Chapter 25 – The Battle of Mildian
AN: Ok, as always before we begin, Reviewer Replies! :D I guess last week's chapter must not have left too many questions in its wake because I only got two reviews about it, although I DID get the immense joy of this story reaching 100 reviews/comments, which is a milestone for me, never had a story do that before. It's put me in a fantastic mood.
Raidentensho: Yes the little girl in his story DOES sound a bit like Sakura doesn't she? (mysterious eyebrow waggle) Will he use his Devouring Magic to omnomnom the Etherion? Read on and find out!
Prometo: (Christmas Special) Welcome back! (hugs you) And thank you for my 100th comment on this story! Yes the gods DO play a rather significant role in Earthland, but no, the legend of Gilgamesh was actually one Jerry knew before being yanked to Earthland. Since you posted 4 reviews, I shall give 4 replies!
Prometo: (Ch19&20) Yes I thought the comics references with Lucy and Levy's new outfits were pretty fun as well, and yes Lucy definitely fills out that new battle suit rather enticingly. If you recall, Gajeel's counterpart in Jerry's home dimension was actually Jerry's best friend, so it's only natural that they'd hit it right off. I'm glad the fight scene came out well. Yes Gajevy quite surprised me becoming something bordering on an OTP for Fairy Tail after I stumbled onto the outstanding work of that fine artist by name of RuskyBoz.
Prometo: (Ch21&22) I'm glad you enjoyed Jerry's ability to open up to Erza and the reveal of Jerry's backstory, I feel like it wouldn't be a proper Fairy Tail arc if somebody's backstory didn't rear its head for explanation. Yeah, the Mira surprise actually caught me a little off guard too, but I'm glad it hit me when it did because it turned out perfect. DOES Jerry look like that? Or is it an ingenious red herring since there's another monstrously powerful wizard with an actual interestingly shaped scar over one eye who Jerry has been confirmed to consider a dick who an exact look a like of with better manners would be more than enough to stun Erza and get Mira's immediate attention, as well as be enough to frighten Erza if said look a like were to be just as strong and an evil genius?Does he actually look like none of the above and I'm just throwing all these fun little maybe hints out to screw with my fans? Am I a complete freaking TROLL who will definitely not tell one way or the other until time for the big reveal because I enjoy keeping everyone guessing? You betcha! XD
Prometo: (Ch23&24) Glad you enjoyed! Yeah I was particularly pleased when Jack occurred to me, and I sincerely hope that when she shows up in the future she will be as much of a fan favorite as she is mine. Of course they're funny, they're the next generation of FAIRY TAIL, there'd be something terribly wrong if they WEREN'T little bundles of mischief. No, they're not in Alvarez, they actually went the opposite direction, east to the land of Minstrel which was never really even touched upon in canon which gives me a great big sandbox to play in. A military force FROM Alvarez is there for reasons unknown, but they're definitely not on their home turf. Can Sting eat Etherion? In a small dose when it's in zappy mode since that's a blinding white light, but the full throttle satellite cannon? Nah, he'd go into lethal overload in about two seconds and get incinerated unless he discharged, which on its own would strain his magic circuits to their absolute limit and probably beyond. As for an Etherion crystal, it would have to be white or it wouldn't work at all. Very glad you're still enjoying!
And now...
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Chapter 25 – The Battle of Mildian
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I materialized about fifty feet above Mildian's outer wall, and in a glance Archive had counted the exact number arrayed against me. I landed with my vicious grin growing, "Now five hundred to one ain't no fair fight…" I drew my cards and grew them into a volley of table sized blades, "But when that one's me, that makes it just about right! Absolute Void!"
The seething darkness enveloped my massive card blades, making them that much harder to spot and rendering them capable of turning any magic, no, anything period used against me into fuel to keep me going indefinitely. Master Precht's reveal of the true nature of my magic had granted me an incredible shield, it was time to use it. I was embarrassed that I'd forgotten I could use it the day before during the ambush, it would've made rebuffing the ambush simple, but perhaps it was better this way. Now, I don't have clients right here to protect. I can go all out!
