Minerva moved first, which Aelius had expected.
She lifted one hand and the air to his left bent inward, a small warp in the space before it turned into a strike that hit him across the shoulder blade and turned him slightly. He looked over his shoulder at the empty air where it had come from. A second strike hit him in the ribs from the opposite side. A third folded around his knee, and the joint dipped before he locked it.
"You are standing very still," Minerva said. She was twenty feet away with her hands loose at her sides, and the purple of her magic had settled into a steady glow around her wrists. "Is that confidence, Saint, or have you already run out of ideas on how to deal with my magic?"
"I'm waiting," Aelius said flatly.
"For what?"
"For you to show me something worthy of the title of Ace."
Her mouth tightened, and the sand around his boots collapsed inward. The space under him compressed, his legs were pulled together at the ankles, and for one moment he was a man standing on a point rather than on ground. A strike hit him in the sternum hard enough to lift him off the floor, then a second one at his back threw him forward, and she relocated him mid-air to the far wall of the arena where he hit the stone and left a shallow crater in it. Dust rolled down the wall. In the stands, someone shouted her name, and then a lot of people shouted it.
Aelius dropped from the wall and landed on both feet. He rolled his neck once and brushed stone dust off the front of his cloak.
"Again," he said.
Minerva stopped smiling, though the corners of her mouth stayed lifted at an angle that did not belong on someone her age. She threw everything at him after that. The displacements came faster and from farther away, pulling him across the arena in one stride and dropping him into the next set of strikes before he finished landing. She stacked them. A strike that caught his jaw was followed by one that caught the same side of his ribs, then a compression around his forearm that she held for three full seconds while she walked in a slow arc around him, watching his reaction as the bone snapped.
"I wonder how many times I have to break you to get through that regeneration," she said.
Aelius raised a brow, unseen under his mask; even after her failed display, she thought she was something. "More than you are capable of"
She tilted her chin up. "I suppose I'll have to disprove that then."
Her magic rose a notch, the purple spreading to her shoulders, and the next displacement did not simply move him. It sent him through the air in a flat line toward the barrier on the south side, and a heartbeat before he reached it she dropped a compression across his back that drove him into the stone chest first. The barrier cracked in a spiderweb pattern. Aelius hung there with the rock against his face for a moment, and then he pushed off it and turned around.
She was already in front of him. She had come through a fold in the air, and she stood close enough that he could see the sweat at her hairline. Her hand came up flat against his stomach, and her eyes were very steady. "Territory," she said, and the world under his palm twisted. It was a point blast with no warning in it; the space inside his abdomen pressed into a smaller volume than it was supposed to hold. Something deep in his side went wrong, and a thin line of dark fluid came up past his teeth and ran down his chin, before dripping on his collar.
The crowd went quiet for a heartbeat, then loud cheers filled the space.
Minerva stepped back and watched him, and the enjoyment on her face was plain now. Her eyes had gone bright. She did not look at the scoreboard or at the stands or at the announcer's box. She looked at the blood on his collar and at the angle of his shoulders, and her hand opened and closed at her side.
"There," she said softly. "Now you look like someone I can defeat."
Aelius wiped a line through the blood with his finger, the crimson coloring darkening even more against his glove. "How many have you done that to?" he asked.
"More than you have fought," Minerva said.
"I doubt that."
"Shall I show you?"
She did. The next ten minutes of the match were the most one-sided exchange the arena had seen in the Games, and the crowd did not seem sure who was on which side of it. She hit him from behind, from above, from inside the space he had been standing in a moment earlier. She pinned his legs together with a compression and broke the left knee with a second one, and when it knitted back, she broke it again to listen to the sound. She dropped him through a fold and caught him on the far side with a heel to the temple. She turned the sand under him into a pit, closed it around his waist tight enough to crack his femur, held him there, and walked around him, and spoke to him quietly the way a person talks to something in a cage.
"Sabertooth does not lose," she said. "Not to Fairy Tail, not to Saints, not to anything. You are very durable. That is all you are. Durable things break eventually."
