The first thing Kazu noticed wasn't the spells.
It was the sound.
A distant, uneven thunder—magic discharging in bursts, increasing in amount then before.
'So they finally committed.'
He raised one hand slightly.
The air in front of him rippled like disturbed water, then flattened into a translucent plane. Another formed beside it. Then another. Soon, a loose arc of hovering projections surrounded him—each a moving window into a different edge of the city.
Outskirts. North ridge. Eastern farmlands. River approach.
Reinforcements of the attackers were here. Nearly a hundred mages now, quietly sneaking around, not knowing that Kazu was already aware of them due to minor light manipulation using his barriers.
'I need to procure a safe route if I can't defend against all these mages. I would rush towards Erza and Cana. I hope they don't do anything rash and defensively battle.'
Kazu's eyes moved calmly from projection to projection. His expression didn't change, but something inside him turned—like a dial being rotated, click by click.
The barrier responded.
Across the city, invisible layers adjusted their density. Where fire gathered, refractive angles shifted. Where lightning clustered, grounding vectors formed. Where brute-force spells slammed in unison, the barrier thickened—not everywhere, only there.
Efficiency over excess.
A barrage struck the western wall. Flames, ice, compressed air.
They vanished mid-impact, unravelled into harmless motes that washed over rooftops like dust.
'Neutralisation time: acceptable.'
From below, the people of the city were in panic.
The evacuation zone was supposed to be safe.
That was what the guards kept saying. What the city mages kept repeating. But when the sky rang again—deep, hollow, like a bell struck from the inside—people screamed anyway.
A mother clutched her daughter so tightly the child cried out.
Another blast rippled overhead. The ground shuddered. Dust shook loose from rooftops.
"They're breaking through!" someone yelled.
Panic spread faster than magic.
People pushed. Tripped. Shouted over one another. A man fell to his knees, covering his head, whispering prayers that tangled into nothing.
Then—
"Look."
It wasn't shouted. Just spoken. Clear enough to cut through the noise.
Heads lifted.
Above the city, framed against the fractured light of the barrier, a lone figure hovered in the air.
Unmoving.
Spells slammed into the sky from above and died there—flames flattening, lightning dispersing, darkness thinning into nothing before it could touch stone or skin.
The barrier didn't even tremble.
Someone whispered, "That's… him."
"Kazu Sukehiro."
"The youngest S-rank."
Another impact hit harder than the rest. The air boomed. Children screamed—
And nothing happened.
No cracks. No falling debris. No breach.
The figure in the sky didn't turn. Didn't gesture.
He just stayed there.
A guard swallowed and straightened his back. "See?" he said, voice steadier now. "It's holding."
Slowly—hesitantly—people stopped running.
A woman loosened her grip on her child. A man helped the fallen stranger to his feet. Breathing steadied, fear shrinking into something smaller. Manageable.
To the people of the city, Kazu looked like a god protecting the town.
They didn't see the strain.
They didn't see the calculations stacking faster than they thought.
If they did, then they would have been more shocked. Kazu was constantly receiving information on each part of the barrier from the projections in front of him, and based on each spell thrown, he was micro-adjusting for each spell to make the most efficient Ethernano usage.
Then—
Three projections flared red simultaneously.
High-output signatures.
Kazu glanced at the screen and instantly identified the mages.
He exhaled slowly through his nose. "So you came personally." 'So, the sounds I am hearing now should be the other 3 fighting the two.'
The first impact came from the southern outskirts.
Darkness surged—not as shadow, but as substance. It crawled across the barrier as oil poured over glass, eating at the structure in slow, deliberate waves.
Within the projection, a cloaked figure stood still, one hand raised.
Reaper.
The darkness didn't crash but rather eroded.
Kazu watched the corrosion rate tick upward… then plateau.
'Too slow.'
Minutes passed. The barrier thinned fractionally, then stabilised again as internal layers compensated.
Reaper tilted his head.
Even through the projection, Kazu could sense the calculation happening.
Hours. Not minutes.
'Good.' Kazu murmured. 'That'll impede him.'
A flicker of memory surfaced—sparring sessions, Mira tearing through his barriers like they were wet paper, forcing him to adapt, to harden, to rethink internal layers.
He almost smiled.
'Training Mira really was worth it.'
Reaper's darkness was refined, dangerous—but compared to hers?
Inferior. By a wide margin.
The second pressure hit differently.
A sharp, invasive tug at his chest—like a hook trying to sink into his magic core.
Curse magic.
Kazu's eyes shifted to the eastern projection.
A tall man, etched with sigils, stood with both palms extended, his mouth moving in silent incantation. Tupper.
The pull intensified… then stopped.
Nothing connected.
Tupper frowned. He tried again. Changed vectors. Layered conditions. Sacrificial triggers.
Still nothing.
