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The Blazing War Horse covered the distance in three thundering strides, every cannon port on its body cycling to full charge as it closed. Steam venting from its exhausts turned the fog behind it into a rolling wall of white. The Blazing Marksman stayed back, its cannon already tracking a secondary firing line, ready to saturate whatever quadrant Mana tried to retreat into.
Mechanical synergy. The War Horse was the anvil. The Marksman was the hammer. Caught between them, most card spirits would be ground to paste.
Mana didn't retreat.
Her boots left the Relic floor.
"Flight?" Vance's eye twitched.
Mana rose smoothly into the air, her cape catching on a nonexistent breeze, her staff held in a relaxed diagonal across her body. Ten meters above the ground. Twenty. The mist parted around her in lazy spirals. It was a capability she hadn't shown in the first stage, and Vance hadn't accounted for it.
Not a problem. He could adapt.
"Precision Shot! Maximum Burst!"
The Blazing Marksman's cannon snapped upward. Its entire torso rotated to track Mana's new altitude, and the barrel began firing in rapid succession, each plasma lance punching through the fog at supersonic speed. Meanwhile, every cannon port on the War Horse's back opened simultaneously, vomiting a carpet of superheated projectiles into the sky above Mana's position.
Ground fire and anti-air saturation, synchronized to the millisecond. A kill box in three dimensions.
Mechanical constructs held a brutal advantage in sustained output. As long as their master's mana reserves held, they could fire indefinitely, never needing to pause for breath or rest. For a Commander Realm Card Master like Vance, the drain was significant, but he'd calculated he could maintain this level of output long enough to crush anything Mana had left.
He didn't believe a flying Spellcaster could outlast a ground-based artillery platform. And he didn't believe she could dodge a carpet bombardment designed to fill the entire aerial kill zone.
"Magical Hats."
Mana's response was unhurried. She didn't twist to evade. She didn't accelerate. She simply rotated her staff in a slow horizontal sweep, and the air around her rippled.
A single black-and-purple striped hat materialized where her body had been an instant earlier. The other two hats that Luke had seen deployed against the Ruin Guards didn't appear. Just one, hanging in mid-air at the exact coordinates where Mana had been floating.
The incoming barrage hit the hat full-force.
Plasma shots. Superheated projectiles. The full coordinated output of two Six-Star Legacy mechanical constructs. Everything converged on that single point and disappeared into the hat's opening, swallowed into whatever geometric impossibility the reflection card operated on.
The hat absorbed the fire without deforming, without glowing, without even shifting position. It just sat there. Eating ordnance.
Then Mana reappeared.
Behind the Marksman. Behind the War Horse. In their blind arc, at point-blank casting range, her staff already raised.
"Dark Magic Burst!"
The pentagonal circle beneath her feet erupted with violet-black light, the orb at her staff tip ignited, and a concentrated sphere of dark mana detonated from the apex of her staff in a close-range blast.
Both mechanical constructs were inside the blast radius.
"Plasma Shield!" Vance's voice cracked. His eyes had gone wide the moment Mana vanished from the hat's location. The enemy teleporting behind his formation wasn't something he'd prepared for.
Blue-white hexagonal shields snapped into existence around both of his spirits, catching the Dark Magic Burst at the edge of the blast radius. The shields held for a single heartbeat. Then they fractured, splintered, and shattered with a sound like breaking glass amplified through a cathedral.
The dark mana wave tore through the broken shields and hammered both mechanical constructs at point-blank range.
When the fog rolled back in, the Blazing Marksman and War Horse were still standing. Armor plating scarred black. Weapon mounts sparking. Exhaust ports venting uncontrolled steam. Alive, but visibly damaged, and their shields were gone.
"Magical Hats is extremely useful." Luke watched the exchange with a small smile. It wasn't the first time he'd seen Mana use the Counter Card, but its tactical flexibility kept impressing him.
"Spatial displacement?" On the monitoring deck, Roland's eyebrows rose. "I didn't know his Spellcaster had that kind of utility."
