Aelius stared at the mountain of a man standing across the sand. He had suspected this match was coming since the draw ceremony the previous evening, which had been conducted with an unusual amount of haste, and the board that morning had confirmed it. Lady luck had arranged nothing here. Viewership and profit had arranged it, and Aelius had spent enough time around guild finances to recognize the shape of a decision made by people who counted ticket sales.
Jura stood at the center of the arena with his feet planted and his hands loose at his sides. His shoulders were broad enough to block the light from the lower stands behind him, and he looked at Aelius with the calm of someone who intended to stay exactly where he was until something forced him to move. Aelius looked back and gave him a short nod. Jura returned it.
The announcer's voice came over the arena, and it carried the brightness of a man who had been handed a very good script. "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the last battles of this year's grand magic games. I would like to preface that opponents in the Grand Magic Games are drawn by lots, and this one was not." He paused to let the crowd murmur. "Representing Fairy Tail, a Wizard Saint. Representing Lamia Scale, a Wizard Saint. Saint against Saint. I am required to inform you that this arrangement is a technical breach of the Games regulations, and the committee wishes it understood that the exception was requested personally by His Majesty the King."
The noise in the stands went up. Aelius turned his head slightly toward the royal box, where a distant figure sat beneath a canopy with a cluster of attendants around him, and he did not bother to read anything the figure at that distance.
"His Majesty has expressed an interest," the announcer went on, "in seeing how the defenders of this nation measure against threats of equal power. It is, he has said, a question that should be answered under controlled conditions rather than discovered on a battlefield." There was a pause that sounded like the man turning a page. "That is what you are about to see."
Aelius exhaled slowly through his nose. It was a reasonable argument, and it was also a convenient one. The king wanted a demonstration, the committee wanted a draw, and neither of them had been willing to ask the two men standing on the sand whether they wanted to provide it. He did not mind. The fight suited him, and what he intended to say before it began suited him more.
He raised one hand and drew his magic up into his throat, the way he had done on the guild stage the day he returned. A thin pulse of it ran through the air in front of him, and when he spoke his voice carried to every tier of the arena without any change in volume.
"I will take a moment of the committee's time." The stands went quiet. The announcer began to say something and stopped.
"I have spent the last several weeks reading the rules and regulations that accompany the title Jura and I both carry," Aelius said. "Most of it is administrative and has no bearing on anyone in this arena. One clause does. It concerns the ranking of the Ten Wizard Saints, and it has not been invoked in a very long time." He turned slowly so that his voice reached the upper sections on every side. "It states that any Saint may challenge another for their seat, publicly, before witnesses and before the Council. If the challenger wins, the seat changes hands. If the challenger loses, the matter closes. Jura of Lamia Scale holds sixth rank," Aelius continued. "He took it when Makarov Dreyar was declared missing, and it was given to him without contest, as these things usually are." He lowered his hand and looked across the sand at the man who stood there listening. "Jura. I challenge you to a rank duel. If I win, I claim your seat."
The silence that followed lasted for roughly the time it took a person to look to the person beside them. Then the arena came apart.
A man in the third row stood up and said something that no one could hear. A woman near the barrier dropped a cup of water and left it where it fell. The judges leaned toward each other and spoke fast, and one of them began paging through a thick binder with the speed of someone hoping the clause did not exist. The announcer made a sound that was half cough and half laughter before he found words again. "Ladies and gentlemen, I will need a moment. Please, remain calm. We are consulting the regulations."
Aelius waited. He stood with his arms at his sides and his cloak still, and the noise washed over him without effect. He knew the clause existed, because he had read it four times. He had read it in the library of the Magnolia guild, on a night when the guildhall was empty and the only sound was the fire, and he had marked the page with one of Levy's many left over bookmarks. The reasoning was simple, and contributed to Aelius's sudden change of plans. People didn't fear him, or if they did, it wasn't enough, publicly beating one of the wizard saints, and taking his seat, would show Aelius's power, and more once he won.
