Something changed in Erza the day after we walked out of Makarov’s study.
I couldn’t point to the exact moment it happened — there wasn’t a dramatic speech, no single line that flipped a switch — but she woke up that morning and it was like watching someone put on a piece of armor that had nothing to do with requip magic.
Straighter spine.
Sharper eyes.
The kind of walk that suggested she’d assigned herself a job nobody else had actually given her, and fully intended to perform it whether the guild wanted her to or not.
She’s decided she’s responsible for something, big brother observed, the way he tended to when he’d noticed a thing before I had and wanted credit for it.
Responsible for what, exactly?
Watch and find out, kid.
I watched.
It took about four hours.
“Gray.” Gray, halfway through a completely unprovoked argument with Cana about whether his shirt had been on when he sat down at breakfast, turned around to find Erza standing behind him with her arms crossed and an expression that would have made a Wizard Saint reconsider their life choices.
“…Yeah?” “Your shirt.” He looked down.
It was, predictably, gone.
“That happens on its own, I don’t even—” “Discipline,” Erza said, already requipping a training sword into her hand with the calm, unhurried motion of someone who had clearly rehearsed this exact scenario in her head at some point during the night, “is a habit.
Habits are built through consequences.” “Wait, hold on—” She hit him.
Not hard enough to actually injure him — I want to be fair to her, she never once actually hurt Gray beyond what his pride could survive — but hard enough that he yelped and toppled backward off the bench, and hard enough that the entire hall went dead silent for a second before dissolving into laughter.
“There is no rule against being shirtless in the guild hall!” Gray shouted, from the floor.
“There should be,” Erza said, already walking away, sword vanishing back into her requip space like she hadn’t just bodily assaulted a fellow guild member over a wardrobe malfunction.
“I am instituting one.
Effective immediately.” That was, as far as I can tell, the exact birth of what the rest of the guild started calling — quietly, and never within actual earshot of Erza herself — the Discipline Committee.
Membership: one.
Erza Scarlet, self-appointed, unelected, and completely immune to anyone’s attempts to explain that this was not, in fact, a real institution.
Gray bore the brunt of it, mostly because Gray’s magic came with the unfortunate side effect of frequently removing his own clothes as a byproduct, which meant he violated Erza’s completely invented dress code roughly nine times a day without any actual intent behind it.
“It’s not my fault,” he tried to explain to her, maybe two weeks into this new regime, hands raised in the universal gesture of a man who had given up trying to win.
“It just happens.
I don’t even notice half the time.” “Then notice,” Erza said, and hit him again.
By the end of the first month, Gray had developed what I can only describe as a full-body flinch response to Erza simply turning her head in his general direction — a flinch that had nothing to do with actual fear of injury and everything to do with something deeper and more thoroughly beaten into his subconscious.
He started keeping a spare shirt in his back pocket at all times that he always lost together with his pants .
He started checking his own clothing status roughly every ninety seconds like a man with a tic.
Once, Macao said Erza’s name completely unrelated to Gray at all, and Gray flinched so hard he knocked over his own drink.
“You’ve traumatized him,” I told her, watching Gray dive behind a table the moment she walked in one afternoon.
“I’ve disciplined him.” “He hides from you now.” “Discipline is sometimes uncomfortable,” she said, entirely unbothered, and went back to her lunch.
Poor kid never stood a chance, big brother said, sounding far too entertained by all of this for someone who claimed to care about my wellbeing on a regular basis.
She’s going to end up running this entire guild by the time she’s fifteen.
I look forward to it, honestly.
Terrifying woman.
Excellent instincts.
My own months looked considerably less entertaining, and considerably more like slow, grinding suffering.
Physical training had never actually been my weak point, even in my old life — I could show up to a gym, put in the work, build the muscle, no problem.
Cardio, on the other hand, had always been the one thing I’d successfully avoided for the entirety of two separate lifetimes now, right up until Erza decided, sometime in that first month of her Discipline Committee era, that my training regimen was insufficiently thorough and appointed herself in charge of fixing that too.
“We’re running,” she announced, one morning, appearing at my door at an hour that should have been illegal.
“Running where.” “Everywhere.
For two hours.” “I don’t run.” “You do now.” I did, in fact, now run, whether I wanted to or not, because arguing with an eleven-year-old who could requip a sword faster than I could finish a sentence turned out to be a losing strategy roughly one hundred percent of the time.
