Pantherlily has found Mystogan.
Pantherlily and his division have changed sides.
Well that changes my plans. And officially changes what we're doing here from a coup to a mutiny.
:Tutor has found his ally. We flee: I told Cubellios, who ducked one attacker, casually swatting him out of the air with her tail as we sped by. The jetpack toting guards might be more steady in the air than Cubellios, at least while hovering, but they were not nearly as maneuverable as she was.
:Should we rejoin him?:
:No. He said to find the iron wyrm: Which was what he had said word for word, but I did feel as though we should focus instead on finding our guild and people.
Magic was drawn to magic. When a Dragon Slayer jostled the lacrima, the wizards would snap back into their proper forms but the civilians wouldn't. Not unless they had enough magic to react to the outside stimuli.
:You are hesitant:
:We should scout where the rest of our people are being held captive: That was what I wanted to do after all. I wouldn't be able to wake them by myself, not unless Wendy, Natsu or Gajeel came with me.
:I understand you require one of the wyrms to free your captives:
:Yes...:
:Then logically, we should find the iron wyrmling as tutor said, and find the magic prison with him. That way, all may be found and freed at once:
...I hate logic.
Cubellios correctly interpreted my resigned sigh as agreement and we made for the city.
There wasn't fighting in the streets, but there was definite unrest.
"Point me; Gajeel Redfox."
The kunai I had leftover from my fight spun around my finger by the ring on the end. It pointed straight and unerringly for the higher ground of Faustian.
Then a massive glacier appeared out of nowhere.
Gray's alright! Yay!
There also came a soft vibration from my rune slate.
My clones were finished setting their traps.
Ooh, this is gonna be fun!
-vVv-
Edolas was a war based city. The army was used to reacting swiftly and appropriately to attack, in any form at a moment's notice. Conquerors were not popular, by any stretch of the imagination.
The well trained army of Edolas was however, at a loss of what to do when they went to their stations and found them...altered.
The lookout posts on the walls were painted with cheerful colors and cartoonish images of animals in soft pastels, much like a nursery. The telescopes and binoculars had all been rimmed with black paint which somehow made everyone who put them to their eyes look like raccoons and pandas. And, when they tried to send someone out to question what was going on...they found the door had not only been locked behind them, but it had also been rigged to spray the one attempting to open it with sneezing powder.
Rations had been laced with some drug to cause hiccups. Lavatories sang to the occupants.
The halls were filled with trip wires, smoke grenades and paint bombs. Spare uniforms were filled with some substance that caused a violent purple rash on the skin. Weapons lockers were filled with a strange, sticky brightly colored foam. One lab had been raided and was spewing hallucinatory gas, neutralizing more than 20 men in it's innocuous yellow fumes.
Mystogan couldn't be more proud.
"What is happening?" Pantherlily demanded, tail starting to lash with irritation.
"My student is making her escape." He replied with a rueful smile. "Nothing disrupts guards quite like pure chaos."
"One child did all of this?"
"One child raised by Fairy Tail." He corrected, glancing out the window and spying a large purple winged snake with a small figure on it's back, aiming for the city. They were skillfully avoiding any guard that tried to stop them, but not aggressive in their defense. He felt his blood pressure spike when a blast that would have sent both snake and girl to the unforgiving ground barely missed. "You have a way to communicate with your men?"
"We're all on a comm channel together."
"Contact them and tell them to stop trying to shoot Fae out of the sky!" He didn't have a lot of charge left on his air staff but he would burn through all of it in a heartbeat if he had to get to her quickly.
"Hey, Mystogan! Don't worry about them, they're more than good enough in the air to keep from getting hit." A cheerful voice sounded from above and he looked up to see Fae, standing on the ceiling with no apparent regard for gravity, priming a chandelier to fall.
The S-Class mage glanced from Fae, to the shrinking figure of Fae in the sky...then back to...Fae?
"What did you do?"
