The former enemy character/heroine case : Eclreaire’s
I, Eclreaire, was born an Imperial Vanguard Scout.
No, my rights were surrendered to the Empire immediately after birth.
It’s a common occurrence.
In a world where even basic food is a struggle for the weak village residents,
Surrendering children’s rights as losers of duels to get by is an everyday affair.
That’s the kind of world I was born into.
From a young age, only the way of a soldier was drilled into me.
I thought it was normal.
The turning point came a few years ago.
The Empire had finally achieved world conquest.
They considered there were no more enemies left in the world.
The next enemy was the “other world”.
Through the other world invasion technology that had been long researched, we would invade the other world.
That’s what I was told.
And I was chosen as the first vanguard for this.
The mission was reconnaissance and retrieval.
I was to defeat the fighters of the other world, and bring them and their rights back with me.
In our world, there was no one who could defeat the Empire.
But that wasn’t necessarily the case in the other world.
So in order to measure the level of the other world’s fighters, we needed to retrieve samples.
As a result, I challenged the first human I encountered in the other world to a fight – and lost.
Well, the Empire hadn’t really anticipated that very outcome though.
I’m just a common soldier, a disposable pawn that there are plenty more of.
The Empire would likely judge that my losing wasn’t really a problem.
There was just one miscalculation.
I didn’t just lose – I was utterly defeated.
The difference in power was far too great.
Well of course, my opponent was Mitsuru the shop manager, one of the strongest fighters in this world.
As a result of this miscalculation, something unexpected happened.
The Emperor Kaizer, the top of the Empire and the strongest fighter in our world, took an interest in the shop manager.
Emperor Kaizer, as the ruler of the Empire and our world’s mightiest fighter,
craved battle against powerful foes.
To Kaizer, who had conquered the world and had no more enemies, the powerful fighters of the other world were toys he desperately wanted.
So, in other words…
Well, let me put it this way.
After I was defeated, the Empire invaded this side one more time.
The shop manager fought against and defeated the invader, driving them back.
The shop manager thinks that invader was just my boss…someone slightly above my rank.
But that’s…
Not the case.
He was – Emperor Kaizer himself.
The shop manager didn’t realize this, and ended up defeating Kaizer.
Well, in other words…
The shop manager thinks he can’t be involved in anything too major of an incident.
But that’s wrong.
That perception is mistaken.
Well, not completely mistaken, but mistaken at times.
In reality, there have been many coincidences where the shop manager happened to narrowly avoid incidents.
The shop manager’s tendency to miss out on things is genuine.
But there are also cases where he resolves things before they become real incidents.
I’m probably the only one who realizes this.
Because I’m the only one who has seen the shop manager defeat enemies in a Dark Fight.
Normally, the shop manager engages in fights where he fully receives the opponent’s full power and responds in kind with his own full power.
The shop manager calls it a “Respect Fight” or something like that.
Basically, that’s his usual fighting style.
But in a Dark Fight, the shop manager doesn’t fight that way.
He crushes the opponent’s initial move and doesn’t let them act.
This way, the fight ends before he sees the opponent’s ace. So the shop manager mistakenly thinks the opponent was small-fry.
He would never realize that his opponent was actually the mastermind behind everything.
It seems things like this have happened behind the scenes numerous times.
By the way, in terms of which is stronger – the respect-focused fighting style he uses publicly, or the style that doesn’t let the opponent act that he uses behind the scenes?
They’re about equally strong.
The reason is that it comes down to compatibility between his cards and himself.
The compatibility between cards and the person is affected by the mental/spiritual aspect.
So when the shop manager fights publicly, he inherently cannot fight in the style that doesn’t let the opponent act,
because he himself doesn’t wish to.
Even if he could, he likely couldn’t exert as much power as when fighting behind the scenes.
Conversely, if he tried to fight with a respect-focused style behind the scenes, he couldn’t go all out either.
Why? Because when the shop manager is shutting down his opponents behind the scenes, he’s absolutely furious.
During the fight with Emperor Kaizer, Kaizer mocked the shop manager’s world.
He called it boring, uninteresting, worthless.
He said letting a capable fighter like the shop manager rot in a world like this was blasphemous.
At the time, I didn’t yet know it, but those words were essentially a landmine for the shop manager.
As a result, the person who was the strongest in our world.
had transformed our world – where the strong were supposed to be absolute…
Was defeated by the shop manager while completely unable to act.
The shop manager’s lockdown tactics combined with Kaizer’s deck having a critically bad compatibility likely played a role too.
Kaizer’s monsters boasted abilities that made them virtually invincible once summoned.
But the shop manager simply didn’t let Kaizer summon in the first place.
And so after that, I ended up living an ordinary human life under the shop manager.
Although I’m a monster, aside from having a card that looks like me, my biology is no different from a human in the shop manager’s world.
I can grow up and even have children.
I’m allowed to simply live like anyone else.
Well, thinking that way, I ended up getting a bit too used to living in this world lifestyle.
I guess I’m quite the laid-back person.
