Meanwhile, in the Labyrinth of Directions
Erza moved through corridor after corridor, the walls around her running red with every passing minute. She didn't give the dozens of shaggy, horned, contorted things a single chance to slow her down.
The demons, because demons were what the girl had drawn for her trial, were mostly humanoid, though wingless, which was exactly why they couldn't leave the building that had become their very unlucky home. On their own, none of them were significantly stronger than an ordinary human.
The great otherworldly emperor's sister didn't even need to Requip into battle armor. Just a few extra blades, and using Sword Magic with Telekinesis, she moved through them like a combine harvester, shredding anyone who dared stand in her path.
Soon she emerged into a long corridor packed with an especially dense horde of demons. In the middle sat something resembling a large, yellowish flesh-tank. Floating inside it was, naturally, another demon, but with a far more malicious and self-aware face. Its body was decidedly feminine.
"DEVOUR!!!" came a gurgling shriek from within the cocoon, suggesting that perhaps its resident wasn't quite the strategic genius she appeared to be. Otherwise she might have actually tried tactics instead of settling for a one-word order.
Erza spun, sweeping aside several demons, then shifted direction, herding the creatures and tightening their formation. Only then, in a flash of Requip, did her armor change: lighter now, silver plating over dark fabric, with bracers engraved with dozens of runes. The extra blades vanished. A pair of curved daggers in Erza's hands began to glow with Ethernano, and the inscriptions on the bracers lit up alongside them.
The girl made a single, lightning-fast horizontal sweep, and a wide white slash tore through the air along its arc. The sound of riven space cut through the room as the attack wiped out the bulk of the demon horde in one stroke, sending them crumpling to the floor with wet gurgles.
Finally, Erza turned to what was apparently the queen of this demon rabble. The creature barely managed a shriek before a vertical white streak split it clean in two.
"In its own way, that was almost satisfying," the girl said with restrained emotion, clearly thinking of someone she knew who had ties to demons. Though I've never found slaughter satisfying before, she thought. "But this is the end."
She finished off the stragglers with methodical precision, making sure not one piece of filth remained, then turned toward the far wall. There, slightly lower than the corridor height, maybe eight meters up, was an opening, with a large inscription below it: "That's it. This is the passage to the next stage." A helpful arrow pointed upward, just in case whoever was taking the exam somehow got confused.
Erza took a running start, leaped through the opening, crossed the tunnel beyond, and dropped down into a large circular arena, a good hundred and fifty meters across.
"Am I first?" she asked, glancing around. "Lian... I suppose I should thank you. But this is so unfair!"
She was certain her brother had rigged things so she'd draw one of the easiest possible routes. Which wasn't entirely true; had she gone up alone against either of the two stowaways, it would've been even simpler. But she still felt conflicted about the whole situation.
At the same time. The aforementioned pair of stowaways
Wakaba and Macao, wandering through their respective labyrinths, stumbled into the same oblong hall at the exact same moment.
The wall to the side flared up with the inscription "Only the one left conscious shall pass," but neither man paid it any mind.
Old friends and old rivals, face to face, neither with any intention of yielding. That much was written all over their expressions.
"Seriously? Of all people, you?" the blue-haired mage asked.
"Get lost, old man. I need this rank more than you do," Wakaba replied dismissively, adjusting his Elvis pompadour.
"Who are you calling old?! We're the same age!"
Done with words, Macao went silent and snapped his arm up fast, like a cowboy drawing iron. And from it flew not a single revolver round, but something closer to machine-gun fire: a rapid stream of bullets made of solid violet flame.
The element had taken on physical form, which only made it more dangerous. But Wakaba just took a long drag on the pipe in his mouth and dissolved into smoke. The rounds passed clean through, and the mage rematerialized at Macao's side, unleashing several smoke fists in retaliation, which were promptly incinerated by his opponent's fireballs.
The improvised pre-arena began filling with smoke, though not so much the controlled kind that Wakaba commanded, but the choking, disruptive kind that bothered both of them equally. The smoke Macao kept burning was laced with his opponent's interference magic, throwing off anyone's magical control.
Both mages kept lobbing spells back and forth, and neither managed to actually hit the other, what with all the dodging and elemental phase-shifting. The hall grew thicker and thicker with heavy smoke until visibility dropped to nothing.
