Fresh Air

Shun liked the look in her eyes, the cold fire. It resembled the fire burning in his own, a fire that would obliterate Academia by itself if given proper direction.

“We already have the best mechanics in Maiami. But if you managed to build a functioning D-Wheel from scraps, that’ll make you useful in emergencies. When something needs to be built or fixed with minimal resources.”

It wasn’t like him to be so open about his plans and thoughts, but the girl in front of him was… different. 

A single knife amidst a pile of dull scrap metal. It was unpolished, still, rough around the edges. But with enough sharpening, he was positive it’d become one of the deadliest of weapons. An iron will and the strength of steel… Shun had a feeling that the girl possessed both in abundance.

“Your training will begin tomorrow, 7 o'clock sharp,” he announced. “But before I let you leave this room, I want you to tell me everything about your imprisonment. Were you being kept on your own?”

             Rin’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember everything in detail.  “No, there was one other girl there, and she looked a little like me.  She had been there longer than I had.  Her name was Ruri.”

              Captivity had been exhausting, with their attempts to pump her for information about Yugo and keep her from escaping, but Ruri had managed to bear it all with a grace that Rin didn’t have.  “She was about the same height as me, with long dark hair.”  There was something about the other’s bearing that reminded her of Ruri.

He gave her a curt nod, pleased that the girl had no intention of being a dead weight or damsel. It would make things easier, make giving her some awareness of the role she was to play less of a chore.

„You’re Rin, right?“ He asked, not actually waiting for an answer as he couldn’t bring himself to care whether he’d remembered her name correctly.

„If you work hard, no one’ll call you a piece anymore, myself included. And if you do as I say, you won’t get killed by Akaba Leo either. That being said, I can’t have you running around like a walking target right now. From what I’ve seen, your dueling’s solid, but if you want to be able to protect yourself from getting captured again – let alone protect another – you’ve lots of training ahead of you. Are you prepared to commit to that?“

At the question, golden eyes bore into amber ones, scrutinizing them for the slightest hint of defiance or hesitation. If she wasn’t willing to compromise or see reason, he’d have no choice but lock her up until the war was over. He couldn’t have a stranger jeopardize Ruri’s safety because of a simple ego trip, no matter how important the girl considered hers to be. And should that time come, Shun’d be the last to hesitate.

                  Rin opened her mouth to answer with her name, but waited and answered, “Yes, I’m prepared.  I’ve been waiting since being captured for a chance to fight back- some way to take it to them after all they’ve taken from me.”

                      Her eyes were determined, harsh.  Rin had had to fight for everything she had ever gotten until now, and she wasn’t prepared to give up and die now.  Yugo needed her, and besides, she liked living for living’s sake.

To be ripped from one’s surroundings with neither an explanation nor any means of exerting control over one’s circumstances had to be a disconcerting sensation, but Shun couldn’t quite afford to harbor any sympathy for Ruri’s Synchro counterpart, impressive hand to hand combat skills or not.

“Be quiet for a moment,” he demanded, taking a firm hold of her shoulders, and nodded for one of Reiji’s female scientists to approach, the woman in question wasting no time patting her down –  first, with her hands, then, with three different electronic devices.

“Sir, I have detected two bugs and one tracking device under the Synchro piece’s skin.”

“Remove them and perform an analysis- now.”

Shock and nervosity permeated the examination room, doctors and researchers alike bustling about, gathering their equipment and tuning it for the situation at hand, whereas Shun stepped behind the girl, twisting her hands on her back and holding her in place for the doctor approaching with an anesthetic spray and a scalpel to perform his task.

Having removed the foreign objects with one precise cut each, the doctor handed them to a researcher standing in wait right next to him, and only then dabbed the cuts with a cotton swab and covered them with a band-aid.

“Everything’s alright, Sir. The jamming levels of this room were high enough to intercept the transmissions attempted,” the head researcher ultimately announced, and Shun’s ears picked up on a collective sigh of relief, his own posture relaxing slightly as he released his iron grip on Ruri’s Synchro counterpart.

“Good. Keep the devices active and feed them false data. If we manage to fool Akaba Leo into believing we escaped to Synchro, that should buy us enough time to adjust our own plans.”

‘Now that we’ve obtained the Synchro piece in Ruri’s stead’ were the words left unspoken before he continued, “Once the devices are transmitting again, I want you to report the current state of affairs to Akaba Reiji- doesn’t matter whether in person or in written form.“

The staff responded with a firm “Yes Sir!” already bracing themselves for an inevitable all-nighter; anything for the sake of Standard’s war effort.

