"Gray-sama!" Juvia ran over the moment he landed, but her greeting died on her lips as the sight behind him stole every thought in her head.
Plutogrim's castle had become a firework. A fountain of brilliant golden light erupted skyward from its shattered frame, like a Silver Trees and Iron Flowers display, except the tube was a demonic fortress and the charge was one of Fairy Tail's three great magics.
The roof was gone. The walls were gone. The thorn barriers Mard Geer had woven throughout the structure, thorns that had trapped and skewered intruders, were blown to splinters along with everything else.
Kyoka's screams were somewhere in there. Nobody could hear them over the blast. Nobody particularly cared.
Rhodes landed smoothly with Mira still in his arms. He glanced back at the massive golden firework blooming behind him and thought, 'Actually, that's pretty romantic.'
Gray, who was hauling Crawford's limp reanimated body by the collar, probably did not share that sentiment.
Natsu, Lucy, and Happy, who had apparently thought they were stealthily infiltrating the top floor right up until the floor ceased to exist, definitely did not.
"WAAAAAH!"
The three of them came tumbling out of the explosion riding a slab of broken flooring like a raft, spinning end over end as they entered freefall.
Fortunately, Happy remembered he had wings. He grabbed Natsu by the back of his vest and started flapping for dear life.
Lucy latched onto Natsu's leg. Half her body dangled in open air, the ground rushing up beneath her.
"You're too heavy! I can't keep us up!" Happy strained, tilting his entire body backward as if that would somehow generate more lift. "Lucy, let go!"
Natsu twisted around, looking genuinely uncomfortable. "Yeah, this really hurts, Lucy. Let's just jump, it's not that far."
Lucy's grip tightened so hard her knuckles went white. "ABSOLUTELY NOT!"
Happy's eyes lit up. "Then Natsu! Spray fire from your feet! Like a rocket!"
"Are you insane?! That'll burn Lucy!"
"She's the one dragging us down!"
"SHUT UP AND FLY HARDER, CAT!"
The three of them bickered the entire way down, loud, frantic, and completely unhelpful to the situation. Happy's wings were buying them just enough to slow the descent from fatal to merely painful.
They hit the ground in a heap.
Mira looked at the pile of groaning bodies with genuine concern. "Are you three okay?"
Natsu sat up and brushed dirt off his scarf, looking more annoyed than hurt. "No! I was this close to finding their Guild Master's room!"
Happy dusted off his paws. "I told you we should've checked in with Rhodes before charging in."
Lucy — still slightly pale from the freefall — pivoted away from the blame with practiced speed. "That magic just now... it looked like Fairy Glitter. Did you run into someone really strong up there?"
"Sort of." Rhodes set Mira down and rolled his ankle experimentally. The pain was fading, but still there, a dull, persistent throb. Kyoka's Enhancement curse, amplifying sensation long after the fight was over. "She was more annoying than strong. Powering up pain is just a miserable ability to deal with."
"So it WAS you!" Natsu pointed at him with the confidence of a detective cracking the case wide open. "I knew it! You always sneak off and take out all the tough ones before anyone else gets a shot!"
Rhodes opened his mouth to respond.
But the countdown beat him to it.
On the floating display screen still being maintained by Crawford's corpse, the timer hit zero.
[00:00:00]
Just as the golden fireworks over Plutogrim faded, more than three thousand new ones lit up across the continent.
All over Ishgar, in forests and mountains, on coastlines and plains, buried beneath cities and standing in open fields, the Face units detonated.
Self-destructions.
Controlled, systematic, total. The massive crystal pillars carved with giant human faces cracked from within. Light spilled from the fractures. Then each one shattered, disintegrated, and dissolved into ash and fading light.
The rumbling went on for a long time. It echoed across every nation on the continent, rolling through valleys and rattling windows in cities hundreds of miles from the nearest Face unit.
In Crocus, Sting bolted upright in his hospital bed so fast the IV stand nearly toppled.
"There's an explosion outside the city!"
"Mr. Sting, please — you can't be moving around with those injuries." The doctor tried to ease him back down, then added matter-of-factly, "It seems to be that enormous magic crystal that appeared outside the city walls."
Sting frowned. "Magic crystal? What magic crystal?"
"It appeared out of nowhere, and then it just... exploded." The doctor shrugged helplessly. "Some people went to investigate the site. I hope no one was too close when it went off."
Near Mermaid Heel's guild hall, Kagura and Millianna had already pulled back to a safe distance, eyes locked on the smoldering crater where the crystal pillar had stood moments ago.
Kagura's hand rested on Archenemy's hilt, her expression sharp. "That was a Self-Destruction Magic Circle. What's going on?"
"At least it wasn't a real explosion, meow!" Millianna exhaled, pressing a hand to her chest. "Something that big going off for real would've flattened half the coastline."
