The sigil-throne twisted upward, a swirling mess of impossible glyphs that shimmered and squirmed like ink spilled in water. The air hummed with raw chaos, thick and heavy, like reality itself was about to snap.
Aelius's breath was ragged, chest raw where his heart had been stolen, the rot beneath his skin pulsing in ugly waves. Yet beneath the pain, something darker stirred—an ancient, restless power waking from a long slumber.
No more games.
Nehzhar's laughter bubbled up, sharp and wild, slicing through the silence like a knife dipped in honey. His form flickered like a poorly tuned projection, robes shifting between colors and patterns in a dizzying show of magic gone rogue. He was a walking carnival of spells, a swirling mess of impossible shapes and illusions that made your eyes hurt just trying to focus.
"Come on, come on," Nehzhar said, spinning in the air like a dervish with no sense of direction, "don't tell me you're all serious and brooding now? I thought we were having fun!"
He juggled Aelius's heart between his fingers like it was a flashy poker chip. "Look at this thing! Still ticking like a bad wristwatch. Honestly, I thought you'd be dead and gone by now. You gotta stop surprising me, it's ruining my dramatic flair."
Aelius didn't move. Didn't flinch. His green eyes glowed faintly, cold and hard.
"You think I'm your puppet?" Aelius said flatly. "I am not your shadow."
"Oh, please," Nehzhar grinned, flipping upside down midair as if defying gravity was just a casual Tuesday thing. "You and I, we're like peanut butter and jelly—can't live without each other, but you keep trying to pretend you hate the taste."
He threw a quick spell that exploded into a cloud of sparkling butterflies that immediately burst into flame, leaving behind a foul stench of burnt sugar and chaos. "Oops, my bad. Butterflies tend to be a bit… explosive with me."
Aelius's rot magic writhed beneath his skin, a dark pulse building like a storm.
"Show me what you got, sainty-boy," Nehzhar said, snapping his fingers. Suddenly, the clearing warped and bent even more—trees melting into strange geometric shapes, the sky swirling with impossible colors like a kaleidoscope gone mad.
He laughed, throwing another spell that turned the ground beneath Aelius's feet into slippery jelly. "Slippery when rotten! Get it? Because of the rot? Eh? No? Tough crowd."
Aelius steadied himself, the rot pulse surging as his magic fought back, and the battlefield became a battleground of raw decay and mind-bending fractals.
Nehzhar hovered with a grin, shooting off random spells like fireworks—one moment summoning a flock of spectral crows that sang off-key, the next wrapping himself in a shimmering cloak of harmless sparkles that made him look like a disco ball.
"You're serious all the time, and me? I'm the cosmic clown," he said, spinning lazily in the air. "But hey, someone's gotta keep the party going while you brood in your corner."
The battle wasn't just a clash of magic—it was a circus of madness and decay, the world bending under their duel.
Nehzhar's voice echoed as he twirled Aelius's heart one last time. "You break first, or I do? Honestly, I'm betting on you. But hey, I'm fair—winner gets to pick the next song."
Aelius's eyes narrowed, the rot rising like venom. "Enough."
Nehzhar laughed again, the sound a twisted melody bouncing off the warped trees. "Alright, alright, no more brooding. Let's see what happens when you stop playing nice."
Aelius moved.
No fanfare. No chant. No arcane theatrics.
He raised one hand, slow and deliberate, the rot coiling down his arm like vines growing in reverse—blooming from within, not without. His fingers curled, and the ground beneath him cracked in a spiral, a foul heat rippling from his feet outward like a breath drawn from the lungs of a dying god.
The bloom began.
Dark green light pulsed from the cracks. Mushrooms erupted in concentric circles—pale and glistening, some wide as shields, others like twitching fingers. Milky stalks burst forth and twisted in the air as if sniffing, tasting. The sky dimmed as a shroud of oily black spores lifted into the air from the mushroom caps, rising in a thick, shimmering haze.
Nehzhar froze midair, holding Aelius's heart between two fingers like a dainty macaron. He tilted his head slowly.
"Ohhhh no."
The spores lifted.
The sky went black.
Then they came down.
A storm of decay, of seeded death—millions of fungal spores whirling like a swarm of locusts born from some ancient sickness. They howled in silence, frictionless and wet, a biological magic so old it remembered the warmth of the first corpse.
Aelius stood beneath it all, his voice flat, hollow:
"Plague God's: Bloom."
Nehzhar stared as the cloud descended toward him like a continent falling from the sky.
