Chapter 27
"Your plan is clever enough - it might fool a weaker duelist. But I'm not someone you can trick that easily."
Alexis watched Rowan with a confident smile, eyes sharp with battle-ready focus.
"As expected of Alexis-sama!"
Jasmine and Mindy chimed in admiringly from behind her.
Rowan's expression went through a brief, complicated journey.
For a moment he genuinely debated whether to say something.
To gently point out that he had, in fact, already switched decks.
He decided against it.
"My turn - draw!"
Alexis pulled her card with the energy of someone who had already won, and immediately held it up.
"Spell card from my hand - Polymerization! I fuse Blade Skater from my hand with Etoile Cyber on the field!"
"Fusion Summon - Cyber Blader!"
The Etoile Cyber figure above the lake's surface rose and dissolved into streaming light.
From Alexis's hand, a second form emerged - a sleek, shaved-head woman in black and violet, blades gleaming at her feet - and both were swept upward into a swirling vortex of yellow, blue, and green.
The vortex collapsed inward.
From the roiling wind emerged a tall woman with long black hair and a bold red-and-white bodysuit, razor-edged ice skates carrying her across the lake's surface as she landed before Alexis with a battle-ready breath.
"Hmph."
Cyber Blader Level 7 / EARTH ATK: 2100 / DEF: 800
"Let's see if I'm right."
Alexis raised her hand with calm certainty. "Cyber Blader - destroy that face-down monster! Ice Blade Cyclone!"
Cyber Blader moved.
She spun into a razor-edged whirlwind and tore across the water toward the large horizontal card silhouette on Rowan's field.
The impact sent a shockwave of force and light outward, and the card flipped - a golden glow flashing beneath - before a burst of fire and smoke swallowed everything.
Cyber Blader swept back to Alexis's side of the field, untouched.
"Just like that, Alexis-san! Crush that slacker boy's arrogance right here!"
Crowler, floating somewhere far behind them in the lake, pumped a quiet fist in the air and nearly let the words carry across the water.
Alexis held her confident smile and watched the smoke clear, waiting to see what remained of the destroyed Royal Magical Library.
The smoke thinned.
"Alexis," Mindy said from behind her, voice going slightly strange.
Where the explosion had been, a figure crouched on the overturned card silhouette - intact, unbroken, one hand resting on the hilt of a sword at its hip, dark cape settling behind it.
Not a Royal Magical Library.
Obnoxious Celtic Guardian Level 4 / EARTH ATK: 1400 / DEF: 1200
"Is that... Obnoxious Celtic Guardian?!"
The smile on Alexis's face didn't so much fade as freeze completely in place.
She wasn't the only one who recognized it. Jasmine and Mindy both went still.
Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley on the nearby boat all registered it at the same moment.
It was hard not to.
Obnoxious Celtic Guardian was one of the cards that Yugi Muto himself had used in duels, a name known to anyone who followed the King of Games.
"Why is that the card the slacker boy set?!" Crowler stared from his spot in the water, completely lost.
Was this still supposed to be the Dark Magician OTK deck?!
"Obnoxious Celtic Guardian's effect," Rowan said, spreading his hands, "prevents it from being destroyed in battle by any monster with 1900 or more attack points. Cyber Blader's attack was wasted."
A beat of silence across the lake.
"..." Alexis. Jasmine. Mindy.
"..." Jaden, Chumley, and Crowler.
"Actually," Syrus said slowly, working through it aloud without quite realizing he was speaking, "Blade Skater has 1400 attack, which is under 1900. So if Alexis-senpai hadn't gone into the fusion, and instead just normal summoned Blade Skater to attack directly... it would have been enough to destroy the face-down Obnoxious Celtic Guardian. And then Etoile Cyber could have hit Rowan for direct damage."
The self-murmured observation landed in the silence like a stone into still water.
It was, objectively, correct.
And for Alexis - who had just misread the entire situation, built a confident read on a wrong assumption, and executed a fusion summon that accomplished precisely nothing - it was a second impact on top of the first.
[Ding! Alexis's Emotion Points +300.]
Listening to the chime, Rowan had the quiet feeling that this duel might end up producing more Emotion Points than yesterday's match against Chazz.