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Lethe Netherwater!
Thunderstorm!
The waters of the river of the dead poured down in reverse out of the empty sky, drowning the second grudge-hunter whole, and inside the flood, gale and thunderbolt flashed and raked. The second hunter went the way of the first.
Dark Burning Attack!
Firepower at full open. Pitch-black detonations hammered down all around Viola, and because the Crystal Cluster stood over her, the girl inside took no harm at all, while every grudge-hunter and grudge-beast near her was blasted flying in the same breath.
Even a Seven-Star hunter, eating a full-power Dark Burning Attack with its guard down, did not walk away comfortable. As for the weaker grudge-beasts, several of the unlucky ones were simply blown apart.
The blasted hunters and beasts didn't counter. They went low and wary instead, watching everything, because whatever had just arrived was nothing to provoke, and the power of light riding on that arrow had every last one of the aberrant creatures crawling with unease.
"Who is it! WHO!" It had all happened in the space of a blink, and Silas felt the madness climbing his throat even as an endless wariness rose beneath it.
The Dark Purgatory was not what it had been in its prime. The beasts of ultimate evil from those days had been purged or exiled long ago, and the Seven-Star grudge-hunters were the highest fighting strength he could field without touching his final card.
Five Seven-Star hunters. He had believed the game locked. Only trial students had been teleported in, and with a bomb like that in hand, capsizing had not even crossed his mind. Five Seven-Star hunters. Whichever new student came, there was only one road, and it ended in the dirt.
And in one blink, before he could so much as react, two of them were gone. That was not a result he could accept.
Celestial's masters, come hunting?
No. There's no way. The Dark Purgatory's coordinates were not a thing found on a whim. Even Moira, a Sovereign Realm Card Master, could never have traced this place so easily. When Dragon's Valley had come out in full force in those days, even they had burned a long, long stretch of years before they found it.
What Silas didn't know was that Tobias, Celestial's own Head, had shown himself only after every student entered the trial, and that Drake, the elder of Dragon's Valley, had arrived nearly at the end. Renshaw could not have passed him that warning if he'd wanted to.
Inside the crystal blossoms, Viola was running the same question and finding no answer. Then a streak of blue lightning cut into the battlefield, and the girl saw the riders on its back, and her vertical pupils drew tight.
Those new students?!
And it wasn't Viola alone. Silas saw them clearly in the same moment, and his face filled with pure disbelief. From the very start, he had never once entertained the idea that any student teleported into this place could stand in his way.
But the Luke, Elise, and Iris before him were breaking that lifelong frame apart, and the angel-family spirit and the red-gowned flower spirit gliding behind them radiated a presence that gave nothing to his grudge-hunters at all.
The angel above all. Soaked head to heel in the power of light, she had every aberrant beast on the field flinching just to look at her.
Still. These were not Celestial's instructors. That much let Silas breathe again. At the very least, things had not gone to the worst.
"So you'd be the prime culprit, then." Luke looked at Silas. Strictly speaking, none of them had untangled what this man was to Viola yet, but from the state of the field, his suspiciousness outran hers by a wide margin.
A rough judgment, admittedly. But if Viola were the mastermind here, roping herself into the trap would make her an idiot of rare quality.
And above all else, this man's whole look was nothing, nothing like a fellow student of their cohort.
"And if I am?" Silas denied none of it. Two Seven-Star hunters lost, and yet, thinking of the card still folded at the bottom of his hand, his spine held. "Heaven laid you a road and you refused to walk it. Purgatory has no door, and still you forced your way in. Since you chose to save her, then every one of you is my enemy."
"I'd planned to leave you all to rot in the Dark Purgatory on your own. A longer life, if a worse one. Since you've delivered yourselves instead, I'll spend a little more time and resolve you here and now."
"Confident, aren't you." Luke arched a brow. Behind him, Elise and Iris had already gone to collect Viola.
"This time, it's I who dragged all of you in." Saved, the dragon-maiden's face filled with open gratitude, and she told them everything she knew.
But the worry never left her eyes. She understood the Dark Purgatory more deeply than any of them, and the clan's codices had taught her exactly what this place was.
"Celestial has your people inside it?" When Viola finished, Luke's group traded a look, their understanding of the Dragon Renegades rewritten one more time.
"You don't need to know that much." This once, Silas gave Luke no straight answer. "One way or another, all of you die here."
"And if cutting down two grudge-hunters in a sneak attack has convinced you that you're my match, then you are gravely mistaken." He was plainly done wasting time. "Let me show you what a TRUE purgatory looks like!"
The words fell, and before Luke's and Elise's startled eyes, every grudge-beast and grudge-hunter on the field turned and began devouring one another. Flesh flew. The whole scene ran soaked in gore, and underneath the gore sat a wrongness no words fit.
Viola's face changed as the memory struck her. "Stop him, quickly! I've read it in the clan codices. Grudge-beasts can raise their strength by cannibalizing their own kind!"
"Too late. Once the devouring begins, you have no chance, and no means, of stopping the process." Silas began to laugh. "I told you I'd show you a true purgatory. This is only the beginning!"
"Who said there's no means? Angewomon." Luke cut the laugh off at the root.
In the next moment, the power of light came down out of heaven. Four pairs of wings, eight in all, spread wide at Angewomon's back. Her hands rose high above her head, a seven-colored ring surfaced, and boundless radiance rolled outward in every direction.
Everything the light touched lost command of its own body in the same instant. The hunters and beasts locked mid-devouring, jaws in each other's flesh, exactly as they were. As though someone had pressed pause on the world, the whole field went silent as the grave, and stranger than any battle had been.