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"When... when did you?!"
The arrogance was gone from Animus's voice entirely. Only shock remained, filling those eyes that had been so cold and commanding a moment ago. She had not noticed Noah appear behind her at all.
The hand resting on Sonya's shoulder looked almost casual. It did not look like the kind of grip that would make it impossible to move. But Animus could feel it, a suffocating weight pressing down through her control of the body, something vast and utterly indifferent to her resistance.
Worse than the physical restraint was what was happening to her magic. A single touch, and an external force had already begun suppressing her flow from the outside in.
Sonya was slipping out of her grasp.
There was a human who could actually undo the Dragon Soul Technique by force.
Noah did not acknowledge her shock. His five fingers tightened slightly on Sonya's shoulder, and something invisible and completely overwhelming drove itself through the body beneath his hand, passing past flesh and bone entirely, going straight for the dragon soul nestled inside.
The scream that came out of Sonya's mouth was not hers.
A huge, distorted phantom in the shape of a Dragon erupted partially from her body, dragged out by Noah's grip, twisting and roaring in the air above the balcony with an animal terror that had nothing of the ancient predator's dignity left in it.
It fought with everything it had. It made no difference.
"Stop! Stop it!"
Animus screamed, and the panic in that deep voice was genuine and complete. "This girl has been bound to me for over three hundred years! If you tear us apart by force, she will die along with me! Do you understand what you are doing?!"
Noah raised an eyebrow.
"Are you trying to threaten me?"
The grip did not loosen by the smallest degree. His voice was almost bored. "And who gave you the idea that I was planning to separate you at all, you hideous thing?"
His other hand came up and pressed flat against Sonya's forehead. His earlier contact with her had already told him exactly where inside her Animus had taken up residence.
Now came the rest.
Magnetic Field Rotation. One hundred thousand units of power.
Heavenly Lock: Dragon Seal!
The dragon phantom released a single, long, desperate roar. It felt the Dragon Soul Technique being cut through and ripped away from it, and then the seal closed around it, driving it back inside Sonya's body not to be expelled but to be locked.
Permanently.
The connection that had let Animus control Sonya from within was severed and would not grow back. What remained of the Dragon's power was being drawn out and redirected, slowly and irrevocably, becoming Sonya's own to draw on for as long as she lived.
When she died, Animus would be released. And there would be nothing left of him to recover from.
The Dragon that had lain dormant for centuries, waiting for the moment it would be invincible, met its end like this, on a palace balcony, in less time than it took to draw a full breath. It had not managed a single real exchange with Noah from start to finish.
The three men on the balcony had watched every second of it.
Crawford had given up on his legs and was sitting on the ground.
Zash Caine's hand was tight around the Dragon Cry staff at his back, his knuckles going white.
He had been the one to track down Animus in the first place, the one who had spent considerable effort convincing Crawford and Abel that bringing a dormant Dragon into their alliance would give them the decisive edge they needed against whatever the Council or anyone else threw at them.
Their strongest piece had just been taken off the board without effort, before it had even moved.
Abel was very still. He was running calculations behind his eyes and the numbers were not adding up the way he needed them to.
Sonya, freed from the Dragon's grip on her mind, blinked. For a moment there was nothing in her face but pure confusion, and then the strength left her all at once. She tipped backward, and Erza, who had arrived without fanfare at some point in the last few seconds, caught her.
Noah turned from Sonya with the same unhurried ease and let his gaze move across the three remaining figures on the balcony. It settled on Crawford.
"I told you," he said pleasantly. "If I catch you, I would break your legs."
Crawford's face went through several expressions very quickly. Then he started crying.
"Please, no, I was forced into all of it! It was Zash! It was Abel! They pressured me, I had no choice! And Abel, he's the Pope of the Black Magic Cult, shouldn't you be going after him? Just let me go, please, I will tell you everything, just don't..."
Noah was not listening. He raised one finger.
Two sounds followed, close together, the kind that made everyone nearby wince involuntarily.
Crawford's scream was immediate and spectacular. Both legs had snapped clean at an angle that legs were not supposed to achieve. The pain took him under before he finished screaming.
Noah looked at him on the ground and shook his head. "Completely spineless." A man who had once held the highest seat in the Magic Council, reduced to begging and weeping at the first real consequence he had ever faced for anything. It was genuinely irritating.
He stepped over Crawford and turned his attention to Zash Caine and Abel. The latter in particular.
Abel had been the true driving force behind the Black Magic Cult for fifty years. Every plan the Cult had executed, every life it had ended or ruined, had run through him in some form. There was a long list attached to his name, and none of it was small.
He did not need to leave this balcony.
Abel caught the shift in Noah's expression and understood it immediately. He stopped pretending and pulled out the magical artifact he had originally prepared for Animus, holding it up and triggering it in one motion. Black smoke poured from it and billowed upward, and a massive magic circle assembled itself in the air above the palace, wrapped in dark mist that seemed to reach somewhere else entirely.
Abel's laugh was unhinged and sharp, the sound of a man who believed he had just changed the odds. "Did you really think a single guild could simply come in here and take me? Do you have any idea who stands behind me?"
He thrust both arms toward the magic circle overhead. "Eighteen Demon War Gods! Lord Battle Bond! Your faithful servant calls upon you! Descend and destroy the enemies before me!"
The magic circle pulsed.
Then nothing happened.
Ten seconds. Thirty. A full minute.
The circle floated there, dark and silent and empty.
Abel's expression changed slowly, like something hardening and then cracking at the same time. His eyes stayed fixed on the circle. Lord Battle Bond always answered. Always. He was one of the Eighteen. He simply had not heard yet. He would hear. He would come.
Abel raised the artifact again, forcing more power into it.
Noah watched him for a moment. "They are not coming," he said. "I killed every last one of them some time ago. The Black Abyss itself no longer exists."
The look that passed through Abel's face was difficult to describe. It was the expression of a man watching the ground he had stood on for fifty years turn out to have never been there. His eyes went unfocused. He kept telling himself it was a lie, that Noah was bluffing, that the magic circle would still respond, but the circle was still silent and the confidence in Noah's voice left very little room for doubt.
Noah slapped him across the face.
Abel spun three full rotations through the air and landed in a heap.
The last man standing was Zash Caine.
He looked at Crawford unconscious on the ground, at Abel crumpled nearby, at Sonya being held by the red-haired knight, and at Noah standing in the middle of all of it with his hands at his sides. Zash Caine was not a man given easily to despair, but he was also not a man who refused to read a situation clearly.
His face changed. Something calm and resigned gave way to something raw and reckless.
He pulled the Dragon Cry from his back and drove it point-first into the stone floor of the balcony. His hands locked around the staff. Magic Power and his own blood began flowing into it together, and the gem set at the top of the staff erupted with a cold, pitch-black light that climbed toward the sky.
"You forced my hand."
His voice was shaking, but not with fear. "If I am going down, I am taking all of you with me."
"Wake up. Every last drop of resentment the dragons left behind."
"Dragon Cry!"