Beta read by Shigiya.
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-Cube-
Within a giant structure wandering the wasteland, a bedroom could be found, a large and quiet one with high ceilings, dark wooden beams, and heavy crimson curtains that blocked any sunlight from peeking through. Polished stone walls and at its center sat a wide bed dressed in black and wine-colored sheets, its carved frame subtly suggestive without being overtly threatening, while a faint mix of incense and something sweet lingered in the air.
The sheets were tangled around her waist when she opened her eyes. The fragrance of her partner's body still lingered in the air, their sweat and fluids soaked in the sheets from their night of lovemaking.
Seilah believed herself to be quite experienced when it came to dominating anyone in bed, even though the number of partners she had amounted to only a single person. But still, by no means would she fall short given the versatility of her own curse.
But when it came to Kyoka, that advantage always burned to ashes the moment their bodies pressed against one another. When their lips tasted each other, and when their warmth combined.
Kyoka sat across the room at the vanity, back straight, working a comb through her hair
with the same unhurried patience she applied to most things. With not a trace of clothes on her voluptuous figure, illuminated by the morning light that came through the narrow gap in the curtains.
"You were amazing last night," Kyoka said, without looking away from the mirror. Her voice carried the same sensual tone it always did, enough to make any demons fall for her; yet she never used that tone outside this room. "As usual."
Seilah stared at the figure for a while before sitting up. Some of the hickeys, bruises, and even bite marks across her body were already halfway healed. She looked at the back of Kyoka's head for a moment, then reached for the robe draped over the edge of the bed and pulled it across her shoulders.
Kyoka watched her in the mirror. "You are quiet this morning."
"I am always quiet."
"Quieter than usual, then."
Seilah said nothing to that, moving to the window and looking out at the corridor
Below, the lower halls are now illuminated at this hour, the footsoldiers not yet moving.
"Ezel has been pushing for a larger assignment again. Something about not liking Jackal getting to have all the fun, massacring humans." Kyoka said, setting the comb down and beginning to pin her hair back. "He made another case to Mard Geer last night. Apparently, being overlooked is becoming an injury to his pride."
"Ezel's pride has always been an injury to itself."
Kyoka smiled at that in the mirror. "True." She lifted another pin. "Ah, speaking of Jackal, did you finish your little investigation on the southwest reach?"
"Yesterday. You just did not give me much of an opportunity to talk about it."
"Fufufu~! I felt like your mouth was busier with another task~!" The black-haired Etherious showed no reaction as usual, used to the occasional comment from Kyoka. "And the humans in the border settlement?"
"Also left Jackal to handle it. No point in me getting involved as well."
"Can't argue against that." Kyoka made a small sound of satisfaction and turned her attention back to her reflection.
Then Seilah's hand tightened slightly on the windowsill.
"-!"
"Hoh.. "
Both of them went still as an invisible but clearly heavy presence swept across their senses. Almost like a barely noticeable pressure blanketing the entire room, and most likely having every other residence of the cube be aware of this individual.
Across the room, Kyoka, who had gone still, couldn't help but have her prior smile vanish into an annoyed frown. "Unruly guests thinking they can just barge in. Humph, Jackal better handle this soon enough or else I will." Her eyes met Seilah's in the mirror.
"That presence," Seilah said.
"Yes." Kyoka's voice had lost its warmth entirely. She turned on the stool to face the windows directly. "I recognise it too. That is the same one from before."
Seilah had already moved away from the window. She crossed to where she had left her clothes.
With each passing second, fluctuations could be felt across the room, with the power itself growing more chaotic and domineering, to the point that even Seilah felt hesitant at first. This new source of energy differed greatly from ethernano, but neither of them was familiar with it, though they had felt it before.
"Jackal," Kyoka said, and the word carried nothing but a flat edge of contempt. "I remember him bragging about how he would take down the source of this power with ease. Let's see if he's all talk or not. Apparently, that was a generous assumption on my part, given this is going beyond what he should be capable of." She tilted her head. "The man cannot formulate a plan that survives contact with anything more complicated than a human. I don't know why Mard Geer continues to find him useful."