Finally, having lost sight of each other, both men arrived at the exact same new strategy simultaneously: close the distance, get in tight where the other guy couldn't dodge.
Macao and Wakaba broke into a sprint, each privately congratulating himself on his own brilliant plan. The only problem was, it wasn't meant to be. The men ran headlong into each other at full speed, foreheads cracking together, and both of them hit the floor unconscious.
"Went all that way, and here we are again..." came a voice from somewhere up above, followed by a gust of wind that cleared every last wisp of smoke, revealing two remarkably undignified mages sprawled on the ground. "Second time you end up the exact same way! Have you no shame?!"
Makarov could only shout in exasperation.
"You've got ten minutes. Maybe one of you'll come to." The old man waved a hand and moved on along the labyrinth walls.
Doubling back, he returned to watching his grandson. The boy was tearing around a large open space, blasting lightning at an enormous snake, a good ten meters long, and doing his level best not to end up between its fangs.
The reptile itself was a mottled green, its left eye swollen shut with a bruise like a shiner.
That snake had been going without food for three days now, and the black eye it had gotten from one monster-in-a-human-body hadn't done a single thing to improve its disposition. With that monster nowhere to be found, it could finally take another shot at catching this meal it hadn't seen in a while, one that also happened to be very unpleasantly shocking.
Laxus himself had, at the start of the labyrinth, spotted his grandfather watching him. And because that was his personality, proud, and with all the patience of a teenager with a permanent itch, he'd promptly changed his strategy for the exam, deciding that the best use of his time was making Makarov miserable. He'd been walking through the labyrinth deliberately slowly ever since, just to enjoy the old man's expression of skeptical displeasure. Only recently, having savored that look to his satisfaction, had he decided to actually pick up the pace, since failing the exam in the very first stage seemed, objectively, like a bad move.
So for about a minute now he'd been hammering the snake with lightning. To minimal effect. The scales were tough, and though he was giving his element solid properties, it still wasn't cutting it.
When he converted to lightning himself and flew through the snake, the discharge wasn't enough either. The massive creature absorbed current with surprising efficiency. The frustration building in him made the lightning around him flare higher and brighter.
Not being able to overpower an enemy by sheer force is basically an insult, the blond thought. I can't out-muscle a dumb animal? That's absurd. Living in the shadow of his grandfather, a Wizard Saint and guild master, Laxus had spent his whole life trying to prove he was something in his own right. And with rare exceptions, said grandfather being the prime example, he was the strongest around.
But sometimes fate had other plans.
Still flying around the arena in lightning form, Laxus gritted his teeth, let out a silent curse, and made a decision. He arced wide and dove toward the snake's head. In the last instant before impact, his body turned physical, swollen with the energy raging inside him. Then the boy drove his arm down like a hammer.
"Lightning Nail!" With his shout, a flash burst from his fist, followed by a thunderous explosion.
The snake's head was thrown back immediately. The creature slumped and stayed down.
The blond landed, looked with visible irritation at the spot where the snake's other eye had been, its weak point, and turned away with even more visible irritation. Technically he could have beaten the snake in the first few seconds. He just considered it beneath his dignity to exploit a stupid animal's vulnerability. Anyone reasonable would call that idiotic, but Laxus had his own way of operating. He didn't always understand his own preferences, let alone explain them.
"Did I pass?" the blond muttered grudgingly, looking up at his grandfather.
"As you can see." Makarov gestured toward the far wall, where a passage was slowly sliding open.
The young mage made a face, converted to lightning, and simply flew over the wall, apparently deciding that crawling through an opening was beneath his station.
"Ugh..." Makarov sighed at the way his rules had been flouted in the final stretch, then shuffled off along the wall. "Just as insufferable as Ivan at that age. Maybe I should beat him again... No. That's not my job anymore."
From Elian's POV
"You took your time," I said as Laxus landed in front of Erza and me. "Get lost in there?"
My own tasks, as expected, hadn't given me any trouble. Just trivia questions and various traps, none of which were a problem to get through.
"None of your business," the boy exhaled in irritation, turning his back on both of us and on Gildarts, who was also standing there.
