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Kazuma feels the flare of Shimano’s enchantment reasserting control over Majima in the middle of their conversation before it tears through Majima like a hurricane, and Majima’s knees give out. He hits the forest floor with a heavy thump, trying to contain his agonized whimper with gritted teeth.
The force of it slams into Kazuma’s temple like the first gut punch of a migraine. It rattles his teeth and turns his stomach, and he can almost smell something rotting. It's nothing like Majima’s magic; even when he's slinging tornadoes of fire, his power thrums under Kazuma’s skin like an affectionate caress.
But this – this is like a poison thunderclap, and it crashes through them both again, and this time, Majima screams until unconsciousness silences him. And it shatters Kazuma.
A dragon roars in Kazuma’s ears, and blue glows at the edges of his vision as his entire body is enveloped by arcane fire. The blue flames rage in time with his heart as an ancient wellspring of power floods through him, and he should be terrified, but he's not, he's reeling with inexplicable deja vu, as though he recognizes what is coursing through him, as though it is burning away stagnation in corners of his body and mind that he hadn't even known existed.
He hears that dragon roar again and understands one thing with more clarity than he has ever understood anything: whatever this is, it recognizes him.
Then, as he approaches Majima’s collapsed form, he sees it – the enchantment that keeps Majima shackled in the prison of Shimano’s commands. It's a complex web of intricately woven strands of white light, each of them an unending series of delicate glyphs strung together, each one foundational to the next and the one before, a flawless masterpiece of coercion. The strands float out behind Majima’s body and then seem to fade, a literal leash extending in Shimano’s direction, but there is no point of entry, no weak link, no loose thread to begin the unraveling.
Kazuma looks for all the points on Majima’s body where Shimano anchored his enchantment – one at each temple, seven around his throat, and forty-two down the long column of his spine – and his stomach turns. He is close enough to feel Shimano’s power pulsing through them, and it's suffocating.
Kazuma does not have a naturally deft touch. He never has. In battle, he carves through hordes of enemies with all the subtlety and grace of a battering ram. Unraveling the layers and tripwires and safeguards of this enchantment would take a patient dexterity that is utterly beyond his abilities.
So he doesn't bother trying.
He gathers all the strands into a single bundle, feeling the glyphs against his skin like links in a chain, and the dragon roars as the power rises in him like an inexorable, unstoppable force of nature.
He tightens his hand into a fist, crushing the strands, and watches the enchantment snap, crumbling into fragments like dust which fall to the grass under his feet and wink out of existence.
He kneels next to Majima and gently touches the places where Shimano had tied the enchantment to his body, visible to him only now with this unexplainable power, rubbing away the anchor points like he wipes blood off Majima’s face after they spar.
It's gone. There's not a trace of Shimano’s control left on Majima.
Kazuma shudders with relief, exhaling heavily, feeling the surging power inside of him slowly ebb, the arcane fire fading with it, until both are little more than incoherent whispers in the back of his mind, continuing to get quieter and quieter until they were gone, leaving bone-deep exhaustion in their wake.
He sits flat on the ground, shoulders slumped, and carefully moves Majima onto his back and rests Majima’s head on his lap. He doesn't know how much time passes until Majima’s eyes flutter open.
“Kiryu-chan,” he says, voice groggy and loose.
“Niisan,” he answers quietly.
Majima thinks about it, and his brows furrow. “You smell,” he says, scrunching up his nose, bleary and disoriented. “Kinda like magic, kinda dusty, kinda burnt. Smells like that time you dodged into one of my fireballs.”
“Hm, I didn't realize.”
“Kiryu-chan?”
“Hm?”
“Why do you smell like old, fucked up, magic?”
“I'm –”
“And why the fuck can't I feel Shimano’s leash on me anymore?”
“I broke it.”
“... Haw?”
“I broke it,” Kazuma says. “I don't know how. You just - it hurt you, and you screamed, and I was so scared and so angry, and something came over me and I could see the enchantment. I just, I don't know, it looked impossible to untangle and I didn't know where to start, and I thought breaking the chains of glyphs would be faster anyway, so I did. And I made sure there wasn't anything left stuck to you, too. And then whatever let me do that just… faded away. I can't even feel it anymore. I don't know what happened.”
Majima stares up at him, expression flashing between alarm, shock, and bewilderment. “Ya serious?”
Kazuma nods.
Majima manages to sit up with a few grunts of effort, rubbing his face with a hand as he squirms to turn around and look at Kazuma. Majima drops his hand and looks directly into Kazuma’s eyes, his eye hard. Kazuma wonders if he should apologize or something, but unless breaking the enchantment has hurt Majima somehow, he's not sorry, so he doesn't.
“Ya really – ?” Majima’s voice breaks.
“Yes,” Kazuma whispers.
“I owe ya one,” Majima rasps, shutting his eye and pressing a hand to it to try and stop the tears that Kazuma can already see sliding down his face. “I really – I owe ya.”
“No, you don't,” Kazuma says, with the impulse to reach out and touch him, to pull him close and let his touch be an assurance that it's really over. “You don't owe me anything.”
“Fuck off, Kiryu-chan, I owe ya pretty fuckin’ big for this.”
Kazuma gives in to the impulse, at least enough to let himself touch Majima’s knee gently. “No, you don't.”
Majima mumbles something – Kazuma thinks it sounds like another “fuck off” – but doesn't argue further. He just falls apart with the weight of the end of nearly a decade of Shimano’s keeping him leashed like a dog.
Kazuma knows they will need to move. Surely Shimano knows already that Majima is free. Majima will need to disappear and most likely for years. Maybe until Shimano finally dies. But they do have time until they will have to gather supplies for Majima to escape with, and Kazuma thinks letting Majima weep and bearing witness to Majima’s grief and relief is important. So he sits quietly next to him, hand steady on his knee, content to wait until Majima is done.