After the young girl introduced herself as Wendy Marvell and the shock had worn off, she explained her magic to be supportive. She mainly knew healing spells.
"All guilds are now present," Jura stated.
"You're just going to move on like that?!" Gray exclaimed.
Lyla walked up to the girl, kneeling to be closer at eye level. "You're magic is a lot like Natsu's. Salamander over there." She pointed, "Dragonslayer magic?"
Wendy nodded, then asked, "How did you know?"
"Let's just say I have a knack for sensing magic."
"Still, it's concerning she's the only one from Caitshelter…" Laura sighed.
To everyone's surprise, a white cat -similar to Happy, but dressed- came from behind Wendy and introduced herself as Carla. She had brown eyes and could talk just like the blue cat, who founded over her instantaneously.
Lyla turned back to Wendy, patting her head as she said, "You'll be fine. Magic isn't all about fighting."
With that, she stepped away from Wendy back to Laura, who grumbled over there being two talking cats. Happy was an annoying little brat, but that was unsurprising considering who raised him. Carla at least seemed to be more sophisticated and interesting.
It took Lyla several minutes to calm Laura down enough to stay still and listen to the plan. The others were at least being semi-useful and comforting Wendy.
The teens turned to a small square pad with stage lights on each corner. Ichiya made various poses while explaining the plan they had formed.
"First is the location where the Oracion Seis -the 'six demon generals'- have gathered…"
A quick moment of silence before the man shuffled away for a bathroom break. Lyla sighed. These pegasus folk were rivaling Fairy Tail's strange and odd personalities.
"What about you?" Laura asked and Lyla realized she mumbled her thoughts out loud.
"Heh, well, I'd say I'm more unique than odd." She put on another smug look, winking. It worked for hiding the worry from her friend, who rolled her eyes and looked away.
The sense of another's magic set her off a little. It followed Ichiya to the restrooms. It felt like Lucy's she didn't think much of it. There were so many wizards with so much magical energy that she couldn't be sure of anything.
A moment later, Ichiya returned and explained that they were going into the north in Woodworth Sea to find Nirvana, destructive magic supposedly sealed away by elders long ago. Lyla can't recall ever hearing of it, which mildly surprised her.
"There are twelve of us, and six of them." Hibiki started. "I mean fourteen." His eyes flicked over to Lyla and Laura for a moment.
"But we mustn't take them lightly." Eve followed.
"Those six are tremendously powerful." Hibiki then snapped his fingers. A golden screen and keyboard appeared beside him, then he began typing.
"Didn't you use that magic for a while?" Laura asked Lyla
Lyla nodded and said, "I haven't seen anyone use that in forever. I might still be able to use a data shield though. I wasn't the best at it anyway." She sounded deep in thought.
Six screens appeared in front of the group and Hibiki began to explain about the members. Lyla vaguely heard what he said, but she didn't care. She focused on one screen in particular. She had to forcefully suppress her magic as she ground her teeth. She had hoped to never see or hear from that man again unless it was to kill him.
When Hibiki began to talk about him, Brain, a man with dark skin, long white hair, and bizarre tattoos, Laura clutched Lyla's arm tightly. The teen didn't even realize she had moved, she just wanted to kill him.
The floating golden screens disappeared and Lyla took a deep breath to calm down. She hadn't even heard much of what was said.
"...they are unstoppable." Hibiki finished as his magic dissipated.
"Our only advantage is in numbers?" Lyla asked through gritted teeth with a barely suppressed growl.
Ichiya tried to reassure them while striking some weird poses, but Lyla wasn't paying attention. Aside from Laura, no one had noticed her anger.
"...and we will use Christina to eradicate them where they stand." Ichiya finished explaining and struck another dumb, flamboyant pose. Pegasus was already in the process of answering Lyla's question.
Christina happened to be a flying magical bomb. They would blow up Oracion's base of operation and hopefully kill a few. At least, that's what Lyla hoped.
Jura advised that no more than two people fought an enemy at a time. Lyla and Laura already found their partners for this little project.
"Okay! I'm all fired up!" Natsu burst through the front doors, darting down the dirt road as if he didn't just annihilate to large pieces of wood.
"My head hurts just being in the same room as him…" Laura grumbled, placing her fingers on her temples.
"Bitch, you don't even hang out with anyone."
She growled, "Let's just go."
Lyla nodded and followed Laura's tail as they ran with the rest of the wizards. Lyon, Sherry, and the pegasus boys were catching up to them.
"Have any idea where we're going?" Lyla asked quietly as they ran. Laura would hear either way.
"Nope. Salamander is the one leading right now. It's better to go randomly than sit around."
The young woman started to sense the magic similar to Lucy's. It couldn't be hers, though. It was still back at the meeting place.
"Lyla! The building!" Laura yelled. Several strange magics where there. She hadn't been wrong and now she had to pay for being too complacent.
"Go on. I'll take care of it!" The shadows surged around her violently and in an instant, she was back at the building.