"Only if they find something stronger than they are durable," Aelius said.
She hit him across the mouth with an open palm wrapped in a compression, and his head went around with it. The sound cracked off the arena walls. He brought his head back to center. A tooth was loose for maybe a moment before it slotted back into place.
"How long do you plan to do this?" he asked.
"Until you stop standing up."
"That could take a while."
"I have the time."
He nodded slowly, and the pit around his waist released him because she was not truly strong enough to stop him. He stepped out of it and stood a few meters from her. He looked up at the stands for a moment, at the colored banners, and the distant shapes of the guild sections, and at the place where he knew Fairy Tail was sitting. Macaos words about how this was against Makarov's Fairy Tail rang in his ear, but he shook it off.
"Alright," he said. "That's enough."
"Enough?"
"I wanted to see what you'd do with all of it. I've seen it," he sighed, before his cloak lifted off his shoulders and rose behind him as if caught in a draft, rippling once in the air; it was not his arms, as they were still by his side, something that Minerva also noticed as her eyes widened before narrowing as she took a step back. His cloak was past his waist now; whatever was holding them up was still hidden, but only just. And then, with a flash of light, his cloak disappeared into his requip space, and his wings spread fully on either side, with the bonus of his bare chest being exposed as well, his pale skin and the scar he 'got' from Nehzhzar adding to the moment.
Minerva took a step back. She did not appear to notice that she had.
"Those are not magic," she said.
"No," Aelius said.
"Then what are you?"
"Something that doesn't have to pretend it's gentle." He took a step toward her and the ring of darkened sand moved with him. "You've been enjoying yourself. I understand that; I've enjoyed myself in fights too. So let me return it."
She threw a displacement at him before he had finished the sentence, and it took him a meter to the left. He took a step back to where he had been. She threw another, and he stepped back again. The third one pulled him through a fold and put her behind him, and she turned fast with a strike already loaded, and his hand closed around her wrist.
"That's twice you've tried to go behind me," he said. "Predictable."
He broke the wrist. It was a short, sharp motion and the sound it made was dry. Minerva's scream came out thin and surprised, and the strike she had been charging went wide and hit the air instead. He held the broken wrist while she tried to fold space away from him, and her magic stuttered because she could not concentrate through the pain, and he watched it stutter the way he had watched her watch him bleed.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
She tried to hit him with her other hand. He caught that wrist too. He held both of them together in one of his hands and lifted her until her boots left the sand, and her face was level with his chest. She kicked at his stomach, and her heel hit hard, and he felt it land and did nothing about it. Her eyes were wide and furious and very young.
"Let me go," Minerva said.
"You told me you'd show me what you do to people." He brought her closer. "I'm returning the courtesy."
He let a thin breath of Carrion Gale out against her face and watched her try not to inhale it. She held her breath for four seconds before her body forced her to take one, and the miasma went in with it. Her eyes watered. The color left her mouth. She twisted in his grip, and her magic gathered in a violent pulse that threw the two of them apart, and she landed on her side in the sand with her broken wrist curled against her chest and coughed until her whole body shook.
The crowd had grown loud again, but it was a different sound than before, uncertain and scattered. The announcer said something that no one heard. Aelius walked in a slow half circle around her with his wings trailing in the sand behind him, and she pushed herself up onto one knee and looked at him through her hair.
"You are a monster," she said. Her voice was rough.
"You said that like you've never met one."
"I have not."
"You will." He stopped in front of her. "Get up."
She looked at him for a long moment. She looked at the arena, at the cracked barrier and the craters in the wall and the stretch of sand that was a different color than the rest. Her magic came back slowly around her uninjured hand, a smaller glow than before, and she got her other foot under her and pushed herself upright. She swayed once, but she stood.
Aelius's wings fluttered, and the sand around his boots turned black.
"Good," he said. "Now show me the rest."
Minerva showed him the rest.
