Chapter 360: Continue Destroying
"How pathetic!!"
Erza's voice rang out, raw and unyielding, echoing through the desolate ruins of the Tartaros control chamber. She stood in a realm of absolute, suffocating darkness. Kyouka's Enhancement Curse had severed her five senses entirely, leaving her deaf, blind, and devoid of touch, save for one terrifying exception: her pain receptors had been forcefully amplified to their absolute maximum limit. Every breath felt like swallowing shattered glass; the ambient air brushing against her skin felt like a roaring inferno.
"Huh?! What did you say?!" Kyouka's demonic visage twisted into a vicious snarl, her razor-sharp talons twitching with bloodlust.
"Oh, right! You can't hear..." Kyouka sneered, her voice dripping with sadistic mockery, even though she knew her words would never reach the scarlet-haired mage's ears. She took a step closer, reveling in the sight of the mighty Titania seemingly reduced to a helpless, battered doll.
Yet, Erza stood tall, her unseeing eyes staring straight ahead with terrifying conviction. "It's truly pathetic! Even though I cannot hear or see, I can feel just how pitiful you are."
Kyouka's sneer faltered, replaced by a flicker of genuine shock.
"You demons… you possess no thoughts of your own," Erza continued, her voice gaining strength, cutting through the heavy, curse-laden atmosphere. "You cannot dominate your own fate. You are nothing but empty, abandoned children, throwing a tantrum simply because you want to return to the cold embrace of your creator. You have no true strength, because you have no true heart!"
Erza's piercing words struck a nerve deep within the Etherious. The profound emptiness Kyouka felt—the driving, hollow purpose ingrained into her very genetic makeup by the Books of Zeref—was laid bare.
"Bastard!" Kyouka roared, her demonic features contorting into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage. Her aura exploded, fracturing the stone floor beneath her. "I've changed my mind. I'm going to tear you limb from limb and kill you right now!!"
With a burst of blistering speed, Kyouka lunged forward. Her elongated, cursed claws shot straight toward Erza's chest, aimed perfectly to pierce her heart and end the fairy's life in a single, brutal strike.
If this strike landed, Erza would surely perish.
Just as Ren, observing from afar through his shadow clones, was preparing to instantly intervene, the impossible happened.
Erza suddenly pivoted on her heel. With an elegant, terrifyingly precise sidestep, she completely evaded the lethal thrust. Before Kyouka could even register the miss, Erza twisted her hips and drove a devastating, armor-clad fist directly into the demon's jaw.
Bam!
The sheer kinetic force of the blow sent a shockwave through the chamber, rattling Kyouka's skull and knocking her violently off balance.
"How is this possible?!" Kyouka shrieked, stumbling backward as she tasted her own dark blood. "You shouldn't be able to see!!"
She stared incredulously at the scarlet-haired mage. "This can't be! I've completely sealed all five of your senses, and I've maximized your pain using my Curse power! You shouldn't be able to see me!! Nor should you be able to hear my voice or feel the displacement of the air. How do you know where I am?!"
Kyouka scrutinized Erza closely. At this moment, Erza's eyes were completely vacant, glazed over and devoid of focus, as if she truly hadn't heard a single word of the demon's rant. The visual confirmation was undeniable: her Enhancement Curse was still fully active and maintaining its debilitating effect on the Fairy Tail mage.
"A lucky guess? Then die!"
Refusing to accept the reality before her, Kyouka charged at Erza once more, her talons glowing with venomous purple energy.
But unexpectedly, Erza didn't retreat. Instead, she charged forward to meet Kyouka head-on.
With a flash of spatial magic, a long, gleaming katana materialized in Erza's hand. Even without the ability to feel the hilt, her muscle memory and indomitable will guided her. She swung the blade with the ferocity of a tempest.
Clang!
Sparks rained down as Kyouka frantically raised her reinforced claws to block the heavy strike. The impact sent a painful tremor up the demon's arms.
Immediately after the first clash, Erza unleashed a relentless, suffocating assault. A flurry of silver arcs painted the air, each strike heavier and faster than the last. Kyouka found herself pushed onto the defensive, completely overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with the blinding pace of the onslaught.
"How?! This is impossible!"
As Kyouka desperately parried the barrage of sword strikes, her mind was shaken to its core. Her opponent shouldn't be able to see, hear, or feel anything except paralyzing agony! So why did it seem like Titania could perceive everything? Her attacks were so incredibly sharp, precise, and unyielding that Kyouka found her demonic reflexes pushed to their absolute breaking point.
Squelch!
The razor-sharp edge of Erza's blade slipped past Kyouka's guard, biting deeply into the demon's shoulder and spraying a fresh arc of dark blood across the shattered stone.
"Tch!" Kyouka hissed in pain, quickly leaping backward to put a massive amount of distance between herself and the terrifying swordswoman.
Panting heavily, Kyouka watched from afar. To her surprise, Erza simply stood in place, her vacant eyes staring into the void, making no attempt to pursue.
