I woke with the feeling that something was terribly, irrevocably wrong.
It wasn't a sound that stirred me from the heavy sleep I had fallen into on that uncomfortable bench. It was the exact opposite. It was the absence of it. The silence. An unnatural, heavy, and suffocating silence, as if someone had placed the entire world under a vacuum dome. The crickets that had been chirping their nightly melody had fallen silent. The distant murmur of the lively music from the casino had ceased. Even the constant, reassuring sound of the waves breaking on the beach seemed to have been swallowed by some invisible and hungry force.
And then, came the darkness. Absolute.
The colourful lights of the square, the paper lanterns swaying on the wires, the illuminated fountain that danced, the decorative posts that guided the resort's paths. They all flickered once, in an agonising spasm, twice, and then died simultaneously. As if a giant hand, with fingers of shadow, had simply… snuffed everything out, plunging the tropical paradise into an impenetrable blackness.
(How overly dramatic,) was my first thought, an automatic critique of the perpetrator's style.
I sat up on the bench, my entire body instantly tense, all my senses on high alert, sharpened by millennia of survival instinct. My wolf ears, sensitive to every change in air pressure, swivelled, trying to catch any sound, any movement, any breath that was not my own. The air was different. Charged. There was something in it, a residual energy, that irritated me on an almost primal level. An ancient, unpleasant, and terribly familiar sensation. That of dirty and malevolent magic.
(Eos. Situation. What is happening?)
[Detecting a large-scale energy anomaly, Azra'il,] her voice sounded in my mind, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I detected an unmistakable urgency in her usually monotonous tone, something that made me raise an eyebrow in the darkness. [A wave of darkness magic has been released. Primary effect: neutralisation of all magical and electrical light sources in a considerable radius. Origin of the emanation: the area of the resort's main casino.]
(Darkness magic? Seriously? Someone is using a spell so… cliché in the middle of a holiday resort? What a lack of originality.)
[Affirmative. And that is not all. I am detecting multiple hostile magical signatures being activated simultaneously in the same casino area. A coordinated attack.]
(Marvellous. Simply an endless marvel. I take a one-hour nap, and the world, predictably, decides to catch fire and end. Literally.)
I was already on my feet before she had finished speaking. Multiple magical signatures. At the casino. Where I was almost certain that Erza, Lucy, and the rest of that noisy circus would probably be.
(How long was I asleep, Eos?)
[Approximately one hour, thirty-seven minutes, and fourteen seconds. Sufficient time for a group of mages with ill intentions to infiltrate, establish a perimeter, and initiate an offensive,] she informed, always precise, always irritating.
(Sufficient time for those idiots to find trouble, you mean. Of course. Why would I even expect anything different? It was obvious.)
The amusement park, ahead of me, was unrecognisable, a graveyard of joy. Where before there had been dancing colourful lights, distant music sounding, and the cheerful buzz of tourists enjoying the evening, there was now only darkness. A dense, almost solid darkness, that seemed to swallow even the faint light of the stars above, as if a piece of the void itself had fallen upon the resort.
(Whoever did this clearly has an exaggerated sense of drama. And very, very bad timing. They interrupted my sleep,) I thought, starting to walk.
My feet made not the slightest sound against the cold stones of the path. Years of training, entire lifetimes of practice in the art of being a shadow, had taught me to move in absolute silence when necessary. Not that I was particularly worried about who might be lurking. If someone, in their infinite stupidity, wanted to attack me in that darkness, let them come. I was in a terrible mood for having been woken up, and I would love to have a convenient target to take it out on.
The Ferris wheel, which hours ago had been turning majestically, a kaleidoscope of lights against the sky, was now still. Motionless. A black, skeletal silhouette against the firmament, like the carcass of a prehistoric creature. (It looks like a scene from a cheap horror film. Low-budget. All that's missing is the sinister music with lots of out-of-tune violins and a child humming something disturbing in Latin.)
[Shall I provide an appropriate soundtrack to enhance the mood? I have access to several lullabies from extinct civilisations that are considered… unsettling,] Eos offered.
(Eos, if you even think of humming anything, I swear by all the forgotten gods that I will format you and install an operating system that only plays lift music.)
The roller coaster, which hours ago had roared with the screams of its passengers (and with the laments of a certain Dragon Slayer), was silent. The empty tracks snaked in the darkness like the exposed bones of some ancient and colossal creature. Poetic. And deeply irritating. The hotel, ahead of me, rose like a monolith of shadows, its elegant towers now looking like claws pointed at the sky.
The automatic entrance doors were open. Not partially. Completely open, locked in position. An invitation.
(Very inviting. Nothing suspicious. Absolutely no sign that this is an obvious and poorly-conceived trap.)
I went in anyway. Traps were for people who could be caught in them. The main lobby was a cavern of darkness and silence. The crystal chandeliers, which should have been shining, were unlit, hanging from the ceiling like dead glass spiders. The reception desk was empty. Papers were still scattered. A cup of tea was still steaming slightly beside an open book. As if whoever was there had simply… evaporated. In the middle of a task.
