Yu-Gi-Oh Manga: 257 Memories of Fate

That's what I'm afraid of. See, I have to do a SUMMER cleaning this year, because all this semi-quarantine time inside has necessitated this apartment be cleared and freshened again, as though we've just been snowed in for the last few months in the midst of a second winter. A strangely warm and sweaty winter. So, I'm having work extra hard to motivate myself to grab my broom, vacuum and dust rag, because the memory of what it was like is so very recent. I'm not someone who is enthusiastic about cleaning anyway, so I take a lot of convincing under normal circumstances, but the spiders in this apartment are especially stupid? I don't know if they expect to be friends, or if they think they can take me, but I've had quite a few of them fearlessly scuttle up to me in whatever attempt they're making, and I've reacted rashly. It's not that I hate spiders, and in fact I like them being in my home, since they get rid of all the really pesky insects that might otherwise try to muscle in on my territory. But I don't like to see them, and I especially don't like when they try to get close.

But alas, as long as I live here, I fear it is my fate to smack the little bastards with the weekly ads.

At least the my encounters with the spiders don't look like this. In the end, I can be thankful that none as big as me have turned up to grapple with me. No matter how equally-matched we could be, I would immediately pass out and lose that battle by default.

Yami calls out to Slifer, grinding his teeth with the uncomfortable knowledge that its attack points are the same as Obelisk's. Kaiba watches his god with a similar level of anxiety as it begins to smoke and steam. The arm Obelisk has shoved into Slifer's jaw begins to crack, to Kaiba's nervous disbelief. Shafts of light shine out of the cracks and Slifer's mouth around Obelisk's fist. Squinting up at the struggle, other!Marik silently describes this as a battle of wills between the opposing gods, and wonders if they will both perish. I guess it's not guaranteed that these monsters behave in the same way as the others in the game, given that they're GODS and all...

While the beams of light shoot out from every possible split in both Obelisk and Slifer, Yami looks on in amazement. They start to break apart all the more, unraveled by the point of light shining at where they had connected. Kaiba wonders what it is, if their powers are reacting to one another. It grows, consuming the forms of each god monster in an explosion of radiance, Kaiba and Yami both staring into it with terror. Retinal damage will ensue, no doubt.

If they're not literally incinerated by the holographic nuclear explosion of death, of course. The rules for how these holograms interact with physical space are still woefully unclear, so I'm not ruling it out.

The blast is so bright that it floods the windows of the blimp below, and throws into stark relief Honda, Anzu, and the unconscious Jonouchi at the one in the medical room. The doctor asks in a panic what the light is, and Anzu responds with another alarmed question; whether the whole tower blew up. She yells Yuugi's name at the blinding flash, and by contrast, Ishizu stares out Rishid's window with silent surprise.

Other!Marik gapes in disbelief over the utter chaos that was unleashed by the two gods colliding, while Mokuba screams to his brother in the midst of the explosion. The Millennium Rod stuck in the back of his belt catches other!Marik's attention somehow, must have put it on vibrate for the match if I had to guess, and he twists around to see it sporting similar shafts of light to the gods before they were ultimately consumed by a sphere of it. Not sure how we're able to see MORE light in the all-encompassing radiance here, but we'll go with it since there's really not any other way to get anything strange about it across.

Other!Marik pulls out the rod (not a euphemism) with some aggression, teeth clenched (not a euphemism!), noting that it's glowing again just like it did before. No time for a flashback like KT is used to; we just skip to other!Marik glaring into the eye on the rod, identifying the shafts of brilliance he can miraculously see in the midst of a greater brilliance as Seto Kaiba's memories.

Only a fraction of what Kaiba deserves for the shitty horror ride in Death-T, but hey, it's probably the best comeuppance he's gonna get, so I won't turn my nose up at it.

Kaiba and Yami find themselves floating in the air between a strange inverted pyramid poking down out of a rippling bank of clouds above and a smoking and roughed-up looking ancient Egyptian city set against a backdrop of a couple more right-side-up pyramids below. Eyes practically popping in panic, Kaiba wonders where the fuck he is. On Yami's forehead, the eye symbol on all the Millennium Items shines out from between his eyes, on one of which we get a nice close up before...

Well I wonder who these strange dudes shrouded in shadows are, they don't look familiar at allllllllll...

Ah, hell, I'll play along with this shadow game. Get it? Shadow game? Don't ask me why I'm like this. Anyway the TALL Egyptian dude below them says something about the High Priest of Darkness conquering heaven and earth with his evil power, all of the short one's divine right and Millennium Items counting for DICK against the power of darkness. The short one just glares while the tall one rambles on that he too is the short one's enemy, now and forever, with his rod and dragon. We get a better look at his face and would you believe it, he resembles Kaiba exactly! The modern Kaiba looks aghast down at the guy with his face while he continues by claiming to repeat himself - he again vows never to be on the short one's side, but his pride won't let him surrender to darkness either. He just REALLY wants to defeat the short one with his own hands, whose face is also rendered more clearly as the mirror of Yami's normally stern visage. At the moment, though, the modern one in the air looks horrified and a little sweaty.

