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"Did Manjoume-bro... lose?"
In the audience, Underling A and Underling B were in disbelief.
As fellow students from Duel Academy Middle School, they knew Manjoume-bro's strength very well. It was no exaggeration to say that even in the elite-filled Middle School, Manjoume was absolutely the best in their class.
Yet, such a Manjoume had just casually lost to a newcomer who was participating for the first time?
Was this newcomer a monster?
The red-haired girl next to them was also surprised for a while, then looked at the two of them, "It looks like your bro lost."
The two underlings looked at each other, pondered for a moment, and then said,
"Oh, we just misidentified him. He looks a little like him at first glance, but upon closer inspection, he's not our bro," said Underling A.
"Yeah, yeah, they really do look alike, haha..." Underling B echoed.
The red-haired girl narrowed her eyes, "So, their names are also the same by any chance?"
"Y-yes."
The two underlings braced themselves, gritting their teeth.
"What a coincidence."
"..."
This was an upset; the audience was greatly surprised. But perhaps no one was more frustrated than Manjoume himself.
Losing was one thing, but he also had a strange feeling that the opponent didn't even use his full strength.
The whole time, he gave off a relaxed vibe, as if standing there, coming to this competition, he was "just playing around" casually, not taking it seriously at all.
The opponent hadn't even summoned a single high-level monster!
Manjoume thought he had a full field and sufficient pressure, but the opponent lifted heavy as if it were light, seemingly dissolving his full power with ease... No, a more accurate feeling would be that it was like hitting cotton.
Throughout the entire duel, Manjoume felt like the atmosphere had been built up, foreshadowing again and again, and everything had been accumulated to the point of explosion, but there was nowhere to vent...
In short, he had never encountered such an infuriating duel before.
"Wait a minute."
He couldn't help but call out to the opponent as he put away his duel disk and turned to leave.
Yuugen stopped and turned around.
"Who... are you exactly?" Manjoume asked unwillingly through gritted teeth.
Yuugen looked at him, giving only a faint smile.
"Just a passing one-star duelist."
After saying that, he turned and walked away gracefully, but Manjoume felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart again, he almost spat blood.
One star?
What kind of crappy system, crappy evaluation mechanism? Do you call this level one?
In any case, Manjoume was stopped at the top eight this time, he didn't know how he was going to be reprimanded by his two older brothers after returning. And it would have been fine if he lost to Ryuzaki, but he lost to such an unknown person instead. The key was that this duel was so infuriating...
He must have had eight lifetimes of bad luck to run into this guy.
One thing was certain to Manjoume.
He never, ever, ever wanted to see this scheming bastard again in his life.
...
...
Yuugen reviewed the matches he had played in the past few days, drawing experience from actual combat with local duelists and summing up his lessons.
Although he hadn't encountered any tough opponents so far, the matches made him realize a flaw in his previous thinking.
That is, he couldn't directly apply the real-card environment from that time period to the anime environment.
Although hand destruction was the deck that dominated the competitive scene back then, and it still had strong suppression power here, relying on this one trick was okay against ordinary duelists, but it might not be as effective against experts in the anime.
First of all, there were absurd draw engines in the anime that didn't exist in real cards. It wasn't impossible to draw five or six cards with one card.
Secondly, it was common for strong characters in anime to turn the tables with a single card, even with an empty hand and an empty field. This wasn't metaphysics, but there was a reason for it. In the words of the original work, this was called, "Everything for a true duelist is inevitable, even drawing cards can be created."
Like Jaden Yuki in the later stages of the anime, whenever there was a tough duel, he would wear colored contact lenses. It wasn't just for looking good. Activating the power of the Supreme King, Jaden could topdeck at a higher level than usual. In the anime's power system, he was also considered a high-level duelist.
Jaden in his Supreme King form, even with a deck of forty random cards from the card pool, might be able to crush ordinary people with a top-tier deck build.
"It would be nice if there was a chance to get some god-draw skills..." Yuugen sighed.
At first glance, transmigrating to the Yu-Gi-Oh! world meant being able to take off just by playing cards, but without a foundation in the supernatural, it wasn't necessarily easy to survive in the later environment where gods were flying all over the sky.
It was well known that in Yu-Gi-Oh!, the easiest and most direct way to reach a supernatural level wasn't cultivation, but to find a way to get a spirit to possess you. But as far as he knew, most of the spirits in the original work had already been claimed. Where could he find one to trick?...
For now, he wouldn't think about these things. What he could currently do was only to study the environment as much as possible and optimize his deck to improve his tactics.
Yuugen was still in the stage of learning while practicing. His deck wasn't finalized yet.
His next opponent was Kajimoto Makoto, a level five duelist. His background listed the results of several public competitions and noted that he was a direct disciple of the "Psychic Stream Dueling Dojo."
Psychic Stream. Yuugen pondered carefully after seeing this.
If he remembered correctly, this school briefly appeared in the later stages of the GX anime. It was a rival of the Cyber Style Dojo that Ryo Marufuji inherited. In the end, a master of Psychic Stream appeared to challenge the dojo and used the "Jinzo" card.
He watched the recordings of the opponent's recent public competitions half a day before the match. What Kajimoto Makoto used seemed to be a deck centered around "Machina Force," a series of ace monsters belonging to one of the "Big Five" villains, who were defectors from KaibaCorp in the DM anime.
According to what the Psychic Stream duelist who challenged Ryo Marufuji said in the anime, the trump card of their Psychic Stream seemed to be Jinzo, but obviously, Kajimoto Makoto didn't have it in his deck.
Thinking about it, it made sense. Although Cyber End Dragon was said to be the trump card of Cyber Style, there was only one in the dojo, which was only passed down to the sole legitimate inheritor of the style. It was also proof of the style's identity.
Kajimoto Makoto was only an apprentice of Psychic Stream, and obviously didn't have the qualifications to inherit the style's trump card.
Having watched the recordings of his opponent's previous matches, Yuugen had a good grasp of the opponent's tactics. He had also adjusted his deck accordingly.
He checked his deck one last time before the match and confirmed that there were no mistakes. He got up, inserted his deck into the duel disk, put it on properly, and walked through the dimly lit passage to the arena.
The host had already finished warming up the crowd and introducing the players. Yuugen walked up the stairs to the stage and saw that the opponent had also appeared on the opposite side of the field. Their eyes met in mid-air, and invisible sparks flew.
Yuugen stood firmly on the field, and his duel disk unfolded.
It seemed that this duel shouldn't be a problem.