Jura was writhing on the ground, in obvious pain. There was a pool of blood under him. Standing over him was a woman and two small blue people that looked like they had come from a comic book… or something. Lyla vaguely recognized the woman as Angel from the pictures Hibiki had shown -she was supposed to be a Celestial Spirit wizard so that made the thing a Celestial Spirit.
"How unexpected." The woman commented. "Gemini, take her down." The spirit moved towards Lyla.
"Bitch, not today. I'm so fed up with this bullshit." The young woman sighed. She cast her hand to Angel, her shadow stretching and slithering towards the woman. Getting this bitch out of the way would leave fewer distractions for the fight she looked forward to.
Gemini zipped past Lyla, brushing her arms. To her surprise, smoke floated around Gemini, the two blue spirits turning into a copy of herself. The copy reached down and took the slithering shadow, tugging on it and pulling the real Lyla to the ground.
The copy merged into its own shadow, hopping to the next one closer to Lyla. The original leaped up at the last second when the copy would have sliced open her with one of her hidden knives. Looks like Gemini can copy even what's not visibly seen on a person.
Lyla threw her knives down while she still rose into the air. The copy dodged them all except for the little red cut on its calf.
When the original landed on the ground, she immediately used a spell called Shadow Orochi. A magic circle appeared where her hand hit the ground and a swarm of shadow snakes shot out, targeting the copy. When the copy dodged, the snakes came back around and attacked it again.
The real Lyla took this chance to shadow hop towards Angel. The teen came flying in from the building's side, kicking her with her metal sole boots and leaving a nasty bruise.
"Haha! Bitch!" Lyla stuck her tongue out to mock Angel, flipping her off as icing on the cake.
Angel growled. "You're so classless! Hardly half the perfection of my beauty!"
"Jeez… Ego much?"
A flash of white blinded Lyla when the Gemini copy punched her square in the jaw. She fell to the ground, her head hurting alongside her mouth.
When getting up and looking around dazedly, Angel and Gemini were gone. Lyla spit out some blood. Did that celestial spirit knock out a tooth? They seemed to be able to copy physical strengths too.
She stood up, wobbling a bit with her headache. The teen looked back at Jura, who lay on the ground in immense pain. The pool of blood had gotten bigger. She hurried to him the best she could without tripping and helped him up.
"What happened, exactly?" Lyla asked.
Jura grunted in pain, "Angel… Her celestial spirits copied Ichiya and used parfum to bring me into my current state. She stabbed me with a knife as well."
"Parfum? Is that his magic?" She thought out loud.
"Gemini used a bottle of an awful stench that caused whoever smelled it to experience any pain imaginable."
Lyla settled him down against the building, asking for Ichiya's whereabouts. Jura didn't know, but Lyla remembers Ichiya having to use the men's room. That has to be where Gemini made their move.
She clumsily ran up the stairs and to the restrooms, knocking on the door first. No response came when calling his name. She tried again and heard painful moaning. Gemini must have beat him up pretty bad.
"I'm coming in!" She warned, staring at the tiled floor as she entered. Everything had the same pink and white theme throughout the place.
Nearby the urinals laid Ichiya, completely beat up and barely conscious. The flooring had been broken around him, and he leaned against where a urinal should be, but only a pipe spewing water remained.
Lyla picked him up and took him to where she left Jura. If someone saw this, they might find it comical that a sixteen-year-old girl carried a barely four-foot man down the stairs.
The teen sighed, taking a quick breather. She stood up while the others rested. She wore a blank expression when staring at the unconscious Ichiya. Nothing happened for the next few seconds, just silence.
… Lyla lightly kicked the short man, shock passing over Jura's face. The teenager didn't say anything, still kicking him, slightly harder with each blow.
Nothing happened. Lyla slouched and sighed in the minor defeat. She then remembered Ichiya's strange fondness for Erza.
With the most dead tone and worst acting ever, Lyla exclaimed, "Oh no. Erza lost her skirt. We need some help in finding it."
The short man's head popped up, shouting, "Man!"
Lyla kicked him a little harder. "Pervert." Another, harder, kick before she continued. "At least tell me you've got a healing perfume or something?"
"Hm…" Ichiya rummaged through his test tube-shaped bottles of scents and smell, each owning different properties and effects.
He took out a green one, popping the cork off and letting the scent float into the air around them. They all took a deep breath of the sweet aroma.
Lyla's headache eased away and her jaw felt better. Her tooth had even healed. This was next-level stuff. She'd have been more than happy to study this magic if she hadn't discovered it from a pervert.
"Still have enough for the others?" The teen asked.
"Of course!" Ichiya made another pose, rooting through his jacket to pull out another healing parfum.
"Mind giving me any strength or magic enhancers? Laura and I will need them."
"What do you plan to do?" Jura asked.
She replied casually, "Beat up Brain, of course. Maybe kill him. I'm still deciding how slow I want his death to be. Can't be too nice."
Both men seemed concerned over this "child's" intentions. She noticed them and added a snap to her voice when she spoke again, "Hey, Brain is more powerful than you guys know. He's someone you wouldn't want to meet in a fight whatsoever, especially under these conditions. His pawns aren't so nice either."
