The sun had begun to set. Blood orange replaced blue. Nirvana had turned the warmly colored evening into something much more ominous.
Laura and Lyla finally found Lucy and Natsu. Virgo stood with them, one of Lucy's spirits.
The clothes the wizards had worn before were replaced with matching outfits. Lucy wore a short night blue dress and knee-high boots with gold trimmings and white frills. Natsu had the same themed top with orange pants and black boots. Lyla suddenly realized how strange it was to see him with a top. He only wore some sleeveless vest that always showed his abs.
"Hope we didn't interrupt your date." Lyla teased as she emerged from the thick trees.
"We're not a couple and you know it!" Lucy retorted. Natsu just ignored the comment.
The teen shrugged. "If you say so." And walked up to Virgo. She hadn't met all of Lucy's spirits before, so it was interesting to talk to them and see how quirky they were. She would deem them odder than Fairy Tail, but she was a member.
"Nirvana." Laura said with a hint of melancholy, "It changed." No, not melancholy. It sounded more like fear.
"Yes, it changed from black to white while you were unconscious," Virgo confirmed. The unconscious part referred to Lucy and Natsu. They had fallen down a waterfall after facing Angel.
Instead of Nirvana being tainted with black and dark magic swirling around it, it became a pure beam of white magic. Lyla felt ill, but it wasn't enough to take her out of commission. They weren't as close to it as when she fought Brain, but Nirvana grew more powerful by the second. They would have to hurry this up so the shadow mage didn't have another incident like the tower.
"Where's Happy?" Natsu asked, looking around for the cat.
Lyla looked at Laura. The young woman rolled her eyes as she thought. "We… we all got split up. I left once I heard you yell. Erza left at the mention of Jellal."
The teen clapped her friend's shoulder, congratulating her, "You said more than two sentences. Good job!"
Laura grunted in denial.
"Guess we'll just have to go to that light by ourselves," Natsu suggested, sounding quite upset without his kitty cat pal to keep him company.
"Princess. I should be going now." Virgo said to Lucy. She bowed with her fist to her chest and vanished into the celestial world.
"Oh! Virgo!" The wizard called, but she had already left. She stood there in shock, thinking about something. Lyla let her be and turned to the other two.
"Do you know where Wendy would've run off to?" She asked Laura. The woman shook her head. "Erza?"
"She ran off at the mention of Jellal. She probably ran to Nirvana."
"Oh, yeah! That tattoo guy needed him to activate it!" Natsu exclaimed. Both girls scowled at the thought of Brain, but they quickly hid their emotions so no one would suspect anything. Lyla noticed the pain in her friend's eyes, however.
The bushes closer to Lucy rustled. She jumped back to stand next to Natsu. Lyla made a comment in her head, grinning at it.
Sherry emerged from the shadows of the foliage. She walked to them with a depressed and hollow look in her eyes. She stared at the ground, her mouth ajar.
"Sherry!" Lucy exclaimed with excitement, "Thank goodness! You're all right!"
"Say… Weren't you on Galuna? What happened to that dog and eyebrows?" Natsu questioned. Laura had to hold Lyla back before she knocked him unconscious.
Sherry mumbled something. Lyla couldn't understand her, but it sounded threatening. She looked at Laura to see her muscles tense. Whatever was happening, Sherry's cackling didn't make things any better.
Something crackled behind the crazed woman. It looked to be wooden hands reaching out to grab the wizards. Lyla hesitated due to her eye. Instead, spikes of ice shot from the ground and shredded the wood into splinters. The teen felt lucky that they were all safe, but furrowed her eyebrows. Her magic was both a blessing and a curse at times.
"You idiot!" Gray shouted. His cut and bruised arm wrapped around Sherry's neck and he pulled her to the ground. The fact that he had no shirt on made things seem questionable… yet Lyla knew that his only intention was to protect his friends.
"Gray!"
"You guys okay?"
"Let go!" Sherry screamed, "Damn! You're still alive?! You killed Sir Lyon!"
"Sir? What about 'My love' or 'My darling'?" Lyla teased.
"That's Juvia's thing," Laura told her.
"Oh? You know her?"
"I'm not that anti-social."
"Oh, but you are, though."
Laura shot her a defensive look. She couldn't fight Lyla, she knew the teen was right.
"She suddenly started acting crazy after that light started…" Gray informed, trying to pin Sherry to the ground so she couldn't attack anyone.
"You were acting crazy too, you know!" Natsu claimed.
"Huh?"
Lyla looked at Laura for context. Lucy answered instead, "Gemini got to us by disguising as Gray."
"You'll pay for killing Sir Lyon!" Sherry squirmed. Lyla placed her hand over her eye. Nirvana's magic was strong for some reason. It seemed to be coming from Sherry, which didn't bode well for the young woman since her magic would already be bad enough.
"Who killed whom?"
Everyone's heads turned to Lyon, who stood shirtless as well. He at least had his white coat on. He had that much. Ice wizards, man…
Lyon filled them in. He got tied into Gray's fight with Racer. When the speedy wizard lost, he threatened to blow up Gray, Lyon, and Sherry with a bomb. They stood near a cliff, so Lyon tackled Racer and jumped down. Sherry assumed he was dead, but Lyon had thrown the bomb away from him and Racer before it blew up, so neither of them had died.
Sherry's blue eyes filled with tears. She laid on the ground, sobbing as black magic rose from her body. Gray sat on the ground a ways away from her.
"Seems she really was possessed by something," Gray commented.
"Nirvana." Laura explained, "It can turn people on wavering sides to the opposite of their original."
