When about a hundred Eisenwald mages came at us, three of our team didn't waste a second.
Natsu, screaming that he was already fired up for the oncoming fight, literally caught flame and dove around the enemy's flank. Under his burning fists, the dark guild mages could barely reach for their own magic before the Salamander tore straight through their ranks.
Gray came in from the other side. The floor immediately froze under his feet, stripping half the mages of their footing. Before long, he'd conjured an enormous hammer and started swinging it like a wrecking ball, sending bodies flying left and right.
Erza's body lit up as armor formed around her. Dozens of blades shaped themselves into two pairs of wings, a skirt made partly of white fabric threaded with more blades, and a breastplate of interlocked edges that left her midriff and cleavage exposed.
"Heaven's Wheel Armor," she announced. Her magic surged, and swords began materializing around her one after another until close to two hundred of them floated in formation.
"Woo-hoo! Strip show!"
"Now that's a sight!"
The mages in the center, the ones Natsu and Gray hadn't gotten to yet, started celebrating.
Their celebration didn't last long.
Two hundred assorted blades, guided by Erza's telekinesis, came crashing down on the enemy all at once. Bodies were slashed; bodies were swept aside. Screams erupted from every direction. What had looked like an overwhelming mob of an entire guild's worth of mages was visibly shrinking by the second.
"You can jump in too," I said to Lucy, who was watching everything around her in a daze, Erza's performance in particular.
"Huh?! Right, yeah..." She immediately started rummaging through the key pouch on her belt. Then she froze. "Elian, right? Why haven't you joined the fight?"
"Saving my strength for something more important than a crowd of small fry," I replied. "I'm not the most durable one on the team. Though honestly, I could've handled these guys."
My magical output right now is roughly on par with Natsu's, maybe slightly above. But that strength might have a more important purpose ahead.
"Got it..." Lucy pulled out one of her golden keys and raised it in a wide arc. "Open, Gate of the Golden Bull! Taurus!"
"Mooooo!" With a bovine cry and a flash of light, a massive black-and-white minotaur appeared beside us, a giant battleaxe strapped across his back. "Miss Lucy! Your charms are as magnificent as ever!"
The spirit rumbled in his bass voice, hearts practically spinning in his eyes as he stared at the girl's chest.
"Yeah, yeah, enemies are that way." Lucy jabbed a finger toward the mass brawl.
"Enemies?! Anyone who threatens Miss Lucy's charms is DONE FOR!!!"
He let out a roar, launched himself into the air with his axe, and immediately started pummeling the Eisenwald mages alongside the others.
"Not bad," I noted, still watching from where I stood. "You can call the others, too."
"Huh?!" She blinked. "I can only sustain one spirit at a time."
"Makes sense. I'd heard that mages like you don't just open the gate, you're also channeling your magic into the spirit as a power source. No wonder."
"Lucy's a weakling," Happy concluded, interpreting things in his own special way from right beside her.
"Shut it, cat! You're literally doing nothing!"
Soon, it was all over. The Fairy Tail trio came out without a scratch, while every single Eisenwald mage was either groaning on the ground or out cold.
"We overestimated them," Erza said as she walked over. Her armor had already shifted back to her standard plate.
"Easy as pissing!" Natsu punched his palm.
"Gross," Gray muttered, walking up with a grimace.
"But it's not over yet," I spoke up. "I kept an eye on things, and no one went near the broadcast booth. Erigor left the building, just like the guy with the ponytail said."
"What do you mean 'kept an eye on things'?! You were right here," Lucy pointed out. "And earlier, before we even found those soldiers, you already said they'd been beaten..."
"I don't need to walk somewhere and see it with my own eyes to know what's happening. Either way, we're about to get answers right now."
I raised my hand and used telekinesis, the darker application of it. Immediately, as if caught by an invisible force, a mage who looked remarkably like Shikamaru came sailing face-first into my grip.
"Alright, talk. Where'd your boss go?"
The mage, already sporting several cuts and a chest full of bruises, jerked his head up with a glare.
"You really think I'm going to tell you anything?!"
"Ha... Ha-ha... Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" I started laughing, which made Lucy, who'd already been staring at me over the telekinesis thing, stare at me in a completely different way. She really did have the most expressive face. "You have absolutely no idea how many people have told me they wouldn't say a word, and then after just a couple minutes of torture, they were telling me things they didn't even know they knew! That never gets old!"
