Aelius knew who he was fighting. Only one mage in Blue Pegasus was worth accounting for, and that was Ichiya. Everyone else in that guild was capable enough against opponents with reasonable ceilings, but against Aelius they would simply lose and go home uncertain about what had gone wrong. Ichiya was their ace; as embarrassing as the man was, he supposedly had a reasonable amount of power.
He sat with his back against the wall of the Fairy Tail area and listened to the guild around him without participating in any of it. Several members had been watching the earlier rounds with genuine enthusiasm, the kind that made people shout at outcomes they had no stake in and argue afterward about whether the result had been fair. Others were debating the scoring system, which Aelius had already worked out on his own and found straightforward enough that the debate seemed unnecessary. At one point the conversation drifted to whether Elfman could have out-benched the entirety of Lamia Scale under the right conditions, and Aelius had listened to that one with more attention than it deserved simply because it was at least quantifiable.
What he had not accounted for was the attention. It was not hostile. This was worse by a substantial amount, and he had noticed it from the moment they had arrived that morning. Small clusters from other guilds were tracking him without quite committing to acknowledgment, hovering at the edges of his peripheral vision long enough to become noticeable. A few had approached directly. He had declined the autographs without explanation each time, and that had apparently compounded the problem rather than resolved it, because the ones who had not yet approached seemed to find the refusal more interesting than an agreement would have been.
His attention drifted back toward the arena floor, and that was where the day started going sideways. He started thinking about Ichiya. Which redirected him to Erza. And Erza's feelings about Ichiya were something he had been subjected to more than once, usually expressed as her going subtly rigid whenever the man's name surfaced and then immediately finding something else to discuss.
Thinking about Erza meant thinking about Tenrou. And thinking about Tenrou meant thinking about all of them still suspended, frozen inside Fairy Sphere without any awareness that time was passing outside.
His saving grace was the announcer calling for the contestants of the fourth match to step into the arena.
Aelius stood and walked toward the edge of the wall, and just like the prior day's fight, he jumped down into the arena.
He had to wait maybe twenty seconds before Ichiya emerged from the waiting area that Aelius had neglected to use. He was already performing for the crowd, both arms spread wide, chin lifted, turning a slow half circle as if acknowledging a standing ovation that was only about forty percent as enthusiastic as he was treating it. The belt of vials at his hip caught the light each time he turned. Aelius watched him and waited, and eventually Ichiya completed his rotation, and his eyes found Aelius across the dirt, and he began to cross the field toward Aelius without the performance, and by the time he arrived his expression had changed into something considerably more sober. He was shorter than Aelius by such a significant margin it was almost comical, which seemed to briefly register as he got close enough for the comparison to become unavoidable. "Men," he said. He was quiet enough that the crowd wouldn't catch it. "I did not think we would meet again like this. I heard about Tenrou. When the news reached Blue Pegasus." He did not immediately add anything to that, and the pause stretched long enough that it started to carry weight. "I went to the site myself. Several times since then. I could not find anything, and I..." He shook his head slightly. "Erza. The others. I was greatly saddened, men. Greatly."
Aelius had heard some version of this from nearly every mage he had encountered in the last week who had known the Tenrou team in any capacity. Guild masters, council members, acquaintances, strangers who had worked a joint mission once three years ago. Every single one of them had needed to say it to him specifically, as though it would be useful if they did. He understood the impulse. He still felt the familiar pull of mild exhaustion every time it happened, and he kept that entirely off his face.
"They're alive," Aelius said. "They'll be back."
Ichiya looked at him carefully. "Yes," he said after a moment. "I heard that too." Something in his posture loosened, fractionally. "I am glad of it. Men." He held eye contact for another moment and then seemed to decide the conversation had reached its natural end, because he reached down and selected one of the vials from his belt with the ease of long practice. He held it loosely between two fingers and looked at Aelius with something more focused settling behind his eyes. "Shall we give these people a proper show?"
The announcer's voice rolled over the arena, and Ichiya moved in the same moment, faster than his frame had any business being. Whatever he had inhaled had gone into his nose in a single sharp breath and done something immediate to his legs, because the distance between them vanished in a burst and the follow-up punch came in low and hard toward Aelius's ribs with genuine structural weight behind it; the muscles in Ichiya's arms visibly thickened from whatever the second vial had contributed.
Aelius did not move; Ichiya's fist drove into his side with enough force that the sound of it carried, and the crowd reacted to that sound, and Aelius stood in exactly the place he had been standing before it happened. He looked down at Ichiya. Ichiya looked up at him. Whatever the man had expected, it was not that, and his next combination came in with a half second of hesitation behind it that had not been there in the first one.
