Free Web NovelChapter 115: Chapter 114: This Can Be Played?!
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While Luke was still processing Noir’s stat profile, she had already engaged.
The dual pistols came up in a coordinated flourish, both barrels tracking independent targets. Noir began moving in a fluid orbit around the two Gold-Eating Demon Rats, her steps cat-light and impossibly precise, maintaining a strict effective range that kept her well outside the rats’ melee threat envelope while keeping them well inside her line of fire.
The dual pistols sang. Sharp, rhythmic gunshots filled the arena.
The rats responded with frenzied closure attempts, claws extended, teeth bared, the Metallization skill activated to harden their bodies against incoming fire. Their speed was respectable. Their aggression was unrelenting.
It didn’t matter. Noir’s circular footwork stayed exactly one beat ahead of every closure vector they tried. The geometry of the engagement was already settled.
"She’s playing with them," Luke murmured.
The thought came with quiet appreciation. The combat pattern wasn’t urgency-driven; it was play. A cat batting a mouse around the kitchen, simply because the cat could.
The canonical Sistermon’s background included extensive training time spent with Hackmon, a young Royal Knight candidate. They’d also famously held their own against one of the Thirteen Royal Knights in a documented sparring engagement. By that lineage, two Five-Star Common-grade rats were less than a serious test for Noir. They were, at best, a moderately entertaining distraction.
The arena’s ambient lighting flickered with muzzle flashes.
"Mickey Bullet!"
Noir’s circling motion stopped briefly to settle into a firing stance. The dual pistols roared, both barrels chained into rapid-fire sequences that defied conventional ammunition capacity. Dozens of bullets blazed outward in less than two seconds, the rounds tracking impossible spatial trajectories.
The bullets ricocheted.
Off the broken stone pillars. Off the arena walls. Off the floor. Off the air itself, somehow, the rounds carving curved paths through the open space that violated normal projectile physics. Every ricochet redirected the bullets along new vectors, and the new vectors all converged on the same two targets.
The Gold-Eating Demon Rats were turned into honeycomb in under three seconds. Bullet holes punctured them from every angle, the Metallization skill failing to deflect rounds that exceeded the metal’s structural threshold. The rats’ bodies collapsed onto the arena floor, riddled with perforations from rounds that had approached them from impossible angles.
Noir holstered both pistols at her thigh-mounted holsters with a fluid spin, both weapons settling into place with the satisfied click of completed work.
"That technique is something else."
Luke watched the choreographed kill with raised eyebrows.
Blanc’s combat style had been clean and direct. Single-strike kills with minimal flourish. The aesthetic was efficient.
Noir’s combat style was a different aesthetic entirely. Skilled, flashy, layered with showmanship. The aesthetic was performative. Every motion in her engagement was a small piece of theater, choreography that suggested she enjoyed the work as much as the result.
The damage profile was also categorically different. Each individual Mickey Bullet round, by Luke’s quick estimation, exceeded the destructive output of Blanc’s Awakened-state Divine Judgment Pierce. Every single bullet was operating at full-power Five-Star strike output, and Noir had launched dozens of them in a single ability activation.
Against any same-tier opponent specialized in defense, the Mickey Bullet’s saturation pattern would be devastating. Even a Five-Star tank-class card spirit, faced with that volume of high-tier kinetic energy from unpredictable angles, would have a serious survival problem.
"Tamer-sama, the targets have been eliminated."
Noir had jogged over to the two rat corpses, confirmed both were genuinely dead rather than merely incapacitated, and returned to Luke’s position to report. The diligence in her debrief was significantly more thorough than Blanc’s typical post-combat behavior. Where Blanc would have retreated behind Luke with a quiet wait-for-instructions posture, Noir was already running active reconnaissance and reporting confirmation back.
"Good work, Noir."
Luke gave her a small approving nod. Noir’s cheeks colored faintly, but unlike Blanc, she didn’t retreat into shy body language. She just smiled, pleased with the praise, and reset her stance into combat-ready.
Observation Hall.
"You can play the game like that?"
Mara Crawford and Conrad Yates, watching Luke’s feed alongside several other candidates Luke had eliminated earlier, had their mouths slightly open.
They had assumed Luke’s combat ceiling with the new card spirit was Blanc’s Awakened state. They had assumed that when Blanc reverted, Luke would be forced to deploy his other card spirits, the ones they’d vaguely heard about but never seen in person. The Spellcaster. The dragons. Cards from his established roster, with established combat profiles.
The new card spirit’s evolution into an entirely different form, just from swiping cards through a device, was a category of move they hadn’t known existed.
The earlier card-swipe action had looked stylish. The accompanying background music had been atmospheric. They’d assumed both elements were cosmetic flourishes that didn’t materially affect the combat.
They had been very wrong.
"Should I be grateful Luke went easy on me?" Conrad asked aloud, voicing what most of the eliminated candidates were quietly thinking.
The current display, with the new evolved form casually dismantling two Five-Star opponents in a coordinated saturation barrage, was a fundamentally different category of combat from what any of them had faced. If Luke had deployed thisagainst any of them, the engagements would have ended even faster, and the kill confirmations would have been considerably more violent.
The other eliminated candidates nodded slowly. Several of them looked vaguely traumatized.
