Deep beneath the mountain, in a sprawling network of natural caverns, a fight was underway.
Several light orbs I'd conjured glowed near the ceiling, too weak to use offensively, but more than enough to keep things lit for Erza down below. My little sister was juggling a good dozen weapons at once, swords, axes, maces, spears, all floating in the air, carving through the tide of stone necro-beetles swarming the rocky hollows. I kept bouncing around the battlefield, occasionally slicing off a limb here and there from creatures roughly the size of a mid-sized dog. My real job was patching the gaps in her combat rhythm while she served as the main firepower.
The constant thud of weapons burying into rock mixed with the shrieking of beetles and the crunch of their bodies.
Erza swung hard enough to split beetles clean in half with her blade, or crush them outright with the armored gauntlets she'd specifically bought for this mission. She was tearing through everything, burning through a staggering amount of energy, and yet she'd been keeping pace for a solid couple of minutes now, showing real stamina.
My movements were far more economical. I just went for the weak spots.
Spotting a good opening, I pushed into a small cluster of beetles and spun. My blades took the heads off five of them in one rotation, and a conjured shield caught two more mid-leap, knocking them off course.
The problem was that my telekinesis wasn't quite strong enough to kill these things cleanly, so I leaned on physical reinforcement instead to keep things efficient. That said, it didn't mean my magic wasn't pulling its weight.
One beetle had crawled up a stalactite and launched itself bomb-style, ass-first, straight down at Erza. She barely had time to register it before a spike materialized beside her through my magic, and the falling body drove itself right onto it.
"Screeeeee!" the beetle shrieked, instantly deprived of any dignity whatsoever.
My Requip Magic had been supplemented with Item Teleportation, a spell most mages found difficult and unforgiving due to how strict the spatial structure had to be, but one that suited me just fine.
Erza snapped back to attention, took down another beetle with a guided axe, and dove back into the fight.
We kept at it for another minute before I noticed something off. The constant impacts were cracking the stalactites above us.
"Seven o'clock, against the wall! Cave-in!" I called out to my sister, but she was deep in the zone and didn't hear me. "Oh, come on."
I sprinted toward Erza just as, right there in my soul's vision, the rock above us started giving way. Her eyes went wide as my body slammed into her and kept running, dragging her along.
A jump, catching the wall with magic, scrambling up it with Erza in tow, grabbing a ledge with one hand, hanging there. The roar of collapsing stone crashed over us from behind.
But then.
A crack from the stalactite directly above us. Its tip angled downward, pointed straight at us, and I felt my will strain under the pressure. Pushing against the thing with my magic, believing it would work, and somehow it did, just barely, as the spike flashed past without making contact. Though honestly, that was less about my power being seven percent stronger than usual from the adrenaline, and more about picking a decent spot to begin with.
A few seconds later, the rumbling died down.
"You okay?" I checked with Erza, then willed a small light orb into existence nearby.
All my other lights had been smashed in the collapse.
"Yeah..." she breathed. "You?"
"Fine," I started to say, but the ledge I was holding cracked. We both tensed, but before anything happened, the tiny piece of rock at my fingertips reinforced itself and fused back together under the barest thread of my Earth magic. "More than fine. Spike."
A metal spike materialized from my spatial pocket. Erza drove it deep into the rock face beneath us. We stepped onto it, then carefully dropped down to the floor.
Our duo was genuinely complementary. I brought a wide bag of tricks, including a growing arsenal of weaker spells I'd pulled from the guild library, while Erza brought raw, rapidly growing power.
"Well. Looks like we might get docked," I noted, lighting the cave back up.
"My weapons..." Erza sighed beside me, remembering that most of her arsenal was now buried under several tons of rock. Along with the beetles, yeah.
"Some of it might survive when they dig it out. And buying new gear isn't the end of the world."
