The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Sacrimony, Part 1
-We Are the Storm-
Usually, Lucy considered herself fairly good on trains.
Anyone who thought that wasn't much of a standout quality had clearly never been on a mission with a team full of Dragon Slayers, where the ability to look at a train timetable without throwing up was in alarmingly short supply.
Today, however, Lucy was on the side of the Dragon Slayers. Every time the train accelerated, the tense knot of anxiety in her stomach threatened to displace her breakfast.
One of the reasons for said knot of anxiety was slumped across both seats opposite her.
To say that Gajeel was in no fit state to travel was a gross understatement. Twelve hours ago, he had been slipping steadily towards death by exsanguination. She hadn't exactly needed Zeref's professional opinion to know that the Dragon Slayer's leg wasn't supposed to be hanging on by a tendon, or that those bones were supposed to be beneath the skin, or that he had lost enough blood to print his own eulogy in glistening crimson.
Zeref had healed him – but those four words failed to capture the panic and the agony it had involved. He had wavered for just short of an eternity over whether or not he would be able to do it without triggering his curse, while Lucy herself had wavered between knowing that screaming at him would only make things worse and not being able to stop herself from doing it anyway.
In the end, she had been able to detect the exact moment that the blast doors of his emotional control had slammed down. Even then, though, it was far from a simple application of healing magic. It had taken him until the early hours of the morning to reconstruct Gajeel's shattered leg and reverse the effects of haemorrhaging and shock, calling on old medical knowledge and experience Lucy wouldn't have imagined he had before she met him, but for which she was now inordinately grateful.
But although Gajeel had returned to the land of the living, he had brought back many souvenirs of his time in-between. The scars were the most obvious. Lucy saw them in her mind's eye every time her gaze fell upon his bloodied Rune Knight's uniform – horrible, twisted worms entwined around his shin, which spitefully refused to fade. He was too pale, his steps were uncertain, and he still flinched every time weight passed through his leg. When the train had started to move, he had retched, found nothing in his stomach to throw up, and immediately passed out. He hadn't stirred since.
He needed to be resting in a hospital bed.
He needed to not be dashing into battle against the same cult which had dragged him to the gates of the afterlife in the first place.
The only reason why Lucy hadn't taken Zeref up on his only-half-joking offer to re-break Gajeel's leg was because she'd known it wouldn't make a difference.
Gajeel believed Levy was in danger. Therefore, he was going to go to her aid, and no earthly force was capable of stopping him.
Lucy couldn't find it in her to blame him for that. She was worried for Levy too.
Yet the other main reason for the convoluted knot of apprehension lodged somewhere inside Lucy's digestive system was not present.
Zeref wouldn't have come on the train anyway, but he had also told her in no uncertain terms that if Gajeel was on the team, he wasn't. It was less a personal grievance than a desire to keep his role in Fairy Tail's revival a secret, he assured her, and he said he'd keep an eye on them from far enough away that Gajeel wouldn't notice, but she was worried there was more to it than that.
She had never seen him have to fight so much to hold back his curse while healing before. Since their journey had begun, he had insisted that the Dragon Slayers were their highest priority. She had assumed it was because of their rare magic, but if that was the only factor, surely it would have made Gajeel easier to heal than Juvia, because it would be easier to justify to his curse… but from what she had witnessed, it was the exact opposite. Between that and the mystery of his own healing magic – which felt more like Wendy's the more she saw it – she couldn't help wondering what he wasn't telling her about his relationship with the Dragon Slayers.
That thought concerned her, and yet it was far from the main reason for her anxiety.
When he'd come to, Gajeel had told Lucy everything about Avatar's attack on the military compound – including the fact that Gray and Natsu had infiltrated the dark cult. Zeref had listened from the room next door and said nothing.
It had only been as they were about to leave, with Gajeel out of earshot in the street outside, that Zeref had pulled her aside. She wished she could forget what he'd said, but with Gajeel unconscious and the train rolling through unending southern farmland, there was nothing to stop it from playing over and over in her mind.
