The cute-loving Detective of Neo Card Police case : Kusakabe
In this world, a force of destiny overtly exists.
People are guided by destiny to cards, and cards are guided by destiny to people.
But that does not mean destiny is the entirety of this world.
Destiny in the form of cards merely rests in people’s hands.
If the destiny you want isn’t in your palm, then draw it to you.
Cards are what we draw destiny from our decks – the power to attract the destiny we desire.
That is the essence of the force of destiny.
So half of the compatibility between people and cards is decided by mutual preferences.
A boy who likes cool dragons builds a deck with dragon aces.
A girl who likes cute animals acquires lovable animal cards.
In the case Kusakabe, a boy who would become Neo Card Police:
From a young age, he liked cute things and hard-boiled detectives.
The two were contradictory, but fortunately there was an anime that catered to his tastes.
Or rather, that anime influenced him to develop those two tastes.
It was a children’s show about “a hard-boiled detective cat solving animal problems.”
He was entranced by the cat detective’s hard-boiled nature and occasional adorableness.
However, realizing that aspiration was an uphill battle for him.
It was around then that the world’s leading agent agency, Card Police, collapsed.
The newly formed Neo Card Police was not yet recognized by society at the time.
Public sentiment towards police was at its worst, not an environment to voice dreams of becoming an officer.
Moreover, his parents suppressed his cute-lover hobbies.
“Stop those girly hobbies and be a man,” they said.
As a result, he had to let go of his aspiration…the destiny he wanted to grasp.
He had already finished building it—the perfect deck made up of all his favorite cards—and had tucked it away in the back of a cupboard.
As he moved on to middle school and then high school, he gradually began associating with delinquents.
The rift between him and his parents had spread, not just to his preferences but also to his very lifestyle.
That said, his life among the delinquents was not entirely bad.
While the deck he used wasn’t one he truly liked—it was one chosen to fit in with those around him—
he still managed to carve out a place for himself. With his natural talent for card fights, he earned enough respect to unite a small group of delinquents under his leadership.
However, this position was ultimately built on suppressing his true self and conforming to others.
Deep down, Kusakabe was far from satisfied with such a life.
Even if he revealed his true self, those who currently respected and admired him wouldn’t accept it.
If anything, they’d be bewildered.
And when that happened—if they turned on him—
Kusakabe couldn’t say with certainty that they’d be entirely to blame.
Still, the weight he carried gradually piled up.
The shadow cast over his heart had been there since the day his parents rejected him as a child.
No matter how resilient he was, his ability to endure wasn’t infinite.
Eventually, the darkness eating away at him would lead him—and his “cards”—to the depths of hell.
The Demon’s Cards.
These were the origin of the incidents that shook the world,
the cards that dragged people into the abyss, dyed in darkness.
Their creation had various causes.
Sometimes they would suddenly appear from nowhere.
Sometimes a malevolent being would inhabit a card, turning it into a demon.
And sometimes—a card would fall into darkness, corrupted by the darkness within its owner’s heart.
These are the three main reasons.
For Kusakabe, the cause was undoubtedly the third one.
His stress, combined with the resentment of the cards he had locked away and forgotten in the cupboard, began transforming the cards into demons.
Once, he had loved those cards so much, and they had loved him in return.
Thus, the cards teetering on the edge of becoming demons eventually found their way back into his deck—
and were inevitably seen by his delinquent friends. When they mocked the card, Kusakabe finally snapped. Together with the card, now fully transformed into a Demon’s Card, he crushed the delinquents in a dark fight.
That was the future that awaited him—
“You dropped a card,”
until “he” called out to Kusakabe, just as he was on his way to meet his friends.
His name was apparently Tanafuda Mitsuru.
A university student at a nearby college and, later, the manager of the card shop “Duelist,” Tanafuda had picked up Kusakabe’s secret—the one he had tried so hard to keep hidden.
As Kusakabe panicked, Tanafuda simply looked at the card ,
“This is a good card.”
