara Akaya I just transferred here too welcome to Seigaku let me take you around,” and yanks Niou away by the wrist.
Or tries to. Don’t all these kids have classes to go to? As Kirihara’s attempting to disentangle them from their audience Niou says, brightly, “I simply love your blazer, Kirihara-kun, what school did you say you transferred from again?” So not only is Niou here running interference on Kirihara’s mission, he is also apparently in Yagyuu mode. Two major pains for the price of one! Kirihara might as well have never left Academia at all.
As well as being depressingly outdated compared to the Rikkai-exclusive facilities back at Academia, Seigaku’s solo duel simulators are weirdly and inefficiently roomy, which makes them disconcerting to practise in but perfect for discreet meetings. Obviously Kirihara checked them for surveillance cameras the first week he got here, he’s not stupid. Kirihara drags Niou to the nearest block, pushes him in, and slams the door to the duel simulator shut after them both. Overhead, the automatic lights click on, warming the room with a pleasant and extremely unatmospheric glow.
Then Kirihara whirls around to face Niou. “Niou-senpai,” Kirihara hisses, “what the fuck are you doing here?”
“I missed you too,” Niou says dryly. He leans back against the simulator control panel like he gets bundled into foreign training facilities every day of his life and tilts his head. “I come all this way across dimensions to see how our young one is doing, and for such a warm welcome…”
“Why? Did Sanada-fukubuchou send you?”
Niou snorts. “Sanada doesn’t tell me what to do.”
“So go back!” Kirihara seethes, crossing his arms. “I don’t need a babysitter, this is my mission, I have it handled—”
“I’m here on assignment directly from the mouth of the Child of God."
Each syllable is crisply rounded off as it leaves Niou’s mouth. Kirihara’s heart rockets into his throat. “Yukimura-buchou woke up?”
“Just for a week. It was right after you left.” Niou’s eyes lid. “Long enough to restructure our strategies, quash a couple Xyz blitzes, make Sanada’s life hell…”
Kirihara swears under his breath. Yukimura woke up, and he hadn’t been there. Before he’d been chosen for the Seigaku infiltration mission he used to visit Yukimura’s wing of the medical bay almost daily, even as Yukimura’s spells of lucidity grew sparser and sparser. Sometimes he’d just sit by Yukimura’s bed and hold his hand and try to push whatever vitality animated his own body into Yukimura. And wasn’t that the core of Fusion? Strength flowing to strength to generate a newer, greater self.
They’d been at an Xyz outpost, all eight of Rikkai Force, coming off a skirmish with some rebels from the Higa branch. One moment Yukimura was laughing at something Marui said, the next he was puddled unmoving on the ground. That first collapse is the only part Kirihara remembers in vivid detail; the rest is a disjointed scatter of sensory impressions. The nauseous rush back to Academia, the agonising wait outside the medical centre. Turned out it was some rare dormant strain of summoning sickness. Yanagi said it was probably triggered by the dimensional crossing. There was nothing that could be done, not even with all the medical technology at Academia’s disposal.
The whole thing was so gutwrenchingly unfair it made Kirihara sick to his eyeballs. That Yukimura Seiichi, the Child of God, the strongest general Academia had ever had, the only general Kirihara had ever had, could be snuffed out by some genetic accident. Just like that. Not even the dignity of going out in battle, and Kirihara hadn’t gotten to beat him yet, and it was so stupid and wrong and evil, all of it, this slow and demeaning degradation, the immense crackling force of Yukimura’s presence whittled down to a single slight figure in the hospital bed. Yukimura was supposed to be something more than human. He wasn’t supposed to fall ill, he wasn’t supposed to die—
Kirihara grits his teeth and swallows down the old rage. “How was buchou? Did he look okay?”
“He’s not doing worse than he was before,” Niou says.
“But he’s not doing better,” Kirihara mumbles.