That, in a nutshell, was the mission. About two hours from Magnolia sat a village whose entire economy depended on iron ore mined from this very cave network, the one that had just caved in. According to the village elder, the miners had stumbled across an ancient door-boulder and, being the sharpest tools in the shed, decided: why not open it? They spent a whole day picking at the thing and eventually broke through into what appeared to be the sealed laboratory of some kindly old necromancer who'd locked away his creations. Not very securely, as it turned out.
Since the opening was small, the miners managed to knock back a few beetles and get out alive. The problem was that these beetles, small as they were, were surprisingly smart. They fed on magic and had been stirred up by the noise of the miners in the first place. Once freed, the creatures started spreading through the cave system, turning it into their personal base of operations. The village elder, horrified at the idea of an infestation staging right under his feet, wasted no time filing a job with the guild before said infestation decided to pay them a house call.
"...How many are left?" Erza asked once she'd shaken off the mood.
"A couple more clusters, each with a queen, plus about a dozen regular guard beetles per cluster."
We moved to clear the rest. At the passage entrance, the two of us cleared the rockfall, mostly Erza's doing, then mopped up the stragglers from one cluster, moved through the next passage, and finished things off there too.
"Hm." I let out a low sound when we stepped into the necromancer's lab.
Hundreds of large flasks lined the walls, seemingly grown straight from the stone. We even found what looked like a workspace, a table carved into the rock and an alcove in the wall that must have held books and documents, but as for the contents...
"The books are gone," Erza said sadly.
"Wanted to read some ancient forbidden texts?" A smirk found its way onto my face.
"Lian! Don't make it weird."
"Fair enough. But yeah, the humidity in here is brutal. Not exactly a surprise." I wrinkled my nose. The smell wasn't doing anyone any favors either.
We spent another five minutes poking around, found nothing worth taking, and headed out of the cave network. After that, satisfied with a good day's work, we made our way to the village.
"Mission complete," I reported to the village elder, who looked exactly like what you'd picture a village elder looking like. His name was Marc, but stand him next to an Oswald and you'd have a hard time telling them apart.
"But the main tunnel is buried," Erza added, which got her a look from me. Was that her sense of fairness, or was she protecting the guild's reputation?
"What?! Buried how?!" The elder looked alarmed. "And the beetles?! Are they dead?!"
"Every last one," I confirmed, and the old man let out a long breath.
"Alright, if that's the case... The cave-in is a problem. But you didn't cause any other damage on the way?" He started peering out the windows of his house, where we happened to be having this conversation. "Nothing seems to be on fire."
"We're not vandals," I shrugged, and the old man's gaze snapped straight to our shoulders, where our Fairy Tail guild marks were stamped, mirrored on our clothes.
"...People have their own opinions on that," he said, then wrapped it up. "But I won't keep you. Let's get you your reward."
Soon after, cash in hand from the village safe, Erza and I started back toward Magnolia. They docked us a third of the fee for not being careful enough, and after some back-and-forth about just how badly collapsed the tunnel was, settled on three hundred thousand Jewels.
It was an extermination job, which usually paid better, but the creatures were well below standard threat level, so the pay was accordingly leaner.
"We really have gotten stronger," Erza said with a smile, opening and closing her hand.
"Yeah. Wouldn't have pulled this off a week ago. Still plenty of room to grow, though."
We talked as we walked, same as always. We filed the report with Makarov, sat through his mix of praise and lecturing about being more careful next time, and then went our separate ways.
Guild life started settling into a rhythm. Rest, read in the library, go for walks, train. Repeat.
We made a point of visiting the village of Rosemary, but there was nothing waiting for us there but the bleak quiet of a communal grave. We tried tracking down Kagura too, asked around in the neighboring town and several villages nearby, but there was no trail to follow. Too much time had passed, and a small girl isn't exactly a memorable figure. If she survived, we had no way to know.
In the guild itself, the routine was occasionally broken by Gray showing up once a week to spar, and even rarer exchanges with Laxus. He was constantly off on missions, but at our second meeting he hadn't been shy about mockingly asking whether anything still hurt from his lightning bolt, to which he got an equally pointed question about how his liver and face were holding up. We didn't fight again after that. The outcome was too obvious for me, and he had no interest in the embarrassment of getting knocked around by someone smaller and weaker. I filed his behavior away for future reference anyway.
