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Bonus Chapter
"One-shotting a Four-Star Collectible Inferno Knight that easily..." Among the Moonvale students, Lily Everhart's gaze hadn't left Mana since the spell fired. "She's at least Five-Star. Maybe higher."
So that's why the Ashenvale side was so confident.
A Five-Star Card Spirit was a genuine threat. But Lily's composure didn't waver. Even a Five-Star wouldn't be enough against her. And she wasn't the only one on the Moonvale roster with high-level cards.
While Lily calculated, the next Moonvale fighter was already stepping in. Preston Hale replaced Levi without wasting a breath. His card materialized beside him: a serpent so massive it could've coiled around a truck. Scales like polished obsidian, slitted pupils radiating predatory intelligence, a forked tongue tasting the air with lazy menace.
Five-Star Normal quality. Venomous King Serpent.
The beast's coiled body radiated a suffocating pressure that silenced the Ashenvale celebration mid-cheer. This wasn't a Four-Star pushover. This was a genuine Five-Star Card Spirit, built to kill.
But the Ashenvale students' eyes held no worry. They'd watched Luke's exam livestream. They knew what Mana did to Five-Star beasts.
Hailey and Marcus could barely contain themselves. They were aching to see the look on Moonvale's faces.
"You took out Levi, so I'll give you credit for that." Preston stared Luke down, jaw set. "But if you think you can pull the same thing on a Five-Star card, you're dreaming."
"Are all of you from Moonvale this chatty?" Luke pinched the bridge of his nose. "Mana. Show him what Five-Star means to us."
"Gladly!" Mana's staff came up, dark energy already swirling at the tip. "I've been waiting for a real opponent!"
The Venomous King Serpent struck first. Its coiled body exploded outward, covering the distance in a single lunge that turned its entire mass into a battering ram of venom-slicked scales. The speed was shocking for a creature that large.
Mana sidestepped. Not a panicked dodge, but a precise lateral slide, her body tilting just enough to let the serpent's fangs pass within inches of her shoulder. She spun her staff in a tight circle and fired a Dark Magic Attack point-blank at the serpent's flank as it streaked past.
The spell hit. The serpent's obsidian scales flared with defensive energy, absorbing the brunt of the impact. Damage reduction. The attack left a scorch mark but didn't penetrate.
"Ha!" Preston's confidence surged. "The King Serpent's scales reduce incoming damage! Your spells won't punch through that easily!"
The serpent whipped around, its tail scything through the air at Mana's legs. She vaulted over it, twirling midair, and landed lightly behind the beast's head. Her staff swept down like a conductor's baton, and three rapid-fire bursts of dark magic peppered the serpent's body from above.
Each hit sparked against the defensive scales. Scorch marks appeared, but the serpent endured.
"Tough skin." Mana pouted. "Fine. Let's try this."
She planted her staff and channeled a stronger pulse. The dark energy condensed into a dense sphere at the tip, humming with barely-contained power.
The serpent didn't wait. It lunged again, jaws wide, and this time the attack came with a spray of venom, a toxic mist that filled the air between them. Contact with the mist would corrode mana constructs, weaken spells, eat through magical defenses.
Mana swept her staff in a wide arc, and a crescent of dark energy sliced through the venom cloud, dispersing it before it could reach her. In the same motion, she fired the charged sphere directly at the serpent's open mouth.
The serpent twisted, dodging with that impossible agility, the sphere sailing past its jaw by a hair's breadth.
Preston's lips curled. "Missed!"
Mana grinned. "Did I?"
Behind the serpent, the sphere hit a sharp turn in midair. A perfect, physically impossible ninety-degree redirect. The spell hooked back around and slammed into the Venomous King Serpent's exposed underbelly, the one spot the defensive scales didn't cover.
No damage reduction this time. The full force of a Six-Star dark magic spell detonated against unprotected flesh.
The serpent's body came apart from the inside out. Dissolved. Erased. Gone.
"Wh..." Preston's confident expression froze, then shattered. "A homing spell?! It curved AROUND my serpent?!"
"Hehe." Mana twirled her staff. "Tough scales on the outside. Soft on the inside. So I went around."
The arena erupted.
"DID THAT DARK MAGIC JUST DO A U-TURN IN MIDAIR?!"
"She couldn't punch through the scales, so she redirected the spell to hit where there ARE no scales! That's not just power, that's BRAINS!"
"Five-Star Normal with damage reduction, and she figured out the weak point in one fight. This girl is terrifying."
Moonvale's side had gone quiet. Very quiet.
If Levi's loss could be explained as a gap between Four-Star and Five-Star, this couldn't. The Venomous King Serpent was a Five-Star card with innate defensive properties, and it had been erased just as effortlessly.
Before anyone could fully process, the next fighter was already in the arena.
Warren Finch didn't bother with introductions. He'd watched two teammates get dismantled and decided that talking was a luxury he couldn't afford. His card hit the field in silence: a Howling Moon Wolf. Five-Star. Rare quality. A step above both the Inferno Knight and the Venomous King Serpent.
The wolf was built for speed. Lean, silver-furred, with muscles coiled like loaded springs beneath its pelt. It planted its paws and threw its head back.
The howl that followed wasn't just sound. It was weaponized mana. A frequency designed to shred the concentration of spellcasters, scramble spell formations mid-cast, turn precise magic into misfiring junk. The kind of ability specifically engineered to counter everything Mana was.
