Chapter 5: - Seeking Answers
"I think I'll go first." Zorc/Bakura said, smirking, "But be warned, Seth. This is a Shadow Game and you are outside the rules. When you lose, the Shadows will claim you and there will be no way back, even if your 'family'," Bakura's eyes swept the group behind Kaiba, "Manages to defeat me, which they won't."
"Seto?" Hermione asked nervously.
"Stay out of this Granger." Kaiba growled, calling Hermione by her surname for the first time since the Chamber of Secrets had been opened, causing the teenage witch to back off.
"I set one card face down." Zorc called, putting the card on his Duel Disk and watching, amused, as the card appeared on the field, face down, floating between the two Duellists. "It's your move, Seth."
Kaiba didn't bother to correct him, not considering that, with the cards in his hand the duel would be over this turn. "I summon my Lord of D. and play Flute of Summoning Dragon, allowing me to summon these straight to the field."
Hermione cheered as two of his Blue Eyes White Dragons took the field on Kaiba's first turn.
"Then I activate Pot of Greed, allowing me to draw two cards and play Polymerisation to fuse them together with the Blue Eyes in my hand to create my Ultimate creature!" In a burst of bright the Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon appeared on the field. "And I activate Quick Attack, allowing my dragon to attack you this turn." The white scaled dragon loosed a roar that spoke clearly of her anger towards the Tomb Robber, "Now, Bakura, you'll pay for what you did to my brother!" Seto roared, "Blue Eyes!"
The huge, three headed dragon launched an attack from all three heads, more than happy to blow away the Tomb Robber in one, incredible, blast of light.
Bakura smirked. "I activate my face down card, Zoma the Spirit!"
"Seto, call back your attack!" Yugi yelped, fully aware of Zoma's effect.
It was too late. Even as the fiend appeared on the field, smirking at Kaiba, the attack hit home, blowing away the sneering fiend, only for it to reappear on the field as a ghost.
"What's the meaning of this, Bakura?" Kaiba demanded, wary of the ghost considering Yugi didn't tell people to recall their attacks very often. Not that you could in the card game (unless you were Yugi, which he wasn't).
"I thought you were supposed to be good at this game Kaiba," Zorc gloated, giving the CEO a sinister smile as he did so, "You fell right into my trap."
"Yuge?" Joey asked, certain he'd heard of the card, but wanting confirmation on the details.
"You see," Zorc continued before Yugi could explain, his spirit monster floating there, waiting for directions, "When Zoma is destroyed, you lose life points equal to the attack point of the monster who destroyed it, and since you blasted Zoma with Blue Eyes Ultimate…"
Joey swore, already working out that Blue Eyes Ultimate's attack points were more than high enough for Zoma to wipe Kaiba out.
Seto's eyes widened and he took a step back, realising that, just like that, it was all over…
"In other words, you're dead." Zorc finished, gesturing forward, ushering the spirit to attack.
The spirit launched itself at Kaiba, mouth wide.
"I'm sorry, Mokuba… I've failed you again." Seto's arms fell to his sides as the CEO accepted the punishment for failure.
"No!" Hermione screeched, "Seto!"
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Bakura had been waiting for him; the fact wasn't a reassuring one.
"Bakura! Stop hurting innocent people! They have nothing to do with this!" Yami demanded. He had little faith that the words would work, considering that in Yugi's time Bakura had deliberately drawn a pregnant woman into a Shadow Game, but he had nothing left to summon with, so words were all he could use.
Those and his fists, but Bakura was staying well out of reach.
Bakura let out a mirthless chuckle. "When your God was defeated, you ran out of Ba didn't you?" The Tomb Robber smirked. "So your lectures are all you have left." The thief kind turned towards the city and pointed, "Look."
