Our little group of four stood in Makarov's office, making him the fifth. Perched on his desk and working his way through the last of his beer, he listened to our mission report.
"To summarize: you two," the old man said, fixing his gaze on Macao and Wakaba once the story was done. "Your cover was absolutely terrible, which meant the rookies never got to feel the full weight of responsibility for the job. And on the way there, you got thrown out to the vestibule for smoking and not having tickets. After getting fined, you bribed the conductor to take you the rest of the way to Magnolia."
The two men nodded glumly. They'd had to shell out a sum that wasn't exactly astronomical, but wasn't pocket change for them either.
The old man turned to Erza and me.
"And you two threatened to wreck the client's shop, damaged the guard captain's furniture, and broke his arm."
"Yep," I said, nodding straight-faced, while my little sister looked thoroughly embarrassed.
"Brats! Someone explain to me, why can't anyone here do anything quietly?! Calmly! Without all of this. You had the option to just track down the thief, didn't you? Was that even possible?"
"Sure. But why bother?" I said. "The way we did it was way more fun."
"Heh-heh-heh." Wakaba and Macao snickered, then shut up fast under Makarov's glare.
"Right..." the old man sighed. "Look, you got lucky this time, but be more careful next time... Although, who am I even talking to? Congrats on the first one, kids. I'm going to go get drunk."
On that note, the guild master left us to it. After catching a few words from the remaining two men, which were something about how we were now proper Fairy Tail wizards through and through, Erza and I went our separate ways to take care of business. We made the rounds to a couple of people, namely our landlord and the blacksmith we owed money to. After settling both debts, we headed to a bakery to celebrate completing our first mission.
We'd paid Makarov back right away. But after all the expenses, almost nothing was left of the reward for that first mission, so we went ahead and cashed the check we'd been given in Oshibana.
The only thing we actually got to keep was the escort bonus from the two wizards, since they turned it down. I'd offered to treat them on my tab, but no means no. As for covering the little stunt they pulled with the conductor and the train lady, that was never on the table. Paying for backup was reasonable; paying for stupidity wasn't.
For the next couple of days, Erza and I rested and trained. I finished the little book Porlyusica had lent me and got a new one from her, this one about herbs. We talked for a whole four minutes that time before she asked me to get lost. Progress, honestly, since before that I'd had to bolt out the door a lot faster. Erza, for her part, wasn't able to hold her entire modest arsenal in her personal space until the end of the second day, and even then, at least it stopped dropping on my head.
And then, toward the evening of that very second day, a certain persistent guy decided to remind me he existed.
"Start the cast, Gray," I said, standing in the wide backyard of the guild, addressing the wizard who had, once again, stripped down to his underwear.
Erza was off to the side, not doubting my capabilities for a second. Beside her stood a handful of other guild members who'd come outside to watch the show.
At my command, the kid planted one fist against his open palm, and a cold, gray chill rolled off him.
"Ice-Make: Lance!" Gray called out. He thrust both hands forward and shaped a lance out of thin air, sending it flying straight at me.
A smooth sidestep was all it took to clear the line of fire.
"Slow," I noted.
Gray wasn't giving up.
"Ice-Make: Floor!"
Dropping back into that crossed-arms stance, he slapped the ground, and within seconds the whole surface was coated in a slick, surprisingly even sheet of ice.
I had to adjust fast to the slippery ground, while Gray moved around me in a wide arc, gliding like he had skates on.
"Ice-Make: Hammer!" Closing the distance, he conjured a massive hammer directly over my head.
This time I didn't wait around for it.
A sword materialized in my hand, and using Telekinesis along with it, I physically yanked myself sideways across the ice, pulling on the blade with my magic to clear the impact zone.
The kid's moves struck me as pretty raw and unrefined. Nothing close to elegant.
"Yeah, speed is still the issue, Gray. Against anyone strong, or even just skilled, you really don't want to close in for melee."
"Shut it! I don't need you going easy on me!" He was clearly stung by that.
"Kids." I rolled my eyes. "Fine, have it your way."
Keeping hold of my swords, I snapped my arms and let Telekinesis carry me fast across the ice again.
A couple of clean moves got me past another lance. I rounded an ice column he'd thrown up, closed in, and the blades blurred with the speed of it: one move knocked the frozen sword out of Gray's grip, the second left a shallow cut along the skin of his neck, and the third already had me stepping behind him.
