Aelius was losing. He'd known it somewhere between the second and third rib breaking—again—but it became undeniable when the ice came.
A blast of frost, jagged and sudden, arced across the battlefield like a scream made solid. It slammed into his left arm with the force of a spell he recognized instantly—Gray's.
But it didn't come from Gray.
It came from Nehzhar, grinning like a child who'd just pulled the wings off a particularly difficult bug.
"Surprise!" he chimed. "I've been saving that one!"
The ice flash-froze Aelius's arm from shoulder to fingertips—locking it mid-guard, the plague-forged blade still clutched in frozen knuckles.
And Nehzhar didn't even aim for the kill.
He sauntered forward with a whistle on his lips, turned his sword sideways, and brought the hilt down in a sudden, precise arc—
CRACK.
The sound was obscene.
The limb didn't just snap—it shattered.
From shoulder to elbow, then again at the wrist, the frozen arm splintered like brittle stone. Shards of blood-iced muscle and bone scattered across the rot-choked ground, flecking Nehzhar's boots in red and gray.
Aelius staggered back—off balance now, weapon falling with a dull, wet thunk beside the broken remnants of his limb. Steam hissed off the stump as blood surged and then clotted, thickened unnaturally by his own body's twisted regeneration.
But even as the wound began to seal, Aelius didn't rise.
He hunched.
Not from pain.
From calculation.
Nehzhar, meanwhile, tapped the hilt of his sword against his own chin like a tuning fork. "Y'know," he said, peering at the frozen limb chunks, "I was going to save that for Erza. But your expression was so good I couldn't resist."
He pointed it lazily toward Aelius.
"You can't keep this up forever, N. You're a slayer, sure—but even rot gets tired."
Aelius said nothing. Blood dripped in slow, viscous drops from the open socket of his shoulder, hissing where it touched the corrupted soil.
Nehzhar crouched slightly, miming sympathy.
"Aww, don't be mad. Look at it this way—now you don't have to carry that ugly thing around anymore." He gestured toward the plague-blade, still twitching slightly on the ground like a dying parasite.
He took another step closer.
"You're losing limbs. You're bleeding out. You've been dodging instead of ending this. You're playing careful." His grin widened. "That's not the Aelius I remember."
Aelius raised his eyes. Quiet. Hollow.
And then, calmly, he stepped back.
Just one foot.
Into the deepest part of the rot.
And smiled back.
It was faint.
But it was real.
Nehzhar tilted his head as Aelius stepped backward—just one pace, just one shift—into the deepest curve of his own rot. The air grew thicker, more pungent, oppressive with the stench of old death and deeper magic, but Nehzhar hardly noticed. He didn't flinch at the decay. He didn't recoil from the bile-colored steam curling up from the soil.
What caught him—what made him pause—was something else entirely.
That look.
Those eyes.
Cold. Hollow.
And… something else.
His grin wavered slightly.
"Wait a second…"
He leaned forward a fraction, gaze narrowing, like a man trying to read the last word on a fading page. His voice lowered, a rare shard of tension sneaking in around the edges of his breath.
"…Are you smiling?"
He pointed, flicking two fingers toward Aelius's mask like a conjurer calling attention to a failed trick.
"No. No, no, no. See, now you're smiling? Now?! After all that?"
Nehzhar threw both arms up, nearly dropping his sword. His coat billowed theatrically with the motion.
"I've been throwing jokes like confetti, man! I practically did stand-up! I bled irony and monologued with rhythm—and now you smile?!"
His voice cracked upward into a high-pitched offense.
"What is wrong with you?!"
Aelius didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The subtle shift in his presence said enough. The quiet weight behind those eyes—the depthless black behind the pale, unreadable mask. A veil of rot curled higher behind him, like a curtain rising. The kind of silence that spoke not of peace, but of decisions made long before words could follow.
Nehzhar huffed and spun once in frustration, waving his sword around like it might stab the mood itself.
"I swear—if this is you trying to do the whole 'oh I was holding back the whole time' thing, I'm gonna scream. That trope is dead, N! D-E-A-D. You don't get to be mysterious and tragic. Pick a lane!"
He pointed again, jabbing the air now with his free hand.