The air warped around the howl's epicenter. Dark energy that had been gathering at Mana's staff tip flickered and destabilized.
"Oh?" Mana's eyes sharpened. Her half-formed spell had actually been disrupted. "That's a neat trick."
She flicked her staff sideways and the unstable energy dispersed harmlessly. Then she smiled.
"My turn."
"Silence Seal."
The sigil materialized above the wolf in an instant, dropping over it like a cage. The howl cut off mid-note, the mana-disruption frequency collapsing as the Silence Seal severed the wolf's ability activation.
Warren's face went pale. "No..."
But the wolf was Five-Star Rare for a reason. Even without its howl, it was still fast. Terrifyingly fast. The Silence Seal suppressed skills, not physical ability, and the Howling Moon Wolf's base speed was its greatest asset.
The wolf exploded forward, a silver streak that crossed the arena in the time it took to blink. Claws extended, aimed at Mana's torso.
Mana didn't fire a spell. She brought her staff around in a horizontal sweep and blocked.
Metal met claw with a crack that echoed across the arena. The wolf's claws scraped along the staff's shaft, sparks flying, and Mana slid backward three feet from the force of the impact. But she held.
"She's blocking with the staff?!" someone in the crowd gasped.
"In close combat?! Against a speed-type beast?!"
The wolf pressed its advantage. A flurry of slashes, fast enough that the individual strikes blurred into a wall of silver. Left claw, right claw, spinning kick, lunging bite. Relentless.
Mana matched it move for move. Her staff became a blur of blue and pink, spinning, deflecting, redirecting. Each block flowed into the next with the fluid grace of someone who'd trained in close-quarters combat as thoroughly as long-range spellcasting. She parried a claw strike, ducked under a snap of the wolf's jaws, and cracked the butt of her staff against its ribs in a sharp counter.
The wolf yelped and leaped back, creating distance.
Mana didn't chase. She planted her staff, aimed it directly at the retreating wolf, and channeled.
This time, the energy that gathered wasn't the familiar dark-purple of her standard attack. It was denser. Brighter. A swirling vortex of concentrated dark magic that compressed itself into a tight spiral at the staff's tip.
"Dark Burning Attack!"
The spiral detonated forward in a wave of dark energy that expanded as it traveled, filling the width of the arena like a wall of destruction bearing down on the wolf. There was no dodging this. No weaving around it. The attack covered every angle, every escape route, every inch of available space.
The Howling Moon Wolf, still inside the Silence Seal zone with no skills to fall back on, slammed into the wave head-on.
Silver fur disintegrated. The wolf's form came apart layer by layer, peeled away by the expanding wave of dark magic until nothing remained.
Mana lowered her staff and blew a strand of hair out of her face.
"You were pretty fast," she said to the empty space where the wolf had been. "But fast doesn't help if you can't use your best move."
Warren Finch stood at the edge of the arena, staring at nothing, and said nothing at all.
Three fights. Three victories. Each one more decisive than the last. The Four-Star Inferno Knight hadn't survived a single spell. The Five-Star Venomous King Serpent had lasted a few exchanges before its weakness was exploited. The Five-Star Rare Howling Moon Wolf had been systematically disarmed, outfought in melee, and finished with a technique none of them had seen before.
Moonvale's delegation had been cut in half.
Only two fighters remained: Zane Calloway, ranked second, and Lily Everhart, ranked first. Everyone else on the roster was weaker than the three who'd already fallen. Sending them in would be feeding them to a wood chipper.
"She's Six-Star." Zane's voice was low, measured. "The serpent fight proved she has precision. The wolf fight proved she can handle close combat AND long range. And that last attack wasn't the same spell she used on the others. She's got multiple finishing moves."
The conclusion was inescapable. And it meant that going up against Luke was, mathematically, a losing proposition for Zane. His own card wasn't Six-Star. He knew what the outcome would be.
"Lily." He turned to the girl beside him. "After this, it's your show."
He didn't say "I'll lose." He didn't need to.
"Understood." Lily's single word carried more than acknowledgment. There was steel in it.
Zane walked to the arena. His card materialized beside him: a creature that looked like a fortress had decided to grow legs. Layered steel-gray shell plating covered a tortoise-like body the size of a small car. Every surface was reinforced, angular, designed to deflect rather than absorb.
Steel Shell Turtle. Five-Star. Collectible quality.
"The turtle! Zane's turtle is up!"
"Finally! This is the one card that might actually survive. Zane's defense is so ridiculous that even Warren's wolf couldn't leave a mark on it!"
"If anyone can outlast that Card Spirit's attacks, it's Zane. He's ranked second for a reason!"
Hope crept back into the Moonvale camp. Every card Luke had faced so far prioritized offense. Fast, aggressive, meant to kill quickly. The Steel Shell Turtle was the opposite. Pure defense. A wall. It won fights by simply refusing to die until the opponent ran out of steam.
Even Lily needed time to crack it open.
"Steel Shell Turtle, huh?" Luke studied the new opponent. He'd never faced a dedicated defense-type Card Spirit before. The exam beasts had all been offensive threats.
Mana was already raising her staff, dark energy coalescing at its tip. Her playful expression had faded. What replaced it was the same focused look she'd worn against the wolf, right before things got serious.
A pure defense type. She'd never fought one of those before.
This was going to be fun.