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*BOOM.*
The dragonfire beam struck Mandragora Queen center-mass.
"Not fair!" The little girl's outraged squeal pitched so high it was barely audible, but her expression broadcast a universal language of betrayal. Her tiny fists clenched. Her silver crown tilted sharply sideways from the impact before the rest of her followed. "The Dragon Maiden hit me! Why am I the one getting punished?!"
She didn't get to finish the complaint. The compressed dragon-breath, originally calibrated to punch through Seven-Star resistance, didn't care about the protests of its intended-but-redirected target. Mandragora Queen's body was lifted off the sanctum floor, carried through a wall of her own uprooted thorn vegetation, and slammed into the far wall with enough force to crater the masonry.
Her figure flickered, wavered, and dissolved back into card form.
Eliminated.
"How am I supposed to fight like this?!" Elise's voice had gone up an octave and lost all composure. Her last pretense of dignified combat crumbled the moment Mandragora Queen dissolved. "That was my control piece! She's supposed to lock down the battlefield!"
Her carefully constructed three-card formation, the product of years of training and the accumulated resources of one of the Capital's most powerful families, had been dismantled in the space of a minute. Eternal Crystal Orchid, destroyed in a single sword strike. Mandragora Queen, taken out by her own teammate's attack. Dragon Maiden Flower was now alone, her offensive power rendered useless by the realization that anything she fired could be absorbed and redirected.
Debuff conversion? Revival-on-death? Attack reflection with target reassignment? What kind of demon are you, Luke Mercer?
Before Elise could formulate a salvage strategy, the Dragon Knight was already casting the next spell.
Dark Dragon Burst.
The air temperature around Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl plummeted. Violet-black energy poured upward from her armor in spiraling columns. Simultaneously, Timaeus's dragon-essence surged downward through his scales, meeting the Spellcaster's magic at the fusion point where knight and mount connected. The two energies wound together, intertwined, compressed into a single focal point above the Dragon Knight's raised sword.
The resulting sphere was smaller than her earlier Dark Magic Burst. Denser. Black at its core, shot through with sapphire veins that pulsed like arteries. A concentration of the fusion's total output focused into a single anti-matter-class projectile.
The sphere released.
It crossed the sanctum in a straight line, carving a corridor of compressed atmosphere through the ruined Flower Field Domain. Vegetation on either side of its trajectory blackened and disintegrated without being directly touched, killed by the pressure shear alone.
Dragon Maiden Flower's crimson petal-dragon form tried to brace. She'd been charging a secondary Mimicry Dragon Breath to counter, but she wasn't ready yet, and the Dark Dragon Burst wasn't going to give her time.
The sphere struck her in the chest.
For a single suspended moment, the impact point flashed white. Then the flash expanded, consumed Dragon Maiden Flower's entire form, and collapsed inward in a silent implosion.
When the light faded, there was nothing left where the Dragon Maiden had been. No body. No petals. No trace. The Dark Dragon Burst had designed itself to eliminate Eight-Star targets. A Six-Star Perfect, however impressive, simply hadn't had the structural integrity to survive a direct hit.
"Ghhk." Elise's small involuntary noise came out as she watched her strongest offensive card spirit cease to exist in a cloud of dissipating energy particles.
The Flower Field Domain dissolved around her. Vines withered. Flowers closed their blooms and faded. The domain required all three of its anchoring spirits to sustain, and with all three down, the green paradise she'd built dissolved back into bare sanctum stone within seconds.
Elise stood alone in the ruined core chamber. No card spirits. No Domain. No options.
She took a steady breath.
"Could you maybe go a little easier on me?" she asked, her voice halfway between pleading and indignant. She'd thought she was ready for a serious fight. She hadn't been prepared for a massacre. Her dignity was in tatters, her strategy in smoking ruins, and her grandfather was watching the whole thing from the monitoring deck.
"I could have," Luke admitted, raising one hand to recall Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl. The fusion spirit circled the sanctum once and glided back to hover protectively beside him, Timaeus's massive form somehow folding compactly without taking up half the chamber. Mana's gemstone sword returned to her hip in a sheath that hadn't existed until she needed it. "But you're Edmund Hargrove's granddaughter. Who knows what other trump cards the Hargrove family packs into their heir."
Elise's eye twitched.
"That's why you went this hard?"
"That's why."
"I don't have any hidden trump cards, Luke."
"Even better reason to go hard. If you did, I'd want to overwhelm you before you could deploy them. Since you don't, I just overwhelmed you on principle."
