"Impossible..." Franmalth's voice dropped. His feet moved on their own, carrying him two involuntary steps backward. "How could a human..."
His single eye stayed fixed on Mirajane, wide and disbelieving. This woman had magic that felt disturbingly close to a Curse. Not similar in the vague, approximate way that some powerful magic occasionally brushed against Curse territory. No, this was intimate. Familiar. And she had used it to absorb Plutogrim.?
"Someone's coming," Rhodes said, his tone light and unbothered, already reading the magical signatures converging on their position from outside. He raised his right hand and flicked his index and middle fingers upward in one clean, casual motion. "Amaterasu: Formula One Hundred."
The room changed.
Layer upon layer of interlocking purple magic circles bloomed into existence around Franmalth, spreading outward and stacking inward simultaneously, each one slotting into the next with mechanical precision.
They sealed off every angle.
The space above his head, the floor beneath his feet, the space between his arms and his ribs. Every gap accounted for, every escape route quietly closed before he had even registered the first circle appearing.
Franmalth's eye swept the room in a sharp, instinctive search for the origin point. "Magic circles? When did he..."
The circles activated before he could finish the thought.
The explosion was deafening. Blinding purple light swallowed the entire control room whole, and the force of it rattled the remaining intact walls hard enough to shed dust from the ceiling.
"AAAAHHHH"
The scream tore out of him with genuine pain behind it.
And then, strangely, it shifted.
"Uh-hahaha"
The smoke had not even begun to settle before it was pulled apart, drawn inward in thin curling streams toward Franmalth's open palms. The purple magic circles, layer after layer of them, began to distort.
The clean geometric lines bent and fractured, twisting in on themselves as an invisible force dragged at their structure. One by one they collapsed, folding into ribbons of dissipating light.
Franmalth's frame swelled. His already broad silhouette pushed outward as the absorbed energy settled into his body, and purple flames began licking across his skin.
"U-hehehe." The laughter was loose and wild now, the kind that had nothing to do with humor. He rolled his neck, cracked his knuckles, and spread his arms wide.
"My Curse absorbs souls. Not just the souls of living beings either. Magic itself has a soul, and I can take that too." He fixed his eye on Rhodes with something approaching genuine glee. "Which means your magic is completely useless against me."
Rhodes tilted his head slightly, genuinely processing that. "Hm. I did not know my magic had a soul."
"Of course it does!" Franmalth straightened up, puffing out his chest with visible pride. "I am one of the Etherious, created personally from the Book of Zere.."
He never finished the sentence.
Mirajane had already crossed the distance between them.
Her right palm hit his face before he even registered she had moved. No wind up, just her hand on his face and her full weight behind it driving him straight into the floor headfirst.
The impact punched straight through the floorboards. Rubble and splinters dropped through the gap into the level below.
The soldiers down there looked up. One of them recognized the head poking through the ceiling and started to open his mouth.
Then the pressure from upstairs hit them and every word died in their throats. Knees bent, weapons drooped, two men went down entirely without meaning to.
Nobody said anything.
Franmalth thrashed under her. He was big and he threw real force into it, but Mirajane had her knee across his back and her hand still planted on his skull and she did not move an inch. Rhodes watched quietly from the side and started stacking buffs onto her without drawing attention to it, privately deciding this absolutely counted as strenuous exercise.
Franmalth stopped thrashing. His hands found her wrists instead.
"You're finished." His voice had steadied again. "I'll take your soul right now. Absorb."
White light crawled out from his palms up toward her arms.
It stopped dead.
He pushed harder. Nothing. "Absorb."
Again. Still nothing. "Absorb! Absorb! Absorb!"
Each one louder and more frantic than the last. "Why won't it work?!"
Mirajane looked down at him and smiled.
"Thank you for showing me how that works." She tilted her head. "Take over."
The white light snapped back toward her like something had yanked it on a rope. Franmalth felt it leave his hands instead of enter them and his eye went wide.
"What? Don't you dare..."
He let go of her wrists and his arms shot out, joints popping loose as they stretched far beyond any natural length, coiling toward her throat like thick ropes.
Rhodes caught them both before they got there. One hand on each forearm. His hands moved quickly and he tied Franmalth's stretched out arms into a knot before the demon had fully processed being grabbed.
Franmalth stared at his own arms for a moment.
"Bastard! You touched my hands! Give me your soul! Absorb!"
He threw everything he had left into it.
