The summit had settled into something that wasn't quite a standoff and wasn't quite a truce. Jura sat on the throne and had not been challenged for it yet; the mountain had quieted below, the monsters, shifts, and storms stopping the moment all contestants had passed them up, shifting power to the upper reaches of the mountain.
Sting had moved to the northern edge of the summit and was standing with his arms crossed, watching the throne with what could only be described as pure annoyance. Bacchus was still on the ground, still with his drink, apparently content to wait for a development that interested him more than the current arrangement.
Seraphine had not moved from the summit's edge; she stood two feet to Aelius's left, looking out over the arena, and had done so for several minutes without speaking. The wind at this elevation moved her coat in slow, intermittent shifts, and she watched the contestants below with the patient attention of someone watching something resolve itself without her input.
Aelius watched the climbers too. Kagura was making steady progress up the western face, her route cleaner than most, the sword at her hip not drawn but her hand near it in the way that suggested it was less a weapon and more an anchor for her attention, something to orient around while the rest of her focused on the climb. She had avoided the ice section entirely by going around it, which had cost her time but preserved her energy, and the calculation seemed to be paying out. She was perhaps fifteen minutes from the summit at her current pace.
Eve Tearm from Blue Pegasus was further down, having been set back by one of the monsters that had emerged from the rock face in the middle section, a grinding stone construct that had taken longer to deal with than anticipated. He was moving again, but the delay had cost him significantly. Obra from Raven Tail was still below the midpoint, moving in the same stillness that he had stood in at the base, neither fast nor slow, his route following the mountain's shifts rather than fighting them, which was either tactical patience or something else entirely.
The mountain sent a crack through the summit's eastern edge, a section of stone splitting off and dropping into the interior with a sound that made Sting step back two paces and reassess his footing. Jura didn't move. Bacchus looked at the gap with mild interest and shifted slightly to his left.
"They won't come for him directly," Seraphine said. Aelius didn't respond, rolling his eyes under the mask. "Not yet," she added.
Aelius kept watching Kagura's progress on the western face and said nothing, because engaging with it was not something he had decided to do. She had been doing this since the base of the mountain, producing observations shaped like insights and delivered as if she expected them to land somewhere. He had not yet determined what she was doing with it, whether it was genuine or performance, and until he had a better read on that, the correct response was to give her nothing to work with.
The timer crossed thirty-five minutes, and Kagura cleared the upper storm section, the wind that had been giving the eastern approach trouble having largely dissipated in the last few minutes, the mountain cycling through its disruptions on whatever schedule it had been set to. She reached the summit edge and pulled herself over, landing on the flat summit with a small grunt.
She looked at Jura on the throne. Then she looked at Sting. Then at Aelius. Then at Seraphine. Then she looked back at the throne and drew her sword. Not immediately aggressive, the motion was smooth and measured, but the intent behind it was clear. She walked toward the throne, and Jura watched her come with the same stillness he had maintained since sitting down, and the mountain cooperated under him, the stone settling, and when Kagura reached the threshold of the throne's immediate space, she stopped.
The standoff lasted about four seconds before Sting moved. He came from the side, not at Kagura but past her, angling for the throne itself, and Kagura pivoted to intercept him with the reflexive precision of someone who had read the move before it completed. The sword came up in a guard that stopped Sting's approach cold, and for a moment the two of them were locked in the space between the throne and the summit's edge.
The fight between Kagura and Sting spilled across the summit in a way that made Bacchus finally stand up and move to a safer section of stone, his drink still in hand, his expression suggesting that the fight was more interesting than he had expected but not interesting enough to put the drink down. Kagura was exceptional, the sword work precise and economical, each movement doing exactly what it needed to and nothing extra, the kind of fighter who had trained until the excess fell away and what remained was only the essential. Sting was fast and hit harder, but fast and hard against someone who was already accounting for both of those things produced a different result than fast and hard against someone who wasn't.