"I will go check on him."
"Why?" Kyoka said it as a statement rather than a question. She stood and reached for her own robe without particular urgency, as though the presence pressing against the walls of the building were a minor inconvenience. "Send the footsoldiers. That is what they are here for. Whatever this thing is, it will eventually get exhausted releasing so much energy like that. It can be buried under enough of them eventually. Humans are not worth leaving this floor over, my dear Seilah."
Seilah fastened the sash around her waist and reached for the window.
"Seilah," Kyoka called her again, though her tone this time sounded more like a warning than anything else. The black-haired woman paused with her hand on the frame and looked back.
Kyoka had one eyebrow raised, waiting for an answer.
"This may not be a human," Seilah gave her answer right as her form disappeared from the room, the moment she opened the window.
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The wasteland passed beneath her quickly, no different than a blur as her figure crossed a great distance in a short amount of time.
Seilah covered the distance without hurrying, moving at her own pace with Jackal's likelihood of surviving being the least of her worries at the moment; Actually, she wouldn't have cared if everyone, but her sweet Kyoka died right now. She was merely doing so out of curiosity over this newcomer and possible threat that needed to be assessed immediately while they are in action. The landscape below was the same flat, cracked earth it always was out here, broken up occasionally by the remains before giving way to a lush forest spanning for as far as the eyes could see.
But that kind of beauty never attracted her attention, and she did not have the mind to enjoy the beauty of it, for the area ahead was anything but beautiful.
A way to paint it would be pure destruction as smoke came into view.
She slowed.
The ground below had been rearranged. That was the only accurate way to describe it.
Jackal's curse had been through here; that much was obvious from the blast patterns,
the upturned stone, the sections of earth that had been turned over and scorched in overlapping circles. The army she knew had been stationed in this sector was gone. Not even retreated or ran away like cowards. Gone. What remained of them was distributed unevenly across a wide radius in pieces too small to identify individually.
And from the looks of it, Jackal had not won.
The young-looking woman could see that before she landed.
Held by the neck, with a single hand, surprisingly enough. The figure holding him was tall, broader than most humans she had encountered, with a straight posture that made him resemble a Vulcan more than anything else or even a human version of Ezel. No visible injuries worth noting, aside from the burned clothes. The tight-fitting shirt alone had taken enough damage for barely anything to remain behind aside from a few patches around his stomach.
Jackal, by contrast, was in Etherious form and looked like something had broken him apart and put him back together in the wrong order. His limbs sat at the wrong angles. Blood had come from enough places on his face that most of it was dark and drying. The only indication that he was still alive was the thin slit of one eye that had not closed all the way.
Seilah descended without announcing herself and landed at the edge of the crater.
She heard the tall one speak as she came down.
"If I hand you over to Irene, I can't guarantee that you'll come out of this alive."
She noted the name, only then realizing that another presence watched over the two fighting. That of a red-headed woman standing further back, partially obscured by distance. She looked at her for a moment, reading the air around her but unable to deduce anything conclusive. An unknown variable that gave off a really strange sensation to Seilah. But upon closer observation, another strange result caught her attention.
Nothing.
No ethernano. No magic presence of any kind. Whatever she was putting out, or deliberately not putting out, was constructed well enough to read as an ordinary person at this distance. Seilah filed that away and focused back on her original goal. Simple illusions did not deserve such attention from her.
She stepped forward.
"Drop him."
This strange yet powerful human turned at the sound of her voice. Expecting to see the usual gaze filled with fear or anger aimed at her, like many others. Instead, he just stared at them with a look beaming nothing but curiosity and even a strange presence of relief.
Regardless, her curse took effect almost immediately, and his grip opened. Jackal dropped back into the crater and hit the ground with a sound that, in his current state, should have killed him. The shallow rise and fall of his chest said it had not perished... a shame, Kyoka would have been happy to hear that he died and she wouldn't have waste the effort to call someone to help him.
Seilah walked to the edge of the crater and looked down at him.