"Okay," he said, flicking his fingers and throwing up a dozen magical barriers shaped like umbrellas, pinwheels, and even a little dome labeled 'Nehzhar's Safe Space' in glowing cursive. "You're cranky today."
Then, like a child misbehaving at dinner, he tossed the heart over his shoulder and opened his mouth absurdly wide.
"Fine, you're gonna do the big fungal bloom—again—then I'm gonna do what I always do."
And he inhaled.
Hard.
The spores screamed—not audibly, but through the rippling of the trees, the bending of light—as they were pulled in by the thousands. Spirals of fungal magic twisted and whirled around Nehzhar like he was vacuuming up the breath of death itself.
His body swelled slightly, glowing blue-pink veins tracing up his throat as the Plague God's magic funneled into his lungs like incense into a furnace.
He licked his lips.
"Oh, Aelius," he said with a grin stretching ear to ear, "you really, really shouldn't have—"
And then he stopped.
His pupils shrank. His jaw locked.
A strange sound croaked from his throat.
He blinked. Once. Twice. Slowly. Then looked down.
A dagger was sticking out of his throat.
No—the hilt.
The blade had come up through the inside of his neck, out the top, silencing him mid-mockery. It gleamed slick with rot and runes—ancient, hooked, barbed like an insect's fang. The hilt protruded from his mouth like some obscene joke, perfectly centered between his teeth.
A spurt of blood exploded out from the wound like mist.
He staggered in the air, eyes wide, hands trembling.
Aelius stood where he'd been, silent.
The spores—that had been the distraction.
The dagger—that had been the real spell.
Nehzhar reached up slowly, fingertips brushing the hilt sticking from his mouth. His eyes rolled toward Aelius, wide and utterly betrayed.
Nehzhar choked on a sound, eyes dancing between pain and laughter. Then—
He gave a muffled thumbs-up.
The dagger pulsed once.
And then exploded.
Not in flame. Not in force.
But in rot.
Thick, suffocating, spore-laden decay poured from Nehzhar's mouth, eyes, nose, the wound in his throat, staining the air black and green with liquefying magic. His body convulsed midair, limbs twitching as if too many things were trying to move them at once.
The sigil on his brow sparked.
The throne behind him shattered into runes.
And Nehzhar—gagging, laughing, choking—sputtered out in a voice no longer fully his:
"Okay… ow."
The rot steamed from every hole in his face, curling around his tongue as he struggled to talk past the dagger's hilt still jammed halfway out his mouth. His fingers twitched, tracing spirals in the air—some reflexive tic of old magic trying to patch the wound before it worsened. It failed spectacularly.
His hands rose in mock surrender.
"Okay, okay, you know what? That one's on me," he wheezed, half-chuckling, half-choking, voice rasping like gravel in a blender. "I might've underestimated how much you remembered, being Caius drains my IQ a lot, I tell ya."
He yanked the dagger out of his throat with a wet shhlik, tossed it into the rot-cloud like it offended him personally, and gave a deep, exaggerated bow.
Or—he tried.
Given that he was still floating upside-down at a forty-five degree angle, his body listing like a sinking ship and his limbs flailing with terrible spatial awareness, the result looked less like a bow and more like a drunken boomerang trying to perform interpretive dance.
"Behold!" he declared, arms flung wide as ichor dripped down his chin. "The majestic collapse of ego in real-time!"
He grinned with far too many teeth, the wound in his throat closing slowly, backwards—skin stitching itself up in reverse like watching time apologize.
"I mean, really, Aelius—Caius always was too straightforward. All fists and fury. But you? You actually remembered what 'Magic God Slayer' means."
He wagged a gloved finger at Aelius like an old teacher scolding a favorite student for cheating too cleverly.
"Like all Slayers, I can eat my element," Nehzhar said, trying—really trying—to keep a stern face.
For exactly two seconds, it worked.
Then the corners of his mouth twitched, and he absolutely lost it.
He doubled over midair, cackling, arms hugging his sides like the absurdity physically hurt. "I can eat magic, man!" he howled. "How bullshit is that?!"
He wiped a tear from his eye—real or imagined—and spun a slow circle in the air like a child on a tire swing made of pure chaos.
"I mean, seriously, that's not a fair power, that's just game design oversight." He jabbed a thumb toward his own chest. "I eat spells. Big ones. Little ones. Blessings, curses, forbidden rites. Sometimes I don't even know what it is until I burp and reality hiccups."
Then, with an expression of giddy pride, he snapped his fingers and summoned a floating collage of glimmering, shifting sigils—each one pulsing with a different flavor of stolen magic.
