Replaced

Lisanna's back and Lucy feels left out. Natsu wants Lisanna back on his team. What about Lucy?

You all have my sincerest apologies for not updating this last Sunday. I got back a little later than usual from my grandma's house and the computer was running extremely slow on Monday so I had to skip it. I also want to warn you that as the school year comes around, I won't update weekly because I have Advanced Placement classes, though I will try to update as often as I can. All updates will still be on Sunday or Monday. Thank you for your patience with me and thank you for all the reviews I've received from you. Here's the next chapter in Replaced and I hope you enjoy it. Please review or review again when you've finished reading! Thanks!

Chapter 6- Lucy's Resolve

The blonde mage fell on her butt yet again and the dagger dropped out of her hands as it shocked her. This exercise was specially designed by Uma's previous trainer and frankly, Lucy was surprised that the magic still worked after the passing of Uma's trainer.

"Come on Lucy dear, you're not going to get anywhere if you don't learn how to use a simple weapon." Uma taunted. Lucy nearly glared at her teacher, but remembered at the last minute that she was the one who offered to train her despite already having a kid under her wing, so she settled for glaring at the magicked dummy before her. Every time that she didn't do the stab, jab, or whatever else the dummy told her to do correctly, the dagger would send an electric shock through her body that made her drop the weapon every time. Annoying, but effective in the ways of training.

Grabbing the weapon again, she got to her feet, wobbly from so many shocks, and went at the dummy again. This training continued on for another two hours before Uma said to quit. Lucy was all but electrocuted by then. She just couldn't adjust to these changes very well. Every time that she observed Hisoka, she tried to copy him, but it just wouldn't work. Now, Lucy sat back against the giant root and watched Hisoka as he finished up. She just couldn't see how he could be doing so much better than her when he was the younger one with less experience in fighting. It just didn't seem fair to her that he succeeded so well and she sucked at everything she did. Hisoka was so graceful and gentle looking with his moves and all, and she was sloppy and was always falling down.

Lucy just about slapped herself. She'd caught herself comparing herself to Hisoka again. He was just a kid -five years her junior- and she was feeling jealous because he was doing better than her. Hisoka was probably trying harder than she was which is why he was doing better than she was, so all she had to do was try harder. Lucy scowled and wanted to kick herself. She already was trying as hard as she could, but that didn't seem to be doing her any good.

"Alright, now we're going to spend the next three hours in combat training." Uma announced cheerfully. She seemed to like the role of dungeon torturer. The blonde managed to muffle her groan with a coughing fit. "Don't be getting sick now Lucy, you still have to train even if you really do get sick." Uma's voice sounded overly buttered and her smile looked like that of a demon's. Lucy shivered at the look and thought that she saw Hisoka do the same.

Uma turned to the dummies and said something that Lucy couldn't quite understand and the wooden figures seemed to shut down because they went limp. The silver haired woman dragged the two dummies by their arms and put them back in the storage closest where they had been sitting since Uma's training days.

When she came back, her eyes had an excited glint in them and the two students unconsciously stepped back as she came at them. "Okay, let's start with karate then we'll move to taekwondo and aikido. Get over here both of you." Uma gestured them to move and they went and stood side by side in front of there trainer with only a few feet of space in between. She started going through the basic moves and they repeated. Each hour was spent on a different art of fighting and by the end of the three hours, the two were sore and tired out, even Uma looked a little out of it.

"Alright, it's back to the waterfall." the woman instructed, standing up straight and heading in the direction of the waterfall.

"What?" Lucy asked, disbelief coloring her tone as she struggled to lift her head to look at Uma.

"We'll be doing this before every meal Lucy dear. Trust me, it'll help you in the future when you get into a pinch." Uma didn't even turn her head to look at Lucy who nearly growled and threw a tantrum right there. What stopped her from doing so was Hisoka who slowly walked by, still breathing hard from the last exercise. Here she was, a teenager who was almost a full adult complaining and whining while a boy who wasn't even thirteen took the pain without complaint. It was disgraceful for her to throw a childish tantrum in front of a boy who was acting more grown up than she was.

Grinding her teeth together and mumbling profanities to herself, she pushed her noodle-muscled body to its feet and followed after the crazy family -who she had dubbed by now as a sadist and a masochist.

The celestial mage heard the swish of the fish as it swam by and the roar of the waterfall before she went under -again. This was the fifth time she'd fallen in within the first twenty minutes of meditation and she was getting agitated.

Why aren't they falling in? She thought as she surfaced again and glared at their calm and blank faces. They didn't even break their meditation anymore to look and she if she was okay. Lucy turned her back on them and sank to the bottom of the pond. Crossing her arms, she closed her eyes and thought about why see was doing this again.

