Fairy Tail: Swallow the Fire

47. The Strength of a Devil

A/N: 4656 words instead of the usual 1000. I was umm, feeling inspired towards the latter half.

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Leviathan's Blood.

Captain Ophelia made those of us who studied medicine under her read about it intensively, mostly because a nationwide manhunt was occurring through the efforts of the Royal Army and Magic Council and all civil militia were called to participate should it be detected.

The drug itself was a product of alchemy, structurally similar to Phencyclidine, or PCP. The red tint from the powder earned its name Leviathan's Blood, a play on PCP's street name of Angel Dust.

At first, it was only treated as a variant of the drug, but as time went on the dangers of it became fully known. It didn't flush out of the system the way Angel Dust did, instead it acted more like LSD, coating the nervous system.

But unlike LSD, where you actively become more resistant to the drug's effects with repeated uses, Leviathan's Blood became stronger with repeated uses. It slowly suffused the user's nerves, seeping into them and filtering the effects in a way that increased the potency.

The average effects of PCP became more pronounced. It stopped just being a cocktail of stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and analgesics. It became a mutagenic.

It would twist and malform the abuser's bodily structure in an effort to make them more susceptible to the drug's increasingly heightened effects.

But the effects would wear off.

And so they'd keep taking it.

Inevitably, the difference between their sober selves and their self on Leviathan's Blood is too drastic for their psyche to think of any other alternative than to give this new self a separate identity. This identity would alter the mutations, the drug leeching off their subconscious in a way that baffles even the contracted alchemist from the country of Guiltina the crown and council hired to study it.

What previously could have been a twitching mess of muscle, bones, and nerves in the malformed imitation of a human would gain a retained shape. They could be more beautiful if they sought the sexual highs of the drug, their figure could gain an even stranger twist if they took it for the hallucinogenic effects.

But the most dangerous ones were those that drew pleasure from the feeling of invincibility.

Enhanced musculature, the inability to feel pain, and the constant euphoria that rushed through their minds made them into terrifying beasts in a fight. Even more so, the stronger their identity was.

The continental-wide hunt for the drug had died down within half a year of its start. The fear of the crown and councils' boots bursting down your door and the sheer dedication they had to hunt it down left and willing to sell it before willingly reporting the suppliers to the nearest Rune Knight.

Still, there was never any public report stating that they found the source of the drug. There was just a sudden stop in their distribution altogether.

Himura only ever had one case of a Leviathan's Blood user: Ito Himari.

This was before I had joined the guard myself as the Captain's ward. They had apparently managed to get her clean before it got too far, but it left a stain on one of the Elite's name.

Ito Daisuke was a good man and regularly sparred with Totomaru to see who was the better swordsman. Samurai versus ninja. But he was also the first of the guards to be killed by my mother the night HImura fell.