The plague curled like tendrils from a grave, clinging to the air, lacing the battlefield with death that pulsed like a second heartbeat. Aelius no longer stood at the edge of his domain. The line had vanished beneath his heel the moment Nehzhar dared speak her name, Levy. That was when the restraint burned away. Now, all that remained was motion.
Aelius came forward fast, body moving like sinew animated by something older than rage. The rot followed. It didn't trail, it chased. He flung his hand forward as he closed the distance, and from his palm surged a cloud that hissed with decay.
"Plague Gods: Larval Torrent."
The spell erupted in a violent burst, sickly translucent larvae, screaming as they spiraled through the air, each writhing body hunting mana, sight, and sensation. They didn't aim, they sought. Nehzhar's grin flattened, not out of fear, but sheer disgust.
"Magic Gods: Eclipse Cleft."
His reply came with a lazy backhanded sweep, black magic bursting out like he was slicing open the sky. The wave crushed the parasites into collapsing singularity, pressing their forms into themselves until they burst into ash. It bloomed in the air like the world's foulest flower.
Aelius was already on him, no chant, no build-up. He came in raw and silent, one arm curled to strike like a hammer. A hook drove low, precise, practiced, lethal in intent but not impact.
Nehzhar didn't dodge.
He let it hit.
The impact rippled with rot, but Nehzhar flinched. But his grin returned, cocky and cruel.
"Magic Gods: Nailstorm Wreath."
The moment Aelius touched him, his shoulder detonated in a ring of blackthorns, each tip humming with crushing density. They struck point-blank. Aelius was thrown back, his cloak flayed open, the flesh of his arm peeled into ribbons.
He rolled and came up again. His flesh already crawling back into place, reluctant but inevitable, like something that didn't know it should stop.
But he was breathing harder.
Slower.
His stance was tighter. Defensive.
Nehzhar noticed.
"Still not using your pretty toy?" he called, circling now, casual, half-taunting. "What's the law say about mortals wielding those things again? You need a badge, or a blood pact? Or just a death wish?"
Aelius didn't answer.
He raised both hands instead, another invocation. His movements were stiff now, slower than before, every joint a battlefield of its own.
"Plague Gods: Cadaver Bloom."
The field beneath Nehzhar cracked like eggshells.
From below, corpses bloomed. Twisted roots of spine and tendon, hands made of bone and torn cloth, screeching as they reached up to drag him down. They didn't belong to any known corpse, they were constructs of memory and mold. Death imagined.
"Magic Gods: Raveling Pyre."
Nehzhar's palm dropped with theatrical disdain.
Fire rippled upward, flames that consumed space, not just air. The bloom was gone in an instant, vaporized, erased like chalk. Aelius flinched at the heat.
But he kept moving.
Still fighting.
Still holding.
He charged again, one shoulder twisted, left leg dragging. The rot wept behind him, boiling spores and bitter smoke. Nehzhar rolled his eyes but met him anyway, faster, stronger, cleaner.
Their fists collided. Aelius's knuckles split. Nehzhar's barely bruised.
They broke.
Struck again.
Aelius low, an undead lunge. Nehzhar high, divine punishment wrapped in flair. Each impact cracked the air. Cracked bone. Cracked resolve.
Aelius staggered first. His chest caved where Nehzhar landed a blow. His breath rasped. But his hands still moved.
"Plague Gods: Withering Veil."
Spores burst from his cloak in a haze of burning mist, carving the oxygen out of the air. Nehzhar coughed once, then held his breath, laughing anyway.
"Still trying? I respect it. Stupid, but respectable."
He flicked his fingers.
"Magic Gods: Rift Needles."
Black javelins of compressed gravity spat from the sky, one grazing Aelius's shoulder, another tearing across his side. He grunted but kept upright, arms trembling, legs wide.
His mask had begun to split at the edges.
He was bleeding from the gut. His bones showed in his arm. And still, he circled Nehzhar like a wolf that hadn't noticed it was missing a lung.
He wasn't winning.
But he wasn't falling either.
Every spell Nehzhar threw had to be dodged. Every blow he landed still forced a step back. Every laugh Nehzhar let out came with a flicker of tension beneath it.
He was beginning to realize,
Aelius wasn't fighting to win.
He was fighting not to lose.
And somehow, that was worse.
Because losing meant dying, and dying meant Fairy Tail fell.
It made him slower, but it made him relentless.
Each spell Aelius cast wasn't a scream, it was a whisper of refusal. Each block wasn't perfect, it was deliberate, designed to bleed as little as possible, to keep his rot alive just a few moments longer. Each step backward, away from Nehzhar's onslaught, wasn't retreat.
It was conservation.
And Nehzhar saw it. Felt it. Felt the difference between a man desperate to win and a man who had accepted that death was coming, but he'd drag you into the grave with him, teeth first if that's what it took.
"Plague Gods: Wretched Roots," Aelius hissed, and the ground erupted beneath Nehzhar's feet, twisting roots of black ichor snapping upward, trying to wrap his legs, trying to slow him.
Nehzhar leapt over them, barely, landing in a three-point crouch and skidding to the side. His teeth clenched.
He wasn't laughing now.
"You're not playing fair, Aelius," he spat. "You're not even trying to win this like a mage."
He straightened. His fists clenched. Smoke, real smoke, shadow-born and twitching with divine nerve, poured from his knuckles.
"Magic Gods: Hollow Entombment!"
A cage of swirling void magic erupted around Aelius like a storm snapping shut, an obsidian cube, twisting and bending gravity inward, light warping at the corners like reality was choking on itself.
Aelius didn't dodge.
Didn't flinch.
He stepped into it.
The cube collapsed like a lung imploding,
, and detonated.
The shockwave tore across the battlefield, soil flipping like overturned graves, trees reduced to wet splinters.
When the dust cleared, Aelius stood hunched in the center, breathing hard, plague-slick smoke weeping from his ribs and one arm hanging useless at his side.
But he was still standing.
He raised his eyes again, rot pooling at his feet.
And Nehzhar saw it.
That same look.
Not defiance. Not rage. Not arrogance.
