The cobblestones beneath Aelius's boots gleamed faintly with heat—Erza's rescue, Evergreen's punishment, the smoke of judgment still clinging to his coat. He moved now with quiet certainty, heading toward the high spire of Kardia Cathedral rising in the east like a needle poised over the city's throat.
He didn't rush.
There was no need.
Laxus had announced himself with fire and thunder. Aelius would answer in kind.
But then—something changed.
A strange sensation brushed the edge of his awareness. Not magic exactly, not hostile—but foreign, sudden. He halted, one foot paused in the air as a flicker of light caught the corner of his vision. Then another. And another.
He turned slowly.
The sky was no longer sky.
Hundreds—hundreds—of glowing orbs floated high above the rooftops, scattered across Magnolia like a swarm of silent, golden sentinels. They pulsed with light, humming in eerie unison, crackling faintly as if waiting for something.
His jaw clenched. The spellwork was crude in appearance but overwhelming in scale. He didn't recognize the make or method—but he didn't have to.
He already understood.
Laxus wasn't trying to win anymore.
He was trying to punish them all.
And standing there beneath the pale menace of a hundred silent bombs, Aelius realized this wasn't just a coup. It wasn't just a bid for control.
It was a temper tantrum large enough to drown a city.
He looked up at the orbs, expression unreadable—calm, almost. The kind of calm that came before a slaughter.
Then he turned again, toward the east, toward the cathedral.
The Thunder Palace could wait.
Laxus couldn't.
He moved through the city like a shadow thrown in daylight—quiet, deliberate, unhurried. The path ahead sloped toward the distant outline of Kardia Cathedral, its silhouette jagged against the blue. The air, warm and wind-stirred, carried the mingled scents of stone, dust, and festival flowers. But something was wrong. He felt it before he saw it. A shift. A change in the weave of the world around him.
It was not light or sound that gave it away.
It was pressure.
And then it came—a voice, inside the space behind his eyes, bright and clear and unnatural. Not memory. Not madness. Magic. "Everyone. Listen. This is Warren."
He slowed, just slightly. "I've linked all of us with my telepathy. The city is surrounded by enchanted lacrima. Hundreds. Laxus calls it the Thunder Palace."
The wind brushed his face. His expression didn't change. "If we don't destroy them in time, they'll rain down lightning over everything. It won't just be us—it'll hit the whole city. Civilians. Families."
Another voice joined. Familiar. Irritated. "He's not bluffing," Gray cut in. "I saw them. This isn't a game."
The spell-thread Warren had cast rippled—then splintered under the weight of too many voices breaking through at once.
Jet, angry. Droy, defensive. Tensions bubbling to the surface like rot beneath cracked stone.
"You cheap-shot me, Jet!"
"You started it, Droy!"
"I wasn't even using full strength—what's your excuse?"
"Screw you!"
Everyone was talking, no one was listening. All of them still bleeding from their own personal skirmishes, now pulled into a war that demanded unity none of them had left to give.
The mental tether wavered under the chaos.
And Aelius let it happen.
For a moment.
Let the noise climb. Let the truth of their frayed brotherhood stretch tight.
Then he said, very simply:
"Shut up."
He did not raise his voice. He did not inject fury or volume or even scorn.
But the silence that followed was immediate.
Even inside a shared mental space—woven by spell, thought, and guild mark—the force of it landed like a guillotine.
It was the kind of quiet that follows when something enters the room that should not exist. That should not have voice or presence or breath—but does. Every voice that had been shouting went dead. No one spoke. Not Jet. Not Gray. Not even Cana.
It wasn't respect. It wasn't fear.
It was instinct.
Because in that instant, even through magic, they felt him. Not just the words, but the thing beneath them. The pressure in his voice. The iron behind his restraint. It pressed against the spell's boundaries like a blade slipped into the heart of a conversation.
And then, just as quietly, the moment passed. He resumed walking. No further explanation. No orders. No comfort.
None was needed.
The cathedral waited ahead, and he would reach it in time.
But before that, clarity.
Aelius's steps didn't slow, boots brushing over the weathered stone of Magnolia's central road, but his voice re-entered the link, measured now, low and surgical. A blade used not to threaten, but to dissect. "Warren. You said your name was?"
There was a pause—on the line, in the city, in the fragile hearts of those still tethered together by Warren's spell. "Yes… yeah. Warren Rocko. I'm one of the—"
"What stops us," Aelius interrupted, soft as falling ash, "from simply destroying the palace?"
It was not a challenge. Not even a true question. Just sound—a low thread woven into the chaos. But the moment it entered the link, everything recoiled. Even across the magical thread, even filtered through Warren's carefully maintained communication, it landed like a blade laid on the back of the neck. Cold. Inescapable. And very, very still.