"You're supposed to be sad! Brooding! Guilt-ridden! We've been over this! That was our deal! You mope—I monologue. That's the dynamic!"
He didn't even finish the last word before Aelius moved.
The ground under his heel cracked with the surge of motion, rot buckling upward like something beneath the surface was trying to scream. A burst of decayed wind howled forward with him—thick, caustic, alive with disease and old, festering whispers.
"Plague God's Carrion Gale."
A gust of wind wasn't the right word. Wind implied freshness, air, speed.
This wasn't wind.
This was breath from a corpse's lungs. Thick and dark, flecked with broken feather and dusted bone, stuffed with screaming spores that rode on the gale like cavalry—tiny, clawed, biting things that tore into magic as easily as flesh.
The air howled.
Aelius didn't wait to see if it hit.
He was already in motion behind it, closing the gap like a knife behind a curtain—silent, deadly, masked by the rot he rode.
Nehzhar's grin twitched—just briefly.
Then he flung his arms out wide and barked, "Why not both!"
He devoured the incoming gale like a man shotgunning venom: mouth unhinged, teeth parting like iron shutters as the spell was torn from the air in a spiraling vacuum of inverted light. The air shimmered—wrong—as the magic vanished down his throat in one enormous, gluttonous breath.
But even Nehzhar wasn't stupid enough to take a charge from Aelius unguarded.
With his other hand, he snapped his fingers once, cleanly.
And a wall burst from the ground in front of him—not made of stone, not flame, not ice—but of pure converted magic.
It shimmered like tar poured through stained glass—a writhing lattice of every spell he'd eaten, stitched together with chaos and pride. Glyphs flickered across its surface, written in no known tongue, and the edges bled light that changed color with every heartbeat.
Magic Godslayer magic.
The wall slammed into place with a thud like a closing vault.
Aelius struck.
His remaining arm hit the wall with a noise that sounded more like retching than steel on defense. The impact sent a shockwave through the clearing, rot flaring like a corona around the blast point. The wall held—Its surface cracked, then stitched like Aelius hadn't even touched it.
Nehzhar stumbled back, hacking thick, oily smoke from his lungs, eyes watering from more than just exertion. Steam rose from his lips like he'd gargled a bonfire made of corpses and funeral incense.
"Okay," he wheezed, hand on his knee. "Bad idea to eat that raw." He gagged once. "Carrion Gale? Tastes like wet socks, mildew, and... rabies. With a side of 'why does it crunch?!'"
He shuddered violently, as if trying to shake off the phantom flavor coating his tongue. His voice pitched higher with mock offense.
"Zero stars. three out of ten if I'm being generous. Would not recommend. Do not pair with red wine."
He blinked rapidly, rubbing at one eye, then flinched when a spore poofed off his shoulder and evaporated in a puff of green-black mist.
"Right, right—I can eat your magic, yeah," he muttered, straightening with a grimace. "But you could've warned me that it came with gastrointestinal consequences! Like damn, man—your magic's a walking CDC violation."
Then he jabbed a finger toward Aelius, face half-twisted between disgust and admiration.
"I mean, seriously. You know how illegal your plague is? Pretty sure I've seen quarantine sigils start crying when they sniff your aura. Even I get sick if I snack on too much of it. And I'm basically the universal remote of spell theft!"
He stuck out his tongue like a child tasting medicine and shuddered again. "Ugh. That was inside your lungs. That spell came from your plague-laced lungs. That's deeply upsetting."
Then he gave a short whistle.
"Y'know, for a guy with no heart and a moral compass scraped off with a wire brush, you've really committed to your aesthetic."
He flipped his hair back with a casual wave and sighed.
"Okay. No more raw consumption. Lesson learned. Gotta deep-fry that rot first or I'm gonna throw up magic slugs."
Then he snapped both fingers this time, cracking the air like bones popping into socket.
The battlefield still stank of war-insanity and rot in the moments after.
Plague hissed through shattered trees. Smoke curled from broken glyphs. Magic soaked the soil like old blood, and above it all—standing in the pit of his own ruin—Aelius straightened.
His chest rose once. Twice.
And then—
His right shoulder twitched.
