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"Jungle?"
Ethan looked at the terrain and raised an eyebrow.
In a Jungle, flying units didn't actually have much of an advantage. Aerial recon was useful in theory, but Card Master duels were more about command and execution — scouting felt redundant when you couldn't relay information fast enough to matter.
He glanced at the cards in his hand and felt a twinge of regret. That new flyer he'd built last night? Wouldn't be seeing action this round.
Two seconds of thought. Decision made.
Old reliable.
Spirit Energy Crystal + Big Big Wolf + Scrap Yard.
"Wolfie — make some tools and burn this whole forest down."
"Huh?" Big Big Wolf had just materialized and was heading for the junkyard when the command hit him mid-stride. He froze.
"Arson is a federal crime, you know."
Despite the snark, he was already sprinting for the scrap yard. Complaints and compliance — the Big Big Wolf special.
Ten seconds later, he emerged with a bucket and a squat turret mounted on a tripod.
"This thing is called a Fuel Launcher. Packed with highly compressed fuel. When the payload reaches peak altitude, it detonates and rains the fuel down over a wide area."
"No time for the sales pitch, Wolfie. Clock's ticking."
"Right, right." Big Big Wolf loaded the launcher and fired.
On the other side of the map, Ryan abandoned his initial plan the moment he saw the Jungle.
Normally, he'd open with Demon Bats — his go-to harasser. In an open field, air superiority was devastating. Most Tier 1 cards couldn't fly, and their mobility was laughable. His bats could pick them apart from above without ever being touched.
But a Jungle changed everything. Canopy blocked flight paths. Visibility was garbage.
He had two options.
Option one: Rat Swarm — a Tier 1 Purple that summoned a hundred burrowing rats. They could dig traps, launch underground ambushes, and overwhelm enemies with sheer numbers. Weaker on open plains, but in a Jungle? Absolute specialists.
Option two: Wolf King — ruler of the pack, a size larger than a normal wolf. Stronger in raw combat than the rats, but with lower intelligence — about the level of a seven or eight-year-old human. Still a Purple card, still dangerous.
While he was deliberating, a junkyard appeared near Ethan's crystal.
"A Field Card?" Ryan muttered, confused.
Who opens with a Field Card?
Standard play was to deploy your fighter center-map. A fast enough unit could blitz the enemy crystal around the fifty-second mark. His Wolf King ran at roughly 45 miles per hour — even through dense Jungle, it could cover the five hundred yards to Ethan's crystal in about thirty seconds.
If Ethan was wasting his opening on a field card, there'd be nothing to stop the blitz in round two.
Could this guy actually be weak?
Was all that talk about him being the strongest just hype?
Thinking back to Ethan's lazy attitude this morning, Ryan grew more certain. A real powerhouse respected every match. This guy clearly didn't.
He committed. Wolf King — center field — crystal rush.
Twelve seconds later, the Wolf King had crossed half the distance.
Then a deafening explosion echoed from above.
Black rain began falling from the sky.
"What the—?" The Jungle canopy blocked Ryan's view of Ethan's side. He could see the junkyard, but not Big Big Wolf. He had no idea Ethan had deployed three cards in his opening.
While Ryan was still trying to figure out why it was raining on a Jungle map, a massive wall of fire erupted from the direction of the junkyard.
The spread was terrifyingly fast. Within seconds, three hundred feet of forest was ablaze.
The fire surged toward the Wolf King.
The wolf was fast — but it had been soaked in the black rain. Half its fur was coated in the stuff.
Whoosh.
The moment it touched the flames, the Wolf King ignited.
It burned to ash in seconds. Starlight scattered and faded.
Purple card or not, the defense of Tier 1 cards was notoriously low — especially in simulated combat, where damage was digitized. Once the threshold was hit, the card simply vanished.
In reality, a destroyed card shattered permanently. In a simulation, it just meant the card was out for the match.
So Card Master duels were different from real combat, but the relative power scaling stayed the same. If the system nerfed one side's durability, it nerfed the other's too.
The difference was that most of Ethan's cards were mechanics-based. Their strength didn't come from raw stats that could be nerfed — it came from what they built.
Normally, a forest fire would take hours to burn itself out.
In the simulation, the entire Jungle was reduced to smoldering ash in three minutes flat.
Another difference between virtual and reality.
Round two. The fire was still raging.
Ryan didn't summon anything.
He was waiting — watching for Ethan to make the next move. The ground was an inferno; any ordinary summon would die on deployment. His Demon Bats might survive above the canopy, but they were only Blue quality. If Ethan could ignite an entire forest in twenty seconds, dealing with bats would be trivial.
One minute passed. Then two.
The fire gradually died down. Ryan still hadn't seen Ethan deploy a single unit.
All he could make out was a figure flickering inside the junkyard. Constantly moving. Building something.
He felt uneasy but couldn't figure out why.
It's just a junkyard. He can't build a giant mech out of scrap... right?
Besides, round four is about to start. By then the fire will be out, and my psionic will be at 600.
The flames faded to embers. Round four arrived.
"Come forth — Abyssal Troll!"
Ryan opened his mic and shouted the summon.
The card dissolved. In its place, a ten-foot-tall troll materialized at the edge of his crystal, clutching a massive club. Its skin was mottled gray-black, its eyes were sunken pits of sickly green light, and its jaw hung open in a permanent snarl that exposed rows of jagged teeth.
It was hideous. One look was enough to make your skin crawl.
"Wait..." Ethan looked at the thing lumbering into view and didn't know what to say.
Couldn't you summon something better looking?
That is genuinely the ugliest creature I've ever seen.
The troll emitted an eerie dark aura. The charred tree stumps around it crumbled to black powder on contact.
It walked forward — step by slow step. Deceptively slow. In less than thirty seconds, it had reached the center of the map.
A wide road of blackened, corrupted earth formed in its wake.
"This is my trump card," Ryan announced over the open mic. "His entire body radiates abyssal energy. Any creature that touches it gets corrupted. Almost nothing can get close."
He was narrating his own summon like a commentator. Ethan found that mildly endearing and deeply annoying in equal measure.
He looked at his hand.
In those three minutes of fire, Big Big Wolf had been busy. Three mechs stood completed in the junkyard — not simple ones either. Each could sustain over two minutes of continuous combat, and they could even combine.
But none of them had any answer for corruption. Metal touching the abyssal aura would corrode. The mechs would fall apart.
Should he deploy the Hyperforce trio? Or the other card?
Two seconds of thought.
You say you're from the abyss?
Then taste the flavor of heaven.
I choose you.
Angemon.
PLZ Throw Powerstones.