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Luke and Mana moved through the fog simultaneously with every other competitor in the Mist Relic. Nobody could see each other. Nobody could coordinate. Everyone was choosing a direction and hoping for the best.
Card Spirits provided a critical edge. Before reaching Monarch Realm, Card Masters couldn't perform Source Synchronization with their spirits, leaving the master's physical body essentially defenseless. Mana's perception range, boosted by her Spellcaster racial trait, was the reason Luke wasn't walking blind.
"Master." Mana's voice sharpened. Her staff came up, and she stepped in front of him, green eyes locked on something the fog hadn't revealed yet. "Multiple signatures. Six of them. Closing from our two o'clock in a wedge formation."
"Biological?"
"No heartbeats. No breathing. But they're coordinating like they're linked to a central system." The emerald orb at her staff tip pulsed softly, syncing to her focus. "Whatever they're using to track, the fog doesn't block it. They already know exactly where we are."
Luke extended his own spiritual sense and hit the mist's resistance like a hand pressing into wet cotton. He could barely perceive ten meters. Whatever Mana was tracking was far outside his range.
"Stay in front. You're my eyes." He drew a step closer to her. "Let them come to us."
The first shapes resolved out of the fog with a sound like grinding metal on stone.
Armored humanoids. Roughly person-sized but wrong in a dozen small ways: rigid proportions, symmetrical limb ratios, joints angled for mechanical efficiency rather than biological grace. Each carried a curved blade in its right hand and a circular buckler in its left. Their eye sockets glowed dull amber, and the light there flickered in a scanning pattern, sweeping back and forth across the fog like targeting lasers.
*「 Ruin Guard 」*
Race: Mechanical
Quality: Legacy
Level: ★★★★ (Four-Star)
Skills: Guardian, Sword Dance, Combination, Heat Source Induction
"Heat Source Induction." Luke read the skill panel the instant it surfaced. "Body heat through the fog. That's how they found us."
"They can't miss us. Neither of us can hide from that." Mana adjusted her pink-and-blue mage's hat with her free hand. Her smile was small and focused. "Then I won't waste time trying."
The Guards spread as they advanced. Three at the front, two on the flanks, one held back in reserve. The formation wasn't improvised. Someone had programmed these things to hunt in packs.
The lead three charged.
Sword Dance activated in unison. Their curved blades erupted into whirling arcs of motion, each weapon carving overlapping helical patterns through the air. The three of them turned into a walking threshing machine of steel, chopping the fog in front of them into visible ribbons that spiraled away from the rotating blades.
Mana rooted her stance. Her staff came up in a two-handed grip, and she rotated it once in a tight, practiced spiral. The emerald orb flared bright, and a pentagonal magic circle unfurled beneath her feet. Arcane script rotated along its edges, each glyph flaring as it aligned with the next, the whole formation rising into the air around her in layered concentric rings.
"Dark Magic Attack!"
Her staff snapped forward. A condensed sphere of violet-black energy, edged with crackling ribbons of mana, screamed from the emerald and tore through the fog in a straight line. The lead Ruin Guard raised its buckler. The sphere punched through the buckler like wet paper, continued through the Guard's chest cavity, and detonated two meters behind it, pushing the mist outward in a visible concussion ring.
The Ruin Guard folded in on itself in a shower of sparks and hit the ground in two separate pieces.
The other two lead Guards didn't slow. Didn't hesitate. Their programming simply rerouted around the loss and accelerated.
"Combination." Luke's voice went sharp. "Mana, don't let them touch each other."
He'd caught it from their stats. The Guards ahead weren't just charging, they were converging. Two flanking units and the reserve unit were all moving toward the same point ahead of the lead runners. Four Ruin Guards Combining would produce something considerably nastier than four separate Four-Stars.
"On it." Mana's staff twirled once more, and the air ahead of her warped.
Three conical hats materialized in a staggered line between Mana and the converging Guards. Taller than she was, black-and-purple striped, each crowned with a silver crescent. Magical Hats.
The two charging Guards hit the first two hats at full sprint. Geometric impossibility. They entered and were simply not on the battlefield anymore. The third hat snapped laterally through the air and dropped directly onto the reserve Guard as it tried to swerve away. The hat swallowed it mid-motion.
All three Magical Hats wobbled once, rotated in place, and vanished.
"Where…" The last surviving Guard, one of the flankers that hadn't been caught, halted mid-charge. Its head rotated a full hundred and eighty degrees as its sensors failed to locate any of the Guards that had been with it a second ago.
A faint rustle above.
Three Ruin Guards fell from the fog one after another, each still frozen in mid-charge pose, swords still spinning from their aborted Sword Dance. They crashed into the Relic floor at three different compass points, thirty meters apart, landed hard on the stone, and tried immediately to reorient.
Separated. Unable to Combine.