I felt the surge of energy and calculated the amount I could afford to spend on my first shot without leaving myself dangerously weakened. I grinned and a blazing orb of Bullet Magic the size of a small car manifested at my fingertip as I aimed my finger gun, "BOOM." It was the biggest version of the spell I'd ever unleashed, easily six feet in diameter as it shot forth in a blinding ray of destruction too fast to be traced by anything other than its after image. The ensuing explosion ripped through the front rank of the approaching army and lit the night sky as brightly as the flare a moment before had.
In less than a second I was back to full power as a result of having Absolute Void active, sucking power from the air and faint moonlight. Another shot, another explosion the size of a city block. Again! Again! AGAIN! Explosion after explosion ripped across the sand until the sand itself rose to block my attacks. I grinned as the sand roared towards me like a semi-solid tsunami and moved one of my cards between me and the tsunami, growing it to be so vast that I couldn't even see the enormous wall of sand anymore. I grinned as I felt the sand fall inert upon crashing into my all-consuming shield and opened a portal to high in the sky above it.
I spread my fingers and a volley of softball sized bolts of Bullet Magic flashed into existence before roaring through the portal to detonate in the midst of the army I could see scrambling for cover on the other side. I raised an eyebrow as the mechanical-magic user intercepted my Light Bolts and then glanced to either side as I heard the sand come roaring around my shield towards me. Two of my tower shield sized cards shot out towards the rushing sand and the instant they came into contact with the power animating the sand, I knew I had to discharge or be overwhelmed.
I didn't go for a single shot that time, this time it was something similar to Natsu's Fire Dragon Roar, only I think Natsu's was typically smaller. The roaring river of light I unleashed through my portal would've obliterated the city behind me in a single sweeping second. It was like focusing the sun into a beam of pure undiluted 'Go-To-Hell'. It was my magic and even I couldn't look in the direction of it without squinting so much that my eyes were nearly shut. I didn't know where the sand wizard had gone, but I knew I'd missed him because his power didn't stop roaring into my system through the open flood gates that my card provided until I'd been firing steadily for almost a solid three minutes. By my calculations, the amount of power expended in that three minutes was over half my full capacity, and not a single scrap of it was mine.
I launched myself skyward and sent my great wall of a card bulldozing forward, instantly shivering as I felt the overwhelming amount of power contained in the sand I was absorbing, Is that still active magic?! Am I absorbing the natural energy of the sand? This CAN'T be just the residual traces of his magic! I raised my hands and opened a dozen portals, easily conjuring a dozen great torrents of light comparable to the one I'd unleashed a moment earlier.
Despite unleashing enough destructive force to level a city a dozen times over like an almighty broadside from on high, the sand just kept roaring with power. I grimaced as I realized that for all that the army those two had brought with them had to be nothing but ashes on the wind at this point, at least one of the two big guns must've not even been singed yet. This is gonna be a long night…
Then the sky lit up overhead.
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==ELSEWHERE==
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"Hey Lector," A little boy with pale blonde hair mused as he looked south from his perch on the snow covered mountainside, "Do you think I could eat that?"
"What?" The small brown cat cuddled against his chest in the bundle of blankets asked blearily.
The boy just pointed and the cat turned, his eyes immediately going wide as he saw an immense white light illuminate the southern sky so brightly that it blocked out the moon.
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"WHAT DO YOU MEAN SOMEONE'S FIRING AN ETHERION CANNON?!" Siegrain and Ultear roared in unison as the panicked toad messenger simply pointed a trembling finger out the window facing the southeast where the night sky was lit with unimaginably bright light from somewhere beyond the horizon as nearly a quarter of the southern sky turned white.
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Master Makarov stared in shock as the light simply continued to shine. The Etherion Cannon was supposed to be able to wipe out entire nations in seconds! What could possibly merit maintaining that kind of attack for nearly five minutes?!
Then the light faded and a moment later as Master Makarov, and indeed the whole world, saw what I had done, Master started laughing.
