Our date kicked off at the Strauss family's new place. Mira had put on a white summer dress with cutouts at the hips, and she looked every bit the picture of grace and sweetness. Given how she can get sometimes, especially in her The Demon form, the contrast was pretty damn striking.
After our hellos, though, we didn't dwell on it. We got straight down to business.
"Did you only prepare this outfit, or..."
"Or," she replied. "I didn't know where you were planning to take me."
I gave her a slow-lidded look that communicated, without a single word, that if a certain someone hadn't scheduled our date for the very next morning, we both might've had more time to actually prepare.
"That's fine, actually. First dates usually involve a lot of talking, just getting to know each other better, the classic approach. But since we already know each other pretty well, my plan is heavy on shared activities instead."
"Let's see..." she murmured, squinting at the neat little sheet of paper I'd handed her, the one with the actual plan on it. Sure, surprises sound romantic in theory, but in practice they're usually terrible. It's just smarter to agree on where you're going beforehand rather than spending the whole day wearing a strained smile and competing for who's the better actor. "This is—"
"Before we get to that," I cut her off, and her eyes snapped back to my face, "it's only fair to clarify one small detail about whatever this thing between us might become."
Carefully, deploying every ounce of my eloquence, I told her that something had happened between Erza and me the day before, and that if the three of us were heading somewhere together, it wasn't going to be a conventional arrangement.
We were still standing in the empty street when Mira's eyes went wide as she tried to process what I'd just dropped on her.
"You did that... with Erza?!" she half-shouted, half-hissed.
"That's right, and it's really not that weird—" I started into my spiel about DNA helixes and how this world works, but I didn't get far.
"Fine! Let's just say, just say, you somehow addressed one issue, you pervert. But Elian! You promised me a date! How could you do this?!"
"Erza gave you her blessing to go out with me. It'd only be fair if you gave her yours," I said, keeping my face as casually self-assured as possible, like I'd just stated something completely unremarkable.
She kept staring at me, breathing hard, eyes still wide. Fury would surge across Mira's face, then get smothered, then something else would surface, something that didn't bode particularly well for me. But to my deep relief, she was at least trying to understand rather than immediately rearranging my face.
"We already spend a lot of time together," I pointed out, referencing the missions we occasionally took on. "You and Erza even more so, sparring-wise. One way or another, we've been close for a long time, close enough that being a little closer isn't exactly a stretch. A relationship like this would add depth, not drag in something weird and uncomfortable."
Under the weight of my arguments, she narrowed her eyes at me. You could see the scales had tilted, just not far enough in my favor.
"You're still recovering from that transformation, right?" she asked, her voice clipped.
"More or less, yeah."
"Then hear this." She stepped right up to me and started jabbing a finger into my chest. "If you were completely fine right now, I'd break both your legs, and then there wouldn't be any more of this!"
"It's actually really sweet that you're paying attention to my condition." A smile spread across my face, and Mira, catching the other angle of what she'd just said, puffed up indignantly. "Also pretty bold of you, though. You really think you could do something to me even in my current state?"
My smile edged into something with a few more teeth.
"Hmph! Who's the bold one here?" Mira declined to put that claim to the test, choosing instead to simply assert her dominance.
"When you get nervous, you go back to being the mean tsundere. A nicer one than you used to be, though," I noted, pointing out her emotional range and the fact that her little threat was, once again, just her showing she cared. Then, under her sour, flustered glare, I circled back. "Anyway. No pressure. Take all the time you need to think it over properly."
"I will!" she announced loudly, turned on her heel, and marched with great dignity back toward her front door. She stopped at the threshold without opening it, though, and after a moment turned around and marched back toward me with the unstoppable momentum of an icebreaker. "I thought about it. And here's what: like hell I'm just giving up! I've been working toward today for years, and you are not getting away from me that easily. Understood?!"
"Yep," I nodded, doing my absolute best not to burst out laughing at this theatrical display of seriousness and authority.
"With Erza, fine, we can try. But don't you dare drag a single other girl into this! No harem!"
My face softened into something almost unbearably fond. I opened my mouth—
But she'd already figured it out. In one acrobatic move, Mirajane vaulted up onto my shoulders and clamped my face shut with her thighs. It was somewhere between a chokehold and just silencing me.
"And don't you dare say out loud what you think I'm thinking! It's embarrassing!" she finally admitted, then went quiet. She breathed deeply for about five seconds while I processed exactly what our current position was, before she spoke again. "Where's the plan?"