Ashenvale City Lord’s Mansion.
The atmosphere in the chamber had shifted from relaxed observation to serious analysis. The two-tier jump in the new card’s apparent combat output had moved the conversation past polite speculation.
"What do you think?" Victor Ashford asked the room.
Harrison Cole responded first, voice measured. "Without direct access to the card’s parameters, we’re still guessing. But based on observed combat: the original form was Three-Star, with the activation skill pushing her temporarily to Four-Star. That’s the baseline interpretation."
He paused.
"That much tracks with established patterns. Luke’s black dragon, after all, has its own death-trigger evolution that pushes its tier upward. Tier-jumping activation skills aren’t unprecedented within Luke’s portfolio."
"But the rats just now," Lawrence Cromwell interjected, voice tightening, "those rats were Five-Star. Common-grade, yes, but Five-Star. And the new form erased both of them in seconds, without any apparent strain. That’s not Four-Star output." ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
"That means the new form jumped two full tiers beyond the activation state." Bianca Daly pressed her hands against her temples. "From Three-Star base to Five-Star equivalent. With no recoil that we could observe. Outside of Luke’s own cards, do any of you know of any card spirit that can routinely produce that kind of tier escalation?"
The chamber was silent.
Nobody could name one.
Victor’s mind was running a parallel analysis. Crescent Moon Land’s blessing, the variable bonus that visitors received from the Eastern Region’s special plane, could produce one-to-three-tier permanent realm upgrades in lucky cases. The mechanic Luke had just demonstrated was almost identical in effect, but applied as a card-spirit attribute rather than a one-time blessing.
Did Luke hear me mention the Crescent Moon Blessing’s tier-upgrade outcome and engineer this whole evolution mechanic to replicate it?
The thought was, by his own evaluation, slightly unhinged. The development timeline didn’t work. Luke would have had to design and execute the entire evolution architecture in the few days between Victor’s Black Gate visit and the entrance exam, which was implausible even for him.
Probably.
Maybe.
Victor’s eyelid twitched.
His mental model for what counted as "implausible" was being slowly recalibrated by Luke’s accumulated track record.
"This has to be related to that device Luke crafted," Geoffrey Falk said slowly. "The evolution sequence happened immediately after the card-swipe action. The swipe wasn’t decorative; it was the trigger. Whatever the device does, it’s the mechanism that’s enabling the tier jump."
"I’ve never seen a card spirit with this kind of evolution mechanism before. The architecture is unprecedented. I can’t fit it into any existing category."
That was Geoffrey’s honest assessment. He was a long-tenured high school principal who had observed thousands of Card Master profiles over his career, and Luke’s current performance was outside his entire reference frame.
Victor took a breath.
"All of this analysis is interesting, but it’s also academic. The only fact that matters in this room is the one we all agree on: Luke is from our city. As long as we don’t forget that, the rest is detail."
The other senior figures gave him collectively withering looks. He’d just spent five minutes asking them to analyze the situation, then dismissed the analysis as ultimately unimportant.
Several of them mentally raised middle fingers in his direction, which Victor pretended not to notice.
Capital Card Master Association.
Edmund and Roland Hargrove were running the same analysis from their own viewing position, with similar uncertainty.
"Two tiers in a single advancement," Edmund mused. "Outside of Luke’s own portfolio, that’s not a documented capability."
"We’ve seen the same pattern once before, though," Roland said carefully. "The Spellcaster-and-Timaeus fusion at the Mist Relic. Both component cards were already at the upper end of their tiers, and the fusion result pushed beyond Six-Star into something that performed at Seven-Star equivalency."
Edmund nodded. The precedent was real. Luke had now demonstrated tier-jumping mechanics in two separate contexts: a fusion (the Spellcaster plus Timaeus) and an evolution (the new card spirit). The structural similarity was hard to ignore.
But neither he nor Roland had Lilith’s specialist knowledge of Special Cards. They could observe the outcomes of Luke’s mechanics, but they couldn’t trace the underlying architecture that produced those outcomes.
The mystery would, presumably, become clearer over time.
Capital City Lord’s Mansion.
"Is this what Special Cards can do?"
Selene Dawnford asked the question quietly, eyes still fixed on the monitoring feed. The two-tier jump she’d just witnessed had given her a much more concrete sense of what Special Card-supported combat actually looked like.
"Imagine applying a two-tier jump like that to an upper-tier card," Aldric Ashford murmured. "A Six-Star spirit operating at Eight-Star equivalency. A Seven-Star at Nine-Star. The strategic implications would shake the entire Civilization."
The initial flicker of disappointment he’d carried earlier had completely evaporated. The new card spirit was no longer a soft-cute curiosity. It was a demonstration of a category of mechanic that, if generalized, could rewrite the operational floor of how high-tier Card Masters engaged each other.
The value of Special Cards, in his mental hierarchy, was rising sharply.
Then he remembered Lilith’s earlier remark about the production difficulty.
He sighed quietly.
Special Cards were astonishingly powerful, and astonishingly hard to make. The shortage hadn’t been an accident. It was a structural constraint. The Magic Card Civilization had largely lost the production techniques because the techniques were genuinely beyond most Card Masters’ capabilities.
Which made what Luke had apparently produced during Phase One, in less than twelve hours, even more remarkable.
