"Fairy… God of Death. How are you here?"
Mard Geer tried to force his usual calm, superior smile onto his face, but the tension underneath it was impossible to hide, and even his voice trembled slightly as he spoke.
Ankh casually tossed the string of severed heads into the sea.
The men had willingly served demons and slaughtered their own kind, so he felt no particular need to treat their remains with respect.
"While your Thought Projection was busy running its mouth, I followed that disgusting presence of yours all the way here."
Being called disgusting yet again made anger flash through Mard Geer's eyes, but unlike with Animus, he didn't dare lash out.
He forced another smile and tried to regain control of the situation.
"If you waste your time fighting me here, your companions back in Stella may not survive."
"You mean that dragon you turned into a demon?" Ankh cracked his knuckles and gave him an almost considerate smile.
"Don't worry. We've got two kids back there whose magic is practically made for dealing with that kind of thing."
He took a step forward.
"What you should be worrying about is whether there'll be enough of you left to send home after I kill you."
Mard Geer's eye twitched.
Then he ran.
There was no hesitation, no attempt to preserve his dignity, and certainly no thought of fighting.
His body exploded into motion as he turned toward the bow and fled the ship at full speed.
In Mard Geer's own mind, this was perfectly rational.
He considered himself the kind of Spriggan who operated from the shadows, defeating enemies through schemes, manipulation, and careful planning rather than brute force.
Trying to fight a man who stood near the ceiling of the world's combat power was not strategy.
It was stupidity.
Unfortunately, Ankh was faster.
Before Mard Geer could properly clear the ship, Ankh's hand shot out and seized his ankle.
He yanked him backward with overwhelming force and slammed him into the deck.
CRACK—!
The supposedly reinforced warship splintered beneath the impact, and Mard Geer crashed through the broken planks into a deep crater in the deck.
He reacted quickly, bracing himself against the wreckage and whipping one leg around toward Ankh's head.
For all his insistence that he was a strategist rather than a frontline fighter—and despite being one of the weaker members of the Spriggan 12 in direct combat—Mard Geer had still been the true ruler of Tartaros.
By Ishgar's standards, his physical strength and combat instincts were terrifying.
Against Ankh, that distinction meant very little.
Close combat was the last place Ankh had any reason to fear him.
Between the divine talent he had inherited from the God of Battle and Technique and a godlike body capable of maintaining tremendous physical output without exhaustion, he caught Mard Geer's counterattack just as easily as the first.
Now Ankh had both ankles.
Then he pulled them apart.
Mard Geer's face went white when he realized exactly where that motion was going.
He hurriedly activated his Curse before Ankh could tear him in half from the groin upward.
Black thorns erupted wildly from the surrounding deck and wrapped toward Ankh, while Mard Geer's own body dissolved into dark plant matter and slipped messily between his fingers.
"Demon Seed Curse!"
Realizing Ankh had absolutely no intention of letting him escape, Mard Geer immediately turned toward the headless corpses scattered across the deck and activated the second Curse Zeref had granted him.
After Mard Geer's promotion from Tartaros into the Spriggan 12, Zeref had given him this ability so that his strength would better meet the Empire's standards.
The principle was simple. Mard Geer could cultivate demonic seeds within his own body and implant them into any mass of flesh, transforming that flesh into demons under his control.
Compared with his original Thorn Curse, Demon Seed was considerably weaker in a direct confrontation, but Mard Geer had never intended to become a straightforward brawler.
For someone who dreamed of becoming the demon operating behind Zeref's throne, an ability that created expendable servants suited him perfectly.
At his command, black seeds rapidly took root inside the corpses of the Black Magic Cult members.
The headless bodies began to move.
One after another, they lurched upright as ghostly skulls of demonic flame formed where their heads had once been.
Their bodies twisted into monstrous shapes before charging Ankh in a pack, while Mard Geer used the distraction to turn and flee across the sea once again.
Ankh watched the grotesque corpses rush toward him and merely raised one fist.
A crimson magic circle unfolded above his knuckles, its intricate patterns glowing with dense, highly refined Magic Power.
