Free Web NovelChapter 116: Chapter 115: Within Seven Paces, the Gun Is Both Fast and Accurate!
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"That may be exactly why Luke crafted his new card spirit at Three-Star base," Lilith Crescent observed.She kept her gaze on the monitoring feed.
"If the evolved form also possesses the same activation skill the base form had, the next state can push to Six-Star equivalency. The lower the base tier, the more room the evolution chain has to escalate."
The reasoning unfolded smoothly. A high base tier would have capped Luke’s evolution headroom. A low base tier let him stack tier multipliers from evolution and activation in succession, producing a wider total operating range from a single card lineage.
"Then this one card line covers Three-Star through Six-Star, all four tiers." Selene’s voice carried a slight tremor of disbelief.
For everyone in the chamber, individual tiers from Three-Star to Six-Star were unremarkable as absolute power levels. What mattered was the breadth. A single card lineage that could engage opposition across four entire tier brackets, depending on the current evolution and activation state, was an entirely different kind of strategic asset.
The tactical flexibility was unprecedented.
"Honestly, in all my years, I haven’t seen a Card Master this gifted and this imaginative." Aldric Ashford had reached the same conclusion. "I’m grateful Luke is from the Eastern Region. The other three regions would be in serious trouble if he’d been born elsewhere."
The next several rounds confirmed Sistermon Noir’s combat ceiling at her current tier. Every Five-Star opponent, beast or candidate Card spirit, was dispatched without significant difficulty. The dual pistols clicked through their work with the same casual efficiency that had erased the Gold-Eating Demon Rats.
Then the next portal opened, and the new arena’s opponent resolved into a familiar silhouette.
"You? Now that’s a coincidence."
Luke raised an eyebrow at the figure standing across the arena. Despite the cold composure she was visibly forcing onto her features, her face was unmistakable.
The exam had begun with hundreds of millions of candidates across the country. Phase Two had cut that number dramatically through stage-clear attrition, and the periodic beast intrusions had further thinned the field. By Round Forty-plus, the remaining cohort was extremely small.
He hadn’t expected to encounter a familiar face from the Youth Training Competition this deep into the exam.
"Serena Frost."
Serena’s silvery white hair was pulled back, her ice-pale features composed with the cold professional steadiness he remembered from their last encounter. She was, by any honest evaluation, beautiful in a way that registered even through the formal exam atmosphere.
"I’m not your opponent," Serena said, voice quiet and measured. "I know that. But I want to see the gap between us. I want to measure it directly."
The time between the Youth Training Competition’s conclusion and the entrance exam had been too short for Serena to bridge the mid-to-high-tier crafting gap she’d identified as her ceiling. The outcome of this match was effectively predetermined from the moment the portal opened.
But she wasn’t going to forfeit. Forfeiting wouldn’t tell her what she needed to know.
She raised her hand, and two card spirits resolved into the air on her side of the arena.
The first was the Frost Archer Luke remembered from her tournament match. Slender, blue-white, longbow already drawn.
The second was new.
A tall, elegant figure draped in flowing white robes layered with crystalline armor. Her hair was a cascade of frost-white silk, threaded with floating ice particles. Her face was beautiful and severe, a cold beauty that evoked arctic queens from old folktales. In her hand, she held a tall ice-crystal scepter, the head of which radiated an ambient frost aura.
「 Snow Crystal Queen 」 Race: Ice-Snow Quality: Perfect Level: ★★★★★★ (Six-Star) Skills: Ice Ring, Heavenly Ice Decree, Frost Blessing, Frost Spirit Burst
"Six-Star Perfect quality," Luke murmured. "Same quality grade as Mana. She’s been improving."
He hadn’t assumed he was the only Card Master making progress between the tournament and the exam. Serena had clearly been pushing her own development hard, and the Snow Crystal Queen’s existence proved the effort had paid off. Reaching Six-Star Perfect within months of the tournament was a significant achievement.
"Noir, two Six-Star opponents. Any concerns?"
"Please trust me, Tamer-sama." Noir’s voice carried the bright confidence he’d already gotten used to. The new figures across the arena didn’t register as a threat to her, only as a more interesting test than the rats had been.
"Then Awaken."
Luke gave the command without elaboration. Trusting his card spirit’s self-assessment was, by this point, the obvious move. Her judgment had earned the latitude.
"Understood!"
The Holy Brand surfaced on Sistermon Noir, but the placement was different from Blanc’s.
Where Blanc’s Holy Brand had centered on her coif, Noir’s appeared at her sternum, the activation sigil resolving in a precise flash across the center of her chest. Different placement, same template. The Sistermon line’s design had given each sister her own activation locus, presumably to preserve the visual identity of each form.
Golden light flooded outward in a blinding pulse, then receded sharply back into her body as the Awakening sequence completed.
Awakened Sistermon Noir stood tall.
Her frame had elongated and matured, the same body-transformation that Awakened Blanc had undergone. The black habit reshaped into form-fitting battle attire, the cut significantly more aggressive than Blanc’s holy-warrior aesthetic. The cat-eared coif extended downward, covering the upper half of her face, leaving only her smiling mouth visible.
The mouth’s smile was small, sharp, and predatory.
The dual pistols Anthony, holstered at her thigh-mounted holsters, hummed with elevated potential.