Square one, I was replaced because Lisanna came back and I'm weak so if I get stronger then maybe they'll let me back. Sounds like the plan. That's why I'm here, to get stronger so that I can earn my place with my friends. Lucy thought, and she opened her eyes. If they can be called friends anymore. Something nagged at the back of her mind. She pushed it away and shot to the surface to breathe, then submerged herself again to get her hair out of her face before crawling onto the boulder under the waterfall again.

Lucy breathed deeply before emptying her mind of its thoughts for the sixth time and listening for whatever sounds came to her ears.

Five more dunks later, she came up and this time met Uma's amused stare. The older woman had her chin in one hand that was propped up on her knee. "You suck at meditation Lucy dear. I wonder why. It's the easiest exercise of your training." She looked genuinely confused now. Lucy didn't trust it.

"Is the hour over?" The blonde asked, the irritation carefully sugar coated and topped with an overly friendly smile.

"Yes," Uma said it like it was some sad fact. "Yes it is. Time to eat." She smoothly slid into the water -warmed by the heat of the day- and swam gracefully to the shore. Lucy didn't wait for Hisoka to pass her this time to get out of the water. When she got onto solid ground, she grabbed her clothes and stalked after Uma, not bothering to dress.

Hisoka shook out his onyx hair as he grabbed his clothes and smiled as he watched his blonde training partner. She was amusing in her own way and already so much different from when they started this journey. How much more was she going to change when this was all over? He smiled again when he remembered last night and how much she talked. Man that girl could talk when she's asleep. She almost reminded him of how his mother used to be, talkative and very temperamental, but passionate and devoted. He saw how Lucy tried as hard as she could to keep up with him and he guessed that he'd set the pace for her.

When he reached the house of roots, he smelled the stew from this morning. Leftovers. Lucy was dressed now and so was Uma. Having dressed when he got out of the pond, he sat across the small table from Lucy and stared at his grandmother as she served the food. Half the day was gone and already he was sore. There was still at least nine hours left of training -if he knew his grandmother well enough- and that didn't include the meditation hour. He heaved an exhausted sigh before picking up his chopsticks and eating the chunky parts of the stew.

Lucy fell asleep as soon as her head hit the folded cloak that acted as her pillow. Uma had put them through a repeat of the morning, only switching up the martial arts to Judo, Daido Juku, and Jujutsu. To her, there wasn't really a difference, it was all just close combat/ self defense kind of fighting- all of them were variations of karate. She even threw in some Ninjutsu -the art of strategy and tactics of unconventional warfare/ guerrilla warfare. It was like she was preparing them for a war or something. Right now though, the tired blonde could care less about what Uma was training them for, she just wanted to sleep and sleep she did.

Hisoka watched her, amused, as she fell into the bed and went straight to sleep. He himself was tired as hell, but it was just so funny watching the blonde doing simple things. It brightened the morale in his life after the sudden death of his parents. He smiled tiredly and yawned before pulling the thin blanket over his aching body and promptly falling asleep.

Uma sat in her rocking chair sharpening some of the weapons and watching the two trainees. She was concerned with the blonde's performance in archery this morning. Lucy had given off an aura, a red one. Red was anger. Things fueled with anger made one more powerful, yes, but it also hindered one's ability to judge correctly and make the proper approach in a fight. It was something that Uma discouraged heavily upon her students and others.

She'd had three other students in the past, and they were all dead from what she'd gotten word of. They had all died in action. Sad, but at least they died defending what they loved. The only thing wrong with the way they died is that they had given in to the anger and lost their ability to make a proper decision. In turn, they lost their lives. She didn't want that to happen to Lucy, or Hisoka for that matter. It was something that she would always fear no matter what anyone said. Anger was an easy thing to give in to and that was the end of it. After watching Lucy today, Uma was going to keep a closer eye on her. She didn't want to lose another student to the same thing again.

Setting down the sharpened daggers that had been used that day, she yawned and got up. Even she was tired out from the day's exercises. Ever since that accident, she hadn't really done the exercises much. Uma'd done them every once in a while, but not as often as she should have. This training would be good for her too. With the daggers sharpened for the morning, she walked over to her bed and crawled in, falling asleep soon after.

This time, things weren't out of order. The ground was where it was supposed to be, but this wasn't the guild. It was an unknown place that Lucy had never been to. It was cold and really dark. The giant window on one side of the room -partially hidden by immense red velvet curtains- showed that it was night outside and raining fairly hard. Lucy could hear the thunder, but no lightning was visible yet. At the end of the room was a giant fire place where two people stood. Because the room was so dark and she was so far away, she couldn't really see the facial features of the two men, but when they began speaking, she froze.