"By this point, it's a question of what didn't I do!" She replied, winding a small spool of thread through the final screw of the chandelier as a trigger and walked down the side of the wall. "And I'm not Fae. I'm an identical temporary construct with all of her knowledge and skill, but not nearly as much magic, or even a fraction of the durability. One solid hit, and poof! I'm gone."
I will have to have words with her...She said she wasn't going to try the clone spawning function without supervision.
"I will have a talk with her about that later. Right now, I need a way out of the palace for myself and Pantherlily's squad." She grinned, rigging her string to a rug.
"Nobody step on that." All the men following them took a large step back away from the girl. "Anyhoo, bossman. A way out for our friends..." Her eyes went vacant for a moment in a familiar expression. It seemed the clones were identical down to having the same magical ability to 'read' facts about the world around them.
"No one's touched the servant tunnels. You won't be able to get a lot of people through very quickly. Not through any one tunnel at least. But there is one safe way to reach them from every floor. By the way, Mr Pantherkitty, how can we pass word to our guild members who is an ally and who isn't? The fighting has already started in the city." Mystogan could tell that his friend had questions. Many of them. But he focused on the immediate need and what they could do right now.
"My men are law enforcement in civilian areas, and the air squads on patrol in the air."
The latter of which had stopped trying to attack Fae and were instead departing the palace airspace.
"Good, could you get them started on evacuating civilians then? We've got two angry Dragon Slayers and a pissed off Celestial Spirit Mage coming in fast and when they get here, things are gonna explode." The clone tilted her head. "Actually, things are gonna explode sooner than that. Our decoy Sugarboy and Hughes just got discovered."
"You made decoys of them?" She really went above and beyond even my expectations.
"The real ones are tied up in what's left of the amusement park. And seriously, what is it with the gosh dang park? What kind of person needs a palace so big that you can fit a whole theme park inside it?"
If they're tied up, that means she fought and defeated them...
Mystogan was torn between being extremely proud of her, and feeling horrified that she had needed to face two army commanders alone.
"So-Oh boy..." The clone's face went very still. "You will want to leave. Quickly. Sugar-clone is going to drain Rosa Espada to trap her division in the ground. She...might, kinda, sorta, absolutely definitely compromise a large section of palace foundation in the process..." Her face cleared with a brightness and manic energy and she giggled. "Hey Mystogan, I destroyed my first battlefield!"
The mage grabbed the clone and towed her along, followed by Pantherlily and the guards.
"Right. Ok. Just get us out of the palace without getting caught by one of your traps. We'll talk about this later."
He wasn't even twenty yet, but he suspected he would start seeing grey hairs sooner rather than later because of this girl.
And yet, seeing her smile, even in the chaos and danger they were in, he couldn't really begrudge her that fact. She was safe, alive and finding ways to laugh even in their battle.
-vVv-
Lucy, sitting in the front seat beside Edo-Natsu, saw the walls coming closer and closer and closer by the minute. There was already a large plume of smoke or something coming from inside...
"Is that from fire or dust, Natsu?" The Dragon Slayer was suffering in the back seat, even with Wendy powering a low level Troia spell to keep him from falling unconscious in his misery.
"Dust." He groaned, covering his eyes after his brief glance out the window.
"Silly, Lushy, we're bringing the fire! They can't start burning without us!" Normally, Lucy would have wanted to wring Happy's neck for mispronouncing her name. She knew he did it on purpose. But they had some important business to attend to.
"I won't be able to take you all the way in." Edo-Natsu told Lucy. "The Iron Squadron's got a fast response Legion team primed for whenever they see me or my car. I need enough distance to be able to get away."
Lucy then had a crazy idea.
She had been getting them more and more often since joining the guild. But the disturbing thing was she was starting to see them as a reasonable solution instead of a last resort.
"Legions are those big flying things they used to try and take out your guild hall, right?"
"Yeah." He was looking at her a little warily. It was odd to see some of the differences between Edo-Natsu and the face she was now so familiar with.