Nehzhar paused mid-step, eyes narrowing. "Wait a se—nope. No no no. Don't you dare."
The flesh there bubbled, ruptured, and bloomed outward—bone first, curling like a charred limb remembering how to knit. Then came tendon, muscle, skin—all wrapped in a wet, obscene sheen of plague-spores and necrotic weave. His right arm regrew, slow but deliberate, like a sin stitching itself back into existence.
Aelius barely flinched.
No roar. No grimace.
He just lifted his gaze, mask cracked, eyes gleaming underneath like hollow amber set in dying flame.
Then—he moved.
One step forward.
Toward the blade. The real one. Half-sunk in the rot, like it had been waiting for him. Its handle protruded just inches from the soil—a haft of black steel entwined with red fungus, pulsing faintly, as if breathing with the battlefield.
Aelius reached for it.
Nehzhar's expression dropped like a stone.
"Oh. Nope."
He surged forward, faster than before—cracking reality with a burst of magic that slammed him across the distance in a heartbeat. The rot buckled beneath him, splitting into waves as his boots struck down. Glyphs spun around his wrists, threefold, casting arcs of runed protection as he crossed the space between them.
Aelius's fingertips grazed the hilt.
WHAM.
Nehzhar's boot caught his wrist mid-reach, sending his hand slamming sideways and forcing him back.
The plague-mage stumbled, not from pain, but sheer force. He recovered instantly—always poised, always unreadable—but the weapon remained untouched.
Nehzhar appeared in front of him, bent at the waist, hands on his knees, panting exaggeratedly. "Whoopsie! Almost let you grab your forbidden doom-blade of misery or whatever. My bad! Force of habit."
Aelius took a step to the left—calm, calculating.
Nehzhar mirrored it instantly. "Nope. Uh-uh. We're not doing that. You're grounded."
Aelius didn't speak. But his hand tensed.
"You just got your arm back! Just! Can't even let it rest before you go full apocalypse mode again?" Nehzhar flung his hands up. "Let the damn thing scab over before you summon the blade that ends conversations."
The rot pulsed beneath them. The weapon whispered in Aelius's blood. It wanted to be drawn.
Aelius surged again, a shoulder-check lunge that threw corrupted wind in every direction.
Nehzhar reacted instantly—one foot pivoting, one hand flaring with anti-magic runes. He intercepted the motion with a palm to Aelius's chest and a surge of magicslayer energy, burning off a layer of plague-woven armor with sizzling defiance.
"Don't make me teleport that thing into the sun, man!"
Aelius reeled back slightly. Eyes locked with Nehzhar's. There was no rage. No surprise. Just… calculation. That slow, quiet ticking in his mind. Like a puzzle still unsolved, pieces bloody and broken but still fitting somewhere.
Nehzhar straightened, dusted himself off dramatically, and rolled his shoulders. "Okay. So that's where we're drawing the line. You want your cursed blade, you've gotta go through me first. And I mean through me, like, literally—you're gonna have to bisect me at a minimum. Which, by the way, would be rude."
He flicked a spark of borrowed wind magic off his fingertips, letting it explode like a firecracker behind him.
"Or—and hear me out—we can go back to beating the ever-living spell residue out of each other without grabbing the big 'press-this-to-die' button. Sound fair?"
Aelius tilted his head.
And stepped forward.
Nehzhar's grin returned.
"There's my boy."
He punched both fists together—and the air detonated around them again. The air thickened with glyphs. Flame-not-flame. Light-not-light. The battlefield cracked anew.
The dance continued.
The battlefield trembled in silent anticipation as Nehzhar and Aelius faced off—no quips, no extravagance. Only intent.
Aelius gripped his plague-forged blade and breathed evenly.
"Plague God's Carrion Gale!" He thrust his hand forward. A grinding vortex of rotting wind exploded outward—foul, heavy, crawling with spore-laden insects. The air itself struggled under the spell's weight. Mushrooms wilted where it passed, and the earth screamed in decay.
Nehzhar braced, nostrils flaring, but held steady. He inhaled deeply, drawing the gale into himself.
The rancid wind vanished—swallowed. His chest rippled as the magic twisted down his throat, venom sour in his lungs. Yet his feet stayed rooted.