"Do you see the palace?" Bakura asked the Pharaoh, "You've never seen it from afar like this, have you? You've been too busy throwing your power around for that." The thief turned back to the Pharaoh, "But you see, to a thief like me, if I can see it, I can steal it. Power, cities, even lives. If getting everything you want makes you a King, then I, Bakura, King of Thieves, am a King even greater than you, oh Pharaoh."
"You don't own anything." Yami growled back, "You're only putting out the lives and hopes of the people in the city!"
Bakura smirked and closed his eyes. "It doesn't matter what you think." He said far too calmly for Yami's liking. "Because I win."
With that the ground gave out underneath the Pharaoh, torn away from below by Diabound. The horse Yami was riding fell into the abyss, but the Pharaoh managed to grab onto the edge with one hand.
"Pharaoh!" Shada's voice reached him. "Hold on!"
As Yami went to put his second hand up, to get a better grip and try to pull himself up, Bakura stalked over to the ledge and seized the rope the Puzzle hung from. "I'll take this." He said, yanking so hard the cord snapped and Yami nearly lost his grip. "And now," Bakura said, stepping on Yami's hand, causing the Pharaoh to have to fight to hold off a wince, "I'll trample you."
With that he stomped hard on Yami's fingers, causing them to let go reflexively.
Yami fell.
And the World of the Pharaoh's Memories vanished into darkness.
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15 years before…
Egypt was in trouble.
The foreign forces that were invading had crossed Egypt's borders and annihilated the last of the army. In seven days the enemy would reach the palace and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
However, Pharaoh Akhenamkhanen's brother, had come up with a solution. He was the High Priest Akhenaden, keeper of The Millennium Tome. The Tome whole reason for the invasion and had finally been translated after a hundred years. Though the Pharaoh was loath to do it, he agreed to Akhenaden's plan to create seven treasures that would give their wielders powers over the Shadows, which would allow them to take on an entire army.
There was no choice. It was either that or let the Tome fall into the hands of the enemy and bear witness to the destruction of, not only Egypt, but quite possibly the rest of the continent.
The Pharaoh, his first wife and their son, born only a week ago watched as Akhenaden, a pair of magicians and a select number of men drawn from the forces that protected the palace, rode off to complete the Shadow Alchemy that would, hopefully, save the palace.
They couldn't know the cost of what Akhenaden was going to do.
In order to save the lives of the Pharaoh, his son, and those of the citizens, Akhenaden would commit an act of mass sacrifice. The ritual required ninety nine human deaths. The village of thieves, Kul Elna, had been pre-selected to pay the cost of the Shadow Alchemy that would save the country.
Akhenaden would never know until it was too late that there had been one survivor of the massacre.
One little boy who had seen... everything.
And the Pharaoh, who frowned upon cruelty would never know what the cost of saving his country was until it was far too late to undo it.
All he knew was that, on the seventh day, when the army reached the palace, the six chosen priests and the Pharaoh used the golden 'treasures' to call down the gods and demons of their souls and decimate the attacking army.
Akhenaden's golden treasures saved the throne.
But their creation set in motion events that would span over thousands of years and doomed Akhenamkhanen's son to five thousand years of darkness.
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The Royal Palace, four days after Yami's fall…
"I don't care if you have to drain the Nile. Find him!"
Nen nodded and got to his feet. Over the last four days he'd stretched his men to their limit trying to find the Pharaoh and, though he hated to say it, it was looking less and less likely that they were going to find the Pharaoh.
Mana was waiting for him at the doors, hovering nervously, hoping beyond hope that he had some good news.
He couldn't look at her. Luckily he didn't have to as Isis called her into the throne room as he passed to discuss something with the former protégé of the fallen wielder of the Millennium Ring.
He just hoped that he had news, once way or the other soon.
Not that Nen was the only one looking for an answer to a problem.
While Seth, Kalim and Isis was certain the Pharaoh would be found and would return to the palace safely, Akhenaden was looking to the possibility that they may have to crown the next Pharaoh and was fully aware that, since he was the Pharaoh's Uncle, his son would be in next-in-line for the throne.
