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"The Dark Purgatory. The Dragon Renegades." Viola stared at the man before her, frost threading through her vertical dragon-pupils. Beneath the frost sat dread. "To deal with us, you followed us all the way to Celestial Academy. You dared raise your hand right under the Academy's nose. Are you truly not afraid of a road with no return?"
Silas Vane was only standing there. That was exactly the problem. The pressure rolling off him bore down on her senses like a weight of stone, suppression born of realm and strength both. In all likelihood, the man before her was a Card Master of the Monarch Realm. A full step above her.
And then there were the dragon-grudge fierce beasts prowling slow circles around him. Those fed her dread just as surely.
"A road with no return?" Silas threw back his head and laughed, and the aura around him only climbed wilder. "You'd do better to worry about your own safety first."
The beasts gathered at his position ran vast beyond counting, far past anything Luke's group had encountered, as if every grudge-beast in the whole of the Dark Purgatory had been called to assemble in this one place.
And these creatures, whose entire existence was to attack all living things, made not one move against Silas. They lay prostrate at his back.
At the very front of that prostrate horde lay a dragon-family card spirit of strange and twisted shape. To senses honed sharp enough, countless threads showed tangled through the great spirit's body, threads fine enough to slip the naked eye, and the far end of every one wound away to wrap around a grudge-beast.
*「 Machina Puppet Dragon 」*
Race: Dragon Clan, Modified
Quality: Perfect
Level: ★★★★★★★ (Seven-Star)
Skills: Negation, Control, Ruination Cannon, Pain Nullification
The horde answered to the strange-bodied Machina Puppet Dragon. That, and that alone, was why none of them turned on Silas.
"But no matter. Every ounce of the humiliation your kind dealt our forebears, we will be taking back in full. And it begins with you!" The grin across his face climbed toward open mania, and the beasts at his back, as though infected by it, roared and roared again. "Once you've been resolved, the others' turns will follow!"
The words fell, and the horde came down on Viola like a tide.
Her hand snapped out. Two cards flashed into the air. A Six-Star Perfect Flower Dragon. A Six-Star Perfect Bramble Dragon. With two more dragon-kind taking the field beside the Seven-Star Collectible Earthring Dragon, Viola just barely held her footing against the sheer weight of that charge, and her face turned grave all the same. This battle had gone troublesome.
"Flower Dragon, Slumber!"
"Bramble Dragon, Root Bind!"
"Earthring Dragon, Earth Purgatory!"
ROAR!
Three dragon auras erupted as one.
The Flower Dragon moved first. Amid its bellowing cry, the buds along its body burst open all at once, gorgeous past words, and beneath the beauty drifted a special hypnotic pollen potent enough to drop even beasts stripped of all reason. The front-runners touched the pollen and folded mid-stride, asleep before they landed. The ranks behind had no room left to brake. They crashed over the fallen and went down in a tangle.
Then the brambles came. Countless thorned lashes tore up through the soil faster than thunder could travel, blanketing the downed beasts and nailing them dead against the earth. Flower Dragon woven with Bramble Dragon, the two finished suppressing the entire charging wave in the space of a breath.
The Earthring Dragon delivered the final stroke. Earth Purgatory, the same move that had killed the Abyssal Nether Tiger, a Seven-Star of its own grade, on first contact. Against beasts weaker by far, pinned and sleeping where they lay, one sweep carried the whole wave away.
The tautness in Viola's face eased by a fraction. It had looked effortless. It had worked only because Silas knew nothing of how her cards wove together. Asked to do it twice, she couldn't promise the same result.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Silas applauded. An entire wave of his grudge-beasts had just been wiped off the field, and he showed not one flicker of anger or loss. "Worthy indeed of one of the finest Dragon Envoys in the Valley's cohort. Only, the finer your performance runs, the less possible it becomes for me to ever let you go."
"And what I hold in hand hardly ends with the cannon fodder you just cut down."
Sonic booms split the sky.
Several figures erupted out of the dark at murderously close range, striking at the three dragons before Viola could so much as shape a command.
"AWROOO!"
The Flower Dragon and the Bramble Dragon, Six-Star Perfects both, never weathered a single exchange. One warning cry each. Then the ambushers' opening strikes killed them outright, and both reverted to card form, streaking back into Viola's body.
The Earthring Dragon was faster. Before the blows could land, it had already thrown up its Earth Shield, folding itself and Viola inside, and the ambush failed to take it in the opening breath.
But a guard raised in desperation was still a desperate guard. Beneath the converging frenzy of several attackers at once, the shield shattered. In the last instant left to it, the Earthring Dragon cast one final buffer shield across Viola. Then the blows drove it down, wailing, mauled to within reach of its life.
"Damn it all!" Viola tumbled through the air and landed unhurt inside the buffer her dragon had spent its last strength to give her. The ease was gone from her face. What filled it now was self-blame, and fury.
Set beside her elder sister, she was still too green by half. She hadn't sensed the ambushers waiting in the dark. She'd been struck clean through her guard. The Flower Dragon and the Bramble Dragon had died to a single blow apiece, and now the Earthring Dragon, the strongest fighting strength left in her hands, lay gravely wounded as well.
Where her gaze fell, a colossal claw-wound ran the length of the great dragon's back, deep enough to bare the bone beneath. Whatever these ambushers were, their strength was nothing ordinary.
Had the Earthring Dragon's base defenses not stood so absurdly high, and had it not been able to shunt a portion of the damage down into the earth beneath its feet, that single strike would likely have opened it from crown to belly.
And even so, its aura and its fighting strength had crashed to their lowest ebb. Within the torn flesh of that claw-wound coiled a special power of erosion, gnawing without pause at what vitality the great dragon had left, until it could not manage so much as to rise to its feet again.