We waited. Before long, Makarov appeared on the wall. At that point it was clear to everyone that the count was final. In his enlarged hand, the old man carried two unconscious bodies, which he set down on the wall before jumping down to join us.
"That's how it is, kids," he announced, looking us over. "Congratulations on clearing the first stage. And let's not waste time. The second stage, as you can see," he gestured deliberately at the entire arena around us, "will be fights. Now then. Each of you is strong in your own way. A uniform test wouldn't be fair. So I'll decide how to evaluate each of you based on what I know about you."
He turned to face Erza and me.
"You two were given trials you cleared with ease. That's commendable, but a mage isn't just someone who completes assignments. A mage is someone who grows stronger day after day. That's what gives them the strength to do what they must. I know you two spar often, and you've been drawing even. You know each other better than anyone here. Your task will be to push past your own limits, either by coming up with something unexpected enough to win," he glanced at me, "or by adapting so thoroughly that your opponent's current techniques are no longer enough, and the victory goes to you." He glanced, naturally, at Erza. "The fight ends at the first pseudo-lethal wound. Now, clear the arena!"
At Makarov's shout, it wasn't long before my little sister and I were alone on the field.
The old man was right; our sparring matches had been ending in draws more and more often. Despite everything I could do, including the absurd boost in mobility from Teleportation Magic, Erza had grown strong enough in her own skills and armor to match me right now. And the raw power gap between us hadn't shrunk. If anything, it had widened in Erza's favor over time. Which meant I simply couldn't land a hit hard enough on even her mid-tier armor to deal meaningful damage. My energy output wasn't enough, no matter how clever a spatial cutter I invented or how much I'd trained Sword Magic. An honest fight between us was a guaranteed loss on my side. Then again, since when did I rely on being honest?
"I won't hold back, brother," Erza stated as we separated to our starting distance like duelists.
"Yeah, yeah, no problem. I've got a brain, and I'll tap out the moment I can't dodge anymore. A spar, same as always. Just with a little something riding on it." A slight smile crossed my face.
The girl gave a serious nod.
"Begin!" Makarov roared, and Erza was already a blur in front of me. She Requipped rapidly from her plain armor into a solid mid-tier set, good plate, sword, and shield, and came at me immediately.
A girl in battle armor might have looked kind of adorable, like something out of an anime, but in a fight, adorable she was not. With every step her sabatons struck the ground, the stone shook beneath me, and for some reason my mind flashed to an image of a rhino charging.
"Ahhhh!" she shouted, a full-throated war cry, and I had to Teleport away from the white slash that came whistling at me.
With a crack, the stone at my previous position split apart, a clean groove carved several meters out. Erza was already surging toward my new position before the dust settled. She moved fast, very fast. I launched a few traces of Ethernano into the stone beneath me and had to Teleport again just to keep dodging.
"Hey..." teleport. "Erza..." teleport. "Can we work something out?"
A few more teleports.
"I'll buy you cake!" I managed quickly, before ducking away from a downward slash that left a furrow in the arena behind it.
"I'll buy you cake..." Erza said on an exhale, pushing her magic into motion without missing a beat, "...so you won't feel too bad about it."
Well. She hadn't gotten swept up in exam adrenaline, which meant playing for time wasn't going to work. She knew me well enough to know that if I was stalling, I was probably setting something up.
And to make it worse, Gildarts had stopped me from prepping the arena before the fight started. Looked like a simple guy, but the man clearly had a brain. The nerve. Which meant I was improvising, trying to figure out my next move on the fly. Because my reserves were draining from all these teleports far faster than Erza was getting tired.
I had to change tactics. Find an opening.
She was undoubtedly happy with how things were going. I was burning magic, and every second brought her closer to winning. So if I wanted to flip that, I needed to make her weaker.
I snapped a teleport in close, and Erza deflected my blade with her shield. My next exit point was close enough not just to dodge her sword strike, but to attempt a counter, but no luck there either; her speed was enough to catch my attack from behind with her pauldron.
In a fight, Erza was completely locked in. Her magical sensitivity wasn't nearly fine-grained enough to track everything I was doing with my magic. She couldn't predict my exact exit points. But her instincts and what could only be described as animal reflexes more than made up for it.