Tension snapped back into place with the sharpness of a held breath.
Warren's reply came too fast, stumbling, like a man trying to walk across ice. "The—the Thunder Palace system, it's not just anchored in the sky—it's rigged with a reactive circuit. Motion-based. Proximity. Energy fluctuations. They're tethered to the city's leylines, and—"
He paused, recalibrating his tone, trying to level it before continuing. "There's a feedback loop built into it. Anyone trying to tamper with the lacrima directly… it pushes the interference back through the attacker. It'll hit them like a backlash of pure magic force. The stronger the attempt, the worse the rebound."
Aelius didn't respond immediately.
He didn't need to.
The silence he left in his wake was its own presence—an uncoiled thing, waiting.
The others felt it. They didn't say they did. But they felt it. Even through Warren's magic, through the buzzing ether of connection, they felt something shift—something beneath their feet, inside their chests. The way people sense a predator just before it moves. Or an executioner lifting his hand.
Still, no reply.
Just footfalls. Quiet, steady. Getting closer to something none of them could see.
Cana was the one who cracked first.
"Look," she said, frustrated. "Can we not poke the damned hive while we're still inside it? Some of us are barely holding the line as is."
Droy added, "This thing's got tripwires on top of tripwires. We try to blast it, we all go with it. We've seen what Laxus is willing to do. He's not bluffing."
And Max—his voice tight, frayed—spoke from whatever broken place the day had left him in. "If it comes down, it takes civilians. Families. Everyone. That's what this is about. That's what he wants—to make us fear the cost of fighting back."
Aelius walked.
Each step fell with surgical rhythm. Deliberate. Grounded. Like a pendulum marking out time until something broke.
And then—
At last—
He spoke again.
Still soft. Still without urgency.
"You're all worried about detonations and casualties. About Laxus."
The pause was a breath, but it stretched.
"I'm not."
It wasn't a boast. It wasn't comfort. Just a simple, immutable fact, presented like a stone dropped into water. Weighty. Final. Merciless.
In the silence that followed, not even the wind dared speak.
"Because Laxus won't do it."
Aelius's voice threaded through the link again—low, composed, stripped of fury or doubt. It was not a guess. Not speculation. It was the kind of certainty that came from understanding people the way some men understood weather patterns, or blood.
"He's a narcissist, not a fanatic. He wants to be obeyed, feared. Worshiped. But not hated. Not by them. Not by those who carry the mark of Fairy Tail."
The others said nothing.
He continued, voice like stone cooling after a forgefire. "If he drops those lacrima, he knows what happens next. He wins nothing. He becomes the villain in the story he's been writing himself into since the day he learned to cast a spell. And deep down—he's still that boy choking on the shadow of his grandfather's name."
The weight of that truth thudded into the link.
For a moment, it was as if Aelius had cracked the entire game open, peeled the mask off the threat, and laid it bare in his palm for everyone to see. Not bravado. Not delusion. Calculation. Cold insight that made the air feel thinner.
"Which means," he went on, "we have time."
Another breath. Another footstep.
"And that is all I need."
It was a declaration—not of hope, but inevitability. The kind of thing said not to reassure, but to warn.
"Fairy Tail is about trust and family, right?" Aelius's voice cut clean through the lingering tension in the link—cool, unshaken, steady as a scalpel drawn across silk. "Then I trust you all to find a way should I be wrong."
His steps slowed as he crested a narrow rise in the road, the cathedral now visible in full, a jagged silhouette against the sun-bright sky. But his gaze wasn't on the spires. It lifted, drawn instead to the heavens above Magnolia—drawn to what waited there.
"And from what I'm seeing… It looks like Erza is going to take care of most of it."
Above the city, the air shimmered—and then split.
Weapons bloomed into being, one after another, hundreds of them, a rain of steel and purpose that defied logic. Swords gleamed like drawn lines of light, spears hovered with deadly symmetry, and halberds spun slowly in place like they were waiting for permission to fall.
Aelius watched, unmoving.
The sky was filled with them—too many to count in a glance, but his mind tracked each appearance anyway, cataloguing the pattern. And in that pattern, he saw it. The delay.
The rhythm was breaking.
Each weapon appeared a fraction slower than the last. The air shimmered with the strain of it. Even through the chaos of the magical network, he could feel the drag on Erza's body—her magic thinning, her control narrowing into a needlepoint.
She had summoned hundreds already. And yet—she still needed at least a hundred more.
One for each orb.
One for every single bolt of death floating in the sky.
The precision had to be absolute. The timing, perfect. A single miss would mean disaster. And she was doing it alone.