For a heartbeat, Nehzhar trembled, then suddenly straightened—confidence returning.
"Yeesh. Still bad, very very bad," he stuck his tongue out, wiping phantom residue from his tongue.
Aelius advanced.
Nezhzar's eyes sharpened.
"Magic Gods: Shadow Fortress!" He slammed out his hands and threw a swirling dome of dark, inky barrier between them. It coalesced like living smoke, heavy and murky, humming with ripped spell-thread and tempered magic. A living shield born of pure power. The dome pulsed—a heavy, inky shell of power that hummed like breath caught in a throat. Shadow Fortress. It sat between them like a line drawn in ash and fire. Nehzhar stood behind it, arms raised only halfway now, casually, fingers twitching with residual energy from the last spell. The grin on his face hadn't faded—but it had cooled. Tightened. Like a mask laid over something sharper.
Aelius remained on his side of the field. Rot churned around him in lazy spirals, as if breathing through the ground itself. His hands were empty.
And he refused to move forward.
He hadn't crossed the barrier's line once.
Not a single step.
Nehzhar cocked his head. "You're really not gonna come over here, huh?"
No answer.
Aelius stood still, spine rigid, his ruined cloak hanging in strips around his knees, rot clinging to his shoulders like a mantle of dead gods. One arm—regrown—was still raw, the skin new and pale, half-marbled with black where his curse hadn't finished settling. His other hand clenched open and closed, open and closed, rhythmically. Waiting. Breathing.
Stalling.
"You're really gonna just chill on your side of the sandbox while I'm in here living my best war-crime fantasy?" Nehzhar called out, pacing in a slow arc behind his barrier. "I mean, sure, fine, I get it. You've got your little plague bubble or whatever. Gotta protect the rot throne."
Still nothing.
But Nehzhar's smile dimmed just slightly.
Because Aelius was watching.
Not just staring. Watching. Eyes tracking every movement. Every twitch of Nez's foot, every spiral of smoke, every fray of unstable energy along the dome's edges. Calculating. Analyzing. Like a man disassembling a ticking bomb with no hands.
"Okay, serious question," Nehzhar went on, pretending to stretch his neck, "Is that blade of yours on loan? Are you saving it for a rainy day? Or—and this is my favorite theory—are you actually scared of what happens if you cross this line?"
Still, Aelius did not move. But his fingers flexed again.
Nezhzar laughed softly and shook his head.
"That's adorable. You really think you can win without it? Without stepping in? I mean, I am flattered."
Aelius moved.
Just his hand. He extended it slightly, palm up, and rot began to congeal at his fingertips like ink drawn to heat.
He whispered.
"Plague God's: Reaping Mire."
The ground beneath Nehzhar warped instantly. Roots tore upward, glistening with black mildew, vines surging with a mind of their own—each one tipped with spores, each one hungry. They snapped like whips against Shadow Fortress, splattering spores that sizzled against its interior like acid on glass.
Nehzhar's brow furrowed for the first time.
He hadn't expected that spell. Not from this far. Not with this reach.
He snapped his fingers again, barking a short incantation—no name, no flair—just reflexive compression. The dome hardened inward. The interior fog turned to silver-violet smoke and flattened the attack like a breath held tight in a sealed lung.
The vines hissed and withered.
And Nehzhar's gaze snapped back up.
"You are absolutely stalling," he said flatly, no grin this time.
Aelius said nothing.
Instead, his eyes narrowed behind the cracked lenses of his mask. His foot slid back half an inch. The rot at his feet pulsed once more.
Still on his side.
Still refusing to cross.
Still waiting.
Nehzhar exhaled a long, frustrated breath.
"You know," Nehzhar drawled, pacing just behind the still-pulsing remnants of Shadow Fortress, his silhouette flickering through the haze like a bored specter at an opera, "I really hate fighting you."
He kicked a loose, half-charred spore root aside with the tip of his boot.
"I mean, why couldn't it have been Caius? Or Vanessa? Or literally anyone else with fewer rot tentacles and less psychological damage?" He waved a hand vaguely at the writhing rot around Aelius's feet. "You'd think the universe would've tossed me a bone and made the most irritating genius not be the one dragging ancient death domains into our fights."
