"It's over." Marcus Ward sighed as the white light deposited him back in reality.
But after a moment, a faint smile tugged at his lips. The disappointment was real, sure. But so were the results.
"This score, compared to previous years... I've already beaten Ironvale's best college entrance exam record. It's not first place, but it's something."
He allowed himself a small nod of satisfaction.
"This unified exam. First place is definitely mine."
Still muttering to himself, Marcus materialized back in Crestfall Academy's plaza, expecting the usual reception. A crowd. Some cheers. Maybe a few pats on the back from underclassmen who'd been watching the feed.
Instead, he got nothing.
Not silence, exactly. The plaza was packed. People were everywhere. But not a single pair of eyes turned his way. Every student in sight had their faces buried in their personal terminals, scrolling and typing furiously, completely oblivious to the fact that their star candidate had just returned.
Marcus blinked.
This wasn't the script. Where was the warm welcome? Where were the impressed faces? Why was everyone acting like he didn't exist?
"Uh... hey, Marcus?" A student who usually hung around Marcus finally noticed him and had the decency to look awkward about the situation. "You might... you might only rank third this exam."
"Third?" Marcus's expression shifted instantly. "What happened? Is it Ironvale? Even if it's Ironvale, there's no way two people ranked above me."
His score had surpassed Ironvale's best from the previous college entrance exam. He was sure of that. And the idea of Westbridge producing someone who could threaten him? Marcus didn't even consider it. The gap between Westbridge and the top two schools was too wide, especially at the elite level.
"Hailey North from Ironvale built a Water Azure Beast. Higher quality than your Inferno Knight. She got eliminated too, but her Water Azure Beast lasted about ten seconds longer than your Inferno Knight against Wood Spirit Vine."
"Hailey North? Water Azure Beast?" Marcus's jaw tightened. He hadn't expected Ironvale to produce someone genuinely competitive this year, let alone someone who'd technically outperformed him. "And the other one?"
"The other one is Luke Mercer. From Westbridge. He's still in the exam space right now."
"Westbridge?!"
Marcus was sure he'd misheard. He asked again. Got the same answer. His fingers found the livestream link before his brain fully caught up.
"Where are the Crestfall and Ironvale people? Weren't you just saying Marcus and Hailey were just as good as Luke?"
"And now? Our boy Luke is STILL going strong while yours got sent packing!"
"Hahahaha, WESTBRIDGE ON TOP!"
The Westbridge students' comments hit Marcus like a truck. His blood pressure spiked. He was being used as a punchline. A measuring stick for someone else's greatness. A stepping stone.
But then he actually watched the fight.
"Holy cow."
"Holy cow!" Hailey North, teleported back to Ironvale's plaza a few seconds after Marcus, blurted out the exact same words. With exactly as little regard for her usual image.
On screen, Mana was facing down the Fury Tiger in real-time.
The beast was massive. Easily three times the size of the Wood Spirit Vine, its striped body rippled with muscle and barely-contained aggression. Orange-red fur bristled with visible mana, and its claws left scorch marks on the ground just from standing still. A Five-Star Rare. The kind of beast that made Four-Star cards look like toys.
Fury Tiger lunged.
It crossed the distance in a single bound, claws extended, jaws wide, a freight train made of teeth and fury aimed directly at Mana's chest.
Mana tilted her head. Just slightly. Like she'd heard an interesting sound.
Then she moved.
She dropped beneath the Tiger's swipe with a dancer's grace, her body bending at an angle that shouldn't have been possible without momentum carrying her straight into the ground. Instead, she used the dodge to spin, her staff sweeping in a wide arc that trailed ribbons of dark energy behind it.
The Tiger's claws slashed through empty air. Its landing cracked the arena floor. Before it could even turn, Mana was already behind it, standing with her legs crossed at the ankle, staff resting across her shoulders.
She waggled a finger at it. Too slow.
The comment section went feral.
"DID SHE JUST DODGE A FIVE-STAR CHARGE LIKE IT WAS NOTHING?!"
"She's standing behind it. Posing. She's POSING. I can't breathe."
Fury Tiger roared. The sound was a physical force, a shockwave that cracked the air and would've stunned most Card Spirits into paralysis.
Mana's hair fluttered. That was it.
She sprang forward, vaulting onto the Tiger's back. For a split second she stood there, balanced on the beast's spine like she was surfing, and then she pushed off, launching herself backward in a graceful backflip as the Tiger thrashed and swiped at where she'd been standing.
She landed in a crouch ten feet away, cape settling around her, staff aimed at the Fury Tiger's exposed back. She grinned.
"Dark Magic Attack."
This time, she didn't fire a single pulse. She channeled it. A concentrated beam of dark-attribute energy screamed from the staff's tip, slamming into the Fury Tiger's exposed back. The beast skidded across the arena, claws digging furrows in the ground, its mana-infused fur absorbing a portion of the blast.
It survived. Barely. Smoking, snarling, one leg buckling.
But surviving a direct hit from Luke's Card Spirit was already more than the Wood Spirit Vine had managed.
Fury Tiger charged again. Slower this time, one leg dragging, but the fury in its eyes hadn't dimmed. If anything, the pain had made it angrier.
Mana touched down lightly, planted her staff in front of her with both hands, and the playful expression vanished. What replaced it was focus. Clean, absolute, professional.
"Silence Seal."
The air around the Fury Tiger warped. A zone of absolute stillness expanded outward from Mana's staff, locking down the space around the beast like an invisible cage. The Tiger's next roar died in its throat. No sound. No shockwave. Its skill-based attacks, gone. It could still move, still slash, still bite, but every ability tied to mana or skill activation had been severed.
