By the time they had traded a hundred punches, the rhythm of the fight had changed into something neither of them was consciously directing anymore. The counting had stopped mattering. Each exchange led directly into the next, and the intensity between them kept climbing with a momentum of its own.
Pure punching stopped being enough somewhere around the sixtieth or seventieth exchange. It happened naturally, both of them expanding the vocabulary at roughly the same moment, straight punches giving way to hooks and uppercuts, footwork appearing, then kicks entering the mix. Front kicks, side kicks, a roundhouse here and there, the full range of close-quarters combat opening up between them as the distance closed further and further.
The bruises were already showing on both of them.
Gildarts took a left hook across the cheek and his head snapped sideways. When it came back, the swelling was already visible.
"Don't hit my face!"
"You hit mine first!"
Noah had a bruise developing above his right eye that suggested this complaint was not without basis.
Gildarts had the expression of a man who had been caught but intended to brazen through it.
"That was an accident."
"I don't believe that for a single second."
They looked at each other for one moment of complete mutual understanding, and then both of them threw right hooks at the other's face simultaneously.
Gildarts caught Noah's right with his left hand.
Noah caught Gildarts's right with his left hand.
"I knew it," Gildarts said, breathing out.
"You're just as bad," Noah said, gripping the fist in his hand.
"Hahahaha."
The laugh was awkward in a way that was essentially a confession. They released each other's hands at the same time and went back to fighting, and this time the unspoken agreement between them was that faces were apparently valid targets.
The next few minutes addressed this thoroughly. By the time they separated on a mutual knee strike that met in mid-air with a crack that pushed both of them back several steps, both of their faces had achieved a quality that was best described as sculptural.
Noah put a hand to his cheek, felt the throbbing, and made a decision.
"Attach: Self-Healing Ability Enhancement."
The magic settled over him and the swelling began its slow retreat.
"Hey." Gildarts pointed at his own face, which had developed topography. "Do me too."
Noah looked at him.
"I think it suits you," he said. Then he clapped both hands together.
"Ice-Make: Ice God Spear."
The magic circle that opened behind him was large, and what came out of it was larger. A spear of ice, massive in both length and diameter, shot out toward Gildarts with a speed that didn't match its size.
Gildarts chose not to move. He set his feet, gathered magic into his right fist, and met it head-on.
The standoff was brief. The spear was powerful. Gildarts was more powerful. After a few seconds of the ice holding against the Crush, the structure gave way and the spear came apart in fragments, but the force behind it had done its work. Gildarts absorbed it but gave ground, his feet carving lines in the ice as the energy pushed him back.
He came to a stop and looked up.
The ice dragon was already in the air.
Noah had been building it while the spear bought the time he needed. Tens of meters long, the form of it assembled from the traditional description with the kind of precision that came from having built this particular construct enough times to do it without thinking. Horns like a deer, head like a camel, eyes like a rabbit, neck like a snake, belly like a clam, scales like a fish, claws like an eagle, paws like a tiger, ears like an ox. The whole thing moving through the air toward Gildarts with the weight and intention of something alive.
Gildarts's expression changed when he felt it.
The spear had been strong. This was different. This had depth behind it that the spear hadn't had, a density of magical force that told him before impact that he was dealing with a significantly different order of construct.
He gathered magic into his right hand and punched into it.
The collision threw wind in every direction at once. The ice beneath the impact point fractured immediately, and beneath Gildarts's feet the surface buckled, sinking him several inches into a crater of his own making as the force from above pushed down through the exchange. Ice fragments scattered outward from the collision zone in a wide radius.
They held each other for a second. Then two. Then Gildarts dug deeper into his reserves and pushed more into the fist.
The dragon broke.
It didn't collapse gradually. It came apart under the Crush, the structural integrity dissolving from the point of contact outward, fragments getting smaller until they were powder and then nothing. Gildarts stood in the crater he'd made and looked up.
Noah's magic power was already different.
It wasn't a visual thing exactly, though there was something visual about it. It was more a pressure on the air, a change in the quality of the space around Noah that signaled the kind of buildup that preceded something significantly larger than what had come before. The overflowing magic was converting itself into wind at the edges, and that wind was reaching Gildarts's position with enough force to push against him.
Gildarts set himself and started building in response. The winds generated by their respective buildups collided between them, the air itself becoming turbulent from competing magical pressure, the ice underfoot vibrating in a continuous low frequency.
At the far end of the platform, the watching crowd felt the pressure arrive like something physical and their expressions changed uniformly.
Even Natsu had gone quiet.
"Ice-Make: Ice Giant."
The ground beneath Noah's feet split open.
The head came up first. Then the neck, thick as a building. Then the shoulders, then the torso, then the arms, each segment rising from the ice as though assembled from below. It kept going. The full height of the thing was somewhere above a hundred meters, a colossal humanoid form built from solid ice, its surface catching the light from the open sky in every direction. Noah stood at its crown, elevated far above the ice field, looking down at Gildarts from a height that made Gildarts look very small.
The guild members at the far end of the platform did not need enhanced senses to see this. It was visible regardless.
Ur was the first one to say something.
"He's found his own form in Ice-Make," she said, her voice carrying a quiet conviction that wasn't quite admiration and wasn't quite surprise. It was recognition. "He's moved into a different stage with this magic."
Lyon was standing nearby, and the expression on his face was doing several things at once, none of them simple.
He was roughly one year younger than Noah. He had been studying Ice-Make since before Noah had started. He had been considered skilled, had carried the certainty of someone who knew they were better than most, had built his self-image around that knowledge. That certainty had been systematically dismantled over the years, beaten out by losses to Erza, to Mirajane, to Ultear, by the consistent and unavoidable reality of being surrounded by people who were better than him, some of them significantly better.
He had made his peace with it, more or less. He had become humble in the specific way you become humble when you have no practical choice but to be humble. He had watched Ur keep developing at a pace that should not have been possible for someone who had been frozen for years. He had watched Gray get knocked down and get back up and keep going without complaint.
He had accepted all of it.
But he was looking at an ice construct more than a hundred meters tall that moved with the fluidity of something alive, and the largest thing he could build reliably was an ice spear of about fifteen meters.
"Are we actually practicing the same magic?" he said. He wasn't really asking anyone.
"I stopped being surprised by it a long time ago," Gray said, from his left. "I've been hit enough times to stop having expectations."
He didn't sound bitter. He sounded like someone describing a process they had genuinely internalized. Noah's existence had recalibrated Gray's sense of scale entirely, and he had stopped fighting that recalibration and just accepted it as useful information about the world.
Ultear turned to Ur.
"Could you do that?"
Ur considered the structure above them carefully.
"The form, yes. The scale at that quality, not currently. My reserves aren't there for something this extravagant." She paused. "And it's not my style. My framework is already built. I can add things to it, refine edges, but restructuring around something this size-dependent would mean starting over, and there's no reason to."
She looked at the Ice Giant with the professional attention of someone assessing another practitioner's work.
"He's found something that fits him specifically. That's what makes it this strong."
"It's starting again," Ur said, shifting her focus.
The crowd went quiet and locked onto the scene ahead of them.
Gildarts was looking up at the Ice Giant's raised right hand with the expression of a man calculating exactly how much this was going to cost him, gathering everything he had.
The fist came down.
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