We looked around. The sheet had sailed half a block away, carried off by the wind at some point during our heated exchange when Mira had flung it aside. One Teleportation spell later, the document was back in her hands.
"Okay... Breakfast at a magic restaurant on a glass platform floating three hundred meters up... Where does something like that even exist? Oh, it's here, never been to this city, reservation at ten AM, mm-hmm, got it. After that... a cooking competition? Elian, how did you know I'm a good cook?... And oh, you're very confident in my abilities... But how did you know?..." She paused, her expression darkening. "I'm going to have a word with Elfman. He's gotten way too loose-lipped lately."
When her tone shifted from delighted to threatening, I conjured an explanatory hologram via Archive Magic.
I'm practically a detective. And no, I didn't ask. I observed.
"Fine..." she muttered, eyeing my claim with suspicion as I successfully saved an innocent man. "What else. Karaoke bar at night... I won't even ask how you knew I can sing. But one question, all these places are pretty far apart. Are you sure you can teleport both of us that far?"
At that question, a wide grin spread across my still-occupied face. I raised one hand and pointed a finger downward, indicating she should read the plan to the very end.
"'Transit between locations to be handled on Mirajane's wings,'" she read, then gasped. "Elian, are you seriously asking a girl to haul you around?! You are a terrible guy!"
You're literally riding me right now. Call it one-one. The new line appeared on the hologram, and I spread my hands in a carefree shrug.
From above came vague, indignant puffing.
"How did I even fall in love with someone like—" Mirajane started on an exhale, then froze when a helpful prompt appeared.
Want me to remind you?
"No!"
So it was that after Mira hopped off me, she shifted into her The Demon form and dragged me toward the city. She grumbled at me the whole way, but good food and a breathtaking view from three hundred meters up, all forest and lake and a small town nestled below, smoothed out her righteous indignation considerably.
When we arrived at the cooking competition, mysteriously organized by some anonymous sponsor, Mira absolutely crushed every competitor and was fiercely proud of herself. Most of the other chefs looked devastated, wearing expressions that said they'd already known they'd lost even before the envelopes were handed out.
The karaoke bar that evening was a genuine pleasure for both of us. Mirajane sang beautifully, pure music to my ears. My own vocal credentials were much more modest; I'd always been more of an orator. In my past life I'd been good for exactly one thing: loud, pompous speeches, not singing. Still, I managed to clear the bar of "doesn't actively hurt to listen to," and while that impressed no one, Mira seemed to enjoy the whole process, especially the outlet it gave her in her own singing.
On that note, we parted at her doorstep in good spirits, right after a certain overconfident egotist received a quick kiss on the cheek before the door shut in his face.
That was as far as it went, naturally. Mirajane was only as bold as she was flustered, and that night the latter won out.
And so, with a few new dynamics settling into our lives, the timeline moved on. Things with Erza shifted little in substance, aside from certain moments becoming, shall we say, a permanent fixture. With Mira, however, things developed more slowly; it took a full six months before we reached what's typically considered the post-third-date milestone.
Months passed.
The guild's reaction to my transformation landed somewhere in the neighborhood of total indifference. Barely anything worth noting. Only Gramps had asked at first what was going on with my face and eyes, I gave him the brief version, a transformation, and he didn't ask whether it had been dangerous. He trusted me, and he knew I wasn't the type to stick my head where it didn't belong, so he just shrugged and went back to his beer.
Years passed.
Even by this point, our little group hadn't gathered nearly enough strength, and I still didn't have the power to travel between worlds. Mystogan hadn't finished developing whatever it was that would let him use magic in his world, either. That meant the Edolas expedition was still on hold, though we certainly hadn't forgotten about it.
What was not on hold, however, was an unforeseen and pretty dangerous situation we stumbled into on one of the missions we'd taken as a trio, me, Erza, and Mira. It went a little something like this.
When the three of us arrived back in Magnolia and were still approaching the guild building, one of the mages spotted us. He froze for about half a second, then pivoted like he was running a relay race and bolted inside in a blind panic.
"THEY'RE BACK!" The muffled shout reached us, and the three of us exchanged a look.
"What'd they do this time?" Erza speculated, shifting the enormous demon horn on her shoulder.
I extended my hand to the side, concentrated through my Sphere Vision, stretching it out in a cone for hundreds of meters, and a moment later teleported the news journal from our mailbox directly into my palm.
"Hargeon Port has been destroyed. Fairy Tail is being blamed, and Salamander in particular."
"Classic," Mirajane sighed.