As the spell took shape, a strange rule-like radiance spread through the surrounding space.
Mard Geer glanced back while racing across the water and immediately felt his stomach drop.
"That's… Irene's High Enchantment?!"
That magic was practically synonymous with Irene, one of the Empire's Twin Walls.
How the hell had this monster learned it too?
Ankh had no interest in answering.
He extended his hand, and the magic circle spread outward, directly enchanting the space around him with a new property.
"Enchantment—Smelting."
The air distorted beneath a sudden wave of unbearable heat.
For an instant, the surrounding space seemed to become a vision of hell itself, and the demons charging toward Ankh stepped directly into a region hot enough to liquefy steel.
Their bodies began melting almost immediately, collapsing into foul black sludge before the heat intensified again and vaporized even that into drifting smoke.
The entire group of demons was erased by a single spell before any of them could reach him.
Mard Geer sensed every creature he had created vanish at once and sucked in a sharp breath.
Whatever remained of his composure disappeared, and he pushed himself even harder toward the distant Western Continent.
'Run. I have to run!'
That man had become even more vicious than he was six months ago.
Gone was the self-satisfied confidence of the brilliant strategist.
Mard Geer fled like a beaten dog, looking almost exactly like Animus had when Mard Geer mocked him earlier.
But no matter how quickly someone could run on two legs, there were limits to how far that would take them.
Ankh remained standing amid the wreckage of the warship, watching Mard Geer's distant figure race beneath the evening sky.
A faintly cruel smile appeared on his face as he raised one hand toward the horizon.
"At least I'll give you a dignified death."
A crimson magic circle formed again.
This time, brilliant golden patterns appeared within it.
"Master Enchantment…"
Ankh's voice drifted softly across the sea.
"Delete."
There was no explosion.
No flash of destruction.
No dramatic roar.
The crimson-and-gold array silently spread across the region of ocean surrounding Mard Geer, and for several seconds nothing seemed to happen.
Then that section of the world simply ceased to exist.
The current stopped.
Time within the affected region vanished.
Space itself was erased into a featureless void.
Mard Geer's final conscious moment was still occupied with desperately calculating another escape route when his entire body—and the space containing it—was completely deleted.
It was like removing a section from an image and leaving nothing behind, or selecting a paragraph of text and erasing it with a single command.
Mard Geer didn't even have time to activate his own demonic transformation.
One instant he existed.
The next, the world no longer contained him.
Ankh lowered his hand and watched as the surrounding sea returned to normal, waves filling the empty region as though nothing unusual had ever happened.
Mard Geer, however, did not return with it.
This was Ankh's Master Enchantment Magic.
At its highest level, Enchantment was no longer merely about strengthening objects or adding properties to people.
Its central principle was to impose concepts upon nature itself, manipulating the world as though reality were something that could be rewritten.
Irene and Ankh approached that pinnacle in very different ways.
Irene's philosophy was to seize control of natural disasters through Enchantment, wielding phenomena on the scale of falling meteors and celestial calamities.
Every one of her greatest spells carried the spectacle and destructive force of an apocalypse.
Ankh preferred something quieter.
To him, the world resembled a system of rules, and Master Enchantment allowed him to modify those rules almost like altering lines of code.
His techniques lacked some of Irene's overwhelming visual grandeur, but when it came to results…
there was very little to criticize.
Being killed by a spell like that was practically a lavish funeral for Mard Geer.
After more than six months, the only meaningful improvement Mard Geer had gained was Demon Seed.
His direct combat ability had barely advanced at all, leaving him beneath even the current Natsu and Gray as a frontline opponent, much less capable of surviving one of Ankh's finishing moves.
Ankh stretched lazily and glanced over the battlefield he had thoroughly cleaned of both enemies and corpses.
Satisfied, he turned back toward Stella.
'Maybe in your next life, you'll learn not to run your mouth so much.'
Ankh paused.
Then he remembered what he had just done.
'Oh, right.'
Mard Geer's soul had been deleted along with everything else.
There wasn't going to be a next life.
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