Yu-Gi-Oh! (manga)/Recap/Original/Duel 5 The False Prophet

While walking to school with Yugi, Jonouchi nurses a bandaged wound on his cheek, muttering about recent bad luck. When Yugi asks about it, he says it was from a fight with four punks yesterday. Two seconds later, they barely avoid being flattened by a beam dropped by a workman from a telephone pole, causing Jonouchi to exclaim it as more bad luck.

Later at school, Anzu tells the two of them about a kid in class A named Kokurano, who claims to be psychic and can see the future. Girls have been going to see him at recess to have their fortunes told. Jonouchi decides to get his told and heads off, dragging Yugi and Anzu with him. At classroom A, there's a sizable line for Kokurano's services. Figuring that getting your fortune told isn't considered cool, Jonouchi tries to bluff that Anzu dragged him there, but it and her loud response results in calls for quiet from the psychic's assistants. We see Kokurano tell a girl that as long as she doesn't die she will continue to live before asking for the next person in line. As Jonouchi tries to urge Anzu (who believes Kukurano doesn't really have psychic powers) to go up to "get [her] fortune told," there is a brief but fairly strong earthquake.

After it ends, Kokurano addresses Jonouchi saying he is not a fortune teller, saying that classic methods such as palm reading and astrology are just attempts to do so based on statistics, but he is actually capable of being able to see the future. As a show of proof, he produces a note he claims to have written down his morning after his powers showed him a vision and instructs Jonouchi to read it aloud. "Earthquake today." The attendants call for a round of applause. Yugi merely gives a look and Anzu decides to give him a try after all. While the fortune-teller is holding her hand, Yugi notices how much he's fondling it; turns out (as revealed by internal monologue) Kokurano's been admiring her from afar is getting quite hot under the collar at touching her. Bored by his attendants, he decides to try and seduce her. Out loud, he predicts that a wonderful man will appear before her eyes, someone close to her already, who she'll fall so much in love with she'll swoon. He's thinking of himself, while Anzu thinks it might be the the man who rescued her that said "Let's play a game." Jonouchi then comes up, to which Kokurano simply states his recent bad luck and then calls for the next person; the upset Jonouchi leaves muttering. It is then Yugi's turn, but he seems to not want his fortune told, explaining he once saw a trick like the note before, and that if he wrote various predictions on note cards and hid them in the robes he's wearing, it wouldn't really be a real prediction. This makes Kokurano furious for some reason and he claims "countless letters" will fall from the heavens upon Yugi, which surprises him.

After returning to their classroom, Yugi is still trying to figure out what his prediction means. Jonouchi says not to worry, since they're useless, and Anzu states that Kokurano became famous when he predicted that a class A student's house would be set on fire three days before it happened, which hospitalized said student. While this freaks Jonouchi out, Yugi said he doesn't believe.

After school, Yugi is alone in the classroom packing up his backpack; since Anzu isn't working today, she promised they'd go shopping together on the way home. He then catches sight of a school library book in a nearby desk due back that day; figuring he still has some time before Anzu comes to pick him up, he heads for the library, unaware of Kokurano watching and following. Once there, Yugi locates the book's position on the shelves and goes to put it back when he suddenly realizes what "countless letters" means... just in time to notice the bookshelves behind him dominoing down! The Puzzle's eye flashes... The other Yugi emerges unscathed from the dust cloud kicked up by the bookshelves, apparently having managed to get out of the way, figuring out that Kokurano makes his predictions come true and realizes the danger Anzu is in.

In the classroom, Anzu is waiting for Yugi. Kokurano prepares a bottom of chloroform and steps inside, telling Anzu that he predicts that who he predicted earlier will come instead of who she's waiting for. Anzu finds it unlikely that Yugi won't come, and Kokurano then decides at that time to grab her and cover her face with a chloroform-soaked cloth, knocking her out. He boasts that any woman is his as long as he has his powers and he'll be popular forever, only for the other Yugi to enter the scene and start a game. In her last shred of consciousness, Anzu hears him and tries to get a look, but falls asleep before she can.

The game involves the left-behind chloroform bottle placed on several sheets of paper spread on one of the student desks. The players take turns pulling the paper out, a sheet at a time, without touching the bottle. Whoever causes the bottle to drop loses, "although the loser won't be conscious to know that!" A round of ro-sham-bo has Yugi go first. The two combatants pull out the paper from under the bottle at high speed, until at the end of Yugi's second turn, the bottle is sitting on the edge of the desk. Kokurano is sweating trying to figure out what to do, while Yugi proclaims that the only way he could remove the page now is if he uses his psychic powers to cause the bottle to levitate. Stating he will show Yugi his power, Kokurano focuses on levitating the bottle, proclaiming he can actually see the bottle floating... when it actually isn't; it's all in his imagination. He had grasped the edge of the page he wanted to pull, and his nervous tremors combined with Yugi's claim of disbelief causes his hand to shake the page and bottle right off the desk. The false prophet is instantly knocked out by the burst cloud of chloroform, and his robes open where he lies on the floor, revealing that Yugi was right earlier and he has tons of note cards with various predictions, including "Japan sinks." Yugi states it takes courage to realize you've reached your limit, courage Kokurano didn't have. He figures he won't wake up until tomorrow, plenty of time for the rest of the school to see the truth, and noting he doubts he'll maintain his popularity after that. The chapter closes with a comment to the still-sleeping Anzu.