"Two-nothing, man," I said, clapping Gray on the shoulder. "Maybe next time."
He stood there breathing hard and dazedly touched the trail of blood on his neck, staring at it.
"Woo-hoo! Nice one, kids!"
"Yeah, not bad at all. And nobody even got killed, which is honestly impressive."
The guildmates started cheering.
Erza was among them, clapping quietly. She was impressed, though honestly less by my win and more by the revelation that Gray wasn't just some naked idiot; he actually had something going for him. The congratulations were, of course, directed at yours truly. The magnificent one.
"Pathetic," said a tall teenager who looked about fourteen. Blond hair, a lightning-bolt scar over his right eye, spiked headphones, black and yellow clothes. "Hey, you, whatever your name is. Doesn't matter. Point is, you were talking about how the other guy lacks speed, but you move like a snail. You're just as much of a nobody, so quit acting like you're teaching anyone."
My eye twitched.
"Say that again?" Gray turned his head toward the speaker, still breathing hard.
"You heard me," said Laxus, because that was his name, with a nasty grin. This particular piece of work happened to be Makarov's grandson. "What about you?"
He turned to me.
"I'd say empty trash talk from a walking lightning rod doesn't carry a whole lot of weight," I replied calmly, stepping aside and pointedly wiping frost off one of the swords floating in the air. "But since you're apparently the world's leading expert on snails, come on over. Let's see if you've actually got anything, or if you've just been listening to too many motivational speeches through those fancy headphones."
"You looking for trouble?" he asked, tilting his head up.
That was exactly what I was doing, and for good reason.
"Yeah, good, you caught that. Expert on snails, man of science, I can see it, I can really see it." I kept nodding, laying the mockery on thick.
"Grr..." Laxus, not exactly gifted with eloquence when angry, crackled with lightning running over his body. He was an A-rank Lightning Wizard and, on top of that, a Lightning Dragon Slayer. "You're dead, punk!"
Turning into a bolt of lightning, he shot toward me fast. But the swords I'd spread around me forced him to materialize out of his energy form in a spot that was convenient for me, not for him.
"Catch!" I put everything I had into the punch and caught him clean on the jaw, sending him flying back a meter and skidding another three across the ice. "Hm. You're tough."
Laxus was back on his feet immediately, just with a red cheek. Lightning flared around him again, and then...
"Raaah!!!" With a roar, his bare fist shattered the ice lance that Gray, who'd jumped into the brawl, had just fired at him.
After that, he gathered more magic into himself and slammed both hands into the ground.
"Lightning Body: Eruption!"
"Aaah!" Gray cried out as lightning tore straight up through the ice and ripped into him.
"One down," Laxus said, catching his breath like a cornered animal, and shifted his gaze to me.
I was in the middle of stepping off one of my floating swords, which I'd jumped onto a few seconds earlier. Keeping my balance up there was rough, but for a couple of seconds it was totally doable.
"He shouldn't have jumped in," I said, glancing over at Erza. She looked tense, clearly wanting to throw herself into the fight. "This is just a little boys' scrap. Don't worry about it, sis."
There was a reason I'd just told Erza not to follow Gray's example.
"Raaah!" Laxus, his anger apparently leaving no room for vocabulary, just charged at me on foot. Cloaked in lightning, he was genuinely fast. "Photon Flash!"
No idea why he bothered announcing it, but the next second I had to shut my eyes. He didn't slow down, he just kept barreling forward and swung at me hard.
The flash wasn't really a problem for me, though. Still working the battlefield, I yanked myself sideways across the ice with Telekinesis, pulling on a sword.
"Goddamn ice!!!" Laxus roared as he missed. He compressed a ball of lightning into his hand and slammed it into the ground.
The explosion cracked the ice in every direction.
He turned back into lightning and started cycling around me in fast loops. My swords kept shifting position, boxing off the angles he'd need to hit me from. Seeing that, the blond went for brute force.
He appeared right next to a sword, punched the blade out of the way, then grunted as my foot drove into his liver, but he stayed upright. And that was with everything I had behind it.
The next instant, reading his movement, I tried to spring back and open up some distance, but I didn't make it in time and ended up on the ground.
