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Up close, moth demons were deeply unpleasant.
From a distance, they resembled butterflies. Pretty wings, graceful flight patterns, almost decorative. But within twenty feet, the illusion collapsed. Segmented bodies. Twitching compound eyes. Barbed legs that bent in ways that made Luke's skin crawl. Giant insects wearing butterfly costumes, and the costumes weren't fooling anyone.
If these had been Butterfree from Pokémon, Luke could have dealt with it. Pokémon had friendly designs. These things looked like something that crawled out of a nature documentary about parasites.
The colony's nesting ground was a grove of enormous flowering trees, their trunks wrapped in bioluminescent vines and their canopies heavy with blossoms the size of car hoods. Petals drifted through the air like slow-motion confetti, and a faint sweet smell hung over everything.
That smell was the pollen. Breathe too much and you'd be dreaming until something ate you.
"Mana, watch the pollen clouds. Stay upwind, and don't let them box you in."
"Got it, Master!" Mana's staff was already spinning. She launched off the ground and landed on the lowest branch of a flowering tree, twenty feet up, surveying the swarm. "Ooh, there's a LOT of them. This is going to be fun!"
The first wave came in a curtain of shimmering wings. A dozen Five-Star moths, fanning their wings in synchronized pulses to push a wall of golden pollen ahead of them like a shield.
Clever. The pollen cloud would reach Mana before the moths did, and once she was coughing and dizzy, the swarm would close in.
"Nice try~" Mana aimed low. Instead of firing at the moths, she blasted the ground beneath the pollen wall. Dirt and stone erupted upward, punching a column of air through the cloud and scattering it into useless wisps. The moths behind it were suddenly exposed, their toxic smokescreen gone.
Two quick bolts picked off the leading pair before they could react. The others scattered, banking hard in different directions to surround her.
Mana didn't stay put. She kicked off the branch, caught a hanging vine, swung wide around the trunk, and came out the other side firing. A bolt caught a moth mid-turn, detonating it in a burst of chitin and dust. Another moth dove at her from above while she was mid-swing. She let go of the vine, dropped ten feet, and cracked the butt of her staff across the moth's thorax as it overshot. The impact sent the creature tumbling into a cluster of its own allies, and all three tangled together in a screeching heap.
A Dark Magic Attack through the heap cleaned it up.
"She's using the trees as platforms." In the monitoring room, Brandt leaned forward. "Swinging between branches to change angles. The moths can't predict her position because she never stays in one spot."
"And she's forcing them into each other." Townsend watched Mana bat a stunned moth into a pollen cloud, where two of its allies were circling. The pollen hit the injured moth instead, and the disoriented creature started attacking its own swarmmates. "She knocked one into the pollen zone. It's hallucinating and fighting its own side."
"I know she's strong," Townsend added slowly. "But she's been casting nonstop since entering the Hollow. Dozens of kills. And her output hasn't dropped at all. Where is she getting the mana?"
"That's what's abnormal." Brandt shook her head. "A Spellcaster burning this hot should be showing fatigue by now. Her reserves are either massive or her regeneration is absurd. Possibly both."
"She's an Original Card." Harlow deployed the universal explanation. "There are bound to be abilities we don't know about."
Victor and Harrison nodded, but their expressions said: Even for an Original Card, this is ridiculous.
Back in the grove, Mana was having the time of her life. She vaulted off a thick branch, planted her staff on a blossom the size of a satellite dish, and used it as a springboard to launch herself over a trio of moths diving at her in formation. Upside-down at the apex of her jump, she fired three shots in rapid succession, each one threading between the giant petals and nailing a moth on the far side of the grove. They never saw it coming.
"Three for three! Hehe, I'm on fire today!"
She landed on a different tree, spun her staff in a flourish, and fired a wide-angle Dark Magic Attack that swept through a cluster trying to regroup near the canopy. The blast shredded their wings and sent them spiraling down into the undergrowth.
The swarm was thinning fast. Bodies littered the grove floor. Pollen drifted in lazy clouds between the trees, but Mana had mapped the wind patterns within the first thirty seconds and stayed clear of every hazard zone. The moths couldn't catch her, couldn't outmaneuver her, and couldn't even use their signature weapon against her.
Then the Queen made her move.