"Still alive?"
One side of Jackal's face moved. The eye that had been open managed another
fraction.
"...F-Fuck... y... you," he said. The words came out extremely weak and wet from the blood in his throat.
She looked at him for another moment, then stepped down into the crater, crouching beside him. "Get up." With a simple command, the beaten-up body of Jackal twisted and turned, bones snapping into place but not healing themselves. With a face filled with pain, he got back up with a much more ferocious face.
"F-Fuck! You b-bitch! C-Can't you just... c-carry me!? This fucking hurts!"
His body was not in a state that would survive being moved carelessly. But she did not care for his comfort whatsoever. If he had the energy to shout like that, then he still possessed the energy to walk back. Even if it meant breaking what little remained inside.
"This one," Broly said from behind her, having closed the distance between them at some point. "Was it you? The curse on my friend, Jellal. Did you put it on him?"
Seilah did not look up immediately. Instead continued to look at Jackal, who visibly struggled to stay conscious from the mind-numbing pain. A quick observation was all that she needed to know that he would survive by a small sliver. Finishing what she was doing, Seilah stood and turned.
"No," she said. She held his gaze for one second. "Leave. Unless you don't want to."
"I can't go back without finding the person who cursed him. And I need the effects
reversed. I'm not leaving without that." Broly mentioned, having gone so far as to place his hand on her shoulder to stop her from leaving.
"-!?"
In the two seconds that followed, she considered three things.
The first being to kill him on the spot.
The second was that Mard Geer would want to know about this.
The third was the hand still on her shoulder.
The decision was formed without much hesitation after that. The air around her did not change visibly. There was no outward sign of anything happening at all.
"Take your arm off me. Disappear." she said, barely above a murmur.
"I can't let you go before yo-mmph!" His arm moved. Not because he chose to, but for a brief moment, his elbow pulled back and his hand lifted. A reaction that earned another look of surprise, with him staring at his own fingers with awe.
Strange.
She has never met any creature that gave such a reaction when she used her powers on them.
"Disappear."
The same absence of visible effort. The surrounding boulders and terrain obeyed the word, and he went backwards hard with a rock thrice his size crashing against him, feet leaving the ground, the air around him giving way until he hit the earth ten meters out and skidded another few past that.
The crater dust settled.
"Walk," Seilah said to Jackal.
The command settled into him before his mind could protest. His body, a puppet on invisible strings, forced itself upright. When his weight settled onto his ruined left leg, a wet, guttural sound tore from his throat, pure animal agony. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his hand shot out, clawing at empty air for a support that wasn't there.
"Cunt... I swear on my curse, when I recover-"
He kept walking. Each step was a copy of the last, a chorus of pain.
Seilah turned her attention from the wretch to the red-haired woman. Ignoring his insults entirely without a care in the world.
From the very beginning of this entire encounter, she had not budged from her spot nor had she even tried to escape. Her arms crossed, expression stoic as they came, almost bored. Seilah studied her, a flicker of something... no, of recognition. Though she couldn't think of a name, it nagged at the edge of her mind.
"You look familiar," Seilah said straight to her face, making the other side smirk, and the woman made a small, noncommittal sound. She neither confirmed nor denied the observation.
"A fascinating thing," Irene said instead, her gaze sweeping across the shattered landscape. "Zeref's creations wield a power like this. It's so... unique. It touches the body, the will, even the ground beneath your feet." Her anatical eyes returned to Seilah, "And none of it draws from ethernano... a cursed power operating on a different principle than magic." She tilted her head, a gesture of genuine curiosity. "But it must draw from something. Power that consumes nothing is a paradox. What feeds it?"
Seilah watched her. There was something really wrong about this person.
Looking past how she just questioned her without even a hint of fear after seeing her comrade being dealt with. She was clearly a wizard and even made such a correct observation of her powers after a single glance.
But then again, the etherious offered no answer.
Instead, she let the silence continue between them to an awkward degree. Then, without a shift in her posture or a change in her tone, she worded out a single command.