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"Do you think he even needs help right now?" Lucy asked Erza and Levy as they gaped in unison at our guild's emblem burned onto the face of the moon with the power of a redirected Etherion. They'd seen the lights from my battle, and were hurrying as fast as Levy's tank could go, but that made them stop to wonder.
"We should hurry even more now," Erza declared after a moment, "Deflecting something as cataclysmic as the Etherion must've taken every shred of power Jerry had and then some. I can't believe he blocked that! Even the strongest defensive spells I know all together wouldn't be enough to stop the Etherion! The whole point of that weapon is that there's not supposed to be anything that can withstand it!"
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"HOW IN THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT?!" the weapon summoner screamed at me, "THAT WAS FREAKING ETHERION! I CAN LEVEL ENTIRE NATIONS WITH THAT!"
I just grinned shakily as I lowered my hand from where I'd thrown up the portals to redirect the ungodly torrent of pure magic destruction that had threatened to shake apart the boundaries of my portals just by coming into contact with them. A single portal would've done the job of saving my bacon, but since it was a do-or-die gambit anyway, I went all in and summoned over a dozen portals to form our guild mark and make absolutely sure these two knew who they were dealing with. I couldn't turn my back to them to look at my handiwork, but I was pretty sure it had worked.
"I can do this all night!" I told them with the most absolute bullshit of bravado. Holding my portals together in the face of that assault (especially for that long!) had taken nearly sixty percent of my full power. If he fired again in the thirty seconds left I needed to get back to full power, I was almost certainly going to die.
The machine user narrowed his eyes at me and then pointed at me through the portal I'd been using to open fire on their position, rather baffling me as to how they'd managed to survive my attacks this long, "YOU'RE DAMN LUCKY I CAN'T FIRE THAT AGAIN BEFORE YOU FINISH RECHARGING! I CAN SEE YOUR POWER LEVELS! YOU COULDN'T TAKE ANOTHER HIT LIKE THAT!"
I tilted my head, a grin forming as I felt myself nearing full charge again, "Lucky me!"
"Or not…" declared the sand guy from right behind me.
He should've kept his mouth shut, might've landed that hit that I portal blocked. Instead he got his hand portal chopped right off and caught my full body right (with explosion!) right in the jaw through a fresh portal that knocked him through another portal right back over by his friend. He picked himself up with a grin that looked way too much like Natsu picking a fight, and my brain kicked into overdrive as I saw his hand and face reform in whirls of sand.
"Logia body huh?" I mused, a counter tactic rapidly forming in my head, "Good to know. That would've been a nasty surprise otherwise."
"So you're as analytical as Wall huh? And you've got the power to absorb our magic and turn it back against us on top of being a skilled Spatial Mage to turn any attack you can't absorb," Sand guy asked, his grin growing steadily, "Nice. You're not the sort of opponent we can afford to play around with! I thought this was gonna be a boring mission, but you're making things interesting!" Then he knelt and slammed his hands to the ground and what happened next wasn't like any magic I'd ever seen.
The closest thing in sheer scale and complexity was Master Precht's Earth Make Arena, but that was nowhere near this. Even the sand tsunami had been somewhat comprehensible, but now in an instant what seemed like half the desert had collected itself into three titanic golems that towered over me even though I was sixty feet in the air, and as I looked closer, I saw dozens of what looked an awful lot like miniature sand dragons flocking around them. "BUT HOW ARE YOU GONNA DEAL WITH OPPONENTS THAT CAN'T BE BURNED OR BLASTED OR BEATEN?! I'VE FIGURED OUT YOUR LIMIT! I KNOW YOU CAN'T ABSORB ENOUGH POWER AT ONCE TO STOP THESE FROM CRUSHING YOU!"
I opened a portal to the ocean (thank god it was still in range!) big enough to block that giant satellite cannon again and slammed it down on top of the golems, dragons and whatever was unfortunate enough to be standing under them. Then I closed it. "Like that!" I declared simply, my grin returning as I picked out the utterly floored expression on the sand guy's face, "You said it yourself! Anything I can't absorb, I can simply send away!"