Aelius's jaw tightened—not in doubt, but understanding. He had seen this kind of exertion before. Not in Erza, but in himself. The moment just before the edge of collapse, when the will pushes farther than the body was ever meant to go.
Lucy's voice was just beginning to rise on the thread—soft, hesitant, edged with something approaching hope.
"I think… maybe we—"
And then it vanished.
Not cut cleanly. Not shattered like a spell forcefully broken. It simply… faded, like fog retreating from the morning sun. One moment her voice was there, and the next, silence took its place. Not even the lingering hum of the magical link remained.
Aelius didn't pause in his stride.
He knew the sensation well—not disconnection by force, but by distance. He'd moved beyond the range of Warren's magic. The cathedral loomed closer now, stone shadow thickening with each step he took, pulling him farther from the web of minds behind him.
Good.
He didn't need the link. The arguing, the panic, the hope.
Let them talk. Let them scramble to piece together a plan with too many variables and not enough time.
His role was simple. Theirs was trust and family. His was inevitability.
Aelius adjusted the fit of his cloak with one hand as the wind shifted, bringing with it a sharp tang of ozone. Thunder magic. It danced faintly along the edges of his senses now, threading through the stone and air like veins of fire. Laxus was close. Not just present—active.
The cathedral's interior was a broken monument to chaos.
Shattered glass lay in cruel glitter across the marble floor, jagged teeth of stained color that caught the late-afternoon sun in broken halos. The stone pillars had cracked in several places, spiderwebbed with the aftershock of power too vast for masonry to withstand. Arcs of lightning still crawled along the ribbed ceiling, snapping between support beams like serpents made of light, hissing and twisting, always hungry for more.
Aelius stepped through the heavy threshold without hurry.
The door, nearly wrenched from its hinges by some earlier force, groaned inward as he pushed it open. The moment he entered, the taste of magic thickened—hot copper and ozone, laced with something far more bitter beneath. Pain. Desperation.
And there, at the heart of it all—stood Laxus.
Crackling with power, the jagged crown of his aura flaring like a storm given flesh. Natsu lay downed to his left, groaning, one hand digging into the stone like it might anchor him to consciousness. Gajeel was on his knees, teeth bared but unmoving, blood trickling down his chin, eyes unfocused.
A final bolt arced from Laxus's hand, aimed without pause for Natsu's exposed back.
A heartbeat passed. Then—
"Plague Gods: Aegis."
Aelius's voice cut through the din like frost through flame. Not loud. Not hurried. Just present.
The world reacted before anyone else could.
A shield of black-green decay flared to life just inches above Natsu's back, The bolt struck it with a searing crack of light, impact violent, sudden.
The Aegis held.
But it did not emerge unscathed.
Fractures bloomed across its surface in jagged, pulsing lines—like veins of rot beneath ancient glass. The sickly green shimmer dulled at the edges, flickering once, twice, before restabilizing. Faint tendrils of smoke curled from the surface where the lightning had kissed too close, curling upward, acrid and whispering.
And Aelius walked through it, cloak dragging against the stone, slow and deliberate, his boots ringing like muted drums.
He didn't look at Natsu. Didn't spare Gajeel a glance.
He looked only at Laxus, as if the rest of the cathedral had vanished.
"You hit harder than your little lapdog," Aelius said, voice low and toneless, as if picking up a thread of dialogue from hours ago, long after its relevance had faded. "But you've had your fun."
He stepped forward, the ruinous light of the damaged shield flickering behind him as it dissipated into ash. There was no tension in his shoulders. No strain in his breath. Just that same, slow, deliberate stillness—like a blade being lowered rather than raised.
"Now," he continued, almost gently, "you deal with me."
The words hung there, not loud, not sharp. But in their quietness, in the unfaltering cadence, they landed heavier than thunder.
His emerald eyes—so bright they seemed to give off their own light in the dusted gloom of the cathedral—fixed on Laxus without blinking. They were cold, unblinking, and still. Not aflame with rage. Not brimming with disgust.
Just finality.
The kind that didn't need to shout to be heard.
The kind that didn't leave room for answers.
Like a stone kicked down a hill, it would not stop.
Outside, the last few Thunder Palace lacrima flickered faintly as Erza's swords began to coalesce. But here, inside the fractured belly of the cathedral, time had paused. For just a breath.
Aelius raised his hand—not fast, not theatrical. A simple movement, slow as dusk. A flicker of plague-runes gathered around his palm like breath condensing on glass.
Laxus didn't move. Not yet.
And Aelius didn't rush. He never rushed.
Instead, his voice came again, quieter now—intimate in the way a storm cloud can be intimate just before it breaks over your head.