It was less than before, and she knew it, which made her faster to use it. The displacement came at him from six angles at once, six small folds opening in the air around his body, and six compressions closed on him in the same instant. His ribs flexed, and his wings were pinned against his back by two of them, and the third took the breath out of him. She followed it with a strike at his knee, then his hip, then the base of his skull, working down a list she had clearly built for opponents she was supposed to defeat.
Aelius let all of it land, and then he walked forward through it.
He crossed the distance in four steps. She moved before he got there, folding herself sideways through the air to the far end of the arena, and he stopped and watched where she came out. She was breathing hard. The miasma had settled into her lungs, and every inhale carried a small catch that she was trying to hide, and her broken wrist hung against her stomach where she held it with her other hand.
"Run," Aelius said.
She stared at him.
"You're good at it. Run and fold and strike from somewhere else." He opened his wings a little further, and the sand beneath them blackened in a wide fan. "I'll follow."
She threw a compression at his throat, and he turned his head into it. It struck the side of his neck, and something in the muscle gave, and the wound closed before the pain finished arriving. He took another step. She folded away again, and he followed the fold with his eyes, and when she came out thirty meters off, he was already walking toward her.
It went on like that for several minutes. She appeared, struck, and vanished, and each time she reappeared, he was closer than he had been. He did not hurry. He did not pursue her in a straight line; he simply walked, and when she tried to put distance between them, he let her take it and then walked it back. Her strikes grew less precise as her hand shook. Her breathing grew shallower. Twice she tried to hold him in place with a pit of collapsed sand, and twice he stepped out of it as if it were a puddle.
Then she misjudged a fold.
She came out ten feet from him, closer than she had intended, and he was on her before she finished arriving. His hand closed around her throat. He lifted her, the toes of her boots dragging a line in the sand, and her good hand came up and clawed at his wrist.
"Territory," she choked.
The compression hit his forearm and snapped it cleanly, the bone turning in the middle with a wet sound, and he did not let go. The arm hung wrong for a few seconds while she gasped, and then the bones slid back into line under the skin and the hand tightened again.
"That was better," Aelius said. "Do it again."
She did. The next compression broke it again, and he held on. A third one tore the muscle along the inside of his elbow, and he held on through that as well, watching her face. Her eyes had started to change. The brightness from earlier was gone, replaced by something raw and uncomprehending, the look of a person who has found the bottom of a thing she thought had none.
"You cannot," she managed. "You cannot keep..."
"I can," Aelius said. "That's what you keep forgetting."
He opened his hand, and she fell. She landed on her knees and coughed into the sand, and he stepped around her and put a boot against her ribs and rolled her onto her back. He stood over her with his wings spread across the light, and the shadow of them lay across her body like a second sky. She looked up into it with her teeth bared.
"I am Minerva Orland," she said.
"I know who you are."
"My father will..."
"Your father is in the stands," Aelius said. "He's been watching the whole time. He hasn't moved." He crouched and looked at her from closer. "Do you understand what that means?"
She said nothing. Her mouth shook once.
"It means he's decided you can lose," Aelius said. "He's decided it's educational."
Her eyes went to the stands. She searched for a long moment, scanning the Sabertooth section, and he watched her find the place where the guild master sat motionless with his arms crossed, a heavy shape in the shade. The man did not stand. The man did not lean forward. The man watched his daughter on her back in the sand with a broken wrist and a crushed throat and did exactly nothing.
Something went out of her face then. It happened quietly, the way a light goes out in a window across a street.
"Get up," Aelius said.
She tried. Her arms shook, and she fell back.
"Get up."
She rolled over onto her stomach and pushed onto her hands and knees. She stayed there, head down, her hair hanging around her face, and when she spoke, it was to the sand. "Why are you doing this?"
"Why do you torture your own opponents?" Aelius asked in return as he stood before her, his boots and the blackened sand "your lucky your young, i can, and have done to worse to my own guildmates, ask laxus what i did to him and evergreen." he said quietly, it was mostly true he had no issue torturing her, young or not, but he needed some restraint or he would turn everyone against him. Then he raised his right hand, palm up, and said, "Plague God's Bloom."
