For 30 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
(Bonus chapter)
"I'm out? I had one second left, why didn't they give me one more second!"
"That's it, I'm dead. When I get home my dad is going to break my legs."
"Third time. Third time taking this exam. Can't I pass even once?"
Across the country, plazas at high schools that had been empty during Phase One were filling up again with the white flashes of teleporting candidates. The candidates who appeared in those plazas wore expressions ranging from disbelief to outright despair.
They had failed Phase One. Their Card crafting attempts had ended without producing a viable card before the twelve-hour clock ran out, and the exam system had unceremoniously kicked them out of the assessment dimension and back to their home schools.
Their teachers' faces, gathered at the plaza perimeters, weren't much happier. These were the students from their own classrooms. The teachers had spent the past three years preparing these students for exactly this exam, and watching them fail Phase One reflected on the teachers' performance as much as on the students' personal abilities.
Frustration, however, had to wait. The immediate responsibility was to manage the emotional fallout from disqualification. Several of the failed candidates were on the edge of complete collapse, and unattended despair could escalate to outcomes none of the teachers wanted to be answering for later.
The teachers settled in to provide consolation. The successful candidates, meanwhile, were already arriving at the second phase.
"Phase Two is in a different space?"
The white-light transition resolved. Luke was now standing in a new dimensional environment, distinctly different from the open plain of Phase One.
There was no enormous countdown clock hanging above. There was no diffuse ambient lighting suggesting an open expanse. Instead, the space around him was bounded and intimate, a single chamber maybe ten meters across, with a single feature directly in front of him.
A door.
A vertical rectangle of softly luminous golden light, freestanding in the chamber's center, with no visible frame or surrounding architecture. The light pulsed slowly, the cadence suggesting a portal in standby mode.
Around the country, every candidate who had passed Phase One was looking at an identical door in their own private chamber.
Several candidates, driven by curiosity, started reaching out to touch the door. They were interrupted before contact by a system announcement.
「 Congratulations to all candidates who have passed Phase One. You are now entering Phase Two of the entrance examination. 」
「 Phase Two: Stage Clears 」 「 Each candidate must pass through the light door to enter successive stages. Stages may contain hostile beasts, other candidates, or both. Defeating the stage's adversary advances the candidate to the next stage. 」 「 Each successful clear grants a ten-minute rest interval. If the candidate does not advance to the next stage before the rest interval expires, the candidate forfeits their examination eligibility. 」 「 Phase Two opens in ten minutes. Candidates may use this time to prepare. 」
"So the doors lead to fights." One candidate's voice carried mixed determination and nervousness across his solitary chamber. "Beasts or other candidates. Whatever comes out, I'm not losing."
"I hope I don't draw someone too strong out of the gate. My strongest card is Three-Star. If I get matched against someone with Five-Star or Six-Star deployment, I'm done before I start."
"This is going to come down to luck. And honestly, my luck has been terrible all year."
The ten-minute preparation window passed slowly. When the timer hit zero, each candidate's light door pulsed brighter, the standby mode shifting into an active portal configuration ready for entry.
"Come on, Blanche. The combat phase is yours." Luke stepped toward his door with Sistermon Blanc walking close beside him.
He'd already committed to using Sistermon Blanc as his primary combat unit for Phase Two. The decision had two motivations. First, his other card spirits were now significantly more powerful, and deploying them against typical Phase Two opposition would be overkill that revealed his strongest cards unnecessarily. Second, this was Blanc's first real combat test, and the controlled exam environment was the safest place to evaluate her actual capabilities.
The Sistermon Blanc was the centerpiece of his entire Digimon roster. If she didn't perform, the rest of the Digimon project lost its anchor.
"Understood, Tamer-sama." Blanc nodded earnestly and stepped through the portal in his wake.
The chamber on the other side dissolved into a wide stone arena, easily fifty meters across, ringed by gray walls and lit by an indirect overhead glow. Standing at the arena's center was the first opponent.
A black-furred big cat, easily the size of a horse, lean-muscled and slit-eyed. Its body posture was tactical, deliberate, the body language of a hunter rather than a brawler.
「 Shadow Leopard 」 Race: Beast Quality: Rare Level: ★★ (Two-Star) Skills: Velocity, Stalking, Shadowmeld
"Two-Star Rare Shadow Leopard," Luke observed. "Below Blanche's tier by a comfortable margin."
