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"The Dragon Renegades!" From the moment he'd heard the exchange between Renshaw and Viola, a wrongness had already begun crawling up from the bottom of Drake's heart, and the instant his eyes landed on that key bleeding scattered purple light in the man's hand, his expression turned outright rabid, a pressure terrifying enough to warrant the word erupting off his body.
Caught entirely off guard, Selene and Moira beside him were forced back several meters raw by the aura pouring off Drake, before a soft, gentle strength caught and steadied them both.
"Old Drake. Steady." Tobias's voice rolled out, and in the same moment he had already completed the sync with his card spirit. Both hands pulled, and the space before him was torn wide open, a rift leading straight into the Trial Road. "What matters most right now is finding Luke and the others first."
Tobias's own heart burned every bit as urgently. Among the vanished students stood not only Viola and Elise and their like, but Luke, the student Lilith had only just taken in. But he had weathered storms enough in his long years, and so he forced the calm to hold.
One step forward, and Tobias had passed through the torn space into the trial-land. Exchanging a single glance, Selene and Moira crossed through right on his heels, urgency flickering openly in both women's eyes. Among those still inside the Trial Road were people bound to each of them by ties that ran anything but shallow.
Last through the riven space came Drake. The elder of Dragon's Valley had steadied considerably by now, but the aura about him stayed drawn and ready beneath the surface. Plainly, the Dragon Renegades' appearance had dealt him no small blow.
"All of them. Gone." Tobias had moved fast, and still he had come one step too late. By the time he set foot in the trial-land, Luke and the rest had already vanished without a trace, and his face turned the color of iron.
"Head!" Selene and Moira, following hard behind, likewise swept the trial-land and found not one thread of Luke's group's aura remaining, and both women's faces changed sharply. This was no good sign at all.
"The Dragon Renegades. That Renshaw out of the Southern Region must be a descendant of the exiled Renegades." Drake drew a deep breath, leveling the fury in his chest once more, and gave his surmise. "The Dragon Renegades' Rebellion lies long in the past, but one rumor has never died: that the renegades driven out of Dragon's Valley made, in the end, for the Southern Region."
"The pity of it is that across all these years, however many clansmen we arranged to go south and search, we never once found word of the exiled Renegades. Nor did we ever find whoever had spread the rumor in the first place."
"But by the look of things now, that rumor was never wind from an empty cave. It is simply that those Renegades' arts of concealment outstripped what anyone imagined." A thread of cold light had already surfaced in Tobias's eyes. "To think that even I was kept squarely in the dark."
"When you mentioned tracking that Renegade to this vicinity, where it vanished, I had already marked the matter down, intending to sweep this whole area clean once the entrance trial concluded. I never imagined the Renegades would move this fast."
"Renshaw's target was plainly Violet and Viola. They are, after all, the daughters of Dragon Lord Violante." A thread of open shame climbed Drake's face. "This time, it is we who have dragged all of you in, and left the others tangled in a calamity that was never theirs."
"The Renegades' way of doing things has always been any means at hand. Once they resolved to move against your people, then however tight the guard, one leak in a hundred was always going to spring." Tobias waved it aside. "The only thing no one imagined was that, to strike at Dragon's Valley, these Renegades would dare reach their hands into the Ancient Kingdom itself. Into the Four Great Academies."
If Tobias's guess held, then this was no matter of Celestial Academy alone. Northmarch and Brighthall had in all likelihood been struck the same way, and as for Wanderhall, that was harder to say, given that the Renegades' last rumored haunt was the South itself.
Though, knowing the Head of Wanderhall as he did, that one had very possibly been played by these Renegades as well. And with the Southern Governor's temperament being what it was, there was no chance he would suffer the Renegades to stir wind and rain in the South. Before long, in all likelihood, the Southern Region would erupt into a storm of blood.
But none of that was his concern for the present. What mattered most now was finding the vanished.
"The eliminated new students weren't touched at all. But Luke and the others have vanished outright, and the weight hanging on that is far too heavy." Listening to Tobias and Drake, the two women had finally pieced the whole of it together, and open urgency burned across Selene's face.
It was not only Luke. Iris had vanished along with the rest, and Selene could not have kept the worry down if she'd tried.
"Head. Have you divined where Elise and the others were sent?" To Moira's eye, Selene's present state seemed a touch past what worry warranted, but considering that Iris was the woman's own kin, she supposed it wasn't beyond understanding either.
Tobias gave no answer. He only turned his gaze upon Drake once more.
"If my eyes did not deceive me, the key Renshaw produced was a Dark Prison Transfer Writ, an artifact that, during the original purge of the Renegades, ought by all rights to have been utterly destroyed." Drake fell silent for several seconds before speaking again. "By the records of the clan's codices, a Dark Prison Transfer Writ will teleport every person within a set range into the Dark Purgatory. That is the place the Renegades once used to imprison, and to torment, our clansmen."
By the end of it, Drake's tone had taken on its edge of fury once more, though this time he pressed it down and held it there.
"Within the Dark Purgatory prowl no small number of apex fierce beasts the Renegades seized and cast inside, and the strongest among them reached even the eleven-star grade. Beasts of ultimate evil."
Eleven-star beasts of ultimate evil!
At those words, whether Selene or Moira, both women felt their hearts leap straight into their throats.
"After the sweep we conducted in those days, the beasts within the Dark Purgatory were culled to fewer than one in ten." Seeing their faces, Drake offered what comfort he had. "I won't swear that after all these long years, every beast within the Dark Purgatory has died out. But the apex-grade ones, I can promise you, were left not a single survivor."
"There is only one point that makes this troublesome. The Dark Purgatory does not lie within the main plane of the Magic Card Civilization." A shade of grave care crossed Drake's face. "To ensure the Dark Purgatory stayed hidden, the Renegades of that era built it out in the extra-domain. Only at the border of it, true, but owing to the nature of the extra-domain's chaotic currents, the Dark Purgatory's spatial coordinates lie all but completely buried."
"And for that same reason, the Dark Purgatory's space has never been stable, least of all after the great battle fought there in those days. At any moment it may spawn Black Gates, and draw the covetous eyes of the extra-domain's fierce beasts."
"Even for me, there is no way to quickly pin down safe spatial coordinates leading into the Dark Purgatory."
And what exactly is that supposed to console anyone about?!
Selene and Moira traded a look, and both understood the same thing: this affair had turned deeply, deeply thorny in the handling. Even this Dark Purgatory itself, the two of them were hearing of for the very first time.
Small wonder. The Dragon Renegades' Rebellion had never counted as any glorious chapter for Dragon's Valley, least of all because in those days, no small number of the Valley's clansmen had been dragged into the Dark Purgatory and tormented until they died. That place was, in every sense, the burial ground of the clan's people, and naturally it was nothing Dragon's Valley would ever trumpet abroad.