Monsters Recognizing Each Other

"But that feeble strength of yours isn't even enough to give me a shoulder massage."

The moment he finished speaking, the fingers of Jiang Bai's right hand twitched slightly inside his pants pocket.

No violent magic power spilled out, and there were no dazzling effects of light or shadow.

Only a barely perceptible ripple appeared in the air.

Laxus's beastlike instincts abruptly sounded their highest alarm. The hair all over his body stood on end, and he forcibly halted his forward attack, stomped on the ground, and used the recoil to shoot back dozens of meters.

Even though he had retreated so decisively, a thin line of blood still appeared on his left cheek without warning.

A few strands of golden hair drifted slowly to the ground.

Crimson beads of blood seeped from the wound, traced his resolute jaw, and dripped onto the charred floorboards.

The hall fell deathly silent.

Wakaba's pipe-bearing hand froze in midair, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.

Macao rubbed his eyes hard, making sure he hadn't seen wrong.

That six-year-old black-haired brat had injured the most terrifying monster of Fairy Tail's new generation so easily, without even taking his hands out of his pockets or moving his feet an inch!

Not only did the kid possess that despair-inducing absolute defense, he also had a spatial attack whose trajectory was completely invisible!

Laxus raised his thumb and rubbed the blood off his cheek. As he looked at the scarlet smear on his fingertip, the irritation in his eyes was instantly replaced by a fanatical will to fight.

"It can ignore physical attacks. No, that's not right!" Laxus looked at the calm-faced Jiang Bai and ventured, "It's probably not just physical attacks."

His lightning-fast charge earlier hadn't worked either, and now the kid could unleash this invisible spatial slash.

The brat standing before him, a head shorter than he was, was no fraud pulling cheap tricks. He was a genuine savage beast disguised as something harmless!

"Interesting!"

Laxus bared his teeth in a fierce, excited grin. The golden lightning around him instantly surged severalfold, and the violent high-voltage current shook the chandelier on the ceiling to pieces.

"It's too cramped in here. I can't let loose! Come outside and fight!"

With a thunderous shout, the blond youth turned into a bolt of blinding lightning, smashed straight through the guild's thick wall, and charged onto the wide street outside.

"I told you we should fight outside. Look what happened. The old man's going to yell at us again."

Jiang Bai looked at the enormous hole in the wall and sighed helplessly before taking his time following him outside.

Only then did the battle truly begin.

For the next full hour, the residents of Magnolia heard thunder rumbling nonstop, even though the sky was clear.

Laxus pushed the speed and destructive power of his Lightning Magic to their limits.

Countless thick spears of lightning rained down from the sky, the raging plasma nearly melting every building in the vicinity.

Like a god commanding lightning, he tirelessly unleashed devastating power, trying to tear through that invisible wall of sighs with absolute firepower.

Jiang Bai, meanwhile, was like a reef battered by the waves for countless years. No matter how fiercely the lightning raged around him, he remained standing in place with both hands in his pockets.

The Limitless Cursed Technique ran at high speed under the relentless bombardment, draining Jiang Bai's less-than-abundant reserves of magic power at a rate that multiplied with every second.

For a body with the bone age of only six, maintaining such an intense spatial defense was as dangerous as walking a tightrope.

But Jiang Bai didn't simply take the beating without fighting back.

His gaze locked onto the golden figure darting through the lightning. Relying on his dynamic vision and combat instincts, both far beyond those of an ordinary person, he precisely caught the brief moment of stiffness whenever Laxus finished an attack.

His fingers made constant, tiny movements inside his pants pockets.

The spatial cuts were like venomous snakes hidden in the void, always striking hard from the trickiest angles at the instant Laxus's previous burst of strength ran out and his next had yet to come.

Rip.

A great gash opened in the finely made leather jacket.

Rip.

A bloody cut appeared on his muscular arm, deep enough to expose the bone.

The longer Laxus fought, the more alarmed he became. No matter how fast his lightning was or how strange the angle of attack, it was forcibly brought to a halt as soon as it came within half a meter of the kid, vanishing without a trace.

Meanwhile, those invisible slashes, whose trajectories he couldn't see at all, slipped through every gap and were impossible to guard against.

If he hadn't relied on his beastlike instincts to dodge vital hits at the last moment, he would probably have been hacked to pieces long ago.

Of course, even if they had actually struck Laxus, he wouldn't have been hacked to pieces. Jiang Bai had already controlled their strength.

Magnolia's wide street had been reduced to a horrifying expanse of scorched earth.

Violent lightning strikes had shattered the smooth bluestone paving, and the air reeked of pungent ozone and burnt wood.

Wakaba held up his pipe, not even noticing that the tobacco had long since gone out, and stared at the ruins before him with his mouth hanging open.

Macao rubbed his eyes even more dramatically, as if trying to determine whether the devastation before him was an illusion.

The guild's mages crowded in front of the enormous hole in the wall, not even daring to breathe too loudly.

At the center of the ruins.

White vapor rose from Laxus's body under the intense heat. The custom-made leather jacket he was so proud of had long since been cut into strips that hung from his muscular frame.

Dozens of long, thin cuts covered the blond youth's arms, thighs, and even his cheeks. Blood ran down the lines of his muscles and pooled in a dark red puddle at his feet.

This was the worst beating he had taken since awakening his magic.

Less than twenty meters away from Laxus.

Jiang Bai remained in the same posture, both hands in his pockets, without a speck of dust on him.

But his young face was utterly bloodless, his temples were covered in fine beads of cold sweat, and even his breathing had grown somewhat irregular.

Keeping Limitless running, even though he had switched it off a few times in between, while constantly looking for openings to unleash spatial cuts, had nearly drained the magic power from his six-year-old body.

Waves of needlelike pain came from deep within his brain, a dire warning that his magic power was about to run dry.

Jiang Bai forcibly suppressed the dizziness rushing to the top of his head and calmly watched the blond youth across from him.

It was about time to bring this battle of attrition to an end.

Laxus gasped for breath, his chest heaving like a worn-out bellows.

He raised the back of his bloodstained hand and roughly wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

The frenzy and contempt had vanished from his unruly eyes, replaced by a mad will to fight born of being driven into a corner.

"Hey, kid."

Laxus's voice was terribly hoarse and thick with the smell of blood.

The blond youth abruptly straightened his back, his legs planted firmly on the charred ground as though they had taken root.

"To push me this far, you monster really do have the right to act arrogant. If you can take this final move of mine, I'll concede this match!"

The moment he finished speaking.

Laxus's body snapped backward, his arms spread wide to either side, and his mouth opened like a black hole to an incredible angle.

Whoosh—

The surrounding air seemed to be sucked in by a gigantic pump, forming a howling vortex visible to the naked eye!

As Laxus inhaled fiercely, his chest expanded to an unbelievable size. The golden arcs around him, which had already dimmed, erupted once more in a fiercer, more primal display!

Blinding lightning compressed and condensed wildly deep in his throat, giving off an aura of destruction that made souls tremble.

The faces of the onlookers, who had been leaning over the edge of the hole to watch, changed instantly.

Macao felt his calves trembling, and his voice shook and went up in pitch.

"What kind of move is that? Lightning Magic doesn't have any way of charging power like that!"

Wakaba seized what little hair he had, his scalp tingling.

"This pressure from his magic power is downright unnatural! It's just like a real magical beast about to unleash dragon breath! Someone's going to die! Someone's definitely going to die!"

"It's fine. I'm here!"