She had a point. For a crystal that size, there was a world of difference between a weapon firing and a controlled self-destruct.
At the home of former Council member Reggie, the Blue Pegasus delegation had just finished listening to him explain exactly what that strange crystal pillar had been.
The old man stroked his chin, genuinely puzzled. "Has the Council finally made up its mind to destroy Face?"
Ichiya stroked his chin thoughtfully. "But wasn't the Council headquarters destroyed? I heard that out of the nine Council Members, only Mr. Org survived."
"Org..." Reggie's frown deepened. Would that man have the courage to issue a self-destruct order on his own?
Outside a certain nameless mountain village, the ground was... shattered.
Not by Face. Face had self-destructed cleanly enough. The other damage was a separate issue entirely.
Gildarts stood in the middle of the wreckage, guilt radiating off him in waves, staring at the smoking crater where the crystal pillar had been.
The villagers stared at him. Then at the crater. Then at the trail of additional destruction leading from the village square to the crater that very clearly had nothing to do with any self-destructing crystal.
"It wasn't me." Gildarts held up both hands. "I swear I didn't do this. I didn't even touch it. I don't even know what it was!"
The village chief sighed the sigh of a man who had seen too much. "Setting aside this thing that appeared from nowhere, Mr. Mage... what about our village?"
He gestured at the crumbled houses, the upturned road, the fence that now existed in three separate locations.
"That, uh..." Gildarts scratched the back of his head. "Ahahaha..."
The vast majority of people across Ishgar had no idea what kind of catastrophe their continent had just narrowly avoided.
Mard Geer knew. And he was furious.
As a demon who prided himself on being a strategist, he had always operated under one fundamental belief: everything was within his control. Every variable accounted for. Every contingency planned. Execute the strategy step by step, and the outcome was inevitable.
But somewhere along the way, every single critical node had been sabotaged.
The assassination of the current Council members. One survived.
The assassination of the former Council members. A whole group survived.
The first Face unit to be unsealed was destroyed outright before it could activate.
Three thousand Face units were successfully unsealed, but the activation sequence was interrupted before completion.
He ordered Keyes to kill Crawford and use the corpse to restart Face. The control was stolen again within minutes.
He had intended to wipe out Fairy Tail as a convenient sideshow on the way to his real objective. Instead, the Face plan had collapsed entirely, and now the "sideshow" was about to remove him.
Mard Geer thought about the word he'd used before this operation began. Sideshow. The memory made his blood boil.
And then he stepped out of the ruined castle, already seething, and a blast of dragon breath launched Jackal and Tempester directly into his path. The two surviving Nine Demon Gates hit the ground in front of him like sacks of meat, scorched and groaning.
Above, the Purgatory Dragon let out a booming laugh, thoroughly pleased with his extended game of cat and mouse. "Refreshing! That was a good workout!"
Mard Geer stared at the two crumpled demons at his feet. Then up at the dragon. Then across the battlefield at the cluster of Fairy Tail mages who had, over the course of a single engagement, dismantled an operation years in the making.
"Humans." His voice was low. Controlled. The kind of calm that comes right before something breaks. "And a race long forgotten by history." His gaze locked onto Rhodes. "Such a nuisance."
"You're the Guild Master of Tartaros, right?!" Natsu was already running. No hesitation. No plan. Just a straight line between him and the enemy leader. "It's over once I take you down! EAT THIS!"
Gray was half a step behind, ice already forming on his fists. "Back off, Natsu. He's mine!"
"Insolent."
Mard Geer didn't raise his voice. He held the Book of E.N.D. in his left hand, and with his right he made a simple gesture. Two fingers extended, drawn through the air like a blade.
"Thorns."
The ground beneath Natsu and Gray erupted. A thorned vine as thick as two men burst from the earth like a surfacing serpent. It whipped upward and lashed across both of them in a single motion, catching them dead in the chest.
"GHH!" Natsu felt the thorns bite into his skin as the impact launched him sideways. Gray went the opposite direction, blood flicking from a dozen cuts across his arms and torso.
Neither of them stayed down.
Before they'd even finished flying, both twisted in midair. Natsu inverted, hanging upside down with his cheeks already puffed. Gray mirrored him on the other side, the silver bow reforming in his hands.
"Fire Dragon's Roar!"
"Ice Devil's Zeroth Destruction Bow!"
A torrent of flame from one side. A screaming ice arrow from the other. Both converging on Mard Geer simultaneously.
He didn't flinch. He simply flicked his fingers.
His purple-black curse power bloomed outward and folded into a shield shaped like a rose in full bloom. The petals caught both attacks at once: fire splashing across one side, ice shattering against the other. The rose held without a crack.
Mard Geer lowered his hand. The shield dissolved into falling petals of dark energy.