Noah proudly patted the armor in front of Erza.
“Pretty impressive, right? This set was custom-made specifically for you. Oh, and so your movements won’t be restricted during combat, I even made sure there’s plenty of extra room around the chest—”
“That’s enough. I’m very satisfied.”
Erza cut him off before he could finish.
“Huh? You don’t want to hear the rest? This armor is supposed to protect your life, you know. There are plenty of important details—”
“As long as it fits properly and works in battle, that’s all I care about. The rest doesn’t matter.”
Noah genuinely could not understand her attitude.
If it were him, he would at least take a closer look at certain aspects of the design.
Still, the customer herself had spoken.
As the shopkeeper, he knew when not to ask unnecessary questions.
“All right, then… about the remaining payment…”
Erza immediately pulled out her card and slapped it onto the counter without the slightest hesitation.
“Yes!”
This was what Noah appreciated most about Erza as a customer: she was decisive, rich, and never so much as blinked when it came time to pay.
Compared with a certain woman who drank every day yet still tried to haggle over the price of a single card, Erza was practically adorable.
If she were not such an excellent customer, not even VIP status would have been enough to make Noah serve her this enthusiastically.
His hands moved efficiently as he processed the payment while he casually asked, “Come to think of it, why did you suddenly want a new set of armor? Are you taking on some dangerous job?”
“No. I just want to experiment with a new fighting style, and this job gives me a good opportunity to test it.”
“I see. When are you leaving?”
“I’m in a hurry, so I’m leaving right now.”
Noah stared at her.
‘You’re in a hurry?’
He could not tell at all.
If time was so tight, why had she still sat there calmly eating strawberry cake?
‘So food really does come before everything else, huh?’
Erza stored the armor away and had already turned toward the door when something seemed to occur to her.
She stopped and glanced back.
“You haven’t taken a job in quite a while either, have you? You should come back to the guild when you have time. Don’t spend every day hiding in this shop.”
Privately, part of Erza would have been perfectly happy if Noah remained here forever and simply devoted himself to making armor for her, but she could hardly say something like that to a fellow guild member.
“If you keep slacking off like this, the others are going to catch up with you.”
“The others? You mean Natsu and Gray?”
Noah dropped back into his reclining chair and immediately resumed his lazy posture.
“Come on. We can talk about that once either of them earns the title of S-Class Mage. They’ve still got a long way to go.”
Noah had become an S-Class Mage long ago.
In fact, he had passed Fairy Tail’s S-Class Promotion Trial before Erza had even joined the guild, and even in a guild overflowing with ridiculous talent, nobody had managed to break his record since.
Because of that, Noah was widely regarded within Fairy Tail as the strongest Mage beneath Gildarts, excluding Master Makarov himself.
His talent had never really been questioned.
Erza frowned.
“Don’t get too arrogant. Natsu, Gray, and the others have become much stronger. If one of them beats you someday, people are going to start questioning the standard of Fairy Tail’s S-Class Mages.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Noah waved her off.
“More importantly, if you’re really in such a hurry, shouldn’t you have left already?”
Erza paused.
“…I’m going, then. See you later.”
“Take care! No need to see you out! Please come again!”
The wind chime above the door jingled as Erza left.
Afternoon sunlight streamed through the glass windows and spilled across a patch of green turf inside the shop.
A wooden rocking chair rested there, and Noah lay back in it, staring idly at the ceiling.
A quiet afternoon like this was perfect for sorting through his thoughts.
It had been twenty years since he came to this world, and by now Noah understood exactly where he had ended up.
Fairy Tail.
A world filled with magic and fantasy, where adventure, passion, friendship, and the occasional catastrophic amount of property damage seemed to form the foundation of everyday life.
If Noah had been an ordinary person, the sensible choice would have been to live an ordinary life and stay far away from anything dangerous.
Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—he could use magic, and his talent for it happened to be exceptionally good.
In that case, of course he had to enjoy himself to the fullest—
No, that was not right.