Resolve.
A quiet, stubborn, suicidal kind of resolve that looked at death and whispered: Fine. But I'm taking you with me.
"...You just don't break, do you," Nehzhar muttered, brushing ash off his arm. "You're like... a cockroach. But with more trauma."
He rolled his neck.
"Alright, Aelius. You win. You're worth killing properly."
He flexed his fingers, and for the first time, his feet settled.
His stance widened.
No more bouncing. No more spinning like a clown on fire.
Stillness.
True, practiced, calm. As if he'd decided to begin the fight now.
"Magic Gods: Black Star Burial."
The words came like thunder through his chest.
A dome of dark above. Threads of shadow below. All of it spiraling inward like a noose made from falling stars.
Aelius planted both feet, and inhaled.
Deep.
Then:
"Plague Gods: Blightward Heart."
His entire domain responded.
Rot howled. The plague pulsed from him like a heartbeat, like the breath of a dead world, lashing out against the falling starlight in a cyclone of corruption and boiling spores.
The battlefield didn't shatter.
It dissolved.
Ash, bone, rot, magic, no longer two sides, but a maelstrom.
Two forces not made to survive one another.
A clash not of champions, but of curses pretending to be men.
The first impact didn't register. Not really. Nehzhar felt the collision in the magic first, a sick twist in the core of his gut like the air had turned rancid inside his lungs. Then came the real strike.
Blightward Heart wasn't flashy. It wasn't even fast.
It just was.
The rot swelled like a tidal current, not a spell but a reaction, a bloom of plague-slick atmosphere bending toward him, clinging to his limbs like mold to bread. Every shadow curled into his bones. Every breath dragged the corruption deeper.
Nehzhar tried to retreat. Too late.
A shriek of pressure slammed against his ribs, his left side erupted in a geyser of blood and ruin as plague burrowed into his shadow armor, and melted through his spells like fat under fire. His shoulder hit the dirt first, his boots carving a long, messy line across the battlefield.
The dome of Black Star Burial stuttered, warped, cracked open like a spiderweb glass bowl.
His body stopped skidding with a jolt. He groaned and rolled onto his back, panting steam into the decay-thick air.
Smoke curled from his abdomen. One side of his jacket had dissolved entirely, blackened skin beneath it steaming like acid had bathed it. The plague wasn't just rot, it was memory, it lingered. Where it struck, it stayed.
Nehzhar sat up, coughing violently.
He spit. Something green and wet hit the ground. He stared at it, blinked twice, and wiped his mouth on his forearm.
"Okay," he muttered. "Alright. So that's what that spell feels like. Great."
A silence. Then a tiny wheeze of a laugh.
"Gods above, your regen is such absolute bullshit."
He looked up at Aelius, still standing in the heart of the rot like a phantom carved from grave smoke and determination. Those eyes behind the mask flickered, steady, unreadable.
"You've been stabbed, burned, had both arms blown out at least once, hit with four direct spells from me... and you're still walking."
Nehzhar's smirk twitched.
"I can see the ribs through your stomach, Aelius. I can count them. Like piano keys."
Aelius didn't move.
"You've bled out three times. I know because I felt your heartbeat stutter." Nehzhar pushed himself up, slow, dragging breath through clenched teeth. "And somehow, that bile-fueled little healing core of yours just keeps kicking. You know most people have organs? You have fungus. Fungal necrotic stem cells or something. It's horrifying. It's disgusting."
He raised one arm, snapping smoke from his knuckles.
"It's also impressive. Gross. But impressive."
He pointed at Aelius with that same finger, flicking plague-spores out of the air like gnats.
"But it's still not enough."
And then he charged.
No flourish. No dramatic monologue. Not this time.
Nehzhar moved like the blade he always joked he wasn't, sharp, decisive, almost surgical in his precision now.
Aelius was waiting.
One step forward. Then two.
They collided.
Nehzhar's blade slashed low, ducked under Aelius's elbow, then flipped the strike into a reverse uppercut aimed at his exposed ribs.
Aelius twisted just enough to soften the blow, but not enough to avoid it. Steel kissed bone. Flesh split. Plague mist bled out like pus bursting from a deep wound.
He didn't cry out.
He grabbed Nehzhar's wrist with his half-regrown hand and dug his fingers in.
"Plague Gods: Bloom."
The spores didn't explode.
They nested.
They slithered into Nehzhar's skin like tiny, laughing seeds, threading under his veins, biting into his nerves.
Nehzhar staggered backward with a barked curse, stumbling into the churned mud, yanking his jacket off as the spell burned under his skin.
"I hate that one," he snapped. "It's always that one. Every damn time."
Aelius was advancing.
No smugness. No celebration.
He was bleeding from at least five places, limping slightly, one arm still useless, sludge bleeding from his jaw and back.
But he kept coming.
And Nehzhar felt it.
Not power. Not pressure.
Promise.
He grinned through the blood on his teeth.
"You think I'm impressed yet?" he shouted, flicking ash from his hair, eyes wide and wild. "You think this is enough to stop me from butchering your little family tree?"
"Show me more, Aelius!" he roared. "Show me why they trust you with their lives! Prove it!"
Aelius moved like a man made of knives and regrets, cutting, cutting, always cutting, but every step now came with weight. Every motion dragged behind it the rot of his failing strength. He struck low again, angled toward Nehzhar's legs, but the momentum wasn't there. It scraped off Nehzhar's blade like iron on iron, loud, sparking, useless.
Nehzhar caught the blow, twisted it aside with a laugh, then caught Aelius's forearm with his elbow, ramming it backward with bone-cracking force. Something in Aelius's shoulder gave a sick pop as the joint slipped halfway out of place.
"Man, you're starting to slow down." Nehzhar's grin didn't reach his eyes this time. "Kinda heartbreaking, really."
Aelius staggered but didn't fall. He flicked his fingers outward, forcing breath between his teeth, the rot around him coiling once more into focus.
"Plague Gods: Wither Mark."
A pulse of decay burst from his palm, gray-green, razor-thin, a line of rot aimed dead center at Nehzhar's chest.