"Oh! And—and—I collect pictures!"
The collage rearranged itself—morphing into warped, wobbly pictures of shocked mages, all frozen at the exact moment their magic was consumed by the demon in front of them.
"See? Boom! Sad Lightning Guy. Screaming Plant Lady. One smug kid who did ice stuff. All mine."
He gave the memory-faces affectionate little pats as they orbited him.
"I call it my Magic Munchies Mugshot Gallery. Trademark pending."
He turned to Aelius, eyes sparkling with dangerous joy.
"You wanna be in it?"
His smile widened with childlike enthusiasm.
"C'mon, give me that brooding rot magic again. I dare you."
Aelius didn't respond. The rot still simmered across the battlefield, creeping along his boots like fog that hadn't decided who to kill yet.
Nehzhar rolled in the air with a theatrical sigh, hovering flat on his back like he was sunbathing in the middle of a magical hurricane.
"Still, a dagger inside the bloom?" he muttered. "That's just rude. And brilliant. And frankly, kind of hot." He paused, raised one eyebrow. "You single now or what?"
Aelius lifted a hand slightly—just a twitch of his wrist—and the rot pulsed in reply, as if tasting the possibility of a follow-up strike.
Nehzhar held both hands out defensively.
"Woah woah, okay, message received. No flirting post-dismemberment. Jeez." He spun in a slow circle, trailing a fresh swirl of glittering sigils behind him like graffiti drawn in invisible ink. "You and your whole 'I'm silent and dangerous' thing, it's really killing the vibe, man."
He paused mid-spin, hanging upside down again like a particularly smug bat.
"But honestly?" His smile sharpened again, though his tone lost none of its humor. "If that's the level you're playing at now…"
His eyes narrowed, and the magic behind them shifted—darker, older.
"…Then maybe I don't have to hold back anymore."
He snapped his fingers.
And the rot beneath him vanished.
Not dispelled. Not overpowered.
Just… overwritten. Unmade. As if that patch of reality had been redrawn by a hand that didn't recognize fungi as a valid concept.
A hole opened in the battlefield—not to the ground, but to something beneath thought. A well of magic that didn't shimmer, didn't glow, didn't pulse.
It grinned.
Aelius's muscles tensed.
Nehzhar twirled midair, hands behind his head.
"Round two, plague boy?" he said cheerfully.
Then—his teeth gleamed.
"No more jokes."
A beat.
"Okay, that's a lie. There will be so many jokes."
The battlefield held its shape for a moment longer, but something was wrong. The shadows were leaning in the wrong direction. The air had the taste of wet chalk and the feel of a half-remembered dream. The plague on Aelius's side pulsed slowly, hungrily—but it didn't advance. Not yet.
Nehzhar stopped spinning midair. Just… hung there, like a punctuation mark that hadn't decided if it was a question or an insult. His expression—still wearing that manic grin—flattened slightly. Brows furrowed in faux-intellectual concern.
"Hmm."
He tapped his chin thoughtfully, and three tiny replicas of his head popped into existence beside him, mimicking the same pondering motion with increasing speed.
"Let's think about this," he muttered, voice now lower, laced with something sharp beneath the whimsy. "You've got the fungal apocalypse thing going on—props, by the way, very thematic—and you just chucked a dagger at me like you've been waiting years to try it. Soooo... what's the best way to fight an unkillable emo whose blood smells like extinction?"
The floating Nehzhar heads began arguing with each other. One suggested setting Aelius on fire. Another proposed turning him into a duck. The third offered jazz hands and an interpretive dance routine involving knives.
Nehzhar flicked all three into nonexistence with a single scoff.
"No, no, no," he muttered. "That's all too external. He's internal, see? That broody mess of memory, mold, and melancholy. You don't hit Aelius with force. You hit him with familiarity."
Then his eyes lit up.
"Ooooooh. Wait."
He snapped his fingers again.
And something shifted behind him.
Not in the sky, not in the ground—but in the air. As if something warm and deeply familiar had just walked into the room. Magic flared—not raw, not wild, but recognized.
A pattern of magic that made the air hesitate. That made the air thrum with emotional memory. That made Aelius's jaw clench before he even knew why.
Because Nehzhar wasn't summoning a storm.
He was mimicking a person.
Multiple, in fact.
Figures flickered into being behind him, outlines coalescing from glassy, shimmering threads of stolen light. They weren't fully formed—just echoes. Magic signatures. Ghosts made from memory.
