“Chase, you bastard, didn’t you say you were out of magic?!” Natsu, pinned by the swords of light, sounded genuinely terrified.
“Guess you’re still a little young, Natsu.” Chase smiled, calm as ever, and swirled the teacup in his hand.
“Chase, Natsu’s the one who made me scratch up the coffee table and everything.
If you’re settling scores, go find him.
I’m innocent!” Happy, thoroughly frightened, sold Natsu out without a shred of hesitation.
“You damn traitor, Happy, are we even friends anymore?!” Natsu roared.
“Don’t worry.
Neither of you is getting out of this.” Chase smirked and stepped forward, Dark Magician Girl falling into step beside him, the two of them closing in together.
Whatever aura was rolling off Chase, it had Natsu and Happy frozen solid.
They turned to Lucy, wide-eyed, radiating hope.
“Ha, ahaha, well, I’ll leave you to it, Mr.
Chase!
Wouldn’t want to be in the way!” Lucy took off without so much as a backward glance.
“Hey, Lucy, don’t leave us behind!” “We’re Fairy Tail mages too, you know!” Watching Chase slowly raise a fist roughly the size of a punching bag, Natsu and Happy sank into pure despair, shaking their heads and struggling uselessly.
Lucy had just crossed the stone bridge over the river when she heard two loud booms from somewhere behind her.
Two dazzling shooting stars streaked off into the night sky and vanished over the horizon with a faint, cheerful ding.
Faint but unmistakable, Natsu’s voice rang out after them, thick with resentment.
“You bastard, Chase!
I’ll be back!” “Natsu and Happy really do have a wonderful relationship with Mr.
Chase.” Lucy smiled to herself, let out a soft sigh, and picked up her pace.
She wanted to get home fast and add a couple of fresh entries to Chase’s file in her novel.
Chuunibyou case.
Complete pervert.
Back at the house, Chase, having dealt with Natsu and Happy to his satisfaction, settled back onto the sofa and looked up.
Through the hole punched clean through the ceiling, shaped disturbingly like the silhouette of a man and a cat, the night sky stretched out overhead, thick with stars.
“Huh.
Forgot for a second there and thought I was still at the guild.” Chase sighed, half amused at himself.
Back at the guild, property damage was never a real problem.
Whatever it cost, Makarov’s guild fund absorbed it without complaint.
At home, though, repairs came straight out of his own pocket.
“A year gone by, and Natsu and Happy are just as cute as ever.
Though they have gotten stronger, I’ll give them that.” Dark Magician Girl, watching from inside her card, hadn’t been worried for a second out there.
She’d thoroughly enjoyed handing out that beating, and even the sting of getting flattened in an instant by the Flame God Dragon, Ignia, felt a little further away now.
She’d learned from Chase that the red dragon from before shared a father with Natsu, making it his half-brother in every sense but the ones that actually mattered.
“That said, we’re still a good ways off from where I want to be,” Chase said, shaking his head.
A full day back among his guildmates had given him a decent read on where Natsu stood now, and most of the rest of the guild besides.
A fight to the death was a fight.
So was a friendly brawl with your own guildmates, in the end.
The card-drop mechanic behind Duelist’s Soul didn’t discriminate between the two.
All that mattered was how hard the fight had been.
When Chase first joined Fairy Tail, he’d leaned hard on his guildmates to fill out his starting deck.
Erza and Laxus had beaten him black and blue more times than he could count back then, real monsters both of them, but he’d gradually closed the gap until he stood level with them as an S-Class mage in his own right.
That had been part of the reason he’d taken the ten-year mission in the first place, a year back.
He’d already burned through most of the easy pickings the guild had to offer.
“It’s because Master keeps getting stronger too fast for anyone to keep up!” Dark Magician Girl said it with real conviction, a small smile on her lips, her eyes fixed steadily on Chase.
She’d walked the whole continent of Guiltina with him.