He had to make something of himself in this world.
Yes.
That sounded much more respectable.
Noah had been born in a poor rural village, beginning his new life as an orphan.
He possessed unusually vast magic power from birth and had even awakened his own magic naturally, which was about as close to the standard reincarnated-protagonist package as anyone could reasonably ask for.
Once he was old enough, he joined a group of adventurers passing through his village and traveled all over the country with them.
Thanks to the sheer versatility of his magic, he served both as the group’s primary magical attacker and as support whenever the situation required it.
His magic was known as Word Magic.
It was an exceptionally powerful form of Letter Magic that allowed Noah to cast spells through spoken words and written characters.
In practice, it worked rather like the spellcasting of traditional fantasy mages: speak the name, invoke the corresponding magic.
As for what the magic itself could actually do, the simplest comparison would be something halfway between Arc of Embodiment and Enchantment.
Combined with Noah’s naturally enormous reserves of magic power and absurdly strong mental strength, the possibilities seemed almost limitless.
As far as Noah was concerned, his future was exceptionally bright.
He had all the makings of a future powerhouse.
In X774, when Noah was ten years old, he first heard the name Fairy Tail.
Until then, he had assumed he had simply been reincarnated into some random fantasy world.
It was only when the adventuring party eventually arrived in Magnolia that he finally realized where he actually was.
He had been reborn into the world of Fairy Tail.
Naturally, Noah abandoned the life of an ordinary adventurer soon afterward and threw himself into the world of Mages, joining the familiar guild filled with walking cheats and monsters disguised as human beings.
Fairy Tail.
By X776, after only two years in the guild, Noah passed the S-Class Promotion Trial and became Fairy Tail’s first new S-Class Mage after Gildarts.
At the same time, he became the youngest S-Class Mage in the entire Kingdom of Fiore.
For several years afterward, Noah’s name spread throughout Fiore.
Sorcerer Magazine even named him the kingdom’s “Most Gifted Young Mage,” and somewhere along the way he acquired the nickname the Sage.
The title had nothing to do with Noah possessing some bizarrely enlightened personality.
It came entirely from the strange versatility of his Word Magic.
Not only could he use words to give form to objects and phenomena, but he could also apply various properties and enhancements to almost anything.
Noah’s rapid rise naturally earned him plenty of admiration from Laxus, who had grown up in the guild, as well as Mira and Erza after they joined.
It also annoyed the hell out of them.
All three were fiercely competitive, and once Noah became the standard they measured themselves against, challenges became a regular occurrence.
Then, in X782, when Noah was eighteen, he spent the savings he had accumulated over the years and opened Hope Cottage in Magnolia, becoming a magic merchant in addition to being a Mage.
That decision drove those three especially crazy.
They had spent years chasing after him, only for Noah—still comfortably ahead of them—to suddenly open a shop and begin acting as though he had already retired.
Now it was X784.
Noah was twenty years old.
And this particular year was special, because the main story of Fairy Tail was about to begin.
After so much time, Noah still remembered most of the original plot.
Some smaller details had grown fuzzy over the years, but he was not particularly worried.
This was Fairy Tail, after all.
The entire guild practically ran on cheats.
No matter how powerful the enemy was, all someone had to do was shout the right friendship-powered password, and Noah could almost hear the blood-pumping background music start playing before the inevitable comeback.
That was simply how this guild worked.
The thought immediately stirred something in him, as though his long-dormant youth had suddenly come roaring back.
Noah sat up from the rocking chair.
“Now that I think about it, Erza’s right. It really has been a long time since I went back to the guild. Business is slow today anyway, so I might as well stop by. Maybe I’ll even take a job and remind everyone I still exist.”
He began tidying the shop before heading toward the place where everything had started.
Fairy Tail.
“Judging by the timing, the story should be starting around now, shouldn’t it?”
Noah paused for a moment.
“I wonder if Lucy’s joined the guild yet.”
End of Chapter 2