Still, holding up under that kind of sustained pressure wasn't just physically draining. It was mental too.
I blinked left for a fraction of a second, and the shield was already flying at me. In the next instant, seeing the worst possible angle she could be at right now, I appeared behind her. In a flash of Requip, a full helm dropped over Erza's head, blocking her vision, but also sealing off my best target: her throat. Still, my slash surprised her, driving into the joint at her pauldron where the sword arm connected.
My blade bit into the magical lines there, wrecking the enchantment that gave that part of her armor its strength boost, and peeling away a section of plate, leaving just the shirt beneath. And then I was gone, ducking her immediate backswing with the shield.
"Breaking the armor... clever. But not enough!"
She surged at me, and over the next several seconds I made another couple of attempts. On the third, finishing off the pauldron, I finally knocked the armor's function out entirely.
So, fewer options for my opponent. But my reserves weren't dropping any slower, which meant I needed to move faster.
Erza shifted. A heavy knightly assault armor locked into place around her, all silver, commissioned during our trip to Era from an artificer at Heart Kreuz. Far sturdier than the last set, with even fewer weak points. Of course I knew every piece of her equipment inside and out. That didn't make it much easier.
She was slower in this one, but when she ran, the tremors she sent through the stone were bad enough that calculating my exit coordinates became significantly harder. And my teleports had to land with my feet on a shaking surface so that I could, if needed, push off from the ground to avoid a swing from that absolute beast of a longsword or the massive shield.
I switched to long-range teleports. Fighting close-range was pointless now against that armor. I started rationing my magic, waiting for the right moment.
Then finally, she stepped into a bad position mid-turn, and right in front of her a small artifact of mine appeared, generating a blinding flash. Erza shut her eyes for a split second; I landed a solid hit to the visor, cutting her vision again. Then I stepped out before her forward sweep could connect, and immediately struck the weakest joint, the side clasp where the breastplate met the backplate, just below the arm.
My blade found the gap but left no mark on Erza herself; the runes flared in time. Still, the fastening broke. The breastplate immediately twisted out of alignment, and when I teleported away from the follow-up, the structural integrity of the whole thing failed. Erza had to switch again.
She clearly understood what I was doing by now, systematically dismantling her arsenal, stripping away her options to make her predictable. It was all over her face, and the displeasure there wasn't only about the flashes she hated. I figured out what her answer to that was going to be the next time we clashed.
When my blade was aiming for another joint, she met it with something genuinely impressive, switching armor configurations mid-attack, Requipping in the middle of my strike so that no clean opening ever materialized. I could have adapted to that too, given time, but right then Erza shifted tactics again and took the initiative back.
Her armor changed to the one I remembered as her Sword Magic enhancer, light kit with daggers. And she put them to immediate use: not sparing a drop of Ethernano, white slashes started flying at every point she predicted I'd step out of a teleport. Instantly, without hesitation.
The stone across the arena kept getting split open with sharp, whistling cracks. The attacks came nonstop, and I was dodging nonstop. Erza knew my spar preferences well enough to guess my exit points more often than I liked, which meant I couldn't relax for a second; every bit of focus went to just not being where the next slash landed.
That forced me into less comfortable positions. Less familiar ones. And inevitably, at a certain moment, my own slip-up, naturally at the worst possible time, in a chain of four teleports I stepped out directly into open air, and the edge of a slash caught my shoulder on the way past. It hurt, and it stung the ego. But it genuinely had been the cleanest escape route out of the chain she'd almost boxed me into. The problem was I'd had to hold a small section of the arena just a beat too long.
But this couldn't keep going forever. Erza had three armor sets left, and I needed to deal with that. My particular way.
My teleports started slowing, just barely, just enough for her to notice the fatigue.
Desperate-looking, I blinked right behind her, and she blocked hard. My blade jarred back against my own hands on impact, but in the same instant, two spikes Requipped out between her limbs, tangling her for just a moment. Right then I hit the runes on her bracer with the second sword I'd pulled out, the ones that augmented her slashes. Then I stepped away before she could swing.
"So you were faking it," Erza noted with displeasure, looking in my direction. Then her hand jerked through the air, and with a firm pull, my dropped sword and the spikes lying nearby flew to her and disappeared into her Requip. "I'll hold onto these."
