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"You should be carrying an object that bears the Dark Purgatory's aura." Tobias raised a hand, cutting off the two women's urge to keep questioning. "Hand it to me. I'll set out at once to trace the Dark Purgatory's spatial coordinates. With any luck, we find them before Luke's group runs into danger."
Tobias held the strength of the Immortal Realm, true, but the Dark Purgatory's spatial coordinates were no easy thing to find, least of all with the Dragon Renegades' Rebellion lying so long in the past. Worse, the Dragon's Valley of that era, for the sake of this burial ground of theirs, had deliberately sealed away the site's position, and with the extra-domain's chaotic currents layered over all of it, locating the Dark Purgatory's coordinates was anything but simple. Heaven only knew whether those coordinates had drifted in the years between.
The Dragon Renegades' appearance was no small matter, all the more because it had tangled in Luke, the student Lilith had only newly taken. If anything went wrong at this particular link, then Tobias would truly have no face left with which to meet her.
And beyond even that, setting the whole Lilith connection aside, Tobias would never permit his own students to come to grief right under his nose. These were the fresh blood of the East and of Celestial Academy both. If a whole wave of them were carried off in one stroke, the aftermath would be brutal to swallow, and it was nothing he ever wished to see.
Fortunately, Drake, this elder of Dragon's Valley, stood on the scene as well, and among the vanished was a daughter of their own Nine Great Dragon Lords. The man was, if anything, more frantic than Tobias himself, desperate to recover Viola.
Even as the words settled, a key had already appeared in Drake's hand. It was another Dark Prison Transfer Writ, though set against the one in Renshaw's grip, the death-aura upon this Writ ran far, far dimmer.
"This is one of the Writs destroyed in those days. It has long since lost its power to teleport, but the Dark Purgatory's aura still clings to it." Exactly as Tobias had hoped, Drake held nothing back in a matter like this. "I kept it back then on nothing more than a passing whim. I never imagined it would find its use at a time like this."
One step mishandled, and this whole affair would climb to the level of the Ancient Kingdom and Dragon's Valley themselves. Plainly, that had been the Renegades' design from the very start.
Taking the Writ, Tobias swept a hand through the air, and a slender figure appeared at his side.
Its shape was that of a sky-horse, its entire body composed of countless prism-cut crystals, and in the very instant this card spirit appeared, the thin, weakened space throughout the trial-land steadied and grew stable.
An Eleven-Star Epic. The sky-horse, Pegasus!
It was a peak card spirit of the very same grade as the Eleven-Star Epic in Aldric's keeping, the Polar Seafang, though unlike that hegemon of the ice, Pegasus's abilities inclined toward the domain of space itself.
And it was precisely for that reason that Drake had passed the matter of the coordinates to Tobias rather than moving himself. Among the dragon-family cards he held, not one could measure up to Pegasus where space was concerned.
"Screeeee!"
A long, ringing cry. Transparent wings beat the air, and before everyone's eyes, the Writ in Tobias's hand melted into Pegasus's body. Then the countless threads of spatial information running through the trial-land began pouring endlessly into the spirit's wings, and across that crystalline, translucent body, one special set of spatial coordinates after another took form, only to scatter and dissolve again.
Plainly, Pegasus was filtering for the correct coordinates, and just as plainly, the work was going to demand no small stretch of time.
Beneath the anxious gazes of everyone present, time crawled past, until at last Pegasus loosed another long cry, and Tobias came bolt upright. "Found it."
Almost in the same breath, Drake, Selene, and Moira all came alive, each sweeping a hand through the air to summon their own card spirits, braced for battle.
In the next moment, the spatial coordinates of the Dark Purgatory swung open, and a gloomy, shadowed aura came washing over everyone present through the yawning door of space.
---
"Where is this place?" Gazing around at surroundings steeped through with gloom, Elise gave an instinctive shiver and pressed herself deeper into Luke's arms.
"No idea." Luke's arm tightened around her. He was every bit as unclear on where exactly this was, and the gaze he swept across their surroundings carried a thread of hard wariness.
After taking Elise aboard, he had moved on and eliminated two more of the new students still remaining on the Trial Road, and then a surge of spatial force had crashed over them out of nowhere and carried them clean off the trial. The whole process had been brutally brief, so brief that the two of them, Raidramon included, had been swept away and deposited here before any of them could so much as react.
"Could this be part of the Trial Road's assessment too?" Curled in Luke's arms, Elise studied their surroundings as well. This iteration's theme was the Survival Game, and an environment like this one did rather suit the theme.
"It doesn't feel like it." Luke shook his head. To his eye, this hardly seemed like assessment content. And if it truly was, then to move them out from directly beneath the Academy's gaze in a single stroke, on that one act alone, the technique involved would be refined beyond all reason.
Most crucial of all was what Luke had just discovered: this stretch of space held some extremely peculiar energy, and even the Night Palace spatial coordinates Lilith had granted him were screened out cold by it.
Which meant they had no way of opening a path to the Night Palace and leaving through it. However he turned it over, this did not look like any trial assessment!
Although... the Eternal Land's coordinates haven't been screened by this energy at all. I can step inside whenever I please. Luke ran the quiet calculation, and it left him one solid road of retreat. Most likely because the Eternal Land was conceived and grown within my own body. It is, in the end, a different thing from the Night Palace.
No use overthinking any of it now. See one step, walk one step. And thinking of the cards at the bottom of his deck, Luke's heart held its steadiness.
The Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl and Red-Eyes could, at need, each erupt with a strike of the Eight-Star grade, and a Digimon pushed through the Ultimate-stage X-evolution would hold full-fledged Eight-Star strength outright. Layer Angewomon's absurdly unfair Arrow of Light over all of it, and Luke at full throttle carried the power to cut down enemies of the Nine-Star grade.
Granted, at that point, even drawing on the Eternal Sun's mana, he could sustain it only a short while. But a short while would be enough.
And if it truly came to the worst, then he would simply bring out the nuclear option that was Celestine. Outside her own domain her strength would be dampened, true, but it remained more than sufficient for the overwhelming majority of situations.
These were all his own people. Luke had no intention of hoarding his cards from them, and besides, the relationship between him and Celestine was hardly an ordinary one.
"Tamer, this stretch of space holds heavy residues of dragon-grudge, along with the auras of fierce beasts." Amid his turning thoughts, Raidramon's voice carried up to Luke's ears.