Chapter 999: Is Taiyi Being Targeted?

New Toshinoya, on a Duel Highway.

Two D-Wheels were speeding, their riders engaged in a duel.

One of the girl duelists said: “My turn, draw!”

But before she could act on her drawn card, a red flash suddenly lit up the D-Wheel’s dashboard. After a series of alarm-like beeps, the duel screen abruptly changed, and a voice echoed from within the D-Wheel.

“Duel mode overwritten. Entering Brawl mode.”

Both riding duelists were utterly bewildered.

Brawl mode? What does that mean?

In the girl rider’s rearview mirror, a dozen pure-black D-Wheels suddenly appeared, all leaning into the turn in perfect unison. Before she could press the communication button, the front row of black-clad riders raised their arms in unison; the duel discs on all the D-Wheels activated simultaneously, entering duel mode.

“Brawl mode activated.”

The girl’s pupils contracted, barely believing what she saw.

Dozens of opponents had suddenly stormed into her riding duel!

She had never even heard of a riding duel involving more than ten duelists.

And this wasn’t happening just here—it was occurring across every district of the city.

The twilight of New Toshinoya was torn apart by the roar of engines. The first to notice the anomaly were the duelists training on the ocean-crossing bridge. They were all WRGB competitors, using the off-season to train, adjust their decks, and fine-tune their D-Wheels.

While speeding, they suddenly saw dozens of pure-black D-Wheels surge into their rearview mirrors. One by one, the mechanical riders known as “Phantoms” cut into the major raceways with perfectly synchronized trajectories, their helmet visors glowing with cold blue light.

Surveillance footage from across the city recorded chilling scenes: on the central elevated highway, several Phantom D-Wheels formed a moving formation, cornering a WRGB rider against a dead end; in the abandoned factories of the satellite zone, a young duelist was surrounded by black motorcycles arranged in a radial pattern.

It was as if, suddenly, these things were everywhere.

The Public Order Bureau’s alarms blared wildly; the Public Order Pursuit Unit descended into chaos.

Alarm signals poured in from every corner. Duelists kept getting ambushed by these inexplicable intruders.

And these Phantom riders’ duels weren’t just ordinary duels. Soon, reports came in that their duels were likely lethal.

Though not Dark Duels, the monsters summoned during these duels inflicted real physical damage, like those of Psychic Duelists.

The intensity of the real damage wasn’t very high—even among Psychic Duelists, it was on the weaker end, far below the level of someone like Ichinoya Aki.

But riding duels were inherently more dangerous than traditional standing duels; high-speed duels carried inherent risks. Suffering real impact during such duels made crashes and serious injuries perfectly normal.

In just over ten minutes, the Public Order Bureau had received repeated reports of riders suffering serious injuries from Phantom D-Wheel attacks.

As a blinding flash of lightning split the sky, all electronic devices in New Toshinoya emitted piercing static. A hurricane seemed to materialize from cyberspace, sweeping through the streets with the shriek of data streams. Glass curtain walls of skyscrapers shattered in the gale, countless glittering shards reflecting against the black metal tide churned up by the Phantom D-Wheels.

Yes, a hurricane. Just as this disaster struck, New Toshinoya was hit by a hurricane. The timing—exactly when the Phantoms flooded the city—felt as if the Phantoms themselves had brought the storm.

Once-straight asphalt roads now looked as if devoured by a giant beast; chunks of asphalt curled upward like fish scales, exposing rusted municipal pipes beneath. Traffic lights at intersections bent and collapsed; severed cables hissed in flooded puddles, occasionally sparking with eerie blue flashes.

Glass curtain walls of street shops had become glittering weapons. Coffee shop floor-to-ceiling windows cracked in radial patterns; convenience store vending machines lay overturned, soda cans rolling and clashing across the streets with hollow metallic echoes.

Across this ruined, storm-battered street, the Phantom D-Wheels charged wildly, attacking D-Wheel riders across the city with near-indiscriminate violence.

You Xuan immediately sought out Pulaxi. Naturally—he had encountered this exact scenario in the original anime, where Pulaxi was the culprit. Pulaxi had deployed mass-produced Phantom robots to attack D-Wheel riders, forcing them into desperate survival duels to rapidly generate countless circuits and accelerate the arrival of the Arc Cradle.

You Xuan had previously fought against Pulaxi’s remotely controlled Phantom robots; he knew Pulaxi possessed such machines. So naturally, he was the prime suspect.

But when You Xuan arrived, Pulaxi was equally frantic.

“My system’s been hacked!”

Pulaxi roared.

“Yes, these Phantoms are mine—but all my factories have been breached. Someone has altered the Phantoms’ programming!”

You Xuan raised an eyebrow skeptically: “Oh? So you didn’t personally send these machines out to draw circuits?”

He suspected this because that’s exactly what happened in the original anime. Pulaxi was impulsive; while his teammates insisted on using WRGB to draw circuits, he thought it was too slow. He preferred to hack the entire city, threatening everyone’s lives to force D-Wheel riders to unleash their potential and accelerate circuit formation.

Pulaxi’s face darkened: “These Phantoms are indeed mine—but I did not activate them. My system has been tampered with.”

“Pulaxi’s telling the truth.”

He Sai spoke up from beside him.

Pulaxi: “He Sai.”

You Xuan said: “Oh? Why do you say that?”

“Pulaxi may be reckless, but his goal is the same as ours—he wants to see the circuits completed.”

He Sai pointed downward to the void below, where the circuits hovered.

“But since just now, the Phantom machines have erupted en masse—high-intensity duels are exploding across New Toshinoya.”

“Wait, really?”

Lu Qi also widened his eyes.

“No circuits have increased since then—why? There should be energy surging everywhere from all these duels.”

“It’s probably because the Phantoms’ D-Wheels have been modified.”

He Sai said gravely.

“Someone altered the D-Wheel’s perpetual motion engines to absorb the energy released during duels. As a result, duel energy can’t be drawn into circuits—it’s being consumed instead.”

“What?” Lu Qi exclaimed. “So that means—”

“Yes. Someone is killing WRGB riders to halt the competition, and the energy generated in the process can’t be used to form circuits.”

He Sai narrowed his eyes.

“We’ve been targeted.”

(End of Chapter)