The judges finished conferring a few minutes later. One of them stood and spoke to the announcer in a low voice, and the announcer returned to his microphone and cleared his throat. "The committee confirms," he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the word, "that the clause is valid. A rank duel is a lawful challenge between two Wizard Saints and may be accepted or declined by the challenged party. Should Jura of Lamia Scale decline, the matter ends, though they will still duel. Should he accept, the result of today's match will determine the ownership of the sixth seat."
Every face in the arena turned toward Jura.
He had not moved during any of it. He stood where he had been standing, his hands at his sides, his head slightly tilted as if he were listening for something under the noise. He looked at Aelius for a long while, and then he looked at the judges, and at the royal box, and at the stands where the Lamia Scale section sat in a tight cluster of banners and wide eyes. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them he was looking at Aelius again.
"You have read the regulations carefully," Jura said. His voice was deep and steady and it reached the nearest rows without any help. "I will admit that I had forgotten the clause existed. I suspect most of the Council had as well."
"Most of them have," Aelius agreed, nodding.
"The challenge is lawful." Jura lifted his chin. "I do not hold the sixth seat because I wanted it. I hold it because it was given to me, and I have tried to carry it in a manner that honored the man whose place I took. If you believe you can carry it better, then you have every right to prove it." He set his feet wider, and the ground beneath his boots gave a faint groan. "I accept."
The arena roared. It was a long noise, building and breaking and building again, and the announcer was shouting something into the middle of it that did not matter. Aelius lowered his hand and let the amplified magic fall away from his throat. His voice returned to its normal level, and he spoke across the sand in a tone only Jura could hear.
"If you win, I will not raise it again."
"I would not expect you to," Jura said. He rolled his shoulders once and the sand around his feet shifted. "And I will give this match the effort it deserves."
"That's what I wanted."
A faint line appeared at the corner of Jura's mouth. It was not quite a smile, and it vanished before the crowd could see it. He drew a breath and brought his hands together in front of his chest, and the ground trembled as the earth underneath the arena began to answer him. Stone ridges rose along the edges of the field. Cracks ran outward from his boots in slow, deliberate lines.
Aelius stepped forward "You are a good man, Jura," he said. His voice was level and carried across the open ground with ease, "I will not insult you with petty tricks of disguise, and I will not insult you with cruelty. You have earned neither."
He sighed, and the cloak left his shoulders. It folded into a pulse of pale light and went into his requip space, and his wings were left folded flat against his back with the long feathers lying close along his spine. The nearest rows saw them and murmured. Most of the arena had already seen them the day before, and the murmur passed quickly, because everyone had noticed what he was doing with his right hand.
His fingers had found the edge of the mask. He pulled it down slowly, over his nose and then his mouth and then his chin, and held it in front of his chest for a moment before he sent it after the cloak. The light took it. His hand came back down to his side.
The face under it was younger than the rumors had made it. His eyes were emerald and they stayed fixed on Jura without flinching from the light of the open sky. He had not stood before a crowd this size ever. And he had not taken the mask off willingly since that day either, not for the guild, not for the Council, and not for the mirror in his house. He stood with his face bare in front of ten thousand people and let them look.
Nobody spoke. A child somewhere in the upper tier asked a question that was answered in a whisper. The announcer's microphone had been left open, and a long breath came through it that no one had meant to broadcast.
Jura looked at him for a long moment. His heavy brow drew together and his expression softened, and then he lowered his head in a short bow that was a good deal deeper than the nod from before. "Thank you," he said. "I understand what that cost."
"It cost very little," Aelius said. "Come."
Jura straightened. He set his feet wide and brought his palms together in front of his chest, and the ground under the arena answered him. The dirt floor had been packed hard by three days of matches, and it split along a dozen thin lines that ran outward from his boots like the roots of a tree. The ridges at the edge of the field lifted another foot. A low grinding note went through the stone under the stands, and the people in the front rows gripped their seats.
"Plague God's Pestilent Arrow," Aelius said, holding out his hand. The lance formed in the air before his palm, a long, thin spear of dark green energy that crackled faintly at the edges, and he sent it across the field in a single, flat line. It crossed the distance between them faster than the eye could follow. Jura saw it leave and moved his hands in a short, economical motion, and a wall of grey rock shot up out of the dirt in front of him, thick as a doorway and twice as tall, and watched as the arrow struck the center of it.
