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"So THAT'S dragon-kind strength? I finally understand why dragons sit at the peak of every race. That firepower is something else entirely."
"Ssss! This year's intake is no ordinary batch. The Society and Wesley may genuinely struggle to close this out."
"A dragon spirit that strong. Makes you wonder whether Luke has some connection to this year's Valley sisters."
The onlookers had barely found their voices again when a cold current swept the road. Caught with no guard up, every one of them shuddered, and then a new figure stood on the battlefield.
「 Blizzard Spirit Deer 」 Race: Beast Clan Quality: Collectible Level: ★★★★★★★ (Seven-Star) Skills: Shelter, Ice Age, Ice Crystal Barrier, Frost Aria
Beside the White Tiger and the Giant Ice Bear, the newly arrived Blizzard Spirit Deer was daintier by far, and not one person on the road dared look down on it for that.
The deer's antlers gave off a gentle radiance, and a shield woven of solid ice hung before the downed pair, having caught the follow-up Atomic Blaster meant to finish them where they lay.
Crack!
Fracture lines spidered across the ice shield, and under every watching eye it broke apart inch by inch. The Blizzard Spirit Deer staggered two steps back, its aura sinking visibly.
It had blocked the dragon's attack. Blocking it had plainly cost.
"Ssss! A THIRD Seven-Star spirit, and a support-type at that. Is Wesley making a push up the rankings?" Even the seniors were seeing the deer for the first time, and the road boiled over again.
"Wesley was already high Leader, as I recall. This settles it. The man's crossed into PEAK Leader Realm."
"One year to peak Leader. He'll be breaking into Monarch soon enough. That pace is absurd. No wonder nobody argues about who gets the third seat."
"At this speed? By his senior year, he might reach high Monarch. Might even knock on the King Realm's door."
"Three Seven-Star spirits. That settles his next promotion too. He'll be climbing a few more ranks before long."
So this is the Magus Society. Conrad stood staring, gone somewhere behind his own eyes. In one year the man had put three Seven-Star cards on the table, and asked to match that, Conrad honestly couldn't promise he would.
He'd crafted his Seven-Star Nether Tiger before the exam, true. That proved nothing about Seven-Stars being easy. Conceiving the Nether Tiger alone had eaten his entire final year of exam prep.
The way Conrad figured it, even enrolled at Celestial, one Seven-Star card built per year already counted as good going. Fail a few times along the way, and a whole year could close with nothing finished at all.
And the time was only half of it. The materials a failed attempt swallowed were their own small disaster.
"Forcing me to summon the Blizzard Spirit Deer. Your dragon is truly past anything I expected." The look Wesley turned on WarGrowlmon carried open fervor now. If only a card that strong belonged to him instead. "Worthy of a race that stands at the apex of all of them."
"But however strong your dragon is, against three same-grade spirits at once, there's still no way to win." He waved a hand, every inch a man holding the winning ticket. "Move."
Before today, Wesley had never once imagined emptying his entire bottom deck in front of a freshman, and the fact of it left him somewhere between vexed and speechless. He was done spending time on this.
Ice Age!
The deer loosed a cry, ethereal and bell-clear, and cold currents poured out of it in unbroken floods. Everywhere they passed turned to glacial field, and the spreading chill set the whole crowd shivering and backing off.
Frost Aria!
At the second cry, two ice-blue pillars of light descended from the sky, bathing the White Tiger and the Giant Ice Bear, and the two beasts' auras climbed, and climbed, stair over stair to a new summit.
Heaven Tiger Reversion!
Avalanche Call!
The two spirits, pushed to their absolute peak, roared as one and fired their strongest arts together. The temperature across the whole field crashed again, frost condensed thick across WarGrowlmon's plating and spread at a speed the eye could barely track, and in a few heartbeats the crimson dragon stood locked, a sculpture of solid ice.
Avalanche after avalanche poured out of the empty sky at the bear's summons, and behind the wall of cascading snow hid the White Tiger itself, waiting. The design read plainly: drown the dragon under the avalanches, and the hidden tiger delivers the killing stroke.
Three ice-attuned Beast spirits, each raising the other two, firing together. The combined strike already brushed the Eight-Star standard.
"Whoa!"
Pressed earlier or not, Wesley Brandt remained a top-twenty power of all Celestial, and a serious Wesley was not something most people could afford to touch.
"Interesting. A convenient test, then." For the first time all fight, something that wasn't calm crossed Luke's face, and it looked like appetite. "WarGrowlmon!"
ROAR!
It came from inside the ice. The cannon-ports along the armor went furnace-hot, and the frost sheathing WarGrowlmon ran off in sheets of meltwater.
Trinity Burst!
Layer upon layer of bright crystal climbed WarGrowlmon's body, exquisite beyond words. In the same moment, two figures surfaced at its flanks, one green, one yellow: Rapidmon, and Taomon.
Summoned by the skill rather than any card, both arrived as phantoms only, and the two phantoms crystallized close behind the dragon.
Then the crystallized three fused into a single streak of red, green, and yellow, and it went through the field with the speed and the bearing of a thing that ends everything it touches. The sky-filling avalanches, the White Tiger hidden behind them, all of it shattered on contact. Not one piece of the design managed even to slow it down.
BOOM!
In one blink, the tri-colored light rammed home into the Ice Age itself, and the entire glacial domain flipped over whole. The Blizzard Spirit Deer, the bear, the tiger, all three of Wesley's spirits vanished into the strike's wake, and the explosion that followed swallowed the road.
"Is that genuinely destruction a Seven-Star spirit gets to own? Dragon or no dragon, that's outrageous!" Strange noises were coming out of half the crowd.
"No, hold on. That attack just now SUMMONED two new spirits, didn't it?!"
"It did. I saw them too. A flash and gone, but that presence yielded to nothing on this field."
"Then doesn't that mean Luke has THREE Seven-Star cards? A freshman, with three. Am I mad, or is the world?"
Never mind the onlookers. Wesley himself stood rooted where he was.
His three spirits' full-power combined strike had brushed the Eight-Star line, and against the dragon's tri-colored light it had offered no resistance at all.
Worse. He could no longer sense the White Tiger's aura. Nor the bear's. Nor the deer's. And there was exactly one explanation for that.
All three of his card spirits had been put down by a single strike.
EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.