For now, an immediate crisis was averted, allowing for Shun to address the girl’s questions and concerns for the first time since her arrival. Had he been anyone else, he would be apologizing for having handled her so roughly, for not having offered a single word of understanding and comfort.

But war had bled him dry of compassion for strangers, and his priorities lay elsewhere. Instead, he motioned for her to follow him to an adjacent room containing a desk, a computer, and two chairs opposite one another.

“Have a seat,” he instructed, taking the chair facing the computer screen for himself.

“My name is Kurosaki Shun, second leader of Standard’s army, Standard being where we are right now. Let me warn you in advance that I’ve no comfort to offer. Eight weeks from now at the latest, this dimension will be in a state of war, and I won’t tolerate but a single instance of misconduct or disobedience.” 

“Am I understood?”

Rin yelped at first with the patdown before realizing what they were doing- then she begrudgingly allowed them to continue, wincing as the bugs were cut out of her skin.  It didn’t particularly hurt, but the thought was the same.

Although she wasn’t sure where this was, beyond Standard, the atmosphere was the same, that of a military operation.  She watched their surroundings as closely as she could manage to try and gauge what level of technology they were operating on.  It seemed pretty fancy- the other had a keycard in his pockets, she noticed.  Perhaps not out of the frying pan yet.

In the office, Rin leaned against a chair but didn’t sit.  “War?” she had heard plenty of Academia propaganda on that subject- it was what substituted for entertainment in the Academia.

She grit her teeth.  This guy didn’t mince words, but she couldn’t stand to be intimidated.  “I understand.  But there are things that I want too- and I think we can make this good for both of us.”

“The Synchro piece they called me, right?  They said that at the Academia too; that I was part of some bigger whole that they needed to reunite the dimensions, and that it would likely kill me.  I don’t want to be the Synchro Piece anymore.  I want to fight on my own behalf, so I can keep living and protect my home.“  Her grip tightened on the chair.

He definitely liked the girl’s feisty attitude, wrong target or not.  Handing her a duel disk and the deck he’d stolen back along with Ruri’s, he asked, “That yours? You won’t be fighting for long, but even if it isn’t, this is still better than being unarmed.”

As the Obelisk Force units surrounded them, he couldn’t suppress a scoff. Did they really think that this made them more intimidating to someone who’d by now wiped the floor with hundreds of them?

“They’re not known to play fair once things don’t go their way, so good instincts there.” He praised quietly, which he realized was rather uncharacteristic of him.

“But now, Battle! .”

One by one, the Obelisk Blue fell victim to the vicious assault of Blaze Falcon and finally, the device around the girl’s wrist began to slowly blink.

“Duel!” she shouted in unison, taking back her duel disk and snapping it back on as fast as she could get to it.  She was jittery with excitement- it was a shame they had taken Ruri from her, she was sure that Ruri could hold her own too.  She was finally getting out of this hellhole.

Although it was only one turn she got in before the device began to blink, an Obelisk mook that the man had defeated got a swift right hook when he tried to grab onto Rin.  Nasty bastards, she thought.  Back in the City they had at least known when to call it quits.  It was part of how she had ended up here, thinking that the enemy would just give up quietly, and she didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice.

Shun took an abrupt step closer to the girl, completely disregarding her words as he grabbed her wrist and attached a miniature version of the dimensional travel device they had recreated in Reiji’s labs without the function that’d cause it to self-destruct upon arrival, setting its coordinates to Standard.

“Quiet now, you’re probably bugged,” he hissed, tapping his foot impatiently as the device hadn’t even begun to blink yet.

“There he is! And he’s trying to take the girl! Stop them!” As if on cue, five Obelisk Force units had picked up on the girl’s voice, now closing in on them rapidly.

“If you want to get away from here, then stand back, “ he barked, activating his Duel Disk in a smooth motion and preparing to face the fifteen soldiers all at once.

When Shun got closer, she stepped back, unable to keep him away from her.  She hissed but examined the device- it looked like a miniature duel disk.  Some sort of teleporter?  Which meant this was probably more than some sort of desperate attempt at rescue.

Eyes shining, she looked up at the other.  “Where’s my deck?  Let me fight, we can take them together!”

“Stay back,” Rin growled.  Time was fluid in this place- she knew they were attempting to keep her and Ruri disoriented so their attempts at escape would be easier to foil, but she knew it had at least been a few months, and so she had gotten used to the rhythm of this place.

A strange man in a purple coat turning up and threatening her with Xyz monsters was definitely off rhythm.  It was now that Rin wished she still had her cards or some sort of weapon with her.