The Shadow Leopard, registering its opponents, growled low in its throat and activated Shadowmeld. Its body dissolved into the arena's ambient darkness, vanishing from visible perception. Simultaneously, Velocity engaged, and the cat began moving in the deepened silence of a hunter closing on prey.
To a less experienced Card Master, the dual activation would have been a serious threat. The Shadow Leopard's strengths were ambush positioning and burst speed. Used together, they let it close distance and strike before most opponents could react.
Sistermon Blanc didn't wait to react.
"Defense Wave!"
She raised her Cross Barbie trident and slammed the polearm's butt-end into the arena floor. The impact released a pulse of energy that expanded outward in a ring, traveling through the air at high speed and disrupting the spatial pattern of any concealment effects in its path.
The Shadow Leopard, mid-stride and invisible, was caught by the expanding wave. Its body, suddenly visible again, was hurled upward and backward through the air, the wave's force overriding its momentum and breaking its stealth in the same motion.
The cat tumbled mid-air, snarling, trying to right itself.
"Divine Judgment Pierce!"
Sistermon Blanc spun the trident through a flowing motion, brought it up to throwing position, and hurled it. The Cross Barbie cut through the air on a perfect arc, light-element energy spiraling along its length. It met the Shadow Leopard mid-tumble and pierced through the cat's chest in a single clean stroke.
The Shadow Leopard's snarl cut off into a final whimper. Its body went limp.
The combat was over.
The entire engagement had taken perhaps six seconds.
Luke blinked.
He'd expected Blanche's first combat to be functional. He hadn't expected it to be that smooth. The execution had been clean, the timing had been precise, and the choreography had looked like she'd run that exact combat pattern a hundred times before.
This was not the canonical Sistermon Blanc he'd referenced during the design phase. That version of the character had been hesitant about combat, requiring emotional support to engage. The Blanche standing in front of him had killed a Two-Star Rare Beast with the confidence of a senior Card Master's veteran spirit.
Then he watched her recall the Cross Barbie back to her hand, immediately retreat half a step, and angle the trident across her body protectively, peering at the arena's edges with a small uncertain expression.
The confidence was apparently combat-specific. The moment the fight ended, the soft hesitant body language reasserted itself.
"I almost thought she'd activated Awakening for a moment there," Luke muttered. The contrast between combat-Blanc and post-combat-Blanc was steeper than his design notes had suggested. The Awakening skill, when triggered, was supposed to be the dramatic personality shift, swapping her conservative default for an unrestrained battle-mode mindset. Apparently her baseline combat behavior already operated at a higher confidence floor than her resting personality.
The Holy Brand on her coif, the central activation sigil for Awakening, hadn't lit up. The skill hadn't been triggered. What he'd just seen was her baseline combat performance.
That implied Awakening's actual peak state was going to be significantly more intense than her already-clean default.
Ashenvale City Lord's Mansion.
"That new card feels... pretty ordinary?"
Lawrence Cromwell and Bianca Daly exchanged uncertain glances at the viewing chamber. After months of watching Luke's Spellcaster deploy her elaborate toolkit, and after the overwhelming presence of his black dragon, this small timid-looking nun-themed card spirit felt almost underwhelming by comparison.
The one-shot kill on the Shadow Leopard had been smooth, sure. But by Luke's standards, smooth one-shot kills were baseline expectations. The execution didn't prove anything they didn't already expect.
The overall impression was muted relative to the buildup. Luke had constructed an Original Spirit Card with that new nun-themed figure. Most observers had been expecting another tier-defining heavyweight. What they were seeing instead was a Three-Star Rookie-tier card spirit with a polearm and visible body-language anxiety.
"Even between Original Cards, there's a power gap," Geoffrey Falk said reasonably. "Original Cards aren't automatically top-tier just because they're Original. And this card came from a brand-new worldview that Luke just built tonight. First-attempt cards from a first-attempt worldview should be expected to underperform his more developed offerings."
Lawrence felt a flicker of envy at the offhand confidence in Geoffrey's tone. The other principal was treating "first card from a brand-new Original Worldview" as a routine observation. Lawrence wanted, just once, to be in a position where statements like that came naturally to him.
"This new card looks ordinary for now," Victor Ashford added, his voice carrying the steadying authority he was developing into a habit. "Don't forget that Luke has consistently crafted cards that rank at the top of their tier when fully tested. The Shadow Leopard was a Two-Star Rare. That's nowhere near a meaningful gauge of her actual ceiling."
The senior figures collectively settled in. The first combat had been clean but unrevealing. The real performance test would come from stronger opposition in later rounds.
Phase Two had barely begun.