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The celebration in the streets didn't even last an hour before the reality of the war slammed right back into our faces.
We were back inside the guildhall when the Mayor of Magnolia burst through the front doors. The guy was sweating through his velvet robes, his face pale as he sprinted straight toward the bar counter where Mavis was reviewing the cargo manifests.
"Master Mavis! You have to help us!" the Mayor gasped, gripping the edge of the wooden bar like a lifeline. "The merchant syndicate leader is locked up, but his hired mercenary guild isn't backing down! We just got word from our scouts—the mercenaries are gathering their main force in the lower valleys. They're marching on Magnolia to burn the town to the ground out of revenge! The local guard can't stop a whole wizard guild. Please, Fairy Tail is our only hope!"
Yuri slammed his fist onto the table, lightning sparking wildly across his knuckles. "Let them come! We rolled over their vanguard in the canyon, we can smash their main army too!"
"We need a defensive perimeter," Mavis said, her brain switching into tactical mode as she looked at Precht and Warrod. "Yuri, stop shouting. Warrod, go with the Mayor and mobilize the townspeople to fortify the eastern gates. Precht, map out the choke points."
While the kids were frantically scrambling to organize a full town defense, I stepped back into the shadows near the storage room. Honestly, a massive clash with a horde of basic human grunts sounded boring. I'd much rather skip the line and go directly after the source. I closed my eyes and let my passive magic warp the light and sound around my body, casting a seamless perception filter. To the human eye, I was just a blur that vanished into the background.
Solomon. Lock the container output at 1%. Track the coordinates of that Etherious signature in the north and drop me right at her front door.
[Notice: Spatial coordinate lock confirmed. Target location: Glaciated Peaks of Isvan. Deploying short-range warp calculation.]
A sudden swirl of pale pink flower petals erupted around my boots, swallowing my high-collared white-and-purple coat in a silent vortex. In the next millisecond, the warm woodsmoke smell of the guildhall vanished, replaced by the biting, sub-zero stench of ancient frost.
The warp dumped me right at the base of a massive mountain fortress carved out of solid, glowing black ice. The air up here was so frozen it felt like breathing razor blades, but my thermal regulation kept it from touching my skin. Huge, jagged towers of frost spiked up into the grey sky, radiating a heavy, suffocating Demonic Curse.
"So, you're the one running the puppet strings," I muttered, resting Odin's staff against my shoulder as I walked up the frozen steps toward the massive ice doors.
The heavy gates shattered outward into a shower of razor-sharp icicles, and a figure glided out into the freezing light.
Khione looked exactly like the monstrosity I saw in the vision. Her porcelain-white skin gleamed against the black ice, her long icicle hair whipped in the wind, and those curved black ice horns on her temples pulsed with a greasy, negative Ethernano aura. Her pitch-black eyes locked onto my white robes with immediate, freezing fury.
"A fragile mortal dares step onto my glacier?" Khione hissed, her voice sounding like ice grinding against a glacier. "You shattered my network in the south. You broke the soul-link to my altar. My father, Zeref, will never hear my beacon because of your interference!"
"I told your little cult leader down there, and I'll tell you too—your spellcraft is incredibly sloppy," I laughed, the gold world-sight flaring to life in my eyes as I stepped onto the platform. "Using human trafficking to get your creator's attention is pathetic. Let's get this over with."
[Warning: Target has activated 'Absolute Glaciation.' Ambient temperature within a fifty-yard radius is dropping toward absolute zero. Demonic Curse is attempting to restrict your Ethernano circulatory container.]
"Die, arrogant worm!" Khione shrieked.
She opened her palm, and a sleek, jagged rapier of unmelting black ice snapped into existence. She blurred forward, turning into a white streak across the snow. The frozen blade hissed toward my throat, but I caught it flush on the shaft of Odin's staff. Clang! Sparks of raw magic sprayed between us. I spun the staff, sliding the wood down her blade to lock her hilt, and yanked hard to pull her off balance.
Khione ducked beneath the counter-swing, her icicle hair whipping as she launched a dizzying flurry of thrusts and slashes at my chest. Clang! Clang! Clang! The ring of black ice hitting reinforced wood rattled across the frozen peak. Every time her rapier tried to bite through my coat, the staff knocked it aside by mere inches.
She dropped low when she realized the blade wasn't landing, throwing a brutal, ice-coated kick aimed straight at my knee. I leaped over the sweep, spun mid-air, and drove the heavy butt of the staff downward toward her skull. She threw her hands up, her demonic aura flaring to catch the strike. The raw kinetic impact cracked the ice beneath her boots, sending a spiderweb of fissures across the courtyard.
Khione abandoned the sword entirely, driving an ice-enhanced fist straight at my jaw. I tilted my head, letting her knuckles graze my cheek, and rammed a hard elbow into her collarbone. She didn't even flinch, grabbing my white collar with both hands and burying a vicious knee right into my midsection. I took the hit, grabbed the back of her neck, and slammed my forehead straight into hers.
Crack.
The headbutt fractured the porcelain skin on her forehead, sending her stumbling backward as thick purple blood began to leak from the cracks. Khione clutched her face, her black eyes shaking with terror. "You do not wield Devil Slayer Magic... you do not possess the power to harm an Etherious! How are your physical strikes bypassing my curse?!"