Edo-Natsu's eyes were...different. It had been bothering her the whole time, but only now that she was getting a good look at him did she see it. Edo-Natsu had purely human eyes. Natsu's pupils were more oblong, like a snake or lizard. His skin was a bit rougher and so was his voice.
He's the son of a dragon, so his eyes would be different from using his magic as long as he has. And he has skin more like dragon scales than a normal person. And he is normally breathing fire. That has to have had some long term effects on the vocal chords.
Overall, it was more...wrong than she had originally thought it would be to see someone who was Natsu but not.
Lucy looked back at Wendy.
"If you didn't have to worry about them, could you take us up to the wall?"
"I guess-what are you doing?!" Lucy unbuckled herself and opened the window.
"Kill your speed once I'm out there, and don't make any sudden moves!" She called over the scream of the wind. "I've got something that can cover us as we get closer!" She slung her key ring over her wrist and reached around for the handhold on the side of the car.
If he's got handholds on the side of his Magi-mobile, this can't be the first time someone has done something like this.
Living and working in Fairy Tail made you stronger in a lot of different ways. That was how Lucy managed to hold herself against the side of the car and stretch her hand out to the top. There were other handles there and she'd need them for her spirit to use as footing. She sensed the car slow slightly and grinned.
It seemed even Edo-Natsu could guess what she needed.
She shifted a particular key into her palm.
Sagittarius. We need some cover. It'll be a bit of a tricky crossing.
She could already see the Legion that Edo-Natsu had mentioned was lifting off from a high platform.
"Open, Gate of the Archer." Lucy called out into the wind, feeling as though the words should have been blown back down her throat. She focused on the gate to be as close and low to the top of the car as she could manage it.
Saggitarius appeared on the roof, quickly wedging his front foot into the handheld as additional support.
"Ready to serve, ma'am!" He said, lifting his bow.
"Great! We need big, ugly and flying to either come down, or not have enough time to line up a shot." Her spirit turned, sharp eyes finding his target.
"Understood!"
And the bolts started to fly with unerring accuracy and speed. They would be no more than pinpricks to the massive creature, but the men piloting it on its back were not nearly as protected. They started to take cover and the Legion veered off course.
Lucy slapped the side of the car, getting their drivers attention.
"Let us worry about them, get us to the wall!" Once Natsu was back in action on solid ground, taking care of that thing for good would be a piece of cake. And the people actively assailing the wall and city would be a bigger priority than a fleeing vehicle. Or that was the plan.
If it didn't work out like that, then they'd have to improvise.
"Lucy!" Carla called. "Legions fly by inflating a sac in their chest cavity with superheated gas to give them lift!"
"You hear that?" Lucy asked Saggitarius.
"The chest is the easiest target because it is the biggest. It will take some trial and error to find the correct location!"
Ok, so shooting it down probably won't happen unless he can majorly up his impact and find the right spot. Lucy poured more magic into her bond with Saggitarius, letting him use her own magic as his own. His arrows grew noticeably larger and flew faster than ever.
"Aim for the wings and tail!" Wendy cried. "It may be airborne because of its gas reserves, but if it can't steer, it can't chase anything!"
"Changing targets to the wings." The horse like spirit reported, the bolts shifting to one side of the beast. It roared as they found their mark and the beast began to list slightly in the air, turning in a slight curve as it struggled to compensate for the new handicap. It's riders were already moving to try and patch the holes in the wings with prosthetic skin, but they had to be careful to not get riddled with arrows themselves.
And all the while, the walls were getting closer.
"You're doing great, Saggitarius! Keep it up!"
"You people are insane!" Edo-Natsu called, but he was grinning. "Hang onto your everything! We're making the last leg at max speed!"
Even as Lucy hung on for dear life, winding her whip through the handles as an extra measure of security, she couldn't help but notice that with a grin like what he was sporting, Edo-Natsu looked much more like her guildmate.