Earlier That Morning
"This is okay, right?" Lucy checked. "I mean, we were going to try and find Levy next anyway. It's just more urgent than we had planned."
She stood in the middle of her scorched living room, hands fiddling with the zips on her travelling bag, feeling more awkward than she had ever felt in her own house. Gajeel was waiting for her outside, and she knew she shouldn't leave him alone for too long, but going to join him meant parting ways – however temporarily – with Zeref. After all this time, the thought of setting off on the next stage of their adventure without him at her side was a strange one.
"It's fine," he confirmed, without a trace of emotion. Certainly, he gave no indication that he felt the same way about her travelling with someone else for a while, and she felt like such a child for even daring to think he might.
"I guess I'll see you once we're there, then – or not, depending on how good your ninja skills are."
When that got no response either, not even a smile, she gave it up as a lost cause and made to leave.
Zeref caught her wrist.
"Zeref…?"
"Be careful," he said hesitantly. "I'll be watching, but if you're with Gajeel or Levy, I won't be able to come and help."
"If I'm with Gajeel or Levy, I won't need your help," she retorted automatically, and regretted it almost at once. Normally, she had no qualms about teasing him, but this just didn't feel right. "Zeref, what's wrong?"
"It's nothing," he said, releasing her wrist and stepping back.
"What aren't you telling me?"
"There is nothing I know about this situation that you don't, Lucy."
It was the truth, but she also knew him well enough to spot the loophole in that truth. "Maybe," she asserted, "but you've considered the same information from an angle I haven't, and you're choosing not to tell me about it."
"Well…" He glanced away. "Lucy, you're ready to fight Gray, aren't you?"
"Yeah, of course," Lucy shrugged. "I doubt he and Natsu will be able to help us without blowing their cover. They'll have to pretend to put up a fight, like they did to Gajeel-"
"That's not what I mean. You saw what Gray did. You should prepare to face him as an enemy."
"But he isn't an enemy." Lucy frowned at him, wondering why a Spymaster General found the idea of deep cover so difficult to comprehend. "He infiltrated Avatar to help stop them. I bet he was the one who convinced them to take Natsu on as a new member after he was captured – it would have been much better than watching him be tortured! You heard Gajeel's story. Gray was helping Natsu with his cover."
"Or so we're supposed to believe," Zeref said quietly, and Lucy couldn't stop herself from rolling her eyes.
"You want evidence? I'll give you evidence. Gajeel agrees that Natsu noticed his broken leg and deliberately avoided it for the duration of their fight. Besides, what sort of evil villain gets so carried away having fun fighting that he completely forgets his goal?"
"Natsu is certainly undercover. He despises me far too much to genuinely join a group purporting to serve me."
"You could put it that way," Lucy shrugged. "Or, you could say that Natsu's a good person and would never willingly side with a group as outspokenly evil as Avatar. Neither would Gray."
"Think about it, Lucy," Zeref pleaded. "Too many of Gray's actions make no sense. He disappeared for six months, when he'd have lost nothing from telling Juvia that he was going undercover and that she had no need to worry. He lied to you about being Erza's spy. He lied to you about Natsu being in the black church. He went straight for Gajeel's broken leg in that fight – and what he did went beyond incapacitation. Gajeel could have died. You can't do that to someone by accident!"
"But you can do it by mistake. Especially when trying to appear ruthless for the sake of Natsu's cover as well as his own. It was dark, and besides, if Gray wanted to kill him, he could have just run him through with a blade of ice while he was on the ground. He was relying on Gajeel's famous endurance – and on us."
"Lucy-"
Of course he couldn't share her trust in Gray. He had been alone for far too long to understand their bonds. "No, Zeref," she told him firmly. "There will be a good reason for his actions. These aren't nameless pawns and probabilities we're talking about. They're my friends, and I know them a thousand times better than you do."
