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The summoning circle's sapphire light inverted.
What had been a spreading glow collapsed inward into a single focused point at the circle's center, condensed past the threshold of visibility, and erupted upward in a pillar of pure dragon-essence that punched through the sanctum's canopy of flowering vines like a sword through silk.
From that pillar, the Legendary Dragon descended.
Sapphire scales, each one the size of a shield, catching the light with a depth that made the stone look like painted metal. A body that uncoiled as it emerged, vast and serpentine, ending in a whip-tail that carved arcs through the air. Limbs ridged with armored plates, tipped with obsidian claws longer than a man was tall. Wings that unfurled in slow, deliberate motions, spanning thirty meters when fully extended, each beat pushing the fog outward in concentric waves that rippled across the entire Mist Relic.
A dragon's head, broad and crowned with backswept horns, swung down to survey the sanctum. Its eyes opened.
Sky-blue vertical pupils, bright as cut sapphires, ancient as continents. The gaze of something that had watched civilizations rise and fall and considered both outcomes equally interesting.
Dragon Pressure saturated the core chamber, making the air itself feel like it was carrying weight.
*「 Legendary Dragon: Timaeus (Projection Body) 」*
Elise Hargrove's three card spirits all took an involuntary step backward. Silver Crown Mandragora Queen's innocent face had frozen in a rictus of instinctive terror. Eternal Crystal Orchid's parasol trembled hard enough that the crystal hem chimed against itself. Dragon Maiden Flower's reptilian gold eyes, the very feature that marked her as dragon-infused, refused to meet Timaeus's gaze.
Her dragon blood was acknowledging an apex. A higher order of the same species. An ancestral recognition that predated tactical thought.
The Flower Field Domain, which had been radiating confident life-energy throughout the sanctum, contracted visibly. Vines that had been climbing the walls retracted toward Elise in panicked loops. Flowers closed their blooms. The domain's expansion halted and reversed, condensing around its mistress in layered protective rings.
Timaeus's single downdraft had been enough to signal the domain's priorities: defend, don't expand.
"No way…"
Across the Mist Relic, the surviving competitors reacted.
"I must be seeing things. Someone slap me awake."
The sound of a hand meeting a face echoed across one of the monitoring feeds. Then, dead silence.
Lily Fairchild, already eliminated and watching from the plaza, had gone pale. "A dragon. Luke has a dragon card too." Her voice was flat with disbelief. "That's not a Spellcaster. That's a dragon. He's been hiding a dragon this entire time."
Even without his Spellcaster, even without the spells she'd seen in the competition, the gap between her and Luke would have been catastrophic. With a dragon added to the roster, the gap wasn't a gap anymore. It was a canyon.
Serena Frost's cold composure had shattered. Her pale cyan eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted. Now she understood why her instincts had screamed danger at dinner. The boy she'd been eyeing casually across the dining hall had been walking around with a dragon in his back pocket.
Vance Ashton, still at the plaza, had one thought cycling through his head on loop. If he'd summoned the dragon first, I would have forfeited. Immediately. Without shame.
-----
On the monitoring deck, the branch presidents' faces were a tapestry of identical expressions. Shock. Envy. Grudging admiration. And directed at Harrison, a unified resentment that radiated from every seat.
You hid this. You knew, and you hid it.
Harrison was trying and failing to hide his satisfaction. He'd expected skepticism. He'd expected doubt. What he hadn't expected was the sheer volume of glares being aimed at him, and he was enjoying every single one of them.
Dorian Webb was on his feet, face draining of color. "This can't be. Dragons. Dragon-type cards. In a satellite city. How is Ashenvale producing this?"
"There's nothing impossible about it," Harrison said pleasantly. "You simply lack exposure."
Inside, his mind was running calculations. The dragon's pressure signature felt familiar in some ways. It reminded him of the Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon, but the visual was completely different. Sapphire scales, not black. Different proportions, different body type, different energy profile.
That must be the new card Luke made from the azure dragon eye material. Timaeus, he called it.
But here was the confusion. Harrison had cataloged the Eye of Timaeus as a starless Special Card, essentially equivalent to an Equipment Card in his evaluation. Nothing about it had suggested it could manifest a Seven-Star dragon.
How does a Commander Realm Card Master summon something at this tier?