Nothing happened for a moment. A single seed of pale light formed over his palm and floated up into the air, and then it split. Another split from it, and another, until the air above the arena was full of small drifting motes in every color, red and amber and violet and a sickly blue, each one no larger than a grain of dust. They spread outward on the thin breeze and came down over Minerva like falling pollen.
She watched them land with a kind of vague confusion. One settled on her sleeve and bloomed into a small red flower no wider than a coin. Another opened on her shoulder, then her collar, then the back of her good hand, and each one flowered in its own color, and each one pressed its roots down into her skin.
The first one to hurt was the red.
She flinched and brushed at it, and the red blossom came away with a strip of skin, and a bead of blood welled up in its place. Then the amber ones began to burn. Then the violet ones began to twist something under her ribs, and the blue ones went in through her throat and spread cold through her chest, and she started to make a sound.
It was not a scream at first. It was a high, thin breath, the sound of a person trying very hard not to give something away. Then the spores found her nerves, one color at a time, and the sound broke open. She fell to her knees. She clawed at her arms, her neck, her face, and every blossom she tore away left another one behind it, and the colors ran together across her skin like a bruise that had learned to bloom.
The crowd had stopped making noise. The stands had gone very still, the way a room goes still when someone drops something fragile.
Aelius stood in front of her with his hand still raised and his face empty. He did not look away from her. He watched her pull at her own hair, watched her fold in on herself, watched the spores take her one by one. He did not speed it, and he did not slow it. He let it run until her voice cracked and gave out,t and all that came from her was breath.
"Stop," she whispered.
He kept his hand where it was.
"Please." Her voice was hoarse and very small. "Please. I yield. I yield. I surrender, please."
He lowered his hand.
The spores went quiet all at once. The colors faded from her skin, and the blossoms shriveled and fell away like dead leaves, leaving only the marks where they had been, a scatter of small raw patches across her arms and neck. She folded forward until her forehead rested against the sand, and she lay there shaking with her eyes shut and her good hand curled in the dirt.
For a long moment the arena made no sound at all.
Then the announcer cleared his throat, and his voice came out smaller than it had at any other point in the Games. "The... the winner is Fairy Tail's Aelius." There was a pause. "Medics, please."
The medics were already running. Aelius stepped back to let them pass, and they knelt around Minerva without looking up at him. One of them touched her shoulder. She flinched hard, and then went still and let him lift her onto the stretcher. As they carried her toward the tunnel, she opened her eyes and turned her head and found him across the sand. She looked at him for as long as the stretcher allowed.
He looked back.
When she was gone, he folded his wings against his back, slowly, one layer at a time, until the span closed into the narrow shape beneath his shoulder blades. He called the cloak out of its space, and it settled over him, covering them again. He rolled his shoulder and the arm that had been broken three times moved as freely as if it had never been touched.
He looked up at the stands. Most of the faces were turned toward him, pale or silent or open-mouthed. The Sabertooth section had not moved. The man in the shade still sat with his arms crossed, and as Aelius watched, his eyes met Aelius's across the whole length of the arena. There was nothing in them that he could read, and he did not try to.
He turned his back on all of it.
The scoreboard changed behind him, and the points went up beside Fairy Tail's name. The crowd began to make noise again, scattered at first and then larger, and he walked toward the tunnel through the sound without slowing, boots leaving dark prints in the sand. At the mouth of the passage, the light dimmed, and the noise dropped behind him as the stone closed around the walls.
He stopped in the cool of the corridor and stood there for a moment with his eyes shut, a small hum leaving him as the announcer relayed the judges' decision, and Fairy Tail's overwhelming Victory had ended up putting them in first place; he opened them and kept walking, mildly disappointed he had revealed his wings so soon, but he had expected the Ace of Sabertooth to have any sort of trick that would let him use them.
But what was done was done; he was sure someone 'important' would come to ask how he had wings that didn't seem magical at first glance, and that was going to be a headache no matter how he answered, so he simply made his way back to the hotel he was staying in and waited for the next day's fight and the conclusion of the grand magic games.