"We won."
The duel ended. The burning Nazca Lines in the sky vanished, and the enormous spider image faded into nothingness.
Rudger, the Dark Signer Leader, fell to his knees, his eyes vacant as though the light had been beaten out of them.
After a long moment, Lua was the first to cheer.
"We won!"
The others also revealed delighted, relieved expressions.
Yes, it seemed they had truly won.
Ever since learning of their respective destinies as Signers, the battle against the Dark Signers had weighed heavily on their hearts. Though this battle had not lasted long, each of the Signers had endured trials of life and death. Every one of their duels had been perilous beyond measure; one misstep, and they might have been the ones to lose and die.
Now that they had seen the enemy leader truly defeated and the Dark Signer forces seemingly routed at last, the weight in their hearts finally lifted. Looking again at the upright back of Godwin, the officer, they felt an unprecedented sense of security rise within them.
He was truly too strong.
Even Yusei, the strongest among the Signers, secretly admired him.
Effect damage was something Yusei himself enjoyed using as well. Among all the Yu-Gi-Oh! protagonists, Yusei was probably the one most characterized as having a talent for tactical setups. In the series, he had repeatedly devised lethal effect-damage trap combinations, and there had even been an anime-original Infinite Loop.
Perhaps partly due to the rules of Riding Duels in the anime, Yusei himself was also an avid user of Trap Cards.
And although Yusei, like protagonists before him, enjoyed battles between powerful monsters, he had never displayed the soul-player obsession of having to pit both sides' aces against each other to determine the winner. He used Traps that