She knew exactly how many fights it had taken to get him this far.
“It’s not me.
It’s us,” Chase corrected, meaning it.
He reached out and rested a hand on the deck.
A faint screen of light flickered up in front of him, and for a moment he could see all of them, watching him back in silence.
Dark Magician Girl laughed, patted her own chest, and agreed immediately, not even pretending at modesty.
The next morning came bright and gentle, sunlight burning off the last of the night.
Cattle and horses set to work around town, and the streets filled up, busy and prosperous as ever.
Chase, for once, had gotten a proper night’s sleep.
After sorting out the construction crew coming to fix the house, he headed out along the river toward the guild.
“You damn Chase, what are you even doing back here?
If you’ve got nothing better to do, go find some work!” “Please, let’s all just buy a place by the sea somewhere.
I let my life insurance lapse a year ago and I am seriously reconsidering that decision right now!” “Don’t stand so close!
My house just got renovated!” The neighbors, the second they spotted Chase, started hurling insults and begging him to move along, every face on the street tight with panic.
Not one of them wanted to be the person who turned around to find their cozy little home collapsing behind them for no visible reason.
It wasn’t hard to imagine just how much chaos Chase must have caused, over the years, to leave a scar like that on an entire neighborhood.
Claiming the title of most destructive person in a guild where everyone doubled as a one-person demolition crew was, in its own strange way, quite the achievement.
“This is really something.
Didn’t expect everyone to still be this fired up after more than a year away.” Chase laughed, honestly touched, and waved cheerfully at the terrified faces lining the street, either missing the fear entirely or simply choosing not to notice.
“You’re way too friendly!” the neighbors shot back, adults and children both, in a ragged unison dripping with sarcasm.
“Let’s catch up sometime.
Looks like I’ll actually be sticking around town for a while this time.” Chase breezed right past anything in their tone that might have suggested he shouldn’t.
One sentence was all it took.
Doors slammed shut up and down the street, and the more cautious residents went ahead and closed their windows too.
“Everyone around here really is nice.
Shame they’re all so shy about it.” Chase smiled, shook his head, and kept walking.
Bathed in the “warm” welcome of his neighbors the whole way there, he arrived at the Fairy Tail guild.
Early as it still was, plenty of people were already up and about inside.
Some were passed out cold on the tables, wine jugs still in hand.
Others swayed in front of the request board without actually picking anything.
A few more had already found someone to flirt with on either side of them.
In short: chaos, and plenty of it.
Just a normal morning at Fairy Tail.
“Chase?
Didn’t expect to see you here this early.” A gentle, sweet voice drifted over from behind the bar.
Mira, in a black dress, hurried out from behind the counter, her quick steps giving away that something was wrong.
“Morning, Mira,” Chase said.
Mira nodded back, but her brow furrowed almost immediately after, something urgent flickering across her otherwise flawless face.
“Chase, if you’ve got nowhere else to be, you really shouldn’t stick around the guild right now.” “What’s going on?” Chase asked, caught off guard.
“Master seems to be planning to kill you—” Before Mira could get the rest out, a roar of pure fury tore through the hall, and something four or five meters tall and pitch black came crashing down from the second floor.
The impact alone shook the whole guild, dust exploding out in every direction.
Cana jolted awake out of her stupor.
Nab, mid-sway in front of the request board, froze in place.
Loke, curled up in some woman’s arms nearby, looked up sharply at the commotion.
The dust cleared fast, revealing the full, towering shape of Makarov’s transformed body.
“Chase!
Care to explain how you managed to destroy most of a town in the Kingdom of Ogaso, on the continent of Guiltina?!” Makarov hurled the stack of documents in his hand straight at the floor, furious.
He’d thought all he had to deal with today was smoothing over the failed ten-year mission.
Instead, Chase had gone and surprised him with something far bigger.
The man had only gotten back yesterday afternoon, and the complaint letter and full report had already landed on his desk by this morning.