"You don't understand what you've done. And that's fine. Understanding isn't necessary."
Behind him, Natsu groaned faintly, trying to stir. Gajeel's breathing was heavy, strained, and low.
Aelius didn't glance at them. His world had narrowed now.
Only one name left on the list.
Laxus straightened, his chest heaving with exertion and rage, the air around him crackling with residual electricity. His gaze locked onto Aelius, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"You're not like the rest of these weaklings," Laxus said, his voice laced with both amusement and challenge. "You've got power—real power. So why waste it standing with them?"
He took a step forward, lightning dancing across his shoulders. "Join me. Together, we could reshape this guild into something stronger, something worthy."
Aelius remained silent, his emerald eyes unwavering. The tension between them was palpable, the air thick with unspoken understanding.
Laxus's smirk faded slightly, replaced by a more serious expression. "You're not afraid, are you? I can see it. You're just like me—tired of the weakness, the sentimentality."
Still, Aelius did not respond. The silence stretched, heavy and deliberate. He tilted his head slightly, the quiet scrape of his boots echoing across the battered cathedral floor. Cracks ran through the marble like veins, and the light bleeding through shattered stained glass made his silhouette look half-myth, half-monster.
"But I'm also tired of pretending it doesn't matter."
Aelius stepped forward—once, twice, slowly, until he stood where the light from the shattered stained glass pooled in fading colors at his feet. His cloak trailed behind him like a shadow come to life.
"I tried to deny it. To burn it out. To starve it. All it did was make me crueler. Not stronger." His gaze didn't waver, didn't blink. "You mistake cruelty for strength. As I once did. And yes… cruelty is strength. In the right hands, at the right moment, it works. I've used it. I still do."
He stepped forward, the dark hem of his cloak dragging lightly through dust and blood.
"But it is only one kind of strength. And it's the kind that consumes its wielder fastest."
Laxus's grin faltered. Not because he disagreed—but because he recognized the familiarity in the words.
Aelius's emerald eyes caught the fractured daylight and glowed with something older than fury—something closer to judgment.
"You think power is dominance. Submission. Fear. But those are temporary. Easily reversed. Easily stolen. You're strong, Laxus… but you're also insecure. That's why you're loud."
He paused in front of a cracked pillar, his gloved hand resting against its surface as if feeling the pulse of the old stone.
"I've ruled by fear before. It worked… until it didn't. Until I found myself surrounded by silence, and corpses, and no one left worth ruling."
Laxus flared, lightning bursting around his shoulders, heat crackling through the air. "So what? You grew a conscience? Found friendship?" he spat. "Don't make me sick."
"I didn't grow anything," Aelius said, stepping out from the shadows now, his voice flat as dry iron. "I lost something. Over and over. Until I realized what kind of man I'd become."
He stopped within striking distance of Laxus.
"Now I just make sure no one takes what little I still have."
Laxus's face hardened, the crackle rising in pitch, flickers of electricity skittering down his arms like living threads.
"They'll never trust you," he said. "Not really. They'll never stop looking over their shoulders."
Aelius didn't flinch. He didn't even blink. His shadow stretched long across the broken floor, tangled in the colored light spilling through the fractured cathedral windows.
"That's where you're wrong," he said, his voice a low rasp, almost too quiet for the static. "...As much as I wish you weren't."
He stepped forward, unhurried, his presence pulling the very air taut around them.
"Because this is Fairy Tail. They look at a monster like me… and they see a friend."
He let the words hang, neither warm nor sentimental. A truth he'd learned the hard way, and one he hadn't asked for.
"They know what I've done. Some of them have cried for it. Some haven't forgiven me. But I was still asked."
A pause. A tilt of the head.
"To spare you."
His eyes flared under the shadow of his mask—green fire behind cold glass.
"Even after all this… I was asked to not kill you."
Laxus scoffed. "Then why the hell are you even here?"
Aelius's expression didn't shift. It was unreadable—etched from old stone.
"Because they asked."
Another step forward, measured and steady.
"But don't mistake restraint for mercy. I'm not here because I care what you believe. I'm here because someone I trust asked me to show you another way."
The glint of disgust passed briefly across his face.
"But if this is the only language you speak... then I'll answer in kind."
His hand lifted slightly—just enough for the light to graze the edges of his worn, weathered glove.
"Continue with this," he said, quiet as a grave left open.
Around him, his magic stirred—thick and rotting, a slow bloom of pestilence unfurling through the air like a wound torn into the world.
"And I'll show you what a real monster looks like."
The cathedral shuddered under the weight of what followed—stone groaning beneath their feet, stained-glass windows trembling in their iron frames. A current of killing intent passed between them, old as war, cold as execution.