He was fast, and he was strong, and he understood angles. Aelius would give him all three of those. The speed let him work the outside of Aelius's reach and redirect when a direct line closed on him, the strength meant the strikes actually registered as impacts rather than noise, and the angles were technically sound, consistently targeting the ribs and the base of the throat and the inside of the knee in a rotation that would have broken down most opponents within the first minute. Aelius tracked all of it and stood in the center of it and let it run. A strike across the jaw that snapped his head slightly to the right. Another into the solar plexus. A heel kick at the back of his knee that found the joint and buckled it an inch before his leg locked and held.
Ichiya repositioned after the knee, reading that it had done something, and came back in with the same angle harder and found the same result. Aelius's knee bent an inch and held. He looked at Ichiya and waited.
Ichiya reached for his belt; he got two vials open in a fast sequence and breathed from each in a controlled pull, one through each nostril, and the electricity built across his skin in a visible crawl that climbed his arms and raised the hair along his forearms and put the smell of an incoming storm into the air between them. Aelius recognized what was loading and decided to stand in it. Stopping it meant ending the fight, and he had not made his point yet, and the point required Ichiya to fire everything he had.
The bolt came out of both hands at once, and it was not small. It hit Aelius in the chest, and the force behind it was enough to move him, boots gouging furrows through the sand as he slid back three full steps; his wings instinctively twitched, attempting to snap open for balance before he forced the movement to stop; it wasn't time for them to be revealed yet. Electricity crawled across his body in a brief visible sheet before his magic processed it and the current died. He came to a stop upright. The thin thread of smoke rising from his collar faded after a moment.
The arena was extremely loud.
Ichiya stood with both hands still extended and his breathing audible, eyes fixed on Aelius's chest and then on his face and finding nothing useful in either. The vials on his belt were mostly open or empty. His speed was still running, his strength still running, and none of it had produced a visible result beyond three footprints in the sand. Ichiya lowered his hands. He looked at Aelius with the focused steadiness of someone who has run the full list and is now doing the arithmetic at the bottom of it. Then he pulled the stopper from one of the remaining vials and let it disperse into the air rather than inhaling it, and Aelius felt the compound arrive as a faint sting at the back of his throat a second later, something designed to find pain receptors and open them all at once. It found his threshold and ran into it and stalled there. Ichiya watched his face for the result. There was no result.
"Pain Parfum," Ichiya said. "It has never failed before."
"My threshold is unusual," Aelius said.
Ichiya looked at him for a long moment. Then he exhaled through his nose, uncapped the last viable vial on his belt, and breathed it in deliberately, and whatever it did, it did fast, because his eyes sharpened and he came in again at a speed that was meaningfully faster than the first burst, closing the remaining distance between them and driving an elbow at Aelius's throat with the full weight of both enhanced strength and whatever this new compound had added to it.
Aelius caught it with one hand. His fingers closed around Ichiya's forearm above the elbow and stopped the motion entirely, the momentum absorbed without him shifting his footing at all. He held it there for a moment. Then he muttered "Plague God's Carrion Gale" and exhaled, and the air in front of him changed, a haze spreading outward in a greenish-black wash that darkened the sand beneath it and carried the wet-rot weight of his magic pushing into the space between them. At this range, Ichiya had no exit. The next breath he took brought it in before he could redirect toward his belt, and Aelius watched his body register it, the disruption moving through Ichiya's limbs from the inside, his grip on the elbow Aelius was still holding going unsteady.
Ichiya reached for his belt anyway. His hand found a vial by feel, opened it, and got it to his nose in a motion that was slower than it should have been but still happened, and the compound pushed back against the disruption enough that his legs steadied and his breathing corrected partially. He looked up at Aelius from eight inches away with his forearm still caught and his last vial empty and his belt stripped down to casings.
"Pain-Relieving Parfum," he said, through his teeth. "It handles poisons. Men, your magic does not smell like a poison."
"It is, and it isn't," Aelius said.
He released the forearm, put his hand flat against Ichiya's sternum, and shoved forward with his magic. Ichiya left his feet and crossed four meters of sand and landed hard on his back and skidded another meter through it before he stopped, arms out, the remaining empty casings scattering loose from his belt across the ground around him.
Aelius walked over and stood above him and waited.
Ichiya lay on his back in the sand, checking himself over with the methodical attention of someone cataloguing damage rather than reacting to it. After a few seconds, he brought one hand up, rubbed the back of his head, and looked at the sky for a moment before he looked back up at Aelius. "Men," he said. "You are deeply unpleasant to fight." He pushed himself up onto one elbow. "If I may ask. Why were you holding back? It wounds my pride greatly, men. But it's obvious I'm no match for you." He held eye contact steadily. "So why drag it out?"