She'd been hiding deep in the canopy, camouflaged against the largest blossom in the grove, watching her colony get systematically dismantled. When Mana's back was turned, finishing off a straggler near the grove's edge, the Queen Moth struck.
「 Queen Moth 」 Race: Fairy Quality: Normal Level: ★★★★★★ (Six-Star) Skills: Hallucinogenic Pollen, Poison Needle Rain, Command
Toxic wind condensed into dozens of needle-thin projectiles, each one laced with concentrated venom. Poison Needle Rain. The volley screamed toward Mana from directly behind, timed for the exact moment she was mid-cast and couldn't pivot.
"An ambush. Decent timing." Luke read the Queen's stats the instant she moved. Six-Star Normal. Fairy race. Not a threat. "But it won't matter."
The needles hit Mana's position. Every single one connected, punching through the space where she'd been floating a fraction of a second ago.
"She didn't dodge?!" Victor's hands gripped the console.
"Wait." Harrison's eyes narrowed. "The attack didn't connect."
Where Mana had been, a large hat hovered in midair. Black fabric, conical shape, decorated with a prominent question mark. The needles had perforated it from every angle, turning it into a pincushion. But the hat was empty. No Mana inside. Just cloth and air.
And behind the Queen Moth, wedged in the crook of a branch she'd been using as her hiding spot, a second identical hat materialized out of nothing. Its top flipped open like a trapdoor, and Mana shot out of it feet-first, staff already blazing with concentrated dark energy, grinning so wide her face could barely contain it.
"Peek-a-boo~!"
"Spatial teleportation?!" Every person in the monitoring room said it at the same time.
"That's... a Six-Star card with spatial teleportation?! On TOP of everything else?!"
"What was that?" Victor's hand was over his face. "Some kind of defensive skill? A substitution technique? She tanked the ambush with a decoy, then appeared behind the enemy at point-blank range. That's evasion, repositioning, and counterattack all in one. I've never seen anything like it."
"It looked like an independent construct," Harrison muttered, studying the lingering traces of the hat. "Not a spell she cast in the moment. More like something that was already equipped and activated automatically. But I don't know of any Card Spirit ability that works like that."
They wouldn't. Because what they'd just witnessed was a Counter Card. A type of Magic Card that didn't exist anywhere in Magic Card Civilization's history. Luke had invented the concept, built the card, and fused it into Mana. Nobody outside this room, or even inside it, had the framework to understand what they were looking at.
"So during the exchange match against Moonvale..." Harrison said slowly, the pieces clicking into place.
"He was still hiding this teleport ability the entire time." Victor finished the thought. "We knew about the flight, the homing control, the Silence Seal, the melee combat, the execution finisher. And he still had another card up his sleeve that he never needed to play."
Harlow said nothing. The smile on his face was doing all the talking.
The Queen Moth had exactly zero seconds to process what had happened. Her ambush target had vanished. A hat had eaten her needles. And now the Spellcaster was directly behind her, close enough to touch, staff pointed at her back.
"Dark Magic Burst!"
The execution effect detonated at contact range. The blast engulfed the Queen and every remaining moth demon in the grove. Trees bent. Petals vaporized. The bioluminescent vines flickered and died. When the shockwave passed, there was nothing left but a crater and a rain of chitin fragments drifting down like ugly snowflakes.
"Five minutes." Townsend checked the timestamp. "One mid-tier beast colony, including a Six-Star Queen. Five minutes. A Seven-Star card wouldn't do it much faster."
Brandt nodded silently. Neither she nor Townsend could have matched this pace at Luke's age.
"Mission complete, Master!" Mana floated down from the canopy and snapped a playful salute, one hand at her forehead, staff tucked under her arm. There was a petal stuck in her hair and a smudge of something unidentifiable on her cheek, and she looked extremely pleased with herself.
"Nice work." Luke reached over and plucked the petal out of her hair, then pinched her cheek. The customary squeak and pout followed. He turned to the fallen beasts and cast Extract.
Materials rained from the Queen Moth's remains. Most were standard drops, but one item caught his eye: a pair of wings that shimmered like stained glass, refracting light into prismatic bands of color.
Radiant Moth Cloak. A Six-Star material. Not bad at all for an opening act.