Harrison filed the question away. The answer would probably become clear in time. For now, all that mattered was that Luke won. And from what he was seeing, Luke was going to win very convincingly.
-----
"An Original Dragon-type card. A second one." Edmund Hargrove finally broke his stillness. His voice was controlled but carried an undercurrent of genuine astonishment. "Harrison didn't mention this in his report."
Roland's jaw had tightened. "He played us."
"To be fair," Edmund murmured, "in his position, I would have done the same thing. The Capital team was his direct competition in this tournament. Revealing his strongest assets would have been tactical suicide." He allowed himself a small, rueful smile. "Still. I underestimated him."
He turned his attention back to the screens.
Luke Mercer isn't just an Original Card crafter. He's produced at least two Original Cards. Both dragon-adjacent at the highest tier. This isn't talent. This is generational phenomenon.
He'd seen Original Card crafters before. Read their historical records. Most of them produced one card of significance and spent the rest of their careers refining it. Two Original Cards from the same student, before the entrance exam, was outside the precedent.
"But Elise's situation…" Roland's voice had tightened with a father's concern. Their private detachment had cracked slightly. His daughter was facing a dragon, and no amount of Mandragora-Orchid-Dragon Maiden synergy was going to close that gap on raw power alone.
"Ellie's combination is specifically designed to stress-test even high-tier dragons," Edmund said quietly, using his granddaughter's family nickname. "Mandragora Queen for control. Crystal Orchid for defense. Dragon Maiden Flower for offensive output. At six-star perfect, each one can match or threaten a seven-star opponent. Together, they cover attack, defense, and status effects."
"Against a seven-star dragon, they'd win ninety percent of the time."
"The problem is that the other ten percent still exists. And Luke appears to be operating well outside standard probability distributions."
Neither of them said the obvious. The gap between what they'd expected from this tournament and what they were witnessing had become unbridgeable in the span of a single summoning.
-----
Inside the sanctum, Elise Hargrove forced herself to breathe.
Timaeus's pressure hammered against her senses, and more importantly, against her card spirits' reflexes. Mandragora Queen was visibly shaking. Eternal Crystal Orchid's grip on her parasol had tightened to white-knuckle intensity. Dragon Maiden Flower's knees trembled under the weight of instinctive submission.
Dragons aren't invincible. They can be beaten. Focus.
She inhaled sharply and raised her hand. Her voice came out steady.
"Don't let it set the pace. Engage."
Mandragora Queen moved first. The little girl raised her tiny arms and unleashed the saturating poison fragrance that had paralyzed Callum Ward in the first stage. Thorns erupted from the flower-covered floor, a dense forest of barbed vegetation that converged on Luke and Mana like a closing fist.
Dragon Maiden Flower was already transforming. Her humanoid form crystallized outward, unfolding into her true body, a dragon-shaped construct of stacked crimson flower petals and living vines. Smaller than Timaeus but built for aggression, her eyes locked onto Mana with predatory intensity.
Eternal Crystal Orchid held her position, parasol raised, ready to generate defensive walls the instant they were needed.
"Timaeus." Luke's voice was level.
The Legendary Dragon responded with a single wingbeat.
The downdraft that followed wasn't wind. It was a horizontal hurricane, a pressure wave that detonated outward in a three-hundred-sixty-degree arc. The thorn forest was shredded mid-growth, vegetation ripped apart before it could close around Luke's position. The paralytic fragrance was blown outward, diluted, dispersed, made irrelevant.
Dragon Maiden Flower braced on all four legs, and even she was pushed backward three meters by the sheer force.
"That's…" Elise's composed expression cracked. The entirety of her opening gambit, control and offense combined, had been nullified by a single wingbeat. Not countered. Nullified.
Then Timaeus did something that made everyone watching stop breathing.
He didn't attack Elise's spirits.
He turned, vast serpentine body coiling in mid-air, and flew directly at Mana.
"What?" Elise blinked. "The enemy is over here, you massive…"
Even Edmund, watching from the monitoring deck, couldn't immediately parse what was happening. A dragon summoned for combat had ignored every combat target in the arena and was flying at its own master's card spirit.
Timaeus reached Mana in two wingbeats. Mana, for her part, showed no fear whatsoever. If anything, she was smiling, that soft private smile she reserved for moments when a plan was working exactly as intended.
The space around the two of them began to warp.