There you are.
Though even Natsu had been unsettled by something in the Edolas Fairy Tail guild hall. He had approached a white haired girl standing with Edo-Mira and Edo-Elfman and spoken like he knew her and seemed...resigned and sad when she didn't recognize him. Happy however had been crushed. But Lucy could have sworn she saw tears shining in that girl's eyes as she left the room with her siblings.
I wonder if Mira and Elfman back home had a sister...I've never heard about her if they did. But that was not really a surprise. If they were still grieving her, then talking about her, remembering her, would bring more pain than solace. That was why she only wrote letters to her mother and never actually spoke of her.
One bump almost made Lucy loose her grip and she continued to cling to the side of the car.
"Watch your driving, Flamehead!"
"Now you sound like Lucy!"
-vVv-
Carla, seated inside the magi-vehicle, felt her heart pounding with fear.
She had been seeking her visions for some information about Legions to help their approach to Faustian. What she had seen instead brought with it a powerful sensation of doom and foreboding.
A vague shape, massive, claws, jaws, teeth, wings, tail. And so much danger. Such a terrible threat...
She knew from Wendy's descriptions what a dragon looked like...But in all the years she had never seen or heard of one of the creatures. At least, not in Earthland...
But here...here there were no native Dragon Slayers. They were dangerous because they were unaffected by the Anima. Their magic was too wild and unpredictable to be corralled by the device.
Can it be...no...no there cannot be a dragon here. I've never seen anything to suggest that there is one! Not until now at least.
Extalia had assigned her a mission. Her and presumably all the other younglings and eggs they had planted in Earthland.
Find and kill the Dragon Slayers.
The tomcat didn't seem to be aware of this mission. The kitten, Frosch, didn't seem to realize the truth either. That he had been sent and told to kill the human who was now his closest friend. Only she remembered...and she had refused to go through with it. There was no point in doing so. Dragon Slayers would never go to Edolas, they would have no reason to.
But the other Exceed would not see it the same way. They would only see Dragon Slayers. Threats that needed to be neutralized.
Her paws clenched in her lap and Carla pressed her lips together to keep her teeth from showing. She pressed her back into the seat to prevent her fur from rising and letting others know about her distress.
"Carla, are you ok?" Curse you, you meddlesome tomcat. The blue cat had been monitoring Lucy through the window, ready to snap to and catch her should her grip falter. But he was now looking at her with such concern...
"I am well. Just worried." There. A lie and a truth together would be harder to catch.
"You shouldn't. We'll be ok. Look." Happy pressed a paw to the window. "Gray and Erza are already fighting. They've knocked down part of the city wall, we can just drive right in!"
"They've what!?"
-vVv-
I was doing something in the guild hall. And then it all goes black...and now I'm wherever this is and someone stole my shirt. Again.
Gray had definitely had better mornings. Erza had been talking to him about maybe taking Jellal with him on a job as Mystogan.
"If he's gonna be playing tag with the real Mystogan, then wouldn't it make more sense for you to bring him along on a job Erza? You're S-class, not me. Mystogan has never taken a job on my level since his first year in the guild." This had apparently been the wrong thing to say. Gray suspected Erza had suckerpunched him and made the arrangements without his consent.
But figuring that out could wait until after they were back in Magnolia.
Spying an unfamiliar planet in the sky, the Ice Make Wizard revised his thoughts.
Make that back in Earthland. Cause Caius 4 isn't supposed to be visible during the day.
"Hey, flasher! Get your head back on the ground!" Gajeel's roar, so very like Natsu's, triggered the completely unconscious response of throwing a bunch of snow in his general vicinity.
"Ice Make Avalanche!" An angry sputtering roar told Gray his move had been right on target.
"You don't get to order me around!"
"But I do!" Two of Erza's swords flew through the air, impacting the weak points in some kind of mechanical armor and causing its arms to fall off, causing the two men piloting it from inside to scream in panic. "Work out your issues later, Gray!"
