The duel over, Maximus lowered himself onto a seat by slow degrees. His many students rushed over in a hurry, worried, checking on him.
He waved a hand to signal there was no cause for concern, then looked down at his own hands.
That forbidden power had indeed drained out of him.
He was glad of it, of course. Yet as the power faded, the great store of energy that had sat inside him faded with it. The cards that had held those extraordinary, future-touched forces began to disappear.
For a duelist chosen as a warrior, losing that much force was a strange feeling. He was relieved. He also stood in a small unease of loss.
With those added powers, he had been able to do what ordinary spirits could not.
The camp here, for one, was his own doing, assembled and shored up bit by bit through his ability. The mixed spirits stayed away from this stronghold because the whole "outpost" was, in itself, the shape of his power.
He took the brunt of the corruption for every spirit here, and he took in the powers as well.
But now.
"Guh, uh, kah kah kah."
"Albaz. Are you all right?"
Albaz's body began to shift out of dragon form and back to a human shape. Even so, once returned to human shape, he pitched forward onto the ground and coughed in fits, coughing until he was bringing up blood.
Ecclesia saw it and hurried over, hands scrambling to help, without any clear idea of what to do.
"He took in too much power that was not his own in too short a span. His body cannot hold it." Tierra said it in an easy tone.
She turned to Gem-Knight Crystal. Gem-Knight Crystal gave a small bow, then stepped forward, ready to shift form and take some of the pain off Albaz's shoulders first.
But before she reached him, the moment Ecclesia's hand touched Albaz's back, his body began to give off a golden light again.
Through a slow twist of the shape, the earlier Albaz began to change and shifted into a new form once more. A dragon unlike the silver one before, this one savage and wild.
"Hm?" Tierra's brow drew in.
He, he changed shape?
"What happened?" "Is he corrupted?"
Maximus crossed his arms and set his face in grim readiness for a strike, but the beastlike dragon, after a moment of struggle, returned to Albaz's own shape.
Not only that. The pain, the strain of it all, seemed to lift out of his body, and he settled back to his own self.
Maximus and Iris shared a glance and read the same shock in each other's faces.
This was.
Albaz looked down at his own hands, unable to move for the surprise of it. Beside him, Ecclesia let out a long-held breath.
"Brigrand the Glory Dragon."
A voice cut across the room. The spirits turned to look at Hikaru.
"The Fusion Materials are Fallen of Albaz and a monster of Level 8 or higher. Congratulations, Albaz. You have grown."
"I. I could do that?" His mouth hung open.
"You clearly have more in you than you thought."
Once the small aftershock passed, the spirits in the resistance base finally settled down for good and began to talk with Hikaru. Talk, in a manner of speaking. Given the state of this dimension, they could only speak of their own present in brief, then turn to praise of Hikaru.
Hikaru's duel had shown these spirits, trapped as they were in this hell of a place, something they had never seen before.
Which meant, of course, that they had a choice of their own to make now. To take a stand against this chaotic world, and to work at putting it back to its former shape.
But.
Where was the easy way to that?
They did not know so much as where to begin.
"At ease." Beside them, Tierra saw the spirits' faces knot up with the weight of not knowing what to do. She spread her hands and let out a light laugh.
Hikaru raised a brow.
"Your goddess is now in a position to guide you through the fog."
"?"
A group of spirits looked at her, thrown.
She was El Shaddoll Winda, was she not? A high-rank spirit, yes, but.
Maximus, well-traveled as he was, having once carried the red-light infection himself, looked her over with a careful eye, and caught the wrong note. "You. You are not a spirit."
Not a spirit.
"Ho ho ho ho." Tierra let the moment land, savoring it.
She wasted no more words. She spread her arms, and behind her a great mechanical shape began to rise out of nothing.
Apoqliphort Towers.
The instant the vast machine appeared, the sky over the whole world showed a clear "double image." Four skies in four colors held together at the same time, layered like four transparent sheets in different tints, and in the eyes of the spirits, the whole of what stood around them shifted.
"Th, this, this, this." Maximus surged to his feet in shock and almost pitched over on the spot.
Could it be, that such a thing had come this easily.
The sky that had held firm against every attempt they had made to change it, over years of resistance, had shown a change.
Hikari had truly brought them the answer.
But.
In the next breath, Tierra's brow drew in, and the great mechanical shape faded from behind her by degrees. The world settled back into its old shape.
Maximus let his hands drop, all strength gone from them.
So even that would not hold.
No, that was not right.
The change had come.
Was that not the very change Lord Hikari had brought.
But a moment later he saw where his thought had gone astray.