"Neither did I." Edmund's voice was quiet. He knew Luke had crafted an Original Card. He hadn't known how many abilities were packed into that card. Silence Seal had been the first surprise. Magical Hats with teleportation was the second.
Stable support card spirits, unstable damage dealers. The adage holds true even in Magic Card Civilization. A good support can carry a card spirit far beyond its base tier.
Below them, Vance recovered faster than expected.
"Link!"
The War Horse and the Marksman turned to face each other. Panels along their torsos unfolded in synchronized sequence, revealing connection ports that clicked together with mechanical precision. Their forms deconstructed and recombined in the air between them, armor plates and chassis sections reorganizing themselves into a single unified construct.
*「 Blazing Centaur 」*
Race: Mechanical
Quality: Perfect
Level: ★★★★★★ (Six-Star)
Skills: Lethal Shot, Final Burst, High Plasma Shield, Potential Breakout
The new construct towered over its component parts. A mechanical centaur, four-legged with equine lower body, but the upper torso was humanoid and bristled with weapon mounts that had merged and upgraded during the Link sequence. The Marksman's cannon was now integrated into the right arm, longer and thicker, with a dual-barrel configuration. The War Horse's shoulder cannons had migrated to the Centaur's shoulder-mounted pauldrons. Every surface gleamed with freshly refreshed armor, and the ambient temperature in the clearing spiked as the Centaur's power core came online at full output.
"Combination into a Perfect tier." Luke whistled softly. "That's a nice party trick."
He watched the Blazing Centaur and felt his mind drift toward old mecha anime. Gaogaigar's Hell and Heaven. Getter Robo. Gundam. Super Sentai combinations. Gridman's ferocity. Tengen Toppa's scale. His previous life's media library flashed through his head in a blur of iconic images, and the image that lingered longest was Gaogaigar, arms raised for the finishing strike, radiating an oppressive righteousness that made you feel both threatened and protected at the same time.
Maybe I should design a mecha card line eventually. A combining robot team would be absurdly fun to craft.
He filed the idea away for later and refocused.
The Blazing Centaur charged.
The new form's mobility was a tier above its components. It crossed the clearing in a single burst of acceleration that turned its hooves into blurs, and every cannon mount on its body was already firing, a sustained fusillade that saturated the air in an overlapping crossfire pattern. Mana's aerial position, safe a moment ago, became a target zone.
"Magical Hats."
Mana deployed again, a single hat materializing in her place as she teleported behind the Centaur.
But the Blazing Centaur's targeting suite was operating on Six-Star Perfect processing speed. Its optical array tracked the hat's energy signature during the absorption cycle, calculated the probability vectors for Mana's reappearance, and locked onto the most likely destination coordinates in a fraction of a second.
"Final Burst!"
The Centaur's arm cannon discharged. A single, massive plasma bolt, concentrated from the combined reserves of both original spirits, screamed through the fog on a preemptive trajectory. It wasn't firing at where Mana was. It was firing at where she was about to be.
Mana rematerialized in space.
Directly in the bolt's path.
The recoil of the shot actually pushed the Blazing Centaur back three full strides, its rear hooves carving trenches into the Relic stone.
"This one's mine." Vance exhaled. The fight had been harder than he expected, but the Centaur's processing power had cracked Mana's teleportation pattern. Final Burst would vaporize her at point-blank range, and Luke wouldn't have time to summon another spirit that could match this fight.
And even if he did, Vance didn't believe Luke had another card that could compete with the Centaur.
The plasma bolt closed the distance. Three meters from Mana. Two meters. One.
Magic Cylinder.
Two massive cylindrical barrels, easily twice Mana's own size, materialized in the air beside her. Runic patterns spiraled along their surfaces in glowing crimson. Their mouths yawned open, aligned perpendicular to each other, one pointed toward the incoming bolt and one pointed at a separate target.
The Final Burst plunged into the first Cylinder's mouth and vanished.
Absorbed.
"Where did those come from?!" Vance's voice cracked. There hadn't been anything there a second ago. The clearing had been empty space, and then suddenly two enormous barrels were floating beside Mana as if they'd always been part of the scenery.