"I'll never have that kind of time!" The glint in Erza's eye told him that he had better stop pushing his luck. He grumbled under his breath, muttering a spell (Ice Make Rink) and slapping both hands on the ground to put a slick layer of ice underneath the entire charging army.
They tumbled to the ground like ten-pins.
They were going for non-lethal fights primarily. Erza was using the flats of her blades, Gajeel was using fists instead of blades and Gray was taking his cues from them. But...
He automatically checked behind them.
It looked like the backlash from Erza destroying one of the larger robot-suits had passed into the back wall and destabilized it. And his avalanche had pushed the whole wall outward, causing a large gap. It showed the group of about 100 men that had been coming towards a smaller gate from behind.
"Incoming from behind!" He warned them shortly.
"Got it." The blur of yellow-gold magic surged by. Ok, so there's Jellal. "Keep on those in front." Gray didn't stop to watch the user of Heavenly Body magic simply tear the attempted pincer apart. He had missed him, and someone else in his initial sweep. Simon had been accompanying Jellal to his therapy sessions, had also been peripherally involved in the conversation of finding Jellal his first job as 'Mystogan'.
Speaking of Simon, where is he?
The large gentle giant was mostly tucked out of the way, touching his jaw and false eye and grimacing.
"You ok, man?"
"My prosthetics feel weird here." He replied, straightening. "Lost my depth perception for a second." Which meant he hadn't been fighting to avoid friendly fire on his allies.
"Well there's plenty more bad guys coming in. We're not greedy." The ones that he had knocked down and scattered with the large sheet of glassy ice were regrouping for a second assault. Gajeel, his fist turning into a hefty iron beam, cracked the ice into splinters. Gray took his previous creation, hands coming together into the strong seal Ur had showed him.
"Ice Make: Barrier!" He imagined it first. All the sharp edges Gajeel had formed with his blow shifting, rising into a jagged, glacier-like mountain range, cutting off the ways they could attack and only leaving them a few narrow clear channels. Erza and Gajeel placed themselves at two of the openings, the latter gnawing on the weapons of defeated enemies like they were crackers or something.
"Can you make me an outpost? I need to see who we're fighting if I'm going to do anything."
"What do you have in mind?"
"Just a height that I can get a good view from."
Not very specific...Oh well. Can't blame me then. The more detail Gray had to work with when he used magic, the better his end result was.
In the end, he decided to simply work some stairs into his already present barrier, weaving up to an alcove that gave a view of their entire battlefield.
"What are you planning Simon?" Erza asked, requiping some new swords as she waited for her opponents to come closer.
"Psychological warfare." He replied dryly before hurrying up the stairs to his outpost.
Jellal returned, not even looking winded.
"Pincer move is gone but we could still get flanked through that opening." There was a fast moving plume of dust approaching from the distance, but no other signs of approaching enemies.
"Gray, stand guard back there, give us long distance support, and watch the opening. We will want an easy way out of the city should we be unable to hold this position." Erza spoke quickly and firmly. Taking charge easily and naturally. "Jellal, take the third path, people will be funneling through quickly." Gray could hear them approaching.
Normally, they would be pressing forward. Gajeel's quick update was that this city and its king had attacked Fairy Tail and Magnolia. But normally, they had more people to work with than just five wizards. They needed back up and time for the civilians to get out of the way. And that was Mystogan's plan and it was his plan they were following.
He said wait for backup. Salamander's back up.
Meaning that as soon as Natsu got here, Gajeel was going on the offensive, with or without more support.
Gray spied a faint grey mist trailing down from Simon's tower. He was producing it from a dark violet magic circle.
I've never seen that kind of Darkness Magic before.
Gray moved to the ruined wall and clambered up to give him a better view of the empty land outside the wall. There were scorch marks, craters and unconscious men everywhere. Jellal had been working among them for maybe a minute.
