Fairy Tail Chapter 410: Memento Mori
We continue the fight between Natsu, Gray and Mard Geer, with the first page recapping last chapter's ending with Natsu and Gray delivering this double-punch that came out of nowhere onto Mard Geer. The next page gives us three redundant panels that establishes that, yes, Rogue, Sting and Jiemma are still down and out, then Mard Geer flies up, thankfully unharmed by the stupid dramatic punch.
It's not that I'm rooting for the bad guy to win here, although I guess I'm sort of am... it's just that if Natsu and Gray are going to win with bullshit random punches and kicks and not do some cool Dragon Force or Ice Devil Slaying Magic thing, they might as well as lose and let someone else take Mard Geer out.
Thankfully, that's not the case. Mard Geer recovers, and despite my worst fears from last chapter, isn't any worse for the wear. We get a couple pages as Natsu does a very basic Fire Dragon's Roar -- a rather moronic move on his part considering he had been fighting with stronger attacks before and didn't manage to do much. Gray does this 'Ice Demon's Rage'... so I guess Devil Slayers do 'rage' as opposed to 'roar' and 'howl' for Dragon Slayers and God Slayers respectively? Whatever. Gray does this big ice thing that Mard Geer just flies past, and Mard Geer summons 'Dea Yggdrasil'. It's like the first thing that Mard Geer has done all this while that doesn't involve thorns or, well, thorns.
Yggdrasil is a giant wooden club that comes down at Natsu and Gray... and the two forget that they're in Fairy Tail and have magic powers and stuff, and instead of doing something fire or ice related, suddenly do a Gomu-Gomu Machine Gun and just... punches the wooden thing to splinters. Which is, to be fair, pretty stupid.
Gray then freezes the remaining splinters and uses Ice Make Gungnir, and it's relatively far larger than when he first uses it against... Ultear, I think? Natsu was hiding inside, though, and we get a gigantic page as Natsu does Brilliant Flame on Mard Geer... and, again, for a moment I was afraid that Mard Geer would be taken out by a bullshit main-character-is-strong logic... especially since Brilliant Flame is, again, one of the earliest, weakest spells in Natsu's arsenal. And that Mard Geer has been so far invincible to everything but Gray's Ice Devil magic, so losing to this would be stupid.
Thankfully Fairy Tail hasn't stooped that far yet, and while we get a dramatic scene where Natsu and Gray stands amidst the windy ruins, Mard Geer just stands up, nonchalant and undamaged. Gray actually brings up that his magic could hurt Mard Geer if it would hit, which is nice. I do like this development -- the heroes are giving their all, and looks several times like they dealt that one hit in mangas that will take out the enemy, but they don't.
Mard Geer then goes off into a monologue, where he goes 'originally magic are one before it branches off into other forms', something we've sort of heard before during the Hades arc. Mard Geer then goes and says how END had created Curses, and how it's based on actual negative emotions or something, and how negative emotions will make them stronger. Natsu does this 'magic will create the future' bullshit line of dialogue, but Mard Geer, awesome no-nonsense villain that he is, just summons what seems to be a mist that envelops Natsu and Gray and stops them from moving.
Mard Geer boasts on how Curses are superior to magic in all aspects, and claims that this is the ultimate curse he had developed to use on Zeref, 'the Memory of Death, Memento Mori'. It's a giant... dark-coloured twister-pillar-thing made up of screaming faces, which looks pretty neat, I guess, even if it's not anything we haven't seen before in Fairy Tail. Mard Geer then elaborates on what Memento Mori is, how it can cause people to vanish and making it usable against the immortal Zeref. Mard Geer then claims that with that, the future is 'nothing', and apparently Natsu and Gray disappear. Mard Geer disengages his Etherious Form, and claims that with this curse, once END is revived, he'll kill Zeref.
It's overall a pretty good fight, and not just because Natsu and Gray apparently lose... it's because it actually makes sense for once, how Mard Geer has been built up to be this super-awesome indestructible demon, and how everyone is basically wounded and whatnot. In the main characters' defense, they did pull off a pretty impressive fight, doing that Gungnir combination thing, and it's certainly leaps and bounds better than the Erza-versus-Kyouka fight which is one of the worst fights I've seen in manga. I'm just worried that next chapter will feature Natsu and Gray returning from whatever purgatory Mard Geer has sent them to (because, you know, they will) and just ending Mard Geer then and there because he disengaged his Etherious Form. Certainly hope this doesn't happen.
I mean, we've still got Igneel and Lumen Histoire, either of which could be a massive game-breaker, but I don't think Natsu and Gray should win unless they get some serious power-up between now and their rematch against Mard Geer... or if they'll even have a rematch against Mard Geer. For all I know, Makarov, or Laxus, or Gildarts or whoever could come and pick up where they left off. And there's still END, Face, Zeref and Acnologia to contend with on the bad guys' side, and I'm relatively annoyed that all of these more important things have been sidelined only to give Kyouka and Erza that pointless rematch, and for Jiemma to be a distraction for a grand total of two chapters -- there literally was no point to Jiemma's arrival, and there's no reason why Mard Geer can't just take out all four of the good guys at once other than to drag this on and on as humanly possible.
Still, the last few chapters have been certainly entertaining, if not really special, so I'm still looking forward to when they start dealing with the actually interesting stuff. Like Igneel. And Acnologia. And END. And Lumen Histoire.
No comments:
Post a Comment