Nehzhar caught it.
Ate it.
He didn't even flinch. His mouth opened wide like a great, cracked abyss, magic surged into it like water into a broken dam. His skin flushed, his muscles refilled with light and smoke. The tremor in his hands vanished.
He licked his lips and made a face like he'd just chewed on burnt copper. "Still gross," he muttered, "but efficient."
Aelius didn't reply. His breath came shallower now. His stance dipped lower. His feet dragged more than they stepped.
The rot around him flickered, thinner than before, his dominion straining at the edges, the domain bleeding back into the ether where it belonged. It wasn't gone, not yet, but it was dying.
And Nehzhar could feel it.
"You're out of tricks."
He moved faster this time, more than before, magic surging again in his limbs, replenished by the consumption. His boots cracked stone as he closed the gap.
"Out of spells."
A slash. A parry. A shoulder-check that knocked Aelius off his balance. Nehzhar didn't stop.
"Out of strength."
Another blade strike, this one caught Aelius across the stomach, shallow but precise. Blood sprayed, thick, dark, oily.
"And, judging by that noise your leg just made, " Nehzhar ducked low, swept Aelius's feet from under him with a spinning kick that sent him crashing to one knee, ", you're also almost out of limbs."
Aelius tried to rise. Nehzhar shoved him back down with a single palm to the mask.
"Oh no no no, we're not done. You don't get to fall down and make it noble. I haven't seen it yet."
He leaned close, the grin twisting sharper.
"You haven't impressed me."
Behind Aelius, the rot shivered. Fewer spores. The air was clearer. His spells, tiring.
Aelius looked up, breath heaving behind his mask. He lifted a hand, tried to form a seal, his fingers trembled.
Nehzhar stepped on his wrist.
"Don't bother. You're tapped. You got nothing left. And I've still got your stupid guild to burn."
He crouched, face inches from Aelius's.
"Don't get me wrong. You've done great. Really. Lot of drama. Very poetic. The whole 'I won't fall' thing was cool. And the mask is still terrifying. But you know what's cooler than trying?"
He leaned in.
"Winning."
He stood again, slowly.
"I'll give you one more shot. One. Blow me away, corpse-boy. Because if you don't, I'm gonna do it. And Levy's at the bottom. You know what that means?"
He raised his arms, letting the last of Aelius's spell-rot drip from his fingertips like ink. "It means she gets to watch."
Aelius didn't speak.
He simply pushed himself to his feet again, unsteady, ribs broken, magic waning, vision blurry.
But standing.
Still standing.
The world sagged beneath the weight of the glyph.
Aelius's lips moved slowly, breath shallow, eyes dulled and steady as the rot thickened behind him like smoke forming a spine.
"Warp Gods: Plague, Apparition."
Magic cracked like bone.
Space didn't rupture, it yielded. Softly, like old flesh. Like the veil between worlds had grown too thin from the pressure of something pressing through. The air went rancid. The rot pulsed once and swelled, like lungs dragging in a final breath before a scream.
And then something stepped forward.
A mass. A grotesque, hulking form of bloat and breathless joy. Towering, skin sloughing off in strips, belly distended like a pregnant god rotting from the inside. Horns, stubby, like snapped bones, curled from a head too small for the body. One hand dragged a cleaver of rusted iron and half-grown teeth, wide enough to gut a carriage in a single swing.
It did not snarl.
It laughed.
Bright and happy. Like a child's first laugh, if that child had never stopped dying.
Nehzhar's foot slid back. His shoulders tensed.
For the first time, he didn't speak.
Not a joke. Not a threat. Not a single damn word.
His eyes widened. Mouth slightly parted. The black aura around him fluttered for half a heartbeat.
And then he snapped out of it.
"Absolutely not." His voice shook with something sharp. Not fear. Not awe. Disbelief. "You're not supposed to have that."
The grotesque form raised its cleaver. No ceremony. No chant. Just that horrible, gleeful laughter echoing like a hymn.
Aelius didn't move. His eyes stayed fixed. The rot behind him surged. And the weapon fell.
"Magic Godslayer: Abyssal Guard!"
Nehzhar's voice cracked as he hurled his remaining hand forward, shadows whirling into a thick curtain of coiling pitch, but it folded. The cleaver cleaved through, catching the barrier, and then Nehzhar, with a single, thunderous crack.
The dome shattered. A limb flew.
Nehzhar screamed as he hit the ground, crashing like a meteor, shoulder torn into red ruin, black ichor burning at the edge of the wound. His arm, gone. Cauterized by rot, pulsing with lingering echoes of corrupted plague.
The beast laughed again, higher, louder, a cruel shriek of delighted satisfaction, and as if its role had been played, it dissolved, crumbling back into spores, then nothing at all.
But its presence remained. Its taint.
Aelius lowered his hand.
Nehzhar stirred. Slowly. Painfully. He pushed up to a crouch, hair soaked to his face, breath rattling in his throat. The wound spewed steam.
"I don't know how you did that," he said softly, a note of unsteady amusement returning to his voice, "but that wasn't a spell. That was something worse. Something borrowed."
He coughed hard, nearly laughing as he did, blood flinging from his mouth.
"You're just full of surprises tonight, aren't you?"
He rose, shaking, sparks of Magic Godslayer energy curling around his fingers.
"But next time you borrow something like that, you better make sure it doesn't come asking for rent."
He snapped his fingers, the sound still faintly trembling.
"Because I am not cleaning up, that."
Nehzhar stood fully, shakily, his shadow magic bleeding from the socket where his arm had been severed, trailing tendrils like ink in water, each twitch a tremor of unspoken pain. His grin was back, but this time it was wrong. Crooked. Off-balance. Forced around clenched teeth.
He let out a low whistle, then laughed, short and brittle.
"Well damn, Aelius."
His one remaining hand pressed to the scorched stump, and he winced as black sparks flickered across it, magic beginning the slow, agonizing attempt to seal the wound.
"You've impressed me," he said, voice tight, almost reverent. "Congratulations."
A beat.
"Too much."
He raised his head, and for a second, something ancient looked back through his eyes. Not mockery. Not fury.