"Torture?!" a certain blonde shrieked.
"We may not have time." Erza grabbed the mage roughly herself. "Talk. Unless you want more scars."
The moment she said it, a crushing red aura exploded out of her. The floor cracked under us, and a howl tore through the building as if a gale had gotten in, despite every window being shut.
"Aaah, Erza's in rage mode again!" Happy darted behind Lucy.
"Ts-ts-ts-ts-ts." The blonde's teeth chattered as she took several steps back. Her eyes were wide and fixed on Erza, her expression cycling through naked fear and very visible relief that none of this was aimed at her.
"We're-best-friends, we're-best-friends, we're-best-friends..." Gray reflexively grabbed his buddy Natsu, apparently praying on autopilot.
"Y-yeah!..." Natsu confirmed, sweating bullets.
The Eisenwald mages were thoroughly impressed, too. The conscious ones, beaten and battered as they were, started sweating even harder.
"Yo, Scruff, I just remembered who those two are," one very... rotund mage whispered way too loudly, his head drooping toward his chest. "That's the Scarlet Twins..."
"Who?" asked the one called "Scruff," who in fact had no scruff at all, just a few lonely hairs on his face, making the nickname more of a running joke.
"A duo from Fairy Tail. They take extermination jobs all the time. After they're done, entire forests are drenched in monster blood! That woman can gut wyverns with her bare hands!"
"Holy crap. So what are they gonna do to Kageyama?"
"Kageyama, you said?" Erza caught that and raised an eyebrow. "So you're the one who was supposed to play the Lullaby. Then you definitely know..."
The mage in question, already suffocating within the radius of that crushing magical pressure, could only stare with wide eyes, breathing deep to keep from blacking out.
"We blocked the tracks to Clover! That's why we took the station, that was the whole point!" he finally cracked.
"Clover? That's where the Guild Masters' conference is," I said.
"Just figuring that out now?!" A deranged smile crept across the mage's face, the kind that shows up when a man realizes he's finished but managed to at least ruin someone's day. "The only way into that city is by rail! Unless you can fly like Erigor."
"Understood." I nodded. "Erza, make sure these guys get tied up. I'm going after him."
"Are you sure you can beat him?"
Erza let the pressure dissipate.
"Either way, I'm not letting him use the Lullaby."
"Hm... I get the plan. Don't take stupid risks."
"Yeah."
I looked up.
"What plan?" was all I caught of Lucy's question before my body vanished in a teleport.
Wind hit my ears like a wall of sound, but only because I was very, very high up. When I looked down, I saw an ocean of clouds with Oshibana visible somewhere beneath them.
My pupils narrowed. With a little magical enhancement, I traced the long stretch of rail lines running from one city to the next. Halfway along them, I found a human figure wrapped in gray gusts of wind. That was my target. Across all those kilometers, I teleported straight to him.
"How's life treating you, Erigor?!" I called out, sprawling casually in midair alongside the mage, held up by telekinesis.
"You?! Elian Scarlet! Son of a—" he swore, then kept going. "Useless trash! They didn't slow you down at all, did they?!"
"Easy, easy. I'm not here to rough you up. Hand over the Lullaby, and you can walk away to surrender to the Council with every bone intact."
He turned his head toward me with a sour look.
"As if! So a small part of the plan went sideways, big deal! We're one-on-one up here, and you can't stop me alone!"
"That's a lot of confidence from someone who deliberately sacrificed his own guild just to avoid facing both of us."
"Gloat all you want, Fairy Tail mage! It won't help you!"
With those words, he thrust both hands toward me and snapped his wrists in rapid succession. Blades of wind came streaking at me, fast. But...
BOOM. Erigor's wind mantle shuddered as I appeared behind him, my blade coated in spatial energy slamming into it. Magic clashed, but before I could punch through his repelling shield, I had to teleport sideways.
"Storm Bringer!" A tornado ripped out of him and tried to swallow me whole, but I was already gone. "Damn it, I hate space mages! You Fairy Tail flies are pathetic enough. But you're the worst fly of the bunch, because you can't be squashed!"
"Is that why you're hiding in your little wind cocoon, too scared to come out?" I asked lightly, still drifting alongside him. "So what's with you people, anyway? What's got you so pissed off that you decided killing off a whole room of Guild Masters was the move?"
"And they told you that, too." Erigor's expression soured as he thought of his subordinates. "Fine. It's simple, really, we're just restoring justice!"