Over the months that followed, one genuinely significant thing happened: I restored the vision in my gouged eye, which took real effort.
Ethernano, like the other energies from my original world, the bastards, had an unpleasant property. It interfered with my Soul Energy. Even my own Ethernano did this, though nowhere near as badly as someone else's. The problem was that I still hadn't figured out how to apply my own Ethernano for ultra-fine tissue manipulation, exactly the kind I needed for the eye, so I had to improvise.
Herbology came to the rescue. After spending a considerable sum on various plants and materials, spending a couple of weeks scrambling to keep up with everything else, and then hunching over alchemical equipment for several days, I managed to produce, using one of Porlyusica's recipes, an ointment that could render Ethernano in the applied area extremely passive and workable.
Using that ointment, along with steadily improving fine control over my Soul Energy, I managed to restore vision to the eye. The Ethernano pathways in the organ itself still needed restoring before things would be exactly as they were before, but my progress in medicine had come a long way. As had a lot of other things. The variety of guild jobs helped; they kept opening new doors. Even if the really worthwhile opportunities didn't come up often.
The days kept turning, until in July of year 777, Makarov brought home a pink-haired kid who disrupted the guild's routine for the first time in a while.
Erza and I noticed this particular individual in the following manner:
"The hell is your problem?!"
"You're the one with the problem!"
"No, you're the one with the problem!"
Headbutting each other, one idiot on one side, namely Gray, and another idiot on the other, namely the aforementioned new arrival, the two had clearly locked onto each other before we'd even made it back from our latest mission.
"What are you two up to?" I asked, walking in with Erza.
"Elian! Stay out of this, I'll handle him myself!" Gray snapped.
"Handle yourself, more like. I don't know what it is, but you're already getting on my nerves," the pink-haired one shot back, still pressing foreheads with his opponent, though he'd started looking around. "Oh, right! Why are you walking around without pants?! You're a human, not a dragon! You can't just do that!"
"Hey! It's not on purpose! And besides, what's with that scarf?! It's summer!"
"Grr..."
"Hm," Erza, standing to my side, looked thoughtful. "Should we break them up?"
"Why?"
"We're older. We should be guiding the younger ones. Isn't that what you do?"
"There's something to that," I said, genuinely considering it.
And so Erza, with a decisive nod to herself, stepped forward.
"You two, stop fighting. You're in the same guild!"
"Get lost!" both boys shouted at the same time, and, breaking apart from each other, each of them threw a punch directly into Erza's face.
That was a mistake on their part. Gray seemed to realize it the moment he froze, right as Natsu, seeing the state of his "opponent," burst out laughing and called him a weakling who'd flinched at a girl.
Erza went down on her back, cheeks flushed red. After well over a dozen missions, a little redness was about the worst those two could actually do to her. But something flickered in her eyes, hurt, bleeding quickly into irritation.
She slowly got up and brushed off her boots.
"You're both dead," was all she said, before charging at them in full fury.
The laughing pink-haired one caught it first. One punch to the face, no gauntlet, and he flew back a solid couple of meters.
"I'm sorry! That was an accident, I didn't mean—" Gray raised his hands in a gesture of peace, and promptly caught a powerful uppercut to the jaw for his trouble. He was out before he hit the ground.
"Hmph. Boys," Erza muttered, and then, as I walked over, she glanced up at me. "I mean. That's not what I meant."
"I know. You did fine," I said, giving her shoulder a few pats. She straightened up immediately.
"I really thought they'd come to their senses."
"These things take time."
"So... I'll have to beat them again?"
"Yep," I said, with a perfectly genuine smile. She nodded solemnly, like she was accepting a mission.
Getting acquainted with the new guild member didn't exactly go smoothly, unfortunately. This Natsu, I got his name from other members, turned out to be every bit the brawler he appeared, as confirmed the very next day.
