**I don't own Fairy Tail or the characters. Standard disclaimer stuff. Blah Blah Blah.
So this is chapter 11. Hopefully it's not too terrible. :P**
"Alright, this is his house," Natsu said as they approached an old-looking stone hut with a thatch roof. "Let's go!"
"With all due respect, Natsu," Dimaria said quietly, her military experience warning her that something was wrong. "I think we should approach with some strategy."
Natsu paused. A year ago he would've just charged ahead anyway, but things had changed a lot in a year, and he knew the woman's reputation. Even someone as dense as Natsu listened sometimes. "What do you suggest?"
"I think at least one of us should stay outside till we know what kind of magic we're dealing with. Many of the most powerful forgotten magics are easier to deal with if you know what they are first." She explained.
Natsu paused, considering this. Then smiled. "Sure. Why don't you wait out here Dimaria, since you know more about this than any of us?"
"Of course, Natsu." Dimaria said. From what she'd heard of the dragon slayer, she was surprised that he was so willing to acquiesce to her suggestion.
"Alright, everyone else come on." Natsu motioned. Dimaria watched as he approached the door slowly, testing the handle. It turned easily.
That can't be good…
"Well that makes it easy," Natsu grinned, turning the handle and opening the door. Then they all charged into the house and instantly disappeared.
Teleportation magic or dimension magic, Dimaria thought as she looked at the doorway. She couldn't be entirely sure yet, but there was one way to find out.
Dimension magic – the lost variety at least - would only affect something with a life signature attached to it. This included people, animals, and plants, as well as non-living things that entered the dimensional door with the living things. For example, fingernails and toenails, as well as clothing, bags, weapons, and other items that were worn or carried.
Of course, dimension magic like Erza Scarlet's exquip magic worked only on non-living things. This was a less powerful form of the magic, but, as all magic, the potency was dependent on the strength of the wielder. And Erza had an enormous amount of magic power.
Teleportation magic, on the other hand, would catch anything that went through the teleportation field. Unlike dimension magic. Her bet would be on dimension magic, since teleportation magic wasn't overly powerful and was known in some variety by many of the high ranked wizards. Still, she had to be sure.
Finding a good sized rock nearby, she tossed it through the open door. It landed on the stone floor with an audible clunk.
Dimension magic then. More specifically, terra-locked dimension magic. Unlike spontaneous dimension magic, terra-locked dimension magic was restricted to a specific location, set by the caster, and triggered by specific actions. In this case, opening the door to the house had unlocked the dimensional magic, and stepping through the threshold had activated it.
Terra-locked dimension magic had one major weakness that the spontaneous variety lacked. If she could get the caster away from the location, it would be fairly easy to disable the caster. This would keep him from interfering as the other members tried to find their way out.
But Terra-locked dimension magic also had its strengths. Unlike spontaneous dimension magic, it could create up to 20 different dimensions in the location it was tied to, depending on the magic power of the caster, and anybody activating the magic would be transported to a different dimension. This would allow the caster to divide the group and conquer them individually. She wasn't too worried about Natsu or Mira. She'd felt the magic power the two of them possessed. But Wendy… Or even worse, the exceeds…
Wendy had lots of potential. She remembered all too well the girl's strength from her battle against her and the god slayer. But she was still young. She couldn't fully utilize her raw magic power yet.
The exceeds, on the other hand, didn't have a lot of magic power. Without their dragon slayer partners, they wouldn't stand a chance against a mage with any kind of power.
And there was a good chance that the man they were attacking knew this too.
Dimaria growled, frustrated at her inability to do anything in her current situation. She could stop time, but it would only affect the dimension in which she currently existed. That would do her no good unless the man she was targeting was there in the current dimension.
Right now she only had two options. 1. Wait for the man to come back to her. 2. Run into his trap Natsu-style and destroy dimensions till she found him.
Plan 2 would require a lot of magic power and energy, even for a mage as powerful as her. There was no guarantee she would even have enough magic left to beat Nurako once she found him. However, it would be the fastest way to be certain of finding the rest of the team.
