For 30 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
"Luke, congratulations on claiming first place in this Eastern Region exam on the Capital's behalf." Meredith's voice differed from Lyra's ethereal tones, full of mature resonance, though it lacked the near-irresistible allure of Lilith's. "For the road ahead to the Capital and Celestial Academy, I'll be entrusting Lyra to your care."
"Mom!" Hearing Meredith's words, Lyra seized her mother's arm and gave it an insistent shake, showing a daughterly petulance quite unlike her usual self.
"Lyra's strength is hardly lacking, Mrs. Sinclair." Luke kept feeling there was something layered beneath Meredith's words, but he didn't dwell on it, chalking the whole thing up to simple courtesy on her part.
"Well, I'm not a monster like you." Lyra treated him to a beautifully executed eye-roll.
"Is that any way to talk?" A slender white hand rapped lightly against Lyra's smooth forehead as Meredith delivered the mock scolding, and paired with that appearance so full of mature charm, the effect carried an allure all its own.
As she spoke, Meredith's expressive eyes came to rest on Luke once more, and deep within them flashed a barely detectable trace of surprise.
The Monarch Realm!
With the strength of the Sovereign Realm, Meredith could see straight through to the fact that Luke had already reached the Monarch Realm. A One-Star Monarch, granted, but the significance folded into that was anything but ordinary.
"All right, Mother, we need to get moving. Any later and Elise is going to start hurrying us." Utterly without recourse against Meredith, Lyra could only toss out that one line before grabbing Luke and beating a hasty retreat.
Watching them go, a flicker of helplessness and doting indulgence crossed Meredith's face.
"Finally out of there." Only after towing Luke a good stretch away from the house did Lyra let out a breath, threads of excitement rising across her small face a moment later.
Then, upon noticing just how close her current posture with Luke actually was, drifting clouds of pink bloomed abruptly over the girl's fair face, and she released his hand with elaborately manufactured casualness.
"You and your mother certainly are close. Though why did that exit of yours feel like fleeing a disaster?" Luke had noticed her small maneuver, but didn't mind it, simply steering the topic elsewhere. "Also, I keep feeling the way Mrs. Sinclair looked at me just now was a bit strange. You haven't been saying anything unkind about me, have you?"
"My mother raised me by herself from the time I was small. Of course we're close." Lyra treated Luke to another grand eye-roll. "And do I look like someone who goes around badmouthing people? What you saw just now was definitely your imagination."
Even as she said it, Lyra turned her head aside with studied nonchalance. "My mother's behavior just now was no different from any other day."
"Is that right? Then I suppose it was my imagination." Hearing Lyra's answer, Luke nodded, privately wondering whether the sheer volume of matters he'd been juggling lately had left him a touch oversensitive.
Seeing Luke successfully hoodwinked, Lyra finally relaxed. She knew perfectly well that his instinct just now hadn't been wrong at all. The way Meredith had looked at him truly was rather odd. It was just that the reason behind it was something Lyra genuinely couldn't bring herself to say aloud.
She could hardly tell him, my mom's convinced the two of us are an item, so she's already sizing you up as her son-in-law, could she? On that front, Meredith was actually rather open-minded about things. They'd graduated, after all.
Of course, if anyone ever dared to bully her daughter, Meredith would also make certain the offender learned exactly what a Sovereign was worth.
At the thought, warmth prickled faintly across Lyra's whole body, but she swiftly forced herself back to composure. "We should really hurry up and set out. Elise already asked this morning about when we'd be leaving."
"Then let's go." Luke nodded. He had no wish to burn more time either. Only once they'd collected Elise would their journey to Celestial Academy count as officially underway.
Even as he spoke, Red-Eyes Black Dragon's card had already appeared in Luke's hand.
The Magic Card Civilization did possess teleportation arrays, but such arrays were, as a rule, installed only within the various dimensional planes, never inside the cities of the main plane.
There were reasons for that. For one, ordinary people simply couldn't endure the spatiotemporal disorientation of teleportation. But the chief reason was that beyond the Magic Card Civilization prowled no small number of extra-domain fierce beasts, watching with hungry eyes. Were those beasts ever to intercept a set of spatial coordinates and come rampaging into the main plane to wreak wholesale destruction, the threat to the Magic Card Civilization would be immense.
For that reason, whether within the Ancient Kingdom or in the other nations beyond it, no one installed teleportation arrays casually across the main plane.
When Card Masters traveled, then, they generally chose their card spirits as transport. For one thing, ordinary transportation essentially couldn't match a card spirit's speed; for another, both one's schedule and one's destination came far freer, with no need to squeeze in shoulder to shoulder with the general public.
"Looks like I'll be hitching a ride, then." Lyra's eyes blinked with mischief. She knew full well that Luke possessed a dragon-type card spirit, so there was no call for her to embarrass herself in front of him.
Even with the Silver Moon Fox's Godspeed engaged, it couldn't hope to match the flight speed of a dragon-type card.
"Somehow I get the feeling you had exactly this in mind back when you first contacted me." Luke shot back without much heat, and received only Lyra's indignant little huff in return.
A pity that the eager, glittering anticipation in her eyes had already sold out every thought in her head.
Seeing it, Luke didn't press the point. The card in his hand went flying out, and in the next moment Red-Eyes Black Dragon descended, its violent draconic pressure rolling outward in wave after wave, while Lyra, standing at Luke's side, had gone completely blank in the face.
Didn't he summon a blue-green giant dragon at the Youth Training Competition? How has it turned into a black dragon now? A jolt of shock flickered up from somewhere deep inside her, and Lyra blurted it straight out. "You have two dragon-type card spirits?"
Red-Eyes Black Dragon and the dragon of the Eye of Timaeus differed enormously in appearance, but by Lyra's perception, Red-Eyes Black Dragon's strength, set against Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl's, gave up absolutely nothing.
Which was to say, this black dragon before her was likewise a Seven-Star dragon-species card spirit?
You have got to be kidding me! Even Lyra couldn't stop the crude burst of disbelief detonating in the privacy of her heart. Counting the Angewomon he'd displayed during the exam, didn't that mean Luke already possessed three card spirits at the Seven-Star class?
"When did I ever say I only had one dragon-type card spirit?" Luke gave Red-Eyes Black Dragon a pat, and he could feel that ever since taking up residence in the Eternal Land, the dragon had grown noticeably more spirited.
It seems a dimensional plane genuinely holds more appeal for card spirits than reverting to card form does, Luke noted quietly to himself.
Unbelievable!
Lyra had a bellyful of exclamations and no idea where to even begin. She had a premonition that once they reached Celestial Academy, Luke was absolutely going to kick up no small number of headlines all over again.
She had never once heard of a graduate holding three Seven-Star cards with the exam barely concluded! These were cards of the high-tier bracket. Even within the Four Great Academies, only the tiniest cluster of students at the very summit possessed them.