"Hey, you! You're Elian, right?" the pink-haired kid came rolling up to me.
"That's one way to put it."
"Let's fight!" he said, framing it as a suggestion but not waiting for an answer. His fist ignited. "Fire Dragon's Iron Fist!"
He pulled back and swung for my face. My right hand knocked his arm sharply to the side, throwing his momentum off, then reversed course and connected with his face instead.
The kid flew back a couple of meters, tongue flopping out, and went down.
"And they just let anyone in these days," I shook my head, walked over, and sat down on him, waiting for him to come around. "So. Your dad's a dragon?"
That was the question I'd actually been curious about, which was why I'd stuck around. Word traveled fast in the guild.
"Huh?..." something started moving under me, like a big confused beetle. We were about the same size, and given how much magic Natsu had, quite a lot as it turned out, he shouldn't have had too much trouble holding my weight. "Get off me, you idiot!"
"After you answer a few questions. You wasted my time with that fight, so spend a little of yours for me," I explained my reasoning. Then my hand shifted and delivered a sharp flick to his forehead.
"Ow!" Natsu's head actually bounced off the floor from the force. Not that it seemed to genuinely hurt him.
"That was for 'idiot.' Go ahead."
In response, a series of incoherent sounds and squirming came from beneath me. Having made zero progress toward escape, the kid just let out a frustrated breath and gave in.
"My dad's name was Igneel, and he was a fire dragon. Happy now?!"
"More details?"
More muffled grumbling from below.
"He taught me to read and do magic! Why didn't you just ask like a normal person?! I would've answered!"
"Hm," I stood, walked over, and leaned against a column. "Want me to remind you how we met? Or how yesterday went?"
"I came up to you perfectly normally..." he muttered, also getting up.
"Do you genuinely not understand basic social rules, or should I illustrate?"
"You wanna go again?!" he lit up immediately.
A minute later, however, Natsu was wincing and clutching a small collection of lumps on his head as he continued.
"Okay fine. He was basically my dad. Taught me magic. But he disappeared... and I'm looking for him. Is that what you wanted?"
"Not every kid grows up with a dragon for a parent. Walk me through the magic. A dragon must've taught you something special."
A look of profound concentration crossed Natsu's face.
"Igneel called it Dragon Slayer Magic..."
"So he implanted a Lacrima into you?"
"A what? No, I don't know what that is. He just picked me up really high into the sky and dropped me."
"Huh."
"I never did figure out how to fly... but I got the fire down!" he said with a goofy grin, lighting his fist to show me.
Dragon Slayer Magic again. And yet, staring into those eyes, brimming with sophistication, academic depth, and profound philosophical insight, I accepted there wasn't much more to get out of this conversation. I was already halfway out the door, mentally, when the old man showed up.
"Good to see you've already met the kid," Makarov said, looking pleased with himself. "Elian, how'd you feel about taking this one out on a mission? He's been..."
"Hey! Who are you calling a kid, old man?!" Natsu bristled, mouth open wide enough to see the back of his throat.
Makarov thought he glimpsed a small flame flicker in there. He didn't bother engaging. When the boy lunged, he was simply swatted down by an enormous hand.
"So, keep an eye on him?" the old man asked, face perfectly neutral, like nothing had happened.
"Sure, why not?" I said, actually a little interested. Ancient weird stuff had a way of pulling me in, and watching a Dragon Slayer up close might teach me something. Besides, Makarov had helped me out with plenty over the months. Returning a small favor was the least I could do. "Though this is clearly a clinical case."
"Well, you're practically our resident doctor. Take Erza, and grab Gray over there while you're at it. Let him thaw out a bit."
He gestured toward Gray, who caught the motion, looked down, noticed he was pants-free again, and immediately started scanning the room for someone to borrow from.
I pulled a small Lacrima out of my pocket, a personal artifact I'd made, essentially a communication device with a lot of limitations but useful enough here, and reached out to Erza, who was in the library. After checking she was on board, we agreed to take the little one out for a walk. The little one's opinion on this arrangement was not consulted.