The sound was a deep crack that rolled around the arena like thunder. A shower of grit blew outward from the point of impact, and the wall shuddered along its whole length. The stone under the arrow went black, then soft, and a slow stain crept outward from the wound in widening rings, eating into the face of the rock. Jura watched it spread for a heartbeat and then pressed a palm against the wall from his side. The stain stopped, and a fresh layer of stone grew over the rotted section like a scab, and the wall stood straight again.
Aelius clicked his tongue, he had suspected this would be an annoying fight from the moment he had met jura, and watching the stain stop spreading across the wall confirmed it. Dirt and rock were not things that decayed easily. His plague fed on what was alive or had once been alive, on the binding magic that held a spell together, on flesh and wood and the soft living things that most mages relied on without thinking. Stone had very little of any of that to offer. The only thing he could really rot was the thin film of Jura's own magic that kept each piece in place, and a man with Jura's reserves could renew that film faster than the mold could eat it. In a thick enough layer, rock could stop his magic entirely, and a wall of it had just done exactly that.
It was another bad matchup, though not a bad enough one to tilt the fight very far. Jura could defend against him, but defending was all it did. A defense could be worn thin, outpaced, or walked around, and Aelius had plenty of ways to do all three.
He felt the ground below him tremble, and he spread his wings and took to the air.
The first beat lifted him clear of the dirt, and the second carried him over the ridge that Jura had raised along the east side of the field. A spike of stone burst up through the spot where his boots had been a moment before. Another one followed it, then a third, each one a little higher than the last, and Aelius tilted his wings and rose above them in a long slanting climb. The roar of the stands dropped away as the wind began to whistle through his feathers. The arena spread out beneath him, a broken bowl of grey stone and churned earth with a single broad figure standing at the center of it.
Jura raised his arms.
The dirt under the whole field lifted in a rolling wave, and a mass of boulders tore loose from it and rose toward Aelius in a rising cloud. They came up fast and they came up together, a hundred separate stones turning slowly against the sky. Aelius pulled his wings in against his back and dropped into a spiral to meet them. He passed between the first two with a hair's space on either side and rolled under a third, and a fourth glanced across his shoulder and spun him halfway around. He caught himself with a flare of his wings and opened his right hand.
"Plague God's Aegis."
A shell of mottled green light unfolded around him in a loose dome, thin as glass and faintly veined with darker lines like the ribs of a leaf. The next wave of boulders slammed into it and the dome rang like a struck bell. Cracks raced across the surface where each stone landed, and every crack sealed itself a heartbeat later with a faint wet shimmer. He drifted through the barrage inside it with the stones breaking against the shell on every side, grey fragments tumbling away in clouds, and when the last boulder shattered he dropped the dome and let it fade.
Jura had already moved. He stood on a tall pillar of rock that was still rising under him, carrying him up toward the height where Aelius hung, and the pillar widened as it climbed until it became a broad flat platform. He planted his feet on it and swung one arm in a short heavy arc, and a stone fist the size of a house burst out of the dirt below and punched upward at Aelius's chest.
Aelius folded his wings and fell out of its path. The fist went past him with a roar of displaced air and kept going until it reached the end of its arc, and he caught the edge of it with one hand and swung himself over the top of the knuckles. He ran along the back of the fist toward Jura's platform with the dark mist already building around his arm, and when he reached the wrist he dropped to one knee and drove his palm against the stone.
"Plague God's Carrion Gale." The wind poured out of his hand in a long corrosive stream. It moved along the surface of the fist like a living thing, a pale green current that left a trail of black pitting wherever it passed, and the stone began to flake and slump behind it. The gale rushed up the arm of the construct and into the pillar beneath Jura, and the whole structure shuddered, the man stamped his foot. A new layer of rock grew over the rotting section with a loud grinding crack, and the gale hit the fresh stone and slowed, but did not stop. It pushed into the new layer one grain at a time, and Jura had to keep feeding it with more rock to hold the pillar steady.
