The Last Game of Yu-Gi-Oh Ever Played

Fiction by Xavier Garcia & Caleb Bethea

* Content Warning: Body Horror *

It’s Friday and they gather. They gather to that dingy basement on Birch Street for the promise of blood. All of them eager, all of them hungry, all of them curious. Some have come as far as three schools over. That kid over there, the one with the winter hat on even though it’s July, he doesn’t even go to school in this town.

But he came, like they all came, to witness the end of a friendship.

He came, like they all came, to watch the last game of Yu-Gi-Oh ever played.

Jack looks over at Todd across the table and feels a pang of sadness over this fact. Todd looks at Jack across the table and just wants this over with. Blood makes him queasy.

Best friends for ten years. It was supposed to be best friends forever. Friends through high school and then, fingers crossed, roommates in college and then graduation and then best men at each other’s weddings. It was supposed to be best friends forever.

But they’ve been best friends for too long.

They’re just too similar. They like all the same subjects in school, they like all the same girls, they like all the same sports and have all the same favorite characters in all the same animes. Enough is enough. If either’s truly to shine in life, there can only be one.

So, they’ve gathered to that dingy basement on Birch Street to finally settle it. And none of that kid shit either. None of that Pokémon, Digimon, baby shit either. They’ve come to settle this like men. They’ve come to play Yu-Gi-Oh.

Two scrawny kids in hoodies bring out the duel disk arm gear for Jack. The two friends look at each other as the hoodie kids tighten it up. Another kid in a windbreaker shuffles the deck. The air tastes like after-storm humidity and Doritos. Todd licks the red dust off his fingertips.

It’s time to do this fucking thing.

The draw is simple enough. But it ends less simply. Jack’s the first to lose a round. He knew the Larvae Mouth card wouldn’t bode well for him.

The crowd looks like they’re smoking their first cigarette, buzzing with possibility, nauseous, and green.

Jack reaches into his pockets to pull out a box cutter and ceremoniously removes one of the chucks from his feet. These are the rules, goddammit. The first step toward one of them finally being free of the other. No time for weak shit.

Chips crunch some more. A few gasps leak out of the audience, then silence. Everyone’s breathless at what they’re seeing, what they came to see.

Wincing, and standing a little crooked, Jack says he’s ready again, returning the box cutter to his pocket. Todd’s drawing for the next round, but Jack’s waving on some nerds to remove the little bit of flesh on the floor between them. They hesitate, but Jack’s got a way of making people do what the hell he wants. Todd too. Another reason one of them has to go.

Todd pauses his draw as one of the hooded nerds kicks the tip of Jack’s little toe to the side. Everyone tastes copper on their tongue. The duelers load their disks and you’d swear there’s enough humidity in the air to drown the audience. 

Todd draws the Dark Magician card and lowers his eyes. It had to be done. It had to be drawn. And Jack is no longer his friend. But still, seeing him there, across from him, bleeding all over that basement floor, it doesn’t feel good. War never does.

Then something catches Todd’s attention. Something on the wall. Something that looks like it could be that disgusting green worm on the card that he used to beat Jack with in the last round. But as he stares at the wall to his side, he sees nothing but exposed brick.

“I can’t kill a man when he’s looking the other way,” Jack says.

Todd looks away from the wall.

“Sorry. Your move.”

So, he moves.

Jack draws and slides over the Dark Magician Girl card on his side of the table, and her ability is instantly activated and the little room erupts with the sound of rapture, Jack soaking it in, that highly sought after sound of a roaring crowd, blood drunk and sugar sick from too many Sunny Delights.

The round goes to Jack.

Anime tiddies were always Todd’s weakness.

Then again, they were always Jack’s too.

Todd grimaces and reaches into his jeans. He pulls out a utility knife he stole from his dad. For a moment he goes to lean down to take off the same chunk of his foot that Jack took. But something about the way the crowd reacted to Jack’s move doesn’t sit well with him. Their love should have been his. Not Jack’s. His.

So, instead, he gently presses his hand onto the table, splaying out his fingers, before sawing off his pinkie. Gritting his teeth through the searing pain, Jack can’t see him in pain, and then Todd brushes the little bloody lump of flesh to the other side of the table.

The room is silent. Their respect is evident.

Those same two scrawny kids in hoodies come over to remove the digit and help cauterize the wound with a red Bic lighter and then it’s time for another round.

Todd looks up and meets Jack’s eyes.

He goes to draw, it’s his turn this time, but then he sees it again. Something in the corner of his eye, not a worm this time but some man lurking in the crowd, a man dressed in the same purple robes as the magician on the card, and then Todd blinks and the figure is gone and he wonders if anyone else saw him too, but one look at Jack and it’s obvious he’s seeing something he shouldn’t, because Jack is definitely seeing something he shouldn’t, and Jack wonders if he really saw what he thinks that he saw, a pair of anime tiddies in the periphery of his vision.

