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From her position opposite Luke, the dragon-maiden Violet likewise watched the battle raging between the two dragons, but compared to Luke's calm, she showed visibly more tension, threads of worry flickering through her vertical pupils.
In its battle against the black dragon, the Skywing Dragon held no advantage whatsoever. If anything, it stood at the clear disadvantage.
Above all, there was the dragon-flame the black dragon breathed, its destructive force and scorching power alike nothing short of astonishing. Were it not for the Hurricane Barrier the Skywing Dragon kept hung about its body at all times, canceling out a portion of those flame attacks, and were it not for its edge in speed and agility over its opponent, it would in all likelihood have been wounded already.
Violet had braced herself in advance, and even so, watching the Skywing Dragon pressed to the downwind position still sat bitterly with her. This was, after all, her strongest card spirit at the present stage.
As for summoning her other card spirits, the thought flashed through Violet's mind exactly once before being struck down.
Never mind whether her remaining cards could even wedge themselves into the battle overhead. Even if she summoned them, Luke held other card spirits of his own. From the very moment Luke had called out the black dragon, the rhythm of this battle had already fallen entirely under his control.
"Skywing Dragon, Wind Roar Cannon!" Drawing a deep breath and forcing down the stifled feeling in her chest, Violet issued the command. If things continued as they were, the Skywing Dragon had no way of wresting back the initiative. Better, then, to gamble on striking first.
At her command, the Skywing Dragon accelerated with a sudden violence, shaking off the black dragon's pursuit and climbing to a far greater height, where its dragon-maw opened and trained downward upon its opponent. The Wind Roar Cannon came howling out at its target, and as it traveled, it devoured every thread of mana along its path, the roaring blast steadily transforming into a colossal wind, until at last it had grown into an all-engulfing dragon-coil windstorm, several bolts of lightning writhing through its body, crashing down and hammering into the earth to leave behind a scorched and gaping crater.
The might of that single Wind Roar Cannon yielded not one inch to Iris Dawnford's Polaris Star Whale and the Whalefall: All Things Perish it had unleashed back in the day.
Watching the scene, Dark Magician Girl, Sistermon Ciel, and Growlmon X all felt dread crawl through their eyes. That thunder-laced destructive power stood on par with their own all-out strikes.
The black dragon carried no skill so absurdly unfair as a holy shielding bubble in its arsenal, but it had its own manner of answering all the same.
Attack met with attack. The black dragon's destructive power likewise stood at the very benchmark of the Seven-Star grade.
Scorching dragon-flame condensed, and everything in the surrounding air seemed to thin and waver. Everywhere the naked eye reached, the space around the black dragon had begun to warp beneath the impossible heat. It carried none of the Wind Roar Cannon's flamboyant spectacle, and yet that very restraint proved its control over its own power had been honed to an absolute extreme.
Inferno Fire Blast!
In the next second, a bomb of black flame dense with concentrated inferno split the heavens, colliding head-on with the Skywing Dragon's Wind Roar Cannon, and chain after chain of detonations burst forth, stabbing at every eardrum present. Even the Skywing Dragon, holding the high altitude, nearly lost control of its own body, blown staggering backward through the air.
At Luke's side, Dark Magician Girl reacted fastest of all, her staff sweeping once through the air to unfurl a colossal barrier that folded everyone safely within, sparing them the raging aftershocks of the clash.
As for Violet, beside her there surfaced a dragon whose exterior wore a coat of brilliant, vivid feathers, its whole body scarcely larger than a child of two or three.
It looked harmless enough, but as one of the dragon-family card spirits, its level was anything but low, standing at the full Six-Star grade, on par with Dark Magician Girl and the others. Scarlet wings spread wide, the Phoenix Dragon circled above Violet's head, scattering down motes of red light that wrapped her in their protection.