They were, very efficiently, neutralizing each other.
The timer crossed thirty minutes just as Obra arrived at the summit without anyone noticing until he was already there, which was a feat that suggested exceptional stealth, orthat Obra looked away first, turned toward the throne, and raised one hand. Something dark moved from his fingers toward Jura, a magic Aelius couldn't immediately categorize, not combat magic in the conventional sense, something that moved like a suggestion rather than an attack, low to the ground, staying below the sightline of most of the summit.
Jura's hand came down, and the stone rose up in a wall between himself and Obra's magic, the earth eating the power with barely a dent in the wall.
Aelius looked at Obra, who had moved to the summit's western edge and was standing with his arms back at his sides, apparently done making attempts on the throne for now.
The mountain shook, a deep grinding vibration that came from somewhere in the mountain's interior and traveled upward through the summit stone into the soles of everyone's feet simultaneously. Kagura and Sting broke off their exchange, and both shifted their footing. Bacchus sat back down rather ungracefully, falling more than anything. Jura placed both palms flat on the throne's arms, and the mountain's shaking subsided within two seconds, the vibration simply stopping under the pressure of his hands.
Forty seconds of silence followed; Aelius counted out of sheer boredom. Then something came out of the mountain. It came from a crack in the summit's northern face, a construct of compacted earth and what looked like compressed iron ore, roughly humanoid in shape, roughly twice the height of anyone on the summit, and uninterested in any distinctions between targets. It looked at the summit and began moving toward the nearest thing, which happened to be Sting.
Sting hit it with a spell at close range, which would have solved most problems that were not made entirely of compacted earth and iron ore. The construct took the hit, staggered one step, and continued moving. Sting hit it again, harder, and this time the construct's upper section lost some structural integrity, a chunk of its shoulder cracking off and hitting the summit stone, but the rest of it kept coming, and Sting moved sideways rather than take the return swing from an arm that was essentially a compressed iron club the size of a small tree.
Kagura's sword took the arm off at what would have been the elbow on something with elbows. The blade moved through the compressed earth with a cleanness that made Aelius think of a certain red-headed swordswoman.
Once Aelius took his eyes off the construct and met Seraphina's, he almost killed the girl, because ten seconds ago, she was a few feet away, but now she was right in front of Aelius, her eyes meeting his barely a few inches away. Her voice was higher than it was before, taking on an almost manic quality. "Nehzhar saidyou'dd be interesting, but so far you've done nothing but shove off a woman's advances and stand around boringly. Im disappointed.
"Is that all?" he said.
"Maybe?" she said. Before she backed off
He looked at the timer. Twenty-two minutes. Jura was still in the throne. The construct was nearly finished. Obra was still standing at the western edge, watching everything with that same hooded stillness. Bacchus had stood up again and was looking at the throne with the expression of someone who had finished their drink and was reconsidering their options.
Aelius looked at Seraphine one more time, at the pale coat and the deep water eyes and the complete absence of anything readable in her expression, and filed the message away in the part of his mind that handled things with no immediate resolution and kept them accessible without letting them become distractions.
The construct finally went down with four minutes remaining, Kagura and Sting finishing it together in unspoken cooperation, the construct itself having the ability to regenerate, on par with Aelius's own as long as it was touching the ground. They separated immediately after, moving back to opposite sides of the throne's space.
Nobody moved Jura when the timer hit zero; the announcer's voice came down across the arena in a wave that the crowd rode upward into something close to an eruption. "LAMIA SCALE WINS THE FIRST EVENT, ladies and gentlemen, Iron Rock Jura Neekis sitting on the King's Mountain throne as the bell rings, unmoved and unmovable, and what a statement from last year's second place guild!"
