Chapter 166

Chapter 166: Chapter 166

While Fairy Tail was tearing into Phantom Lord on both fronts, Mystogan had been dealing with Makarov’s problem in his own way.

Aria’s spell had not actually destroyed the old man’s magic power.

It had forcibly expelled it from his body and scattered it across the surrounding area.

Mystogan tracked down those remnants and gathered as much as he could before they completely dispersed.

By the time he finished, only around fifty or sixty percent remained.

That was nowhere near Makarov’s full strength, but half of more than eight hundred thousand units was still an extraordinary amount of magic.

More importantly, it was enough to get the Guild Master back on his feet.

Once that immediate problem was solved, Mystogan checked both battlefields.

Fairy Tail was winning on both.

The Element 4 and Phantom Lord’s other elites were trapped inside Marshall’s carefully prepared Jutsu-Shiki while Phoebe and the remaining guild members dismantled them piece by piece.

On the other side, Jose had been isolated and surrounded by Marshall’s group.

Mystogan watched for a moment.

Apparently nobody needed him.

Standing around doing nothing felt inappropriate, especially in the middle of a guild war, so Mystogan considered what else Phantom Lord possessed.

Then he remembered its branches.

Phantom Lord maintained guildhalls in numerous major cities throughout Fiore.

Mystogan, coincidentally, had left teleportation arrays in most of those cities during his travels.

The solution was obvious.

If he had nothing useful to do here, he could destroy everything else Phantom Lord owned!

Mystogan got to work immediately.

His efficiency was frightening.

He teleported into a city, located the local Phantom Lord branch, cast a spell powerful enough to demolish the building, removed the guild flag, and vanished before anyone had time to organize a response.

Then he repeated the process.

Again and again.

In a little over half an hour, Phantom Lord’s branch guildhalls across Fiore had been systematically reduced to ruins.

Mystogan even collected every flag.

By the time Makarov regained consciousness in Porlyusica’s treehouse, Mystogan had just returned from his little delivery route with an armful of enemy banners.

Makarov’s eyes opened.

He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.

Then the memory of Ivan, Laxus’s illusion, Aria’s ambush, and Jose came rushing back all at once.

His face went dark.

"Damn it!"

He sat up so quickly Porlyusica almost hit him.

"I got careless! I didn’t dodge it!"

His expression twisted with self-directed fury.

"Mystogan! What happened to the guild?!"

Mystogan paused.

"Uh..."

He thought about the two battlefields.

"It should... probably be almost over by now."

Makarov went pale.

"What?!"

He immediately interpreted the sentence in the worst possible way.

"Damn it! This is all my fault!"

He scrambled out of bed.

"Marshall! Erza! Everyone, hold on!"

Before Porlyusica could stop him, Makarov rushed out of the treehouse without even bothering to say goodbye.

Porlyusica stared after him.

Her eyebrow twitched.

"That rotten old man."

She crossed her arms.

"This is exactly what I hate about him."

After several seconds, however, concern overcame irritation.

She looked toward Mystogan.

"Did Fairy Tail lose?"

Mystogan blinked.

"Huh? No."

He looked genuinely confused.

"I meant Phantom Lord should be almost finished."

He dropped the captured flags onto the floor.

Then he seemed to realize what had happened.

"Oh."

He scratched his head.

"Master misunderstood me."

Porlyusica picked up an empty medicine bottle.

Mystogan sensed danger half a second too late.

The bottle bounced off his head.

"I hate humans!"

...

Back on Jose’s battlefield, the outcome was already beginning to take shape.

The Wizard Saint had just spent an enormous amount of magic on Shadow Kill, only for his strongest attack to explode without ever actually touching Marshall.

Marshall, naturally, did not possess the real Limitless technique.

He had no Six Eyes either.

What he did possess was Level Four Spatial Magic and an extremely unhealthy amount of creativity.

The principle was simple enough to describe and extremely difficult to maintain.

Marshall continuously compressed, folded, and "rolled" the space immediately surrounding the surface of his body.

Anything approaching him had to pass through that distorted region first, but the space itself kept shifting under the attack.

The closer Jose’s spell came, the more distance was inserted between it and Marshall.

From the outside, the attack appeared to reach him.

In reality, it never completed the final fraction of the journey.

The technique was extraordinarily expensive in both mental concentration and magic power, so Marshall had no intention of maintaining it continuously like some permanent passive defense.

As a single-use emergency barrier, however, it worked beautifully.