"That logic is awful and I hate you."
Elise forfeited with a raised hand. The Teleportation Card activated, and her figure dissolved into light, reappearing on the Capital Association plaza a heartbeat later.
A streak of white light detached from the Holy Dragon Furnace Heart's pedestal and arced through the air to settle into Luke's waiting palm. The sanctum's authentication system had registered the winner.
The Youth Training Competition was over.
-----
On the plaza, Elise materialized, looked at the monitors showing Luke collecting the Holy Dragon Furnace Heart, and blew a strand of hair out of her face.
"I'm going to have to explain this to Grandfather."
She did not look forward to the conversation.
-----
On the main monitoring deck, Edmund Hargrove was not upset with his granddaughter. He was, in fact, faintly impressed. Being beaten this thoroughly by Luke Mercer was not a failure that reflected poorly on Elise. It was simply the correct outcome given the matchup. No strategic adjustment would have changed that.
What he was processing, instead, was the demonstration of capability he'd just witnessed. A Commander Realm Card Master. Fielding a Seven-Star Legendary fusion spirit. Equipped with an offensive kit that could eliminate tier-plus-one targets and a defensive kit that converted debuffs into buffs. Paired with a set of pre-existing Counter Cards that independently covered spell nullification, spatial displacement, and attack redirection.
The complete loadout was absurd. It was also, technically, all accomplished at Commander Realm. What happened when Luke broke through to Leader Realm? To Monarch? To Emperor?
This student is going to reshape the Eastern Region's power landscape.
Edmund kept the thought to himself.
Beside him, Roland exhaled slowly. "Well. That was educational."
"Educational indeed."
Neither man spoke for a moment. The monitoring deck had fallen into a strange hush, the kind that followed a demonstration of genuine generational talent.
Then Harrison Cole stood up.
"I believe we had a wager, Dorian?"
Every eye in the chamber snapped to Dorian Webb.
Webb's jaw clenched. He stood slowly, reached into his storage card, and produced two items. A long sword that glowed with pale golden light, clearly a light-aligned artifact. And a ring of braided silver wire, set with a single crystalline stone that pulsed with gentle healing energy.
Light Sword. Holy Spirit Ring. Both were valuable materials that any Card Master in the Association would pay a premium to acquire. Losing them stung.
Losing them to Harrison stung considerably more.
He tossed both items across the chamber. Harrison caught them out of the air with the casual ease of a man who'd expected exactly this outcome.
"Don't worry, Dorian," Webb muttered as he sat back down. "I'm not one to welch on a bet."
But may I take this opportunity to ask the universe why Luke Mercer couldn't have been born in Crestbrook, because it would have saved me this humiliation entirely.
The other branch presidents watched the exchange with expressions ranging from amusement to poorly-disguised envy. Every single one of them was silently running the same calculation Webb was: why couldn't that boy have been from our city?
Even Grant Whitfield, Harrison's old friend, allowed himself a small sigh. A Card Master of Luke's caliber was talent that could define a city's reputation for a generation. Ashenvale had produced one. The other eleven satellite cities had not.
Miles Thornton, Everhold's branch president, leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers against his temples. Having Serena Frost as his city's star pupil had felt like a victory three days ago. Watching her come in a distant third to a kid from Ashenvale had significantly recalibrated that feeling.
-----
Harrison tucked the Light Sword and Holy Spirit Ring into his own storage card and permitted himself a smile that he'd been suppressing for the last two hours.
He'd been Ashenvale's branch president for years. He'd spent that entire tenure watching other cities strut into the Capital with better rosters, better rankings, and more respect. He'd accepted it as the reality of his position.
Today, that reality had flipped.
Luke Mercer had just walked through the entire Youth Training Competition without losing a match and had finished by demolishing the Capital's own heir apparent in a manner so comprehensive that Edmund Hargrove himself had needed a moment to compose his response.
The envy radiating from the other branch presidents was the sweetest music Harrison had heard in years. He intended to savor every note.
"I suppose we should award the first-place trophy," he said mildly, aiming the comment toward no one in particular. "Since the final stage has concluded."
"Indeed." Edmund's voice was smooth, his composure fully restored. "Harrison, would you do the honors? Your city's representative has earned it."
"Happily."
Harrison stood up, straightened his jacket, and walked toward the ceremony platform with the confident stride of a man who had just won two battles he hadn't technically been fighting.