Jura stood from the throne, and the mountain began to descend around them, the earth pulling back into the arena floor with the same grinding slowness it had risen with. Aelius rode the descent on the air, stepping off it back onto the arena floor as the mountain compressed itself back into the stone, and he looked across the arena floor at the other representatives doing the same, at Kagura resheathing her sword, at Sting rolling his shoulder with the expression of someone accounting for what the day had cost him, at Obra walking toward the Raven Tail section without looking at anyone.
Seraphine walked past him on the way to the Asteria section, and she did not look at him or say anything further, which was its own kind of statement.
He walked back to Fairy Tail's section, sat down in the single chair, and looked at the scoreboard going up on the arena wall as the officials compiled the event results.
Lamia Scale. Fairy Tail. Sabertooth. Mermaid Heel. The order continued down, the points distributed by the time each competitor had spent either on or near the throne, and Fairy Tail's placement at second was not because he had held the throne the longest but because he had held it first, and because when Jura arrived he had stepped aside rather than been moved, which the scoring apparently accounted for in the time distribution.
Second place in the first event, and in the stands he could see section nine on its feet, Macao with both hands raised, Romeo shouting something that didn't carry over the distance, his excitement palpable even from the lowering mountain summit.
Aelius walked up through the air rather than take the stairs, stepping off the summit and crossing the space between the mountain and the stands in a straight line, each step finding its purchase in compressed magic the same way it always did, and he came over the railing of section nine and landed without ceremony while the crowd around them was still processing the scoreboard.
Romeo turned immediately. "Uhm....Aelius." He had the expression of someone who had been watching the event with a running commentary in his head and had several things he wanted to say and was trying to pick the right one first. "Why didn't you just... take the throne? Or at least fight for it. Or use your wi—"
"Romeo." The word came out firmer than he intended, and a touch unkinder, cutting across the sentence before it could finish. "Do not finish that word. My secrets are my own."
Romeo closed his mouth. He looked at Aelius for a moment with the expression of someone absorbing a correction they hadn't expected, then nodded once, and the subject closed.
A brief silence settled over the row that Macao broke first, dropping back into his seat with a sigh, because the emotional one was still processing. "Second place, that's not bad;d pretty damn good if I say so." He exhaled.
"It's good," Bisca agreed, from two seats down. "Really good, given the format."
"Jura was always going to win that one," Alzack said, reasonably. "Earth mage on an earth mountain. The setup suited him perfectly."
Droy was looking at Aelius. "You could have taken it back from Jura, though. Couldn't you?"
Aelius sat down in the seat at the end of the row and looked at the scoreboard. "Yes."
"But you didn't. Can I ask why?"
Aelius looked at Droy, tilting his head just enough to see the man out of the corner of his eye. He was silent for a long time, the chatter around him stilling in curiosity. "For my plan to work, I need to instill fear into the watchers." He looked back at the arena floor. "Fear requires the unknown. If I show everything in the first event, by the third day there is no unknown left, and fear without unknown is just strength, and strength alone does not keep guilds from walking through our front door." He paused briefly. "What I showed today was enough to make people ask questions. Questions are more useful than answers, at this stage."
The row was quiet for a moment.
"That's..." Romeo started, then stopped himself.
"Terrifying," Wakaba said, into his drink. "The word you're looking for is terrifying."
"I was going to say calculated," Romeo said.
"Both," Bisca said.
Macao had been looking at the scoreboard while Aelius spoke. "Aelius…you aren't…planning to torture…or kill to do your plan, are you?"
Aelius looked at him. "No." He paused briefly. "Probably not."
Macao stared at him. "Aelius." The tone was Makarov's, the one that had never fully worked on Aelius even when Makarov himself used it.
"Killing is not against the rules," Aelius said, neutrally. "I read them. For this exact purpose. Do I plan to kill someone? No. Will I if it becomes necessary? Yes." The words were made worse by the fact that his voice carried no weight behind them either way, the same tone he used to discuss weather or mission logistics, which made it clear he genuinely did not care about the answer beyond whether it would cause him more problems than it solved. "But no. I plan to let them think I am weaker than I am. Let them believe any progress they make against me is real, let them build confidence on it, let the crowd believe they are watching something competitive." He looked at the scoreboard. "And then at the end of this, show them that every inch they thought they gained was only because I let them have it."