Not that Seth was aware that he was of royal blood. When Akhenaden had gone to Kul Elna to complete the ritual that would create the Millennium Items, he had left his wife and son, who had been far too young to remember his father, with a decent amount of money and sent them to live far away from the palace, both because of the coming invasion and because if there was but one survivor of his plans, his family would be in danger.
To say it had been a shock when Seth had presented himself at the palace during the search for Shimon's successor would be an understatement.
And now the Pharaoh was gone, likely dead at the hands of the man who called himself the King of Thieves, and a successor would have to be named if the Pharaoh was gone for too much longer. The throne of Egypt could not remain empty forever.
Especially if Isis's vision was right and there was a darkness on the horizon that would consume the country and leave it in despair.
"Lord Seth." The wielder of the Millennium Rod turned to the guard that was bowing to him. "I have a report to make."
"Go on." Seth nodded, noting that this was one of the men that he'd entrusted the care of girl of the white dragon to.
"She's awake."
Akhenaden noticed Seth's eyes widen and overheard his son say that she was to be taken to the Underground, immediately. He followed the other, much younger, High Priest out of the throne room, only to be shocked when Seto informed him that the woman had a God Ka resting within her, one whose powers were so great that Kalim's Millennium Scales hadn't been able to weigh it properly.
This was brilliant news, perfect even.
Considering that the Pharaoh had fallen because Bakura's Ka beast had managed to defeat Osiris, one of the most powerful beasts ever to answer to a human's hand, and even then they only answered to the hand of the divine Pharaoh, the next Pharaoh would require a power stronger than one of the God monsters if he ever hoped to bring down the Tomb Robber.
And this White Dragon could be the answer to the problem.
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Far above ground, far away from the torture chambers where men, under Seth's orders, were working on increasing the power of some of the demon Ka beasts within the souls of some of the prisoners, Mana was talking to the guardian of the Royal Library.
"The scrolls you need are on the desk just inside the balcony doors." Sera said, running a hand through her bushy brown hair, frustration obvious in her brown eyes, as she turned to look at Mana, "I'm still hunting down the ones Lord Seth asked me to find."
Sera had been a friend of Mahado too, and the eighteen year old had grown up in the palace under the tutelage of Isis. Unlike Mana, however, she had finished her training.
When Sera had completed her training, Isis had asked the Pharaoh, and received his permission, to assign her to the library, but, with the blessings of her patron, Sera had taken Mana under her wing when Mahado had been killed by Bakura and was helping her complete her training by providing the reading material and giving a practical demonstration whenever necessary.
"Is it anything I can help you with?" Mana asked, concerned, only for Sera to shake her head and gesture towards the scrolls. The older teen, knowing from Mahado about the way Mana tended to be easily distracted from her studies hadn't allowed such distraction under her. Not that Mana had allowed herself to stray quite as often either.
It was like the death of her tutor, and now the disappearance of her childhood friend, had made her focus on her studies and try to become powerful enough to help the people around her the next time that they got into trouble.
Sera flitted around the shelves, pulling scrolls and tablets down and reorganising the ones that had been put back in the wrong order or in the wrong place, a habitual problem here when she wasn't on duty. She would rather people left them on the tables for her to pack away then they put them in the wrong place, making hunts like this one difficult.
Mana, in the meantime, had settled at the table and started reading, glancing at her tutor out of the corner of her eye every now and again, becoming amused by Sera's frustrated mumbling, only to become distracted when, outside the window, a beam of light shot out of the ground and pierced the dawn skies.
"What in the name of the Gods?" Sera darted to the balcony, trying to see what was going on.
Mana, who was flash blinded from the sudden bright light, attempted to move to her side, only to trip over one of the chairs. "Sera?" Mana asked as she fumbled around, using the table to help herself to her feet and trying to blink away the spots of light that plagued her vision. "What…?"