"Damn it... how is this woman detecting me?!" Kyouka's face darkened with frustration. As she observed Erza's stagnant posture, a dark realization dawned on her. The fairy wasn't tracking her across the room; she was relying entirely on an innate, supernatural battle instinct. She would only trigger her devastating counterattacks when a hostile intent entered a specific, close-quarters perimeter around her.
"In that case..." A wicked, triumphant smirk stretched across Kyouka's bloodstained lips. "I just need to stay out of your reach."
Kyouka raised her hands. With a sickening crunch of shifting bone and dark magic, her cursed claws rapidly elongated, stretching out like lethal, flexible whips. With a flick of her wrists, she swung them through the air at blinding speeds.
Squelch!
The extended talons slashed viciously across Erza's unprotected abdomen.
"Gyaaaaaah!!"
Erza clutched her bleeding stomach, letting out a blood-curdling scream of pure agony. Because her pain receptors were infinitely magnified by the Curse, a simple laceration registered in her brain as the agonizing sensation of being sawed in half by molten iron. She fell to one knee, trembling violently.
A cruel, sadistic smile bloomed on Kyouka's face. "Just as I thought. Are you relying on a sixth sense—a warrior's intuition—to defend against my attacks? Impressive, but the range of your perception is severely limited. Farewell then, Titania!"
Channeling her killing intent, Kyouka's claws rapidly extended once more, transforming into rigid, spear-like appendages that shot forward, aiming to impale Erza's vulnerable body from a safe distance.
Just as she thought the fatal blow was guaranteed to pierce Erza's heart...
Crack!!
A sudden distortion in the air materialized, and a massive chunk of stone debris was warped directly into the path of Kyouka's strike. The cursed claws shattered the rock into dust, the kinetic energy completely neutralized.
"Who's there?!" Kyouka's expression changed drastically as she retracted her claws and shouted into the dust cloud.
"It is I!"
As the dust settled, Minerva Orland stepped forward, interposing herself between the demon and the kneeling Erza. Minerva's physical condition was far from ideal; her extravagant robes were scorched and torn, and a trail of blood leaked from her temple. She had taken the brunt of Ren's Massive Rasengan head-on and was suffering from severe internal injuries. However, that overwhelming, concussive force had been a twisted blessing in disguise—it had utterly shattered the mental bindings of Kyouka's control over her.
"Minerva? It's you?!" Kyouka hissed, her eyes narrowing with lethal intent. "You dare betray me?!"
"Don't speak to me of betrayal," Minerva replied, her voice cold and dripping with aristocratic disdain. "I was never loyal to you or Tartaros from the start. You slaughtered the people of Succubus Eye, took me by force, and subjected my body to your vile, demonic modifications. If not for my own superior aptitude and latent magical capacity, I would have long since followed in the footsteps of my fallen guildmates and been turned into mindless fodder."
After regaining her sanity and clarity, Minerva hated Kyouka to the very marrow of her bones. The forced transformation into 'Neo Minerva' was a humiliating stain on her pride. If not for her severe, debilitating injuries, she would have immediately unleashed her most destructive Spatial Magic to tear the demon apart herself.
"And because of that, you choose betrayal? Foolish girl," Kyouka scoffed.
"I said, this isn't betrayal," Minerva retorted, her eyes flashing with dangerous spatial energy. "This is revenge!"
"Revenge? Hehehe! With just you in that pathetic state?" Kyouka laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "In that case, you and Titania can both die together!!"
Kyouka crouched, preparing to launch a sweeping, lethal barrage to finish off both heavily injured women.
But at that exact moment, an icy, commanding voice echoed directly into Kyouka's mind, freezing the blood in her veins.
"Kyouka! What are you dawdling for?!"
It was Mard Geer Tartaros, the Underworld King. His telepathic tone was devoid of its usual calm arrogance; instead, it resonated with a furious, urgent edge. "Ignore those insignificant humans! Hurry up and accelerate the timer!!"
Hearing the voice of her absolute superior, Kyouka couldn't help but look up towards the towering, crystalline structure in the center of the chamber—the main core control lacrima for the continent-wide pulse bombs. Her face instantly drained of color.
The massive holographic map of Ishgar projected above the lacrima was a terrifying sight. The originally dense, overwhelming cluster of 3,000 crimson light points—each representing a Face statue—had already been halved. And impossibly, the number was still continuously, rapidly decreasing.
Blink. Blink. Blink. Whole clusters were vanishing by the second.
"How can this be?!" Kyouka gasped in horror.
The speed at which the Face bombs were being systematically destroyed was unfathomable. It defied all logic. At this rate, in just a few more minutes, the entire network of 3,000 statues would be utterly annihilated.
"Hurry! Kyouka!" Mard Geer's voice violently snapped her out of her stupor. "Do you want millennia of effort from us Etherious to be in vain?!"
"No! Yes! Right away, Lord Mard Geer!"