Aelius was quiet for a moment. It was a fair question, and Ichiya had earned a fair answer. He was adequate enough of an acquaintance that Aelius felt no particular inclination toward cruelty, and the man had conducted himself well enough throughout the fight that dismissing him outright would have been both inaccurate and rude. He also found himself, briefly, lamenting the wreck Caius had made of the previous day. The plan had been straightforward. Establish a ceiling early, let the audience spend the following days watching other matches and building their own picture of what the competition looked like, and then make that ceiling relevant at the right moment. Caius had disrupted that before it had properly started by running out the clock in the middle of something that had never resolved, and the frustrating part was that Aelius had let him, had spent the fight observing rather than finishing it, because he had wanted the data more than the conclusion. He still believed that had been the correct call.
"I'll keep it short," Aelius said. "I want the people watching these Games to see that when I choose to, no one can stop me." He glanced briefly toward the stands, toward the rows of competitors from other guilds sitting in their designated sections, watching. "Yesterday's fight did not go the way I intended. Today needed to correct that, and it needed to do it in a way that left room for what comes later." He looked back down at Ichiya. "You were useful for that. I mean that as a genuine compliment."
Ichiya considered this for a moment, still propped on one elbow in the sand. "You are making a point for an audience that extends past the judges," he said.
"Every fight at the Grand Magic Games does," Aelius said. "Most people just aren't thinking about which audience."
Ichiya was quiet for a few seconds, and then he let out a short breath through his nose and sat up fully, brushing sand from his sleeve with the resigned composure of someone who has accepted the shape of the situation and moved on from it. "I see," he said. He looked at Aelius with something that had settled past irritation into something more straightforward. "I will not pretend it does not sting, men. You used my guild's strongest mage as a measuring stick." He straightened his jacket, found that one of the lapels was torn, and left it. "But I understand the reasoning. And I will not insult either of us by pretending the outcome would have been different under other circumstances." He got to his feet, slowly, and dusted the remaining sand from his knees. He was steady on his feet, which said something about the durability the man had built over a career of getting hit harder than someone his size should reasonably absorb. He looked up at Aelius, and there was no hostility in it, just assessment. "You are protecting your guild," he said. Ichiya nodded and said, "I understand that"
He reached down and retrieved two of the vials that had scattered across the sand during the fight, checked them briefly, before he straightened fully, squared his shoulders, and looked at Aelius. "Then I hope your point lands as intended, men." He turned toward the opposite side of the arena and took a step, then stopped without turning back. "And give my regards to Erza," he said. "When she returns." He started walking again before Aelius could respond, back straight, pace unhurried, and the crowd in his section of the stands made noise for him as he reached the edge of the sand.
Aelius watched him go for a moment, then turned and walked toward the tunnel.
The third day's event was called Ruin Crawl. The arena floor had been reconfigured overnight into a rough approximation of a collapsed structure, broken stone and tilted walls and passages that led nowhere useful, the whole thing spanning roughly two hundred meters across. The objective was simple enough. Twelve scattered tokens had been hidden throughout the ruins before the event began, and each contestant had to find and retrieve as many as possible within thirty minutes. Most tokens were worth one point. Two of them were worth five. The contestant with the highest total at the end of the event won the round outright.
On paper it rewarded speed and spatial awareness. In practice it rewarded the ability to take tokens from other people, which meant it rewarded combat above everything else, and the field of eight contestants had worked that out within the first two minutes. Aelius had worked it out before the event started, which was why he had immediately gone for the deepest and least accessible section of the ruins rather than the open ground near the center where everyone else was converging.
The problem was that the deep section had no tokens in it. He had covered the entire eastern quarter inside seven minutes and found nothing, and by the time he crossed back toward the center, the visible tokens were gone, and the contestants who had retrieved them were either hiding or actively fighting each other over redistribution. He spent the remaining twenty minutes being a problem for everyone who crossed his path and retrieving two tokens from people who had more than they could reasonably defend, which put him at two points, which put him in seventh place out of eight.
He walked back to the bench and sat down and said nothing about it to anyone.
Fortunately, his battle of the day was against Sabertooth, and they decided to send out Minerva, not who he was expecting, but a welcome surprise. He had watched her fight once already during the Games. She was the kind of mage who understood that brutality and efficiency were different tools and chose between them deliberately, and her spatial magic gave her a level of battlefield control that made raw power a secondary consideration. She had taken apart her previous opponent methodically, using the terrain and the distance and the displacement to dictate every exchange before it happened, and she had done it with the particular composure of someone who was accustomed to winning and found the act of it unremarkable.
She was waiting in the center of the arena when Aelius stepped out of the tunnel, standing with her hands clasped behind her back and her posture entirely unbothered by the crowd or the noise or the weight of what the scoreboard meant for the overall standings. She looked at him as he crossed the sand toward her, and her expression did not change at all.