"I see. The problem runs deep." Tierra rubbed her chin and muttered a while under her breath, then pulled Hikaru aside and spoke with him in a low voice for a stretch. Only after that did she turn back to explain to the spirits.
She began by telling them she was Tierra, a Star Creator God, and that what she oversaw were machinery and reincarnation.
That, of course, was not the point. The point was that Tierra's body, Apoqliphort Towers, held the power to read the world's data, and through that reading, to run analysis, and even to mend.
When Tierra named her power, the spirits took on a lift of spirit almost at once, and more than a few embraced and wept.
But past the good news came the harder part.
For one, this was not the first time Tierra had done this kind of work.
Even now, after her rebirth, she had already carried out two or three of these acts of rebuilding by reincarnation.
The first was inside a Fusion Army outpost, where she set the reincarnation of that dimension back in order. The second was the reshaping of the Frightfur Dimension. The third, once Apoqliphort Towers had been reactivated, took her, as agreed, to the Vampire Empire Dimension, where she placed Apoqliphort Towers, ran her calculations and inferences, and mended the dimension.
That was her personal power, and it was her "record" and her "miracle" in this new age.
Only, that power was not one she could use on a whim.
Star Creator God though she was, she had her limits.
To rewrite the underlying logic of a world, one point mattered above the rest. She had to hold the consent of the great majority of that world's lives. Without that, she and Sophia would not have been struck down by Creation itself the last time they tried to remake the world.
By the same logic, to rewrite a dimension took the consent of that dimension's living beings.
Only.
"So we are the few." Iris let out a small, wry laugh.
In this chaotic four-in-one dimension, spirits like themselves, ones who did not chase after power to the extreme and only wanted to hold on to their reason, were in fact the small minority. Perhaps not even a tenth of what lived here. In that shape of things, Tierra could not simply rewrite.
"Then this is the better path, elder sister." Ecclesia's eyes lit up. "We start by saving them first."
Iris drew a deep breath.
Yes. That was it.
Since that was the shape of things, they would go and save their maddened kin, one after another.
"There is another matter." Hikaru added the point at that moment.
"Eh? What is it?" They braced themselves for a heavier trial.
"Apoqliphort Towers was here only in passing before." Hikaru gestured to the side. "As of now, Apoqliphort Towers stands anchored in the Vampire Empire, holding that dimension steady."
Hikaru walked them through the outline.
When they heard that the Vampire Empire had also been struck by the red light, though its territory had not been ravaged as heavily as their own and had only kept shrinking little by little, the spirits felt sorrow and regret in the same breath.
Sorrow, because more than one dimension in the world stood in crisis. And regret, because.
Lord Hikari's meaning was plain.
The Vampire Empire had reached an agreement of cooperation with Hikari beforehand. That Apoqliphort Towers should now be repairing their dimension followed from that in the ordinary course.
Hikaru wanted to help this dimension as well, and Tierra was more than curious to look into it. But the earlier work was not yet finished, and shifting focus without a good reason could bring on unintended results. More than that, if he cast off an earlier ally for a later dimension only because that later one proved more useful to them, what would the word Fusion still be worth?
Tierra had a further suggestion. When time allowed, the spirits here could travel to the Vampire Empire, to form an alliance or to learn from what they had done. Either would serve them well.
Though the Vampire Empire Dimension stood in a far better state than their own, its "self-healing" had also begun much earlier.
Maximus was not about to raise any objection.
For a people with no hope left, a single glint of hope was drive enough to push them forward. And this was not one glint. This was solid, tangible proof standing right in front of them.
As for the alliance and the discussions, those matters could wait.
There were plenty of matters left, of course.
Once the corruption had been drawn out of Maximus's body, their base's defenses would need to be set back up. Black Flame stepped forward without prompting and offered to hold the ground here with a squad of spirit companions.
Black Flame was quiet by nature, and yet a sharp reader of a room.
As the spirits in Hikaru's team grew in number, a good few of them had begun to feel a low restlessness. Put plainly: when do I get my chance, and how do I earn the right to help Hikari.
Elders on the level of Flame Sword and Black Flame, whose seats were assured whenever the words "the Absolute Fusion Duelist" came up, took no note of such details. Nor did the ones Master particularly favored calling into battle, such as Gem-Knight Crystal, who did not spend a thought on it.
But Black Flame knew that this kind of mood, low as it was, had begun to rise through the Grand Cosmos Workshop.
What had happened with Andal before was not going to be the only case.
Those who could sit still through the quiet, in the way Gaia or A-Assault Core did, either held that temperament by nature, or, in the case of a spirit like Mud Dragon King, had reached an age when the wait no longer stung.