"This is precisely the kind of situation where familiarity is a hindrance," he argued. "You're letting it blind you to the facts."
"Are you trying to turn me against my friends? Is that what all this is about? You're going to bring my guild back together just so you can get us to destroy each other?"
"Don't be ridiculous. If that were my aim, I would have picked a far more subtle approach than telling you to your face that something is clearly wrong!"
"That's always your answer, isn't it? That if you were the one behind it, you'd be doing it better. Because you understand people so much better than anyone else-"
"Lucy!" There was something frantic about his voice. He glanced sharply away and shook his head, as if to clear it. "Listen to me. You trust me, don't you?"
"Not as much as I trust Gray!"
Zeref took a step back.
For the briefest of moments, he looked lost – lost like he'd been beneath the stars; lost in the nightmares that stripped away four hundred years of learning not to care.
Then he smiled. "Yes," he said. "That's right. We are enemies, after all."
"Zeref-"
"Be careful, Lucy."
And then he was gone, leaving only the resonant vibrations of her keys and that last warning to stir and settle into silence.
Zeref wasn't at the station when she and Gajeel disembarked, either.
She hadn't expected him to be – she was even more adamant that he stayed out of sight than he himself was – but he didn't show himself even when she slipped away from Gajeel under the pretence of using the station toilets and waved wildly in an attempt to signal some invisible watcher.
Well, she was sure he wasn't far away. She trusted him not to abandon her on a mission this important. After all, he needed Levy back in Fairy Tail almost as much as Lucy needed to see her alive and well.
By this point, Gajeel had already started to call her impatiently. She'd only been gone about a minute, but that was a minute too long for the man whose girlfriend was a prisoner of an evil cult. He was the one still recovering from his injuries, and yet Lucy found herself struggling to keep up with the Dragon Slayer's purposeful strides.
The town they had come to was a small settlement called Bishop's Lace, built entirely of wood and cobblestones and age. Between the crooked townhouses, uneven roads, and buildings stained with shadow, it might have been lifted straight out of a history textbook and set down amidst the south-eastern farmland. Through too-small windows, she caught glimpses of modern amenities hidden within the perfectly preserved shells of ancient buildings.
Lucy had never heard of the town before – which was unsurprising, given its size, remote location, and preference for history over convenience. Yet all the things which kept it in obscurity made it an odd place for a dark cult to base their operations. At least their black church had been relatively central in Fiore. Any world-conquering mission based out of Bishop's Lace, however, would find their biggest obstacle to be the local infrastructure – or lack thereof.
After several minutes of scouring the streets Gajeel led her through for anything that looked dramatic enough for Avatar's tastes, Lucy posed the question to her teammate: "Does Avatar really have a hideout here?"
"Yeah, a country mansion, about twenty minutes out of town," he grunted. "It's supposed to be abandoned, but they're secretly using it as a site for meetings of the local members. The train station at Bishop's Lace is the closest we can get on public transport."
"How'd you end up on a mission like this? No offence, but I can't really see infiltration being your thing." Then again, she couldn't see enforcing the law being his thing either, but the Rune Knight uniform suggested otherwise.
"Levy picked it. Something about the location."
"What's so special about- oh."
That was when Lucy's gaze fell upon the twisted lane known as Paternoster Street. In the century or so since Zeref had last visited, it had acquired even more old bookshops, if possible: wonky buildings squeezed into tiny gaps and stacked on top of each other in gravity-defying towers of forbidden knowledge. The street contained an impossible number of corners, whose only purpose seemed to be to make it possible to get lost in what would otherwise have been a straight road. The stone soaked up the sunlight and gave back age and mystery instead.
Lucy couldn't help wondering if she was looking at the reason why Zeref had failed to show up at the station. Four hundred years was, apparently, nowhere near enough to develop some restraint when it came to old books.