The Tiger stumbled, confused, weakened, stripped of half its combat toolkit in an instant.
Mana raised her staff one last time. Dark energy gathered at the tip, dense and swirling, condensing into a sphere that pulsed with barely-restrained power.
"Dark Magic Burst."
The execution skill.
The sphere detonated. A pillar of dark magic engulfed the Fury Tiger, and the beast didn't roar, couldn't roar, the Silence Seal still holding. Its body came apart inside the blast, fur and muscle and bone dissolving into motes of light that scattered and faded like embers in the wind.
When the light cleared, Mana was standing in the center of a scorched crater, staff resting on her shoulder, not a scratch on her. The only thing left of the Fury Tiger was a coil of whip-like material sitting on the blackened ground.
She turned toward where she knew the audience cameras were, blew a kiss, and strolled back to Luke's side.
The comment section didn't just explode. It died and came back to life.
"THAT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE."
"She dodged it, TAUNTED it, rode it like a surfboard, silenced it, and then executed it. I need a moment."
"Fury Tiger? Where's my Fury Tiger? It's just... gone?"
"Did you see that combo? Silence Seal into Dark Magic Burst? She cut off its skills and then hit the execute. That's not brute force, that's STRATEGY."
"She's definitely Six-Star. Maybe higher. A Six-Star Card Spirit with combat intelligence like that? Just thinking about it makes my head spin."
"So, Crestfall, Ironvale. Still wanna talk about who's strongest? Or are we done here?"
The Crestfall and Ironvale students stayed quiet. There was nothing to say. This was reality, and reality didn't care about school pride.
"So strong." Hailey stared at her terminal, teeth pressing into her lower lip.
When she'd faced Wood Spirit Vine, her Water Azure Beast had at least put up a fight. It lasted longer than Inferno Knight. She'd taken a sliver of pride in that.
But Fury Tiger? If Water Azure Beast had faced Fury Tiger instead of Wood Spirit Vine, there wouldn't have been a fight at all. Fury Tiger outclassed Wood Spirit Vine in both offense and defense by a significant margin.
And Luke's Card Spirit hadn't just beaten it. She'd played with it. Dodged its charges for fun, silenced its abilities, and executed it with a combination that showed genuine tactical intelligence. The raw power gap was one thing. The fact that she'd styled on it was something else entirely.
The distance between them was enough to make her feel something uncomfortably close to despair.
Over at Crestfall, Marcus Ward had gone completely silent. His mind kept replaying the clip, trying to find some angle that made it less devastating.
There wasn't one.
Should I repeat a year? Why the hell did Westbridge suddenly produce a freak like this?
The complaint echoed through his skull, equal parts frustration and grudging respect.
"Yes! Luke, let's GO!"
"His Card Spirit is eternal. ETERNAL!"
At Westbridge Academy, the plaza had turned into a celebration. Students shouted without restraint, and not a single teacher moved to quiet them. If anything, the younger faculty had joined in. Luke's performance had infected the entire school with a kind of euphoric disbelief.
Including his homeroom teacher, Mr. Tanner.
"Go, Luke!" Tanner pumped his fist, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and raw excitement.
The shock was personal. He was Luke's homeroom teacher. He saw this kid every day. Sat across from him during parent conferences. Graded his homework. And not once, in all that time, had he suspected that Luke was hiding this kind of talent. The boy had been sitting on a nuclear weapon and never said a word.
The excitement was professional. A student who could build a Six-Star Card Spirit during a unified exam? Even Monarch Realm teachers like Tanner had Six-Star cards, sure, but the quantity was small. It had taken them decades to accumulate that kind of firepower. Luke had done it on his first try, during a mock test, at the student level.
The talent gap was almost offensive.
"Tanner!" Vice Principal Graves descended from her office, and even she was struggling to keep her composure. Her expression was the closest thing to genuine excitement that anyone at Westbridge had ever seen on her face. "Well done."
This was the woman the students had nicknamed "Mistress Annihilator" for her icy demeanor and zero-tolerance approach to, well, everything. Seeing her smile felt like watching a glacier melt in real-time.
"I'm as surprised as you are, Vice Principal." Tanner scratched his head. The unspoken thought hung in the air between them: Since when does Graves look happy about anything?
Truly, excellent students had a way of making everyone around them look good.
"This unified exam," Vice Principal Graves said, her eyes fixed on the display where Mana stood victorious over yet another pile of beast materials, "might just be the beginning of something much bigger for Westbridge."
She wasn't just talking about the unified exam. The college entrance exam was next. And if Luke could do this in a mock test, Vice Principal Graves had no doubt he'd deliver something even more spectacular when it counted for real.
"Fury Tiger?" Back in the exam space, Luke opened his eyes.
He'd burned through a decent chunk of mental energy running the Spell Tome simulation, but the results had been worth every drop. The blueprint was at a hundred percent. When he got his hands on the right materials after the exam, he'd be able to build the real thing with guaranteed success. He didn't bother simulating anything else. The proof of concept was solid, and conserving energy for the rest of the exam was the smart play.
His gaze drifted to the materials scattered on the ground where the latest beast had been. A coiled whip-like drop. Tiger-based, presumably.
A flicker of confusion crossed his face. "Wait, we're already at Five-Star beasts?"
He'd been in his own head for most of the exam, letting Mana handle the combat on autopilot. The difficulty had apparently scaled quite a bit while he wasn't paying attention.
His eyes found Mana, who was twirling her staff with the satisfied air of someone who'd just finished a light warm-up.
The confusion faded. Luke shrugged.
Five-Star beasts. Six-Star beasts. Didn't matter. He knew exactly what Mana was capable of, and he wasn't worried.
Not even a little.
Plz Throw Powerstones.