Erza's bladework.
Gray's weaving ice patterns.
Mira's demonic aura pulsing at his back.
Levy's solid script spiraling in layers across his open palm.
Nehzhar's grin returned, unholy and delighted. "There it is. The look. That little flicker of panic." He mimed wiping a tear from his cheek. "Gods, you Fairy Tail types wear emotion like armor, it's precious."
He floated down slightly, dragging one finger through the air as Levy's runes followed like obedient stars.
"You don't care if you die. That's the trick, right? Aelius the immortal, the inevitable, the rotten. Death means nothing to you anymore."
He held up his other hand.
Erza's spectral blade formed there, gleaming with unearned honor.
"But them?"
He gestured to the ghosts.
"They're still in your bones, N. Not because you trust them, but because you failed them. You watched them. You walked with them. You let them in."
He dropped the blade. It melted into a puddle of magic that slithered toward the rot.
"Let's see how well you fight when the very spells you tried to protect start clawing their way back into your ribs."
A beat.
"Poetic, right?"
Nehzhar's body cracked with refracted light as magic surged through him—not his own, but theirs. Borrowed. Refined. Repurposed.
"Can't copy Slayer magics, of course," he added, rolling his eyes. "Ugh, rules. So boring. But hey—your book club of emotionally damaged wizards? Wide open."
He took a deep breath, the magic signatures dancing around him now like orbiting weapons.
"Let's see how much of you is left… when you're fighting them."
And then he lunged forward—clad in the might of borrowed kin.
The sky above them twisted into a spiral of runes and regret.
Aelius met Nehzhar halfway, their collision not a clash of chaos and order, but a rhythm—war set to choreography. Every strike, every twitch of magic, every pulse of rot was confined to his half of the battlefield. Not a single step crossed the line into Nehzhar's madness-bent domain. The very air obeyed him there.
Steel and sorcery met in a spray of warped sparks as Nehzhar's conjured blade—etched with Levy's spiraling runes and crackling with Gray's elemental discipline—was caught on Aelius's forearm. Not blocked with armor. With skin. Skin that smoked where the magic met it, but didn't give.
Aelius's voice was steady, low, as he turned aside the blow with effortless weight.
"Fighting with someone else's magic…" he said, voice devoid of drama, just fact—flat and inevitable, like gravity. "And fighting them… are two different things."
The air hummed.
Nehzhar didn't recoil. He didn't grin.
He just… paused.
His blade sagged slightly in his grip, and his posture wilted like a flower realizing it bloomed on the wrong grave.
"I know," he muttered quietly. The words dragged behind him like a cloak soaked in regret.
His eyes, still glowing, dimmed a little at the corners—not for lack of power, but a flicker of genuine disappointment.
"I had this whole plan," he continued, shoulders slouching like a child caught playing with a loaded crossbow. "Was gonna be dramatic. I mean, really dramatic. Build it up. Pull all the strings. Make it art."
He gestured vaguely at the battlefield, the hovering spell remnants, the stolen signatures still dancing at his back like confused ghosts.
"And then I got here and just—" he exhaled sharply through his nose, "—got excited. You know how it is. Finally see your masterpiece, finally get to kick the cathedral over, and suddenly you forget half your speech."
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand sheepishly. "I wanted it to hurt, Aelius. I wanted to get you with their magic. Their exact spells. poetic, right?"
His voice dropped, almost tender.
"Thought maybe, for once, you'd flinch."
A pause.
Then he sniffed, made a face, and added, "But noooope. You just had to be immune to symbolism."
He sniffled again, exaggerated, wiping an invisible tear from beneath his eye. "It's rude, honestly."
Then his expression flickered—just for a moment.
The sorrow didn't vanish. It warped. Tilted.
He looked at Aelius with a brightness again, not joy, but that electric glint of a man realizing the show isn't over.
"And now I've gotta improvise." He cracked his knuckles. "So... you're probably gonna hate what happens next."
Nehzhar's fingers flexed once—long, pale things twitching like antennae tasting the tension. The last of the borrowed spells faded behind him, ghost-lights breaking apart and scattering like fireflies at the end of a fever dream. He didn't call them back. Didn't try to conjure new tricks. For a moment, he just stood there, head slightly bowed, fingers twitching, jaw working as if chewing on some unseen string of thought.
Then he looked up.
Not with a grin.
Not with mockery.
But with a strange, almost resigned certainty.
"We know how this ends."
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't echo. But it didn't need to. Every syllable fell into place like stone dropped down a dry well—slow, heavy, inevitable.