A couple of hours later, our group of four stood in front of a large white field, a good hectare across.
"Alright, listen up. Our job involves this magical cotton. It's called magical because it grows faster than normal. It's July, and regular cotton doesn't even ripen until August. It's also called magical because it will hit back. Good luck. We'll be right over here watching."
I gave the boys a thumbs up. Erza, meanwhile, pulled a pair of lounge chairs and a large umbrella from her Requip space, and we both changed into summer clothes, the kind with palm trees on them.
"Something feels off," Natsu muttered, squinting as Erza and I settled in and clinked our cold cocktails together.
"Yeah," Gray agreed, staring at us.
"You're not working yet?" I called over, mildly stern.
Both boys shot me looks of pure resentment as it dawned on them that they were the ones doing the actual work today. Then, remembering that getting lippy with me had consequences, they decided not to push it.
"Should we maybe tell them?" Erza asked once the two had moved off.
"No. They'll remember the lesson better this way. Everything in its own time."
When Natsu walked into the field, he stopped and stared at one of the plants. It was tall, nearly up to his neck, with a long stem topped by a cotton boll, something like a white puff of fluff, with two leaf-like appendages branching off the sides that tapered at the ends into what looked vaguely like hands.
"The hell is this thing," he said, unimpressed, and reached up to pull the white piece off the top. He regretted it instantly. "Oof!"
Natsu doubled over as the plant delivered a solid gut-punch after losing its harvest, then went limp.
"Nice one," Gray said nearby with a smirk, actively dodging attacks himself as he tore off bolls and tossed them into an ice-formed bag at his back.
"Son of a—" Natsu wheezed. "Son of a—!"
He swore again when he realized he had nowhere to put his harvest. But after a moment of resourcefulness, he pulled off his vest, wore it backwards, and fashioned himself a makeshift pouch that doubled as some light protection.
He plucked a few bolls with decent dodging, tossed them into his improvised contraption, and earned a short grunt from Gray. The two of them started going at it in earnest.
From my lounge chair, I could only sigh quietly. Though, they were supposed to figure it out eventually, right?
Makarov had started calling me the guild's doctor, and in a way I'd grown into it. The herbology and medicine books from Porlyusica were paying off, and I occasionally patched up guildmates when they got themselves banged up.
But what was actually needed on this mission was less doctor, more psychologist. Or just someone with basic common sense.
"How much more?!" Natsu's voice carried over.
"That's it!" I called back loudly enough for both of them to hear.
They both froze.
"The whole field?!" they said in unison, equally horrified.
"Yes!"
"This is insane!" Gray snapped. He dropped his half-full bag and hurled it at a cotton plant out of frustration, which promptly smacked him in the face with it on the rebound. "Ow!"
"Ice-block's right! This is, this is, dammit, it's hazing! That's what this is! You can't do this!"
"Look at him," Erza observed from behind her cocktail.
"Yeah," I agreed, then raised my voice again. "It's half an hour's work, tops! What are you even complaining about?!"
"Half an hour, he says!" Natsu practically snarled, flames leaping up his arms. "Fire Dragon's Roar!!!"
He cupped his hands and blasted out a solid wall of flame.
The cotton plants immediately caught fire and started flailing their leaf-hands in every direction.
"Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Natsu started laughing like a cartoon villain.
"Your head is cooked, you've completely lost it!" Gray shouted, then brought his hands together. "Ice-Make: Flooring!"
A blue wave of frost rolled out from him, freezing the ground, but it couldn't smother everything, because the fire had already spread twice as wide as Natsu had originally lit it.
"Don't interfere!" Natsu ignited his hands and dove into the fire, flinging flames in every direction with total enthusiasm. "Bwa-ha-ha-ha!"
He ran through the field hollering. His clothes were somehow untouched by the flames. The only real trouble came from the dying cotton plants still managing to land hits on him.
