Yugioh: The Hope of Six

Chapter 10 - A Dark Council

Lightning floated through the hallway of his sanctuary, his mood very sour. It had been an hour since he learned the truth. He still could not believe how he easily fell for the humans' "fake deaths". He should have picked up on it straight away. He should have anticipated it. The fact that he hadn't left him more pissed than he would dare let on.

'I was careless and overconfident. I made a mistake. As an Ignis, I am supposed to be better than that. I will not repeat those errors.' He promised himself, fuming.

After retreating into his private chamber, Lightning wasted no time in using his newfound abilities to search his enemies' worlds for the perfect recruits to succeed where he, Zarc, and E'Rah had failed. He was still amazed by this power. He did not possess anything like this before. Even now he still did not know how he acquired it. He was positive it had something to do with the way he was forced out of Bohman. Perhaps when he had some free time on his hands, he would examine himself more closely. For now, he had work to do.

He started with the world, and time period, that Yugi Muto came from. His most dangerous enemy by far was the creator of the Shadow Realm itself, Zorc the Dark One. It took the teamwork of Yugi and his friends to uncover the Pharaoh's lost name to reawaken his real power and destroy the monster forever. Lightning believed he could revive the beast using his powers, but then decided against it. Zorc would be inadequate to recruit because he was simply too powerful to control and would most likely not take orders from a lesser being than itself.

As he combed through Yugi's history of adversaries, he saw a few possibilities. There was a young man named Marik Ishtar, who wanted the power of the Pharaoh for himself and had a strong darkness within him until his defeat. He also saw a powerful ancient king called Dartz who wanted the soul of the Pharaoh, as well as Seto Kaiba and Joey Wheeler, to awaken a beast called the Great Leviathan by means of the Orichalcos stone (which turned out to have possessed him as well until Yugi and the Pharaoh freed him). Lightning found the power of the Orichalcos very interesting, especially since the Pharaoh himself was once taken over by it's influence.

Through his viewing image, he reached into it, grabbed something, then pulled it back out. In his hand now held a glowing dark green stone. The power coming off of it was intoxicating. Lightning could tell that much. He put the stone in an energy sphere and set aside for now so that he would not become addicted to it like the humans have. With that done, he resumed his search.

After a minute, one person really caught the interest of the Light Ignis: Noah Kaiba. Lightning learned that Noah had his mind transferred into a super computer aboard a submarine after a car accident rendered his physical body badly damaged when he was twelve years old. His father, Gozaburo Kaiba, did this to save his life. Overtime, he was replaced by Gozaburo's adopted son, Seto. Sick of being stuck in cyber space, Noah tried to reclaim what he lost six years later, only to be stopped in his tracks by both Yugi and others Noah took prisoner. After a last minute change of heart, Noah let everyone else go before a missile fired from an orbiting satellite blew the place up.

All three seemed viable candidates. Thanks to his experience with the Gauntlet program, Lightning could now pull the deceased back to the living as he did with that fool Heartland. All he had to do was reach into the abyss of the afterlife and pull one of those evils back to do his bidding. However, in the end, Lightning chose Noah. He did so because he would be the easiest to manipulate, recalling how he corrupted Windy to serve him. Lightning chuckled to himself, amused that he would be reprogramming a digitized human to do the same. Before he looked for Noah's soul from among the dead, the Ignis first checked to see if he really did make a back-up copy of himself before the explosion like Yugi speculated.