"Natsu is Natsu," Erza said. "But the others must have pulled something too, given the panic. We need to have a disciplinary conversation."
We nodded and fell in behind her.
The doors swung open, and the shouting, which had been featuring Erza's name rather prominently, died instantly. Complete silence fell over the hall.
Erza walked to the center of the room, dropped the massive horn on the floor with a deafening crash, and scanned the room with deep displeasure.
"What did you do this time? Out with it."
"What?!"
"Nothing!"
"Everything's fine!"
While our guildmates fell over themselves making excuses, then immediately lost their minds over whose enormous horn Erza had dragged in, Mira and I waved hello to the room and went our separate ways. I drifted over to the bar and slipped behind the counter like I owned the place, starting on a batch of sweet milkshakes for the three of us to unwind with after the mission. Mira exchanged a few words with Elfman, then headed toward a blonde girl who, judging by the pink mark on her palm and the fact that I had no idea who she was, was brand new to Fairy Tail.
"Why do you always bring the Council down on us?! And what is with the sheer lack of discipline in here?! You there, visitor, go dance outside. Wakaba, smoking is also outside, every table is covered in your ash!" Erza had launched into full drill-sergeant mode, handing out reprimands left and right. "Cana, what kind of posture is that?! Sit like a normal person! Natsu, Gray, why are you hugging?"
"We're... best friends!" Gray announced, nervously draping an arm around his pink-haired buddy.
"Aye!" Natsu confirmed.
"You look like idiots. Stop it." They jumped apart like they'd been burned. "But I'm glad you're maintaining the friendship. I hope nothing gets in the way of that? Like it did before."
At Erza's firm tone, both boys shook their heads vigorously in unison.
"No, ma'am!"
Watching this unfold, a thought flickered through my head: was Erza maybe being a little hard on those two? Maybe I should step in at some point, spare them the regular roughing up?
But the thought slipped away as quickly as it came, when two fair-haired individuals appeared in front of me.
"Elian, this is Lucy. Lucy, this is Elian," Mirajane introduced us to the new mage for reasons I hadn't quite caught yet. The most notable thing about her was her set of Celestial Spirit keys, a rare magic, all things considered.
"Nice to meet you," I gave a short nod, glancing at Mira to figure out why exactly she'd brought this person over to me.
"I thought Lucy might be a good fit for your upcoming job," she explained, and continued: "Lucy did great on a couple of missions she ran with Natsu. On the last one she even dealt with the Southern Wolves herself."
"That wasn't me, Natsu beat them."
"And modest too," Mira cooed. "Think you'd want to come along?"
"Why aren't you going too, Miss Mirajane?"
"Just Mira is fine. As for that, Master Makarov reached out and asked me to keep an eye on things while he's at the Guild Masters' summit."
Radiating warmth and welcome through her posture and her voice, playing the perfect angel, Mirajane made her case to the blonde.
I wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of spending time on an unknown quantity whose usefulness was still debatable. Mira, on the other hand, clearly enjoyed chatting with this Lucy.
Ever since certain activities became a permanent fixture in her life, Mira had started putting on a show of being even kinder and sweeter than she actually was. Whether that had to do with moving into the estate near the guild building by the lake, marking a new chapter in her life, or something else entirely was hard to say, since she flatly refused to answer anything that veered too close to personal territory.
But messing with the new girl? That she found highly entertaining.
"Hm." I turned the new girl's credentials over in my head, weighing whether it was worth bringing her along. She'd handled some decent mercenaries, from what I'd heard. She might not be entirely useless. "The job could be profitable, and extra hands never hurt. Though the Council doesn't usually pay for freelancing, there are other parties who do."
"Profitable?" The blonde perked right up.
"Possibly," Erza said, materializing at my elbow with Natsu and Gray in tow. "And it doesn't leave much time. We leave tomorrow morning by train."
"What?!" Natsu protested. "And nobody asked us?!"
"Don't you dare argue with Erza! She'll beat you again!..." Gray hissed, clearly under the delusion that he was being quiet.
"Get a good night's rest," Erza decreed, picking up the milkshake I'd just finished making. "Thanks, Lian. I'll be home."
And with that, she headed for the exit, and everyone watched her go.
"What's gotten into her?" Lucy asked.
"Erza made a mistake on the mission," I said, taking a pull through the straw of my drink. "And the job was pretty underwhelming overall."
"The demon I was hoping to absorb turned out to be pathetically weak," Mira sighed. "Some kind of beast hybrid on top of it. Completely useless, despite being enormous. All three of us went for nothing."