His power drained faster.
The purple flames across his skin sputtered out. His frame shrank back down. His arms returned to normal length without his permission. The energy he had taken from Rhodes's Amaterasu, all of it, bled away faster than he could account for and his vision started going dark at the edges.
"Damn it..." His voice had gone slack. "Tartaros... Tartaros is immortal..."
The words dissolved into silence before they were even finished. Franmalth's eye closed, and the rest of him followed, slumping completely still.
Kyoka and Seilah rushed over, arriving just in time to see Franmalth disappear.
"Franmalth!" Kyoka's eyes went wide. The pieces clicked into place. Ezel. Torafuzar. Now Franmalth. She was beginning to understand exactly how they had all died.
"Macro." Seilah raised her right finger and pointed it directly at Rhodes. "Kill the woman beside you."
Rhodes's eyes snapped red.
Seilah paused.
Something was off. When Macro took hold of a target, yes, the eyes changed exactly like that. But just now it had not felt like the Curse actually activated. It felt like something had looked at it, decided against it, and closed the door.
She did not get the chance to think about it further.
The air left her lungs all at once and her feet left the ground and suddenly she was looking down at Rhodes's face from above, his hand locked around her throat, arm raised, expression completely flat.
She had not even seen him move.
Just how fast was this human?
Seilah grabbed at his hand with both of hers, pulling, trying to find even a millimeter of give. It was like grabbing a steel clamp.
"Seilah!" Kyoka's hand came up.
A foot connected with her midsection before it got any further.
The kick folded her in half and sent her through the wall like a fired cannonball, then through the next wall, and the one after that, until the sounds of impact eventually stopped somewhere deep in the rubble.
Rhodes felt it the moment his foot landed. A sharp, grinding pain that shot straight up through the bones of his foot and hit his brain like a hammer. His face twitched. The muscles in his jaw tightened involuntarily.
He looked down at his foot. Not a scratch on it.
A Curse that mirrors pain back onto the attacker. That was Kyoka's ability. Clean to understand once you felt it firsthand. In an even fight it would be a nightmare, grinding down an opponent's focus and composure until something broke. Against someone who could push through it, it was just information.
Rhodes filed it away and turned his attention back to Seilah.
Her grip on his hand was weakening. Her voice came out thin and fading. "Macro... Limit... Release..."
Rhodes did not wait to find out what that meant.
His free hand shifted, fingers spreading and darkening as a Dragon Claw formed over his knuckles. The Red buff layered over it, and then the Crown of Shattered Queen over that, the combined aura wrapping the fist in coiling heat and pressure.
He felt her power rising as she tried to speak the words. Her aura was climbing steadily, the shape of a second form beginning to press outward from underneath.
He had no interest in seeing it.
The punch landed square on her face before she finished the sentence.
The impact produced a burst of deep red light that swallowed her head completely and kept going, a concentrated beam of force and heat that punched clean through the wall behind her, then the next, then the next, boring through the entire castle and finally erupting out into the open sky beyond.
Seilah's head dropped. The rising aura collapsed instantly.
Mirajane was already moving. She stepped in quickly, caught Seilah before she could fall, and pressed her hands against her, activating Take Over before the soul could slip away toward rebirth.
Rhodes watched, then glanced over at Mirajane. "How are you feeling? That was not too much today?"
Mirajane looked at him with mild exasperation. "I made exactly one move the entire time."
She had been ready to take on one of the two herself. Her husband had not left enough time for that.
She thought back to the moment Seilah had cast Macro. The red eyes, the fraction of a second where it looked like it had worked, and then Rhodes standing exactly where he was, unbothered. She smiled.
"Full marks."
Rhodes blinked. "For what?"
"As a husband and as a father. Today. Full marks."
Rhodes smiled.
Behind them, the soldiers who had been ordered to provide backup had stopped in a neat row at the doorway. Nobody had stepped through it. One of them was staring at the hole Rhodes's fist had punched through four consecutive walls and out the other side of the castle.
One unlucky soldier lost his grip. His weapon hit the floor with a loud clang and he flinched at the sound, drawing exactly the attention he did not want.
These two humans had just dismantled two of the Nine Demon Gates in the time it took to have a short conversation. And now they were standing there smiling at each other like they had just finished a pleasant afternoon stroll.
Wait.
The soldiers looked at the demons scattered across the rubble, then back at the smiling couple.
Who exactly were the demons here?