And Erza wanted him to take something other than an S-Class quest.
The next fifteen minutes were involved with taking down the grunts as they made their way through Gray's maze of broken ice and several deep gaps. And something about their faces seemed different too. They seemed to be...terrified as they came through. A large number of them even retreated before they engaged, screaming in blind panic.
Gray glanced up at Simon and saw his face still set in concentration.
Darkness Magic.
Psychological warfare.
You're making them so scared of us, not even half of them are making it through the barrier.
Gray hastily recalibrated his opinion of Simon.
Yes, the man was among the gentlest of people he had ever met. But to be able to use magic to inspire that kind of fear meant that he not only had to have felt it himself, but refused to allow it to control him.
Because he was looking for it, Gray saw Simon's face shift slightly. A complication?
Then something large smashed into the barrier from the other side, creating a gap between Gajeel and Jellal.
The men who charged through were screaming, but in defiance and determination.
"Ice Make Cannon!" Three shots delayed them long enough for Gajeel to sweep them down. But they didn't seem to go down quite as easily as a normal person should. They were insane, fighting and struggling through injuries that should have stopped them. And then Gray saw something large and...grey that distracted him from following that thought.
Massive tentacles were winding their way throughout the entire barrier, tearing it down piece by piece.
As soon as that falls, we're sitting ducks for long distance strikes.
Erza seemed to realize the same thing as she lunged at the tentacles with vicious strokes, cutting through two of them in as many seconds.
Gray reformed his barrier where he could, twisting some of the paths closed to trap some men inside and remove them from the fight. He sent spikes of frigid ice at the tentacles as well, but they seemed to be incredibly tough.
This is different. They're adapting to us. A smart enemy would, but this felt like more than just common grunts. The men who had blindly charged had slightly different uniforms then the first waves.
Gray turned his cannon to the walls where men were falling from above. Suicide dives with no visible parachutes, just screaming...
He caught sight of their faces and something in him recoiled. Something was wrong with those men. Very wrong.
"Simon! Kill the fear, try something else!" He yelled.
Fear made people react in different ways. It looked like these people had been forced to choose fight instead of flight. And then the way back had been blocked.
There came a screech from behind. Arrows flew through the air to down several of the berserkers. A magi-mobile skidded to a halt beside the open wall, the door burst open to reveal two Dragon Slayers and their feline partners. Lucy landed, shaking her whip out, her archer spirit already sending more arrows in to keep Erza's path clear as she tore a fourth tentacle apart.
Fourth? Just four?
No...She probably had cut them multiple times before, but even as Gray watched, they were starting to grow back. Erza Requip-ed into her Flame Empress armor and let her superheated blade do her talking.
That tentacle didn't grow back, but something large bellowed from the otherside of the barrier.
Cauterize them. Keep em from growing back.
"Natsu! Get in there and roast the squid freak!" Wendy was clearly trying to wake Natsu up, but he was out of it. "Now isn't the time to take a nap, jackass! Snap out of it and get to it-aw forget it. Lucy, cover me!"
"You got it!"
Gray dismissed his bazooka like gun and charged for the severed end of one tentacle that flopped, reaching for something to destroy. The end oozed black liquid and was already starting to sprout new flesh. He was calling up magic, but not trying to shape it this time.
Now, he just wanted something cold. As cold as he could possibly make it.
The air steamed around him as he grabbed the end of the tentacle with both hands.
"Frostbite!" Pliant, flexible flesh went inert and brittle. Another shriek of pain from beyond the barrier. "Ice Make Sword!" The blade cut into the flesh of another appendage, but didn't sever it all the way. Erza had showed him the right motions for when he used a sword, much like Bisca had taught him marksmanship for his missile weapons. But he just didn't have the right amount of talent or practice time with a blade to be as deadly with one as Titania was.
The half disabled tentacle managed to slap him back. His magic absorbed a lot of the damage, flaring around him like unseen, living armor, but his head still rang like a bell from the impact.