"Any what makes you fighting him any different than the rest of us against him?" Jura asked.
"Me and Laura will be fighting him. We've met him before, and that's enough to go looking for his blood."
Her right eye started to twitch, laces of magic seeping out from it. She excused herself and hurried to the woman's bathroom.
"Strange girl," Ichiya commented.
Lyla slammed the door behind her -the door cracking and falling to the ground- and ran up to the nearest mirror, pulling her bangs out of her face. Her eye looked to be glowing as she watched wisps of magic drift out. She needed to keep her anger in check here. She watched black liquid drip from her eye and run down the scar over it.
"Shit!" She hissed. She swiped away the liquid from her burning eye and pulled her mask off. "What the hell is going on?" Her vision on the right side wavered as if she looked through a heatwave. Lyla put her mask back on in a different way so that it covered her right eye. She tucked hair over her still-visible scar so it was semi-hidden. Little wisps of magic still trailed from it, but at least she wouldn't do something horrible on accident. Only on purpose.
She needed to get back on track. Her friends were searching for one of the people she hated the most. The teen sneered at her reflection at the thought of him before running back out. She had to go help them somehow.
The door fell apart as she ran over it again. Not that a door mattered. Lyla ran outside and closed her eyes to search for her friends. Jura ran ahead a while ago, Ichiya only a little way behind.
She felt like conversing via her magic, so she only teleported to run next to Ichiya, who jumped at her sudden appearance. As she dipped through the magic, she had created small black hole looking things under all her knives and collected them.
"Get used to it. It's just a thing I do."
"I hope the other's are okay," the man said instead of complaining. A wise choice in Lyla's opinion.
"You got your healing parfum. They should be good." Agh… maybe she should try to cheer herself up more.
The two arrived at the battle just in time to see Jura using earth magic to cast pillars of rock to block a green spell. All the wizards were injured and down; Oracion Seis had vanished. Lyla ran up to Laura, falling to her knees and skidding to her friend.
"The hell happened to your ears?" Lyla asked, trying to smirk.
"A little temper tantrum is what happened," Laura admitted, her tone wavering as if she couldn't decide how loud she wanted to be. All that blood must be tampering with her hearing…
The other wizards gasped and mourned over Christina, which had been blown up by Oracion Seis. To everyone's relief, none had been on the bomb that could have died. The pegasus boys explained that Christina was remotely controlled and the alliance would only board it after finding the enemy's base.
Carla pointed out Erza, who's injured arm couldn't be healed by Ichiya's parfum. Lyla then noticed a missing Wendy and second talking cat. Some explaining would have to be done here.
The little girl stood tensely, ready to fight. Today, instead of fighting the other girl, she had to fight him. The man who was in charge of everything related to her stood in front of her. His lab coat, white shirt, and shoes were lying on the floor by the door, leaving his in only his black pants.
"Come at me whenever." He smiled down at her. Fear flooded her frame as she shifted warily. This wasn't the first time she had to fight him, but it was the first time she was going to use magic.
She swallowed quietly as she focused on his shadow with her magic. It began to rise, taking the form of a man similar to him, but not quite him. The color of the shadow changed from black to a deep purple, and finally to a red-green when the man started taking shape.
The Shadowman split off from the man's real shadow. That wasn't what she had wanted! It wrapped its hands around the man's throat when he turned to see why there was a movement back there. The Shadowman began to strangle the man.
"No!" It wouldn't listen to her and if she couldn't get her magic under control… She didn't want to think about that. "Stop!" Magic began to spark from her face. A scream of pain erupted from her as wisps of magic trailed from the bandages on her right eye. The magic flickered back and forth from black to purple as she screamed in pain and writhed on the floor.
None of the people in the cloaks were around because the man had dismissed them! The two men, one made of magic and shadows and the other flesh and blood, grappled on the floor as spells blasted from the man's hands. A spell struck near the girl and crawled back into a corner. Her right eye still burned, but she had stopped screaming and writhing.
The Shadowman roared the man's name and the man roared another name back. It barely registered as a number in the poor girl's mind as she cowered away from the deadly magics, one of them her own doing.
The man began to choke the Shadowman, who couldn't use any magic to fight back. Right before he disappeared, he looked at the little girl and said, "Thank you." When he disappeared, the burning and wisps of magic stopped as well. She curled up in a ball, sighing in relief. It was the worst pain she had ever experienced.
The man coughed before saying, "That certainly was an interesting experience." He walked over and picked the girl up gently. "You did well restricting the flow of magic. You've made so much progress." He congratulated her.
"Thank you." She croaked, her voice hoarse and painful. It didn't matter if it hurt to talk, if she didn't thank him after one of his 'lessons', she would be punished. Those punishments were far worse than the lessons.
"Good girl. Now let's go get you cleaned up." Her robes were tattered. "I also have a gift for you for doing so well."
The girl thanked him again, her voice barely there. "You're welcome."
The thought of whatever he decided was chilling.
A/N: I'm back! A little update on the schedule for updates. We'll be updating every first and third Monday of the month.