“If there’s a cure, the strategist will find it,” Niou says. And it’s Niou saying it, and it’s Yanagi working on it, so Kirihara has to believe it. “Besides, I’m not actually just here to check up on you. I have my own mission.”
Kirihara deflates. “Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so? What is it?”
“Not telling.”
“Ehh? Why not?”
Niou smirks. “Se-cret,” he says, separating out the syllables.
“Aww, come on! Please? I wanna know!”
“Speaking of secrets, you’re not trying very hard to stay undercover,” Niou says, gesturing at Kirihara’s Rikkai uniform.
“No thanks to you, senpai, what was all that about my blazer,” Kirihara grumbles.
“Seigaku’s captain looks like a stick-in-the-mud, I’m surprised he’s letting you stay in your… old school uniform.”
Kirihara has seen Seigaku’s so-called ace Tezuka Kunimitsu in person a grand total of once, the time he’d tagged along with Echizen to the Seigaku regulars’ practice. If he’s got a problem with Kirihara’s outfit choices he certainly hasn’t said anything about it. Kirihara is kind of uncertain whether Tezuka speaks at all; he seemed to have challenged Echizen to a duel via externally-impenetrable telepathically-communicative stare that made Kirihara abruptly, viciously homesick. “It’s not like anyone here knows what the Rikkai uniform looks like anyway.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Niou says, yawning. “If there’s any Fudomine or Higa rebels who managed to escape here they’d know.”
“Good,” Kirihara says. “They better try to challenge me, I’m bored as fuck. I’ll crush them!” He lifts his hand and curls his fingers into a fist to demonstrate. Niou looks faintly entertained. “Anyway, senpai, did you bring your Fusion deck? I miss duelling properly. The Fusion users here all suck ass. Except Echizen, but that’s only ‘cause I’m teaching him how to…” Kirihara trails off. “Oh, shit, don’t tell fukubuchou—”
“It’s really buchou you should be worried about.” Niou arches an eyebrow in a way that tells Kirihara he’s totally planning to tattle to Yukimura as soon as he gets the chance.
“Don’t tell buchou either,” Kirihara pleads. He hunches his shoulders. “Echizen’s… if he’d been ours, if he’d been Academia, I think he’d make Rikkai Force. He’s…” How to describe what it had felt like, duelling Echizen Ryoma for the first time? For a moment he’d been twelve again, winded, desperate, driven to his knees before a presence so vast and monstrous Kirihara could hardly bear the sight of it. The vivid glow of Echizen’s eyes skewering him clean through with an instinctive and marrow-deep terror he hadn’t felt since he’d decided to christen his entry into Academia by challenging the Three Demons to a duel. Not for the first time Kirihara envisions Echizen in a gold-trimmed blazer identical to Kirihara’s own; the image conjures itself so easily it’s like a memory.
“A Standard guy who’s got the attention of Rikkai’s own second-year ace, hm?” There’s a troubling gleam in Niou’s eye that has Kirihara’s hand automatically flying to his deck box just to check that it’s still there. “Well, I did bring my Performages, but we won’t be able to duel at full power anyway, the energy readings would probably overload this dimension’s sensor tech. I know you haven’t been moderating your duelling outputs, really, Kirihara-kun, why on earth did we send you out of all of us for an undercover mission?”
Niou’s voice had tightened primly into the distinct scandalised tinge of a Yagyuu lecture at the end there. Kirihara frowns. “Are you gonna be acting like Yagyuu-senpai the whole time you’re here?”
“Sure,” Niou says in his own bored drawl again. “I’m supposed to be inconspicuous.”
“Yukimura-buchou should’ve just sent Yagyuu-senpai, then. You look really dodgy, senpai.”
“Yagyuu’s on his own mission.”
“Is he acting like you? Wait, is everyone on a mission?” Kirihara demands. “I thought I was meant to be the only one.”
Niou laughs and reaches out to tousle Kirihara’s hair. “You’re still special, Akaya. Don’t worry about what me and Yagyuu are doing, it’s got nothing to do with yours.”