Kyouka could no longer spare a single thought for Erza or Minerva. Her demonic instincts took over. She immediately leaped into the air, landing gracefully atop the main core magic crystal. Without hesitation, she activated her Organic Link Magic, violently plunging her hands into the crystalline surface. She began to forcefully fuse her nervous system with the console, using her own immense life force and Curse power as fuel to override the countdown.
"Accelerate!" she screamed, her body convulsing as the lacrima began to violently drain her vitality.
On the giant holographic display, the digital timer began to blur, the numbers growing smaller and smaller at an unnatural speed.
Below, Minerva noticed the catastrophic shift but gritted her teeth in frustration. Between her exhaustion and her severe injuries, she was completely powerless to stop Kyouka's desperate sacrifice.
Simultaneously, the crimson light points representing the Face statues were also disappearing in massive swathes. Two thousand... one thousand... now less than a third of the original network remained. Ren's thousands of Shadow Clones were sweeping across the continent of Ishgar like an invisible, unstoppable plague, dismantling the Council's ultimate weapons with terrifying efficiency.
Seeing the rapidly dwindling lights, Kyouka's expression twisted into a hideous grimace. Her life force was bleeding away, her vision blurring, but she pushed harder.
"Then let's see who is faster, you monster, or me!!" she shrieked, her voice echoing with the despair of a dying demon.
"Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!"
Just as the holographic map showed roughly five to six hundred crimson lights remaining...
Beep! Beep!
[00:00]
[System Override Complete.]
[FACE: ON!]
A deafening, mechanical hum vibrated through the very foundations of the Tartaros floating island, echoing across the entire continent of Ishgar. The remaining Face statues had been successfully activated.
"Hahahaha!! It's over!!" Kyouka laughed loudly, her voice weak but brimming with fanatical triumph. "The 'Faces' have been activated!! Magic will disappear from this world entirely! Lord Zeref will finally be ours! Hahahaha!!"
As her manic laughter echoed, her body suddenly went limp. The forced acceleration had completely drained her life force. With her demonic vitality spent, her Curse could no longer be maintained.
Down below, the dark, suffocating veil over Erza's mind suddenly shattered. The five-sense-depriving Enhancement Curse that had trapped her in a hell of maximized pain instantly dissipated.
Erza gasped, stumbling forward as her vision violently returned. The dim light of the control chamber, the smell of ozone and blood, the sound of the humming lacrima—it all rushed back in an overwhelming sensory wave.
She looked up at the giant holographic map, her expression changing as she read the ominous, glowing red [00:00].
"In the end... we didn't make it in time?" Erza whispered, a cold knot forming in her stomach. If Face had activated, all Ethernano on the continent was being wiped out. They were stripped of their magic.
But at that exact moment...
Swish!
Another crimson light point representing an active Face quietly went out.
Immediately after: Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!!
One after another, in rapid succession, the light points representing the supposedly invincible, magic-erasing 'Faces' were being extinguished. It signified one thing: even after activation, the statues were still being physically destroyed.
"No! How is this possible?!" Kyouka, barely clinging to the last threads of her consciousness, shouted incredulously, her bloodshot eyes wide with sheer disbelief. "The 'Faces' should have been successfully activated! The magical power around them should have been completely neutralized! Even if the human Mages nearby aren't dead, their magic is gone! They shouldn't be able to move, let alone cast spells to break the statues! How can they possibly continue destroying the 'Faces'?!"
Hearing Kyouka's desperate, broken wails, the gears in Erza's brilliant tactical mind began to turn, and she suddenly realized the truth.
First, the continent's magical power was indeed meant to be erased, but that process was an expanding pulse—it took time to blanket all of Ishgar. For instance, right here in the control room, Erza could still faintly feel her own magical power circulating in her veins.
Moreover, the apocalyptic effect of Face was originally calculated based on the simultaneous detonation of all 3,000 statues. Now, with barely a fifth of the 'Faces' remaining to discharge the pulse, the density of the anti-magic wave was severely diluted. It would take a significantly longer time to scrub the magical power from the vast atmosphere of the entire continent.
But most importantly... Erza smiled, a look of profound relief and unshakeable trust washing over her features.
Ren was special.
What Ren utilized wasn't like Mirajane's or Elfman's standard Take Over magic. From what he had revealed to them, his mysterious, System-based powers allowed him to manifest abilities and characters from entirely different dimensions. He possessed power systems completely foreign to Earth Land.
The Face pulse bombs were designed to eradicate Ethernano—the fundamental particle of Magic. But they had absolutely zero effect on Chakra, Spiritual Pressure, Cursed Energy, or any of the other otherworldly forces at Ren's command.
In other words, the absolute weapon of the Magic Council, the ultimate trump card of Tartaros, was entirely useless against him. Magic disappearing from the world meant nothing to a man who didn't rely on it.
Ren could simply ignore the anti-magic pulse entirely, leading his army of Shadow Clones to calmly and methodically continue destroying the remaining 'Faces' until not a single one was left.
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