Plan 1 would work only if Nurako decided to leave his dimensions without dealing with the other team members first.
The pragmatic thing to do was sacrifice the team – or at least one of their members. She had no doubt that Natsu and Mira could look out for themselves. And really, losing one team member wasn't that big a deal.
Then again, she knew Fairy Tail wouldn't see it that way. Unlike her previous allies, Fairy Tail cared about all its members. Even the weaker ones.
For the first time in a long time, Dimaria didn't know what to do.
~~~Natsu~~~
"What the fuck is this?" Natsu looked around. He wasn't inside a house, but in a large, open field that stretched out for miles in every direction. Hadn't he just come into a house? Was this even possible?
Apparently it was possible, because this is what he was seeing. But how? How far away were they from the house? And what kind of magic could teleport him so far from his team?
But he had other things to worry about. He quickly realized the grass in this field wasn't normal as it began to rise up around him, reaching for his legs. His instincts told him it would be really bad if it got ahold of him.
He demolished the grass with a quick fire dragon's roar, making sure to burn the patch he was standing on too. At first it seemed to work, but then the entire ground started moving below him.
Oh shit. He jumped up just in time as two tendrils tried to grab his ankles, using his flames to fly. The ground below him was molding like clay, forming arms and hands that were shooting up at him from all sides.
"Fire Dragon's Wing Attack!" He hit fourteen of the giant hands coming from in front of him, shattering them to dust, but more sprang up in their place. He growled and flew high above the plains, wishing Happy had transported to his dimension with him. For one, it would save him a little magic power. But there was also a good chance that Happy wasn't surviving as well in his dimension.
Punching and kicking his way through the earth that was trying to grab him still, Natsu tried to figure out a weak spot in this weird ground. There had to be some way to defeat it, after all. He kept blasting away pieces with his fire dragon's roar, and after a while he noticed that the limbs were taking longer to reform.
"Great. This thing can get weaker, whatever it is." He grinned, suddenly seeing a spot that seemed better protected than the rest of the open ground. "I'm willing to bet that's where I want to hit. Fire Dragon King's Demolition Fist!"
With a roar, the dragon slayer burst through the cords of earth protecting the spot in the field. There was an enormous crater, and what followed was surprising.
Cracks appeared all around him. On the ground. In the skies. Even vertically where nothing should be, as though he were in some kind of enormous room. Then the world shattered into shards, leaving him on a giant mountain range.
"What the fuck?" He said, standing on top of one of the mountains. Then a rock hand formed, attacking him.
"Here we go again," he sighed.
~~~Wendy~~~
She wasn't sure where she was, but she didn't like it. There was some kind of light illuminating her space, but it wasn't sunlight. Nor was it moonlight. It was simply an eerie, pale glow that made everything around her surreal. The dirt she was standing on seemed to be a thick clay, and as she watched animals began to form out of the clay. Wolves, tigers, giant serpents, and even small dragons rose up all around her.
I wish I had Natsu-nii's attack power, Wendy thought as she prepared herself for battle. She didn't know what this was, but she could tell from the scent that none of these creatures were actually alive. This had to be the work of some bizarre make magic.
She didn't have any more time to think of it as the creatures started attacking. She quickly swept herself away with a gust of wind, up and out of their reach into the sky. That should buy her more time to think.
To her dismay, the animals below her all sprouted clay wings and shot up into the sky. Of course this couldn't be that easy…
With a battle cry she dove toward the nearest creature, a wolf with wings that looked eerily like a bat. It shattered as she hit it with a full-power wing attack, falling back to the clay below.
"Perhaps if I use sky drill I can buy myself some more time," Wendy said as she soared in closer to some of the other creatures. She hit them with her shattering sky drill, which destroyed three of the serpents and a whole pack of wolves. But there were still many more approaching.
She soon found that these clay creations didn't take a lot of magical energy to destroy, so she decided to take them one at a time, keeping her exertion down till she figured out who or what was controlling them. That was what really needed to be dealt with.