"I'm not sure." The librarian replied. "Stay here. I'll be back." With that Sera hurried from the library.
It was unlike Sera, Mana mused as she righted the chair she'd knocked over, to leave the sanctity of the Royal Library. Sera even had a bedroom whose door led onto one of the library's many aisles, but then with so many of the priests either injured or searching for the Pharaoh she supposed that everyone was having to do things they wouldn't normally do.
Bakura's attack on the palace had caused everything to change and the ripples created by the assault were still spreading.
She wanted to help everyone, wanted to be like Mahado and Sera and be able to summon her Ka beast to help the others fight the Tomb Robber, but to do that she needed to follow Sera's training plan.
She watched over the balcony as Sera stepped out of the doorway, only to glance up at her imperiously. Mana darted back into the library. She had scrolls to read and practise to do.
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Yami groaned as he opened his eyes, only to attempt to push himself into an upright position and scramble away from the stranger leaning over him and almost slip back into unconsciousness when pain spiked up his arm.
"Don't move." The man, who was wearing a strange golden mask that kind of reminded Yami of the death masks of kings, warned him," You're badly wounded. You need to rest and regain your strength."
Since the man appeared to wish him no harm, as, if he'd wanted Yami dead, he could have easily killed him while he'd been unconscious, Yami took the time to examine his arm, wriggling his fingers in order to check that he could and nothing was broken. It hurt but he could do it.
As he took in the extent of his injuries the memories of what had happened returned to him, including the fact that Bakura had taken the Millennium Puzzle from him.
"Who… are you?" Yami asked cautiously, wary of this stranger and wondering how far away they were from the palace, since he wasn't sure he'd be able to reach it in his current condition.
The man just turned away and started walking out into the light that was slowly growing outside.
"Wait…" Yami pushed himself to his feet with his good arm and, bracing the other one with the same arm, tried to follow the man out, "I can walk."
The other man paused and half turned. Yami felt distinctly uncomfortable under the gaze of the mask. "I am the one who watches all memories." The man stated, "A great battle is about to begin."
With that the man simply vanished, in a manner that reminded Yami of Shadi's little vanishing act.
Pushing himself harder than he should, he managed to make it to the cave entrance before he needed to sit down again, exhaustion trying to claim him, only to find himself on the cliffs high above the city and his palace.
'A great battle…' Yami thought as he sat down before he fell down, believing he should try and push himself to go further but well aware that he would do more damage to himself if he pushed himself too hard.
That and he could quite easily imagine the reaction of his friends if he pushed himself too hard and made his injuries worse on the way. Yugi would be disappointed, Hermione would lecture him and Joey would probably wait until he'd healed up and then punch him in the arm for being so stupid, not to mention Seto wouldn't let him live it down and there was no way he wanted to give the CEO a chance to gloat.
At least there was a greater chance of being found if he was out in the open and, if he rested a while, there was a chance he'd be able to make his way further down the cliffs a bit later.
The main questions that were worrying him were 'how long had he been unconscious?', 'what had Bakura gotten up to during his absence?' and 'what had happened to Yugi and the others?'.
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Seto was confused.
Just before Zoma had struck and deducted the forty-five hundred attack points from his life points darkness had fallen across the land and, for a while, there had been nothing but total darkness. Not even sound got through the blackness that had surrounded him.
He had thought that it was because he'd lost and that this was the darkness that Bakura/Zorc had been talking about, but then, suddenly he'd gone from complete and utter darkness to the street that he and Bakura had battled in, at dawn, and the others, who had apparently gone through the same thing as him were just as confused as he was.
"Yuge, what…?" Joey asked, hoping his friend had some answers, now that he'd had a moment to think.