[As I suspected, Azra'il. The life signatures in the building are scarce. Far below what is expected. Most of the remaining vital energy sources are concentrated… in the casino.]
(Where, coincidentally, all the hostile magical signatures are also being activated. What a surprise.)
I quickened my pace, the sound echoing on the marble. I passed the main restaurant. Tables set, plates half-eaten, wine glasses spilt like blood on white tablecloths. A scene of a hasty escape.
I turned the corner that led to the casino. And then, without warning, the lights came back on. All at once, in a sudden burst of brightness that blinded me for an instant.
[The darkness spell has been dispelled. Whatever the confrontation was, it is already over, Azra'il. The hostile magical signatures I was detecting ceased approximately seven minutes ago,] Eos informed.
(Seven minutes. Too late for the party, too early to help with the clean-up. Perfect.)
And then, I reached the casino. Or, to be more precise, what was left of it. The scene was… a monumental mess. (Well. Someone's been busy.) Slot machines toppled, gutted, their metallic innards scattered. Poker tables overturned. Broken chairs. Glass all over the floor. (Natsu. Definitely, Natsu had a special part in this.)
And almost no one in sight. It was then that I felt a familiar signature. Under a pile of rubble.
I ran over there just as the pile exploded from the inside out. And from the midst of the destruction, Natsu Dragneel emerged, his eyes flaming with fury.
"WHERE IS HE?!" he roared to the empty air. "GET BACK HERE, YOU SQUARE BASTARD!"
(Square bastard? That's… creatively specific.)
"Natsu!" I called. He turned, still in combat mode. "Azra'il? Where were you?!"
"Taking a nap. In peace… until the world decided to fall apart," I replied, irritated. "What happened here?"
"A bloke! A square bloke! His body turned into blocks! And he had a magic gun!" He gestured, exasperated. "And then suddenly everything went dark, you couldn't see ANYTHING, and when the light came back, he was gone!"
(Square bloke. Block magic. And darkness magic. A coordinated group.)
"Natsu," my voice came out sharper. "Where is Happy? And Erza?"
He opened his mouth to answer, but stopped. His eyes widened. "Happy? He was with me… when the bloke showed up, and then… then…" The delayed realisation of the real danger hit him. "Erza… Erza and Lucy were over there, I think, before everything went dark…"
I didn't wait for him to finish. My blood ran cold. I was already running through the destroyed casino, leaping over debris, my heart, that stupid organ, pounding in my throat.
(Please. Please let me be wrong.)
[Azra'il, I am detecting a vital signature approximately twenty metres to your left. Pattern consistent with Lucy Heartfilia,] Eos said, her voice an anchor of logic in my growing panic.
I turned sharply and saw her.
Lucy. On the floor, bound by glowing magic ropes that tightened around her like living serpents, writhing in pain. Around her, dozens of playing cards were scattered, and inside each card, a person's face was frozen in terror. (Card magic. Containment magic. They weren't just attacking. They were kidnapping.)
In a fluid movement, I took out my wooden jian, the blade glowing with a soft light as magic flowed through it. One precise cut and the ropes dissolved into threads of light.
"A-Azra'il!" she gasped, coughing, desperately drawing breath. "You… Erza…"
"Calm down, Lucy. Breathe." I held her shoulders. "Tell me what happened."
She grabbed my arm too tightly, as if letting go would bring the night back.
"They… they appeared out of nowhere," she stammered, tears beginning to stream. "Four of them. One who shot blocks, a woman with cat ears who tied me up… one who made everything go dark… and a blonde one who trapped everyone in these cards…" She was trembling, her eyes going to the cards scattered on the floor, to the horrified faces trapped inside them. "They said… they said they were Erza's childhood friends. That they had come… to get her. And Erza… she was in shock when she saw them. She called them by their names… Shô… Millianna… Wally… Simon…"
The world stopped.
No.
Shô. Millianna. Wally. Simon.
The names. The children. My cellmates. The ghosts that Erza and I had left behind.
"She knew them, Azra'il," Lucy continued, her voice becoming a distant sound, each word a knife in my chest. "And they… they took her. They said something about a tower… about a reunion… about her finally… coming home."
A tower. Coming home. The Tower of Heaven. The hell we had built with our own blood-stained hands. The hell we had escaped from. And now… now, they had taken her back to that cursed place. And Happy… they must have taken him too.
(If I hadn't been such an idiot… We wouldn't have argued over something so stupid… If I had been with her… she wouldn't have been alone… she needed me… and I wasn't there… I WASN'T THERE.)
Guilt, cold and corrosive, flooded my veins, erasing everything except a single, terrible certainty.
"Azra'il?" Lucy's voice sounded distant, frightened. "What… what's happening to you? Th-the lights are flickering again…"
What was making the lights flicker was me.