Sand guy's face twitched for a moment and then twisted into a very ugly expression, "Oh can you now?"
In a split second, the calm clear desert night was gone. In its place was what felt like being buried alive despite the fact that I was still in midair. If it hadn't been for the sudden crush of magical energy around me and the roar of the howling sand, I'd have worried I'd been teleported underground. I took about ten seconds to realize he'd summoned a sandstorm, and that was apparently all he needed to drive his fist into my gut hard enough to drive the wind out of me and send any thoughts I might've had at that instant fluttering away. Over two dozen more blows landed in the space of a minute. With his sand body having merged with the storm, he could strike from any angle, at any time with no need for even drawing back since his blows were only limited by his awareness and titanic magic reserves. There was no way to defend because his body was effectively everywhere.
I felt ribs crack and burning pain as they were jammed into places where sharp broken bone really shouldn't be. My face lit up with a hundred paper cuts and my eyes were caked over and screaming with sand in them. Even worse was that they were swelling shut so I couldn't even try to blink them clear. He twisted my arm out of socket and I almost shouted as I felt the horrible pop and my arm went limp and numb. If my nose wasn't broken it certainly felt like it was and that tasted an awful lot like powdered teeth in my mouth mixing with the blood and sand.
Then he messed up. He stilled the sand around us, caught me by the hair and yanked me up to look at him. I'm not sure what he was saying, my ears were ringing so bad that I couldn't hear him, but he was definitely gloating. He summoned an axe out of sand to finish me and I managed to crook a grin at him as the five seconds he'd given me to think gave me my way out. I made like I was going to spit in his face and as he gave me a look of pure disgust and hate, I opened my mouth, and in it, an inch-wide portal to a ten meter wide portal at the bottom of the sea.
Sand-guy didn't have a prayer of dodging as the nearly four million psi water jet erupted right in his face. I grinned as I saw the look of horror and pain on his face and then I expanded and folded the water spewing portal to encompass me like an egg as I expanded the corresponding portal in the ocean even further. I shook my head as my aquatic eruption bought me time, and the instant my ears quit ringing and I could think properly, I started flexing my telekinesis in ways that would make Porlyusica either love me or hate me, and probably chase me with a broom either way.
The sand flew out of my eyes and my shoulder shoved itself back into place. I roared in pain and clutched it, before snarling as I forced my broken and severed veins back into proper alignment and shape, jamming the dislocated cells back into formation. It was something Master Precht had encouraged me to try the instant I'd suggested it, using telekinesis to force the very fibers of my being back together as a form of emergency healing magic. I'd done a couple of experiment cuts and bruises, but this was the first thing of this magnitude I'd done. If it weren't for my Archive giving me the layout and precision I needed, I wouldn't have dared attempt anything beyond shoving my shoulder back into place.
With it though? I quite literally pulled myself back together in the next two minutes and popped my neck irritably. I rolled my head and then my shoulder to make sure they were going to work right, cracked my knuckles and directed a glare at where I could sense the Sand-guy's mental signature, "Payback time."
I closed the portals and shoved out with my telekinesis, snatching control of the thousands of gallons of water I'd summoned, absolutely ready to turn them into a super weapon… and then the water froze. All of it. FROZE.
I sensed the Sand-guy's mind flailing for a solution to suddenly being encased in ice and just smirked as I calmly teleported out and above the bounds of the giant iceberg I could sense around us. What I saw shocked me more than anything else had that night. Where before had been glistening silver sand, was now a deep carpet of shimmering white snow, illuminated by the world shaking magic power I could feel behind me. The moon was gone, hidden behind a ceiling of storm clouds that had arrived from nowhere and rumbled with ominous greenish lightning and thunder as the wind roared around me menacingly.
I stared in shock, how had a blizzard arrived and dumped who knew how much snow on the ground in the five minutes I'd been trapped in that sand storm?!