"Yeah, Levy gave me and Lily a list of books to look for while she was undercover," Gajeel confirmed, following Lucy's gaze. "Though I got called away before I even arrived the first time, so I had no idea the place was this bad. You've gotta be a scholar just to understand the graffiti." Grunting, he gestured to a nearby wall, which had been spray-painted with three arcane interlocking letters.
A smile flickered across Lucy's face, wondering if Zeref would know what ancient language they were being insulted in, before Gajeel picked up the pace once again and she followed him hastily away from the street of bookshops. "Do you know where Pantherlily is?"
"No. He was supposed to be the backup if Levy needed it. Either he's been caught with her, or he's waiting in a camp somewhere for a signal that ain't coming. We ain't got time to look for him now, though."
"I'm sure he'll find us," Lucy reassured him.
Gajeel said nothing.
They jogged on.
"Right," Lucy began, when they were crouched down behind an overgrown bush in what might once have been the mansion's gardens, before time and nature had been let loose upon them. "What do you think? Wait for the cover of night? Look for an unguarded servants' entrance round the back? Grab a postman's disguise from the town? Or, sure, we could just walk right up to the front door and kick it down, that works too…"
"This is the Rune Knights!" Gajeel was yelling. "Come out with your hands up!"
Lucy tailed off with an audible sigh, wondering if this was how Zeref felt travelling with her.
"So much for the element of surprise," she muttered, and she scrambled after him.
Inside, the abandoned manor couldn't have looked more like a haunted house if they'd been greeted by a ghost jumping out with a placard reading 'Boo!'. Boarded-up windows not only blocked most of the daylight, but leeched the vitality from what little managed to seep through the cracks, giving the interior an unhealthy pallor. Thick dust sheets transformed the sumptuous reception room into a graveyard of deformed, angular figures.
Yes, it might have been the perfect abandoned house… if not for the lack of any dust underfoot. Someone had swept this place, and recently. Lucy had a hunch that the rooms further from the main entrance might not look quite so uninhabitable. And beneath the cloak of silence, somewhere in between her soft footfalls and Gajeel's clompy ones, she thought she could hear-
"LEVY!" Gajeel bellowed. "Where ya hiding, shrimp?"
Lucy somehow managed to resist hitting her head against the wall. "Keep it down," she winced. "We don't even know she's here."
"She is. I can smell her. And- look out!"
That was all the warning she got before an iron-clad Dragon Slayer barrelled into her. She went down at once. Something shot by over her head, then vivid orange fireworks burst in her vision as the impact knocked the breath from her lungs.
Gajeel rolled off her, coming up into a crouch and immediately blasting an Iron Dragon's Roar into the gloom. Lucy strained her eyes to try and see what the Dragon Slayer's superior senses had noticed. Someone was there. As she'd thought, the mansion wasn't abandoned at all.
"I ain't got time for you again!" Gajeel shouted, as the clamour of metal shards faded to nothing.
"I'm not sure I can be bothered with you again, either," came the bored response.
Lucy thought she recognized that voice. "Briar? Is that you?"
A pause. "Stardust?"
"You were working for Avatar all along?"
"Yes," she shrugged. "It's not like it's a secret. You just didn't ask."
Lucy's mouth tightened. They had only met briefly, in the wreckage of Alchemilla Town, but she had felt a strange camaraderie with the thief/acrobat who had helped her steal the book of messenger pigeon communications from the tower. She hadn't questioned Briar's motives too much because she hadn't wanted her own to be questioned – and because she believed fundamentally in the goodness of people she met until given reason to think otherwise.
And she hadn't, back then, had reason to suspect that Briar might have been looking for the same message as her – or that she had been tracking down the same artefact for a very different reason. Nor had Lucy connected the magic she had witnessed neatly breaking a locked cupboard in two to the orderly destruction that had cut through the town… or to the magic that had been able to split apart even Juvia's water body.