His voice turned into a high-pitched, mocking whine: "'Oooh, I've got a plague god whispering in my soul, fear me and my beautifully choreographed decay.'" He stuck out his tongue, crossed his eyes, and made an exaggerated wiggling motion with his fingers.
Then he dropped the act and sighed.
"But nope. It's you. Mr. Broody Swamp-Thing. And somehow you always think you've got a chance."
He spread his arms wide and gestured toward the battlefield like a stage magician revealing a failed trick. The rot pulsed. The air trembled. His fortress still stood, flickering slightly at the seams. And Aelius—still hadn't crossed.
"Sure, fine, whatever," Nehzhar continued, waving dismissively. "You figured out how to bring your domain into this plane. Impressive, yes. Gold star. Annoying as hell, also yes. But let's be real, man. Come on."
His voice cracked toward the end, sliding into that familiar whining cadence he used when he really wanted to break someone's composure.
"Can't you just… give up?" he asked, almost pleading now, like a kid denied dessert. "Lie down. Take a dirt nap. Stop being all—" he made a series of vague, swooping gestures toward Aelius's posture "—that."
Still, Aelius didn't respond. No spells. No steps. Not even a twitch of defiance.
He just watched.
That was somehow worse.
Nehzhar's smile faded for a flicker.
"…Okay. You're not gonna make this easy, huh?"
A faint tension gathered at the corners of his mouth, the grin starting to sour into something with teeth.
"Fine," he muttered. "You wanna stare at me from across the plague pool like some overachieving cryptid? Be my guest. But I swear, when I finally knock that stupid mask off your face, I'm gonna staple it to your rot throne and replace it with a smiley face sticker."
The air cracked behind him, "Magic Gods: Abyss Nail" as he summoned a long, spiraling lance of void-etched energy to his side. It hissed like a dying star, black and purple, veins of magic slithering across its surface.
He twirled it lazily.
Then pointed it dead at Aelius's heart.
"You wanna play god of death, Aelius? Then come prove it."
Behind Aelius, the rot pulsed—slow and rhythmic, like something diseased drawing breath. The world held still around him. It wasn't fear. It was reverence. The kind that comes before blood.
"Come to die, Aelius Morvain… Grandson of Decay."
Nehzhar didn't laugh this time. His usual snide tilt was gone. The air bent differently now, heavier, sharpened to a razor-point tension.
And then, like a switch thrown in the void, his voice dropped.
"You know what?"
He straightened, letting the swirling edge of dark magic in his hand disintegrate into vapor.
"No."
Now it was just a voice. Clean. Stripped of irony. Filled with judgment.
"No, if you die here today and you don't impress me—if you fall like another brooding footnote in some dead god's sermon—then I'm not going to just kill you."
The rot behind Aelius twitched. Listening.
"I'm going to kill everyone in Fairy Tail."
The name hit like a drumbeat in a funeral hall.
Nehzhar didn't stop. His face didn't change.
"I'm going to start with Natsu," he said, almost conversationally. "He'll be the loudest, so I'll take his voice first. Crush his throat before he can scream. Then his fire. Then his spine. Leave the smell of charcoal and despair in the guildhall walls for centuries."
He tilted his head.
"Then Gray. You know Gray—always ice, always grief, always the poor, tragic orphan act. I'll crack his magic out of his fingers one knuckle at a time. Shatter his discipline. Shatter him. And when he tries to crawl away on frozen elbows, I'll make sure he gets to see what comes next."
A step forward.
"Erza…" He drew out the name with a reverent sort of venom. "You think she'll die easy? No. She'll last the longest. She's stubborn like that. She'll keep switching armor, keep bleeding for every second she can. But you know what? I'll wait. And when she runs out—when her swords are broken and her strength is spent—I'll pick the slowest spell I've got."
Another step.
"Lucy. Oh, sweet, brave Lucy. I'll kill her stars first. Watch them beg. Watch her beg. Then I'll burn the keys and pour the ash into her eyes."
Still no smile. Just cold declaration.
"I'll find Gajeel and drown him in iron. Juvia? I'll turn her water into salt and let her evaporate in her own tears. Mira—" he paused, exhaled slowly, "—she'll make a pretty corpse. I'll make sure she stays that way."