Then suddenly the entire world flashed greenish white, a split second later the thunder nearly knocked me out of the air from the sheer force of the earth-shattering BOOM. It wasn't a "rattle the windows" thunderclap, it was a "blow them straight out" thunderclap, and as I careened through the air, my whole body felt like I had been slapped from the sky like a mosquito. The ringing in my ears and burning in my lungs certainly lent credence to the idea that some sky god had decided he didn't like me in his domain. My first half formed thought as I saw the ground hurtling toward me and filling my vision was, Oh shi…
Then something like steel bars connected to my ribs and thigh and snatched me sideways out of my free fall. A second later I found myself blinking up at Erza wearing a very cute pair of leopard ears and a very concerned expression. She was saying something, but I couldn't hear through the ringing in my ears. I raised my hands to my chest and grunted, "Thanks…" I forced my telekinesis to start piecing me back together and was mildly horrified as I felt the extent of the damage. Apparently I'd been way too close to the origin point of that lightning, because my ear drums were shredded, several of my internal organs were bleeding and by Archive's calculation, I had less than two minutes to fix it or I'd be dead, and fixing it would require even more power than the portal I'd deflected the satellite cannon with.
Between needing an immediate refuel or a casket, the answer was obvious. The magic roared through me and then the world erupted back into noise. I became aware that Erza had set me down and was shouting. I grimaced and clapped her on the back as I went to force myself back upright, "I can hear you now Erza. Thanks for the save. I'll owe you a dozen hero kisses if we survive this."
Erza reached out to stop me, "What are you thinking?! You can't fight like this! How did you even do that?! Your whole body was a giant purple bruise a second ago!"
I snapped up a hand and threw open a portal to deflect the heat seeker heading straight for us into the ground half a mile away. I grimaced as the effort gave me the start of a headache, "I can and if we want to survive this I have to! That weapon summoner from Alvarez has access to a friggin' satellite cannon, and I don't know how long it takes him to charge it but it takes over half my total power to deflect it! If he fires again, I don't know that anything else can stop it!"
"He can fire the Etherion again?!" Erza demanded, with a look of budding panic in her eye.
"He said he could and I'm not going to test him to see if he's-oh fuck…" The sky was glowing again. I inhaled the biggest gulp of magic power I could and prayed it was enough as I flung open the massive portal.
No fancy designs this time, in one hole and out the other back up into the sky. It shouldn't have been as hard to do a single simpler portal, but because I was so much weaker and more tired than I'd been on the first attempt, I still felt like my blood had turned to boiling pickle juice. Thankfully apparently Weapons-guy was tired too, because the power petered off a second later. Then, before I could even close the portal, the world started to roar as though the world's most insanely huge fireworks show were going on overhead. Off towards where I was pretty sure Weapons-guy was, there was nothing but blinding, flickering light for almost a solid minute.
Erza shielded her eyes and moved to get between me and whatever was causing that light. It was a small gesture, but one I greatly appreciated. Then everything went as quiet as the cool desert night had been before Alvarez arrived. "Did it get him?" Erza asked quietly.
Then my blood ran cold as I heard a voice that was way too mechanical to exist in this world of high fantasy and magic, "Odds of success with personality setting: Prankster, 3.42%. Unnacceptable. Personality setting change: Cold-Hearted. Target all non-allied living things within one mile of current location as well as Mildian Defense Network. Enhanced Exoskeleton Assault Mode. Magic Fusion Reactor ignite. Estimated time to target elimination: Fifteen minutes."
"Did we just piss off…" I was cut short by the need to deflect an incoming ball of plasma that lit the sky up with a brilliant orange explosion that rivaled any of the lightning a few minutes earlier. If Erza hadn't gotten between me and the light show that tried to incinerate him, I wouldn't have been able to see the bomb to deflect it.
"The fucking Terminator…" I hissed angrily as I caught a glimpse of the orange and black, heavily armored cyborg giving us a glowing orange stare of merciless elimination with one glowing hand raised in our direction.
"Assault Wall, on." Then he was two feet from us and his fist crashed into my jaw like a meteor.