The row was quiet. Romeo was looking at the arena floor with the careful attention of someone processing something they hadn't fully prepared themselves for. Bisca had her hand on Alzack's arm without appearing to notice she had done it. Wakaba drank slowly and said nothing, which, from Wakaba, meant he had nothing to add because the situation had already said everything.
Macao looked at Aelius for a long moment. "....Aeli, that's not the fairy tale Makarov wanted."
Aelius's head snapped towards Macao, his voice never changing, though the meaning behind it did. "Does that matter? Makarov is not here to lead, and Makarov is not here to object. I am doing what I must to keep this guild running until hhereturns, and until then, this guild, oes not have a choice in my metmethodsacao looked at Aelius for a long moment. "....Aelius, that's not the Fairy Tail Makarov wanted."
Aelius's head turned toward him, and his voice never changed, but the meaning behind the words did. "Does that matter? Makarov is not here to lead, and Makarov is not here to object. I am doing what I must to keep this guild running until he returns, and until then, this guild does not have a choice in my methods."
Nobody said anything.
Macao held his gaze and didn't look away, which was something he had learned to do over two years of running a guild that required it. "I know that," he said, quieter. "I'm not arguing with you. I'm telling you what it is."
"I know what it is," Aelius said. "I have always known what it is. But there is only one way this story ends... happy." The last word came out forced, and he didn't bother to hide that it was, or hide the fact that it was also, to an extent, wrong. "Everyone in this country doubts us. I am showing them that doubting Fairy Tail is doubting me, and no one in this country will doubt me after this week."
"Sounds an awful lot like you do plan on at least torture," Jet snorted into his cup, clearly under the impression he was quiet enough to avoid Aelius's eye afterward.
"Yep," Aelius said simply. "Any interaction with my magic could be considered torture, whether that's the intent or not."
Jet looked up from his cup, apparently having not expected to actually be heard, and then looked back down again without commenting further, which was probably the wisest decision he had made all day.
Wakaba made a sound into his drink that was not quite a laugh and not quite anything else. Romeo had given up looking at the arena floor and was now looking at his own hands, working through something privately. Bisca and Alzack had the coordinated stillness of two people who had silently agreed that the correct response to the last thirty seconds was no response at all.
Macao said nothing. He looked at Aelius for a moment longer, then looked at the scoreboard, and whatever he was thinking stayed where it was.
Aelius turned and walked toward the aisle. "I'll be back before they draw the names;"
He was truthful, if only just. He came back with a large cup of something that made the people nearest him in the row recoil slightly when he sat down, which he noted with mild satisfaction. It was, technically, every alcoholic drink the concourse vendors sold, combined into one container out of sheer curiosity about what that would produce. The answer smelled like a cleaning product and looked worse, but to Aelius, it was oddly sweet, overall not bad; alcohol was always sweet to him, an oddity that had pushed him towards proper toxins, his particular favorite being a mix of nightshade and basilisk venom.
He thought briefly of Cana, who he had never been particularly close to but who had a reputation that preceded her considerably. He doubted even she could finish what he was holding.
He took another sip and watched the scoreboard.
The draw announcements had been running for twenty minutes, the matchups appearing one by one on the large lacrima screen above the arena floor while the announcer worked through them with the deliberate pacing of someone who understood that anticipation was part of the product. First battle, Sabertooth versus Quatro Cerberus. Second, Mermaid Heel versus Raven Tail. The crowd reacted to each one with varying levels of enthusiasm depending on which names were involved.
"And for our third battle, ladies and gentlemen," the announcer said, with a shift in his voice that the crowd responded to before he even finished the sentence, "we have Fairy Tail versus Sabertooth, a lucky draw for the viewers; the question for this round will certainly be if the new number one guild can stand up to the old."