"Who needs Slayer magic when you have three hundred years of experience?" I scoffed, planting my staff into the snow and raising my right hand.
I focused a tiny fraction of my container, and a massive, intricate crimson magic circle—the classic, layered geometric ring commonly used by wizards across the kingdom—instantly erupted in front of my palm.
"Fire Magic: Crimson Eruption!" I shouted, matching the energetic execution of a frontline guild wizard.
A massive, roaring column of fire blasted straight out of the magic circle, tearing across the snow to engulf her. Khione shrieked, frantically raising a thick, multi-layered wall of glacial ice to block the heat. The standard fire magic clashed violently against her demonic ice, sending thick plumes of blinding white steam billowing into the grey sky.
"Pathetic!" Khione laughed through the steam, her black wings unfurling as her ice wall held firm against the basic elemental spell. "Regular fire cannot melt the Books of Zeref!"
She locked both hands together, her curse flaring as she unleashed her secondary spell. "Glacial Tomb: Permafrost Oblivion!"
The steam instantly froze back into a solid dome, shooting razor-sharp glacier sheets inward from all directions to trap me. I didn't let her finish the lockdown. I slammed another traditional magic circle into the air, forcing my Ethernano to chain together.
"Fire Magic: Blazing Binding Links!" I called out.
Heavy, glowing chains of fire erupted from the magic circle, wrapping tightly around the ice sheets. With a brutal yank of my arm, the fire chains constricted, melting and shattering her glacial tomb into steam before it could close. I snapped my wrist, sending the trailing ends of the fire chains whipping across the stone to wrap directly around her wrists, anchoring her to the ground.
Khione snarled, the heat of the binding links scorching her porcelain skin. "You think these fragile shackles can hold me?!"
Her wings flared as she triggered a localized disaster spell. "Howling Blizzard: Frozen Hellstorm!"
The mountain air split wide open. A massive vortex of black hail, howling winds, and heavy blocks of ice descended onto the peak, tearing the fire chains right out of the cobblestones. The storm tore through the mountain crags, burying everything under an unyielding wall of ice.
"Let's drop the baseline magic circles then," I grinned, my gold eyes flaring with an ancient intensity as I walked straight forward into the center of her storm. "Let's stop playing around under the 1% cap. Solomon. Disengage the limiter for a single conceptual manifestation. Authorize the primordial archive."
[Notice: Limiter temporarily disengaged. Deploying Primordial Rune Script: Fire of Muspelheim.]
The howling wind froze in place. I extended my index finger, rapidly slashing through the frozen air to trace a complex, burning sequence of golden characters. The ancient Elder Futhark runes for fire, power, chaos, and divinity ignited one after another, stringing together into a blinding, fluid chain of primordial heat wrapped in quotation marks.
"ᚠᛁᚱᛖ ᛟᚠ ᛗᚢᛋᛖᛚᚻᛖᛁᛗ, ᛋᚢᛗᛗᛟᚾ ᚦᛖ ᚱᚢᚾᛖ ᛟᚠ ᛋᚢᚱᛏᚢᚱ"
"Fire of Muspelheim," I murmured, my voice echoing with the weight of an immortal as the golden runic sequence locked into place. "Summon the Concept of the All-Ending Flame."
The sky above the mountain pass tore open. A cataclysmic rift of lava and molten magma breached the clouds, pouring a waterfall of liquid fire onto the peaks. Out from the molten sea, a colossal, god-like construct began to manifest—a towering titan of living magma and scorching ash representing the primordial concept of Surtur. The heat radiating from the entity was so intense that the black ice fortress beneath our feet instantly began to liquefy into raging rivers of boiling water.
The giant magma titan roared, drawing a monolithic, catastrophic sword made of pure, white-hot conceptual fire that looked large enough to cleave the entire northern province in half.
Khione looked up at the towering god of fire, her pitch-black eyes finally widening with terror. Her porcelain skin began to blister and peel away into ash before the blade even descended. "No... what is this... This isn't magic! This isn't—"
"Goodbye," I said, snapping my fingers.
The giant magma construct swung its massive, white-hot blade downward in a final strike. The conceptual flame didn't just melt her; it unraveled her demonic composition on an atomic level, incinerating her tattered blue gown, her black horns, and her Etherious matrix into nothing but a cloud of harmless steam. The massive strike slammed into the peak, obliterating the remnants of the black ice fortress and leaving nothing but a steaming, bare stone mountain ridge under a clear sky.
The colossal magma titan dissolved back into the rift, leaving the air quiet and the mountain totally bare.
I adjusted the collar of my purple sleeves, resting Odin's staff back over my shoulder as my usual smug grin hit my face. No dizziness, no effort. Just a clean wipe.
"Alright, Solomon," I muttered, letting the flowers of my teleportation magic start to swirl around my boots once more. "The supernatural cleanup is done. Let's warp back to Magnolia. The kids are still waiting for a war, and we've got some mercenaries to deal with."
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[ If you want to read an extra chapter ahead, go check out the p@treon
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