Chapter 173

"Since your turn's over, I suppose it's mine now."

Watching Tania end her turn with obvious reluctance, the smile on Rowan's face only grew brighter. He activated his skill and drew from the top of his deck with full force.

"My turn, draw!"

For a split second, Jaden and Chazz, watching from nearby, both caught a familiar, unsettling presence flicker across Rowan.

"Is that guy about to get serious?!" Chazz blurted out, as if some deeply traumatic memory had just resurfaced.

Jaden, that hot-blooded idiot, wore the exact same expression.

He remembered all too well what it felt like being "tormented" by Rowan's ghoulish deck before.

It always started right around the moment that particular aura, the full-power "duelist's presence," began radiating off of him, building toward its peak...

"Let me teach you how the true power of the Amazon tribe is actually supposed to be used."

Barely even glancing at the card he'd just drawn, having pulled it while channeling the pinnacle of his mirror-calm, still-water mindset, Rowan slapped it down onto his Duel Disk with that same "kindly" smile still fixed on his face.

"I Normal Summon Amazoness Swords Woman in Attack Position!"

"Nani? Amazoness Swords Woman?!"

Both Tania, his opponent across the field, and the watching Alexis and Professor Crowler, all wore the exact same look of stunned, blank-faced disbelief.

In the blink of an eye, amid a faint shimmer of light, a startlingly familiar figure rose up with a low battle cry: a tall, muscular Amazon swordswoman with violet-red hair, gripping a curved longsword, appearing on the field before Rowan.

[Amazoness Swords Woman] [Level: 4] [Attribute: EARTH] [ATK: 1500] [DEF: 1600]

Identical in every single respect to the Amazoness Swords Woman Tania herself had summoned earlier!

Was this, in some technical sense, a form of poaching?

"Well, no matter how you got your hands on a card from our own Amazon tribe, you're still nowhere near good enough to beat me."

After a moment of shock, Tania quickly shrugged the surprise off and spoke to Rowan with her usual confidence restored, not even bothering to ask how he'd come by the card.

Having a Duel Spirit from the Gravekeeper clan's assassins tagging along at his side already told her that this "kid" named Rowan had been to the other world where their Duel Spirits lived before.

Maybe at some point along the way he'd also passed close to the Amazon tribe's own territory, and somehow walked away with a copy of Amazoness Swords Woman.

But beating her? He was still nowhere close.

Tania was brimming with confidence.

On her field, she still had Amazoness Paladin, flipped face-down into Defense Position by Rowan's Quick-Play Spell, Book of Moon, just moments ago.

Even if it got destroyed in battle, it wouldn't deal her much damage at all.

And thanks to the Field Spell Amazon Arena she'd activated earlier, the moment that card resolved, both players had recovered 600 Life Points.

Rowan's Life Points had already climbed from their original 4000 straight up to 4600.

And her own, after being whittled down to 3000, had likewise recovered all the way back up to a healthy 3600.

Add to that her set traps waiting to cut an opponent's monster's attack power and Special Summon her own monsters, and this turn, that kid Rowan would find it nearly impossible to deal her any meaningful damage at all.

Then next turn, all she had to do was Normal Summon one high-attack monster to destroy Rowan's Amazoness Swords Woman, and the scales of victory would tip back in her favor once more.

But just as the corner of Tania's mouth curled up in a confident smile while she worked through this plan, she heard Rowan hit her with a line that was, infuriatingly, starting to sound all too familiar.

"That's not necessarily true!"

Rowan said it with an easy smile, waving a hand toward the field.

"Battle Phase. Bloom Diva the Melodious Choir, attack the face-down Amazoness Paladin in Defense Position! Reflected Roar!"

At Rowan's command, the silver-haired little songstress on his field, with a mere 500 ATK, threw back her head and released a wave of green sound energy, surging straight toward the massive face-down card on Tania's side of the field.

"WONN!!"

The impact flipped the face-down card exactly as Rowan intended, a faint glow spilling out from within as it reformed into the figure of the blonde Amazon warrior draped in tattered white cloth.

Only now she was crouched low in a defensive stance, arms crossed before her, over the sideways card she'd just been flipped up from.

"Trap Card, open! Amazoness Archers!"

Just as the green sound wave from Bloom Diva the Melodious Choir was about to slam into and destroy the Amazon warrior with her mere 300 DEF, Tania threw up a hand, pointing toward one of the two set cards on her field.

A trap flipped open at once, and out of it rose a squad of Amazon women wielding crossbows.

"Amazoness Archers's effect. The moment your monster declares an attack, as long as I control a monster with 'Amazoness' in its name, every monster on your field has its attack power reduced by 500!"

As Tania's words fell, a wave of dark violet energy burst forth from the crowd of Amazon archers rising out of the trap on her field.

It swept over both the silver-haired little songstress on Rowan's side and the tall, muscular, violet-haired Amazon swordswoman standing beside her.

Both monsters' attack power ticked steadily downward, dropping to 0 ATK and 1000 ATK respectively.

And the wave of green sound energy that had been bearing down on the crouched, defensively-postured Amazoness Paladin suddenly seemed to lose all its power.

It struck her harmlessly, doing nothing at all, and dissipated into nothing a moment later.