She kicked through a tiger, watching it shatter behind her. Then she led with a punch into a fierce looking hyena. Still more waves of animals came up through the ground, seemingly rising as fast as they were dropping. Wendy hit a large group with a sky dragon's roar, making a large empty cone to her right. But almost immediately the path closed, filled with more of the strange clay creatures that were trying to claim her.
~~~Mira~~~
She wasn't sure what kind of psychedelic universe she was in, but she wasn't anywhere on earthland. The sky was lit by a neon green sun, which cast a strange sheen over the myriads of completely chaotic buildings that loomed around her. She sweat-dropped at the disorganization of the place. It was worse than Natsu and Happy's old house when it hadn't been cleaned for a month.
Well, the first thing to figure out was how to get out of here…
THUMP. Mirajane leaped to the side just in time. Scratch that. The first thing to do was stop these weird structures from attacking.
Well, one thing she could say for sure… This was certainly one of the weirdest magics she'd ever experienced.
A building looking something like a square yo-yo on a pyramid-topped tube swung the yo-yo portion at her, and she heard it make a loud clang as it hit another building after she dodged. Great. This was probably metal too.
With a sigh she transformed into Satan Soul and the fun started.
First she destroyed the building closest to her with a huge blast. The metal disappeared in an instant, but another began to grow in its place. Dodging a large metal sphere that was attached to some kind of weird, folded triangular pattern, she analyzed the rate at which the building reformed itself. She came to the conclusion that if this was the maximum rate at which the buildings could be produced, she would be able to level the entire area using her Halphas soul and have about 10 seconds to try to find a way out before the next batch of buildings were done.
"Well, here goes nothing." She said aloud as she transformed into Halphas. Almost instantly the entire 'city,' if it could be called such, was demolished, leaving a flat, hot purple surface beneath her. But off to her right she noticed a sort of shimmer in the explosion. She aimed another explosion in that direction to confirm.
Sure enough, there was a stronger shimmer this time, and cracks in the bright purple plain below her. Finally! A way out!
She focused all the power of her blast on that spot this time, and suddenly the entire world around her cracked and splintered before exploding into billions of tiny shards.
The world she now found herself in was entirely covered with water. "Oh great," she sighed, transforming to Satan Soul again to conserve energy. "Should've stuck with crazy town."
~~~Dimaria~~~
She'd already broken through 8 dimensions when she arrived in the flame-covered mountains. She sighed. At this rate she'd use up almost all her magic power before she could even be of use to any of her companions. Well… Nothing to do but destroy this one too and hope that the others had managed to destroy some dimensions as well.
She was still searching for the weak point when suddenly a light flashed in the middle of the fiery mountain. A pink-haired dragon slayer appeared from the midst of the light.
"Natsu!" Dimaria called out with a grin. "That means we're close to the end."
"The end of what?" The dragon slayer asked, confused.
Dimaria sighed, realizing he had no idea what kind of magic they were dealing with here. "This is dimensional magic, Natsu. There's no time to explain all of it to you, but let's just say that there could be up to 20 dimensions that we have to break before we finally trap this guy. Once we break down all his dimensions, he should be substantially weakened. We have to get out of this one, though. No idea what this fire does, but it's uncomfortably hot."
"Great!" Natsu grinned. "Breaking out of here will be a cinch once I've eaten!"
"Umm… Is this really the time to eat?" Dimaria asked.
"What better time than when you have an all-you-can-eat buffet?" Natsu grinned. Then he started sucking up the flames from the hottest part of the mountain.
Oh right. I forgot that dragon slayers can eat their own element. She watched as his strength replenished before her eyes. In moments, he was good as new again.
"Do you know where the weak point is?" Natsu asked.
"Well, seeing as he wouldn't want the weak point to be discovered, my guess is that it would be in the place that's hardest to get to…" She pointed toward the lava core of the fiery volcanic mountain.
"Ok great," Natsu grinned, diving headfirst into the Lava. "Fire Dragon King's Demolition Fist!"