Laxus didn't wait. Electricity burst from his limbs like gunfire, dancing wildly down the ruined pews, sparking against cracked marble. His arms swept out in a brutal arc, and from deep within his chest, the magic surged.
"Lightning Dragon's Roar!"
The beam that tore from his mouth was blinding—thick and fast and roaring like a cannon shot. Yellow and white, it lit the cavernous cathedral like lightning cracking open the sky. Pillars shattered on impact, air ionized and burned, and the whole cathedral screamed with the pressure.
Aelius stood firm. His cloak rippled with the force of the coming blow, the edges seared with ozone, but he did not move—not at first.
A deep, wet hiss whispered into the world like the sound of breath sucked through broken ribs.
"Plague God's Bellow."
The floor beneath him blackened, blooming outward in a wave of rot and corruption. From his mouth, he exhaled a blast of his own—not flame, not wind, not sound, but a heavy, churning gout of dark green and black miasma, lined with strands of glistening red like diseased capillaries bursting through.
It hit Laxus's roar mid-air.
The impact was a horror show. The two attacks collided with a soundless detonation, pressure rippling outward as pews exploded, stained glass vaporized, and the altar cracked down the center like a skull under an axe. A shockwave blasted through the cathedral, strong enough to crater the walls, sending masonry flying.
For a moment, it was even.
But only a moment.
The crackling storm of Laxus's lightning overwhelmed the miasma slowly, inch by inch, eating through the rot like fire through old wood. Aelius's magic fought back—it clung, tried to congeal around the beam, to infect it, unravel it—but it wasn't fast enough. It didn't match the sheer velocity. The pressure forced Aelius's feet to slide back on the stone, his boots carving dark, skidding lines across the cracked floor.
And then his bellow broke. The rot was blasted aside, consumed in a storm of light and sound and raw, lacerating magic. Lightning speared into Aelius's right arm, detonating in a corona of energy that scorched his cloak, leaving a gaping hole and singeing the flesh below slightly.
He didn't fall.
His voice followed a beat later, not loud, not bitter—just flat, as if confessing a nuisance rather than bleeding through pain.
"I really hate lightning users," Aelius muttered, brushing a hand against the scorched cloak with casual precision, fingers twitching once as if remembering the strike, or cataloguing it.
Laxus's eyes narrowed, a flicker of amusement dancing across his features.
"You know why lightning users get under your skin?" he said, voice edged with that electric arrogance—sharp, confident, absolute. "Because lightning doesn't just burn. It purifies. It cuts through the filth you wallow in, sears the disease straight out of existence. Your rot? Your decay? It doesn't stand a chance."
He stepped forward, the air around him crackling with renewed energy.
"Your magic festers, spreads like a disease. But lightning? It strikes fast, leaves nothing behind. No infection, no lingering poison. Just clean, scorched earth."
Aelius's expression remained unchanged, but the air around him grew colder, the scent of decay intensifying.
"You're at a disadvantage," Laxus continued, his tone almost mocking. "Burnt flesh doesn't regenerate, does it? Your rot can't cling to what's already been turned to ash." He raised his hand, lightning dancing between his fingers.
Aelius didn't blink. Didn't flinch.
Instead, he tilted his head slightly to one side, as if weighing Laxus's words like dull currency, then discarding them.
"You talk too much," Aelius said softly, the words cutting clean through the static, low and deliberate. "It's going to get you killed someday."
His emerald eyes sharpened beneath the shadows of his hood, the rot wreathing around him like coiling breath—still there, still pulsing, stubborn against the burn.
A half-step forward.
A pause.
"...That is, if you survive me first."
And with that, his magic surged again—thick and violent, the floor beneath his feet cracking under the pressure of dark energy flaring to life, raw and unrepentant. The spores that had receded now bloomed anew, fed not by time but by sheer will, choking the air between them as inevitability advanced with quiet, rotting footsteps.
"Plague God's Bloom," Aelius intoned, his voice the only sound in the still, charged atmosphere.
Dark, twisted flowers began to push through the fractures in the floor—black petals unfolding like the fingers of death itself. Their centers pulsed with an unholy green light, releasing thick, toxic spores that swirled into the air like a mist of decay. The spores were potent, laced with poisons capable of infecting and draining the very life from anything they touched. A single breath of the air thickened with the spores could be enough to cripple the strongest.
But Laxus was swift. He raised his hand, a brief flick of his wrist, and the atmosphere around him shifted. Lightning crackled violently, surging down from the sky in a massive wave of pure energy. The bolt shot forward like a spear, slamming into the blooming flowers with blinding speed.