A kind of admiration, maybe. Or kinship.
Then he stepped forward, and that look vanished, replaced with a colder, crueler clarity.
"I'll spare your guild."
His voice dropped. Flat. Icy.
"Not because of mercy. You've bought their lives with that thing you summoned. With that... act. You earned it."
The wind shifted. The plague stirred at Aelius's back, but he remained silent.
Nehzhar's fingers twitched, and the magic around them snapped taut like pulled sinew.
"But you," he said, gaze narrowing, "you still have to die."
No laughter now. No joy.
Just anger.
"I can't let you walk away with that kind of power. You think you're a martyr, or a monster, or maybe both, but what you are, Aelius Morvain, is a problem. And I kill problems."
He shifted his stance. The air around him darkened, shadows spiraling in slow, deliberate orbits. The grin returned, but thinner, ghost-like.
A sharp snap of his neck, cracking tension from his spine.
"Final act. Curtain call. Show me if you're a one-hit wonder, " he flicked black blood from his mouth, ", or the goddamn main event."
A sharp snap of his neck, cracking the tension from his spine. Then the ground cracked beneath his feet as he surged forward.
Aelius's breath rasped behind the mask, fogging the rim of the metal as he stumbled back, sluggish now, magic bleeding out of him like sand through cracked fingers. His body had long since stopped screaming from pain, now it simply twitched, burned, and waited to fail.
He reached out, and an all too familiar flask appeared in his hand. It pulsed faintly in his hand, a pocket of plagueborne essence potent enough to flood his veins with vitality, to refresh his magic.
But the moment he began to lift it, the air screamed.
"Ah ah ah, nope, can't have that!"
Nehzhar was there before the flask had even cleared Aelius's palm.
With a flick of his fingers, a lance of shadow lashed forward, "Magic Gods: Ruin Spiral!", and struck the flask dead-on. The reinforced alchemical steel crumpled mid-air like wet paper. The thing exploded into a cloud of sickly smoke and shattered boneglass, spiraling away into the rot-choked wind.
Aelius's eyes snapped up, wide, desperate, but the moment of panic was brief. He said nothing. Just squared his stance again, fingers now empty, and braced for what was coming.
Nehzhar hit the ground, skidding, hand trailing black fire, laughing.
"Too slow, too slow! C'mon, man, I'm missing an arm and I'm still dancing circles around you!"
He didn't even stop moving. One foot pivoted, dragging a semicircle of scorched ash behind him, and then he surged again, blade raised in his remaining hand.
Aelius ducked the first blow but caught the second, flat-edge, but still enough to slam him into the ground with bone-jarring force. His knees buckled. He coughed blood. But his eyes never left Nehzhar.
"Still not giving up?" Nehzhar barked, amusement laced with heat. "You're out of gas. No flask. No blade. No summons left. What, you gonna blink at me menacingly until I keel over?"
Aelius moved.
Not fast.
Not strong.
But with the grinding certainty of something that would not stop. A body already dead, driven by will Nezhzhar came down hard.
Faster than before.
No taunt this time. No theatrical spin. Just violence, pure and abrupt.
His remaining arm, wreathed in a whisper of voidlight, crashed down against Aelius with a single clean arc. There was no spell name, no trick, no delay.
Just a strike.
And it hit.
Aelius tried to move, he did. The intention was there, coiled in every exhausted tendon, but his body lagged behind his will. The rot around his knees slowed him. The blood loss dulled him. The shock of everything so far had already pushed his reflexes past the edge of collapse.
He was a moment too late.
The strike connected with the side of his face.
There was a sound like a thundercrack underwater, shhhhhkkkkt-crkk, as metal split and bone gave way. The left side of his mask exploded outward in a burst of iron shrapnel and dry, flaking blood. A broken fragment of ceramic spiraled into the dirt, still glowing with the embers of protective runes now dead.
And with it, his eye.
Aelius staggered, his hand flying up to the side of his head. But it wasn't instinct. It wasn't defense. It was pressure, an attempt to stop what was leaking.
The orb was gone.
Shattered.
A ruin of crimson ichor spilled down his cheek like tar drawn from a corpse, thick and slow. The air around him rippled at the sight, like the world itself had been wounded in tandem. A breath escaped him, gurgled and short. One step backward, then another.
And his face, what remained of it, was exposed now.
And behind it. His expression wasn't pain. It wasn't even fury.
It was still. Cold. A silence that felt ancient.
Aelius didn't scream. He didn't shout. He didn't fall.
He blinked, just once, with his remaining eye, slow and deliberate. The crimson streaks down his throat shimmered like paint on marble, his body swaying like a tree that refused to break.
"Okay," Nezhzhar muttered, taking a half-step back, lowering his blade just a little. "That was… that was a bit more mess than I expected."
A moment passed.
Then another.
Nezhzhar lifted his head, squinting. "Wait. You're still standing?"
Aelius didn't respond.
He simply raised his right arm again, slowly, mechanically, like a puppet with one string still intact. His hand curled tight, pulling in the rot around him like smoke drawn into a lung. What poured through his veins now wasn't magic, it was sheer, agonizing, pressure. A cracked conduit of will and disease and death that refused to shut down.
His voice, when it came, was quiet. Throat-burnt.
"…still here."
Nezhzhar hissed between his teeth, backing up now in earnest, hand snapping up to guard his chest. "Seriously? You should be on the ground. You should be twitching and drooling and leaking life like a broken spout."
Aelius stepped forward.
The rot followed.
"And you're still here?" Nehzhar barked, voice rising with disbelief and simmering irritation. "You don't have any magic left. You don't have a sword. You barely have a face, and you're still, "
He caught himself mid-rant, snarled, and threw his arm up like a tantruming storm god denied lightning.
"RRrrrrgh, GODS, you're so annoying!" he roared, fingers twitching with the recoil of half-formed spells. "Even your vitality should have limits! You're a mage, not a cockroach!"
Aelius didn't reply. His chest heaved, half from blood loss, half from something deeper, something older than exhaustion. Something forged not in strength, but in choice.