Another one of her abilities. Another card effect that Luke had apparently been holding in reserve.
On the monitoring deck, every branch president simultaneously turned to look at Harrison.
Is your competitor in some kind of ability contest? How many things can one card spirit do?
"What are you all staring at?" Harrison waved them off, trying and failing to hide his satisfaction. This was the first time he'd seen Magic Cylinder in combat himself. He was enjoying the reveal as much as they were, maybe more, because unlike them, he'd known something extra was coming. "Mind your own screens!"
Luke, you devil. How many more of these does Mana have? Is there a limit?
He thought of the Spirit Home incident and felt a strange echo. The same sense of watching a monster unfold its capabilities one terrifying layer at a time.
At the front of the monitoring deck, Edmund and Roland had gone still.
"Silence Seal. Spatial displacement. And now attack absorption." Roland couldn't keep the stunned note out of his voice. "Three distinct support abilities on a single Six-Star card. That's not a Six-Star card's capability curve. That's higher."
"No." Edmund's eyes narrowed, fixed on the second Cylinder. "Not just absorption. Look at the orientation of the second barrel."
Roland looked.
One Magic Cylinder was pointed at where the Final Burst had entered. The other Cylinder was pointed at the Blazing Centaur.
"Absorption and reflection." Edmund's voice was quiet. "The card doesn't just eat the attack. It redirects it."
On cue, the second Cylinder's mouth flared crimson.
A familiar, concentrated lance of plasma erupted from the second Cylinder, tracing the same path the Final Burst had originally followed, only reversed. The Centaur's own weapon, repackaged and sent back with the same ferocity that had fired it.
"No!" Vance's eyes bulged. "High Plasma Shield!"
The Centaur's emergency defense activated a split-second before impact. A dome of reinforced plasma flared around it, thicker than the individual Plasma Shields the mechanicals had used before, designed to absorb catastrophic hits.
The returned Final Burst struck the shield.
For a single heartbeat, the shield held. Then it began to buckle, plasma layers bleeding light and breaking apart under the pressure of an attack that had been calibrated to destroy a Six-Star card spirit, not defend one.
The shield shattered.
The returned plasma lance tore through the Blazing Centaur's chest at reduced but still catastrophic intensity. Sparks and alloy fragments sprayed across the clearing. The Centaur's armor plates peeled open along the impact line. Its power core fluctuated visibly, amber glow dimming and pulsing erratically.
The construct staggered but didn't fall.
"Dark Magic Attack."
Mana had already begun her follow-up during the reflection's impact. The next sphere of violet-black mana tore across the clearing and struck the Centaur's damaged chest cavity at exactly the point the reflection had opened.
The Centaur detonated.
Chunks of mechanical debris showered outward across a twenty-meter radius. When the dust settled, there was nothing left standing. Just scattered wreckage and a wide trail of scorched stone where the combined construct had been.
A streak of light rose from the wreckage field and settled into Luke's palm.
*「 Magic Card Voucher 」*
On the monitoring deck, Vance Ashton's figure dissolved into light as the Teleportation Card's forced-elimination protocol activated. He materialized on the Capital Association plaza a heartbeat later, staring at his own hands in disbelief.
"Unreal." Roland exhaled. "He packed Silence Seal, spatial displacement, attack absorption, and attack reflection into a single card. And that's only what he's shown so far."
"The design philosophy…" Edmund's voice had shifted, going thoughtful and approving in equal measure. "Concentrating multiple synergistic abilities into a single card at a lower tier is significantly harder than building one powerful ability into a higher-tier card. The trade-offs, the balance, the mana economy required to make it work without any single ability becoming a liability…"
He trailed off.
Even Elise couldn't do this. Not at her current level. Possibly not ever.
He kept that thought to himself. Comparing one's own granddaughter unfavorably to another student, even silently, felt uncomfortably close to disloyalty.
But the fact remained. Original Card crafting was a talent that transcended standard metrics. And Luke Mercer had apparently stuffed an entire utility belt worth of abilities into a single Six-Star card.
"Perhaps," Edmund murmured, "the next round will be more interesting still."