"Go," Lucy ordered Gajeel – for her tone left no doubt that that was an order. "Get Levy. I'll deal with Briar."
It was obvious that the Dragon Slayer wanted to go as much as Lucy wanted to stay. "Fine," he conceded.
"No," Briar said matter-of-factly. As Gajeel dashed past her, she twisted, one palm flashing out like a viper-
Loke punched her in the face. "That's for Juvia."
In the same moment, Lucy, even before her transformation into Leo's Star Dress form had completed, launched a running kick at what she had correctly assumed to be a sheet-covered grand piano. With a distinctly unmusical groan, it slid backwards to block the door Gajeel had disappeared through. Leaping into the air, Lucy followed this up with another magic-imbued kick from above, and the piano folded in on itself.
When the discordant clash of keys and twanging strings faded, a heap of incredibly expensive debris lay between Briar and her target.
Well, given that the mansion was legally abandoned, at least Avatar couldn't sue her for the destruction.
Loke came to stand by her side as Lucy hopped back down to the ground. "Mind if I help out this time?" he asked, as an afterthought.
Lucy grinned. "Be my guest."
"LEVY!"
Gajeel hurtled up the sweeping staircase and out onto the landing, his feet sinking into the royal-red carpet. The scent trail was strong – she had been brought up here recently.
"LEVY!" he bellowed again, turning a full circle at the top of the stairs. The long hallway was lined with closed doors, each decorated in identical white and gold. As on the ground floor, dust sheets covered the portraits and mirrors, and transformed the assortment of vases, potted plants and decorative tables into shapeless tombstones.
Fine. He'd smash everything to pieces if that was what it took to find her.
A scuffling sound came from behind the furthest door, and a faint voice called, "Is someone there?"
"Levy!"
"Gajeel? Is that you?"
"Yeah, it's me!" The Dragon Slayer raced over and tugged at the door handle, which splintered in protest and then fell off in his hand.
"…Why would I still be in here if the door wasn't locked?" Levy sighed. "This room's warded against magic from the inside, but you should be able to break through from the outside…"
"Right," Gajeel agreed. Dizzy with relief, he latched onto the solid pragmatism of her words. "Stand back. I'll-"
Abruptly, he whirled around, dropping straight into a battle stance. The carpet swallowed the sound of footsteps, but he knew that scent – charcoal and hearth and the smoky, sizzling aftermath of an explosion large enough to consume Mercurius. Which it very nearly had, on more than one occasion.
"I knew it!" There was a grin on Natsu's face as he approached. "I heard someone smashing up a grand piano and just knew it had to be a Fairy Tail rescue team!" Then his delight faded a little. His gaze dropped to Gajeel's newly restored leg. "Didn't think it'd be you, though. Are you okay?"
"Okay and more than ready for a rematch," Gajeel challenged. "Don't think you're getting away this time!"
"You sure? You were in a pretty bad state last time I saw you."
"Yeah, and whose fault was that?"
"Not my fault you're weak," Natsu muttered. But it was half-hearted, and he wasn't meeting his fellow Dragon Slayer's eyes, and Gajeel wondered if that was the closest thing to an apology the other could manage while pretending to be a villain.
"Not like you're looking much better right now," Gajeel observed, taking in Natsu's pale face and the lines around his eyes. The more he looked, the more he could make out the dappled shading of bruises upon Natsu's unbandaged arm. Was that his punishment for not fighting Avatar's enemies as ruthlessly as Gray…?
"Nah, I was just up all night practising my new move, ready for our rematch!" Natsu breezed, rubbing briskly at his upper arms. "Wanna go?"
"You bet!"
"Ahem," said Levy, through the door.
"Right, no, can't fight now," Gajeel corrected himself hurriedly. "I'm in the middle of rescuing Levy."
"Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be guarding her, aren't I?" Natsu realized. "Figured that if I volunteered to be the guard, at least none of those creeps could do anything to her. I really wanted to be on the operation with Gray, since it sounded like it was mostly destroying buildings, and I haven't been able to do that in ages… but Avatar don't trust me enough yet."
"How sad," Gajeel said absently, powering up his Iron Dragon's Sword to cut through the door.
"…You ain't listening to me, are you?"
Gajeel wasn't, in fact, and so the only warning he received was a pulse of wind – and then Natsu grabbed him by the back of his uniform and hurled him down the other end of the corridor. "I'm. On. Guard. Duty," Natsu reiterated, timing each word between Gajeel's bounces for emphasis. "I can't let you just take Levy. Not without a fight. It's like Gray said – I gotta show them I've left Fairy Tail behind."
"Gehehe. Fine by me," Gajeel responded, a matching fire igniting in his eyes. "Come at me with everything ya got, Salamander! I'll beat you up so badly that Avatar'll have no doubt you well and truly lost!"
"Do your worst," Natsu grinned.
On the far side of the door, Levy sunk to the ground in despair.
For the first ten seconds or so, the battle between the two Dragon Slayers was completely normal. They met in the middle of the corridor to trade kicks and punches, landing frequent if superficial blows upon each other. They were too evenly matched in ordinary physical combat to do more than that, at least until one of them came up with a new tactic… or one of them got bored.
Unfortunately, both of them got bored at the same time.
The result was a fist packed with explosive dragon's flame detonating against a fist armoured in impenetrable iron, causing a concussive blast of magic which flung the nearest doors wide open and took a sledgehammer of air pressure to the windows in the rooms beyond.
Natsu went face-first into the nearest wall. Gajeel was thrown out into the void above the stairwell – which might have led to a disastrous fall, if he hadn't flipped over in mid-air and drawn upon his magic. Steel-grey wings flared out, and then beat slowly to hold him in mid-air.
Extracting himself from the wall, Natsu glared up at him. "You think you're so cool up there, don't you?"
"I do, actually," Gajeel agreed, and hit him with a Roar.
A burst of flame knocked the worst of it away from Natsu's body. "Get back down here!" he ordered, sprinting forwards and leaping from the top of the stairs. Coils of flame spiralled around his outstretched arms in what Gajeel now considered a poor excuse for a Dragon's Wing Attack.
"Nope," the Iron Dragon Slayer announced. A powerful wingbeat carried him effortlessly over Natsu's wild attack. Then, without warning, he folded his wings and dropped right on top of Natsu like… well, like a man who hadn't been weightless even before he'd covered himself in solid steel scales. Natsu hit the floor with the force of a small meteorite, while another flare of his wings let Gajeel recover before impact and return to circling below the ceiling.
Natsu staggered back to his feet. "Fine. Be like that. You're a lucky man, Gajeel – you get to be the first to witness my new technique!"
"Uh oh…"
Gajeel's dubious expression didn't seem to faze Natsu. The fire mage's face was, for perhaps the first time in his life, a perfect picture of concentration. First, great fiery wings appeared from his back – an intimidating sight, even if last night had proven that they were useless in practice. A hint of blue fire flashed at his feet.
Then, astoundingly, Natsu began to rise steadily into the air.
Gajeel's jaw dropped. "That's impossible! How are you doing that?"
"Updrafts!" Natsu exclaimed, beaming. "If I superheat the air beneath my feet, it produces a strong enough updraft to lift me into the air! The wings are just for show," he added quickly. "Cool, huh?"
"Uh…" Gajeel hedged. That certainly explained why Natsu was leaning forward at an awkward angle – increasing the surface area of his body in the updraft rather than trying to counterbalance his weightless wings – and it was a fairly creative solution to the problem of flight, he supposed, but…
"Does it do anything else?" Gajeel checked.
Slow vertical levitation was a neat party trick, but as far as battle moves went, Natsu's intense night of training had thus far yielded disappointing results.