The flowers shriveled and writhed as the lightning vaporized them in an instant, their spores vanishing into the air before they could even spread. The crackling energy surged outward, turning the toxic bloom into nothing more than smoldering remnants, leaving only a scorched stain on the cracked floor where they had once been.
Aelius, standing amid the dissipating smoke, didn't flinch. The faintest curl of his lips suggested some dark amusement, but his eyes remained cold, focused. He didn't need to speak—he was already preparing his next move.
"Lightning Dragon's Heavenward Halberd!" Laxus roared, his voice electric with power. A massive spear of crackling lightning shot from his outstretched hand, descending from above with terrifying speed and force. Aelius moved with unnerving precision, sidestepping just in time, the tip of the halberd grazing the edge of his cloak, striking the ground with a deafening crack that sent shockwaves through the air.
"Plague God's Vile Exhalation." Aelius's voice was low but certain as he summoned a dense mist of toxic gas, a swirling, choking fog that sought to disorient and suffocate. But Laxus was relentless, summoning his lightning-infused form, becoming one with the storm, and phasing through the gas without so much as a scratch.
"Raging Bolt!" Laxus bellowed, his power surging as a concentrated beam of pure lightning shot toward Aelius. Aelius reacted immediately, his body moving with unnatural speed as he dodged, narrowly avoiding the strike that struck the ground with explosive force. The explosion sent debris flying, but Aelius was already behind Laxus, his figure an ominous shadow in the chaos.
"Poxmake: Noxious Lash," Aelius spoke again, his voice unwavering, as a tendril of dark energy lashed forward like a whip. It cracked through the air, aimed to ensnare Laxus in its toxic grip. Laxus twisted with agility, evading the strike, and without hesitation, he retaliated with a lightning-infused Iron Fist, the electrified punch connecting with Aelius's side. Aelius grunted, his body absorbing the force of the blow, but he showed no sign of pain, merely adjusting his stance and raising his gaze to Laxus.
"Lightning Dragon's Roar!" Laxus shouted, his mouth opening wide as he unleashed a deafening roar of thunder and lightning. A wall of pure energy surged forward, a shockwave that would have leveled anything in its path. Aelius raised his arm just in time, A Plague God's Aegis forming into a shield of rotting energy to absorb the brunt of the attack. The force of the roar sent him skidding back, but he remained standing, the shield cracking under the strain but holding firm.
"Plague God's Vile Exhalation." Aelius's voice remained steady, unbothered by the hits he had taken, as he summoned another wave of toxic gas. But Laxus, ever adaptable, summoned a barrier of crackling lightning, clearing the air and pushing the mist aside.
The fight had reached an equilibrium. Neither side had gained a clear advantage. Aelius, though showing light signs of damage—his cloak singed—remained cold, impassive. His eyes, sharp and calculating, never left Laxus. Every attack, every maneuver, was calculated, controlled. He couldn't afford to go all out—not with Natsu and Gajeel still in the vicinity. Every spell, every movement, was tempered, held back by the threat of collateral damage.
Laxus, on the other hand, was relentless, pushing his own limits, his electric aura crackling with rage. But despite his power, the battle had become a test of attrition. Lightning was fast, but it was also erratic, a power that could easily be countered with the right focus. And Aelius had all the time he needed to observe, to calculate.
"Heh, this is getting fun," he muttered, the words crackling with static. "I knew you weren't a pushover."
He took a step forward, the ground beneath his feet sizzling with residual electricity. The air between them was thick with tension, the aftermath of their clashing magics leaving scorch marks and withered flora in its wake.
"You know," Laxus continued, his voice steady despite the chaos around them, "when I take over the guild," he paused, letting the words hang in the air, "I might just keep you around."
Aelius tilted his head slightly, his expression unreadable. The spores around him pulsed, reacting to his silent command, but he made no move to attack.
"You're strong," Laxus admitted, his tone devoid of sarcasm. "Worthy of my Fairy Tail."
The two stood amidst the wreckage of their battle, neither willing to yield, both recognizing the strength in the other.
Aelius's cloak shifted slightly with the wind, the threads of plague-infused spores writhing around his boots like smoke rising from a battlefield pyre. His emerald eyes, cold and exacting, didn't blink as he stared Laxus down through the decaying haze.
"Did I not just tell you..." His voice, quiet as falling dust, came laced with something sharper than contempt. "You talk too much."
His hand rose, fingers barely twitching.
"Even a mutt knows when to roll over."
The floor beneath Laxus's feet split with a sickening crack as a new eruption of plague magic surged upward. "Plague Gods: Maw of Scourge." Twisted black lilies bloomed from the fractured stone, their petals wide and gaping, their centers more mouths than flowers. They didn't wait for Laxus to move—tongues of venomous gas lashed out like serpents, seeking purchase on skin, cloth, anything they could reach.