Gray, seeing he was powerless to stop any of this, jogged over to us.
"Why are you two just lying there?! The Magic Council is going to hear about this! That lunatic just set the whole thing on fire!"
I raised a single finger at his righteous rant and clicked my tongue with deliberate patience.
"Think it over. You can sit with us if you need time to work through it," I said, and then a small sphere appeared in my hand and got passed to Erza. "Time to close the circuit."
"Mm-hm," Erza pulsed with released magic, and behind her, hundreds, thousands of symbols blazed to life along the ground in long lines encircling the entire field and a separate ring around us, then rose up as shimmering barriers of cascading runes.
It was a subtype of Writing Magic, Jutsu Shiki, which created barriers that could only be crossed by following certain rules. Picking up any kind of magic at a foundational level was never that hard for me. Jutsu Shiki, specifically, was usually a meticulous process: writing out the necessary symbols with your magic and charging them took real time and care. But instead of all that, I'd sketched everything quickly while lying around, borrowed Erza's magical output to power it, and had the whole thing up within a couple of minutes of us arriving, just enough to stop the fire from spreading. That was the only function. Stop the fire.
The Lacrima I'd handed Erza was an artifact I'd made, a transmitter with a fairly long list of limitations but suited to the situation. I'd picked up artifacting from Porlyusica too. The old woman was genuinely excellent at it, and the guild library had filled in the rest.
"The hell is that?" Gray asked, not entirely following the magic he was looking at.
"Think it over. We'll be resting," was all I said, and for the next ten minutes or so, all we heard was the roar of the flames and Natsu's screaming.
But we did get some useful data. Dragneel, that being the troubled individual's surname, had near-total fire immunity. And beyond that, I was pretty sure I'd seen him eating the fire that was spreading on its own, not his own fire, just the ambient stuff. Hm. I'd need to find a way to hit Laxus with a magical stun device at some point. All in the name of science. Especially since it would involve someone I wasn't particularly fond of.
Somewhere in the middle of those thoughts, one of only two Dragon Slayers I'd ever met came walking back through the barrier.
"You see that?!" he said, chest puffed out, clearly angling for some praise.
"You burned the whole thing to ash!" Gray said flatly.
"Yeah! Pretty cool, right?"
"Nice work, Natsu," I cut in.
"What?!" Gray turned to me, and I held out a flyer for him to read. "Eliminate magical parasites mimicking a cotton plant... Wait, so the fire-brain actually did everything right?!"
"Exactly. The lesson here is: read the assignment carefully before you start the work. This parasite just looks like a productive crop. The cotton itself is useless, and in practice the plant just drains resources from the soil for nothing."
"Ha-ha-ha-ha! You get it now, ice-block?! I'm the smart one and you're the dumb one!"
"Elian meant we didn't need to collect anything in the first place! How does that make me the dumb one when you didn't understand it either?! You're calling me dumb?! Me?! I said, you're, the, DUMB ONE!!!"
I winced at the volume but didn't intervene. I'd already noticed movement nearby. Erza had gotten up from her lounge chair.
"I believe I said," she started, walking toward the boys before they could launch at each other, "that you shouldn't be fighting."
Gray, hearing the tone in Erza's voice, immediately downshifted. Natsu, on the other hand...
"Hey, you're that girl... I've seen you somewhere, right?" Natsu demonstrated that he may have taken one too many hits to the head over the years. Then he lit his fist and smacked it into his palm. "Whatever, I ate a ton of fire out there and I am fired up! Let's go!!!"
He charged at Erza. Same as before, he went down from a single hit. Erza turned slowly toward Gray.
"No... please, please don't... I understand everything, I swear," he covered himself with both arms, apparently believing that would help.
"Hmm..." my sister considered this. "Fine. You can live. But next time, there's nowhere to run from it."
Gray nodded emphatically, communicating his complete and thorough understanding of the situation.
A warm smile settled on my face. My Erza, still so young, and already keeping the whole world in line. Couldn't be prouder.