Anime Magic Card Era Chapter 46 46: Nothing But Satisfaction

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( Bonus Chapter)

Luke pocketed the Black Core Fragnt and imdiately started calculating how unreasonable the collection task was.

Seven fragnts per core. Seven cores to unlock whatever the endga reward was. That ant forty-nine Black Gates. Each one guarded by at least a Seven-Star extradinsional beast that had to be killed before the Gate could be Extracted.

Option one: hunt Black Gates across the Magic Card Civilization's Dinsional Planes and hope to encounter enough of them in a single lifeti. The odds made winning the lottery look reasonable.

Option two: go directly to extradinsional space, where Black Gates were presumably more common. Luke had glimpsed the stats on the Abyss Predator, the weakest class of extradinsional beast. In the spaces between dinsions, Ten-Star creatures road freely. Eight and Nine-Star were as common as rabbits. Seven-Star was the absolute bottom of the food chain. Going there at his current level would be suicide with extra steps.

Option three: trade for fragnts. If Black Gates had been appearing in Dinsional Planes for centuries, then Magic Card Civilization's authorities had probably been studying them. Which ant there were likely existing stockpiles of fragnts sowhere in the system.

Luke couldn't find any fragnt listings on the Association marketplace. But that didn't an they didn't exist. It ant they were controlled.

The Black Gate shuddered one final ti and collapsed into nothing, the spatial tear sealing itself the mont the fragnt was removed. The dragon fire along its edges flickered out. The rift was gone.

Victor, Harlow, and Harrison landed beside Luke as the last traces of the Gate dissolved.

Their eyes didn't go to Luke first. They went to the Red-Eyes Black Dragon, still hovering above the clearing, and stayed there.

Up close, the legendary dragon's presence was staggering. Even for Sovereign and Emperor Realm Card Masters, the primal weight of it pressed against sothing instinctive. That deep, animal part of the brain that recognized a predator operating on a completely different level.

Victor had owned dragon-type materials. He'd studied dragon-type cards in the Association archives. He'd never stood this close to one, and the reality of it dwarfed every academic understanding he'd ever built.

"He really did it." Harlow's voice was quiet. Not his usual banter. Genuine awe. "He let the first dragon die on purpose to bring this out."

"The transformation isn't permanent," Victor noted, watching trails of crimson energy flake from the dragon's wings like dying embers. "But the concept is extraordinary. Death as an activation condition, not an end state. I've never seen a Card Spirit designed with that kind of thinking."

"If this showed up on a real battlefield," Harrison murmured, "the enemy would think they'd won when the first dragon went down. Then this crawls out of the corpse. The psychological impact alone would break a formation."

"How are you holding up?" Victor turned to Luke.

"Like soone squeezed every drop of juice out of and then wrung the rind for good asure." Luke recalled both Mana and the Red-Eyes Black Dragon. The mont they dissolved back into card form, the mana drain vanished, but the emptiness it left behind was staggering. His legs felt like they belonged to soone else.

"You scared the life out of us, you know." Harlow shook his head, but the look in his eyes was pure satisfaction. No disappointnt. No anger. Just an old principal looking at his best student and seeing sothing that exceeded every expectation he'd ever set.

"The Black Gate is gone, but the spatial fabric is still fragile from all of this." Victor gestured at the cratered, scorched clearing. "The expedition is ending. Let's get out of here before your student demolishes anything else, Harlow."

The four of them headed toward the exit. Behind them, Fae Spirit Hollow slowly began to heal. Creatures that had fled the deep zones crept back toward their territories. The spatial fractures knitted themselves together, one thread at a ti. By the ti the Hollow's next scheduled opening ca around, the scars would be gone.

But the beasts that lived here would rember the dragon for a very long ti.