"Heard that part. Give me specifics."
"Then stop interrupting!" He shot me another irritated glare. "You light guild mages get to enjoy your lives, take your jobs, bask in your glory. Savoring all those rights of yours... And you don't even know that those rights are built on stripping freedom from others!"
"...Wait. You're seriously just mad that you got classified as a dark guild?"
"We're not just mad!" he shouted, deeply offended. "This is a great cause! With this attack, we'll make ourselves feared, by the other dark guilds! And then, free of our miserable past, we'll carve out our own bright future!"
"Nah, terrible plan. The Guild Masters are nowhere near the top of the food chain. The Magic Council will just wipe you out," I said flatly, looking at him the way you look at someone who's missed something blindingly obvious.
"What?!"
"What I said. And honestly, did nobody in Eisenwald ever think about basic cause and effect? Who takes assassination contracts directly? That's why you got disbanded in the first place, right? If you wanted to run a 'righteous hitman' operation, you should've been building shell organizations in the criminal underworld and playing both sides at once. Instead, you're out here acting like kids who didn't understand the rules, threw a tantrum, and got disqualified."
He stared at me.
"Wait... Are you actually from a legal guild?"
"As legal as it gets! And for the record, I consider myself a good person. You know why?"
"Why?"
"Because I sat down recently and counted how many people I've killed, and the number wasn't high enough! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!... Not funny? Fine, suit yourself."
He was looking at me very strangely now.
"I think I joined the wrong guild..."
And so, mid-conversation, fields and forests slid past beneath us. Before long, we were flying over a rocky canyon where lone spires of stone jutted up toward the sky, bridges and railroad tracks running across their peaks, the same tracks that had been blocked back at Oshibana. After that, the city of Clover came into view, and Erigor put on a burst of speed, pulling ahead on sheer flight velocity. I didn't bother wasting magic to chase him. I just teleported directly to the destination, a modest three-story castle of a building. That was where the Guild Masters' conference was being held.
"Hey, old man," I greeted Makarov, who jolted so hard he nearly knocked over his drink. He'd been nervously nursing a beer. "What are you so wound up about?"
"Elian, damn it!" he snapped at me for appearing out of nowhere. He took a few slow breaths and explained, "Mira contacted me and said you and Erza brought Natsu and Gray along. That true?!"
"Yep."
"Lord almighty! You didn't leave them unsupervised?! You can't leave those two unsupervised! The collateral damage around them scales geometrically!"
"Erza stayed with them."
"Phew," Makarov exhaled, running the numbers in his head. "Okay, so with her there, property damage will be maybe thirty percent above baseline. She keeps them in check. We can cover that."
He took a long pull from his mug after finishing that particular calculation.
"How's the new girl holding up?"
"She'll do. More useful than some of the others," I said, then looked up and shifted gears. "Anyway, the reason I'm here. There's a wind mage incoming with a kill-switch artifact. Heads up."
"Hm?" The old man looked up too, following my gaze, and sure enough, a wind-wrapped silhouette was approaching.
"Finally! I see the little fly ran to a bigger one?" Erigor spotted me and Makarov. "Doesn't matter. I've got a flyswatter right here!"
His wind mantle dissolved, revealing a man with long, spiky hair, a bare tattooed chest, ragged cloth wrapped around his legs, and a scythe on his back.
In his hands, drawn from behind him, was a grotesque flute, just as Lucy had described: a skull with three eye sockets along one side, and twisted, gnarled roots branching out the other.
"This is the end," the mage said, raising the artifact to his lips. He was about to blow, to finally activate this dark instrument, when...
"What the—?!"
Blinking in confusion, Erigor realized his hands were empty.
"What was that you were saying about space mages? Didn't quite catch it," I asked with theatrical innocence, spinning the flute on my index finger with telekinesis.
"I HATE ALL OF YOU!" the man screamed, the realization hitting him that his entire plan had just collapsed in an instant. "Damn it..." He caught sight of Wizard Saint Makarov standing right there. "DAMN IT!!!" And then he noticed, stepping outside, that the other Guild Masters were all watching, a crowd that included no small number of seriously powerful mages.
That, more or less, was the plan. Sure, I could've tried to batter through Erigor's defenses and dealt with him on his own terms. But why? One of my biggest strengths is controlling the battlefield. Instead of fighting inside his frame, I dragged him into mine and crushed him in it. Now this wind mage could only stand there blinking, because he knew full well he couldn't do a thing against this crowd.
