She wore a tall blue conical hat trimmed with pink stripes, tilted at a jaunty angle that somehow looked both ridiculous and perfect. Golden-yellow hair cascaded past her shoulders, catching nonexistent light and sparkling like it had its own personal sun. Her eyes were wide, emerald-green, and impossibly bright. The kind of eyes that radiated pure, undiluted innocence.
A yellow choker circled her neck, a small crimson gem set into its center like a drop of frozen fire. Her outfit was a blue off-shoulder bandeau top that connected to a short pink cape at the back and a matching pink skirt that was, objectively speaking, very, very short. The skin it left exposed was porcelain-fair, practically luminous.
In her right hand, she held a blue staff topped with a sphere and a flat, vortex-shaped crest. Her wrist guards and boots followed the same color scheme, blue base with pink trim, tying the whole look together into something that shouldn't have worked as a coherent outfit but absolutely did.
Cute. Beautiful. Pure.
Luke stared.
He'd spent years looking at this character on screens. Phone screens, monitor screens, TV screens. Printed on card sleeves and playmats. Saved as wallpapers he'd cycle through every few months but never actually delete.
And now she was standing in front of him. Life-sized. Three-dimensional. Real.
It was like watching an anime character step through the screen and into the room, and for a moment, Luke's brain needed a second to catch up with what his eyes were telling him.
Yeah. This was definitely the right choice.
While Luke was still processing, Mana had already taken stock of her surroundings. Her gaze swept the empty exam space, lingered on the faint residual glow of the summoning circle, and then landed on Luke.
Her eyes lit up like someone had flipped a switch.
"Master!"
She launched herself at him.
No warning. No buildup. Just zero to full-body tackle in the space of a heartbeat. Luke hit the ground with Mana on top of him, her arms locked around his neck, her hat askew, her face about three inches from his, beaming with the kind of unfiltered joy that most people reserved for winning the lottery.
"Uh." Luke lay flat on his back, arms instinctively wrapped around the girl who'd just body-slammed him into the floor, his brain running a full diagnostic on what had just happened. "...Enthusiastic."
It made sense, once the initial shock wore off. From the moment a Magic Card was successfully constructed, the Card Spirit was hardwired with absolute loyalty toward their Card Master. Maximum affinity, right out of the box. Zero chance of betrayal.
It wasn't brainwashing. It was more fundamental than that. Card Masters were, in the most literal sense, the creators of their Card Spirits. Their parents. Their origin point. Whether Original Card or common card, the bond was the same: unconditional, from the very first breath.
Mana wasn't just happy to see him. She was happy to exist, and he was the reason she did.
"Remarkable intelligence." Back in the City Lord's Mansion, Douglas Brandt's voice carried a note of reluctant awe as he watched the scene play out on screen. "Whatever that Card Spirit is, its quality is definitely not low."
A Card Spirit's intelligence was directly tied to its quality. Higher quality meant sharper awareness, deeper personality, more autonomous decision-making. Conversely, if a Card Spirit displayed high intelligence, it was a dead giveaway that the card's quality was up there.
And Mana had just demonstrated the kind of self-aware, emotionally complex behavior that most Card Spirits couldn't dream of.
"The quality has almost certainly reached Collectible," Victor Ashford added, his eyes never leaving the display. "And the star level won't be low, either. When the card was forming, I sensed the dimensional space around Luke beginning to fracture. Now it makes sense."
"Collectible quality and a high star level." Townsend repeated the words like they physically hurt to say. Which they probably did.
Harlow, meanwhile, had given up any pretense of composure. The man was grinning so wide it was a miracle his face hadn't cramped. Luke's performance wasn't just good. It was the kind of good that rewrote the narrative of an entire school overnight.
Townsend and Brandt's envy was practically a living thing at this point. If jealousy could be measured on a pain scale, they were both maxed out and climbing.
Phase One ended in a blink.
The instant the timer hit zero, a deep bell rolled through the entire unified exam space, a sound that resonated in the bones rather than the ears. Across thousands of individual chambers, candidates who hadn't finished their cards were seized by the dimensional plane and ejected without ceremony.
One moment they were frantically working. The next, they were standing in their school's plaza, blinking in the daylight, the Card Editor gone from their hands.
"It's over? Already?"
