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"Impossible!" Silas glared at Luke through gritted teeth, and underneath the glare, panic flickered.
His plan had been all but perfect. Nearly everything accounted for. And then Luke appeared, and turn after turn went wrong, until he'd been driven to an ending like this. The fury of it filled him. So, absurdly, did the sense of grievance.
It was supposed to be a simple mission. Not a descent into hell-mode.
"Nothing is impossible." At Luke's silent command, Angewomon X released the Grand Celestial Arrow, and the shaft brimming with the power of light tore straight at Silas.
A strangled curse was all he had time for. Survival instinct threw him into a flat, graceless roll aside, and then his face changed again. "You TRICKED me?!"
Because the arrow, under Angewomon X's guidance, bent its course mid-flight, and what it struck was the still-yawning Black Gate. The four-element light detonated on contact, and the hundred-meter Gate began, section by section, to collapse.
Watching it, the three girls all froze, and then an awkward flush crept up three faces at once. Every one of them had exhaled the moment the Devourer died, and every one of them had forgotten the Gate. The single largest hazard on the field.
At Luke's command, Angewomon X loosed several more Grand Celestial Arrows in succession, and the Gate's collapse accelerated.
"Don't imagine I can't see what you're counting on." As he said it, Luke cast an Extract at the crumbling Gate, and when the whole of it had finally dissolved, a second Black Core Fragment sat in his hand. "I never forgot the Gate."
"AAAAGH! We will NEVER let you go!" Silas was angry enough to taste blood. This Luke had to exist for the sole purpose of dismantling his plans. There was no other explanation.
"Worry about yourself first." Another thought, and Luke flung a handful of Extracts across the dead Devourer and the fallen Predators as well. Then he looked up at the sky.
Drawn by the motion, the three girls lifted their heads too.
In the next moment, the light dimmed across everyone's eyes, and Pegasus, the Windsoar Dragon, and the Simurgh came down upon the land. Tobias, Drake, Selene, and Moira stood before them all.
The presence of super-grade-sequence card spirits blanketed the entire region, and everyone present felt a suffocation that ran far past anything the extra-domain beasts had pressed on them.
Silas most of all. The pressure pouring off those three apex spirits aimed itself almost wholly at him, and it crushed the man flat against the earth, prostrate on all five points, unable to move a finger.
Unable, even, to die by his own hand.
"I say. Isn't this boy's perception running a touch too sharp?" Tobias swung down off Pegasus, shaking his head as he came. He'd caught Luke's upward glance, and he simply hadn't expected to be noticed that fast.
Though an intuition told him something else, too. Had the four of them not shown themselves, then in the very next second, Silas would have been a dead man at Luke's order.
Given the boy's temperament and everything he'd shown so far, Tobias believed it without reservation.
And that's fine. When the hand should fall, softness has no place in it. That streak of ruthlessness is exactly what keeps a person alive longest. This boy. The more I look, the more he suits my taste. Startled by the perception, satisfied by everything else, Tobias let the thought settle. People like that lived longer. It seems Celestial is going to be a very lively place once this cohort enrolls.
"Luke. That's Head Tobias Wren." Guessing that Luke wouldn't know the arrivals, Elise leaned close and pitched her voice against his ear. "The one beside him is Instructor Lady Dawnford. Selene Dawnford. And that's Instructor Moira Ashwood."
Her voice climbed audibly on the second name.
"Why do you sound so excited all of a sudden?" His ear itching, Luke gave her a sidelong look of open bemusement. Don't tell me this girl idolizes Selene.
"Instructor Lady Dawnford is Lady Lilith's student! That's as good as carrying the Night Empress's own recognition! Do you have any idea how many people pray to be seen by Lady Lilith, let alone taken in?!" Caught out, Elise flushed and mounted her defense at speed. "And don't single me out. If Lyra ever met Lady Dawnford, she'd be every ounce as worked up as me."
Her family had already lined her up under Instructor Ashwood, true. That was no obstacle whatsoever to keeping Selene as her idol!
Good grief. Best friends indeed. You'll even drag Lyra into the water with you, unprompted. Luke suspected that if Lyra ever learned she'd been volunteered like this, the first person she dealt with would be Elise.
"Auntie isn't just Lady Lilith's only student in all these years. She's the idol of half the Card Masters in Mistral!" Iris put in from the side, pride running warm through her voice.
"'Auntie'?" Luke caught the address at once, and understanding moved across his face. The same surname, the uncommon talent, the Mistral origin. Some relation had always been plausible. He simply hadn't expected the relation to run this close.
Beside him, Elise and Viola looked equally startled. Neither of them had known Iris was Selene's niece either.
"That's right!" Reading Luke's look as envy, Iris lifted her chin. "Auntie has already promised that once we formally enroll, she'll take me as her personal student."
"And if. IF the chance comes up. Once we've enrolled, I'll mention you to Auntie. Perhaps there's a chance you could become her student as well." By the end, a small tsundere note had crept into her voice. Consider it repayment for this whole affair.
Not Lilith's studentship, granted. But even a place under Selene was one people would crack skulls over, and in all these years, Selene had never once taken a student. With the strength Luke had shown, Auntie ought not to refuse a talent like that. In the quiet of her head, Iris began composing how, exactly, she'd raise it.
"Er. If the chance comes up." And now it was Luke's turn to have no idea how to answer. He could guess she meant to repay a debt. The problem was that his own relationship with Selene ran a little past ordinary.
He was, in point of fact, Selene's junior brother. Somewhere down the line, Iris might have to greet him as one rung above her, her teacher's own junior.
Ssss. Luke only had to think about it, and honestly? What a rush.
"And the last one?" Beyond the three, Luke had also registered the gaze Drake kept resting on him, and it dragged up the memory of a certain covetous elder from his exam season, that exact same hungry, appraising shine, stroke for stroke.
If he hadn't known better, Luke would have flung a card at the man already. A gaze that loaded invited every kind of misunderstanding.
"That is one of our Dragon's Valley's elders. Elder Theron Drake, a Card Master of the Immortal Realm." The answer came from Viola. Even Elise and Iris, it turned out, hadn't known the old man's identity.