"This..." Erigor faltered, still hovering on the currents of his own magic. "Fine. You win today! But this isn't over! We'll settle this eventually!"
And with that, the mage simply shot upward and flew off into the distance.
"So, what was all that?" Makarov asked, eyeing the artifact in my hand.
"Just a pest with an inflated sense of self-importance. Grow your hand out, we've got someone to smack."
The old man shrugged and expanded his palm to an enormous size. I reached out with my free hand, focused, and using the same spatial magic that had snatched the flute, I made Erigor reappear right beside us. One swing from Makarov later, the man was embedded in the ground and thoroughly unconscious.
"That's that." I stopped messing with the artifact and just held it. Catching Makarov's interested look, I handed it over.
"Nasty piece of work... After Zeref's modifications, the Lullaby really could've killed even us."
"Huh. Didn't know that detail."
"Either way, glad it ended cleanly. Look, our people are already here."
And indeed, a magical carriage was pulling up. Erza stepped out from behind the wheel, and everyone else piled out of the back.
"Elian, glad you handled it," she exhaled, sounding a little worn.
I looked the carriage over and clocked that it wasn't one of the expensive Lacrima-powered models, it was the cheaper kind, the type that ran on the driver's own magic. That explained why Erza was drained. She'd apparently floored it the whole way here.
"That was impressive work," remarked an older man who'd walked over, broad-shouldered, hat on his head, spiked choker at his throat. Goldmine, Master of Quatro Cerberus. "You dismantled an entire dark guild, from what I understand?"
"That's right," the redhead confirmed.
"I still don't totally get the plan... That guy who got flattened, that was Erigor, right?" Lucy checked.
"Ohhh, Elian, Erza, my darlings, you get more gorgeous every time I see you!" A new figure appeared at our side: Bob, Master of Blue Pegasus. Short, bald, two chins, stubble, and lipstick. He was wearing a purple tank top with little angel wings on it, gold ring accessories, and shorts in vertical pink-and-purple stripes. "Oh, Elian, don't give me that look! You truly do get better with age, you know!"
"Whatever you're implying, back off. I'm into girls."
"Cold as ever! But those elegant wrists, the way your muscles show through your shirt, those predatory eyes... The contrast makes it all the more captivating!"
Everyone nearby gave the man a deeply strange look. I had no interest in playing along with whatever game he was running, so I simply extended a hand and grabbed him with telekinesis, Star Wars style.
I remembered once watching Loke from our guild try to flirt with Erza and get beaten half to death for it. I, being a guy, wasn't entirely sure how to respond to being hit on by another guy, but figured the principle was probably the same.
"Save your commentary for someone who asked. There are birds flying around out there in the sky. Go tell them they're pretty."
I raised my hand, and sent Bob sailing through the air like a certain spiky-haired, pierced acquaintance of mine once did. The bald man shot into the sky with a shriek.
"Who the hell was that?" Lucy asked.
"Better not to know," Gray said.
"Terrifying individual," Natsu agreed.
"He's gonna fall," Lucy noted.
"Nah, you saw, he's got little wings on him, just like mine," Happy explained and took off.
"...Those are decorative."
"Let's not talk about Bob," Makarov said breezily, waving it off, and turned to face us. "What you kids did today was something else. You shut down a major threat!"
He launched into a proper commendation.
"So, colleagues, in light of all this, I propose we file a joint commendation petition to the Council!" Makarov turned to face the assembled Guild Masters, punctuating his words by slapping the flute against his palm as he shamelessly bragged on our behalf. "Because these kids are brave, and strong, and responsible, and— YAAGH!!!"
He didn't get to finish. A plume of violet smoke had begun pouring from the skull's eye sockets, and the artifact hit the grass before anyone could process what was happening.
"Monster!" Natsu, Happy, and Gray screamed.
"EEEEK!" Lucy shrieked.
"Well, I'll be!" the Quatro Cerberus Master confirmed.
What our eyes saw next: in the span of a few seconds, an enormous wooden figure assembled itself directly above us.
"He-he-he-he! Foolish mages!" came a voice from on high. "My time has come!"
The demon's clawed limbs slammed into the ground with a crash that sent tremors through the earth under our feet. Above us towered an immense creature, easily fifty meters or taller.
"I will DEVOUR YOUR SOULS!!!"