"Fairy Tail," she said, when he was close enough that the words were for him rather than the crowd.
"Sabertooth," Aelius said.
She looked him over once, unhurried, taking in the wings and the height and whatever her assessment of him added up to. "I have heard a great deal about you," she said. "You have been an interesting presence this week."
Aelius said nothing.
"I will not insult you with pleasantries," she said, and the composure in her voice was genuine rather than performed. "I intend to win this match. I imagine you intend the same."
"I intend to make a point," Aelius said. "Winning is part of it."
"I wonder if you can back that up, saint," she said, and a purple aura bled out of her like something pressurized finally finding a crack. It was heavy and oppressive, and it spread across the arena floor in a visible wash that made the sand shift and pushed against the air the way only genuinely large reserves could, and Aelius stood in it and took stock of it honestly. She was strong. Stronger than he had expected, and he had expected nothing. She was young, sixteen at most by his estimate, and for someone that age the output was remarkable. A decent portion of Crocus could probably feel the edges of it from where they were standing.
His silence stretched for a few seconds, and she took it as shock, or maybe even fear.
"Nothing to say?" Minerva's chin lifted slightly. "I expected more from a Wizard Saint."
"Most mages your age are still running D rank requests." Aelius finally said.
Her eyes cooled. "Your assessment is noted," she said. "And irrelevant."
"It wasn't an insult," Aelius said. "It was an observation. There is a difference." He held her gaze for a moment. "You also just made my plans considerably easier."
Her brow pulled together by a fraction. "Excuse me?"
Aelius exhaled and let go. His magic came out all at once rather than in measured increments, no gradual release, no careful management of output, simply the full weight of it surfacing at once, and the air around him changed color before it changed anything else, a deep greenish-black spreading outward from him in a visible tide that moved across the sand and climbed the walls and pushed into the stands at the lowest levels, thoroughly unbothered by the purple aura it was moving through. Minerva's magic did not vanish. It simply became impossible to locate underneath his; if her magic was a candle, then Aelius was the furnace that it was just used to light.
Several people in the nearest stands had gone pale. A few leaned forward with their hands braced against the barrier rails, not in excitement but in the instinctive way of people whose bodies had decided to respond to something before their minds had finished processing it. Someone three rows up sat back down heavily and put their head between their knees. The mages in the contestant sections were doing better than the civilians, but not by much. A member of Lamia Scale had both hands flat on the table in front of her and was breathing through her nose with the focused attention of someone working very hard to stay upright. Across the arena floor, one of the judges had taken a step back from the edge of the platform without appearing to notice he had done it.
Aelius pulled it back, and the effect on the crowd was immediate. People straightened. Someone exhaled audibly enough to be heard at ground leveL, and color came back into a few faces in the front row.
The announcer's voice returned after a pause that lasted several seconds longer than any transition in the Games so far. "Well… uhh ladies and gentlemen, for those of you in the stands who are feeling somewhat unwell, please be assured that is entirely normal….. We believe."
Minerva looked, or at least attempted to look, dignified. Her posture had not changed, and her expression had not broken,n and she was clearly working at both of those things, which Aelius found more impressive than if she had simply been unbothered. Being unbothered required nothing. Maintaining composure through an active effort while standing in the residual weight of what had just filled the arena required actual character.
He would give her that one because, if he was being honest with himself, surprised by his own output. He did not go around releasing his full reserves as a habit;t, it served no purpose and attracted the kind of attention he generally preferred to avoid, which meant he had no recent baseline to compare against. Chaos had mentioned it during what loosely qualified as their training, that his magic capacity had increased, which at the time Aelius had filed under things that were probably true and not immediately verifiable. He had a clearer picture of it now. Standing in the residual of what he had just released, he could feel the difference from even two years ago, and the difference was not small.
The most likely explanation was the simplest one. His body was a construct, and his core had been under constant active stress since the day it was built, sustaining his physical form continuously rather than being called on and released the way a normal mage's magic functioned. Years of that kind of uninterrupted load did not leave a core unchanged. It expanded to meet the demand the same way a muscle expanded to meet repeated strain, slowly and without announcing itself, and at some point the expansion had apparently crossed a threshold he had not been tracking because he had been occupied with other things. The toad dragon had contributed something to that as well. He was not certain how much, but fighting something at that scale and sustaining the kind of damage that fight had involved and regenerating through all of it had not been a passive experience for his core either.
"Are you finished," Minerva said, "or was there more of a demonstration planned?"
"That was incidental," Aelius said. "You can blame yourself for it."
Her jaw tightened by a fraction. "Then shall we continue."