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"The northwest, then?" At Iris's words, Luke and Elise traded a glance, and each read the same thought in the other's eyes. "In that case, that's the direction we'll take."
As things stood, they held no better option anyway. Perhaps that heading genuinely hid some thread of a clue worth finding.
"Though, shouldn't you swap to a different mount?" Drawing back his gaze, Luke looked to Iris again. "Your Star Whale is in less than ideal shape, and it's hardly built for covering ground besides."
As for inviting Iris up onto his own mount, Luke figured she'd likely want none of it, even if there was room enough at his back for one more. He and Iris were acquaintances and little else, nothing like the familiarity he shared with Elise.
"Obviously I know that." Iris rolled her eyes at him without a shred of grace. This scoundrel had a positive gift for reaching straight for whatever hurt most. And even as she thought it, her gaze slid across Luke, across Elise, across the thunder-wreathed dragon beneath them both, and a small idea surfaced in her heart.
She raised a hand, and the Polaris Star Whale gave a low, ringing cry as it folded back into card form and melted into her body. In the next breath, Iris summoned out another card spirit, one standing at the full Six-Star Perfect grade. The Storm Mermaid.
*「 Storm Mermaid 」*
Race: Sea Clan, Merfolk
Quality: Perfect
Level: ★★★★★★ (Six-Star)
Skills: Howling Gale, Thunderfall, Thunderstorm, Wind-Thunder Domain
Snow-pale skin, arms like carved jade, golden hair and a long, gleaming tail. She differed little from the mermaids of Luke's memory, except that the Storm Mermaid before him was no helpless maiden out of a fairy tale, but a card spirit who called down raging gales, driving rain, and the crack of thunderbolts.
The Storm Mermaid, is it? If I remember right, reconstructing the Storm Mermaid carries a chance of yielding the Eight-Star Storm Mermaid Empress! The card's information flashed through the back of Luke's mind, and he swept Iris another look despite himself. "You've got real ideas of your own, haven't you."
A Card Master could raise a spirit's combat power through the reconstruction of its card, though it was never any easy feat.
And within that craft there existed a handful of special cards that no amount of conventional construction could ever produce. Only through the path of reconstruction did one hold any chance of crafting them at all.
Iris's Storm Mermaid was precisely one such special card.
Conventional construction could build the Storm Mermaid herself. But only through reconstruction was there a probability, built upon the Storm Mermaid's foundation, of raising up the Storm Mermaid Empress, whose grade likewise surpassed her origin, standing at the full Eight-Star line.
The pity was that it remained only a probability. Reconstructing one's way to the Storm Mermaid Empress was no simple matter, and to put it in plain terms, cards of this type were a limited edition reserved for fortune's darlings and the deep-pocketed.
How Iris's luck ran was anyone's guess, but she wielded purchasing power of the same cannon-caliber as Elise's, and that gave her a genuine shot at the Empress someday.
"Naturally." Catching the open surprise on Luke's face, a flicker of smugness crossed Iris's own, and then, beneath Luke's and Elise's increasingly odd stares, the girl swung herself straight up onto the mount behind them.
With the frame this dragon carried, one more rider made it no more crowded than before. It was simply that the move itself had landed entirely outside either of their expectations.
"Aside from the Star Whale, I don't own a single card suited for riding," Iris declared, and under the weight of their strange looks, above all Elise's oddly bright-eyed one, her heart began drumming like a mouse whose tail had just been stepped on, though her face held its forced composure to the last.
The truth was, she was already regretting the impulse. She had only wanted to manufacture a little "trouble" for Luke, seeing as he and Elise looked every inch a couple.
She held a healthy confidence in her own looks. Winning against Elise might be a stretch, but competing on the same stage was well within reach, and all she'd wanted was to stir Luke a small helping of trouble. A tiny, well-earned revenge, nothing more.
Who could have known that the moment she settled onto the mount, Iris would discover matters developing in no direction she had planned.
It was the first time in her life she had ever sat this close to a boy. But far more important was that Elise had not flared up in the slightest, the way any reasonable script demanded. Instead the girl was watching her with open, sparkling interest, wearing the small, expectant face of someone settling in for an excellent show.
You people aren't playing by the script AT ALL! Iris had the distinct sensation of having fallen into a pit. Worse, of having jumped in herself, with a running start.
But she was already seated, and there was no graceful way down now. Iris could only harden her scalp and see it through.
"Ohh~?" Elise let out a long, meaning-laden sound, and it left Iris feeling exactly like a mistress caught red-handed by the main wife, bitterness piling up in her silently. How had she lost her head so completely?
No, hold on. Since when am I the MISTRESS here? He and I are perfectly, spotlessly innocent!
"Fun, isn't it?" While Iris was still hunting for exactly where it had all gone wrong, Elise leaned in and murmured it, feather-soft. She was no fool. Of course she'd seen straight through what Iris was playing at, and she was seizing the opening to fan the flames higher while she was at it.
"Quite fun." But Luke, as it turned out, refused to play by the script either, and as he said it, his hand was already reaching back to thoroughly muss Elise's little round face.
He had discovered the thing was genuinely addictive, all the more since Elise, in her current position, had no means of resistance whatsoever, and thus no escape at all from his clutches.
"Mmph~!" The muffled, indignant sound was adorable. Elise had never imagined a single teasing sentence would deliver her straight into the line of fire. As for Iris behind the two of them, she wore the face of someone comprehensively betrayed by the universe.
Unbelievable! Her situation had already been awkward enough to begin with, and now she was being force-fed a fresh helping of their sweetness on top of it. Iris genuinely felt that facing down all those grudge-beasts hadn't soured her heart half this much.
"Time to move, Raidramon." Withdrawing his hand, Luke patted his mount's back, and at the command, Raidramon dissolved into a streak of lightning and vanished from where it stood.
Long accustomed to Raidramon's speed, Elise had already tucked herself snugly inward the instant Luke spoke, her face the picture of ease. Iris, however, had thoroughly underestimated the terror of that launch, and if her hands hadn't shot out fast enough to lock around Luke, she'd likely have been flung clean off the back.
Are you KIDDING me! In this moment, Iris felt her entire composure disintegrate, but at this speed she couldn't manage so much as a word, and all that remained to her was to cling to Luke for dear life, that being the only thing keeping her from sailing off into the gloom.
Watching it all unfold, the Storm Mermaid shook her head in quiet despair. How did my own master manage to grow this much sillier in the span of a few short days? And so thinking, her figure slid gliding through the air, keeping easy pace alongside Angewomon and the rest.