"So here's the proposition sir," Started the first one. He was taller and worn -what looked like- a giant hat. His voice was slick and full of a darkness that was hard to describe. Lucy knew that voice quite well, so why couldn't she remember who it belonged to? "If you gather your subordinates by the end of next June, and I do my part of what I just explained, we'll march out to Fairy Tail and destroy them." The tall man seemed to smile at the last part. Lucy knew because she saw the white flash of his teeth.

As the next man started to talk, she moved forward and found that there was a fairly long table in the room. A meeting room or the dining room of some sort, but why it wasn't lit was beyond her understanding.

"I realize that we have a similar objective, but I don't think that simply invading the guild will work. It's too straight forward, and the Fairy Trash is good at handling straight forward if you haven't notice from your previous failure." The man's tone was mocking and he grinned -showing fangs- when the other man hissed threateningly.

"We need to take a more subtle approach to them. Get a spy in there or have someone spy on them from a distance. Frankly, I don't care about the whole bowl of Fairies, I just want one in particular."

Lucy shivered when she saw him lick his lips. Was his tongue forked? She continued to edge along the table towards the two men.

"Well you can have whoever you want, I myself want to kill one personally, but it'd be better to take out the whole lot of them otherwise they'll hunt us down till we're dead and I would like to have at least some luxury time in my old age." The man's face was turned down into a sneer.

"So what you want. I just want the one fairy. I'll get my subordinates rounded up and then we'll talk strategy." The man turned and Lucy gasped. She knew those slitted eyes, had seen them before, but she couldn't connect a name to it. It right on the tip of her tongue, she knew, but it wasn't coming out.

The other man then turned to face her for the first time, but he was addressing the other man. "Fine then. We'll talk strategy later." Lucy was frozen solid in horror. She would never be able to forget that man's face. Not in a hundred years.

Lucy woke up suddenly and found herself on the dirt floor. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and she felt sticky everywhere. Rolling onto her back, she sucked in the air that she hadn't known she wasn't getting before and flopped back onto the ground. The blonde looked around and found that there wasn't any light showing like the previous morning which meant that it wasn't yet time to get up. Lucy almost groaned, but remembered at the last minute that other people were sleeping.

For the moment, she lay on the ground and listened as her breathing returned to normal. Why was she dreaming of someone so horrible? Was that even a dream? It didn't seem like one at all. Everything was too real to be a dream. For a moment, Lucy closed her eyes to get her bearings then rolled back over and hoisted herself up. She felt the screaming of her sore muscles as they protested her movements. They hurt so much more than yesterday -as was expected.

Walking over to her suitcase, she got out some dry, clean clothes and made her way over to the evil pond, as she now called it. Stripping down, she plunged in, completely forgetting how cold the water was in the morning. She yelped as she came up shivering.

"S-st-standing h-here is-sn't go-oing t-to help m-me get a-an-ny num-mber." she chattered out loud, and she dove back in. Swimming along the bottom, she looked at everything that passed her and all around the pond. There wasn't much seaweed, but there was quite a few fish, more so than one would expect to find in a pond. Strange, but then again this whole place was strange.

When she finally got out, it was still dark and just as she put on her under garments, she glanced over at the boulder under the waterfall. After a minute of deliberation, she waded back into the water and swam to the confounded spot. At first, she tried meditating like Uma had showed her the first time and she ended up falling into the pond, like she always seemed to do. So this time, she pushed her body under the waterfall completely and closed her eyes. Since she couldn't breathe through her nose, she used her mouth and she cleared her mind.

The sound of the waterfall was roaring and she pushed the sound away until it was nothing but soft background music. This time, she wasn't interrupted by almost drowning, she listened to the sounds around her and seemed to hear everything. A bird pecked at a tree quite far away. A snake slithered through the ferns; bugs ate away at the tree roots, making their homes. It was all so new and unreal. Lucy listened more, this time concentrating a little harder and thinking of nothing. Her ears let the sounds of nature come to her and she didn't know how long she stayed there listening to everything, but she was rudely shaken out of her meditation -she thought- all too soon.

As she opened her eyes, she found them heavy, like something had been pulling on them for a long time to make them weigh so much. It was a strange feeling, but she forced them open all the same. The first thing she saw was Uma's worried expression and a dull grey. Lucy could see Uma's lips moving, but she couldn't hear anything coming out of it because her ears were roaring. The blonde clamped her hands over her ears and rubbed them, trying to get the sound to stop, but it didn't get any duller. If anything it put more pressure on her eardrums and it felt like they were going to explode.

She didn't see Uma put her hands on either side of her head and magic circles appear. Lucy only saw the movement of her teacher's mouth and then the pain was gone. There was no more roaring or pressure in her ears. She blinked and she slowly removed her hands from her ears, ready to put them back on if the roaring came back. It didn't. When she started to sit up, she felt a sharp pain twist in her stomach and she turned quickly to empty out the contents of her stomach which mostly consisted of the bitter taste of bile.