Nehzhar pointed at him, as if summoning the universe itself to witness the absurdity.
"Look at you! You're bleeding out, you're gasping, your mask is gone, your eye is somewhere in the dirt probably making friends with worms, and you're still shambling toward me like you're trying to win a medal in Stubborn Bastardry!"
Aelius stopped, not because he was done.
Because his legs were shaking too hard to move without falling.
Blood dripped in rhythmic pulses from his fingertips, pooling quietly into the rot.
Nehzhar stared for a moment longer, expression contorting, rage and bafflement coiling into something darker. He wasn't laughing now. He wasn't even smiling.
"This isn't courage," he spat, stepping forward. "It's not resolve. It's not even will. It's just, stupidity. You've lost. Just stay down, Aelius. You've done your bit. You've impressed me, wow, hooray, great show, but the curtain's falling."
He reached his good hand out, crackling with another surge of pure magic.
"Stay down."
But Aelius raised his head, not high, not proud, just enough. Enough to show he'd heard. Enough to show he refused.
Blood matted the left side of his face where his mask had shattered, his ruined eye a hollow ruin glistening darkly. His breath came in ragged shudders, shoulders rising like a man dragging himself up from his own grave.
"Scarier things than you," he said, voice cracked and raw, "have tried harder…"
He took another step forward, and the rot responded, swelling at his heels like something eager to follow.
"…and I'm still standing."
Nehzhar flinched. Not visibly. Not obviously. But the corner of his mouth twitched, and his fingers stopped moving for half a breath. That ancient, ridiculous weight of a man who should have died a dozen times was still here.
Still standing.
Still looking him in the eye, well, eye socket, technically.
"You know what?" Nehzhar said slowly, forcing his usual flippancy back into his tone. "I don't know whether to be offended or concerned that this line would've hit harder if you weren't gushing blood out of your face like a horror movie sprinkler."
He forced a grin, one that didn't reach his eyes. "And for the record, I am scarier. I'm hilarious and deadly. That's a combo."
Aelius didn't laugh. Didn't blink.
Nehzhar's fingers twitched, briefly considering another spell, but his hand stilled mid-gesture. The tension that crawled down his spine didn't come from fear, it came from confusion. From the sharp, unfamiliar edge of uncertainty cutting into the script he'd written in his head for this fight. Aelius wasn't supposed to keep going. Not like this. Not with nothing.
His grin faltered.
"You're a stubborn little bastard, I'll give you that," Nehzhar muttered, pacing sideways in a slow arc, keeping distance. "Most people stop after the whole 'face explosion' bit. Some even start crying. I respect it. I do."
Still no reaction.
Aelius just walked forward, steady, broken, hunched like a scarecrow dragged through war and stitched together wrong. There was no more swagger. No cool mask. No theatrics.
Just movement.
Rusted, grinding, purposeful movement.
The ground beneath his feet squelched with the soft hiss of corrupted matter, plague thinned and dying, starved of energy, flaking in strange patterns as if even it was tired. But Aelius didn't care. He didn't need the rot anymore. Or the sword. Or the flask.
He had momentum.
And Nehzhar hated momentum.
"Okay," Nehzhar said sharply, tilting his head, one hand raised again. "You're not healing. You're not casting. You're walking at me with your damn ribs poking out like a goddamn haunted coat rack. What's the plan, Morvain? You gonna headbutt me to death?"
Still nothing.
Aelius was close now. Close enough that Nehzhar felt the weight of him pressing into the air between them, not magical, not divine, not theatrical. Just presence. Pressure. The kind a man leaves when he refuses to fall down.
"…You're bluffing," Nehzhar tried.
He wasn't.
Aelius moved faster than he had any right to. It wasn't grace, it was desperation honed into a blade. He lunged like a beast cornered for the last time, bones screaming through every movement. His fist slammed into Nehzhar's barrier, no spell, no incantation, just a hit, and the barrier cracked.
Not shattered. Not broken.
But cracked.
And Nehzhar blinked. Because he'd felt that.
"Oh," he muttered. "So that's what this is."
A second hit came before he could finish the thought, this time a backhand that caught his shoulder and sent him stumbling sideways with a grunt. It wasn't strong. It wasn't fast.
But it was relentless.
Aelius followed, another step, another swing, another strike, and Nehzhar deflected it, barely, with a wall of magic so thin it hissed against the man's skin like burning paper.
"You're not even trying to kill me anymore," Nehzhar barked, stepping back again. "You're just trying to wear me down. That's the play, isn't it? Bleed on me until I get bored?"
Still no words.
A knee hit Nehzhar in the gut. Sloppy, underpowered, and thrown with the force of a man whose body was already failing, but it landed. And for the first time since the fight began, Nehzhar felt his footing slip.
Aelius grabbed his collar, brought him in close, mouth bleeding, half his face caved in, and whispered, barely audible through broken teeth:
"You talk too much."
And slammed his forehead forward.
Nezhhar's head snapped back, vision briefly going white.
"Son of a, !"
The next blow came before he recovered, an elbow to the chin, followed by Aelius collapsing forward with the weight of his body, dragging them both into the rotted mud below.
It wasn't a battle anymore.
It was a mauling.
A grim, breathless, scrambling storm of fists and shattered bones, of feral snarls and broken hands trying to choke the last breath from an immortal throat.
And somewhere beneath it all, Nehzhar felt the whisper of something awful,
Not power.
Not fear.
Just intent.
Raw, human, and furious.
Nezhzhar finally ripped himself from the muck and flung both arms outward with a sharp snap, his patience, his playfulness, his smug composure, all obliterated in a burst of raw irritation.
"Magic Gods: Lance Barrage!"
A cascade of onyx spears erupted from the air around him, serrated and shrieking as they screamed forward in a spiral, twenty, thirty, maybe more, slamming into Aelius's chest, shoulders, thigh, neck. The impact rippled the air like shattering glass, magic carving deep lines through flesh and bone alike. Some of the lances detonated with hollow, thunderous booms.
Aelius didn't flinch.
Blood erupted from the wounds in thick, diseased ropes. His chest collapsed slightly on one side. A spike pierced straight through his thigh and drove into the earth behind him.