"Wait..." Lucy looked confused, then pointed at the massive horn resting behind her. "You mean that one?..."
"Yep."
Lucy's face went totally blank.
"If that's a weak demon to you, I'm terrified to imagine what a strong one looks like... Maybe I should sit this mission out?"
"Well, have a great time, everyone." I started gathering my things to head home. "Come find us if you decide to join, Lucy. Your track record is genuinely decent."
"Bye-bye," Mira waved, staying put to fulfill her babysitting duties.
The next morning, Erza and I made our way to Magnolia's train station.
"Six people, plus Lucy's Celestial Spirits. Not bad." I looked over our little group: me, Erza, Natsu, Happy, Gray, and Lucy. "You decided to come after all?" I asked the blonde.
"I've got rent to pay, so... The job isn't too dangerous, right?"
"Depends on how it goes," I shrugged. "Everyone on board, the conductor's already waiting. We'll go over the details inside."
We boarded the train car, which had "Scarlet" written along its sides.
"Wait, you have your own private train car?" Lucy asked.
"Train," I clarified, catching her bewildered look.
"I didn't think you could be both rich and a mage..."
"If you stop making money your main goal and treat it as a tool instead, it's very possible. The key is finding good managers and reminding them you exist every now and then."
Lucy fell into thoughtful silence at that. The rest of us settled into seats around the large table with its luxurious bench seating, and the train started moving.
"I'll be the one to explain what we're dealing with, since I witnessed it firsthand," Erza finally began. "Our trio needed to restock on supplies, and in Onibas I stopped into a bar where mages tend to gather. I caught fragments of a conversation, about a Lullaby that someone named Kageyama was trying to unseal, and, most importantly, that he intended to deliver it to Erigor, the Death God of Eisenwald..."
The redhead's fist tightened, her whole posture shifting into something dangerous.
"That mage is one of the upper ranks in a dark guild. If I'd remembered that sooner, his subordinates wouldn't have walked out of that bar."
"Eeeek!..." came a frightened squeal from Lucy.
"But by then we were already too far away. That was my mistake."
Personally, I didn't have a burning stake in some random dark guild's business. But Erza, now that she knew they were plotting something, had already started blaming herself, and she was fired up with the drive to stop them before they could see their plans through, plans that were highly likely to end in mass casualties. And I couldn't exactly leave my sister to deal with that alone.
"Through my contacts, I've managed to track down Eisenwald's location," I took over. "Our destination is Oshibana. That's where we're paying them a visit to find out exactly what they want with this Lullaby."
"Strange feeling..." Erza said, shaking off the grim mood. "That's the same city as our first mission together."
"You're right," I agreed in the same reflective tone. "We took down a few criminals, I threatened the head of the city guard with grievous bodily harm, and you broke his arm. Ah, those were the days."
Lucy, absorbing all of this, was quietly melting into the upholstery.
I turned to Natsu.
"How's your inner ear?"
"My what?"
"Do you still get motion sick?"
"Oh. Nah, not since that thing you gave me."
He leaned back against the seat with his arms behind his head, grinning in appreciation.
"Good."
Dragon Slayers have heightened senses across the board, and in any vehicle, where your body is moving but your muscles aren't doing the work, the disconnect causes brutal motion sickness. For myself, I'd recalibrated my sensory sensitivity during my transformation so I wouldn't spend every train ride utterly miserable. For Natsu, after watching his suffering often enough, reworking an almost-finished component of my mutagen had been no great effort. One injection, a couple of days of recovery, and this son of a dragon was cured.
Laxus, on the other hand, had not received that gift. He'd gotten paid for letting me study his Dragon Slayer biology, and on top of that, I remembered exactly what kind of person he'd been as a kid and still was. Possibly it was petty of me to hold a grudge over a sparring loss from over a year ago. But yeah. Petty was exactly the right word.
"The Lullaby, the Death God..." Lucy murmured, and then her face lit up. "That mage's title just made me think of one of the old stories... This Lullaby, it could be Death Magic!"
"Never read about anything like that," Erza said, turning dead serious before looking over at me.
"Haven't heard of it either. And I don't read fairy tales."
We both stared at Lucy.
"Hey! Don't look at me like I'm some little kid," she protested. "Someone read it to me when I was little!"
"That's not relevant to us," Erza said flatly. "Tell us about the Lullaby. Details."