Everyone stared at her, dumbfounded.
Lucy stuttered as she nervously tried clearing up the confusion, "I think what she's trying to say is that if someone was good and started to doubt themselves, they'd turn bad." Her voice changed to something more dismal as she continued, "Hibiki started to question his actions… He started to think he wasn't good enough and Nirvana almost made him bad."
Lyla took in these words. The council had never told her about Nirvana. Nor had she ever found books about it, but to her, it sounded as if Nirvana could turn darkness into light and vise Versa; In its most basic sense.
While the group properly caught up with everything, Lyla's gaze followed Laura as she found a tree to rest under. They weren't as tall and thick as the inner-forest. She probably would have climbed to the tallest branch if that were the case.
The teenager followed and sat beside her. It's been a while since it was only them. Two girls fending for themselves in a world that they wished was easier to live in. Even as children, they caught on pretty quickly.
"I don't… get it…" Laura mumbled. If only Lyla had her hearing.
The teen shifted her eyes to some blades of grass. She picked at them as she asked, "Get what? The fact that nostalgia is more painful than we expected?"
She shook her head. "Nirvana turns good people bad, and bad people good."
Lyla stopped for a second to think. She continued plucking the grass. "Yeah. ...And?"
"How does it know what's good and what's bad? How does something determine that?"
"Well… Nirvana was made by people. They got to choose that. The machine only knows what the humans program it to do, after all."
"How do they get to determine what 'good' and 'bad' is?" Laura's voice rose, still quiet enough to not attract any attention, however. "It's all just opinions and points of view. There's nothing black or white about anything. You can't choose what makes a hero or a villain."
"There… are general rules each side will go by that everyone can agree on."
Laura snorted, "If I complete a job to save a village from a monster, does it make me good or bad?"
"Good."
"But what if I only did it to get the reward?"
"Bad?"
"But I need money to continue living. How am I supposed to survive if I don't get paid?"
"You steal."
"So if I accepted the job out of the kindness of my heart without payment, I would starve and end up stealing from others."
Lyla stopped picking the grass. She paused, then rested her hand gently on the small circle of dirt she created. She stared at her fingers. She stared at the armored gloves she wore. Then her other hand brushed her mask and her stinging eye.
At that, Laura stood up briskly. She suddenly winced at the loud buzz of magic coming from Nirvana. The dark magic returned to the white pillar, circling around it as it multiplied in size. The light cast a sharp shadow behind everyone.
"We didn't make it in time?!" Lyon shouted in shock, his wide eyes glued to the blinding light as he carried Sherry in a bridal style.
"Erza's in the middle of that light?!" Gray yelled.
The light dimmed and everything fell silent for a few seconds. Laura and Lyla shot each other the same terrified look just before the ground vigorously rumbled beneath them. The land that once laid beneath Nirvana rose from the ground, large tentacle-like pillars of stone pulling themselves from under the ground. It destroyed miles of forest, ripping trees from the ground and flinging chunks of rock into the air. Lyla wouldn't be surprised if it left miles worth of canyons in the forest.
She fell to her knees as the ground specifically under them shook like the earth would explode any second now. Laura pressed her hands to her ears, barely able to stand up straight.
The dirt and rock beneath them shot up, taking everyone into the sky with screams of horror all around them. It took only a few seconds for the rumbling and moving to cease. The dust caused by whatever came from the ground created polluted the air. Lyla had a coughing fit while the dirt cleared out and fell onto her hair.
She opened her eye, blinking the dirt away. She only now realized that Laura clutched onto her wrist, gripping onto whatever she could to keep them from falling.
Lyla reached for something to grab onto and relieve her friend from the strain. Examining and change of scenery, the beam of magic had vanished and replaced by a large domed platform of rock and stone. Large would be an understatement. The thing could fit a whole damn city! Six long pillars for legs supported it. Currently, the group held onto one of them. They were almost vertical.
"It would be a nice view if we didn't have to hang on for our lives," Laura commented casually.
"I suppose." Lyla halfheartedly agreed. She clutched her eye. They were way too close to Nirvana. If anything, this probably is the blasted thing.
From behind them, shouting grew louder. She took no alarm to it since she could already guess by the Salamander's voice who it would be.
He kicked up clouds of dirt as he bolted up the leg, Gray, and Lucy not far behind. The girls coughed some more as they passed them.
"Where's Lyon and Sherry?" Lyla croaked. When removing her hand from her mouth she saw wisps of her magic oozing from her fingertips. Too close.
"I can't tell. Nirvana is overpowering everything." Laura informed. She then started to climb up. "How do those wizards do that? The running up thing."
Lyla played a smirk on her lips, "Simple. Get on your feet and run."
Laura responded with an unimpressed look.
"It might take a side of fighting spirit and a main course of crazy."
The woman rolled her eyes. She placed her feet on the "ground" and tried figuring out how to run. Too close.
Meantime, Lyla took some deep breaths, trying to get a grip on her magic. She watched her fingers fuse out with only a trickle of dark magic escaping. It would have to do.
Lyla worked her way up, following Laura who was an awful way ahead. She eventually got to a point where the leg started to curve into something more horizontal. The teen began with a jog. Too close.
The ground shook once more and Lyla had to fall and press her body to the ground to stay on. No. The ground didn't shake. The legs. All six of them were moving. They were walking. Nirvana was walking. Wherever it planned to go, they would have to stop it before it reached its destination.
A/N: Hey... sooo... sorry it's late. But today was my birthday, so yeah... sorry... I'll do better... *hides under the couch* if you enjoyed... let me know, please?