And the black dragon ignored the chaos of the detonations entirely. Wings flashing, it plunged headlong into the very core of the attack-storm, ferocious beyond all measure.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The explosions rolled on and on, Wind Roar Cannon and Inferno Fire Blast locked against each other, until at last both energies annihilated one another and dissipated as one, churning up a vast, smothering cloud of smoke.
"No!" The image of the black dragon following hard on the heels of its own Inferno Fire Blast flashed through Violet's mind, and her face shifted minutely. "Skywing Dragon, go! Windsoar Stride!"
"Too late." Luke shook his head, and in the same instant, from within the fog of smoke came the Skywing Dragon's grieving dragon-cry.
The next moment, the black dragon burst out of the smoke with the Skywing Dragon seized fast in its grip. The combined rampage of the Wind Roar Cannon and the Inferno Fire Blast had left nothing but shallow marks upon its body. And before every watching eye, the black dragon gave the Skywing Dragon a single, vicious, thunderous overhead throw, hammering it headfirst into the earth.
BOOOM!
The Skywing Dragon's enormous frame slammed into the land with a deafening quake, and centered on the point of impact, countless cracks tore racing outward, declaring the sheer terror of that collision's force to everyone watching.
Even with a dragon-kind's physique, standing far above that of ordinary card spirits, the Skywing Dragon suffered badly from that single blow, all the more because the one delivering it was a dragon-kind exactly as it was.
And before the Skywing Dragon could so much as gather itself to move, a colossal bomb of dragon-flame descended and swallowed its body whole.
Beneath the dragon-flame's twin incineration of soul and body alike, the Skywing Dragon managed only one last grieving cry before it reverted to card form and returned into Violet's body.
Having resolved the Skywing Dragon, the black dragon threw back its head and loosed a long dragon-cry that rolled across the whole of the battlefield, and its vertical pupils, radiant with a blood-fresh scarlet glow, locked squarely onto Violet. Even though a Six-Star Phoenix Dragon still hovered at her side, every person present could feel the naked disdain in the black dragon's eyes.
Even the Skywing Dragon had been no match for it. A mere Six-Star Phoenix Dragon amounted to a single Inferno Fire Blast's worth of business.
---
"Utterly dominant. And its grasp of timing is razor-precise besides." Having tracked the entire battle between the two dragon-kinds from its first exchange, even Drake could not pick out a flaw in the black dragon's fighting, and a thread of open approval flowed through his eyes. "More important still is that from beginning to end, Luke never issued a single command. He simply let his card spirit play its own game."
"Which also means that Luke's black dragon, in the matter of spirit-intelligence, runs a thread higher even than the Skywing Dragon." As the words left him, Drake's eyelids gave a violent jump. "Which is to say, that black dragon's quality has very possibly already surpassed Perfect, and reached the Legendary grade!"
The instant his own words landed, a swell of gloom rose in Drake's chest that he could not press down. A dragon-family card spirit this domineering, a Dragon Envoy of this caliber, and it had appeared in the Ancient Kingdom, of all places, rather than their Dragon's Valley?
Damn it all! This fellow's luck runs far too good. Watching the open smugness spreading across Tobias's face, Drake's teeth fairly itched.
Hearing Drake's praise of Luke, a thread of delight sprang up in Selene's chest as well, though beneath it she marveled in spite of herself. This little junior brother of hers, the longer one knew him, the more helplessly curious he made a person. Exactly how many secrets was he holding?
Angewomon, Red-Eyes Black Dragon, the Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl. And that's without knowing whether Growlmon X can push its evolution further. If it can, wouldn't that mean Luke already holds four Seven-Star-grade card spirits? Silently pulling up everything she knew of Luke's cards, Selene's lovely mouth rounded into a small "O" before she knew it. That lineup is considerably more luxurious than mine was back in the day!
How is it that barely a month and change without seeing him, and Luke's strength has climbed this fast? This pressure is no laughing matter at all. At the thought, a bitter look settled over Selene's small face despite everything.