"Kill yourself."
Barbaric as those words came out, it felt like the right thing to do against this human whom she could not get a good read on. Something about her just unsettled Seilah, and her entire being kept telling her to deal with this human quickly.
A sensation that she ever felt before.
"..."
The red-haired woman did not move.
She did not flinch or stiffen. Her hands remained folded, her expression interested as she raised an eyebrow. Then, slowly, the corner of her mouth curved upward. Looking at Seilah with nothing but pure amusement, while the latter looked back with pure shock.
"Remarkable," she murmured, as if to herself. "A blessing applied directly wouldn't necessarily draw a similar result; then again, I never tried it, funnily enough. It would be in the same branch as mind control. No circle, no contract, no medium." Her eyes roamed over Seilah with interest. It was the gaze of a scholar cataloging a new species. "I could do a great deal with something like this."
Seilah's spine straightened, a flicker of anger in her eyes.
"Kill your-"
"-Enough," the woman interrupted, her tone flat and dry, "while I do find the creation of Zeref's as fascinating as anyone would. I do find it disappointing that all of you share the same exact fault of being unable to recognize the actual threat here. The last thing you'd want is to turn your back against them."
What? The black-haired woman's eyes raised, and she quickly snapped her head back to see the rubble shifting.
A single, large slab of earth at the edge of the debris field lifted up and tossed to the side as if it weighed nothing, rolling free and landing with a dull thud. Then another. Then the entire mound began to heave from within and pushed upward.
The human...no, not a human, from before emerged.
The rocks that had entombed him slid from his shoulders, with him going so far as to pat his shoulders casually. What little remained of his clothes now showed even more of his muscular body and the lack of any injuries - much to her dismay. Truly, not a single mark marred his skin. He rolled his head once, the crack of his neck, and scanned the field until his eyes found hers.
"Who cursed Jellal?" he asked, "I will tell you the same thing as I did with your friend. If you don't tell me, then I'm more than willing to use other forceful means to get my answers, even if I would prefer not to.
The heat behind Seilah's eyes intensified, though her face remained a mask.
Impossible, this had to be a trick.
"Kneel."
He stopped.
His body locked for a moment, legs bending at the knees, the same helpless puppetry as before. For a single second, it held and worked as intended.
Bam!
Then his right foot slammed forward.
The ground cratered under the impact.
"-!?"
His left followed. Stone fractured into a web of cracks that spiderwebbed outward from his heel. The tendons on his neck stood out like steel cables. Every vein on his forearms bulged against his skin, like a roadmap drawn on his body; the sheer force required for the simple act was mind-boggling. His eyes, however, had not changed at all.
They were fixed on her the entire time.
One step. Then another.
Seilah did not move.
She had seen Irene ignore her curse somehow and deduced why this happened. For inside that woman, one could find a vast ocean of condensed ethernano that no human so far has showcased. Someone who stood on a different level entirely, and a wizard who, as incredulous as it sounded, stood on a similar level of power as her. Such a being could not be influenced by her powers.
But this other one did not make sense.
Broly had nothing close to ethernano. The power she felt earlier was too foreign for her to understand its nature entirely.
She reached out with her senses again, probing him. Again, not a trace of ethernano despite the faint glowing white energy surrounding his body. And yet, her curse had taken hold, and he was walking through it. Each step drew him closer while she became increasingly more nervous... an emotion she never expected to feel today against this... thing of all things. This feeling further reinforced what Jackal mentioned earlier: he was no human.
He stopped a few meters away.
"Who cursed him?" he said again. "I won't ask again."
"You have no ethernano," Seilah said, not answering his question at first and instead being far more curious about what was going on with this strange power. The words came out before she could stop them.
Broly looked at her, tilting his head in confusion at the random comment, while Irene in the background chuckled.
"My curse does not fail," she continued, ignoring that other wizard. "Not against something without the power to resist it."
Hearing her observation, he actually seemed to visibly consider that for a moment.