The barrier didn't just block the curse.
It refused it.
Tupper's eyes widened slightly. He hadn't expected the barrier to not only have such high defence, but also the ability to block curses of his.
'Expected,' Kazu thought.
After the underwater temple, he'd worked on his curse isolation aspect and some neutralising aspect, raising it to a standard to block most of the high-level curse attacks.
His barrier gave them none.
Tupper stepped back, lips thinning.
'I thought he specialised mainly in close-combat, now defence. His Ethernano reserves should also be low, then how is he able to sustain this big barrier?' He was really dumbfounded.
He had thought Kazu to be a naive and easy target among S-ranks, especially after receiving detailed intel of his abilities, but now it seemed that he had clearly underestimated the other party.
Then the third strike came.
A column of annihilating force slammed into the barrier from the northern ridge, space screaming as it compressed and collapsed.
Lambda.
Destruction magic in its purest form—erase, overwrite, end.
The barrier didn't crack.
It didn't ripple.
It absorbed the force, redirected it sideways in a controlled bloom of light that scattered harmlessly into the clouds.
Lambda froze.
He struck again. Stronger.
Nothing.
Kazu tilted his head slightly, studying the projection like a teacher watching a student repeat the same mistake.
'He doesn't understand.'
Destruction magic wasn't about power. It was about structure—about knowing what ended a thing, not how hard you hit it.
Lambda knew how to destroy.
Kazu knew what destruction was.
He had never learned destruction magic. Yet his mastery over the principles of destruction mastery was beyond Lambda's league.
'Destruction Interference,' he thought calmly. 'Still holding.'
To Lambda, the barrier was an impossible wall.
To Kazu, it was a conversation he was winning.
All three S-ranks activated their communication lacrima at once.
Kazu watched their mouths move, arguments and reassessments playing out in silence.
They could coordinate.
He could observe. The more information he gets from them, the more advantageous it would be for him. After all, his instincts work better the more he knows about the target.
Below, the hundred mages pressed harder, desperation creeping into their spellwork. The barrier adjusted again, thinning here, thickening there, never wasting effort.
Kazu felt the drain now—not exhaustion, but weight. Sustained output. Long-term defence.
He closed his eyes briefly.
'They're testing endurance,' he realised. 'War of attrition? That's fine.'
Kazu had already recovered the 10 per cent Ethernano loss he had suffered last year, and his total capacity was higher than in the underwater temple.
He was also maintaining the barrier in the most efficient way possible, but despite all that, his overall reserves were still small. They were significantly less than an average S-rank due to his young age.
At the current rate, Kazu wouldn't be able to hold the city-wide barrier for more than an hour.
He opened them again.
Above the city, barrier layers multiplied—fine, finger-thin constructs spreading outward, forming a lattice across the sky. Light refracted through them, bending, splitting, until the projections sharpened further.
Every enemy position was now mapped.
Tracked.
Known.
'You can try all night,' Kazu thought, floating alone above the people who believed in him without knowing why.
'I've already decided how this ends. To likes of you, Ethernano isn't something that can drag me down.' Kazu's eyes glinted as he watched the S-ranks complete the strategy meeting.
The barrier rang again.
And again.
And still—
The city stood.
***
Ability Corner:
Name: Kazu Sukehiro
Age: Almost 15
Main magic affinities: Instinct magic, Ethernano manipulation magic, Barrier magic
Instinct magic: Kazu's strongest affinity and the magic with the highest potential among all.
Mastery Level: Advanced
{Levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, Wanderer}
Spells:
Passive Instincts - Allows his body to react swiftly to any phenomenon without input from consciousness. Ethernano is continuously drained, depending on what phenomena are coming at him. The purpose of it is to be at a most efficient state, moreover, instinctively. This aspect got sharper after the Veyren incident, as he could distinguish fake attacks and the intentions of others more easily.
Some of the applications are:
Somebody is attacking him, his body reacting without needing to know.
Instinctively able to know which choice to take(personal, limited by his wisdom and own capabilities), like knowing which choice he should make next in a battle.
This also helps him train or learn stuff. Like everything makes sense directly.
Active Instincts: This is an upgraded version of PI. Here, consciousness plays a significant role, making it more in control for Kazu, along with quick, but the downside is that it takes too much ethernano and mental stamina. The world becomes Colourless in this mode as his emotions become muted.
One of the applications is to how he calculates/plans everything on the battlefield when he has enough information,eg: seeing how they would react and then make moves according to how he wants them to move. Everything loses colour in his eyes in this state.
One of the advanced applications is to think in broken and short thoughts, which are incomprehensible to normal humans, but Kazu could understand them instinctively. This is pretty similar to how computers work in binary(though they do that because computers understand that language and not because it gives speed), which Kazu had taken inspiration from. He can do this in x779.