Good thing for me she'd never managed to master Telekinesis on other mages. Otherwise I wouldn't just be fighting empty-handed, I'd have already lost. I'd gotten the hang of it myself, but taking something from her by magic was a whole ordeal; the effort wasn't worth it. Because she'd learned, somewhere along the way, to resist various dark arts, Telekinesis on living people included.
Erza's armor shifted again, mostly fabric now, more of a combat suit than plate, with only pauldrons, bracers, and armored boots. White and red accents, with lightning bolt insignia on the equipment, a fairly transparent hint at its function.
"This armor... you made it." She ran a hand across the front of the suit, then settled both hands on the pair of rapiers hanging at her sides. "Using your own gift against your own weaknesses. That's not very sporting. Because it was built against mages who use Teleportation."
"Yes! Yes, you're absolutely right! You don't need to use that armor at all!" I agreed with my sister very encouragingly, standing still in a way that was definitely not suspicious.
"But... I just don't want to beat you with a handicap. That would be an insult to both of us. So let's make this an honor fight, each other at full strength!"
"We could do that some other time..." I tried again. No luck.
"We continue!"
She drew the blades, and then she was practically on me, moving fast enough to blur in my physical vision, barely a step from a teleport herself.
My own teleports became useless against her speed. I'd barely blink out to the next position, and only the overclock on my perception, the soul's vision, let me dodge at the last instant. My regular eyes simply couldn't keep up.
This was the end. I wasn't faking that part. The Ethernano was nearly gone. My teleports were getting shorter, the distances shrinking, only a handful of jumps left in me.
Erza saw it. She accelerated for the finishing blow. Her legs coiled, and at a stunning speed her blade shot toward my throat.
And at exactly that moment, the floor under us blazed with runes, and I teleported one more time. Erza didn't understand what trick I'd pulled, but she intended to end it fast regardless. She was nudged sideways, not enough, she decided, and slashed diagonally at the spot where she'd spotted me again.
Victory blazed up in her heart. My magic hadn't been able to stop her; nothing it had given, no extra jump, no attempt to slow her, had worked. Only... her mind seemed to plunge into cold water as she felt the chill of a blade touching her throat.
After her slash cut through the space where the tip of my neck had been a moment ago, the world lurched sideways, forty centimeters to the left.
"You would have resisted an illusion, so I shifted the photons in the space instead," came my tired voice from behind her, a smile on my face. As agreed, I had just enough Ethernano left for one long teleport out, so I could escape and concede if needed. Though given how careful Erza had started being near the end, it probably wouldn't have come to that.
"Oh, come on..." Erza said with all the sulkiness of a little kid, and straightened up. "You can't even trust your own eyes now."
We put our weapons away.
"You fought well," I said, and got a dignified nod in return.
"So did you."
"Yeah..."
Most people think experience in any discipline comes with age. But that's not quite right. It comes with training and practice. Otherwise my first world wouldn't have had twelve-year-old chess grandmasters, and in this one my Erza wouldn't have reached the heights she had. And even if I had complicated feelings about seeing those kinds of skills in her, the acknowledgment on my part was no less than she deserved.
Before long, all the participants were in the arena. Except the stowaways. They'd come to from the noise but were stuck on the wall, too scared to jump from the height.
"Not bad, kids," Makarov said, doing his usual thing of smoothing his mustache while surveying the arena, cracked, scarred, and thoroughly carved up.
"Erza is far stronger. But a fight isn't only about strength," Gildarts observed the obvious. The old man nodded, then spoke again:
"No time to waste. Next bout."
"Next?" Laxus said with a skeptical look in my direction. "He can barely stand. Couldn't do much before, but now? Even less."
"No, my dear grandson. Your opponent won't be the winner of the last fight." A suspiciously wicked little grin appeared on Makarov's face.
"That would be me," came Gildarts's voice from right behind Laxus, and then everything went completely sideways.
With an explosion like a thunderclap, followed by a roar of wind, Fairy Tail's strongest mage let his Ethernano loose. A crushing white aura engulfed Gildarts instantly. The entire arena began to shake from the released power, and what settled on all our shoulders felt like an immovable mountain.
"Gramps... why..." was all Laxus managed.