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From the moment the intruding spirit launched her attack to the moment the Gale Demon Tiger and the Frostflame Demon Lion were both cut down, the entire process was so brutally brief that Chandler Reeves only managed to react once it was already over.
"How is this possible?!" Having watched with his own eyes as the Frostflame Demon Lion and the Gale Demon Tiger were slaughtered with clean, crisp efficiency, Chandler stood there dumbstruck.
His Frostflame Demon Lion and Gale Demon Tiger were no bargain-bin card spirits. They stood at the very peak of the mid-tier, Six-Star card spirits both, and yet they'd been resolved as easily as someone carving up produce. In what world did that make sense?
The impact of what had just unfolded hit Chandler like a landslide. Even in the Western Region's exam, he had never once run into a situation like this!
"Don't tell me... the one before me is a Seven-Star card spirit?" The thought flashed through Chandler's mind without warning, and the look in his eyes as he stared at the intruder changed entirely.
Only that single explanation could account for how his Frostflame Demon Lion and Gale Demon Tiger had been resolved with such absurd ease.
But it was precisely because he'd thought of it that Chandler's whole state of mind curdled. "?! Why on earth would anyone let a Seven-Star card spirit roam around beyond their own field of vision? Isn't that supposed to be the trump card you save for the final battle?!"
Chandler hadn't paid much attention to the Academy's other admitted students, but the ones who'd crafted Seven-Star cards, those he knew of, because the Western Region had produced masters of that caliber too.
New students at that level, however, were the rarest of rare birds. Across the Western Region's three Capitals, this entire cohort had produced exactly three new students who crafted Seven-Star cards, effectively one per Capital. Those three were also the top three heavyweights of the West's exam, the gaps between them thread-thin.
Chandler simply hadn't imagined his luck would be quite this magnificent, sniped by a heavyweight of that level right at the opening of round two.
"Move." A voice cold as deep frost reached Chandler's ear, and riding with it came a chill of blade-edge intent. Having resolved the lion and the tiger, the spirit had not sheathed the long blade in her hands, its point still angled loosely, unmistakably, his way.
Under that undisguised, ice-cold killing intent washing over him, Chandler felt as though he'd been dropped whole into an ice cellar, and before he knew it, he had taken a step back.
Only afterward did his mind catch up, and his face flushed scarlet to the roots. He, a Card Master, had just been cowed into retreat by someone's card spirit.
And yet, try as he might, the nerve refused to come back.
Setting aside the fact that the spirit before him was very possibly a Seven-Star card spirit he couldn't defeat with everything he had, there was something that mattered more. Chandler had an intuition, bone-deep, that if he dared the slightest strange movement, the long blade in her hands would come down on him without a heartbeat of hesitation.
The Trial Road's rules had never mentioned that Trial Crystals could be seized from one another. But neither had they ever mentioned that one couldn't raise a hand against the Card Masters themselves.
And if the rules never mentioned it, that meant all of it fell within what the rules allowed!
Chandler figured this was, in the end, only an assessment; the other side probably wouldn't go so far as to actually finish him off. But a thorough beating of the flesh was absolutely unavoidable, and walking away with a crippling package deal wasn't outside the realm of possibility either.
For crying out loud! This is just the entrance trial! We haven't even set foot in the Academy yet. Is there really any need to be this vicious? In that moment, the corner of Chandler's mouth twitched hard, his whole worldview listing badly. Were the Card Masters of the East all such ruthless articles?
But what drove Chandler closer to despair was that, even now, he still didn't know the true name of the card spirit before him, nor had he the faintest idea who her master actually was!
He couldn't even put a face to his enemy. Never mind revenge; the sheer gap in strength alone left him without a single word to say, with nothing to do but stew.
The spirit, for her part, couldn't have cared less what he thought. Seeing Chandler thoroughly cowed, she strode straight past him with grand, unhurried swagger, the long blade flicked once, and the Trial Crystal dropped neatly into her hand.
Then she left without sparing Chandler so much as a backward glance, already off in search of her next target, seemingly untroubled by any possibility of him striking at her back. Or rather, even if Chandler had dared, she held absolute confidence in her ability to turn around and educate him properly.
Only when the intruder had fully departed did the tension strung through Chandler's body slacken by degrees, and gazing at his now-emptied stronghold, he wanted to weep and found no tears to shed.
Had he known it would end like this, he'd have done better to play the fool from the start and let her carry the Trial Crystal off in silence. That way, at least, he might have kept the Frostflame Demon Lion and the Gale Demon Tiger intact.
This was only the opening of round two. Even robbed of his crystal, so long as he avoided elimination, he could have copied that spirit's master and gone robbing other students' crystals himself.
But as things stood, both of his ace card spirits had been beaten down. Never mind robbing anyone; whether he could even hold his own stronghold safely was an open question now. The mimic beasts deployed from here on would only grow stronger, and having lost his strongest fighting strength, the ending practically wrote itself.
In this moment, Chandler had the distinct feeling that his grand plan had died in the crib before he'd even begun to carry it out.
"Ciel's temperament runs a good deal more decisive than Noir's and Blanc's. Handing this line of work to her really does put the mind at ease." Having watched the entire exchange through the link, Luke nodded in quiet satisfaction.
---
"This round's opponents were a fair bit stronger than the last. Everyone still left in now, none of them can be taken lightly." Watching the defeated new student vanish before her eyes, Lyra let out a long breath of relief. The pressure the Trial Road pressed down on her was anything but small. "I wonder just how wide the gap between you and me will have grown by the end of this entrance trial, Luke."
Amid her murmuring, Lyra was teleported out of the battle space.
And it wasn't only Lyra. Serena Frost still wore her usual frost-cold face, but the way her body eased down from its coiled tension was plain to see. The forced battle had been no stroll for her either.
"Come to think of it, that person's state of mind just now seemed rather off, didn't it?" On another front, Elise had resolved her own opponent with far greater ease than either of the other two girls. It was only her opponent's abnormal behavior mid-battle that had snagged her attention.
"During the fight just now, that person's mouth never seemed to stop muttering something about the Trial Crystal." The parasol-holding elder sister, the Eternal Crystal Orchid, spoke up, one small hand covering her mouth as she did.
"The Trial Crystal?" Hearing the Eternal Crystal Orchid say it, Elise knew her own hunch hadn't been wrong. What she couldn't work out was why her opponent had been so fixated on the thing. "Don't tell me the Trial Crystal is hiding some secret nobody knows?"
With that thought turning, Elise reached out and touched her own Trial Crystal, and in the next moment, the crystal that had hung drifting in place received the push of her hand and floated lightly off to one side.
???
Watching that scene, Elise froze stiff where she stood. And then, piecing it together with that eliminated new student's obsession over the Trial Crystal, Elise suddenly had a very bold idea.