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Gack!
Mid-cackle, Silas choked like a duck seized by the throat, his laughter cutting off dead, and he stared at Luke with pure disbelief. "Why are YOU untouched by the dragon-grudge's assault?!"
Angewomon X, fine. That was an existence of the Devourer's own grade, and an angel-family spirit besides. Silas felt no surprise at her weathering the grudge's power.
But Luke was a rookie Card Master. Why was HE unaffected? Even a Monarch, by every rule Silas knew, had no business simply ignoring a psychic assault of dragon-grudge!
The dragon-grudge? The psychic attack, he means? Three ornaments now hung off Luke's person, and none of them weighed on him in the least. His face stayed exactly as level as it had been, though he did, at last, understand why he'd felt nothing.
The Legend Spirit Ring.
The ring on his hand was breathing out wave after wave of cool clarity, holding the grudge's assault entirely at bay.
Evolved up from the Moon Spirit Ring, the Legend Spirit Ring granted its bearer immunity to every attack of the psychic class. Never mind an Eight-Star Abyss Devourer. A Nine-Star beast, a Ten-Star beast out of the extra-domain, it made no difference. So long as the attack ran psychic, it would find nothing in Luke to touch.
"Angewomon X." Luke offered Silas no explanation whatsoever. The way out of the Dark Purgatory was known now, and he had no intention of wasting one further breath.
Saint Air!
The same binding that had caged the grudge-beasts and grudge-hunters not long ago bloomed again, and because the one casting it now was the stronger Angewomon X, its reach and its weight alike ran past anything it had shown before.
The seven-colored halo had barely finished appearing before the Abyss Devourer and every summoned dragon-phantom were locked where they stood, unable to move a hair.
And in the same moment, Saint Air's gentle radiance washed down over the three girls, and the agony knotted into their faces by the grudge-assault slowly, visibly unwound.
The Dragon Knight, the Lethe Spider Lily, the Storm Mermaid, every spirit under that light shook free of the psychic assault as well, restored to themselves one after another.
"THAT MOVE AGAIN?! You have got to be JOKING!" It replayed exactly as before. Seven-Star grudge-hunters, an Eight-Star Abyss Devourer, none of it escaped the sanction of that ring of light, and Silas simply stopped functioning. Does this BUG skill have NO restrictions at all? You just fire it whenever you PLEASE?!
"The binding heals too?" Elise breathed out long and shaky, one hand pressed over her heart. Moments ago her mind had been drowning under the grudge of slaughtered dragons, and if Angewomon X hadn't purged the assault when she did, Elise had genuinely felt her head about to burst, felt herself about to slip under and stay there, an idiot for the rest of her days.
Thinking back on it now left cold sweat on her spine. Psychic attacks truly were the kind you could not guard against.
Iris and Viola came back to themselves as well, and the two girls quietly opened a little distance from Luke. Their footing with him wasn't Elise's, after all. But the looks they turned on him held nothing except gratitude, Viola's deepest of all.
She was Dragon's Valley's own blood. Of the three, the grudge had struck her hardest, and hurt her worst.
"Mm." Luke nodded once, and his gaze went back up to Angewomon X. Time to wrap this up.
Inside the seven-colored ring, a terrifying suction erupted. The bound dragon-phantoms could raise nothing against it at all, and one after another they were dragged into the halo and swallowed.
In the space of a few breaths, every phantom the grudge had raised was gone from the world, and only the Abyss Devourer remained, locked dead in place, straining with everything it had against a binding that did not move.
"This!" Apart from Elise and Iris, who had seen it all before, Viola and Silas both went blank all over again. One bubble with THIS many effects. Is there no END to it?
"So it really was Luke!" Tobias, Selene, and the others came down upon the field in that very moment, and having confirmed with their own eyes that Luke's whole group stood unharmed, the four of them finally let out the breath they'd been holding.
Except that, having confirmed the Eight-Star light-force truly had erupted from one of Luke's card spirits, Selene drifted into a daze. Staring up at the Angewomon X hanging resplendent in the sky, she was seized by the sudden urge to lie down flat on the ground and stay there. This little junior brother has simply stopped being human, hello!
Angewomon's forebear was Sistermon Blanc. A card Luke had crafted before he ever became her teacher's student. A card conceived by one person, alone.
And now that spirit's strength had climbed again, which meant that back at exam time, Luke had already built a card carrying Eight-Star potential. Was that something a rookie could DO?
Selene even harbored the suspicion that Lilith herself didn't know Luke was hiding this hand.
Were it not forbidden, she'd have liked nothing better than to lift the lid off Luke's skull and study, carefully, exactly how he crafted monsters like these.
Even original cards were not supposed to be THIS outrageous! At minimum, she judged, grade for grade, even the spirits Lilith crafted might not measure past Luke's. And Luke's cards kept evolving, kept climbing, on and on. In his deck, there was no such thing as an expired card.
Beside her, Moira was seeing Angewomon X for the first time, with no notion of the long road up from Sistermon Blanc, and even so the wonder escaped her anyway. Luke held dragon-family cards, and now angel-family cards on top of them!
And the angel carried that BUG of a binding besides. Small wonder Elise had taken one look at this boy and decided to coast. In her place, Moira would lie down flat and coast too.
It isn't that one fails to strive. Alas, the opponent isn't human.
"So this is the might of evolution? I had assumed that climbing from Three-Star to Seven-Star was already its ceiling. And it rises to EIGHT." Tobias stared up at Angewomon X, light turning slow circuits through his eyes.
He had stood at the Immortal Realm for a long, long age, and this was still the first spirit he had ever seen run this far past reason. As though it had no upper bound at all. His understanding of the world had just been broken across the knee one more time.
"If not for the Renegades' strike, and this whole sudden turn, I suspect every last one of us would still be kept in the dark by this boy." Of the four, Tobias's feelings ran the most tangled. "He hides deep. Deeper than deep."
From the day Selene had come to him with word of Lilith's new disciple, Tobias had carried high hopes for Luke. Anyone Lilith chose would never run shallow in talent or strength. Across all these years, she had chosen exactly two. Selene. And Luke.
And the boy's exam crown, his command of the entire trial battlefield, none of it had disappointed him. He simply had never imagined that, underneath all of it, Luke was hiding this hand as well.