"You couldn't beat me before. Not when I was fragmented, scattered, playing a dozen little games through a dozen little skins."
He tilted his head slightly—his eyes narrowing.
"And you sure as shit can't beat me now."
The grin returned, but this time it was thinner. Meaner. Not the wild glee of a trickster, but the edge of something sharp that knew what it could do.
"You're going to die here, N."
He took one slow step forward, his bare foot pressing into the twisted ground of his half of the battlefield—madness and possibility coiling beneath his soles like threads unwinding from a spool.
"Right here, in this crooked nowhere. In this little stage I built just for us."
He gestured broadly at the surrounding chaos—the split sky, the warring domains of rot and riddles, of death and dreams.
"I made this place to be your tomb."
Another step. Slow. Controlled.
"You're cracked, Aelius. You're tired. You've been fighting yourself longer than you've fought anyone else. And I know what you really are under all the stoic silence and martyr's bravado."
He pointed at Aelius's chest—where once his heart had been, where rot and memory now churned together like tar in a hollow drum.
"You're not a warrior."
Another step.
"You're not a hero."
Another.
"You're a grave, N. A walking one."
He smiled again. Not wide. Just sure.
"And every grave gets filled eventually."
Then, without raising his voice, without flaring his magic, without so much as blinking, Nehzhar spoke the sentence not as a threat, but a fact:
"You're going to die here."
He let it hang—quiet, sharp, absolute.
A line drawn not in blood, but belief.
But his voice—low, dry, and edged with exhaustion—cut through the stillness like a blade skimming glass.
"I hate how everyone I fight feels the need to monologue like I asked for their autobiography."
He exhaled once, short. Tired.
"I'm not your therapist, Nehzhar. I'm just the one who's going to put you down."
The rot stirred again.
Not as a wave, not as a fog—as a memory.
It slithered from Aelius's palm, trailing down his wrist in thick, black ropes of sinew and dead pulp, bones twisting into place from no origin, cartilage stretching like wet paper snapping into form. The air recoiled. Even Nehzhar took a half-step back—not from fear, but a kind of curiosity curdled with recollection.
Aelius drew the blade from himself. Not a sheathe. Not a conjuring. From within.
It was not a sword so much as a thing that mimicked one—longer than any proper blade, crude in silhouette, a jagged, pulsing growth of bone and rusted iron fused together by old blood and spore-wrapped sinew. It moaned faintly as it moved, the edge vibrating at a pitch too low to hear but high enough to make the madness in the trees tremble.
Nehzhar tilted his head.
"…Ohhh. That one."
A pause. He put a finger to his chin in exaggerated thought.
"Last time you pulled that out, you beat that poor excuse for a saint, didn't you? Gods, that was such a weird fight. You were all over the place, but I suppose that was me technically."
Aelius didn't answer. He stepped forward.
Where his foot landed, the ground didn't just die—it curdled. The grass liquefied. The roots beneath boiled. Plague-pustules bloomed and burst in a single blink. The rot welcomed him like a prodigal king returning to the battlefield.
Nehzhar didn't back away. He grinned, teeth wide and gleaming, and conjured a blade of his own—sleek, crystalline, etched with other people's magic. Not his. Never his. A Frankenstein thing of stolen incantations, Levi's perfect work, Gray's geometry, even Ezra's sheer focus.
Then they moved.
The blades met with a shockwave that flattened what trees remained in the near distance. Fungus burst. Glyphs ruptured midair. Half the rot recoiled from the sound of the contact alone. Neither man was pushed back—both held ground—but the clash sent a ring of cracked air outward like a glass bell struck with a mallet.
Aelius pivoted—low, efficient, no wasted motion—dragging the edge of the plague blade across Nehzhar's ribs. The weapon missed its mark as Nehzhar pulled back, the blade barely nicking his clothing."
"You know," Nehzhar added brightly, ducking under a sweep of rot-heavy steel, "you're the only one I never lie to in a fight?"
He launched himself up—high—flipping over Aelius's shoulder, trying to strike from behind—
But Aelius turned as he landed, already there.
The hilt of his living blade slammed into Nehzhar's chest, sending him skipping like a stone across his own distorted half of the battlefield.
When he came to a halt, the dirt recoiled from him, shivering under the madness that no longer held perfect shape. He coughed once, then pushed himself up—grinning.
His neck cracked. His ribs reformed with a flick of his hand and a twitch of borrowed spellwork.
"Oh, this is gonna be so funny when one of us finally dies."