"So the evolved form also possesses the same activation mechanism," Aldric Ashford observed.
He and Selene had been mentally prepared for this possibility after Lilith’s earlier remarks. The transformation didn’t surprise them.
The other viewers, however, had not been similarly briefed. Across multiple monitoring chambers, senior figures startled visibly at the second tier-jump. Edmund, Roland, Victor, Harrison, and the principals had all been operating on the assumption that the new evolved form was a one-off tier-jump opportunity, not a card spirit with the same tier-jump architecture as her predecessor.
Their evaluations of the new card spirit’s strategic value adjusted upward, sharply and simultaneously.
"Time to put on a show."
Awakened Sistermon Noir drew both pistols in a single smooth motion and opened fire before Serena had finished issuing her own combat commands.
The Mickey Bullet’s signature spray pattern unleashed, dozens of rounds tracking diverging vectors across the arena.
"Counter!"
Serena reacted fast. Her Frost Archer responded first, longbow blurring through a multi-arrow draw. Each arrow targeted an individual bullet’s trajectory, a precision counter-fire pattern that had been clearly drilled in advance.
The Snow Crystal Queen was a step slower, the Six-Star ice spirit’s casting speed slower than the Frost Archer’s reflex shooting. She raised her scepter and activated Ice Ring, a freezing aura expanding outward from her position in concentric circles. The aura was thick, opaque, and dense enough to physically arrest projectiles passing through it.
Both counters failed.
The arrows met the bullets, and the bullets shot through the arrows. The arrows shattered. The bullets continued forward, their kinetic profile mostly intact.
The Ice Ring met the surviving bullets, and the bullets shot through the ice ring as well. The freezing aura cracked and fragmented around each projectile, the dense ice-magic structure unable to absorb the kinetic and elemental damage the bullets carried.
The bullets reached both spirits and impacted home.
The Frost Archer staggered, multiple impact points blossoming across her body. The Snow Crystal Queen, suddenly aware that her defensive aura was inadequate, jerked backward in a panicked retreat motion.
"The Awakened state isn’t just power increase. It’s power and agility, both scaled together," Luke murmured, watching with quiet appreciation. "Pure attack-versus-attack at the same tier, very few opponents are going to outdraw her."
The Frost Archer and Snow Crystal Queen recovered fast. Both spirits dodged sideways, splitting their positions to widen Noir’s targeting problem. If a single concentrated attack hit them both, separating laterally should at least force Noir to commit her bullets to one target instead of both.
Awakened Noir’s smile widened a fraction.
"You think spreading out helps?"
The dual pistols came back up. Her body sank into a low-set shooting stance, a fighter’s center-of-gravity drop suggesting she was about to do something deliberately impressive.
"Mickey Bullet!"
The Mickey Bullet’s saturation fire opened up again, but the pattern this time was different. The bullets emerged from the barrels on collision courses with each other. They struck each other mid-air in tiny sparking impacts, and each collision redirected both bullets along new vectors.
The redirected vectors, calculated with impossible precision, carried the bullets along curving arcs that bent around obstacles, looped over barriers, and converged on both Frost Archer and Snow Crystal Queen from impossible angles. Every bullet hit. Sparks of red light bloomed across both spirits’ bodies, the impact points like blooming flowers of damage.
The spread-out positioning had bought them no advantage at all.
"Holy hell."
Conrad Yates and Mara Crawford, watching from the Observation Hall, swore aloud in unison. The precision control they were witnessing was outright absurd. Mechanical card spirits had reputations for trajectory manipulation, but the level of fire control the evolved figure was demonstrating exceeded anything even high-tier mechanical types could routinely produce.
Several of the other eliminated candidates were openly gaping at the display.
Serena’s reaction time was excellent. She processed the spread-fire trick within a heartbeat and pivoted to a counter-protocol.
"Snow Crystal Queen, Frost Blessing and Frost Spirit Burst! Frost Archer, Ice Snow Frenzy!"
The combination order was sensible: layered defense from the Queen, screening offensive disruption from the Archer. Both spirits started channeling their respective skills.
Awakened Noir’s smile deepened.
"Too late. Haven’t you heard? Beyond seven paces, the gun is fast. Within seven paces, the gun is fast and accurate."
The combat aphorism rolled off her tongue with the cadence of someone who’d been waiting for the right opening to deploy it. freewebnovёl.ƈom
Her Awakened agility kicked in. She closed the distance in a sequence of cat-light steps, body weaving through her own active fire patterns, somehow timing each step to thread between her own ricocheting bullets. The footwork looked impossible. It worked anyway.
Within five strides, she was standing between the two ice spirits, both pistols raised in a casual cross-arm presentation.
Two gunshots.
Snow Crystal Queen and Frost Archer, both still channeling their counter-skills, froze mid-cast. A single bullet hole had appeared between each spirit’s eyes, the rounds delivered at a range that made dodging mathematically impossible.
Both spirits dissolved into white light. Their cards returned to Serena’s storage in two quiet pulses.
"Blessed Bullet."
Awakened Noir’s pistols spun, the chamber-cycling motion clicking through to the second skill’s activation. Her stance shifted, the casual cross-arm presentation tightening into a precision shooting hold. Her covered eyes locked onto Serena Frost across the now-empty arena.
Bang. Bang.