"Of course it does other stuff!" Natsu blustered. "I can make a vortex horizontally too! If I can just remember…" Puzzled, he glanced down at his feet. "Was it a hot left foot and a cold right foot to go forwards, or was it-?"
With a sigh, Gajeel tucked in his wings, dived, and used a single blow to smash his mid-air target back down to the ground where he belonged.
He was thinking of naming that one 'Iron Dragon's Gravity Smash'.
"Alright, that's it," Natsu growled, climbing out of the impact crater as Gajeel wheeled round for another attack. "Fire Dragon's Ascent at full power!"
White-blue flames flashed once again beneath his feet, and he shot skywards.
Unlike the normal rocket blast he would have used to launch himself, Natsu was pouring all the magic he had into the source of heat, producing a sustained thermal strong enough to carry him into the air – and, in principle, hold him there, so that he could fight Gajeel on even terms above the ground.
Unfortunately, he hadn't been counting on the rotation.
As the hot air rose far faster than before, and the updraft sucked in cold air from the surroundings, it began to spin. The taller it grew, the tighter it became… and the more it spun. Roiling winds shredded the flames of Natsu's wings and filled the vortex with embers. Angular momentum was not Natsu's friend, and it proceeded to prove this point by slinging him around in directions he hadn't previously known existed as the updraft soared.
By the time Natsu hit Gajeel, he was upside-down at the heart of a fully fledged fire tornado.
It would have been impressive, if it had been in any way intentional.
"Stay back, Lucy," Loke had advised, and she had done so.
It wasn't about Spirit and owner, or strong and weak. It was simply, brutally, pragmatically, that Leo the Lion couldn't die and Lucy Heartfilia could.
From Lucy's observations in Alchemilla Town and Gajeel's account of his fight in the underground bunker, they had a good understanding of how Briar's magic worked. Anything she touched split. It didn't matter if it was a plank of wood or reinforced steel – she had broken Gajeel's leg with a single touch through a layer of magic-enhanced iron scales. To make matters worse, it seemed that she could turn her magic upon herself to produce a somewhat different effect, splitting herself into four independent copies. All needed to be defeated to stop her, and each could use the same deadly magic as the original.
They were taking no chances. Loke was leading this fight. Lucy was watching for an opening. She had summoned Sagittarius too, but refrained from adopting his powers herself through Star Dress. If the expert archer was struggling to get a clean shot into the melee, she'd do more harm than good with her own bow.
Besides, the Lion Spirit was holding his own. With his quick punches and catlike reflexes, he was doing an excellent job of forcing the dark mage onto the defensive. By emitting bursts of Regulus's light from his fists, he was dazzling her just enough in the dark drawing room to make her swipes clumsy, and increase his odds of dodging.
Just as Lucy was starting to think that he had this under control, however, Briar parried a strike with her elbow, twisted, and ran her palm along the boards covering the nearest window. They cracked and fell to the ground, allowing proper daylight to enter the room.
That meant Loke's light no longer had the blinding effect it needed.
Transitioning into her Taurus form without even thinking about it, Lucy called for Loke to fall back. He did so, trusting her, as Briar's empty-palm strikes suddenly doubled in accuracy. Lucy used Taurus's strength to flip what she hoped was a table – it was – on its end, shedding the heavy dust sheet, and she sent it flying towards their opponent with a spinning kick.
Annoyed, Briar cracked it with a single strike, and the halves fell harmlessly around her as she continued to advance upon Loke.
Lucy's fist clenched. A strong mage was one thing, but a mage with unblockable magic made for a completely different kind of opponent – just as it had in the battle in the diner. She needed to find something so strong that Briar couldn't split it… but she had a feeling that the mansion's previous owners hadn't hidden a shield of enchanted diamond underneath any of those dust sheets.
So, reverse your thinking.
She heard those words as clearly as if Zeref was stood right beside her. No, perhaps she wasn't the best at putting herself in her enemy's shoes. Perhaps she didn't want to. Perhaps she did need his insights to prompt her before she could understand the motives of her guild's enemies.
