Free Web NovelChapter 113: Chapter 112: Quite the Transformation
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The next several rounds played out similarly to the first two. None of Sistermon Blanc’s opponents exceeded Three-Star quality. She dispatched each one before the beast or Card spirit could fully bring its abilities online, the Defense Wave plus Divine Judgment Pierce combination handling enemies cleanly across varied environments.
By the time Round Ten arrived, Luke was starting to anticipate the rhythm.
Round Ten.
The portal deposited Luke into a forested arena: gnarled trees, broken stone paths, ambient mist. Across the clearing, his opponent materialized at the same instant.
A young man in his late teens, slim and aristocratic-looking, dressed in dark tournament robes with elaborate trim. His stance was a study in deliberate flair, one hand resting at his hip, the other extended in a theatrical pointing gesture.
"Your spirit’s cute," Conrad Yates announced, pitching the words at Luke with the practiced cadence of someone who’d memorized his combat introduction in front of a mirror. "Honestly, in any other context I’d want to chat with you about her. Unfortunately, it’s the entrance exam, and that means I’m forced to kill you both."
Behind him, the air rippled. A long serpentine form coiled into visible space, scales shimmering between dark green and oily black, hood flared in a defensive cobra-like display. The creature was easily fifteen meters long, with golden slit-pupiled eyes and a forked tongue that tasted the air with predatory deliberation.
The serpent surged forward almost the moment it manifested. Conrad clearly believed in opening engagements at maximum aggression.
Defense Wave!
Sistermon Blanc was already moving. The Cross Barbie hammered the ground, and the expanding pulse of energy met the serpent’s charge halfway, slowing the creature’s momentum dramatically.
Divine Judgment Pierce!
Blanc launched the trident in a precise overhand throw. The Cross Barbie struck the serpent at the seventh-vertebra point, the traditional weak zone for serpentine creatures. Light-element energy detonated on contact, and the serpent was hurled backward through the air.
Sistermon Blanc, however, recoiled.
The impact had carried equal force in both directions. The Cross Barbie returned to her grip on a recall summons, but her small body had been pushed back several steps along the arena floor, her boots scraping divots in the stone. She landed off-balance, visibly shaken.
The serpent was wounded but not dead. It hit the far wall, coiled around itself with reflexive flexibility, and reoriented to face her again. The wound bled darkly but wasn’t fatal.
Luke recognized the imbalance immediately.
The serpent was Four-Star, mid-tier, an entire tier above Blanc’s standard operating level. The opening exchange had worked only because Defense Wave’s pulse caught it off-guard. In a sustained engagement, Blanc would be outmatched on raw output.
"Blanche, Awaken!"
The Holy Brand at the center of Sistermon Blanc’s white rabbit-themed coif flared to life.
Light flooded outward from the brand in concentric waves, golden-white and intense, drowning the immediate area in radiance. The serpent, mid-counterattack, recoiled instinctively from the brightness. Conrad Yates, watching from the far side of the arena, felt his combat instincts blare warning signals.
"Don’t let it complete!" he snapped to the serpent. "Full assault, now, while it’s vulnerable!"
The serpent didn’t need a second command. It struck like a loosed arrow, body uncoiling toward Sistermon Blanc’s silhouette in the rapidly-expanding light.
The serpent met a leg.
A long, elegant leg, kicking upward and outward in a fluid martial arc, intercepted the serpent’s head at full force and sent the entire fifteen-meter body airborne for the second time in less than thirty seconds. The serpent crashed to the arena floor with a hiss of pain and confusion.
The light cleared.
The figure standing in the arena’s center was not the small, soft-faced loli that Blanc had been moments earlier.
She was now considerably taller, easily reaching shoulder-height on a typical adult Card Master. Her frame had elongated into the proportions of a young woman in her late teens, the gentle innocence of her previous form replaced with a more mature femininity. Her body filled out her now-resized combat habit with confident grace.
Luke, watching from his Tamer’s position, registered the silhouette with a brief flicker of recognition. The new proportions tracked surprisingly close to Mana’s polished elegance, almost echoing the Dark Magician Girl’s iconic outline. The Magic Card Civilization had apparently calibrated the Awakened form along similar aesthetic vectors.
Her face was now half-obscured by the bunny-eared coif, which had stretched to cover the upper half of her features. Only her chin and her lips remained visible. The exposed lips were set in an unreadable expression that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite a smirk.
Her combat habit itself had reconfigured. The previous loose nun’s robes had tightened into form-fitting battle attire, the skirt redesigned with high slits that allowed full-range leg movement, the upper bodice trimmed to reduce drag during sustained engagement. The aesthetic had shifted from pure-cute to something closer to holy warrior, a different kind of presentation entirely.
The Cross Barbie hummed in her grip with newly-released potential.
"A girl’s eighteen changes," Geoffrey Falk remarked, the old idiom surfacing reflexively as he stared at the monitoring feed.
The principals beside him weren’t certain how to respond. The phenomenon they were witnessing wasn’t exactly a coming-of-age moment. It was a card spirit transformation triggered by a skill activation. But the visual was striking enough that the comparison felt accurate at a metaphorical level.
"That’s actually useful information," Harrison Cole said, more analytically. "Watch the prior exchange. She was the one disadvantaged. Her trident strike sent the serpent flying, but she took the recoil. That means her base output, before this transformation, was below the serpent’s. The serpent is Four-Star. So her base tier is Three-Star."
Three-Star was the lower end of Original Spirit Card production. A Card Master of Luke’s caliber, by everyone’s prior expectations, should have been producing at least Six-Star cards by default.