Jose had spent nearly one hundred thousand units of magic accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Combined with the constant defensive expenditure forced on him throughout the battle, his reserves were already approaching half of what they had been at the beginning.

The Wizard Saint had finally begun to run out of options.

His pride, unfortunately, remained inexhaustible.

"You brat!"

Jose glared upward.

"All you do is hide behind teleportation and tricks!"

He pointed at Marshall.

"If you have any courage, fight me one-on-one!"

Marshall stared at him for a second.

Then laughed.

"Why would I do something that stupid?"

He turned toward the others.

"Everyone, jump him."

The response came immediately.

"GLADLY!"

Marshall joined the frontline himself.

His staff, the Ruyi Jingu Bang appeared in his hand, and his body exploded into motion.

A brilliant streak of light crossed Jose’s vision before the Wizard Saint could properly follow it.

The staff struck his defense.

Once.

Twice.

Trice.

Seven blows landed within a single second, and Marshall was nowhere near his true speed limit.

Jose simply could not react quickly enough to block individual strikes.

So he stopped trying.

Darkness compressed around him from every direction and formed a complete spherical defense.

[Shadow Sphere.]

The barrier protected him from all sides at once, but it came with an enormous disadvantage: Jose now had to maintain it continuously.

The moment he lowered even one section, Marshall’s speed would allow the staff to reach him before he could restore the defense.

He had effectively locked himself inside his own shield.

Marshall immediately recognized it.

So did everyone else.

"Now!"

What followed was less a duel than a public beating.

Juvia merged into the river and used the water itself as her firing platform, repeatedly launching hair-thin streams of compressed water at Jose’s sphere.

Each stream struck with enough pressure to cut stone, forcing the barrier to reinforce every point of impact.

Gray planted himself on firmer ground and began manufacturing Ice-Make weapons as quickly as he could, sending volleys of spears hammering into the same sections of the shield.

Natsu had no interest in elegance.

He simply ran around the giant black sphere punching and kicking it.

"TAKE THIS!"

His fist exploded against the surface.

"And this!"

Another impact shook the barrier.

Jose’s voice came roaring from within.

"You brats! Don’t get arrogant! The moment I get an opening, I’m going to kill every one of you!"

The problem was that no opening appeared.

Erza and Mira struck whenever Jose shifted magic to compensate for Gray and Juvia.

Cana’s remaining summons attacked from angles that forced him to split his attention further.

Marshall continued battering the shield with the Ruyi Jingu Bang so quickly that Jose could never risk dropping his full defense.

None of the individual attacks was overwhelming.

Together, they were fatal.

Every strike cost Jose magic.

Every second demanded reinforcement.

If his concentration slipped for even a moment, the accumulated assault would break through and bury him beneath half a dozen different spells at once.

He could no longer spare the time required to cast another wide-area clearing attack.

All he could do was remain inside the sphere and keep feeding it power.

So Jose resorted to the only weapon he still had freely available.

His mouth.

"You think your magic will last forever?!"

Another barrage slammed into the barrier.

"When you run dry, I’ll show every one of you what real suffering looks like!"

Minutes passed.

Jose’s voice became slightly less threatening.

"Hahaha! You’re getting tired, aren’t you?"

Natsu punched the barrier again.

"Not even close!"

"If you surrender now," Jose continued, "I might be generous enough to spare your lives!"

Gray sent another cluster of ice spears into the sphere.

Jose’s shield visibly trembled.

A little later, his tone changed again.

"What exactly are you trying to prove?!"

Juvia’s compressed water sliced across the barrier.

"This stalemate is pointless!"

Erza struck.

"We can negotiate!"

Marshall’s staff hit immediately afterward.

Jose began sweating.

"W-Wait!"

The attacks continued.

"I’ll admit I miscalculated!"

Mira’s whip cracked against the sphere.

"Phantom Lord will withdraw!"

Cana’s beasts slammed into the opposite side.

"Just stop attacking!"

No one answered.

Jose’s reserves were collapsing!

The situation he had believed impossible was happening in front of him: the great Wizard Saint of Phantom Lord was being drained dry by a collection of younger Fairy Tail Mages who simply refused to stop.

His final scraps of arrogance disappeared.

"Can’t we..."

Another impact.

Jose swallowed.

"Can’t we settle this peacefully?"

For the first time since the battle began, Marshall stopped attacking.

Jose almost felt relief.

Then he heard Marshall laugh.

"Now?"

