Chapter 22: Battle at 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 activated Blackout Mode 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, it's 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 began to invoke my spell. Master Precht must've practiced this so much to have refined it to such a simple gesture. The nice thing about it, was that so long as the seals were right, the spell could be ANY size at all! Spread over such a wide area it would undoubtedly lose a bit of its power, but it would still make a fantastic opening salvo to thin the herd. I might've felt bad about it… if I'd been able to sense any thought from any of them and didn't suspect them of all being robots.

The Alvarez forces gearing up to storm Mildian only had a brief moment to realize something was happening as the Magic Circles erupted into being, encircling them and forming a cage of light. The ensuing explosion ripped through the approaching army and lit the night sky as brightly as the flare a moment before had. AMATERASU TEN CIRCLE FORMULA!

In less than a second I was back to full power as a result of having Absolute Void active, sucking in the air and faint moonlight like a whirlpool and feeding me power as quick as I could expend it. Another minute, another explosion the size of a city block. Again! Again! AGAIN! Explosion after explosion ripped across the sand until the sand itself rose into a massive dust devil, surging upwards in an attempt to stymie my attacks. I grinned as the sand roared towards me and moved one of my cards between me and the approaching twister, 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 convert to raw power 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 nonexistent 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. In the time it took me to notice the sand attempting to flank me, massive broadswords formed out of the sand and twin torrents of earthen blades shot at me like a missile barrage.

For a split second I considered countering them with Master Precht's Blades of Calatin, but I also knew there was no way I could match the sheer volume. I didn't need to in order to neutralize the attack anyway. 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 or even a volley 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 again my full capacity, and not a single scrap of it was mine.

I launched myself skyward and sent my great wall of cards 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 whatever cursed the life out 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 as he idly bit into a snowball, "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 of Siegrain's bedroom at Era 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, illuminating the Guild Hall through the windows like a search light outside. 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 even slow down 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 wizard 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 as he floated back up to level with me on a cloud of sand, "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 waved his hand in a sweeping gesture and as a massive magic seal erupted, what happened next wasn't like any magic I'd ever seen.

The closest thing in sheer scale and complexity I could think of was Master Precht's Earth Make Arena, but that was nowhere near this. Even the sand twister had been 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 into outer space big enough to completely envelop Mildian and as my magic system screamed at me in protest to the strain, I 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, shaky but confident 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 get over the shock and realize he'd summoned an incredibly dense sandstorm, and that was apparently all he needed to drive his fist into my gut hard enough to knock 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 or force him back because his body was effectively everywhere.

That said though, it also meant I didn't have to aim, and with the amount of raw power he was dumping into my Blackout Mode shroud, I had plenty to not bother. I teleported a mile away from Mildian and grinned, Sorry Juvia, promise to make it up to you! "THUNDERING SPRING!"

I'd left my cards in the middle of the now very confused sentient sandstorm, so I was not hurting for power as I channeled every shred of power I could into a giant version of the magic seal Juvia had used to fill my improvised wash booth at the Guild Hall. The result was something like a pressure washer with the volume of a flash flood. The sand mage tried to get his sand and incorporeal body out of the way, but I had cranked my Devouring magic to its strongest. I wasn't even powering the absolute RIVER I was bombarding him with, it was all his own magic taken and hurled back at him!

He might as well have been standing next to a black hole for all the good his efforts to escape did him, because the more he pumped into the sand, the more my Devouring absorbed. What would probably have been a near instant movement speed was slowed to a slog through molasses, and I could tell as the water slammed into his great cloud of sand it was a perfect counter. As he finally realized what was happening and cut the flow, I shoved out with my telekinesis, snatching control of the thousands of gallons of water I'd summoned, absolutely ready to turn them into a superweapon… 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 took advantage of the lapse in combat to look around and take stock of the situation. 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 emanating from Mildian. The moon was gone, hidden behind a ceiling of storm clouds that had arrived from nowhere and rumbled with ominous greenish 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 short time I'd been focused on that sand wizard?!