"Oh, come on..." I lifted my head and looked at Laxus, who had me by the ankle.
"Hff... Hff..." He was still breathing like a furious animal, lightning snapping all over his body.
"You're going to let me go, right?" I asked, trying to sound innocent. The nervousness was entirely justified.
The next moment, lightning flooded my entire field of vision. My body locked up in pain and just shut off.
I came to roughly fifteen minutes later, lying with my head in Erza's lap. We were at home, on the bed.
"Lian..." she said my name quietly, sad. "I couldn't protect you again..."
"Don't blame yourself, sis. The choices I make are mine to own." I gave her the kind of reassuring smile that made it clear things weren't quite as bad as they looked.
Laxus was genuinely strong. He'd have been able to take out someone like Varick no problem, and probably even Jellal. I doubted Jellal's Telekinesis could have kept that guy pinned down. That was exactly why I hadn't let Erza fight him; she would have gotten hurt, and fast. As for why it was my hard head that went picking the fight, it was simple pride. I wasn't about to sit there and take lip from some punk. This wasn't a fight to the death; it was a pecking-order thing, and getting in someone's face was exactly the right call for that. And honestly, beyond the obvious envy at his raw power, there was something genuinely satisfying about landing a clean hit on an opponent who outclassed me so completely in raw magical output.
A blacked-out body wasn't an obstacle for me as an observer. So I remembered, because I'd seen it: after Laxus hit me with a charge that would have fried a power station, the lumberjack made his entrance into the backyard stage. Makarov, taking in the fact that the in-guild brawl had gotten way out of hand, grew literally into a giant roughly seven meters tall, then brought one hand down on Laxus in a single flat clap. That had the effect of calming him right down. That was exactly why Erza hadn't had a chance to jump in and pull me out, since the whole thing was already over by then.
Now we were home.
"I'll get stronger..." Erza promised me again.
"Wouldn't hurt for me to do the same." I pushed myself up to sitting, propping myself on my hands. "I actually have a few ideas for both of us. So why don't we make them happen?"
I turned my head and noticed it was already almost night.
"I mean tomorrow."
My rhetorical question got no answer.
The next morning we showed up at the familiar blacksmith's, all in the name of testing out one interesting idea.
"Just be careful, remember?" I asked, got a nod from my sister, and settled in to watch alongside the visibly skeptical blacksmith.
Erza slipped on a metal gauntlet, planted herself in the braced stance I'd shown her, extended her arm, and pressed it against a chunk of scrap iron clamped in the vise.
"It's not working," she said after a few seconds, pulling her hand back with a small frown. "I can feel the gauntlet like it's a part of me, and that's it..."
What we were doing was fairly interesting. We were testing our magical capabilities, specifically how our Telekinesis actually interacted with things.
Our Telekinesis runs on magic and bears the load internally. According to Newton's third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But Erza could lift well over a hundred kilograms with her Telekinesis, and that load landed not on her body but on her magical core, which then burned through Ethernano to sustain it.
What I couldn't quite nail down was where, in that case, the fulcrum was, since Newton's law demands one, and why Telekinesis couldn't be used on something you were already wearing. No clean answer on either count.
She could pull objects into her hands and float them back out just fine. But grabbing onto a sword and yanking herself toward it was something only I could do, and it came down to knowledge from my old world; my grasp of spatial geometry ran a lot deeper. Erza, even after my five-minute lecture, hadn't been able to figure out how to consciously hook your own magic onto the fabric of space and push off from it.
That lecture, by the way, was supposed to run at least an hour, but Erza had a splitting headache long before that. Between the nearly twenty essential terms that had to come first and everything that happened when you started combining them, the whole thing had gotten considerably more complicated.
And honestly, it wasn't easy for me either. The local magic just didn't have a natural affinity for that sort of thing. Back home, the original version of me had such an absurd energy reserve that I could bend space around however I wanted, at any angle and any configuration. Here, things were trickier in very specific ways. I could lift objects with basic Telekinesis roughly equal to my own weight, but only with real effort and only for about a minute before I had to let go. Holding myself up while standing on a sword wedged against space itself was on a whole different level. A few seconds, and I was already dropping. Forget gliding around on a blade like some xianxia cultivator in a silk robe with a dragon pattern; that wasn't happening anytime soon.