"Lucy. . .?" The blonde felt Uma's hand rest at the small of her back and rub small circles in it.

"I'm fine." Lucy said when she finished, wiping her mouth. Uma handed her a water canteen. She washed out her mouth and then took a small drink, knowing better than to gulp a lot of water.

"When you're meditating, especially in this pool, you can't lose yourself or else you'll end up like the rest of them." Lucy followed Uma's gaze and noticed, for the first time, that she was behind the waterfall in a cave. What Uma was looking at was hideous. There were at least a dozen stone statues of what used to be humans. Their features were messed up with some kind of plant or animal that was part of their stone complexion. Hideous.

"What is that?" Lucy heard herself mutter. Uma stood up straight, not looking at Lucy, but continuing to stare at the stones.

"That is what happens when you lose yourself in Za Numa Za Rosuto. The Pond of The Lost. This isn't an ordinary pond Lucy. It has taken the lives of many because they loses themselves." Uma smiled bitterly. "You could say that it's been tainted by the demonic magic of the world because people have been using alternate ways instead of the rightful and original way. Magic is not just an object of power. It's alive. Whenever someone becomes lost, their soul will inevitably come here and their body will follow soon after. Never meditate more than an hour."

Uma then turned to her suddenly and grabbed her by the shoulders. The look in Uma's face was frightening, not because it was scary looking, but because one would never expect to see such an expression on Uma. Fear and something hidden under that. "Lucy, if you ever find someone who you can't find, don't let them out of your sight because they've probably become lost." Uma now looked like she was in pain. Mental pain.

Lucy didn't now what to do so she settled with wrapping her arms around her teacher. "I promise not to let them out of my sight Uma." Though she had no idea what Uma had meant. How were you supposed to find someone you couldn't find? That thought was better left for a rainy day. Her answer seemed to give the older woman peace of mind because she pulled away from Lucy and stood up straight agin, holing her hand out for Lucy.

"Let's get out of here. Can you stand?" She asked as Lucy took her outstretched hand. It was warm and slightly callused. The hands of a housewife, though Uma was hardly that.

When they got back to the root house, Hisoka was still asleep and Lucy noticed that it wasn't quite as dark anymore, but still not time to wake up.

Now that they were off the touchy subject, Lucy debated on another one that had been nagging at her since archery practice the previous day. "What's going through your head Lucy dear?" the older woman asked as she gave Lucy an herbal remedy for her stomach and then sat down herself.

"It's not really that important to you but it's been bugging me ever since we started training." Lucy frowned into her cup, thinking again.

"What's been bugging you?" Uma said finally, breaking through the blonde's thoughts.

"It's just that I've noticed that I suck at everything. Hisoka can do everything so, so well and me, I can't do anything at all. I can't even meditate right." She brought the cup to her lips and took a sip. It was tasteless at first, but then the aftertaste came and she almost gagged.

"I know it doesn't taste all that great, but it'll help." Uma said with a small smile.

"Uh huh." Was all she could manage to say at that point. When she got the taste out, or most of it out, she continued. "I don't know what to do. I try to keep up with him, but he's just so good and he's younger than me, which makes me feel even more insignificant."

Uma could almost see the cloud of depression coming over Lucy's head to rain on her, and she laughed. Lucy looked up, surprised and frustrated, almost embarrassed.

"Let me tell you something Lucy. Some people are born to know weapons. Sometimes it's one weapon in particular. Hisoka's parents were weapon specialists, so it's natural for him to know how to handle weapons." She watched as Lucy took a full gulp of the remedy and wanted to laugh at her expression, but kept it controlled. "Other people learn to use weapons."

"But how do I do that?" Lucy asked and finished the cup of awfulness.

"You use every second of time you can spare. Keep practicing until it becomes mechanical. That's the only way you'll ever learn to do something. That's how I learned. I never had any free time because I used it to practice." Lucy said nothing as she stared at something behind the woman. Then there was a fiery determination in her eyes and the cloud disappeared.

She stood up and focused on Uma. "Thanks Uma." and she disappeared outside.

Uma shook her head as she set down her mug. "Your welcome."

OF ISN'T A WORD IN JAPANESE!- Random fact of the day.

This chapter is the longest I've written so far I think. I went from it being too short to too long. I think longer is better. I've caught up with the pre-written chapters. I've tried to stay at least one chapter ahead, but I've been a little preoccupied with the school preparations and the fair, and my books. Sorry, I love my Tamora Pierce books with a passion.

You all should thank her by the way! Her work got me to start writing!

Thank you for reading! Please review! ^/ . \^