And he kept walking.
Nezhzhar growled and twisted both wrists, shadows curling around his fingers like living smoke.
"Magic Gods: Gravity Hallow!"
The weight hit like a mountain, slamming Aelius into the ground with crushing force. The swamp cratered around him, rot exploding outward, bodies of fallen creatures long devoured rising up like bloated balloons before collapsing again under the sheer pressure.
And Aelius stood back up.
One leg was shattered. One arm barely attached. A long, ragged cut from temple to jaw, leaking blood like molten wax.
But he stood.
And walked.
And hit.
A wild fist caught Nezhzhar in the ribs, hard. Not because of strength. Because Aelius no longer cared about the pain. No longer registered the blood in his lungs or the absence of a jawline.
Another punch.
Then another.
A knee.
A shoulder slam.
Nezhzhar stumbled, spitting out blood of his own now.
"This is insane," he hissed, throwing another spell like a reflex. "Magic Gods: Charnel Chain!"
A writhing set of bladed links burst from the air, wrapping around Aelius's limbs, biting into bone, yanking tight, glowing with sickly runes designed to cut magic itself.
They didn't stop him.
He just dragged them.
Feet grinding through the mire. Muscles locking and seizing. But his right arm still pulled free, chain slicing through his flesh, and drove another punch forward, this one slamming Nezhzhar across the face.
Spittle and blood flew.
Nezhzhar reeled, rebalanced, and screamed:
"Plague Gods: Black Wind Ritual!"
The very air turned against Aelius, spiraling into a cyclone of sickness, the clouds above boiling green and yellow as the cursed wind fell upon him. Boils erupted across his arms. His back split open. His ruined left eye popped again.
And still,
He didn't scream.
He didn't acknowledge it.
He just kept swinging.
Nezhzhar parried a hit, ducked another, then barely avoided a headbutt that would've cracked his nose if it hadn't already been broken earlier.
"STOP IT!" he roared, frustration boiling over. "You're losing! I'm winning! DIE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON!"
Aelius answered with a hit to the throat.
Then a tackle.
Then a slow, grinding slam of his forehead into Nezhzhar's temple, over and over again, every impact weaker but no less determined.
"I will kill you," Nezhzhar hissed, spitting blood. "But I swear to the gods, "
A tooth flew from his mouth.
", You're going to make me work for it, aren't you?"
Aelius didn't blink.
Didn't smile.
Didn't speak.
The thought didn't strike Aelius like a revelation, it settled, slow and heavy, the way ash settles over the ruins of a burning home. It wasn't a panic, or a fear. Just a fact. Another weight on the growing list of weights. His limbs barely responded now. His vision swam. His left eye was gone, ruptured in its socket, and his right could barely keep Nehzhar in focus.
He couldn't remember the last spell he cast. Couldn't even feel the wellspring in his gut where magic used to live, just an echo, thin and dry like trying to draw water from a shattered basin. Every movement now was pure will, bone grinding bone, muscle stripped raw by too many detonations of power and rot and blade.
But he didn't stop.
He couldn't stop.
Because if he did, Nehzhar would win. And if Nehzhar won. No.
Not even a full thought. Just the shape of one. Enough to send another burst of motion through his exhausted body. Enough to make his ruined right arm move again, strike again.
He'd stopped thinking of winning a long time ago. That wasn't the goal anymore. This was endurance. Attrition. He was playing for seconds, inches, fragments of space between Nehzhar's strength and his own dying form.
Nezhzhar was faster. Stronger. Still overflowing with magic. Even wounded, he had reserves left, still flinging spells with color and weight and sickening speed.
Aelius had only rot.
Only will.
His thoughts turned numb, but one kept flashing in the dark:
One more. Just one more hit.
The air warped as Nehzhar fired another spell, loud, cruel, burning black and crimson.
"Magic Gods: Binding Crucible!"
The magic slammed into Aelius's chest like a meteor, bones cracked, ribs gave way, and he felt his right lung collapse with a wet, inside-out sound. He staggered. Fell to one knee. Blood frothed from his lips.
He should've gone down.
He didn't.
He pushed off the ground, dragging himself back upright, barely seeing Nehzhar now, but feeling him, like pressure behind the eyes, like a thorn in the soul.
Nehzhar can't win if he is still standing.
His left leg buckled. His spine screamed. His mask was gone. His magic was gone.
Aelius knew spells wouldn't work.
Even if he had the magic left, even if his thoughts were steady enough to summon the syllables and shape the magic into something with form, Nehzhar would just eat it. Devour it, laugh through it, spit it back up in his face. The man could dodge spells by instinct, raise barriers like reflexes, hurl them aside like they were pebbles tossed by dying hands.
So he didn't waste the breath.
Didn't waste the words.
Didn't try.
Instead, he turned the only weapon he had left, his body.
He drove every flicker of energy still swimming in the marrow of his bones inward, not to launch, not to cast, not to strike. But to fuel. To burn the magic as kindling. He fed it into cracked muscle, into splintered cartilage, into torn ligaments and misaligned joints. It wasn't magic anymore, it was momentum, will, force.
His spine realigned with a pop like breaking stone.
His tendons pulled taut again, elastic re-knitting beneath burnt flesh.
His right leg, nearly limp from damage, found its footing once more, and drove forward.
He didn't care about spells.
He didn't need them.
Nehzhar blinked, just for a second. Enough time to see Aelius not casting. To realize he wasn't summoning, wasn't invoking, wasn't calling out,
He was charging.
The first blow cracked against Nehzhar's barrier.
The barrier shuddered.
Not shattered. Not crumbled. But recoiled, like a living thing surprised it had been hit that hard.
Aelius didn't wait. He stepped into the next blow like a hammer falling from the heavens.
A second strike, blood-drenched and unguided by spell, crushed into the edge of Nehzhar's defense.
A third, a backhanded sweep with a shattered arm wrapped in blood, broke a portion of the dome, sending shrapnelized magic scattering in the air.
Nehzhar hissed, actually hissed, stepping back.