It knocked me out for a second, but Erza catching me jarred me back to consciousness. I briefly registered that I was upside down and then Erza had to drop me on my head to dual wield at speeds that made her swords and the cyborg's arms appear as nothing but a blur of metal. The cyborg shouldn't have gotten in close. Granted, it was the logical way to bypass my portals, but life doesn't work on logic.
I took a giant chomp of magic from the now extremely ethernano heavy air and tilted my hand. My telekinesis latched onto the metal comprising the cyborg's armored shoulders and…CRUNCH! The cyborg bellowed in pain and leapt away, narrowly dodging the thrust that would've gone through his throat. I started chomping again as I pulled myself back to my feet, and a minute later wiped the blood off my chin. Even as I did, a flurry of bullets came screaming towards us again, only to be deflected by a barrage of portals. I didn't take my eyes off him to tell Erza, "I can handle his long range attacks if you can keep him off me, and I want you to swing as hard as you can in three, two, one."
I said it levelly so as not to alert the cyborg to the fact that I'd just opened a portal right behind his neck for Erza's blade to pass through. It didn't work, but it was worth a try. Then I had to slam the portal closed as a tank shell came screaming down. The cyborg dodged again, but then the fireball disappeared in what looked like a tangle of flaming spaghetti. I grinned broadly, "Cavalry's here!"
Then the cyborg went skipping and tumbling across the sand. Gajeel was right behind him and unless my eyes deceived me, he'd somehow turned his hands into really, really big chainsaws as he chased the cyborg right into the line of Natsu's Fire Dragon Roar.
I'm certain I wasn't the only one who blinked as Natsu's unstoppable inferno suddenly winked out and then my eyes widened as I saw the tell tale pale blue glow of ice magic, followed by a dull brownish-orange glow that made Gajeel's chainsaws crumble as he swung them closed on the cyborg's guard. The cyborg lashed out with a punch and knocked Gajeel flying. Natsu shot forward on a burst of flames and got clotheslined by a rock-solid punch right in his face as the cyborg calmly sidestepped his wild charge. Erza's decapitating strike to the back of the cyborg's head was dodged just as calmly and the cyborg used jets in his feet to pull and impossible horizontal spin and axe kick to Erza's back. I only narrowly managed to snap a portal open and use it to snare the cyborg's foot before the kick could connect.
It would've worked a lot better if his foot hadn't simply disconnected and been regrown just in time to plant a kick in Natsu's gut as that brown crumbling magic disintegrated Erza's swords to leave her open for a punch that sent her flying. Another tank shell came down as Erza and Natsu flew clear and the ensuing fireball was instantly canceled out by that ice magic again. Then the cyborg was suddenly encased in ice. There was a split second of shock before he burst free in a burst of heat that I could feel even from two hundred feet away.
That was when it hit me, "HE'S USING WEAKNESS TARGETING MAGIC! NATSU! FIRE STORM!"
Natsu may not be the best at thinking, but one thing nobody can deny is that he trusts his friends. Anyone else would've protested that the cyborg had already proven he had a perfect counter for that. Not Natsu. He immediately broke out a full throttle Fire Dragon Roar.
Once again, the cyborg unleashed a wave of cold magic to cancel it out, only this time, I threw my portal to the sea floor back open and dumped a torrent on him. What or whoever was controlling the storm had apparently caught on, because in less than a second, the cyborg was encased in ice again.
The cyborg unleashed another wave of intense heat to burn out of the ice as I snapped my portal closed, and just as the ice evaporated, Erza, Natsu and Gajeel came at him in a three directional scissor from his front back and left while I threw open a portal to the ground to act as a wall to his right and above. The cyborg managed to block Natsu's punch and Gajeel's chainsaw, but Erza's crimson sword went right through its chest.
Then Natsu and Gajeel got their hands on the cyborg and helped Erza tear it to pieces. We looked around warily and then that horrible mechanical voice declared, "Error. Situation exceeds expected parameters." We turned and saw the damn thing had somehow conjured a second body for itself at the last second. The cyborg regarded us coolly from next to the giant iceberg its partner was trapped in and then it reached out and casually melted the ice. A second later as the frozen sand turned into mud, the sand guy reformed himself, clutching the gaping chest wound I had given him and hanging onto the cyborg for support.