The tone alone made his stomach drop.

"You must be joking."

Marshall could feel how little magic remained behind the Shadow Sphere.

Jose had reached the end.

Marshall rose into the air.

"Everyone, back off!"

Erza, Mira, Natsu, Gray, Juvia, and Cana immediately withdrew.

Jose looked upward through the wavering surface of his barrier.

Marshall climbed higher into the sky.

Then light began gathering around him.

Not merely ordinary light.

The radiance of the sun.

The pale power of the moon.

The brilliance of the stars.

Marshall drew all of it together through the magical disciplines he had spent years studying, pouring the last of his own remaining reserves into the spell as the light above the battlefield became almost painful to look at.

Jose’s face finally lost all color.

"What... is that?"

Marshall raised a hand as the radiance compressed.

This was the final strike.

Everything he had left.

"Fairy... Glitter!"

The heavens answered.

A colossal pillar of light descended directly onto Jose.

The Shadow Sphere held for an instant.

Then cracks appeared.

Jose’s eyes widened.

"No!"

Light poured through them.

The Darkness Magic that had resisted the combined attacks of Fairy Tail began disintegrating beneath the Grand Magic, pieces of the barrier peeling away like ash in a storm.

Jose desperately poured the last of his reserves into the shield.

There was nothing left to give.

The sphere shattered.

Fairy Glitter struck him directly!

"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"

The combined radiance of sun, moon, and stars swallowed Jose whole.

The earth beneath him collapsed.

The blast tore across dozens of meters of ground, throwing stone and dust high into the air until a small mushroom-shaped cloud rose above the battlefield.

Then, gradually, the light faded.

The dust settled.

At the bottom of the crater lay Jose Porla.

Motionless.

One of the Ten Wizard Saints—defeated!

...

Makarov arrived at the battlefield in a panic.

He had spent the entire journey imagining disasters.

Fairy Tail overwhelmed.

His children wounded.

The guildhall destroyed.

Jose rampaging through Magnolia while he lay unconscious because he had allowed himself to fall for Ivan’s trap.

He broke through the final stretch of trees—and stopped.

Jose was lying at the bottom of a crater like a discarded corpse!

Marshall floated high above him.

Makarov blinked.

Once.

Twice.

’They... won?’

He looked at Jose again.

There was no mistake.

’Jose actually lost?’

For several seconds, Makarov could do nothing but stand there.

Then something warm gathered behind his eyes.

Because once the shock passed, he finally saw the scene in front of him properly.

Marshall hovered in the air above the crater, the wind tossing his hair across his face as a bright, youthful grin spread across his features.

Sunlight fell across him at an angle, stretching his shadow down into the broken earth where the defeated Wizard Saint lay.

Around the crater stood six members of Fairy Tail’s younger generation.

Erza.

Mirajane.

Cana.

Natsu.

Gray.

Juvia.

They were bruised, exhausted, and almost certainly running low on magic.

But the way they looked up at Marshall contained neither fear nor uncertainty.

Only pride.

Trust.

Confidence.

Makarov’s chest tightened.

’They’ve grown up.’

For years, he had regarded himself as Fairy Tail’s shield.

Whenever an enemy became too dangerous, he believed it was his responsibility to step forward and place himself between that danger and his children.

Today, that shield had fallen.

And Fairy Tail had not fallen with him.

His children had stood together.

They had faced an enemy who should have been beyond them.

And they had won.

Without him.

What Guild Master could possibly look at something like that and not feel moved?

For the first time, Makarov felt as though he were looking directly at the future of Fairy Tail.

And that future no longer depended entirely on him.

Marshall noticed him first as he turned in midair.

"Yo!"

His hand rose in greeting.

"Master!"

Everyone spun around.

"Master?!"

"You’re awake!"

"Master, you’re okay!"

"Thank goodness!"

Natsu immediately broke into a huge grin.

"Hahaha! Old man!"

He gave Makarov an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

"We beat a Wizard Saint!"

His chest puffed out.

"Pretty awesome, right?!"

Makarov quickly turned his back.

Nobody saw the old man wipe at the corner of his eye.

When he faced them again, an enormous smile had replaced every trace of panic.

"HAHAHAHA!"

His laughter rolled across the ruined battlefield.

"Well done!"

He looked from one battered face to the next.

"Damn well done!"

"You kids were incredible!"

Natsu’s grin somehow became even brighter.

"Of course!"

He hooked a thumb toward himself.

"We’re Fairy Tail!"