There was a huge explosion and the dimension shattered around them, leaving them in an odd, clay world with an eerie lighting. Looking up, Dimaria saw hundreds of creatures of various shapes and sizes – all with wings – flying around in the sky. Chasing something or someone.
"Wendy!" Natsu shouted next to her. That would be those dragon slayer senses again. So this was where the sky dragon slayer was.
Dimaria froze time and in an instant all the creatures were shattered to dust.
"Natsu!" Wendy called out, tackling the pink-haired man to the ground. "Thank goodness! I'm really starting to get tired."
Dimaria just smiled. "Let's get out of here," she said quietly.
~~~Mirajane~~~
She crashed through into another dimension. This one was a large forest with trees that looked like deadwood. No leaves anywhere in sight. Some of the trees reached for her, but she easily dodged and blasted them to oblivion. She flew high in the air, still in Satan Soul, and was scanning for a weak spot when she caught sight of a man in a black hood.
"You!" She yelled, heading for him quickly. But she stopped as the man held up a blue cat with one hand. The other held a knife to the exceed's throat.
"If you value your pets' lives, you'll come down slowly…" the man said, his eyes glinting. "I'm impressed that you and your friends managed to break through so many of my dimensions, but this is where it ends."
Mira came slowly to the ground, slipping out of Satan Soul. "What is it you want?"
"What do I want?" The man asked, sounding incredulous. "You come with the intent to invade my home. You destroy all my carefully crafted defenses. And you ask me what I want?
"Don't play dumb," Mirajane growled. "Why are you after Natsu's child."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," the man said. "I'm just defending my home from intruders."
Mira just smirked as the branches caught hold of her. "Natsu is here… and believe me when I tell you that you don't want to deal with an angry dragon. You might want to just tell me what's wrong now."
"When and if he gets here, he'll have no choice to surrender as well. Unless he wants to see his "best friend" die in front of his face," the man chortled.
Mira glared at him. "I thought the idea of your secret council was to 'protect' people, Nurako." She said. "Not kill people who are substantially weaker than you for sport."
Nurako studied her from beneath his hood. "You seem to know a lot for a little girl with a big mouth," he said quietly. "Where did you get this information?"
"Like I'm going to tell you that…" Suddenly Mira realized that taunting him may not have been such a good idea.
"I'm pretty good at extracting information," the man said. A thorny tree branch struck Mira across the back, causing her to cry out in pain. "Now tell me who the informant is."
"You know, you'd think that all you dark mages would learn by now…" Mirajane said through gritted teeth as a thorny vine smacked her hard across the chest. "Fairy Tail doesn't cave in to your demands. Ultimately, you'll get nothing out of me. And you'll end up in prison."
"We'll see about that." She was assaulted by a string of thorn vines and branches, causing her to scream in pain again. The branches tore her clothing and skin, leaving bleeding lines all over her body.
Natsu, please get here soon, she prayed, not daring to activate her magic. She knew her opponent would follow through on his threat to kill the exceeds.
"There is more than one way to make you talk," the man said with a grin, putting the exceeds, chained tightly, under a tree similar to the one that was holding Mirajane captive. "Especially a young girl with a body like yours." He advanced toward her, a malicious gleam in his eye.
"Touch me and you die," Mira growled, struggling against the vines that held her.
"Brave words, girl. But who's going to kill me? Your boyfriend who's gonna come for me?"
"Natsu's not my boyfriend…" Her voice trembled a little as she said that, betraying the sadness she felt at never being able to be with the man she'd fallen in love with. "But then, you already know that."
The man smirked. "So you love him. Even better. When he gets here, I'll make him watch while I ravish every part of your young, beautiful body. And maybe when I'm done with that, I'll even let him have a turn."
"Natsu would never—"
"If I ordered him to he would," the man grinned maliciously. "You should thank me. How else are you going to get with Natsu?"
And Mirajane suddenly felt herself torn between hoping for Natsu's arrival and hoping he wouldn't get there until she figured out a way out of this mess. Natsu would never lose hope, but she was beginning to think there was no way out of this somebody ending up dead.