"Dark Burning Attack!"
This spell had more ceremony. Mana drew her staff in a wide horizontal arc, and a second, larger magic circle ignited at the staff's tip rather than beneath her feet. Crimson-black flame coalesced at the circle's center, twisting into a concentrated sphere that visibly densified as she channeled. The sphere's surface rippled with heat haze.
She pointed, and the sphere detonated outward in a radiant pulse. Three separate lances of dark flame tore through the fog in simultaneous arcs, each one locked onto a scattered Ruin Guard. The impacts flashed white-hot.
When the fog closed back in, the three Guards had been reduced to slag heaps glowing orange from the inside.
The last Ruin Guard, the surviving flanker, had completed its assessment and was already turning to flee. Some part of its programming had apparently included a self-preservation protocol for overwhelming threats.
"Not this time." Luke raised one hand. "Extract."
The spell caught the retreating Guard mid-stride. Green light spiraled up its mechanical frame from the feet and froze it in place, and Luke's secondary skill began unmaking the construct in real time. The Guard dissolved progressively, alloy and circuitry peeling away into component materials, until nothing remained but a small pile of salvage on the Relic floor.
"Master, you cheated on that one." Mana floated over, pouting theatrically.
"It was running for reinforcements. I was being efficient." Luke walked over to the slag heap and the salvage pile and began sorting through the drops. Mechanical-type materials. Modification plates. Alloy fragments. Inorganic components, pristine and undamaged, far cleaner than most beast drops. "And free materials. Not going to complain."
He hit the other Ruin Guard remains with Extract as well, pulling clean components from each destroyed unit. The mechanical race's inorganic construction meant the extracted materials came out nearly flawless. In his knowledge base, both the Duel Spirits and Digital World worldviews contained cards that needed exactly these kinds of components.
"Master, there's something here." Mana hovered near the lead Guard's remains and plucked a small disc from what had been its breastplate. She floated back and held it out.
The object looked like an antique brass compass. The needle inside spun lazily, unaffected by the mist, before settling on a fixed bearing.
Luke took it.
*「 Indicator 」*
Effect: Contains a trace of special energy. Before the energy is exhausted, this item can guide its holder toward the core area of the Mist Relic.
Luke stared at it for a long moment.
"This is literally a hidden quest drop. Please tell me we're not in a video game."
"A what?" Mana tilted her head.
"Nothing. Just…" He pocketed the Indicator. "The people who designed this stage and I apparently watched the same stories in my previous life."
The Indicator's existence clarified the competition's structure. Reach the core, need these compasses, get them by killing Ruin Guards. The designers had built a system where passive strategy was a losing strategy by default. Hide under a rock and wait? You'd still be holding one Voucher when the winner walked out with the prize.
"No camping allowed," Luke murmured. "Got it."
He oriented himself along the Indicator's bearing and gestured for Mana to follow. "Keep your senses stretched. We'll run into other competitors eventually, and I'd rather see them before they see us."
"Yes, Master!"
They walked into the fog together, and the Mist Relic's silence closed around them.
-----
"The start isn't bad." In the monitoring area, Edmund Hargrove observed the light screens with measured approval. Most competitors had adapted to the fog's restrictions reasonably well, and casualties so far were minimal.
"That won't last," Roland said from beside him. He'd already spotted Six-Star Ruin Guards appearing in the mid-zones. For competitors whose strongest cards were Five-Star, those encounters would be brutal.
"If it stayed easy, there'd be no point continuing." Edmund's reply was quiet but firm. "Don't forget why we hold this competition. The Eternal Night Dimension exploration is coming. The enemies they'll face there will be stronger and show no mercy."
Roland nodded and said nothing more. The Youth Training Competition's true purpose ran deeper than rankings and resource allocation.
-----
"These things can combine?" Deeper in the Relic, Serena Frost stared at the Ruin Guard that had nearly caught her off guard.
She'd put a Frost Archer shot through its core, same as she'd handled the previous three. Should have been a clean kill. Instead, the Guard's dying body had twitched, pulsed, and begun visibly reaching for another Ruin Guard that she hadn't noticed creeping in from her blind spot.
Only her Ice Sky Sprite's instinct had saved her. It had shattered both units the instant it detected the Combination attempt forming. A second later and she'd have been fighting a freshly-merged higher-tier construct from her flank.
Her pale eyes narrowed.
"So Combination isn't just a merger. It's a survival protocol. The longer the fight drags, the more dangerous they get." She filed the information with ruthless precision. From now on, every Ruin Guard would be instant-kill or nothing. Half-measures were a liability.
She wasn't the only one learning this. Across the Mist Relic, competitor after competitor was discovering the same brutal truth. Leave a Guard wounded and it would find a partner and come back stronger. The Relic's defensive system rewarded precision and punished hesitation in equal measure.