My Soul card is a Reaper

The original plus formation is based on Hydra taking the center of the formation while Leah takes the head, Claire takes the tail, and Azzy and his black wolf take each side.

As the center, Hydra\'s job is to assist the one who is locked in close combat with the enemy. If it is Leah, then, the snake could use wind attribute to assist her fire attacks or might use Leah\'s Arcana Izarok\'s water for its advantage. Because of its multi attributes, the four-headed snake would make an excellent assistant to anyone.

Meanwhile, the other three would also assist the main attacker with range attacks or using support-type skill cards. Based on the enemy\'s position, Azzy, Claire, Leah, and Vajra would rotate around the multi-headed snake while conserving their energy.

However, Azzy never expected that he will stumble on a situation where he could literally gain another pawn. That\'s why he never hesitated to use his Spear of Death onto the snow wolf as soon as Leah suggested it. Now, with the addition of Snow wolf, he could just make his own formation without the need of Leah. After all, his team up with Leah was like a one-time thing. Eventually, he will go back to the Academy and Gideon might have to replace Leah\'s position.

In his honest position, Gideon isn\'t a good replacement. But, now, the issue has been solved and he was happy that he could use this formation anywhere.

Back to the battle, Azzy was locked in close combat against the beast. With his speed and reflexes comparable to that of an Exalt realm expert, the Draco Galarian Beta couldn\'t even land a single attack on him while it was getting beaten up in every round.

In the meantime, Claire was creating golden spears and throwing at him one after another over Hydra\'s head in a projectile motion. Snow wolf was spewing out snowball attacks from its mouth, Vajra is blasting away black lightning energy balls at the enemy, and Hydra is using wind bullets to attack the beast.

If the opponent is someone else weaker, they would have long been defeated. However, with its high defense, the Draco Galarian Beta managed to hold itself against the four except for the snow wolf, which is a peak-rank-6 platinum grade beast. With Azzy not giving it any chance to counterattack, the light wounds became heavy.

Enduring the attacks, it attempted to fly high but once again, Azzy\'s energy-powered punch forced it to crash on the ground. After trying seven times, it finally managed to get away.

Blood was trickling down its mouth. Several bruises and wounds could be seen on its body.

*Roar*

Roaring in anger, it flew higher and higher until fifty-meter range, the beast suddenly transformed back to heavily bruised Vann except that he still retained dragon wings.

"I wanted to kill you through fair means as a way of displaying my strength but if it doesn\'t work, then, using unfair means is also fine too." Taking out an activated skill card from his shared storage card with the counterpart, Vann eyed the two humans in the group.

He glanced at the pre-activated eight-star skill card. It has the image of two humans with one of them being connected by energy threads to the other\'s fingertips. Vann bought this skill card for several millions of Krocs through an instructor at Moon Academy.

<strong>"Skill card: Puppet Control, activate."</strong> He poured the soul energy into it and activated the skill card, targeting Claire.

A beam of golden lightning energy escaped from the card and shot towards Claire like a flash.

"Careful," Azzy shouted in panic, feeling the intense power behind the attack. Claire who was also keeping an eye on the beast sensed the power behind it and quickly flapped her wings to dodge but she wasn\'t fast enough to dodge the attack and was struck at the abdomen.

"Claire… Eh?" At first, Azzy was panicked to see Claire was harmed and was even ready to use the hourglass in case, something unfortunate happens to her. However, to his surprise, she wasn\'t harmed in the least. Claire seemed completely fine or so he thought until he saw her eyes changed to that of cold before throwing the golden spear in her hands at the twenty-foot snake standing in the center of the formation.

"What the…" Azzy was taken aback by her sudden attack. Before he came out of his senses, the golden spear struck one of the heads of skeletal Hydra and destroyed it.

"Why is Claire attacking…" Something suddenly clicked on his mind and he abruptly turned his head towards the sky. "Is that because of the earlier attack?" He wondered.

*Hisssss*

The Hydra let out a powerful hiss in anger, displaying its animosity against Claire for harming it. While Vajra seemed to be confused by her actions, the skeletal Snow wolf, which only joined the team a while ago and doesn\'t have any relationship with Claire, also turned towards her and bared its teeth, treating her like an enemy to its master.

Claire recovered her soul power instantly and dashed towards Hydra while creating twin golden swords in her hands.

"She was struck by an eight-star skill card. She was now nothing but a puppet to the Draco Galarian." The Reaper informed Azzy and confirmed his suspicions.

"Then, how to get her back?" Azzy immediately sought a solution while ordering Hydra and his other beasts to not attack her. In the meantime, Vann took out a healing card to heal his wounds.

"One is to knock her out with Soul Absorption. Two, kill the controller of the puppet. And three, raise her to mutate gold grade Arcana spirit by another level so that it can possess the host." The Reaper put forth three solutions before Azzy, taking him by surprise.

"Raise her Arcana\'s grade?" Azzy was taken aback upon hearing the third solution. After all, it is impossible for a rank-5 to raise the grade of their Arcana spirit. After all, any type of Arcana can mutate only at three instances, when breakthrough from Rank-3 to rank-4, Rank-6 to Rank-7, Rank-9 to Rank-10 unless it gets infected by Protos Energy.

Remembering Barbara\'s case, he wondered whether the Reaper is suggesting for him to use the Protos energy to mutate her Arcana. But, wasn\'t most of his Protos Energy sealed inside Vajra? His soul energy was no longer being dominated by the Protos energy like in the past. Is it still possible? And even it is possible, how can he infect others without asking their permission. Infecting Barbara by accident is one thing but purposely infecting his girlfriend is entirely another issue despite how it helps her.

With a lot of thoughts, as Azzy went into a dilemma, the Reaper\'s words once again echoed in his head to clear his misunderstandings, "I\'m not suggesting Protos energy. And it is quite dangerous for you if her Arcana spirit is infected with Protos energy. We don\'t want to incur the wrath of the Angels."

"Eh? Angels? Not using Protos energy? What do you mean?" Azzy was confused by his words.

The Reaper proceeded to reveal the secret that was only known to Leah until now, "her Arcana spirit is the sword of Archangel Michael. There were complex seals placed upon it, which will be unlocked at the specific breakthroughs. In normalcy, the sword will retain its mutated Celestial grade on its own when Claire becomes a Demi-god but I guess I can remove one of the seals to let the sword of Michael become a Platinum grade and unlock the consciousness of the spirit."

"Archangel Michael?" Azzy still remembered the name. It was uttered by the Reaper when he first attended the card creation class. It was the day when he met Claire for the first time. "So, this is why her healing ability is too powerful compared to other light attribute users?" His suspicions of her possessing the Life Attribute despite not being an Angel became stronger.

"Oraaa"

Claire\'s roar brought Azzy back to reality and he immediately agreed with the Reaper\'s proposal upon seeing his girlfriend was aggressively attacking a poor undead hydra, which cannot attack her due to its master\'s order and is too huge to dodge her attacks with ease.

Soon, the Reaper took over his body and raised his hand to perform a seal. Vann saw the unknown seal and got alerted and quickly transformed back into beast\'s form and spew out a fireball.

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