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"This!" Viola froze where she stood. Never in her life had she seen a skill this miraculous. It had locked down an entire region of enemies in one stroke, and three Seven-Star grudge-hunters stood caged inside it with the rest.
If that move were turned on me, would I have any answer? She ran the question in silence, and the answer came back: none.
The Earthring Dragon excelled at defense, but the holy binding pinning the field was no attack. It was restraint, pure and absolute, and the Earthring Dragon carried nothing that could dispel a hold of that strength.
Though right now, Viola wanted that binding as strong as it could possibly be. So long as it stopped the hunters and beasts from devouring one another, nothing else mattered.
"This isn't even my first time seeing this skill, and I still think it's beyond all reason." Elise let out a sound halfway to reverence. Set against the day it had merely bound Iris's Polaris Star Whale, the spectacle before her ran grander by an order.
Beside her, Iris was biting her lip. All this time later, she had still found no way to break that move.
The only answer she'd ever reached was to resolve Angewomon before the binding could fire. Which was its own joke. The road here had already shown her exactly how much raw strength that angel carried.
"Impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!" Unlike the girls' quiet awe, Silas's face held nothing but disbelief. "How can a card of yours carry an ability like that! The grudge-beasts' erosion, stopped, by YOU?!"
His voice edged toward hysteria and couldn't hide the shaking underneath. Three Seven-Star grudge-hunters. Dozens of Six-Star grudge-beasts. Bound wholesale by a single ring of holy light. In what world was that reasonable?!
From the moment Luke's group had appeared, the situation had bent further and further off his design. Twice now this Luke had broken his plan across his knee, and Silas could feel the frenzy climbing.
"So you see. Nothing is impossible." At Luke's command, Angewomon drew her bow, her perfect frame bending into the arc, and the arrow of light left her hand. One more Seven-Star grudge-hunter died on the spot.
Then the second arrow. Then the third.
Three arrows, and the three strongest hunters, the ones who had devoured the most of their own kind, were resolved with an ease that looked like play. Silas's eyelids spasmed with every shot.
And while Angewomon fired, Dark Magician Girl, the Lethe Spider Lily, and the Storm Mermaid poured their own skills down in a frenzy, hammering the bound grudge-beasts where they stood.
Even the Eternal Crystal Orchid, whose attack power ran modest at the best of times, hiked up her crystal parasol and waded in swinging. No defense to hold. No counterattack to fear. Opportunities like this did not come along often.
And so, beneath the increasingly subtle gazes of three girls, Angewomon and the other spirits spent only the barest stretch of time annihilating every grudge-hunter and grudge-beast on the field.
Even the Machina Puppet Dragon, master of all those threads, was carried off by a single Celestial Arrow, leaving Silas standing alone. A king with no subjects left to rule.
"Is it just me, or is the whole tone of this off somehow? Why does it feel like WE'RE the villains?" Watching Silas's blank, broken-toy stare, Elise stuck out the tip of her tongue.
The sentiment earned Iris's and Viola's unanimous approval. Thank every heaven Luke was on their boat. Otherwise the ones taking this beating would be them.
In this moment, the looks the three girls turned on Luke each carried its own private thoughts, but on one point they stood in perfect agreement. Luke was, beyond any question, a monster.
"Tell us the way out of here. Then come back to Celestial with us, quietly, and turn yourself in." Unaware of the small thoughts stacking up behind him, Luke watched Silas, and a thread of frost had entered his gaze.
Silas had no patience for them. Luke's stock of it wasn't infinite either.
The moles the Renegades had planted inside Celestial were a hazard that would never stop being one. Luke had no idea whether they could learn what happened in this place, but the moment those agents saw his group walk back into Celestial unharmed, no guesswork would be needed. Silas had failed.
And agents like that would absolutely pick their moment to move against his group next. Luke had no intention of living with knives waiting in the dark. The grass was cut. Now came the roots.
Reading his intent, Angewomon and Dark Magician Girl both trained their weapons on Silas. One wrong twitch, and they would fire.
"You're strong. Stronger, I'll admit, than anyone of my generation I have ever known." The blankness drained out of Silas all at once, replaced by a calm that fit nothing around it. Even the Machina Puppet Dragon was gone. Whatever grudge-beasts still roamed the Purgatory, he had no means left of commanding them.
His plan had been to let the hunters and the beasts devour one another until something greater was born of it, a dragon-grudge demon-beast strong enough to kill every person on this field. And that card, the last one at the bottom of his hand, had been broken effortlessly by that eerie angel-family spirit. Against Luke, he had nothing left.
But that held true only for himself.
"Though you've gotten one thing wrong all the same." Two weapons trained on him, and Silas only grew steadier. "I never once planned to let any of you leave. And there will be no 'turning myself in.'"
"Noisy." Luke's brow creased, and Angewomon's and Dark Magician Girl's attacks tore toward Silas in the same breath.
"The mission has failed. Even if I slipped away, the organization would never suffer me to live." Facing the incoming fire, Silas detonated the mana inside his own body, his face twisting through the glare. "So all of you can come along and die with me!"
The two attacks never touched him. A rift in space and time yawned open before his chest and swallowed them whole.
"Since you know this is the Dark Purgatory, then you should know what it was built inside. The extra-domain's chaos-currents." Mana rampaging through him, Silas began to laugh, wild and cracking. "A little outside force, that's all it takes, and the Dark Purgatory can birth countless Black Gates at any moment it pleases!"
The words fell, and the rift before him had already grown into a Black Gate bleeding wrongness into the air, swelling at a speed that defied the eye. In the space of a breath it stood nearly a hundred meters tall.
"A Black Gate!" The three girls' faces drained as one. Every one of them had heard of Black Gates. Every one of them knew exactly what came through.
Terrible pressure poured out of the hundred-meter Gate, and in the next moment, the first creatures to sense its birth came through ahead of all the rest. Abyss Predators. Row upon row of compound eyes fixed on every person and every card spirit on the field, and their shrieks tore the air apart.