The first sign was the floor. The marble floor beneath my feet didn't just crack; it exploded in a web of fractures that spread out in all directions, as if the earth itself were fleeing from my fury.
The second sign was the air. The temperature plummeted, the tropical heat giving way to an icy, cutting cold that made your breath condense in the air.
And then, the third sign. The fire. Not Natsu's red fire. Not ordinary fire. Blue flames, ethereal and terrible, erupted around me, licking the floor and the walls like furious ghosts. Silver sparks crackled in the air, charged with a power that made space itself vibrate.
And the pressure. The magical pressure emanating from me was crushing, suffocating. The kind of force that makes your bones ache, your lungs refuse to work, and every primal instinct scream to run and never look back.
"I… I can't… breathe…" Lucy was on her knees, struggling not to faint under the weight of my aura.
Near her, Natsu, who had approached to protect her, was also on his knees, sweat pouring down his face, trembling. He tried to light a flame in his hand, and it died before it was born, suffocated by my presence. He, the Dragon Slayer of fire, struggling against a force he did not understand.
"Azra… il…" he managed to growl. "What… the devil… are you…?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because, at that moment, I was no longer just Azra'il Weiss. I was something more. Something older. Vaster. And infinitely more terrible. The chains had broken. And what was free now… had no more patience.
The blue flames around me exploded upwards with a silent roar, piercing what was left of the casino's ceiling as if it were made of tissue paper, shooting towards the night sky in a column of cold light, so intense it turned the dark night into a blinding day.
I finally moved. I turned slowly to look at them, at Natsu, on his knees, struggling to breathe, his dragon's strength proving useless against mine. At Lucy, prostrate on the floor, trembling with a terror she had never felt before.
And what they saw in my eyes… What they saw in my face… It was no longer the Azra'il they knew. It was no longer the sarcastic, lazy guildmate who loved to escape work for a cup of tea. It was no longer the mysterious mage who told tasteless jokes and teased everyone with an amused glint in her eyes.
What they saw at that moment was something primordial. Something that existed before dragons, before demons, before the very gods that mortals worshipped. Something that had walked through worlds that no longer had names and that had witnessed the destruction of civilisations that history, in its infinite ignorance, had completely forgotten.
What they saw, for the first time, without masks, without restraint, without disguises… was the White Wolf. The real one. The ancestral predator.
And the sight was, for them, understandably, terrifying.
"They took her," I said. And my voice… my voice was no longer mine. It was a resonance of ages, a harmony of a thousand voices, of a thousand lives. It was deeper. Older. Laden with the echoes of a thousand deaths and a thousand battles fought in worlds that these poor mortals before me couldn't even imagine. It was the sound of mountains turning to dust. Of oceans boiling to the last drop. Of stars dying in a silent sigh.
"Took her… where?" Natsu managed to ask, his voice hoarse, almost a whisper, barely able to form the words under the crushing pressure.
"To the Tower of Heaven."
The flames around me, as if responding to the mention of that cursed name, pulsed, and began to change. The ethereal blue lightened, purified, until it became an incandescent white. Pure. Absolute. Like the heart of a star about to explode.
"I am going to that tower," I continued, and every word made the air tremble, made the flames pulse. "I will find every one of those lost children who dared to touch her. Every person who hurt her. Every person who made her feel fear again. Every person who dared to think they could take from me the only person who still makes me feel alive."
The flames around me concentrated, solidified, forming behind me the ethereal shadow of a colossal wolf, the size of a mountain, a creature made of pure starlight and an ancestral fury. Its eyes, two twin moons of white fire, opened, and the weight of its gaze made the very air vibrate.
The remaining windows of the casino, which had survived the previous battle, exploded outwards, all at the same time, a shower of glass that was immediately vaporised by my flames before it even touched the ground. The wind howled, drawn by the vacuum of power I was creating, a wind that served my fury. The sky above us, already illuminated by my pillar of fire, seemed to lighten even more, as if the night itself were retreating before my light.
"And when I find them…" I took a step forward, and the ground where my foot touched disintegrated, turning to dust and light. "…I will make every miserable second of the rest of their pathetic existences an eternal reminder of the colossal mistake they made by touching my little red."
"I will destroy that tower," I declared, and my voice was thunder, an earthquake, the roar of a predator that had finally been awakened and would not rest until its prey was annihilated. "I will reduce it to dust, to ash, to nothing. I will erase even the memory of its existence from the face of this world. And if hell itself, or heaven, or any stupid god tries to stop me…"
The wolf of blue flames behind me opened its mouth and roared. And it was not a sound. It was a force. A wave of pure light and pressure that swept away what was still standing in the casino, that tore off the last pieces of the ceiling, that made the remaining walls crumble, that turned that place of luxury and sin into absolute ruins in a single, devastating instant.
And in the midst of that destruction, in the midst of that miniature apocalypse that was just a prelude to my fury, I finished my promise.
"…I will destroy hell too."