"Are you kidding me? If the unified exam matches last year's college entrance exam, does that mean I wouldn't have even cleared Phase One of the real thing?"
"No... no, no, no. That can't be right."
The plazas filled with returning students, and the mood was grim. Pale faces. Shaking hands. A rising chorus of groans and muttered self-recriminations as the reality sank in.
Failing Phase One of a mock exam was bad enough. The implication that they'd have failed the real thing was worse.
A few students kept their heads. This was just a practice run, after all. The actual college entrance exam was still ahead of them. There was still time.
But how many of them would actually use that time well? That was anyone's guess.
Before the despair could fully set in, every eliminated candidate's personal terminal buzzed with a notification: a livestream link. The feed cycled through the remaining candidates still inside the exam space, showing real-time footage of everyone who'd passed Phase One.
The message was clear: You're out, but you can still watch.
It was a small consolation. And it made the sting just a little bit worse.
「 Congratulations to all remaining candidates for completing Phase One. The current phase is Phase Two: Repel Fierce Beasts. 」
「 In Phase Two, a wave of fierce beasts will be released every five minutes. Only Magic Cards constructed during Phase One may be used in combat. 」
「 When all of a candidate's Magic Cards have been defeated, the candidate will be removed from the exam space. Final rankings will be determined by each candidate's total elimination count. 」
"Monster waves, huh?" Luke scanned the rules, nodding slowly. "Makes sense. You build the cards, now you prove they work."
Phase One hadn't restricted how many cards you could build, just how much time you had. In theory, a candidate could've cranked out a whole roster. In practice? Building even a single high-quality card ate through most of the clock. Anyone who'd spent their time on one strong card instead of several weak ones was gambling that quality would outpace quantity.
Luke had exactly one card. But that one card was a Six-Star Collectible Dark Magician Girl, so he wasn't exactly sweating the math.
"Master." Mana stepped forward, staff in hand, her expression shifting from playful to focused in an instant. Confidence radiated off her like warmth from a furnace. "Leave the fighting to me. I won't let you down."
She wasn't posturing. Card Spirits didn't reject combat. Fighting for their master was baked into their very purpose. It was what they were for.
"Your first real fight." Luke met her eyes and smiled. "Make it pretty."
A Six-Star Collectible Dark Magician Girl, a peak Intermediate Card with an execution skill and an area denial ability. Whatever the exam threw at her in the early rounds wasn't going to last long.
As if on cue, the air in the exam space rippled, and a shape materialized out of nothing.
「 Forest Wolf 」
Race: Beast
Quality: Normal
Level: ★ (One-Star)
Skills: Wind Rend Claw, Roar
A one-star normal-quality beast. The absolute bottom of the food chain. The tutorial mob of tutorial mobs.
The Forest Wolf's eyes locked onto Mana. Its muscles tensed. Its jaws parted...
And then it was dust.
A single pulse of Dark Magic Attack left the tip of Mana's staff, washed over the wolf like a passing shadow, and erased it from existence. The beast didn't yelp. Didn't stagger. Didn't have time to process what had happened. One frame it was alive, the next it was particles.
All that remained was a single fang, clattering to the ground where the wolf had stood.
"Oh?" Luke picked up the drop, a Forest Wolf Fang, as a notification chimed in his head.
「 Defeating a fierce beast may randomly drop beast-related materials. All drops belong to the candidate. 」
"Feels like playing a game." He weighed the fang in his palm, then tossed it into the Card Editor's material storage. "Grey-grade, though. Bottom of the barrel."
Materials for card construction came in nine tiers: Grey, White, Green, Blue, Purple, Orange, Gold, Red, and Rainbow. Higher tier meant rarer material, which meant higher-star cards.
A fang from a One-Star scrub wolf was always going to be grey. No surprises there.
Still, free materials were free materials. And unlike using Extract, which drained magic power, having the beasts drop loot on death meant Mana could keep fighting without Luke spending a single point of energy on harvesting.
More uptime for his Card Spirit. More rounds survived. Better score.
Five minutes ticked by. The second wave hit.
Three Forest Wolves this time, quality bumped up to Rare, and they moved with the coordinated instinct of a pack that had hunted together its entire life.
Mana didn't even blink.
"Dark Magic Attack."
One pulse. Three wolves. Three piles of dust. Three material drops.
The exam continued.
PLz Throw Powerstones.