Jellal didn’t come back.
Three days passed.
Then four.
Then a week, and still no sign of him — no word, no explanation, nothing except an empty space in the cell where he used to sit, and guards who just shrugged or went quiet whenever anyone dared ask what had happened to him.
I don’t know what they’re doing to him.
I never got much on Jellal — just scraps, just enough to know I should stick close to Erza when everything falls apart.
Jellal was always the blank space on the map.
That not-knowing was almost worse.
No certainty to brace against, just an empty space in the cell where he used to sit, and guards who shrugged or went quiet whenever anyone dared ask what had happened to him.
It was Erza who moved first, same as always.
“We’re getting him back,” she said that night, quiet enough that only the cell could hear it, her voice harder than I’d ever heard it.
“Whatever they’re doing to him, wherever they’re keeping him — we’re not leaving him in this place.
We do this again.
Properly, this time.
We get out, all of us, Jellal included, or we don’t stop trying.” Nobody argued.
Not even Simon, who’d been the most cautious voice the first time around.
Something had shifted in all of us since the last attempt — less a plan born of hope now, more one born of simply having nothing left to lose that hadn’t already been taken.
.
Just felt the weight of it settle in my chest, along with something else — a low, simmering anger that had been building since the day I’d watched Erza dragged off and done nothing, since the day I’d watched Jellal walk out that door and done nothing, since a year and a half of feeling that missing piece of magic sitting just out of reach while everyone I cared about paid prices I couldn’t do anything to stop.
Not this time.
Whatever it takes.
The rebellion started two nights later.
It went further than the first attempt, further than any of us had dared hope — more of the older kids joining in this time, more guards caught off guard by an uprising nobody thought a bunch of starved, broken children would actually try a second time.
For a while, it almost felt like we might actually make it.
Then the dark guild’s real fighters showed up, and the tide turned the way it always seemed to turn in that tower.
I was fighting near Millianna and Sho when I heard Erza scream Rob’s name, and turned just in time to see it happen — a guard’s blade already swinging toward her, Erza a half-second too slow to block it, and Rob throwing himself into the space between them without a moment’s hesitation.
The blade meant for her found him instead.
“ROB!” Erza’s voice cracked the air, raw and furious and grieving all at once, and something in her broke open right along with it — I felt it before I understood what I was even feeling, a surge of magic tearing loose from somewhere deep inside her, wild and unrefined and absolutely furious.
Steel materialized in her hands out of nowhere, a blade taking shape like it had simply been waiting all this time for exactly this moment to exist, and she turned on the guard who’d struck him down with something in her face that no eleven-year-old, no matter what she’d survived, should have ever had to wear.
She didn’t need help finishing that fight.
I’d never seen anything like it — grief turned into a weapon, turned into magic, turned into something the guild’s mage clearly hadn’t expected from a child.
Rob— I didn’t get to finish that thought.
Something else was happening at the same time, something I’d been chasing for a year and a half finally, finally slotting into place.
There.
THERE.
Do you feel that?
I feel it.
I FEEL it.
The missing piece hadn’t been technique, or control, or patience.
It had been this — rage, grief, a promise I’d made to myself in the dark that I’d never sit still and useless again, all of it crashing together into the one thing that had apparently been the actual key the whole time.
The magic that had been sitting just under my skin for a year and a half didn’t trickle out.
It exploded.
Space bent around me like it had been waiting for permission.
I didn’t think.
Just reached for the nearest thing that felt right, and the world answered — distance folding in on itself under my feet, a single step suddenly closing a twenty meters like it was nothing, putting me directly between a guard and Millianna before either of us had time to process how I’d gotten there.
Oh.
OH.
That’s — okay.
Okay, that’s incredible, actually.
Focus, kid.
Figure out the rest later.
Survive first.
I didn’t have a weapon.
Didn’t need one — space twisted at my will instead, condensing into something solid, something long and sharp enough to work like a rod, a polearm made of nothing but distorted reality itself, and I swung it into the nearest guard with a six-year-old’s clumsy form and a full-grown fury behind it.
It connected far harder than it had any right to.
The next guard came at me with something thrown — a knife, a projectile spell, I didn’t even register which — and instinct did what a year and a half of theory hadn’t managed: I bent its path midair, distorted the line it was traveling on just enough that it missed by inches, sailing harmlessly past my shoulder instead of through it.
Space to close distance.
A weapon out of nothing.
Bending anything thrown at me off its path.
Three tricks.
Three ugly, unrefined, absolutely beautiful tricks.
Not bad for a first day.
Don’t get cocky.
These are still trained mages, and you’re still a child throwing a temper tantrum Noted.
Also — thank you.
For this.
For all of it.
Thank me later.
Fight now.
I fought.
Clumsily, furiously, closing distance in single impossible steps, swinging a weapon that shouldn’t exist, bending projectiles harmlessly out of the air.
Somewhere around me, the rest of the tower was fighting its own version of the same desperate battle — Erza cutting through anyone who got close with a grief-fueled fury that didn’t seem to be slowing down, Simon and Millianna finally getting real openings instead of just surviving guard after guard, older kids who’d joined the second attempt pressing every advantage a distracted, bleeding dark guild kept handing them.
And this time, the tide didn’t turn against us.
Whatever it was — Erza’s magic tearing through their strongest fighters one after another, my own three ugly, unrefined tricks buying just enough space and time in every corner I reached, or simply the fact that a guild built on cruelty had never actually planned for the day its victims got strong enough to fight back — the guards started falling faster than they could be replaced.
One by one, then in twos and threes, until the corridors that had swallowed our first attempt whole were just full of bodies that weren’t ours.
By the time the last of the dark guild’s mages went down, gasping in a heap at the base of the tower’s central shaft, none of us could quite believe it.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Just stood there, bruised, bleeding, exhausted, surrounded by an enemy that had finally, actually stopped getting back up.
We won.
We actually won.
It didn’t feel like victory should feel.
Not with Rob’s body somewhere behind us in that corridor, not with Jellal’s fate still an unanswered question hanging over everything.
But it was still, undeniably, a win — the tower’s grip on us finally, actually broken.
Rob.
I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.
But I promise — everyone else, I’m not losing anyone else I can actually do something about.
Not anymore.
And whatever happened to Jellal — we’re not done looking for him.
Not yet.
…For what it’s worth, big brother said quietly, once the fighting had finally gone still around us, I think that old man would have been proud.
Watching all of you finally stop hesitating.
Yeah.
Well.
Wish it hadn’t taken this to get us there.
Most important things cost more than they should, kid.
Doesn’t make them worth any less once you’ve got them.