Laxus snarled, pushing himself back with a burst of lightning as he threw out his arm. "Lightning Dragon's Breakdown Fist!" He brought it down with thunderous force, detonating a shockwave that shattered stone, vaporized half the lilies mid-bloom, and disrupted the strike before it could fully close in.
Aelius didn't retreat. He walked forward, untouched by the explosion's edge, his expression unchanged, the hem of his cloak curling with the heat of seared air.
"Paralysis takes two seconds to take root," he muttered, almost to himself. "But you'll be too busy throwing punches to notice."
A new wave of energy coalesced at his hand—green sigils circling one another in a slow spiral. "Pox Make: Retching Coil."
From his shadow, a serpentine tendril of bile-green mist curled forward, seeking to wrap around Laxus's limbs. It was laced with a neurotoxin—a subtle blend meant not to kill, but to disorient, to slow, to force the body to betray itself.
Laxus gritted his teeth, lightning coursing through his veins. "Lightning Body!" His form surged with electric current, searing the tendril as it touched his skin. It burned away, screaming like steam against hot metal, but not without leaving a welt behind—just enough sting to remind him that he'd been touched.
They circled now, both marked.
Still a stalemate.
Laxus's grin returned, teeth bared. "You call that rolling over? You're going to have to hit harder than that, freak."
Aelius tilted his head. One of the lilies, still burning, crumbled to ash behind him.
"I haven't started hitting yet."
Aelius stepped forward through the scorched petals and cracked flagstone, the twisted remains of the black lillies crunching beneath his boots. His shadow stretched long in the lightning-stained glow—flickering behind him like something alive, like something waiting to be unchained.
His eyes stayed fixed on Laxus, unblinking.
"It's been a while," he said softly, not out of reflection but as if recalling a dull fact. "Since I fought without the intent to kill."
Spores drifted lazily in the charged air, but didn't press forward yet. They hovered in a slow, spiraling orbit around him, thick as breath on glass.
"I almost forgot," Aelius continued, raising one hand. The cracked stones beneath his feet pulsed again, small veins of color bleeding outward from his touch—faint greens, bruised purples, and yellows like the sick of a fever. "The truth behind poisons."
With each word, sigils spun outward, slow and steady, no faster than the drumbeat of a dying heart. His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to.
"They're not just death."
A single flower bloomed at his feet—slick, waxy, unnatural. It didn't open like a petal. It yawned like a wound.
"They're choice."
He flexed two fingers. "Neurotoxins. Hallucinogens. Paralytics. Seizers. Coagulants. Suffocants. Breakers. The kinds that numb. The kinds that scream. The kinds that leave you alive just long enough to wish you weren't."
His emerald gaze never wavered. "I could show you all of them, Laxus. But like I said—"
His arm snapped outward, and a stream of virulent mist exploded from his palm, racing across the floor like liquid shadow, chasing the electric traces Laxus left in his wake. Each tendril held a different strain, spinning midair into needles of visible vapor. The cloud hissed—hungry.
"—I'm trying not to kill you."
Laxus barked a laugh even as he jumped back, lightning bursting around his feet to hurl him clear.
"Lightning Dragon's Heavenward Halberd!" His hand sliced through the air, calling down a searing arc of thunder that cut the mist in two with a sonic boom. The force of it lifted rubble, blew back the petals, and made the cathedral tremble.
Aelius stood still in the eye of the wind, his cloak flaring out behind him. Even singed and grazed, even with small burns blackening the edges of his sleeves and a shallow cut leaking something darker than blood from his neck—he didn't falter.
"Impressive," he murmured. "But if you truly think lightning can solve every equation—"
He stepped forward again, and the cathedral floor cracked beneath his heel like eggshell.
"—then you're going to run out of answers long before I run out of poison."
The thunder cracked like a divine verdict.
Laxus blurred through the poisoned air, his frame cloaked in raw, snarling arcs of electricity. His breath was heavy but steady, eyes alight with that ruthless, storm-fed pride as he twisted mid-motion and thrust one hand forward.
"Lightning Dragon's Descent Fang!"
It wasn't a standard attack. Not quite. There was a sharper edge to it—an instinctive improvisation forged in the crucible of frustration and challenge. The bolt that erupted from his hand wasn't aimed to stun or push back. It was shaped to carve.
Aelius pivoted, fast enough to avoid the full brunt, but not enough.
The bolt slammed into his side with a deafening crack and explosion of white-blue force. Smoke billowed instantly. Flesh seared. Fabric vaporized. The force hurled Aelius several meters across the ruined cathedral floor, his boots dragging twin scars through the cracked stone before he came to a stop near the broken edge of a collapsed column.