Taking all of that into account, and thinking back to how our Telekinesis basically couldn't affect living things in any meaningful way, the practical takeaway was clear: Erza, the powerhouse of the two of us in the Telekinesis department, needed to keep pushing that side of her magic. And I, the clever one with the unimpressive mana pool, needed to keep studying magic itself to find something that didn't burn through my reserves so fast.
We bought about twenty different iron weapons for Erza, plus an iron breastplate for protection since she wasn't exactly the most mobile in a fight. I picked up a large shield and a pair of long metal rods, which were items I could swing without them weighing me down too much. Because if I'd had more equipment back then, getting close to me would have been even harder for Laxus.
After the shopping run, we headed out to the big open fields outside Magnolia so we could cut loose without holding back, and ran some sparring.
I spent a fair amount of time walking Erza through the basics of swinging iron around, breaking down the stances. But most of the time we just trained by doing, alternating between straight one-on-one rounds and rounds with floating weapons in play.
"You're hitting harder every time," I said, taking her strike on a two-handed hard block and feeling the ground give slightly under my feet. Then my body slipped her next swing with a clean twist, while the rod under my control intercepted the mace she'd sent flying at me. "And bolder, heh. I like it."
At the start, Erza had been holding back, scared of hurting me with her weapons. But after our first ten-minute round, where the pace kept climbing and not a single flying blade had actually managed to reach me, she gradually stopped pulling her punches.
By now she was fighting with a sword in hand and her entire arsenal airborne at the same time.
Even so, her raw strength and the sheer number of weapons couldn't make up for how brutal it was to do both at once; fencing while directing that many pieces of iron was a nightmare. My movements, on the other hand, were exactly what they were: precise and economical.
Steel flashed constantly as we moved across the field together, closing in for exchanges then breaking apart.
And, in the way only someone with my particular brand of arrogance could manage, once I'd settled into the rhythm I actually found spare mental bandwidth to think about magic.
Erza's magical container was larger than mine by at least an order of magnitude, which was obvious enough. What wasn't obvious was how she was using that energy. It felt off somehow, like the practical gap was even wider than the gap on paper.
Fierce strikes came from her one after another, occasionally knocking one of my floating weapons clean out of the air, yet she wasn't tiring as fast as I would have expected.
I was still turning that over in my head when the day started winding down. Our makeshift outdoor session was nearly done, and we went into one more round with full gear and everything on the table.
That's when a visitor dropped by mid-fight.
"Hey, kids." Makarov waved when we stopped. "Don't mind me. Keep going."
And so we did, trading blows for a few more minutes before finally calling it. By the end of the day we were both dirty and beat, but satisfied with the work put in. Erza especially, since she'd made a real leap forward today. And I hadn't come away empty-handed either, having shaken the rust off plenty of techniques in this new body.
"Elian, I've been meaning to say something. The way you use magic is off," the old man said, making his presence known again, catching our curious looks.
We walked over.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Too precise. Too mechanical. Like you're forcing it into a box."
"Huh..." Something stirred at the back of my mind, a conversation about magic with Rob, who'd said something similar. "Can precision actually be a bad thing?"
"Yes and no. Usually, no." Makarov stroked his mustache and thought about it. "Magic always comes from the heart. But you give orders to your magic like it's a soldier. It's not, magic is like the wind. You have to feel it, understand it. You follow?"
"The way I see it, magic is more like a conduit for will. Like my own hand, it's part of me, so it can't not obey."
"Hmm," he pressed his lips together. "You understand, and you don't. Here," he pointed at Erza. "Your sister understands. Have her teach you."
And then, to my complete bewilderment, Makarov turned around and walked off.
I looked at the two of us, still equally dirty and exhausted.
"Tomorrow," we both said at the same time, and shuffled home.
The next morning, we showed up in the guild's courtyard.
Today I was apparently going to grasp something I hadn't managed to grasp yet. And since we had no plans to tear up an entire field like yesterday, we picked a spot closer to home.
Erza had no idea where to even start, so I guided her with an opening question, just asking how she herself actually felt magic.
"Well, you just... feel it! Like when you're mad at someone and you want to hit them. Except with a sword that's flying. You know?"
"Contrast in the source? Movement through space?"