Failing that, they were the sort like the Earthbound Immortals or the Sacred Beasts, spirits content past all measure so long as they had a corner in which to live.
But.
At the Grand Cosmos Workshop, many other spirits had gathered by degrees onto its various worlds over time.
Those spirits would not be like these.
That was why, as one of Master's right and left hands, he reckoned this was the moment to lift the burden when Master had his hands full.
He knew more than that.
Since the last outing, when the few of them had escorted Master out of this dimension in flight and the mid- and lower-rank spirits had seen the harried state they came back in, those spirits had begun to train in earnest.
Their hope for a turn of their own could not be left to fall on nothing.
"Then I leave it to you, Black Flame."
Hikaru paused a moment, then broke into a smile.
"Rest easy, Master. Wherever you stand, whatever the hour, so long as you call for me, I will be at your side." Black Flame gave Hikaru a knight's salute.
Even Fleurdelis was moved by the sight.
Spellcaster spirit she may have been, at her core she was a knight. Watching a knight so loyal, she could not help her own admiration for him.
So, once the duel was done and every matter had been talked through, the different forces began their own preparations.
At the base, Maximus stayed to hold ground. Iris put together a party, ready to head to the Vampire Empire Dimension to learn what that dimension had to teach, and to press for talks and an alliance where she could. Black Flame recruited squad members from within the Grand Cosmos Workshop to head to the Branded Dimension, to hold defense there together and wait for the counterstrike to come.
When the many spirits gathered together in the Grand Cosmos Workshop, Hikaru saw the whole workshop light up like an actual field of stars. Countless silhouettes moved through it, back and forth.
The place had turned, for a moment, into what its name meant. A true crossroads of the cosmos.
On his way out, Dogmatika Ecclesia, the Virtuous, stopped Albaz and Hikaru. She began with a bow of thanks to Hikaru, then spoke what was on her mind.
Ecclesia was one of the smaller spirits at the base. She had the talent for it, yes, but she lacked the ready battle strength that Maximus and Iris carried. Because of that, she had never brought herself to make her own choice, and she could only try, again and again, to soften the tension whenever her teacher and elder sister came into conflict.
Now Hikari had brought them all a new opening, and the lost girl she had been finally saw she could no longer stand still.
So she had made up her mind to help Hikari, and to help Albaz.
She drew out a card of her own "self," a Nadir Servant, and further cards, Dogmatika Encounter among them, and she pressed them all into Hikaru's hands.
Because their dimension was not safe yet, and there were still countless trials ahead, she could not leave with him. But she hoped her cards might help.
"Huh? Cards that stop you from Special Summoning from the Extra Deck after they resolve? What good are those to you?" Tierra looked over the two cards and could hardly find her words.
"That is not so cut and dry, Tierra. Dogmatika, or at least these two cards, sit remarkably well with Fusion."
"Ha? How is this fused?" Tierra could not quite follow.
Hikaru gave her a small smile and told her he would show her later.
At the last, he set down his plans and preparations in the spirit world in his own planning book.
The Branded matter was not one for a single day. It was not one to be closed out in one or two trips.
But.
"Tierra. Do you believe in fate?"
"Why bring that up now?" Tierra countered on the moment. "That is a question you have asked more than a few times during your duel with Aster Phoenix."
She had it memorized down to the details.
"On the card art, Albaz and Ecclesia's meeting looks rather lovely, does it not?" Hikaru drew out a Dogmatika Encounter. Tierra blinked at it.
The scene on a card's art was a thing that had once, in some age, truly happened.
Which meant that the first Fallen of Albaz and Dogmatika Ecclesia, the Virtuous had met exactly this way.
And the present Ecclesia and Fallen of Albaz she knew.
That coincidence.
Hikaru let out a small laugh.
The Branded world had given rise to a set of thoughts he had not held before.
Albaz and Ecclesia's meeting. Chance, or fate?
Or a certainty brought on by the shift of an age?
He and Tierra, meeting as they had. Chance, or fate?
If the first card he had ever crafted had not been El Shaddoll Winda but some other, would he have met Tierra again all the same?
That question, in this moment, had found an answer of its own.
The world's crises stood as constants. So long as he wanted to answer them, sooner or later he would have to seek out those with a gift for the answering.
Which meant that meeting Tierra, coming to know her, was not chance, not accident, but a certainty under the working of time.
Not that time, then some other. They would meet all the same. They would come to know each other all the same.
Which, in turn, meant.
He closed his eyes and thought back to the Duel Terminal Dimension, where Tierra's final duel against all living things had already been set.
That was not fate.
That was the outcome one was bound to meet in the moment one chose the road forward.
....
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