Aelius stood on the fist and let the gale run. Then he took his hand away from the stone and leapt.
He crossed the gap between the fist and the platform in a single bound, wings spread, and landed on the edge of the platform with his knees bent. Jura turned to face him. The big man's hands were already coming together, and a ring of spears shot up from the platform around Aelius in a tight circle. Aelius twisted between two of them, and a third scored a line across his ribs, and he kept moving. He closed with Jura in three strides and struck him in the middle of the chest with his open palm.
The stone armor across Jura's torso cracked and held. Jura staggered back and caught Aelius's wrist in a heavy fist, and he pulled. It spun Aelius around and brought him up against the surface of the platform, and Jura's other hand came down on his back like a falling anvil. The breath left him. The platform cracked beneath his chest. Jura raised his hand to strike again, and Aelius twisted under the grip and slammed his knee into the underside of Jura's elbow.
The grip broke. Aelius rolled away across the platform and came up on one knee with his wings pulled tight around him. Jura was already turning to follow him. Aelius snapped both wings outward in a single hard beat that threw a gust of wind across the platform and knocked a long strip of loose gravel into Jura's face, and in the half second that bought him he swept his arm across the air.
"Plague God's Bloom."
A scatter of pale seeds sprang from his fingertips and drifted across the gap. They landed on Jura's shoulders and chest and arms, and for a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then each one split and a thin green stem uncurled from it, and the stems opened into small pale flowers that clung to the seams of the armor. The flowers shed a fine golden dust. The dust drifted upward, settled on the next patch of stone, and sprouted new stems in turn. Within three breaths the entire front of Jura's armor was covered in a creeping garden of blooms, each one dropping its own spores and each one feeding on the one beside it.
Jura looked down at himself and clenched his fists. The rock across his body flexed outward in a short sharp pulse, and the flowers shook loose in a cloud of petals. A second pulse followed the first and more of them dropped away. He brushed at his arms with a hand like a shovel and shed another handful, and Aelius watched the spores that had fallen across the platform land in the cracks between the stones and begin to sprout there.
The platform shuddered. Aelius leapt off it a moment before it dropped.
Jura had let the pillar fall. It came apart in a long grinding avalanche that sent chunks of grey rock rolling down the sides and into the broken ground below, and he fell with it in a controlled slide, riding the largest slab like a sled. He hit the ground with both feet and the dirt around him rose in a wide ring to catch the debris. Aelius dropped from above and landed in the middle of the ring with a heavy thud, and Jura met him with a punch that took him across the jaw.
It was a clean hit and it knocked his head sideways. A hot bright line of pain ran down the side of his neck. He rolled with it and swung a backhanded fist into Jura's ribs, and the stone armor cracked under the knuckles, and Jura grunted and swung again. They traded blows in the middle of the ring with the dust rising around them. Jura's strikes landed like falling boulders, heavy and slow and sure, and each one rocked Aelius back a step. Aelius's strikes were faster and sharper, a series of short cutting blows that chipped at the armor in a dozen places at once. Neither of them gave ground.
After the sixth exchange Aelius changed rhythm. He ducked beneath a looping right hand and came up inside Jura's guard, and the dark mist rose off his skin and pooled around his fist. He drove the fist into Jura's stomach.
"Plague God's: withering maw."
The mist poured into the point of contact and the stone went grey and brittle under his knuckles. A web of black veins raced outward from the impact across the surface of the armor, and chunks of it fell away in dry flakes. Jura gasped and folded around the blow, and Aelius followed it with a hard elbow to the back of his neck. Jura dropped to one knee. The ring of earth around them started to collapse inward as his concentration slipped, and a shower of loose dirt rained down across both of them.
Aelius stepped back and spread his wings wide.
Jura lifted his head. He drew a long breath and slammed both fists into the ground, and the field erupted. A forest of stone teeth tore up through the dirt in every direction, a hundred pillars of different heights thrusting out at angles that crossed and cut across each other. Aelius threw himself upward. A pillar caught him in the thigh and another caught his wing, and he spun in the air with pain flaring across his back and a long ugly gash opening in his side. He clawed upward through the forest with his wings beating against the stone, scraping past one pillar after another, and burst out of the top of it into open air.