"Just Three-Star?" Edmund Hargrove was running the same analysis from the Capital Card Master Association. His tone wasn’t dismissive; it was puzzled. "But the post-transformation tier escalation appears significant. The same template as the Spellcaster-and-dragon fusion. A base form with a higher-tier activation skill that bridges into combat-relevant brackets."
The structural parallel to the Spellcaster-and-Timaeus fusion Luke had deployed at the Mist Relic was hard to ignore. Luke had now demonstrated the same design pattern twice: a base card whose true combat tier required activation to access. The discovery raised obvious questions about whether the pattern was intentional across Luke’s entire portfolio, or specific to certain card lines.
The serpent attempted to reassert itself.
The Awakened Sistermon Blanc didn’t give it the opportunity. She closed the distance in two strides, Cross Barbie spinning in her grip into a forward thrust position, and drove the trident down with both hands.
Divine Judgment Pierce, in its Awakened form, was qualitatively different from the version that had hurled the serpent into the wall moments earlier. The light-element energy along the trident’s length had compressed into a dense corona that visibly burned the surrounding air, and the strike speed was easily double the previous attempt’s.
The trident punched through the serpent’s head, into the arena floor beneath, and pinned the creature in place. The serpent’s body convulsed once, then went still. Dead.
The Cross Barbie pulled free with a smooth motion. The Awakened Blanc straightened, turned, and pointed the trident’s tip at Conrad Yates. The arena’s distance between them was theoretical; the kill-stroke arc was already laid out in her body language.
"I forfeit!"
Conrad’s hands shot up before the trident finished its rotation. His theatrical introduction from minutes earlier had completely evaporated, replaced by the immediate survival instinct of a Card Master whose strongest spirit had just been clean-killed in front of him by an opponent who could clearly do the same to him personally.
The arena’s teleport system registered the forfeit and dissolved his form into white light.
Conrad Yates rematerialized in the eliminated-candidates’ hall, blinking, and immediately encountered the eye contact of half a dozen other young Card Masters waiting there.
The looks they gave him were sympathetic. Several of them nodded slowly, in the manner of people who recognized a fellow casualty of the same overwhelming force. Conrad realized, slowly, that he was the seventh candidate to have been eliminated by the same Card Master that day, and that the others had been wearing the same shellshocked expression he probably wore now.
Luke Mercer’s card spirit, Conrad thought with quiet bitterness, is not at all cute.
He picked an empty chair and sat down to commiserate.
Back in the arena, Awakened Sistermon Blanc held her form rather than reverting.
Luke noticed and approved. The personality shift had also held; the post-combat shy retreat that the baseline Blanc would have performed was absent. Awakened Blanc remained standing tall and composed, the Cross Barbie resting at parade rest, her covered eyes scanning the arena with patient combat readiness.
"The personality also flipped, exactly per the design notes." Luke spoke quietly, mostly to himself. "Aggressive, confident, locked into combat mode. Won’t last forever, though."
Awakening provided a one-tier upgrade for a limited duration. Once the duration expired, Blanc would revert to her baseline Three-Star form. Sustaining Awakening indefinitely wasn’t an option, and against Four-Star or higher opposition encountered in later rounds, the duration would be a critical resource to manage.
"Next opponents are going to be Four-Star at minimum," Luke murmured. "I’ll need to evolve her soon."
The Hyper Evolution Unit S waited in his card storage, ready for the swipe. He’d been holding it back to test Blanche’s baseline performance first, but the test results were now in. Time to escalate.
The next several rounds confirmed his suspicion.
Round Eleven’s opponent fielded a Four-Star Beast. Round Twelve’s brought a Four-Star Card Spirit. Round Thirteen brought another Four-Star. The exam’s matchmaking had apparently filtered out the Three-Star bracket entirely after Round Ten, leaving only Four-Star-or-stronger competitors at this stage.
Awakened Sistermon Blanc handled each of them, but the engagements were no longer the one-sided dispatches of the earlier rounds. The fights were genuine, requiring tactical positioning and skill timing to win cleanly.
Awakened Blanc’s Four-Star equivalent combat output put her at the top of her temporary tier, which was enough to win every match she’d been thrown into. But the duration timer was ticking down, and Luke was tracking it carefully.
"Blanche, end Awakening."
After another round closed, Luke recalled her into the soft form. The Awakening’s effective duration was nearing its threshold anyway. Sustaining it further would risk the skill collapsing involuntarily mid-engagement, which was a worse failure mode than a controlled deactivation between fights.
The Holy Brand’s light receded back into the coif. Sistermon Blanc’s tall mature form compressed back down into the soft loli proportions, the high-cut combat habit reverting to the loose nun’s robes. She landed lightly on her feet, the Cross Barbie suddenly almost as tall as she was again.
"Tamer-sama," Blanc said, her soft hesitant voice resurfacing along with her baseline form, "the next battles may need to fall to my sisters."
She knew. As Luke’s bonded card spirit, she had access to his tactical evaluation. She understood that her standard form wasn’t going to clear Four-Star-plus opposition reliably, and that the Awakening reserve needed to be allocated more carefully going forward.
Luke ruffled her hair, a small approving gesture. Blanc’s small face lit up with a faint pink blush.
"You did great, Blanche. The test exceeded what I budgeted for."
The Awakening duration alone had been substantially longer than his design notes suggested. The Magic Card Civilization’s worldview integration had apparently amplified several parameters beyond their conceptual specifications. The combat baseline was higher than expected, and the Awakening reserve was deeper than projected.
The Sister Cross combo technique was still untested. He’d hold that for later, after Blanche’s evolution unlocked the Noir and Ciel projections at meaningful tier.
Blanc’s blush deepened at the praise. She pressed close to him slightly, the way a cat might press against its handler’s leg when reassured.
The next portal began to open. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
It was time to start swiping evolution cards.