Lucy, sweating a little, started laying it out. The picture that emerged was this: the Lullaby was Death Magic, sealed inside a terrible flute carved from a three-eyed skull. That meant the Lullaby Erza had overheard about was a dark artifact built specifically for mass killing. Honestly, I'd half-seen this coming.
"Perfect little trinket for a dark guild," I noted, grimly satisfied at how cleanly the pieces fit together.
"We don't know exactly what they want it for," Erza said. "But we have to take down this group, whatever their goal may be."
"Take down?" Lucy forced out. "So we're going to wipe out an entire dark guild?!"
"Did you just figure that out, Luigi?" Happy asked. "Slow on the uptake, aren't you..."
"It's Lucy! And who are you to talk?! We've known each other a week and you still can't get my name right!"
But before the argument could go anywhere, the rails screeched and the train lurched into an emergency stop.
A flustered conductor came rushing to our car moments later.
"Apologies, sir, ma'am... The Oshibana station is blocked. There's another train parked across the tracks."
I immediately stretched my Sphere Vision outward in a cone for hundreds of meters to see what was happening. A moment later, a dry scoff escaped me.
"Looks like Eisenwald found us first."
Soon, our group was off the train and moving toward the station. When we pushed through the gathered crowd, we were stopped at the police tape, DO NOT CROSS, by a security cordon that had sealed off the entire building.
"Nobody goes in!" a man in chainmail wielding a spear announced loudly, apparently local military. "The dark guild Eisenwald has seized the station... City forces are handling the situation!"
"City forces are already down for the count," I said. The officer twitched nervously, while Lucy behind us started worrying even more audibly. A lacrima communication crystal appeared in my hand, and a moment later it displayed the face of a sweaty, very square-jawed man. "I can see you're having a rough day, Duke."
"Make it fast, Scarlet! I just received some very alarming news and I don't have time for pleasantries!"
"My sister and I are in your territory. In Oshibana."
At those words, the aristocrat's pallid face seemed to flood with color on the spot.
"You're there too! Excellent! Wonderful!" he exclaimed, before his face went purple with fury. "Those damned Eisenwald wizards have seized the railway station and blocked all traffic! I hereby authorize the elimination of these criminals! No mercy for terrorists!"
"Eliminate?!" Lucy let out a terrified squeak.
The lacrima went dark in my hand.
"Yeah. You may have heard that using magic to kill people is illegal. Killing people in general is illegal. But with authorization from local authorities, in situations exactly like this one, it's permitted."
Lucy's teeth were audibly chattering. She had the panicked look of a civilian who hadn't even been handed a weapon but was still being shoved out the door with a spec-ops team and told to go storm a building.
"Don't overthink it," Gray cut in. "Just because we have the authorization doesn't mean we're going to kill anyone. Yeah, things happen... but that's not an excuse to stop valuing other people's lives."
"Yeah, scaredy-cat Lucy, don't worry," Happy chimed in with a cheeky grin.
"I'm not scared!" she protested. "It was just very sudden. And besides, Natsu and I never got permission from anyone, even when we were doing some pretty sketchy stuff..."
"Which is exactly why the guild keeps getting grief from the Magic Council," Erza said sternly. "You need to think ahead."
On that note, we moved toward the station entrance. The entry corridor, where the beaten soldiers had apparently been dragged off to, gave way to an enormous crowd of mages. They were fanned out in a massive semicircle near the train. There had to be close to a hundred of them.
"Well, well, look who decided to drop by!"
"The high-and-mighty light guild! On their own private train! Living large, are we?!"
"Enough," I said, cutting through the noise. I had zero interest in sitting through this little show. I pointed directly at one mage with a black ponytail who looked like a budget Shikamaru, standing slightly ahead of the rest of the pack. "Are you in charge here? Answer me. What is all this about?"
"Oh, do allow me to explain, great and noble light mages," he started, his voice absolutely dripping with sarcasm. "We, the pitiful dark mages, have gathered here for one purpose alone. To restore justice."
"Spell it out," Erza commanded. "What do you want with the Lullaby? Your answer determines whether we beat you to death or just close to it."
Silence hung for a split second, and then the members of Eisenwald erupted into mocking laughter.
"I spotted your private train heading this way back in Magnolia, before you even reached Onibas. Thanks to me, Erigor already knows you're coming," the one with the ponytail sneered once the laughter died down. "But don't trouble yourselves. Our boss is already on his way to the target. As for you, we'll just kill you here so you don't get in the way. Forward!"
The crowd surged forward, flanking us from both sides.
Seems like they really didn't know who they were up against.