He hung there for a moment, breathing hard, while the wounds closed beneath his shirt. The stone forest spread across the arena below him, a thick bristling mass with Jura somewhere in the middle of it. The pillars were packed close together and tangled in a way that left no clear path through. Aelius looked down at them. Then he drew in a deep breath and filled his chest with air.
"Plague God's Bellow."
The roar tore out of his throat in a long rolling blast. It was not a sound as much as a pressure, a wall of sickly green wind that fell on the stone forest like a hammer. The pillars on the near side shattered at once, bursting into clouds of pale dust. The ones behind them cracked and leaned, and the ones behind those began to rot from the tips downward as the wind poured over them. The whole forest shuddered and slumped, a hundred columns folding in on one another in a long grinding collapse, and a thick grey cloud rose from the wreckage and rolled across the field in a slow wave.
The bellow went on until his lungs emptied. When he stopped, the noise in the arena had dropped to a faint ringing hush. The cloud was still settling. The stands were silent, and then, slowly, a ragged sound began to rise from them.
Aelius floated above the ruins and waited.
A stone arm shot out of the dust, a long thick limb of grey rock that wrapped around his ankle and yanked. He was pulled out of the air with a violent jerk and slammed into the ground on his back, and the arm lifted him again and hurled him across the field. He hit a standing column with his shoulder and went through it. He tumbled into the dirt, rolling, and came up on his hands and knees with a mouthful of grit and his ears ringing.
Jura emerged from the dust.
He walked slowly, his armor cracked and flaking and streaked with black, patches of it hanging in loose scraps from his shoulders. The flowers that had grown across his chest were gone, and in their place were raw patches where the stone had been eaten away. He carried himself with a heavy deliberate tread, and the ground rumbled softly as he walked. Behind him the broken pillars were beginning to move, lifting off the earth and gathering around his shoulders in a rising mass. Slabs and boulders and slivers of rock peeled away from the ruin and joined the swirl, and the whole cloud of debris turned slowly above his head like a storm.
Aelius pushed himself to his feet. A thin trickle of blood ran down from his hairline and he wiped it away, and the cut was already sealing. He rolled his shoulders back and unfurled his wings, and the dark mist began to gather around his arms again in thick coiling streamers. The air between the two of them tightened.
Jura opened his hand, and the storm of stone came down.
Aelius threw up his arm and the shell of green light snapped into place around him, and the first wave of rocks struck it from every side. The dome rang and cracked and sealed. The second wave hit it harder, and the third made it buckle inward. He held it with his teeth set and one hand braced against the crushing weight, and the cracks widened with every blow. Fragments of grey stone sprayed outward in every direction. The shell began to thin, the green fading toward transparent, and he could feel Jura's magic pressing against it like a hand against a window.
He dropped to one knee and pushed his palm against the ground.
"Plague God's Carrion Gale."
The wind burst from the dirt under his hand and rushed outward in every direction at once, a wide flat tide that rolled across the field and swept through the cloud of falling debris. The stones turned black as it passed. They softened in midair and sagged, and chunks of them crumbled into dust before they could land. The pressure on the dome lifted all at once. The shell collapsed, and Aelius rose through the cloud of falling dust with the gale still pouring off him in a widening ring.
Jura raised a wall to meet it. The gale hit the wall and began to eat, and Jura grunted as he shoved more stone into the gap to hold it. The two of them stood across the broken field from each other with the wind howling between them and the dust whirling in the air, each one pouring magic into a contest that neither could win quickly. The wall groaned. The gale thinned. The ground between them began to tremble again, and the crowd above them rose to its feet.
Aelius broke free of his impromptu imprisonment, and used his wings to create distance, hovering in the air above Jura, the bruises, small cuts and whatever else Jura has inflicted were already healed, while the rock titan himself, though standing, was breathing hard, and clearly in some distress.
The fight was nearing its conclusion, and Aelius found himself enjoying something for once.