Yugi, who was frowning lightly and considering their surroundings, pursed his lips. He had a few ideas, none of which appealed. "I think something happened to Yami." Yugi stated, trying to speak calmly, but believing that, since this was the world of the Pharaoh's memories, that if something happened to Yami, then the world around them would vanish too. "But I think he must be ok… or at least alive…"
What Yugi wanted to do was go and find him, but he was fully aware of their assigned task. Yami would need his true name before the end and if Yami really had been injured so badly it had nearly counted as a loss then his name, the last key to his sealed memories and powers, was of vital importance.
Joey and Seto looked at each other, then Joey shrugged, "We don't speak Egyptian." Joey indicated himself and Hermione, "I know 'Mione reads it," Joey earned himself a glare for shortening Hermione's name even as she nodded, "But neither of us know the spoken language like you and Rich-Boy, so it might be a good idea to split into two groups."
Seto, who still didn't like admitting that he had any abilities linking back to his ancient persona after eight years, just snorted, "I'm taking Hermione then." He stated, giving Yugi little choice but to take Joey, not that Yugi minded.
"We can try and find Yami's name, while Seto and Mione find Yami." Joey continued laying out his plan, hoping that sending the others after Yami would reassure Yugi enough to continue searching for Yami's name. "Seto is hunting Bakura, after all. Woe betide anyone that gets in his way."
Yugi looked at the CEO, who still looked a little shaken from his close encounter with death, not that anyone but he or Yami would notice, Yami by reading Seto's aura and Yugi through his natural ability to read micro expressions, the thing that had put him on Yami's level of reading his opponents long before Yami had taught him how to read people's auras.
Seto just snorted at him. "I'm not letting Bakura get away with what he's done to my brother. I'll take him down next time."
"Seto…"
"Just get going, Yugi." Seto snorted at him, "We," He indicated himself and Hermione, "Can handle anything the Tomb Robber throws at us." Hermione nodded in agreement, nervously but with a small smile.
"Seto…" Yugi trailed off at the look on the CEO's face. "Good luck."
"Luck's for losers." Seto glanced at Joey, smirking as he did so. Joey glowered back, well aware Seto was making a reference to all the luck based cards in his deck. The normalness of the pair of them made Hermione roll her eyes and Yugi have to hide a laugh though, breaking the solemn mood that had been settling. Then the pairs split up, Seto and Hermione heading for the palace, and Yugi and Joey heading for the one place that Yugi could think that Yami's name might be hidden.
"So, where are we headed, Yuge?" Joey asked as Yugi tried to get his bearings, then seemed to make up his mind about something.
"The Valley of the Kings. Yami's tomb is the one place that's guaranteed to have his name somewhere."
"Yami's tomb?" Joey yelped. "But he's not dead!"
"No, but they build tombs for the Pharaohs long before they pass away." Yugi explained, wondering if, because they were outside the rules he could get away with something.
"So where is the Valley of the Kings?" Joey asked, a little freaked out by the concept of entering his friend's grave.
"On the other side of the river." Yugi stated.
"Then how are we…" Joey trailed off as Yugi took a huge leap into the air and didn't come back down. "How did you…?"
"We're outside the rules." Yugi grinned. "We can do whatever we like."
"That means we get to fly?" Joey asked. When Yugi nodded and Joey leapt into the air and hovered just as Yugi was, the blonde grinned. "We should be outside the rules more often."
Yugi, who was rather glad it had worked so he hadn't looked like a complete idiot in front of his best friend, just snorted, feeling rather uncomfortable being outside of the rules of a Shadow Game when it was 'The Rules' that had defined most of his life since he'd completed the Millennium Puzzle.
"Shall we go?" Joey asked, still enjoying the feeling of being off the ground without a broomstick or a dragon, even though he was currently floating upside down, though Yugi knew that would change once they got any distance from the ground.
Yugi just shot skyward to see if he could get a better look at the world around them.
Joey righted himself, then watched from below as Yugi got his bearings before darting off to the right. The blonde wizard followed his friend. This was probably both the best and worst ideas they had come up with yet, but this was the best way to find both Yami and his name.
He just hoped that Hermione and Kaiba would be ok.