Jack looks up and meets Todd’s eyes.

“Your move.”

And that’s how it goes, move after move, round after round. And the air in that basement on Birch Street now smells so thick and metallic, a miasma of spilled bodily fluids and the body odor of men who haven’t learned to use deodorant yet.

Card after card, Jack and Todd play out their deck. Pot of Greed and Lack Luster Soldier and Slifer the Sly Dragon and Polymerization and Legendary Six Samurai and Monster Reborn and Parasite Paracide and Tyler the Great Warrior and Necroface and another Necroface and Jack had no idea that Todd even had a Necroface and another Necroface because Todd actually had two Necrofaces and please no more Necrofaces and Mystic Tomato.

And round after round, Todd and Jack play out their deck with the loser of each round losing a part of themselves. The pinkie off of Jack’s right hand, the big toe off of Todd’s left foot, Jack’s right ear and Todd’s left one, and more fingers and more toes and even some flaying of flesh, even some choice cuts off thigh and off back.

The room so heavy with the coppery stink of amputation that the kid over there, the one with the winter hat on even though it’s July, he throws up in the corner. But Jack and Todd and the blood hungry crowd aren’t the only ones in the room anymore. And though Todd and Jack are the only ones that can see them, the basement also fills with Pot of Greed and Lack Luster Soldier and Slifer the Sly Dragon and Polymerization and oh look there’s Necroface and another Necroface and another Necroface.

But Jack and Todd keep going.

Because there can be only one.

Because yes, even though they like all the same subjects in school, and they like all the same girls, and they like all the same sports, neither is really good at any subject in school, and neither has talked to a girl ever before, and let’s not even bring up fucking sports. But that’s only because there’s two of them. That’s only because each holds the other back. It wouldn’t be this way if there were only one of them.

So, Todd and Jack keep going.

Because there can be only one.

More Parasite Paracide. More Mystic Tomato. More fucking Necroface. Until it’s time for the last draw, both players bloodied, both not doing so hot. There's less of their bodies now than there was before. And the air—it’s like something is about to snap or tear, to break or end. It’s a special draw. 

The Blue Eyes White Dragon.

Worth half a house on eBay and even more rare in the show. In fact, there were only four in the world and some dude had three and when he finally won the fourth in a duel he tore that shit to shreds so no one could use it against him. And Todd himself is so shocked by the sight of it that he drops it in the ground, damp with piss and blood. And then it begins to tear apart. Invisible forces. Hooded figures. Tearing apart the greatest Yu-Gi-Oh card of all time. Shredding into more pieces than can be counted, until finally the air tears open too.

Blood projectiles out of every wound on Todd and Jack’s body. It’s ice blue and hot as nuclear waste. It spouts into the crowd, incinerating the Dorito dust off their flesh, and then the flesh itself. The trace of copper is burnt out of the air, replaced by the smell of Bic lighter fluid and dying stars.

The kids in the hoodies get out of the way in time, but one trips on the boxcutter because the boxcutter is alive and breaking itself into an uncountable number of pieces and all the sharp edges are flying through the basement, chasing down the hoodie kids until each piece disappears one by one inside their bodies, worming around on the inside until all the bladed pieces erupt out of their hoods in an apocalyptic gut flood of red and black and sharp points.

The gore exploding from their faces laps across the bodies of the basement, blasting their scorched bits into new formations, poses fit for the monsters of trading cards. Until the deluge of innards lands on the kid with the beanie. He’s trying to drag himself away, half his body burnt already. The little blades and caustic blood cut away at his skin. But he keeps crawling. The cuts keep coming. Until he’s crawling out of his own flesh. His insides are deep purple and the blades cut away at them too. Revealing brand new white and blue skin, scales, as old as the earth itself. The blades stop cutting.

The Blue Eyes White Dragon shakes the human bits from its wings, twirls its tongue to untangle a mass of tattered beanie and human hair from its teeth.

It's shorter than Todd and Jack would have guessed, no more than three or four feet tall, squawking its way between the last two players on the planet.

With a knowing shriek, it bares its teeth over the bleeding former friends. And its jaws snap shut. 

Both kids let out a sigh, the same exact sigh.

The basement collapses. The world ends.

What a fucking game of Yu-Gi-Oh.

Xavier Garcia is a writer/editor from Toronto, Canada. His short fiction work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies published by Fugitives & Futurists, Cold Signal, hex, Apocalypse Confidential, Cursed Morsels, Filthy Loot, and others. You can find him walking the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, or at twitter.com/xavier_agarcia.

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They earned an MFA at UofSC and now spend the best of their time with their wife and three goblins by the ocean. You can read their work in HAD, Tenebrous, Maudlin House, hex, Twin Pies, autofocus, and elsewhere. They tweet at @caleb_bethea_