Someone's gotta take out the main body of this thing. We're hurting it, but it can still tear down the shield. Just not as quickly.
Hands were grabbing the side of his heads, something dark blue swam before his eyes. There was a distant ringing in his ears-
Until suddenly it was gone and replaced by the sounds of the battle.
Gray blinked up at Wendy and she shot him a smile.
"You're good to go! Don't forget to take another X-ball, you're feeling a little low." Right...Wendy's a doctor. I managed to forget that.
"Gray, with me!" Jellal's call got the Ice Make wizard's attention as he seemed to materialize beside him. "I have a spell that can take down even something this big. But I need you to hold it still for me, can you do that?" Gray snorted.
"You're new. So I'm not gonna hold that question against you."
"Good. Grab on. We're pushing through to the other side."
-vVv-
Moving at the speeds at which Heavenly Body users normally did, Gray decided, was not for him. He was no Natsu, he didn't get sick easily, but he wasn't used to moving that darn fast.
The source of the tentacles was some kind of huge octopus with way too many limbs. Rubbery grey skin, blind, crazed eyes and a voice that shrieked in pain from whatever Erza was doing to its tentacles.
It seemed to grow larger as they watched.
That just isn't right. Something more than it being something between an octopus and a squid and it being on dry land in a large metropolitan area.
Gray put his hands together, calling on all the ice just behind him. If he could reuse old material, he would save a lot of power and Wendy was right, he was in need of a little pick-me-up. But this he could still do.
"Ice Make Net!"
Ice was inherently an immobile substance. But adding magic to anything could change it's use dramatically. By thinking of it as a net and capturing something in it, it gave his crystal blue ice an odd sense of give, thus letting him immobilize even creatures without a skeleton.
The lines of blue ice grew rapidly around the monster, merging with the recycled material Gray called from their maze. Most of the foot soldiers had retreated from their own massive shock trooper-
He smelt something weird.
He wasn't Natsu. He didn't have a Dragon Slayer's nose, but something smelt weird.
He also wasn't Lucy, he didn't have her observational skills.
But he still saw a glitter of glass shards on the ground and a bent, gnarled old man who looked far too pleased at the sight of the pandemonium-
Part of the net burst in a spray of ice fragments.
It's definitely still growing. Don't know how, but it is.
Gray shifted his stance.
Ice is rigid and unforgiving. It all comes from the same structure though. And ultimately, it forms when something stops moving.
"Ice Make: Hypothermia."
The air itself crystalized around the still thrashing monster. Thousands upon thousands of barely visible ice crystals clinging to the flexible creatures' limbs, weighing them down, the air filled with the sound like someone trying to run through a snow field. Only multiplied by two thousand. The ice crystals were rubbing against one another, causing the grating sound and having the desired effect of slowing the monster. It was spending and more energy with every move. And something that big had to use a lot of energy if it was trying to move this much.
Hope that's enough for you, Jellal. He didn't seem to mind that the thing was only severely handicapped instead of completely paralyzed. Jellal wove through the now sluggish tentacles, surrounded by the yellow aura of his magic, effortlessly carrying him high above the creature.
Gray tightened his spell around it as it grew yet again, keeping it slow and it's tentacles unable to rise to its own defense.
"Heavenly Body: Jiu Leixing."
Nine different objects appeared as Jellal cancelled his speed spell above his target. They looked like swords at first, but altered to more resemble long spears instead. Then with a gesture, he sent them down, all aiming for the main body of the devil-octopus.
The thing was so huge that when it was hit by Jellal's spell, the constructed weapons vanished completely into it's body.
It was like watching a waterballoon get punctured.
Grey ooze exploded out of all nine places, and the thing gave a final shudder before going still.
Gray only realized Jellal was still subject to gravity in the nick of time, the ice formerly holding the world's most disgusting specimen of calamari reforming into a smooth slide to redirect Jellal's momentum safely and keep him from impacting the ground too hard.