Tanafuda said.
Tanafuda had acknowledged and accepted Kusakabe’s taste in cards.
Even if Kusakabe admitted he liked cute cards, Tanafuda didn’t mock him.
Of course, such open-minded people were rare, but they did exist.
For Kusakabe, Tanafuda’s words were reassuring but not a true salvation.
Even if Tanafuda accepted him, those Kusakabe truly wanted acceptance from would never do so—or so he believed.
That’s why the moment that truly saved Kusakabe wasn’t Tanafuda’s affirmation,
but what he said afterward:
“If you want the people around you to accept you, why don’t you make them acknowledge you in a duels?”
READ THE ORIGINAL TRANSLATION AT gadgetizedpanda.net
It was an excessively bold suggestion.
But the more Kusakabe thought about it, the less unreasonable it seemed.
“Fighting is the best way in this world to convey your feelings to someone. By clashing with them in a card fight, you can make them understand how you feel.”
In other words, Tanafuda was telling him to express himself fully and seek understanding,
not to give up just because he had been rejected once.
He was telling Kusakabe to challenge them again and take a step forward.
It was such a simple thing.
Fate isn’t something you wait for—it’s something you seize for yourself.
Thanks to Tanafuda, Kusakabe finally began to walk his true path in life.
He confronted those who didn’t understand him head-on in card fights.
Before he knew it, he and his friends were no longer delinquents but walking a proper path.
And Kusakabe, too, fulfilled his dream—becoming a hard-boiled yet charmingly quirky detective-like Neo Card Police officer, commanding his adorable deck with pride.
That is the story of a young man saved by the “manager.”
But something about it feels off.
The “manager” is bound by two destinies:
One, he cannot get involved in incidents related to Demon’s Cards.
Two, he must eliminate incidents unrelated to Demon’s Cards before they occur.
This story, however, contradicts those destinies.
The manager prevents an incident caused by a Demon’s Card from happening.
Why did this occur?
This anomaly involves a kind of “bug.”
Kusakabe’s case stemmed from a Demon’s Card.
But when the manager spoke to him, the Demon’s Card had not yet been born.
It was still on the verge of becoming a demon. At that point in time, the Demon’s Card was not yet involved in the incident.
In other words, at the moment when the store manager called out, “the Demon’s Card was not involved in this incident.”
Nevertheless, it was “right before the incident occurred.”
As a result, this case got caught up in the store manager’s fate of “preemptively eliminating incidents unrelated to the Demon’s Card.”
It was as if an old existing card was behaving differently than expected due to a new card.
Against the rule that “a Demon’s Card right before its birth is not a Demon’s Card,” the store manager’s fate of “preemptively eliminating incidents unrelated to the Demon’s Card” processed it as “if it’s not a Demon’s Card, it’s okay to eliminate it preemptively.”
To put a specific example in one phrase: “Samo-samo Cat Bern-bern.”
TLNOTE: サモサモキャットベルンベルン aka https://yugioh.fandom.com/wiki/Synchro_Cat
By the way, if Kusakabe had fallen to darkness, that’s roughly the kind of incantation that would have started.
However, since this is quite an exceptional process, it doesn’t happen very often.
Actually, in the store manager’s life of just over twenty years so far, it has only happened a countable number of times on one hand.
Above all, this itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Problems that were supposed to happen were solved in advance, and Kusakabe and his companions had actually won a more blessed fate than their original destiny.
However, he snapped.
When the store manager solves problems that weren’t supposed to be solved originally, the subjects of the solved problems snap.
In Kusakabe’s case, he was originally supposed to gradually grow from this failure, taking a long time to become a hardboiled but cute-loving cunning old man.
But Kusakabe, who skipped various steps in that process, is now active as a young detective-like Neo Card Police officer who uses a cute animal deck.
Of course, while that’s a good thing…
there are beings who hold their heads in worry.
Like the Angles of crystal water (Sui Ren) who support the store manager…
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