A Heart to Duel For; Yu-Gi-Oh! Protagonists x Reader

Chapter 24: Let the Story Be Told

It was really happening. Or at least something was. I still couldn't wrap my head around it. We'd found out something big, something everyone should've been able to remember. But not once had I ever heard about any such thing or seen it.

Is our town's history being erased? A wild thought lodged itself into my head but I shook it away dismissively. That was stupid. What did anyone have to gain from erasing the wonderful and amazing history Adelfell had? We should be proud of it, shouldn't we?

All three of us were silent as we walked down Sunset Avenue. Honestly, it was pretty tense. A car sped by in the opposite direction and we passed by a few people on the street but other than that, there was nothing. I wanted to break the silence, but I found it more difficult than I thought it'd be, my mouth opening to speak and then instantly clamming shut again. What should I even say?

"Uh, Yusaku," I finally summoned up all of my courage to say. "How's calculus going?"

His shoulders twitched, almost as if he was caught off guard by my voice but he quickly recollected himself. "It's going fine," he answered coolly. "After I finish calculus one, I'm going to do calculus two and then physics."

"He's trying to cram in as many credits as possible before college." Takeru chuckled.

Yusaku muttered something under his breath and shot Takeru an irritated look.

"What do you guys want to do when you grow up anyway?" I asked curiously.

"Yusaku wants to go into tech. He's really good at that stuff," Takeru said. "I'm still undecided though."

"Really?"

"Yeah." He admitted with a sheepish laugh. "I just know I want to work with kids. Maybe as a teacher or something. Oh, that reminds me. . ."

Takeru launched into a trail of school stories about their class back in Den City, and I laughed as he recalled amusing memories and things that had happened to him and Yusaku.

"Once, I bet fifteen dollars with Yusaku that Aoi—she's our friend—would score higher than him on the next exam we had. He thought he was going to win because we were supposed to have a math test the next day, but then it got cancelled so our next test was actually for English. Aoi ended up scoring one point higher than him!"

He was just in the middle of another story about a lunch catastrophe when we finally reached our destination. We all went silent again as we stared at the clear double doors of the library.

"We're here," Takeru said, his voice solemn.

I suppressed a shudder. Zenith Library had been so warm and cozy the day Yusaku and I had been here. Why was it so uninviting all of a sudden?

"Let's go," I said, bravely stepping forward to open the door and walking in as confidently as I could. The air conditioner blasted me with a wave of chilly air, but that did little to calm me. I led the two boys towards the back of the library and into the Archives room.

Tall shelves lined the walls of the vast room, packed with storage boxes labeled by year, starting all the way back from when the newspaper was first launched up to the present. A long table sat in the center of the room with a lonely little computer to the side for reference checking.

Whatever we needed, it had it to be here.

"Everything's in order of year," I told them. "We need to go back to the 2020s, right?"

"Yeah. I'll start here." Takeru motioned to one side of the room. Yusaku was already walking up to examine the opposite corner, and I turned to look at the boxes closest to where I was.