"It was strange," he said. "When it first hit. My body moved on its own, and I couldn't stop it... like invisible strings entangling around my limbs." He paused, looking at his hand briefly. "It reminded me of someone who used something similar to hold me down. Someone who did something similar to me once." His hand lowered. "But his version was not like this... no, rather what you're using is weaker. So I just ignored it by channeling a bit of Ki."
The space behind Seilah's eyes went very still.
"Weaker," she repeated.
"Than the one I'm thinking of, yes." He said it without any intent to insult. That made it worse. "Jackal was stronger than you, too, I think. I'm not sure how your power works here. Maybe it's my ki? After all, it operates differently from how ethernano works... best to ask Irene about the details since I'm not so well versed in it myself." He gestured vaguely at the air between them. "I don't fully understand it myself."
The irony of him calmly speaking to his supposed enemy, making it clear that he did not even see her as a threat big enough to make her bristle with anger, did not escape Irene, unfortunately.
"That is not how my curse works," Seilah said. "Ethernano is not-"
"Doesn't matter," Broly said, cutting her off before she could finish, with now a clear presence of impatience in her tone. "Tell me who cursed Jellal. I've already shown mercy to the
one on the ground. I'm willing to show it to you as well."
The woman whispered a few words under her breath.
The ground around her feet moved.
Not because of Broly. Every loose piece of stone, every split section of earth, every fragment of debris within thirty meters of her position lifted off the ground at once. The rubble that Broly had walked out of reassembled itself into something with mass and direction. The cracks in the earth widened, and the soil between them rolled inward,
folding like cloth being gathered at the center.
Everything obeyed.
Everything except him.
She drove it all inward at once.
Crash!
The ground came up from beneath him, stone closing over his feet and ankles and pulling downward. Debris rained from above, weight stacking on top of weight. More earth rolled in from the sides, compressing inward until the entire pile had swallowed him from every angle simultaneously.
For two seconds, it held.
Then the pile shifted from the inside.
Not crumbling, but instead, literally blowing apart. A single pulse of force from his body outward, not contained to his hands or his stance, just released from every surface of him at once, and the stone that had buried him went outward in every direction without resistance.
She saw him through the clearing dust.
He was already moving.
The distance between them closed faster than her eyes fully processed it. She read the trajectory a fraction too late and brought her arm up, but the punch did not go to her guard.
It hit her face.
"Gah!"
The pain of it was not a concept she had experienced before. Not from a human, not from any other Etherious, not from anything she had fought. Her head snapped sideways, and her feet left the ground, and the scenery changed from sky to rubble to sky again before she found her orientation. Seilah had not finished processing the impact when the hand closed around her neck and pulled her upward.
"Hn!"
She was off the ground, and her hands went to his wrist. "L-Let go, now!" the woman pushed a command into him, into the arm, into the fingers. The grip did not change.
She tried again.
Nothing.
"Are you perhaps Jackal's subordinate?" Broly asked. His voice had not changed pitch.
"I can send you back with a message. If the one who cursed Jellal doesn't come forward, I'll use his life as leverage."
How utterly humiliating to hear those words.
"You'll get nothing from this," she said. Her voice came out intact despite the grip on her throat. "The Nine Demon Gates are not the humans you are used to dealing with.
Using us to threaten anyone is a waste of your time."
She believed the words as she said them went and applied to most of the members of her guild. But... it did not apply to her sweet Kyoka.
Because she would come upon getting this news, and she was the one this person searched for. 'I can't let that happen at all costs.' If she were held here, if her life was genuinely at risk, Kyoka would come, and she would do it without being ordered to. That was a certainty that Seilah did not need to reason through.
Which meant the situation had changed.
This was no longer about subduing him. This was about surviving this encounter and putting her pride to the side.
She reached inward.
"Macro," she said quietly. "Person-"
Her own body answered.
"Remove limiter."
"Eh?"
Whoosh!
Broly squinted right as an enormous change took hold of her body.