The answering jolt of warmth through his chest takes Kirihara by surprise; he hadn’t realised how much he missed hearing the sound of his name. Nobody here calls him Akaya. He probably wouldn’t want them to, anyway, but still. “What about everyone else? What are they doing?”
“Ehh… Sanada’s back in Academia with our strategist, thank fuck I’m out of there now… Fudomine's been pretty quiet since you took their general out, but Marui and Jackal are still in Xyz dealing with another Higa riot, Marui just overtook you again on the all-time leaderboard. Jackal’s about to beat you too.”
“I’m gonna have to do so much duelling to catch up when I’m done here,” Kirihara complains. “I won’t be able to leave Xyz for weeks.”
One of the metrics Academia uses to gauge performance is the number of enemy opponents sealed. Digital leaderboards next to the interdimensional transport hub track the card counts ranked by week, month, and all-time. Back when all of the Three Demons still did fieldwork, during Rikkai Force’s golden age, the medal-podium positions on every leaderboard never changed: YUKIMURA SEIICHI. SANADA GENICHIRO. YANAGI RENJI. The rest of the lists cycled through the remainder of Rikkai Force and the occasional Academia hopeful looking to break into the Rikkai ranks, though none of the prospects ever managed to sustain their performance long enough for promotion. Usually Kirihara would jostle for fourth with Marui and daydream about seeing his name beside #1. Niou never showed up on the leaderboards; when Kirihara asked Niou just said something airy about how he turned people into cats instead of cards so the number didn’t get recorded, and then vanished while Kirihara was trying to process whatever this was supposed to mean.
Now, of course, Yanagi rarely leaves Academia, and Yukimura hasn’t been on active duty for six months. On Kirihara’s last deployment to Fudomine before his reassignment to Seigaku, Sanada finally unseated Yukimura from the top position on the all-time leaderboard. When they arrived back in Academia and saw the updated ranking Sanada's face went blank, an unbearable kind of stillness that made Kirihara's congratulations shrivel up in his throat. Wrong, all of it was wrong. Kirihara won’t take off his Rikkai uniform because he earned his right to wear it, but even more than that, Rikkai’s lost enough already. No more losing. Once he finishes up here Kirihara will bring another victory home, and Yukimura will wake up, and he’ll call them back, all of Rikkai flung across the dimensions carrying out disparate parts of Academia’s will gathered together again. They’ll win the war. How could they not? And everything will go back to how it used to be.
“Well, that’s the tradeoff,” Niou says. “You want special missions, you give up your normal ones. You can’t have it all, you know.”
Kirihara’s temple is beginning to pulse, an inevitable side effect of spending any length of time in a conversation with Niou. “So does that mean you wanted… whatever you’re doing here?”
“Once upon a time,” Niou says solemnly, “there was a baby devil who asked too many questions, so a bigger devil came out and ate him.” He taps Kirihara on the forehead. “The moral of the story is that baby devils get eaten if they don’t watch themselves.”
“That’s a really terrible story, Niou-senpai.”
“Haven’t we been in here a little too long? People will start getting suspicious, no?” Niou stretches his arms over his head and flashes his teeth at Kirihara. “I want to meet this Echizen.”
“Like now? He’s in class…” Kirihara glances down at the time display on his duel disk and yelps. “I have class! I totally forgot… Niou-senpai, your timing sucks.”
“The same class?” Kirihara nods. Niou’s smile grows wider. “Then bring me along, I’ll vouch to your teacher that you were showing me around like a model student. Two birds, one stone.”
“Why do you want to meet Echizen so bad?” Kirihara says suspiciously.
Nothing seems to actually change in Niou’s expression this time, but somehow it’s gone glacial, a spike of ice into Kirihara’s spine that hundreds of duellists must have felt in their final moments. Niou isn’t in the Rikkai uniform but the matter of his identity, too, is unquestionable. “You’ll get eaten, remember,” Niou says. “I mean it. Be careful, Akaya. We’re counting on you.”