She ran her own endurance drills first, a brutal two-hour circuit around the training yard and the edge of town that she performed with the same grim, methodical focus she applied to everything else these days, and then — because apparently my suffering wasn’t optional either — she came and dragged me through my own considerably more pathetic version of the same thing.
This is agony, I informed big brother, somewhere around the forty-minute mark of the third week, lungs on fire, legs refusing to cooperate with basic instructions.
You’ve been complaining since minute one.
I will complain until minute one hundred and twenty.
I contain multitudes of complaint.
You could simply get better at this.
That is deeply unhelpful advice and I resent you for it.
He found this, predictably, hilarious.
A grown man’s mind trapped in a body that could barely manage a light jog without wheezing, being personally tormented by a fox-dragon who apparently found human cardiovascular limitations to be endlessly amusing, was, in his words, “the funniest thing to happen to me in several centuries,” which I did not find comforting in the slightest.
After the running came actual body training, which Erza insisted on supervising with the same intensity she brought to everything else — pushups counted out loud in a voice that brooked no argument, sparring sessions that left me flat on my back with startling regularity, drills that felt less like training and more like punishment for some crime I hadn’t been informed I’d committed.
It worked, though.
Infuriatingly, undeniably, it worked.
Somewhere around month three, I noticed I could finish the run without wanting to actually die at the end of it.
Somewhere around month four, I lasted eleven rounds against Erza’s practice sword instead of nine.
Small victories.
I’ll take them.
The actual magic, at least, was moving forward too — slower than I wanted, same as everything else about this body, but forward.
I’d started calling it a spear, mostly because “the thing that happens when I concentrate distortion into a point and shove it at someone” was a mouthful nobody had patience for.
It worked differently than the crude polearm I’d first managed back at the tower — instead of just being a solid, distorted weapon, the spear carried the distortion itself into whatever it hit, which turned out to be considerably nastier than I’d initially expected.
The first time I tested it properly, on a training dummy Erza had requipped in for exactly this purpose, the wood didn’t just get sliced.
It came apart wrong — edges that should have been clean instead looked warped, twisted, like the dummy’s own structure had tried to heal itself around the wound and gotten the geometry catastrophically incorrect in the process.
“That’s disgusting,” Erza said, examining the ruined dummy with something between horror and professional respect.
“It’s efficient,” I said, though privately I agreed with her.
“Doesn’t matter how tough something is.
Doesn’t matter how good its defense magic is.
If the spear connects, it’s not really about how hard I hit — it’s about what happens after.
Bone, armor, magic barrier, doesn’t matter.
Whatever it touches gets its shape argued with.” Nasty little thing you’ve built, big brother said, sounding genuinely impressed for once instead of mocking.
Ignoring conventional defense entirely.
That’s the kind of trick that ends fights against people stronger than you.
I’m calling it the Distortion Spear.
Working title.
Terrible name.
Very on the nose.
I contain multitudes of terrible names too.
The shield came easier, at least — distorting space around myself into something solid enough to block a strike wasn’t so different from the polearm, just inverted, and within a few weeks I could throw one up fast enough to stop most of what Erza threw at me, provided I saw it coming with enough warning.
What frustrated me was everything past that.
“Try it on the water,” I muttered to myself, alone in the training yard one evening, staring hard at a bucket someone had left out, trying to bend the actual substance of it rather than the space it occupied.
Nothing happened.
The water sat there, entirely unbent, unimpressed by my efforts.
“Try the dirt, then.” Nothing.
“Try literally anything that isn’t space.” Nothing, every single time, no matter how I approached it — like there was a wall in my own magic that flatly refused to budge no matter how hard I pushed against it.
You’re forcing a square peg, big brother said, watching my fourth failed attempt of the evening with what I assumed was polite patience wearing thin.
Your magic touches space.
Only space.
Water bends because the space it occupies bends.
Dirt shifts because you’re moving the ground beneath it, not the dirt itself.
You’ve been trying to do something your magic was never built to do.
So it’s a hard limit.
Not just something I haven’t figured out yet.
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Magic surprises even old fools like me, given time.
That wasn’t a no, at least, which I decided to hold onto out of pure stubbornness, even as I sat there in the dark, staring at a bucket of resolutely unbent water, feeling every bit as frustrated as I had the day I first tried reaching for magic at all.
One thing at a time, I guess.
Guess I’ll add “figure out what else this magic actually wants to do” to the pile with everything else.
The pile’s getting rather large, kid.
Yeah.
Well.
Wouldn’t be much of a life without one.