A year and a half is a long time to spend chasing something you can’t quite reach.
That’s the best way I had of describing it to big brother, most nights.
The magic was there — I could feel it now, more clearly than ever, humming somewhere just under my skin like a held breath.
Close enough that some nights I swore I could almost taste it.
And every single time I reached for it, it slipped away again, like grabbing at smoke.
You’re not doing anything wrong, Placidusax told me, more than once.
Your body’s ready.
Your control isn’t bad, for someone your age.
There’s just…
something missing.
Some piece of the puzzle neither of us has found yet.
Helpful.
Very helpful, big brother.
Truly a wealth of specific, actionable advice.
I never claimed to have all the answers, kid.
Just the mana.
A year and a half of labor, stone dust, and stolen ten-minute conversations in my own head had turned into something almost like routine.
Almost like a life.
We’d all grown — Jellal taller and quieter, Erza sharper and more sure of herself, Millianna louder if that was even possible, Sho a little less flinching than the scared kid who’d first been thrown into our cell.
Simon steady as ever.
Rob, somehow, still finding new and increasingly unbelievable stories to tell every night like his supply of them was bottomless.
It was Erza who noticed first — the thing none of the guards seemed to want us kids putting together.
The tower wasn’t just a labor camp.
It was being built into something.
Some kind of massive magic construction, layer after layer of it, and every layer meant more kids brought in, more of us worked past the point any of us should’ve been able to stand.
“They’re going to keep doing this,” she said one night, quiet but hard in a way that had become entirely her own over the past year.
“Building this thing, whatever it is.
Using us to The rebellion started three days later, in the dead of night — a plan built out of everything we’d learned over months of watching guard patterns, shift changes, weak points in the tower’s defenses.
Simon’s steady hands.
Millianna’s speed.
Erza’s nerve, holding all of it together at the center like she’d been born to lead people twice her age into something this reckless.
For a few minutes, it actually worked.
We got past the first line of guards.
Got weapons — crude, stolen things, nothing that should’ve mattered against trained mages, but enough to feel like something in our hands.
I fought too, when it came to that, throwing myself at anyone who got too close to Sho or Millianna with nothing but fists and desperation and a body that still, infuriatingly, had no magic to call on.
Come on.
Come ON.
Now would be a great time, big brother.
Any time now.
I know.
I know, kid.
It’s not there yet.
I’m sorry.
It wasn’t enough.
It was never going to be enough — a handful of exhausted, starved children against an entire dark guild’s worth of mages who’d been doing this far longer than any of us had been alive.
The tide turned fast, and ugly, and the corridor we’d been fighting in became a bottleneck with nowhere left to run.
That’s when Rob stepped in front of us.
“Behind me.
All of you.
Now,” he said, and there wasn’t a trace of the joking old man in his voice anymore — just something steady and absolutely certain.
“Rob—” Erza started.
“Now,” he said again, and something about the way he said it made even Erza, mid-rebellion, mid-fight, obey faster than her mind could argue.
He held that corridor.
One old man who’d told us for over a year that he could barely use magic anymore, standing against guards who should’ve cut him down in a heartbeat — and for just long enough, he didn’t fall.
Whatever magic he still had left in him, he threw all of it into that corridor at once, buying just enough time and just enough chaos for the seven of us to scramble back the way we’d come.
It wasn’t enough to win.
It was enough to survive.
We didn’t make it out of the tower — didn’t even come close, in the end.
Cornered a floor down, exhausted, out of options, we were dragged back to the cells in chains, Rob limping between us, bruised and burned and breathing hard, but alive.
Alive, and half-carrying Sho the last stretch of the corridor when the boy’s legs finally gave out from exhaustion.
They locked us back in without a word, guards too busy dealing with the mess the rest of the tower was in to bother with much more than shoving us through the door.
Nobody spoke for a long while, once we were alone again.
Millianna cried without trying to hide it, curled up against Rob’s side while he sat with his back against the wall, wincing every time he shifted.
Sho stayed pressed close to him too, still shaking.
Simon stared at the floor, jaw tight.
Erza sat a little apart from everyone, dry-eyed, arms wrapped around her knees, in the kind of silence that scared me more than any amount of crying would have.
“We failed,” she said, eventually, flat and quiet.
“You didn’t fail,” Rob said, voice rough but steady, one hand coming to rest on Millianna’s head.
“You’re all still here.
That’s not failure.
That’s just not finished yet.” Nobody argued with him, but nobody looked convinced either.
And Jellal — Jellal sat apart from all of us too, staring at his own hands like he’d never seen them before, something behind his eyes already starting to shift in a way I recognized with a sick, helpless dread.
…You did what you could, big brother said quietly, that night, when I finally reached for him again, hollow and exhausted and furious at my own uselessness.
A body without magic, throwing itself at trained mages anyway.
That’s not nothing, kid.
That’s not nothing at all.
Doesn’t feel like much of anything right now.
No.
I imagine it doesn’t.
I didn’t sleep that night.
Just sat with my back against the cell wall, listening to Millianna’s quiet crying finally taper off into exhausted sleep, watching Jellal stare at nothing in the dark, and thinking, over and over, about a missing piece I still couldn’t name, and a fight I hadn’t been strong enough to actually matter in.
Whatever’s missing.
Whatever piece I’m not seeing yet.
I need to find it.
Because next time, I am not standing there useless again.