Could he have taken it? Probably. But he was a guild mate now and they did still need him.
The man he had spotted at first was now looking disappointed. Not like a champion or a hope in battle had been defeated, but rather like an experiment hadn't had the outcome he had wanted.
It gave Gray the creeps.
"Changelings! Forward in the name of King Faust-"
"It's Prince Jellal!"
What?
Whatever the words meant (Prince Jellal? Seriously?) they were spreading like wildfire, the focused attack dissolving into confused panic. The faint grey aura of Simon's magic lightened and began to spin gently, heightening their confusion. And there was a lot of that going around.
Gray let Erza and Gajeel charge forward, downing another X-ball to restore his reserves, seeing Jellal do the same.
"Nice hit." He acknowledged.
"Nice improvisation in slowing it down instead of trying to make it stop moving." They caught their breath as the Requip Mage and Iron Dragon Slayer wreaked havoc, the area around them kept relatively clear by Lucy's spirit's arrows and her whip cracking with impressive precision to keep any stragglers far away from Wendy, who was still trying to get Natsu back into fighting condition after his trip.
"Why are they calling you prince and how do they even know your name?"
"Those are excellent questions that I hope will be answered later."
"Fair enough."
"Hey!" Lucy's voice broke through the hubbub with an accompanying crack on her whip. "Natsu! You have something to be doing, don't you? Get up!"
"Aw hell yeah I'm fired up now!" The salmon haired wizard cheered, rushing straight into the fray.
"No! The lacrima! You and Happy have to find the lacrima where everyone else is!" But it was no good. Natsu was well and truly lost in the fight in about three seconds flat.
The 'Changelings' lived up to their name, several others of them also transformed into monsters, all larger and stronger than their natural counterparts, but also clearly in some sort of pain or with some kind of deformity.
The hunched over man Gray had spotted earlier was hurrying away, distributing some vials to the men around him.
When the men drank the vials and began to change, Gray knew he had found his target.
They weren't here to kill these people. But anything that turned you from yourself into something else ran the same kind of risk as Take-Over magic. The shape you assumed could dominate your mind and control you, even after you got your body back. He didn't know the numbers of people who successfully reclaimed their old lives after such an experience, but they were very low.
Gray had to stop that man before he increased the body count even more.
-vVv-
Byro hobbled away quickly, mind spinning with what he had seen.
Jellal was back.
The boy was meant to have been dead for many years, they had all agreed that having him be assasinated nobly defending the Anima was the best way to keep their country unified behind Faust.
If Knightwalker sees him, we could lose her. We will lose Pantherlily.
The stupidly noble, naively idealistic young prince had made an excellent martyr, but as a resurrected hero, he would bring nothing but trouble. Especially since he had just handily demonstrated that he possessed magic power. They had had no notion that living in Earthland could alter their people's bodies in such a way to allow that. A personal, never ending supply of magic power...
Byro clawed for the comm that all the commanders bore, then altered the frequency so his words would reach one man and one alone.
"The boy is back with Earthland wizards, Dragon Slayers and his own magic power."
There came a sharp inhale of breath from the other end of the comm.
"...He's come back to take what I've worked for..." The familiar tones of paranoia and madness rang in Faust's voice, but with considerably more force than ever before. Byro restrained his amused chuckles.
"What does my king command?"
"Reroute all available power to Dorma Anim. Direct the city supply to it, all of it, right away, right now! I want it ready for deployment within the hour!"
The old king's voice cracked faintly, trembling with emotion. Byro inclined his head almost respectfully to the device in his hand, trying not to dance a jig in his glee.
Dorma Anim had been forbidden by law for years and years. He had been forced to seal the project before it's testing was complete, it was deemed too wasteful. He would finally get to see the fearsome armor in action to serve its purpose:
Defeat Dragon Slayers and prepare them for harvest.
"As my king wishes."