Joey nodded and pocketed the earring. Kari had commented on the fact Tea had had her ears pierced during the school year, telling the teen that her earrings looked really pretty. Tea had apparently dropped one of them to give her friends a clue as to which way they were heading. He glanced around one last time, making sure there was nothing else he needed to pick up, then gestured for Ombre to follow him and darted up the tunnel.
“Keep up!”
It felt an awful lot like Duelist Kingdom all over again as he started the landing preparations to touch down on DimSoft island.
He wasn’t foolish. He knew that he was walking into a potential trap. The virus that had hit Kaiba Corp’s system hadn’t been very difficult to hack once he had managed to isolate it. It had been simplistic in its design, almost too much so. There was no way, if they hadn’t been trying to lure him in, that the virus should have led him back to its creators as easily as it had.
Still they were threatening his company and that was something he would not allow. He was convinced he knew why. Their VirtualNet system had the potential to overthrow his Duel Disk System, but only if people could be convinced that his tried and tested system couldn’t be trusted. No one would want to spend hundreds of thousands of Yen or worse, English pounds, on virtual tech that would probably break down within a year if Kaiba Corp could provide the same sort of service reliably with not even a fraction of the cost.
But after the Duel Disk System had gone down for three days while they tried desperately to recover or replace the information that had been wiped, people were looking for other options, ‘just in case.’ They had done that to him, to his company, to his staff who had worked themselves to the bone to try and get everything up and running again.
If it hadn’t been for Ironhide and the backups she had made, it would have taken them much longer, but she had saved them weeks, even months of work by copying everything she had had access to into her backup system. Or rather a backup system he hadn’t even known existed until this point.
He planned on looking into that once he had dealt with Dimension, or rather with SharpShade, who he rather more suspected were the driving force behind the break in, the virus and his horrendous stock prices. The fact that it was a ‘N.O.A.’ security system made him wonder if his half brother, the Gozabora Kaiba’s true son, had survived the decimation of his virtual world somehow.
According to Ironhide it stood for Networked Office Armour security system and had been a part of the system before she had joined the company, but he had asked around. Ironhide was the only department head, temporary or otherwise, who used it. He wasn’t sorry she did, but he needed to know more about it, in case something like this happened again. He couldn’t really afford the three days it had taken to get into it after the breech, nor could he risk trust a system that could have been created by an adopted sibling who had once tried to kill him.
Still for now it had saved his company and allowed him to get everything settled enough to let him come here to deal with the threat personally.
At least this time his brother wasn’t in danger. Just before he had left the grounds of the mansion, he had made sure his brother was securely in the panic room. Mokuba had objected, worried for his brother’s safety and about the amount of work he had to do at Kaiba Corp. Kaiba had managed to talk him round by helping him get set up so he could work right where he was without any trouble.
It was one load off of his mind as the helicopter touched down and a group of suited men gathered to meet him. Despite having no intention of actually testing their game, he had Ironhide playing and reporting to him for that, he was pleased to see one of the men had what amounted to a Duel Disk without the projectors and half the processing power. He wanted to reverse engineer it later and find out exactly how much of their programming was actually his programming.
“Mr Kaiba.” One of the men smiled at him as he slipped on the DimDisk and inserted his deck, “Welcome to the island. I’m afraid you’re a bit behind the others. They all started about an hour ago.”
“I was expecting Harper.” Kaiba responded, not bothering with the pleasantries. “Where is he?”
“I’m afraid Mr Harper is busy at the moment, he was expecting you a couple of hours ago and now the game has started he has details to take care of.” The man informed him, “However if you head for the castle, he will be formally addressing everyone this evening.”
“The castle?” Kaiba questioned, looking at the fortress on the mount in the centre of the island. It looked like some stereotypical evil fortress from some generic fantasy game, just as every evil fortress in a Dimension Software game had. It was reassuring actually. That on some level he was dealing with the same level of inability to design that he had seen from Dimension the entire time. It told him that it was SharpShade who was the problem and if he could deal with them, Dimension would go back to being the hopeless incompetents he was used to dealing with.
“That’s right.” The mook nodded, “If you head there now, Mr Harper will probably be ready to see you by the time you get there.”
Kaiba nodded. If he had had his way he would have landed in the castle courtyard or as close as damnit, but the forest surrounding the castle was too thick and if he had tried that landing in the tiny central courtyard he would have crashed. Still it wasn’t that far to the castle and unlike the last one he had infiltrated he would be able to walk in the front door. He stalked off, heading towards the castle and looking forward to dealing with the issues and going back to his job.
“I hope you enjoy your game, Mr Kaiba.”
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