"You're cheating," he barked. "That's not how this works!"
But Aelius didn't respond. Couldn't. His mouth was blood-clogged and broken and too tired to form syllables. His thoughts were smears of pain and will and fire.
Instead, he kept coming.
He grabbed Nehzhar by the shoulder, gripped hard enough that rot surged from his fingers into the Godslayer's skin, and drove a broken knee upward into his ribs. The crack was sharp, undeniable, real. Nehzhar stumbled back, not in mockery, not in dramatic flair, but from pain.
"I said, STOP, "
And Nehzhar hesitated.
Not because of the words. But because Aelius was still moving.
Barely alive. Barely holding together. But moving.
Then, before Nehzhar could draw breath for a retort, Aelius lunged.
Not with grace. Not with strength. Just a burst of raw, starved desperation given shape and momentum. His left hand was too mangled to close properly, and his right hung like a meat-hook from his shoulder, so he used what was left.
The bones.
Where fingers had snapped and tendons had ruptured, the bone had punched free, white, jagged, and glistening with red. Not a weapon meant for killing. Just splinters of anatomy no longer bound by flesh.
Aelius drove them up.
Not into the chest. Not into the stomach.
But straight into Nehzhar's throat.
The sharpened tips of broken fingers stabbed into soft skin, wet, sickeningly slick, the impact punctuated by the dull crack of cartilage giving way.
Nehzhar's words died before they formed.
His eyes bulged.
His magic surged on reflex, too late.
Black tendrils of godslayer energy arced out in all directions, snapping into the air, into the ground, flailing with no direction. But Aelius didn't pull back.
He shoved further.
Bone dug deeper. Nehzhar's arms twitched. His body buckled. But he didn't fall.
He gripped Aelius by the wrists, finally reacting, finally ripping the ruined hand out of his neck with a savage, bubbling snarl. Blood, tainted with divine magic, poured down his collar, steaming where it hit his clothes.
"You, " Nehzhar coughed, voice shredded, eyes wild, ", you rabid little, !"
Aelius didn't answer.
He simply stood there, swaying, face torn open, his breath coming in choking fits.
The attack hadn't killed Nehzhar.
But it hurt.
And worse, it made him bleed.
"You're not supposed to push me back," Nehzhar whispered, tone tilting somewhere between fury and disbelief. He touched his neck with one hand, pulling it away to see the glistening stain of his own blood. "I'm above this. I'm the, "
He didn't finish.
Nehzhar growled, a low, guttural sound that rolled out of his ruined throat like thunder passed through gravel. His jaw tightened, blood still dribbling down his neck, painting symbols of rage in uneven strokes across his chest.
His gaze shifted, not to Aelius, not immediately. But past him. Just a flick of the eye, a minute rotation of his head, as if checking something that only he could see. A ticking clock on the horizon. A thread fraying too fast.
Whatever it was, it made him snarl again.
"No more games," he hissed, voice rasping and uneven. "No more goddamn rounds. I've let you dance long enough, N."
Aelius twitched forward again, the weight of death still pushing his battered frame into motion. Nehzhar didn't let him finish the motion.
He raised a single hand, shaking not from fear but from boiling adrenaline, and pointed it like a blade.
"I have to finish this now. Before I get too impressed again."
Black magic gathered with unnatural speed. Faster than before. Tighter. Denser. "Magic Gods: Singularity Execution."
The very air constricted, recoiled from it, like it could feel what was coming.
The moment Nehzhar spoke the spell, the battlefield shifted.
Space clenched, folded inward as if the world had sucked in its breath and was too terrified to let it go. The rot recoiled. The air shattered like glass in slow motion.
Aelius moved.
Not instinctively. Not clumsily. But deliberately, every shattered tendon and dying muscle fiber pulled tight under sheer will. His legs dragged through mud, rot sloshing around his feet like tar, trying to catch, to hold. He pivoted, not away, but off-center, knowing that getting clear was impossible.
But surviving?
He'd built his life on that word.
The moment the spell struck the ground, it didn't explode. It collapsed. The world caved in, a single pinprick of absolute blackness igniting into a gravitational maelstrom. A singularity in the most literal sense, not fire, not pressure, deletion. The spell didn't burn. It didn't cut. It erased.
Aelius barely cleared the core.
But it wasn't enough.
A shriek of agony tore from him as the edge of the spell caught his right side, then his legs, then more. For a heartbeat, there was no pain. No sensation at all. Just loss. The scream came a second later, involuntary, torn from a mouth that should no longer have breath.
From his ribcage down, there was… nothing. The lower half of his torso had vanished in a sickening blur of red mist and ruined cloth. His right arm was gone completely, shoulder down. The left hung by sinew, twitching, the nerves firing blindly.
He hit the ground, not fell, hit, as if gravity finally remembered to reclaim him. He landed with a wet thud in the muck of his own rot, no longer enough body left to brace the fall.
The world spun. The sky shrank.
But somehow, somehow, he was still awake.
Still breathing.
Still alive.
Nehzhar's silhouette loomed ahead, flickering with spent power, his expression unreadable behind the veil of smoke and residual magic. He didn't speak this time. Just stared.
Aelius didn't move.
Couldn't.
But he looked back. One eye, nearly blind, found Nehzhar through the haze of red and black. There was no hatred there. No triumph. Only the stubborn, infuriating glint of endurance.
A ragged exhale bubbled through his shredded chest cavity.
Then a whisper, no louder than breath:
"Still here."
Nehzhar stepped forward, slow now, not out of caution, but gravity. Finality. Like the weight of everything caught up at once and dragged his boots through the grime. The ground hissed beneath his feet but didn't rise against him. It knew better. Even the plague seemed to know who had won.
He stood over what remained of Aelius, just a torso, a ruin of flesh and cloth and bone, eye half-lidded and face caked in drying blood and ash. A body that shouldn't be breathing, and yet, somehow, still was.
Nehzhar looked down, chest rising and falling with sharp, uneven breath. His neck oozed blood from where fingers had punched into his throat. He wiped the blood away with the back of his hand, flicked it to the side like spitting after a bad joke.
