Lucy didn't quite follow. "A modified form of Take Over Magic?"
"Specifically, borrowing only a portion of the target's power rather than absorbing them outright. Different from a standard partial Take Over." Mirajane explained. "For example, if I were dealing with a demon, I could pull a particular ability from it without fully taking it over. The demon would simply have that ability reduced for a time. Its life wouldn't be affected."
She had used this method once during the questioning of a Tartaros prisoner. Unfortunately the prisoner's mouth had stayed firmly shut.
Lucy turned it over with a worried expression. "But if I used something like that, wouldn't the Spirit's power just go down?"
"Not necessarily," Rhodes said. "There's a good chance the Spirit itself wouldn't be affected at all."
"Why?"
He smiled. "Because when you summon a Spirit, you're nowhere close to drawing out their full power. Borrowing a small amount probably wouldn't make a noticeable difference."
Lucy stared at him.
Is Mr. Rhodes aware that he just told me I'm weak in a very roundabout way?
"Right. Think about it this way. When a Celestial Spirit Mage summons a Spirit, what they're doing is opening a Gate and allowing the Spirit to pass through it into the magic world. How much power the Spirit can bring through, and how long they can stay, is generally determined by how firmly that Gate is held open.
"But what if at the moment of opening the Gate, instead of bringing the Spirit through, you reached into the Spirit's own form and borrowed a portion of their strength, keeping it on your own body for a time?" Rhodes paused. "Theoretically, even after the Gate is closed again, that borrowed power wouldn't vanish immediately."
He kept going, the idea taking clearer shape as he spoke. "If that reasoning holds, then after closing that particular Gate, you could still summon the Spirit normally. And because the power you borrowed came from the portion they were never able to bring through the Gate in the first place, the Spirit's combat ability when summoned wouldn't be affected at all."
Lucy's eyes lit up. That actually made sense.
Rhodes and Mirajane had only provided the thread of an idea. Whether it could actually be developed into working magic was something Lucy would need to work out with her Spirits directly. Given how strong her relationships with them were, getting their agreement wouldn't be the hard part. The challenge would be on the technical side.
While the principle was similar to Take Over Magic, it would need some theoretical grounding from the Celestial Spirit world itself. Fortunately, Lucy had access to at least one Celestial Spirit with considerable knowledge on that front. With some effort, she could likely develop a derived magic grown from her own Celestial Spirit magic.
Rhodes glanced at the time, decided it was close enough, and escorted Mirajane home on their evening walk.
They hadn't been back long before a message came through from the Council. Arlock's interrogation had produced results.
Rhodes headed straight over.
"It must have been difficult getting them to talk."
Rhodes flipped through the interrogation records as he asked.
"Surprisingly manageable, actually," Lahar said. "Arlock and his senior cadres cooperated with unusual willingness. It was the lower-ranking members who showed the most internal conflict."
Rhodes looked at him. "Special methods involved?"
Lahar shook his head. "No. I think it was simply that their hopes had been shattered. Or in some cases, a genuine desire to cause harm."
"Cause harm?"
"Yes. During questioning, Arlock spoke openly about nearly everything. He was most thorough on anything relating to Zeref. He did, however, shift tone partway through, dropping into something resembling a sermon. An impassioned register, laying out Zeref's greatness without specifics."
"We can only interpret that behavior as deliberate harm. Perhaps from his perspective, it was enough for anyone to remember Zeref's story, or if there was even the smallest chance of drawing one of us toward Zeref, that was worth attempting."
Zeref fanatics outdid each other in their particular brand of madness. Understanding their reasoning wasn't worth the effort.
Rhodes set the speculation aside and went through the interrogation record carefully.
This cult had been considerably more sophisticated than the average Zeref worshipper. They had known Zeref was still alive, and they had known he moved unpredictably. Because death always seemed to follow wherever Zeref appeared, they had concluded that death could draw him. What they had failed to consider was that those deaths had been caused by Zeref in the first place.
Though, Rhodes reconsidered, Zeref had spent a long period in earlier times researching methods to raise the dead. It was possible there had genuinely been a phase where death had followed in his wake for different reasons. Stories from that period might have survived and led certain people to the wrong conclusion.
He reached the section detailing the true Purification Plan and exhaled at the sheer audacity of it. The intent had been to count the cult's own members and the arrested Council personnel as offerings, all of it calculated in from the start.
Arlock was considerably more of a strategist than the self-proclaimed tacticians of Tartaros had ever been.
What held Rhodes's attention most, however, was the intelligence on the Yakuma Eighteen Battle Gods Magic.
According to Arlock's testimony, he was a surviving descendant of the long-vanished Yakuma clan. The name Yakuma carried the meaning of divine messenger or emissary of the gods. The clan had called themselves the servants of the divine.
Their entire history had been built around serving and spreading the names of the Eighteen Battle Gods. Yakuma clan members could study the powerful magic the gods had left behind, and some could go further, paying a sufficient price to call a battle god down temporarily to fight on their behalf.
By an ancient covenant, any such summoning could only be invoked for a cause that genuinely served to spread the gods' renown.
The Yakuma had always been a powerful people, and a warlike one. In the name of propagating the gods' fame, they had ignited conflicts across generations and won almost all of them. At the height of their power, the clan had gathered eighteen god-priests simultaneously and called down all eighteen Battle Gods at once to face the Nirvit people.
Arlock didn't know the details of that battle or what had caused it. He only knew that the Yakuma survived while the Nirvit people and their creation, Nirvana, had vanished from history entirely afterward. His conclusion was that the Eighteen Battle Gods had defeated the Nirvit.
The Yakuma clan's principle was never to fully destroy a defeated enemy, since the gods' names needed living people to carry them forward.
What Arlock couldn't explain was why the Nirvit had disappeared regardless.
That had been over four hundred years ago. The clan had suffered three catastrophes across its history, and much of the documentation connecting those events had been lost long before Arlock's time. Verification was no longer possible.
He could summon a battle god, but casually invoking a ritual of that magnitude just to ask about old history wasn't something he was willing to do. He still had a role to play, and his life had greater value yet.
About those three catastrophes, however, Arlock did know something.
The first had come before the Yakuma's encounter with the Nirvit, during the final period of the Dragon Age. In the name of spreading the gods' renown, the clan had declared war on the dragon race.
The result was a catastrophic defeat.
They survived only because the Dragon King Festival broke out shortly afterward, wiping out nearly all of the dragons. The clan had lost several of its god-priests, but was not destroyed.
The second catastrophe came many years after the conflict with the Nirvit, roughly three hundred years ago. The clan was holding a ceremony for new god-priests, their first time summoning battle gods. But something went wrong.