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 freefall. 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 and pain in my ears. I raised my hands to my chest and grunted, "Thanks…" I forced my telekinesis to start piecing me back together. 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 ever done.

If it weren't for my Archive giving me the layout and precision I needed, I wouldn't have but just barely dared to attempt it, and even then, it would've been only because I was extremely desperate upon realizing to my horror just how very injured I was. 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 from the concussion, and I was covered in burns with several minor bone fractures. By Archive's calculation, I had less than two minutes to fix it or I'd be dead, and fixing it would require a level of speed, concentration and laser like precision that would've been impossible without Archive.

Needless to say, I didn't have much choice about whether to try or not. The alternative was being dead. I couldn't do jack shit for the burns, but it was enough to keep me alive and get me back in the fight. 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 like giant tenderized steak 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 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 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 retaliated with an uppercut that knocked Gajeel flying. Natsu shot forward on a burst of flames and got clotheslined by a rock-solid left hook 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 an 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 blast from some kind of concussive cannon in the cyborg's hand 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 an eruption 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 reactivated the water spell I'd used on the sand wizard 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 (having just requipped into what I later learned was called her Flame Empress armor), 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 and the sand guy reformed himself, with an enraged and twitchy grimace, "OKAY! ROUND THREE!"

I responded by hurling another torrent of water at both of them that the Sand wizard blocked with a wall of sand, and unfortunately this time he had the sense to not use as much power as he could have to avoid feeding me more power. I opened a portal behind them and fired a second torrent through it, only for the cyborg to come through the portal, completed unfazed by the water. I simply shut the portal and chopped him in half, so of course he activated his jet pack and rocket punched me anyway!

Thankfully though, by that time I had reactivated Absolute Void, so all that got him was his own arm devoured and me back at full power! I retaliated with a jab of my own and put my fist straight through him before expanding Absolute Void and absorbing the entire autonomous upper half that had come through the portal. I already knew it wouldn't kill him, I could sense his mind back over next to the sand wizard, but it was quite the pick me up. Then I realized what I just did and looked at my hand in shock before shooting a vicious grin at our opponents who both seemed to have realized what I had.

"THIS. ENDS. NOW. LAST CHANCE." I declared as started to stalk towards them, "LEAVE. OR. ELSE."

Our two cataclysmically powerful opponents were watching me with rather stricken expressions. Good, they had realized it. The cyborg grimaced and his eyes glowed for a second, then, "Analysis complete. Odds of mission success without sustaining critical damage: 2.59%." His face twisted into a scowl as he transformed back out of his so called 'assault' form in a flash of coppery orange light, "Suggested course of action: Tactical Retreat."

The sand wizard grimaced, "Yeah, I thought as much. Alright fine, you win. We will leave Mildian be. Before we go though, void wizard with the portal magic, 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 clapped a fist over his heart, "I apologize for my rudeness yesterday and 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 jumped into the flying magic-car the cyborg had just produced out of thin air and clapped the cyborg on the shoulder, "Hit it Wall!" The cyborg hit the… gas? (and how the hell much power did these two have to still be able to keep pulling shit like this in a completely ethernano-free environment?!) and they 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… I can't believe they bought it… Archive, maintain telekinetic internal reinforcement until damage is fully and truly healed. Hey guys?" I glanced over my shoulder as I let Absolute Void dissipate and reveal that I was in fact shaking from the effort of holding myself upright through the pain that I was only just barely ignoring as I raised a wobbly finger towards the city, "Serena and Miguel are in the city at the temple, can you check on them? I'm gonna pass out now."

My vision went the rest of the way dark as the adrenaline left me all in a rush and then, WHUMP. Face, meet sand. It probably would've hurt if I hadn't been out cold when I hit. I might not have been anywhere near 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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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 fight, 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!"