A vortex of raw mana spiraled outward from the point where Timaeus's descent and Mana's position converged. Violet-black energy from Mana's Spellcaster aura intertwined with the sapphire dragon-essence radiating from Timaeus, two colors braiding and contesting and fusing in equal measure. The vortex expanded rapidly, swallowing both of them within a storm of churning power that obscured the combatants entirely.
"What's happening?" Elise directed Dragon Maiden Flower forward. The crimson dragon construct launched a petal-burst attack into the storm's edge. The petals were shredded before they reached the core. Mandragora Queen followed with a thorn volley. The thorns disintegrated against the vortex's boundary.
Eternal Crystal Orchid finally activated. Her parasol rotated, and crystal walls bloomed across the sanctum, interlocking faceted plates that rose to form a three-hundred-sixty-degree defensive perimeter around Elise's position. The storm's shockwaves began hammering the crystal walls, crack marks spreading across the surfaces with each impact.
The walls held. Barely.
Then the storm collapsed inward.
The vortex imploded at its own center, mana pressure condensing to a single focal point, and the vortex unmade itself in a silent pulse that expanded outward and dissolved.
What stood at its center was neither Mana nor Timaeus.
It was both.
Mana's mage robes had transformed into armor. Not heavy plate, but a sleek knight's panoply of silver-white metal edged with violet-blue enamel, gauntleted hands resting on a gemstone-hilted sword where her staff had been. A crested helm rested against her shoulder, its visor open to show her green eyes, brighter than before, carrying a focus that was Mana's and a depth that wasn't. Her hair spilled out from beneath the helm's rim in a braid rather than the loose cascade of before.
Beneath her, carrying her, was Timaeus. But the dragon had changed too. His projection-body transparency had solidified into full physical presence. His scales glowed with an internal light that pulsed in sync with Mana's own heartbeat. He was no longer a summon; he was a part of her, and she of him.
The pair moved together, mount and rider, in a seamless unity that made it clear they had merged into a single tactical entity.
Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl.
Luke recognized the form instantly. He'd seen this exact configuration in the anime. A magic-using knight astride a dragon. The classic image of fantasy's apex fusion, lifted straight from the source material. The watchers around the sanctum and back at the plaza only saw a Spellcaster in knight armor riding a dragon, but Luke knew exactly what had taken shape on the battlefield.
-----
"He just… gave his Spellcaster a dragon to ride?" one of the eliminated competitors muttered. "Is that really worth all that summoning theater?"
"Also, what's with the sword? She's a Spellcaster. Why does she have a melee weapon now?"
The response from the plaza was confused and mildly disappointed. The massive dragon descent, the Dragon Pressure, the mana storm, all of it had built an expectation of something cataclysmic. Getting Mana a big pet seemed… underwhelming, relatively.
"No."
Edmund Hargrove's voice cut across the monitoring chamber, quiet but absolute. Every head turned to him.
"That's not a card spirit and its mount. That's a new card spirit entirely."
He was staring at the screen with the focused attention of an Immortal Realm Card Master reading something most of his colleagues couldn't perceive.
"The auras have merged. Completely. There's no separation between the Spellcaster's essence and Timaeus's Dragon essence. They're a single unified entity now, not two spirits cooperating."
Roland's brow furrowed. "You're sure? That sounds similar to Vance's Blazing Centaur combination."
"Different. Fundamentally different." Edmund's gaze hadn't left the screen. "The Blazing Centaur is two mechanical cards operating through a Link skill. Two power cores, two command circuits, cooperating through a shared interface. Damage one core, you destabilize the whole construct."
"What I'm seeing here…" He paused, visibly searching for accurate language. "This is one card spirit. One aura. One consciousness. The fusion isn't mechanical, it's essential. If you somehow killed the dragon, you wouldn't get Mana back. You'd be fighting something weaker but still whole. They've become a third thing."
The monitoring chamber fell silent as the implication settled.
A Six-Star Perfect Spellcaster and a Special Card with dragon-projection capability had fused into a new entity. The quality and level of the new spirit were unknown. Its capabilities were unknown. The only thing that was clear was that Luke had just deployed something the Youth Training Competition had never seen before.
Edmund turned to Harrison with a mild smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"Harrison. I don't suppose you know what we're looking at?"
Every branch president turned to Harrison simultaneously.