A dark energy that came out of her like a tidal wave. It arrived all at once, pressing outward from every point on her body in a mass that had no particular shape before it did. Her frame shifted, the humanoid proportions giving way to something wider at the shoulders, her hair rising and spreading outward into a dark mass that moved without wind. Pale markings pushed through across her skin. Long, ridged blades formed along her forearms, the edges catching light from no particular source. Her wings opened behind her with a sound like displaced air snapping back into place, each one dark and spanning further than her height.
"Whoa..." Broly looked at her with marvel, and that served as a big enough distraction for her to use her enhanced strength and break his grasp. "Ah!"
She brought her right arm across his face with everything she had behind it.
Bang!
The impact sounded different from steel clashing against steel. A faint line appeared across his cheek.
She stared at it.
He touched it once with two fingers and looked at them. Seilah did not wait for his reaction. She turned and went skyward, wings carrying her up and away from the field. Jackal was still on the ground behind her.
"Buy me time," she said without looking back. "Keep him distracted even at the cost of your own life."
She did not watch what happened to him after that. She needed distance. She needed to reach the Cube and tell Mard Geer what she had seen before-!?
The air in front of her distorted.
With no word for the speed that put him there. One moment, the sky ahead happened to be empty, and the next, he was there, and his foot connected with her face before she had time to raise anything. Her body came crashing down with a thundering bang, ruining the already destroyed landscape even more and cracking some of the bones within her enhanced body.
'A dragon in human form?' She tried to make sense of the ridiculous strength and power, but had no concrete proof to draw a conclusion.
The ground came up quickly.
She hit it and even bounced across it. The impact drove the air out of her, and the dark energy around her frame flickered once, and she lay still for a moment in the new crater with the dust settling around her and the sound of his landing reaching her from several
meters away.
The next thing she saw was him hovering above her, calling me, looking down for several seconds until he just sighed. "I don't want to spend my entire day fighting against each one of you. You won't listen to my words, then fine, come up, I'll just have Irene deal with you and get the information I need."
This thing tried to approach the rhythm of her heartbeat, growing frantically with genuine panic starting to engulf the young-looking Etherious.
"Jackal, come here now!"
Desperate, she had to rely on her one card capable of getting her out of this situation, even if it meant sacrificing himself. If he failed to buy her time, then it would be the perfect opportunity for it. As the seconds ticked by. He did not answer, nor did he appear beside to save her. Rather, both of them suddenly heard a frail and old voice speak from the other side.
"Strange, the sensation is very different from pure magic and life energy. It's almost like the opposite... bah, what a waste of time. I won't get what I want from this."
"Hm?"
This time, not just Seilah but Irene and even Broly turn their attention towards the newcomer. Especially the Saiyan, a bone-chilling sensation he had never ever experienced in the past from this individual.
A hunched back clothed in nothing but tattered rags, the individual's lower face could barely be seen aside from the long beard that reached his chest. Standing beside Jackal with his arm, having torn right through that person's chest.
This entire body has gone dark and bone thin, as if everything within got sucked dry. A few embers of life stubbornly clung to survival but eventually were extinguished as the old man moved his arm and shattered what we had made into pieces.
"Ah, Saiyan. Now, what is a barbaric race like yours doing all the way out here? Your kind does not even have the technology to open portals, let alone learn magic... never mind, it doesn't matter in the end. But you're surprisingly powerful, for a Saiyan."
The hooded figure finally showcased his face, the first thing coming into view was goat-like horns and an animal-like face, smirking back. Broly went still, for this was the first time someone recognized him... his species.
That meant this individual was most likely from his world...
"By the way, you wouldn't happen to see a passing white dragon now, would you? She's been a bit of a headache for me lately hehehehe!"
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The next 5 chapters of Snafu, and my other Fate fics (Fate Coiling Sword with 3 chapters, A Fake Familiar Reborn with 3 chapters, Steel Eyed Faker soon to be 3 chapters, Taimanin with 3, Hound having 3 and To love a sword having 4 chapters) are already available on my P@treon. With 4 more Broly chapters at /NimtheWriter. Also, I post commissioned arts on each story, already posted a few on an Archer's Promise, Broly and Snafu.