Ancient!Kaiba asserts with confidence that his dragon, whose roar shakes the heavens by the way we can't forget to mention that little detail, will wipe out ancient!Yami's magician once and for all. Ancient!Yami looks unimpressed by this claim. Then those big-ass slabs of rock that I thought were just aesthetic tile decoration, giant coasters if you will, begin to rise onto their ends. They pop up behind both of our ancient boys, who wave aggressive gestures like usual, and yell DIAHA at each other, which is noted to be ancient Egyptian for "duel start". Is this diagetic? Can Yami and Kaiba understand their ancient counterparts up until and directly after this point? Or is this just the classic unwise use of foreign language that so many 14-year-olds sprinkle into their fanfictions?

The ancient boys both summon the pictures in the slabs behind them, ancient!Kaiba calling forth his dragon, and ancient!Yami demanding his magician to rise from the slab, even though the slab has already done half of that work already.

Speaking of work, Yami's brain is on hyperdrive, wondering if this scene is part of his lost memories. Kaiba is sweating up a STORM as he... floats in utter disbelief that his Blue Eyes White Dragon was what came out of his ancient Egyptian twin's fancy rock coaster. The images on the stone tablets behind the ancient doppelgangers are pretty okay approximations of what has come out of them, so I don't know why he's so shocked. Anyway, Yami looks like he's come to an epiphany.

And with this revelation, the scene abruptly shifts back to the top of the tower in the center of the coliseum Kaiba constructed from light, which is visible again now that the giant ball of light seems to have dissipated from within it. The lads kneel, panting, as they regain their senses, reorienting themselves in a world where they are still playing a card game on top of a tower topped with a fake coliseum, I cannot stress this enough guys.

Other!Marik watches the wisps of virtual smoke disappearing into the atmosphere, all that's left of the gods who have decided to leave this earthly plane. Then he glares back down at the Millennium Rod like he's trying to wordlessly communicate the severe spanking it's going to get when they get home, by golly. He's figured out that it has somehow awakened Yami and Kaiba's memories, but hasn't quite worked out what it really DID, and he's clearly infuriated by this.

Kaiba and Yami have begun to stand again in the meantime, glowering at one another in barely disguised confusion. Kaiba wonders what that scene was that flashed through his head, pressing a palm to his forehead, probably quelling quite the headache. He closes his eyes to recall the image, and though he thinks it's a bit crazy, he knows it was Yami he was fighting in the vision. Yami stands across from him with an "why I never!" expression, as though he heard all of this. And for all I know, he did, since there never has been a fair distinction between thoughts and dialog in this comic to this very day.

Nah, Yami is just absolutely sure in his particular broody way that the vision was one of his memories. And there's one more thing he's sure of, while we're on the subject.

You guys sure have some patience. I would have forgotten all about this by... Oh yeah.

So what did I think of this chapter overall? The shared hallucinatory trip into Yami and Kaiba's parallel lives is very exciting. It's a nice diversion from the near nonstop card matches since the blimp, and is quite visually stunning in its stark use of dark, shadowy atmosphere. The deep shadows in particular are great at signifying the dogged pursuit of Yami and Kaiba's multi-lifetime association - their confrontation is like their shadow, always following, and put into stark relief the harsher the light on the similarity of their current situation (hence the gigantic explosion of light from the gods there). It's something they carry with them no matter how far back and forgotten, and they shape it with every action they take.

And there's something to be said for the teaser this is; this is really the first taste Yami has of getting the knowledge of his past that he entered this tournament, and it seems to be invigorating for him. It takes a little bit of processing, which is entirely understandable, but this is his first real indication that he's been on the right track this entire time, and gives him a little bit of a new drive to keep moving in the direction that produced it. I think this style of vision came quite LATE, and a couple of smaller ones earlier in the tournament might have given the path a bit more clarity, at least for us readers who might have enjoyed seeing him express a bit more doubt along the way for character development purposes. But it's understandable why this happened when it did, and why it was unlikely to have happened earlier, if not impossible, so I won't be too much of a stickler about it. Whether the effectiveness as an energizing experience is harmed or helped by putting it this late in the game is debatable, but it's certainly not INeffective. There's a real excitement at discovering that THIS is what he came here for, and the renewed, added purpose it gives him regardless.

Kaiba's reception of this vision is of course a bit more confused and alarmed, because even though it's happened to him before, he DIDN'T come here for this. Freaky visions were not part of his agenda, so the fact that this is happening AGAIN cannot be too comforting. I don't know how KT is going to depict Kaiba's recovery after this, since Kaiba also seems gain a little bit of vigor from the scene of him facing off against Yami with just as much fervor as always. There's a lot of interesting directions he could take this for Kaiba, so I'm really eager to see how the next chapter addresses their little journey into the past.

On the other hand, I have a couple of questions. How does other!Marik know that these are memories being transferred to Kaiba and Yami? Does he see them? Did he learn it in the course of becoming a tomb keeper heir? And is his possession of that damn rod the reason I had to endure his garbage for the past several chapters??? Inquiring minds would like to know.