For a moment, there was only silence—thick, acrid, and pulsing with heat.
Then the smoke parted.
Aelius straightened slowly, but his cloak hung torn. His side—a jagged stretch of blackened, smoking ruin—had been sheared open. Flesh cooked and twisted at the edges, and a visible section of his abdomen had been burned clean through. No, rot reknitting it. No new tissue forming. The char was too deep. Too complete.
The infection of decay could not grow in ash.
Laxus's boots struck the stone floor as he approached, lightning crackling with each step like a war drum.
"Well, well," he said, grinning, cocky and golden in the flickering light. "Looks like I was right. You don't heal when I burn it all away, huh?"
His fingers twitched, sending little sparks dancing across his knuckles. "Guess all that big talk about poison and inevitability doesn't mean much when half your guts are on the floor."
He stopped a few paces away, electricity dancing in wild arcs around him. "Man, this is fun. Finally, someone who can take a hit and dish it back. But it's just like I said, isn't it?"
He jabbed a finger toward Aelius.
"You're strong. Real strong. But even you've got a ceiling. And now?" His smile widened, more teeth than joy. "Now I've found it."
The light flared brighter around him, illuminating every inch of Aelius's injury. "You'll slow down. You'll bleed. You'll rot. But you won't regrow."
He tilted his head mockingly. "So what's next, plague boy? Still think you can drag this out?"
But Aelius did not answer—not right away.
He merely looked down at the wound, then placed one hand calmly over the edge of the charred cavity. His expression didn't waver. There was no flinch. No gasp. Just that same glacial, calculating cold in his emerald eyes, his breathing steady despite the damage.
Aelius finally lifted his gaze.
There was no grand declaration. No ritual or arcane spectacle. Just a subtle shimmer—a whisper of movement through the air as if the world itself blinked and forgot to notice. The plague-cloak he wore, already scorched and ragged from Laxus's assault, simply vanished, fading away in threads of dark vapor. In its place stood Aelius as he truly was beneath the rot and ruin.
No monstrous transformation. No grotesque reveal. Just a man.
A tattered white shirt clung to his frame, soaked red where the wound stretched across his side—burnt deep, black around the edges, and still hissing from the heat. Dirt smeared across the seams where fabric had fused with dried blood, but the rest of him was composed. Still. Barefaced now, his emerald eyes gleamed beneath disheveled strands of hair—cut glass behind a wall of calm indifference.
He exhaled once, a quiet breath more thoughtful than strained.
"You really think," he said, voice level and crisp, "I don't know how to work around something as simple as that?"
Laxus's smirk twitched, more wary now than mocking.
Aelius took one measured step forward. Then another.
Without ceremony, he dropped his hand to the gaping, charred wound on his side. The edges crackled faintly, skin blackened and cooked to the muscle. A lesser man might have staggered. Cried out. Panicked. Aelius did none of these.
He pressed his fingers into the scorched flesh and drove them inward.
The sound was wet. Obscene. Blood welled up at once, thick and dark, seeping down his side and soaking the waistband of his pants. Aelius's face remained unreadable as he felt along the inside, found the dead tissue, and ripped it out with a firm, slow pull.
The hunk of cauterized meat slapped the floor with a sickening squelch.
"I just needed to clear the damaged part," he muttered, almost to himself.
Already, faint movement stirred beneath the exposed muscle-fibers, twitching, sinew creeping upward like vines reaching for the sun. The regeneration began not from the base of the wound, but farther up—working down from still-living tissue that hadn't been scorched by lightning.
"You cauterize the base," he said, flicking blood from his hand, "so I made a new one."
Laxus threw his head back and let out a sharp, almost manic laugh. The sound echoed through the fractured cathedral, bouncing off the scorched stone and lingering like the crackle of residual lightning.
"You're a real freak, you know that?" he said, grinning as he wiped a smear of blood from his lip. "Ripping out your own flesh without even flinching. That's some next-level crazy."
He took a step forward, his boots crunching over debris, eyes locked onto Aelius with a mix of amusement and disdain.
"But let's talk about hypocrisy," Laxus continued, his tone turning sharp. "I saw what you did to Evergreen. Took her eyes. And now you're holding back with me? All because—Let me guess—It was the old man who asked you not to kill me?"
He shook his head, a bitter smile playing on his lips.
"Funny how you pick and choose when to show mercy."
Aelius remained silent, his expression unreadable, the wound on his side slowly knitting itself back together.
Laxus's grin widened, the air around him beginning to hum with electrical energy.
"Well, if you're not going to finish this, I will."