The first battle draw was Lamia Scale versus Quatro Cerberus. Lyon Vastia against Bacchus Groh, Aelius watched it, not really carring about the outcome enough to truly pay attention, though,. His respect, if he even had any, for the populace of Fiore had dwindled even more, hearing them 'ohh' and 'aah' and get excited over flashy moves, that lacked any real power, or meaning.
Lyon was precise and fast, ice magic deployed with the efficiency of someone who had trained under the same master as one of the better ice mages Aelius had ever seen and had spent years developing his own direction from that foundation. He opened with multiple simultaneous constructs, which was the right call against Bacchus, who closed distance fast and fought loose, the kind of fighter who needed to be managed at range rather than contested up close. The ice constructs bought Lyon the space he wanted, and he used it, stacking pressure from multiple angles, methodical and clean.
Bacchus demolished the first construct with a palm strike that should not have had the force it did given the angle, destroyed the second by simply going through it rather than around it, and closed the distance anyway.
What followed was not particularly clean from either side, but it was genuinely interesting: Bacchus's unorthodox striking patterns consistently arriving from directions that Lyon's read on the fight hadn't accounted for, and Lyon's ice responding to each surprise with adaptations that were fast enough to suggest the read was updating in real time rather than waiting for a break. Bacchus took hits that would have ended most fights and absorbed them with the physicality of someone who had trained their body past the point where impact was a decisive variable. Lyon took hits that didn't land cleanly because he was never quite where Bacchus was swinging, the movement patterns of someone who had learned that being difficult to hit was more efficient than being difficult to hurt.
It went twelve minutes before Bacchus landed something that Lyon couldn't fully compensate for: a strike to the shoulder that disrupted the concentration behind the next construct long enough for Bacchus to close completely, and at close range with full commitment, Lyon didn't have enough time to rebuild the distance.
Bacchus won. He looked mildly surprised about it, which was its own kind of information.
"Quatro Cerberus takes the first battle, ladies and gentlemen, and what a performance from Bacchus Groh, who just handed Lyon Vastia of Lamia Scale his first loss in recent memory! The man is an absolute force,e and I think we are all learning very quickly that Quatro Cerberus is not here simply to make up the numbers!"
Romeo said something appreciative about Bacchus from the end of the row. Wakaba refilled whatever he was drinking.
Aelius finished his concoction and set the empty cup down.
The second battle draw was Mermaid Heel versus Blue Pegasus. Millianna against Ren Akatsuki, which was a different kind of matchup entirely, less about raw output and more about how two very different magical disciplines interacted with each other in a contained space. Millianna's cat magic, specifically her binding tubes, against Ren's air magic, which at ffirst glanceseemed like a mismatch in Ren's favor given that Millianna's bindings needed to close distance to work and air magic was built for range and disruption.
It wasn't a mismatch.
Millianna was faster than she looked, and her tubes were more versatile at close range than the distance read suggested, and the first three minutes of the fight were largely about Ren discovering both of those things at a cost. He adjusted, pulled range, kept the air pressure between them consistent enough to make closing distance genuinely difficult, and the fight settled into something more even once he had established what he was actually dealing with.
Millianna found the gap in the eighth minute when Ren committed slightly too hard to a sustained pressure attack and left his footwork exposed, and the tube that found his ankle ended the mobility advantage and the fight shortly after, an unsurprising turnout, though one that cost Macao a good few hundred jewels.
"And for our third and perhaps most exciting battle of the day, we have Aelius Morvain from Fairy tTail the solo Wizard Saint, versus a newcomer from Sabertooth, who asked to be referred to as the patron of blood and the wizard of slaughter, A ratrher scary title if i might add. A man, a monster in human skin, simply known as CAIUS!!
Aelius's cup disintegrated as he heard the name.