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( Bonus Chapter)
Luke pocketed the Black Core Fragment and immediately started calculating how unreasonable the collection task was.
Seven fragments per core. Seven cores to unlock whatever the endgame reward was. That meant forty-nine Black Gates. Each one guarded by at least a Seven-Star extradimensional beast that had to be killed before the Gate could be Extracted.
Option one: hunt Black Gates across the Magic Card Civilization's Dimensional Planes and hope to encounter enough of them in a single lifetime. The odds made winning the lottery look reasonable.
Option two: go directly to extradimensional space, where Black Gates were presumably more common. Luke had glimpsed the stats on the Abyss Predator, the weakest class of extradimensional beast. In the spaces between dimensions, Ten-Star creatures roamed freely. Eight and Nine-Star were as common as rabbits. Seven-Star was the absolute bottom of the food chain. Going there at his current level would be suicide with extra steps.
Option three: trade for fragments. If Black Gates had been appearing in Dimensional Planes for centuries, then Magic Card Civilization's authorities had probably been studying them. Which meant there were likely existing stockpiles of fragments somewhere in the system.
Luke couldn't find any fragment listings on the Association marketplace. But that didn't mean they didn't exist. It meant they were controlled.
The Black Gate shuddered one final time and collapsed into nothing, the spatial tear sealing itself the moment the fragment was removed. The dragon fire along its edges flickered out. The rift was gone.
Victor, Harlow, and Harrison landed beside Luke as the last traces of the Gate dissolved.
Their eyes didn't go to Luke first. They went to the Red-Eyes Black Dragon, still hovering above the clearing, and stayed there.
Up close, the legendary dragon's presence was staggering. Even for Sovereign and Emperor Realm Card Masters, the primal weight of it pressed against something instinctive. That deep, animal part of the brain that recognized a predator operating on a completely different level.
Victor had owned dragon-type materials. He'd studied dragon-type cards in the Association archives. He'd never stood this close to one, and the reality of it dwarfed every academic understanding he'd ever built.
"He really did it." Harlow's voice was quiet. Not his usual banter. Genuine awe. "He let the first dragon die on purpose to bring this out."
"The transformation isn't permanent," Victor noted, watching trails of crimson energy flake from the dragon's wings like dying embers. "But the concept is extraordinary. Death as an activation condition, not an end state. I've never seen a Card Spirit designed with that kind of thinking."
"If this showed up on a real battlefield," Harrison murmured, "the enemy would think they'd won when the first dragon went down. Then this crawls out of the corpse. The psychological impact alone would break a formation."
"How are you holding up?" Victor turned to Luke.
"Like someone squeezed every drop of juice out of me and then wrung the rind for good measure." Luke recalled both Mana and the Red-Eyes Black Dragon. The moment they dissolved back into card form, the mana drain vanished, but the emptiness it left behind was staggering. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
"You scared the life out of us, you know." Harlow shook his head, but the look in his eyes was pure satisfaction. No disappointment. No anger. Just an old principal looking at his best student and seeing something that exceeded every expectation he'd ever set.
"The Black Gate is gone, but the spatial fabric is still fragile from all of this." Victor gestured at the cratered, scorched clearing. "The expedition is ending. Let's get out of here before your student demolishes anything else, Harlow."
The four of them headed toward the exit. Behind them, Fae Spirit Hollow slowly began to heal. Creatures that had fled the deep zones crept back toward their territories. The spatial fractures knitted themselves together, one thread at a time. By the time the Hollow's next scheduled opening came around, the scars would be gone.
But the beasts that lived here would remember the dragon for a very long time.