And then he said it, low, quiet, but edged like the final nail.
"Not for long."
No sarcasm this time. No grin. No flippancy to hide behind.
Just a statement.
A sentence.
A promise.
Magic began to build in his hand again, not flashy, not overdone. Just enough. Enough to end it. To leave no more pieces behind. His fingers curled in a slow, deliberate spiral, threads of abyssal power coalescing between them, silent and smooth, ready to finish the story.
Nehzhar's hand came down like the swing of a guillotine, clean, inevitable, execution made magic.
But it didn't land.
CLANG.
Steel struck magic. Sparks split the moment. Nehzhar's hand, mid-swing, was knocked aside by the force of the thrown weapon. His blow, meant to cleave what was left of Aelius's skull, struck empty space, magic flashing wild against the stone.
He staggered half a step back, blinking.
Then growled. Low. Animal.
He turned his head slowly.
And saw her.
Crimson hair,wind-tossed. Armor gleaming in the gloom. Gauntlet still raised from the throw. Her posture was calm, but her presence hit like a war drum.
Erza Scarlet.
No words passed between them.
Not recognition. Not inquiry. Just distance measured in instinct and tension.
Nezhhar's eyes narrowed, gaze twitching from her to the sword lodged in the dirt beside Aelius's broken body. The trajectory was obvious. The intent, undeniable.
His fingers twitched, magic dancing between them again, hungry.
But Erza didn't move.
No threat. No warning.
She simply stared.
Still. Silent.
Waiting.
Measuring.
Nehzhar's fingers flexed again, magic dancing like static between them, simmering with heat and fury. His eyes flicked to the sword lodged near Aelius's head, and then back to her, lips tightening into something between contempt and curiosity.
The clearing stank of death.
The rot that had seeped from Aelius's domain coated everything in a withering lacquer. Grass blackened beneath bootsteps. Bark peeled from trees. Every root, every flower, every patch of once-living greenery had decayed to a skeletal ruin under the weight of the plague-born power that had boiled through the land during the battle. The air didn't move. It clung, wet and fevered. The wind had long since choked to silence.
But through that stillness, through the mire of cracked black soil and ash-choked air, footsteps began to sound.
Not loud.
But deliberate.
Crunching through rot-soaked ground, pressing into plague-softened soil. The dead growth didn't resist, it crumbled like burned parchment underfoot.
From the edge of the blighted clearing, a silhouette parted the gloom.
Then another.
Then more.
Hibiki stepped out first, Archive magic flickering in the haze, expression grim. Ren followed, sweat-soaked and silent, wind magic coiling at his fingertips. Eve emerged behind them, visibly shaken but steady. From another path came Lyon, frost trailing behind him, eyes cold as they fixed on Nehzhar. Sherry at his side looked pale, hand over her mouth, barely holding herself together.
Then came Jura. Calm, immense, unshaken. The rot curved around him as he joined the others without a word.
Behind them, Fairy Tail.
Gray led the charge, ice crackling underfoot, eyes narrowed. Lucy followed, keys clenched in a white-knuckled grip. Natsu strode in next, fire low but simmering, eyes flicking between Nehzhar and Aelius. Happy and Carla hovered close, unusually quiet.
Wendy froze halfway through the brush, the rotted ground crunching faintly beneath her feet. Her heels skidded slightly in a patch of plague-slick ash, but she didn't fall, just stood there, transfixed. Her eyes, wide and shimmering with unspoken fear, locked onto the broken form at the center of the madness.
Aelius.
Wendy's breath caught. The air reeked of blood and corruption, of ruined spells and something worse, something unnatural, like the world itself was trying to forget this place.
And then she saw it.
His chest, sunken, shredded, and slick with disease, rose. Barely. Just enough to betray the faintest draw of breath.
He was alive.
Erza didn't speak. Didn't turn.
But her sword hand twitched.
Nezhzhar stood alone across the field, still looming over the crippled, bleeding Aelius.
Nezhzhar stood alone across the scorched, rotting field, the plague-tainted ground steaming gently beneath his feet. His silhouette was sharp against the blackened horizon, haloed by smoke and the fading embers of godslayer magic. He still towered above what remained of Aelius, torn, bloodied, more ruin than man, yet now his gaze was elsewhere. Not on the broken warrior. But on the sudden wall of enemies that had emerged from the forest like judgment incarnate.
The silence stretched, heavy as a drawn blade.
Then, "Tch. Annoying."
He spat the word out like venom, rolling his bleeding jaw, his neck cracking to one side with a sharp jerk. The magic flickering at his fingertips hissed out, scattering into sparks.
"Fine." His voice was low now, but it carried. Clear. Cold. "You live, today, 'N.'"
His eyes dropped back to Aelius, half-gone, barely breathing, one eye shattered, skin blistered. The fact that he was still breathing at all seemed to irritate Nezhzhar more than anything else.
"You're lucky," he said, louder now, addressing not just Aelius but the crowd of mages watching him with fire in their eyes. "The Seis were more useless than I thought. Had enough power to take over this entire continent, hell, maybe the whole damn world, and what did they do?"
He laughed. It was ugly. Short. Bitter.
"They threw it all away. Bickering. Squabbling. Talking like gods with human plans. Thinking they'd already won just because they could blow up a mountain. All that magic, all that potential, and not one of them knew how to actually use it."
He glanced toward Jura, then Lyon, then Erza. Toward the Trimens. Fairy Tail. The remains of a coalition that should have come too late, but didn't.
"They failed you. Lucky for you."
Then his eyes flicked to Erza. Something in his expression shifted, not guilt, not shame, but awareness. A realization that the game had changed, if only slightly.
He stepped back once, slow and deliberate. The rot didn't resist him. It peeled away under his feet like smoke in reverse.
"You bought yourself time, Aelius," he muttered. "That's all this was. Time bought in blood."
A final glance at Erza, measured, wary, perhaps even curious. Then a swirl of magic, black and bending the air around him.
"But I'll be back."
And with that, Nezhzhar vanished, leaving behind only the scent of burnt ozone, the wound in the world, and a battlefield soaked in rot.