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Honestly, I don’t know what became of my homeland after Kaizer’s defeat.
To this world, that world is just one of the countless other worlds out there.
Only Kaizer and I traveled between them, so the coordinates are uncertain and we can’t go back.
However, sometime after I settled into this world, a photograph somehow “transferred” onto my bedside.
It showed people living lively lives in the town below the collapsed Empire’s castle.
Most likely, with the pillar of the Empire – Kaizer – defeated, the Empire rapidly lost cohesion.
The result was probably a revolution breaking out.
The one who sent the photograph was probably a former Imperial soldier who knew I was sent to this world.
In any case, they seem to have no intent to attack this world, and are simply doing their best to live in the present.
And that’s enough for me.
There’s just one other thing that’s been on my mind.
I once came across an old legend of this world online.
It was an obscure legend, one even the shop manager didn’t seem to know.
But its contents were intriguing.
It said that when an unavoidable catastrophe comes to the world, God sends a messenger accompanied by a divine herald to this world.
The messenger loves this world, and will not permit any catastrophe that threatens it.
So they say.
Come to think of it,
isn’t this about the shop manager?
When I realized that, I got chills.
Because there’s just too much information that can only point to that conclusion.
The shop manager’s deck is the “Primordial Angel Ancient” deck.
Angels are divine heralds.
The shop manager who wields their power is a messenger God sent to protect this world.
He loves this world’s “fun” form of dueling, and won’t permit any “destructive” dueling that seeks to ruin it.
It’s the shop manager to a T.
And above all else, the “Demon Card”.
The symbol that governs the darkness within this world.
Losing a duel using these cards means having your soul taken.
Just like in our world.
But looking at it another way, the Demon Card is also a safety device.
Because if you’re defeated by it and have your soul taken, you just need to defeat the being that created the Demon Card, and your soul will return.
In our world, once you lost and had your rights taken, they never came back.
Such a “Demon Card”.
Demons are the antithesis of “Angels”.
Could the Primordial Angel Ancient really be unrelated to that?
In fact, many of the invasions the shop manager crushed before they started didn’t involve the Demon Cards.
If the shop manager really is a messenger chosen by God, then he likely has that kind of “force of destiny” protecting him.
In other words, his “force of destiny” is intentionally ignoring matters related to the Demon Cards.
No matter what horrible things may happen from the Demon Cards capturing souls, as long as the root cause is eliminated, everything can start over.
The mental trauma caused won’t be undone, but life itself can begin anew.
It’s simple – they can try again because their lives were spared.
No matter how terribly the Demon Cards treated them, they can have another go at it.
It’s the same for evildoers – if the mastermind is defeated, the evildoers can return too.
Then they’ll be arrested by forces like Neo Card Police and given proper judgment.
Well, some may receive leniency considering circumstances, like myself.
Handled that way, catastrophes that can be retried from the start are more like “trials”.
Angels are the ones who give people such trials to overcome.
The angels likely left the Demon Cards behind intentionally, to provide trials that can be overcome… That’s my hypothesis at least.
And I’m probably the only one who has realized this.
The people don’t know the shop manager engages in brutal fights behind the scenes. And the shop manager doesn’t know the enemies he defeats include masterminds.
I decided to keep quiet about this.
Because after all, it’s just my hypothesis.
More importantly, what benefit would revealing it to others really provide?
There’s no real downside, but honestly, barely any upside either.
Simply put, if I told the shop manager, he’d probably just go “I see” and brush it off.
If my hypothesis is correct, then the shop manager is basically a reincarnated being, right?
So having a justification for that wouldn’t be very important to him.
In that case, it’s fine just leaving it be.
And there’s one more thing.
The fact that I know the shop manager’s secret – his brutal fights – is a secret just between him and me.
So I want to keep it that way.
Because after all, that secret is an important bond connecting me and the shop manager.
When I saw the image of the shop manager truly furious for the sake of this world back then, my life began anew.
I chose to stay with the shop manager because I admired that visage so much.
That important bond connects deep within my heart to an important burning passion.
Getting rid of it is something I simply cannot do right now.
–Oh, and one more tangential point.
What if, just hypothetically,
An enemy appeared who could overcome the shop manager’s lockdown tactics?
You might think that would be bad for the shop manager, but his lockdown style is just his hidden face.
It’s only half his true ability.
If an opponent showed up he couldn’t suppress with just that half, the shop manager would likely unleash his other half.
What I mean is this:
You think you’ve pushed through the shop manager’s lockdown by the skin of your teeth, only to then get utterly crushed by his respect-focused style of overpowering the opponent’s full power with his own full power.
That seems very plausible, doesn’t it?
Because the shop manager would probably get “fired up” if someone overcame his lockdown tactics, no matter how unforgivable the opponent.
He’d get so excited, he’d ignore everything about the opponent.
If that happened – I’d just feel deeply sorry for that opponent.
TIPS: The shop manager’s current final ace is [Primordial Celestial Super Ancient Transcendental Novae Ex-Metatron].
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