The cyborg looked at Sand-guy and his eyes glowed for a second, then, "Analysis complete. Odds of success in current condition: 29.59%. Odds of Ajeel Raml surviving without immediate medical attention: 2.95%." His face twisted into a scowl, "Suggested course of action: Tactical Retreat."
He lifted the sand-guy, whose name I guessed was Ajeel, in a bridal carry and sand-guy raised a hand (it was his right hand, I was surprised he could move it given what I'd done to that side of his chest) to force out, "Hold it Wall…" He turned a pained gaze on me, "You, portal wizard. What is your name?"
"I am Jerry Granger of Fairy Tail," I answered firmly, "And yours?"
"I am Ajeel Raml, Prince of Habarga and Shield of Spriggan," he replied with a proud grin as he gently clapped a fist over his heart, "I look forward to doing battle with you again someday."
I nodded and returned the salute with a nod, "I'll be waiting."
Ajeel grinned and clapped the cyborg on the shoulder, "Hit it Wall!" The cyborg's jet pack (and when did he summon a jet pack?!) flared and he took off, flying away so fast that a minute later they were nothing but a faint light on the horizon.
I watched them go and then, "Oh good, guess that means we won…"
My vision went dim and then, WHUMP. Face, meet dirt.
It probably would've hurt if I hadn't been out cold when I hit. I might not have been at Magic Exhaustion, but that didn't mean for one second that my body wasn't well past the limits of physical exhaustion.
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NEXT TIME on Mad Little Slice of Heaven...
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Valentine's Day Special: What if Jerry HADN'T been sent to Earthland to join Fairy Tail?
*Clears throat* Yes, you read that right. Next week is an AU where I'll show what would've become of Jerry if he'd never been sent to Earthland. It's a bit slice-of-life, very down to earth, and definitely a romance.
If you're not interested in seeing the pairing with arguably the best chemistry of any of Jerry's potential matches play out as it canonically WOULD HAVE if Jerry hadn't gotten isekai'd to Earthland, as well as find out what the counterparts of FIVE MORE beloved characters are like in Jerry's world, then you've been warned.
YES. YOU READ THAT RIGHT.
Next week's special is what Jerry's true final pairing would've been if he'd never been sent to Earthland.
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That being said, even if you don't read it, I still strongly encourage you to check it out to see the results of the poll over whether or not this story will be following a harem route.
Yes, that poll ends next Thursday night.
If you haven't voted yet and want your opinion known, you'd better hurry!
You can leave a comment with your vote or if you don't like comments, then you can pop over to my profile page and the poll is at the top so you can vote anonymously.
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For those of you sticks in the mud who skip my holiday specials, here's a sneak peak at Chapter 26: Onward, which will be out February 21st and among a few other hints and surprises will offer a MAJOR hint to Jerry's backstory.
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I'm not sure when it was that I woke up. A part of my brain knew that I should by all means feel like a hammered pile of shit from that beating Ajeel had given me, but there was no pain. I felt weak, like my whole body had gone limp, but it didn't hurt. It wasn't as though my body were heavy and required too much effort to move, I honestly felt like I had become a cloud. I was vaguely aware of someone gently stroking my hair (which hadn't grown back anything like in full although that didn't register with me until later) and I opened my eyes.
The light through the leaves should've blinded me, but it was soft and welcoming. My eyes immediately met a pair of the most heart stoppingly beautiful green eyes I'd ever seen gazing down at me from beneath golden blonde hair, and the smile that accompanied them would've taken my breath away if there'd been any in me to begin with.
"So you're awake," She chuckled, "Are you really in that much of a hurry to come back to me?"
My confusion must've been evident on my face because she laughed lightly, "Don't worry about it too much. Just live for now, you're almost there. Try to be a little less reckless from now on okay? If your body wasn't chock full of magic making you tougher through that fight, you would've died when your wounds opened back up after you passed out. You came close enough to come visit me anyway!"