And then, finally, he stopped walking.
Face neutral.
Tone flat.
"Levy McGarden," he said, like her name alone was something sacred. "She'll be last."
For a moment—just a moment—he sounded genuinely angry.
"I'll walk into that little library of hers. Burn every book, every word she ever loved. Then I'll use her magic against her. Compress her lungs with a sentence she can't unwrite. And I won't let her die until she begs me to erase every name she's ever cared about."
He turned his eyes back to Aelius. Still burning. Still unblinking.
"So don't die, Aelius."
The rot stirred like a tide behind him.
"Because if you do—they die next."
And then, slowly, Nehzhar raised his hand—magic bleeding from his fingers like ink from torn scripture.
"Impress me."
The rot surged. Aelius did not wait.
There was no warning, no battle cry—only movement. Clean, brutal, unhesitating. One step carried him over the line they'd drawn in blood and boundary, into Nehzhar's side of the battlefield, across the forbidden threshold neither had dared violate until now.
He didn't care.
The moment his boot sank into the foreign domain, it was like stepping into black ink mid-boil. The air twisted, stung, fought to reject him—but Aelius was already through it. The plague responded to his will with unnatural speed, curling around his form like a cloak of malignant will, trailing spores like burning incense.
The ground screamed beneath his feet.
His right hand—once severed—was now whole again, newly regrown and veined with sickly, luminous green where the rot had fed itself into the marrow. He raised it, and with it came the invocation. Not shouted. Not elegant. Just a rasp that peeled from behind the bone-laced mask.
"Plague Gods: Maw."
It was not a spell designed for beauty. From the rot at his back rose a jaw—skeletal, enormous, stitched from bone, sinew, plaguecloth and blight-matter. It didn't open so much as unhinge, a mockery of a dragon's breath weapon. The blast that followed was thick and humid, a choking tide of liquified rot and gnashing rotflies, a breath from a world where disease had teeth and will.
And Aelius was behind it.
He charged through his own spell. Let it swallow the battlefield in screaming dark. Let Nehzhar choke on his own threats.
The ground between them warped as the barrier lines fractured, Nehzhar's domain crashing against Aelius's rot-born storm like two titans made of law and sickness clawing at each other.
Nehzhar twisted his hand to deflect, still laughing through gritted teeth as he threw a sheet of magic to defend—
"Magic God: Abyssal Shred!"
A horizontal cyclone of pressure and compressed void raked outward from his left hand, catching the edge of Aelius's spell, slicing open air and darkness alike. The spells collided mid-field, a cyclone inside a plague inside a god's tantrum, erupting into writhing shockwaves of rot-ink and vapor.
But Aelius didn't stop. He couldn't.
He broke through the aftermath, plague trailing from his shoulders like a tattered king's mantle, and lunged low. The mask let nothing show—but his body screamed intent. Every motion bore one singular truth:
He no longer cared if he lived. Only that Nehzhar fell.
His left hand ignited—not flame, but decay: fungal threads, acid mist, teeth gnashing in mold.
"Plague God: Blooming Thorn."
A cluster of fungal knives burst from his palm, organic, shrieking, and jagged—thrown like shrapnel not to pierce, but to rot on impact, forcing Nehzhar back—
But Nehzhar didn't step back.
He caught one mid-air—burned his hand to do it—and grinned.
"Now you're getting it," he said, tossing the knife away with a flick.
Then he vanished. No smoke. No flash. Just gone—
A pulse of godslayer magic cracked behind Aelius's right flank.
"Magic Gods: Black Nail."
A blade of pure annihilation—dark, humming, short as a dagger and shaped like an inverted cross—stabbed from nowhere, aimed for Aelius's exposed ribs.
He twisted, barely—let it slash across his side instead of through it. Blood hissed from the open wound.
And he turned, hand raised.
"Plague Gods: Burial Husk."
A clawed hand of layered rot, bone, and dead prayers erupted from the ground where Nehzhar had just been—just one second too slow.
But Aelius didn't stop to curse it.
He advanced again.
There were no sides anymore. No domains. No diplomacy.
Just a broken line.
And two monsters past the point of reason.