"No! That too, but also something else. Something different. Okay, different example... Imagine you really, really want a cake. And you reach for it with your whole heart! That's what magic is like!"
"Erza, I cannot cast spells through a cake."
"Just try!!!"
My head was spinning, because I sort of got it, she was telling me to use emotion. But how, exactly, was anyone's guess. Was there really something more to it than just plain motivation? Some specific way of believing? I could still picture how, through that exact cake metaphor, Erza had managed to use Requip for the first time when it hadn't worked before. But what she'd actually felt in that moment, what specific emotions I needed to summon in myself, whether the same feelings applied every time or whether it was a matter of hitting the right range, there were a lot of questions, and no one could give me a straight answer to any of them.
"I'll try," I said after a pause, pulling out one of the rods. Taking a throwing stance and setting aside any deliberate thought about which emotions were forming in my head, I pictured the most incredible chocolate cake, rich, with a glossy glaze. The way it melts and spreads across your tongue, flooding your senses with pure bliss. And then I imagined that some absolute joker had tied this cake to a balloon, and my precious dessert was now floating way too far up for me to reach. Only the absolute belief that my magic was stronger than it seemed would get me there. Deep breath, wind-up... "For the cake!!!"
I launched the rod straight up, and it sailed dozens of meters into the air.
"And... Hm. That worked. About three percent better, maybe."
"I don't think you were being totally sincere," Erza said, glancing thoughtfully between me and the sky. "It needed to be from the heart, you know? Really."
"Can't say I fully know." I raised my hand, and the rod, already falling back down, began shifting its trajectory. In a moment the weapon hung in the air beside me, then slipped away into my pocket dimension.
"And you need to believe that you know."
"So instead of understanding that I understand, I need to believe that I understand?"
"I think so... I'm confusing myself now," she said, scratching the back of her head awkwardly.
"Ehh," I exhaled. "This seems like something that's going to take time. Thanks for trying, Erza."
"Mm-hm!"
She was right, what I was missing was sincerity. My old energy systems, Soul energy and the other one, ran on harder limits and stricter mechanics. Ethernano was deeply tied to belief, and I needed to fight my own ingrained habits, to move away from "I know I can" toward "I believe I can."
On that note, the talking part done, we went our separate ways. Erza wanted to unwind with a novel in the library, while I planned to join her a little later, after tracking down the old man about a subject that had been nagging at me for several days.
Specifically, any chance he could hook me up with a Dragon Lacrima?
The thing was crystallized dragon magic, and considering dragons were generally believed to have gone extinct about four hundred years ago, yeah, I figured supply was somewhat limited.
At the same time, I'd heard rumors that a certain blond kid, the very one who'd recently charged me up with good vibes, had been born pretty weak. But after having a Dragon Lacrima implanted in him, he'd become as strong as a whole herd of bulls, physically and magically alike. That kind of option was absolutely worth exploring.
"Can I get my hands on a Space-type Dragon Lacrima?" I asked.
"What do you mean, shorty, are you serious?" Makarov, sitting on his desk in his office, actually set down his mug of beer after I said that.
"Dead serious." I gave him my best expectant look, which earned a sigh.
"Elian, even for me, getting my hands on a single Lacrima would be incredibly difficult. They're banned in the magical world, and even when one surfaces, it's maybe once every few years! And they're not banned for nothing. Ivan, Laxus's father, was incredibly lucky to get one. But Laxus was too weak at the time; we had no choice but to implant it. It was an enormous risk, because the chance of rejection is very real. You're a healthy kid, live a normal life and don't even think about it."
On that note, I left Makarov's office. It would have been nice if he'd just pulled something out of his pocket that would make me considerably more powerful, but the old man was a wizard, not that kind of wizard.
I made my way to the library. Sitting down beside Erza, I started working through various applied magic books.
Either way, I needed to build out my arsenal. And maybe through the books I could start figuring out what exactly I was doing wrong with my magic. I'd grasped the general idea, but I needed the specifics.
That rhythm carried us through the next couple of days. Erza and I alternated between rest, walks, eating our weight in pastries, and training, and sitting in the library. There weren't exactly a lot of ways to pass the time in this world.
Before long, we picked up another mission, a different type this time. One that would let us put the skills we'd built to actual use. Time to make some carnage...