But in battle, she had always been excellent at creative thinking – at seeing opportunities where no one else could. After all, it was the only way she had been able to keep up with Team Natsu.
She didn't need to find something too strong to be split. She needed to find something too weak to be split.
And the drawing room was covered in such things. Literally.
She dragged a heavy sheet off the nearest armchair and hurled the entire thing over Briar's head.
The cultist's hand flashed out. A cut immediately formed in the material, but there was no fracture, no impact, no force, and the torn sheet slumped over Briar. She thrashed blindly against it, ripping everywhere she touched, but not breaking it.
That moment was all Loke needed. A beam of lasered starlight punched a hole straight through the sheet and into Briar's heart.
Into one of the Briars' hearts.
The sheet flopped to the ground as the duplicate beneath it disintegrated into raw magic, leaving the other three hastily generated Briars glowering at Lucy and her Spirits.
Well, Lucy supposed they'd been lucky Briar had waited this long to utilize her most powerful trick.
And just as she was foolish enough to let herself start wondering how this situation could possibly get any worse, the unmistakeable smell of smoke began to drift through the blocked door.
It was all she could do not to sigh. What was Gajeel doing up there?
It turned out that Dragon Slayers were no better at travelling by fire tornado than by any other form of transport.
The impromptu vortex blasted straight through the roof and spat the hapless Dragon Slayers out into the sky, dizzier than if they'd jumped from a plane launched from an aircraft carrier which they had reached by jet ski… all driven by Erza on her way to a free cake buffet.
Natsu landed upon an undamaged section of the roof, and was so surprised to find himself upright that he fell over again. Staggering, Gajeel took a triumphant swing at what he thought was Natsu, knocked the chimney pot clean off, and promptly tripped over it. After that, both wisely decided to remain sat down until the captain had switched off the fasten seatbelt signs.
"I ain't impressed by your ten months of training," Gajeel sniggered. "If the best thing you came up with is a move which makes you and your opponent extremely dizzy…"
"Nah, I just cobbled that together overnight so I could fight you in the air," Natsu defended. "And it's not normally that bad! It shouldn't spin that much… I need someone smart to explain the whole hot-air-cold-air vortex thing to me."
"Defeated by the laws of physics," Gajeel said, with more sniggering. "Universal, inviolable laws… huh, maybe I should switch allegiance."
Natsu snorted. "Yeah, right. I bet you can't even spell physics."
"Can too!"
At this point, their argument would normally have degenerated into a physical fight, but with both of them too disorientated to stand up, there was a moment of embarrassed silence as they tried to work out what non-Fairy Tail types would do in this situation.
Natsu asked, "Why are you a Rune Knight, anyway?"
"Dunno, really. Warrod suggested it, and that old bag from the Council mentioned it before she… well, I guess I didn't have anything better to do. Besides, I kinda wanted to prove that I could hold down a respectable job…"
"Why?" Natsu sounded totally mystified by the concept. "Who in Fairy Tail is gonna care if you're being respectable or not?"
The iron scales that flashed into place on Gajeel's cheeks were definitely because he was preparing to return to the fight, and not to, say, conceal any kind of blush. "Anyway, isn't the real question what the hell you're doing hanging out with Avatar?"
"I've gotta find Zeref. Avatar know how to summon him out of hiding."
"You want to find Zeref? That's idiotic, even for you. If he's happy to leave us alone, why would you wanna risk that?"
"He isn't leaving us alone! He's-" Natsu cut himself off abruptly, voice going cold. "No, what's the point? You won't believe me. No one does."
"Oh, quit being so melodramatic about it," Gajeel grunted. "I ain't your therapist. Just tell me what's going on already."
"Zeref has kidnapped Lucy!" Natsu exclaimed.
"…No, he hasn't," Gajeel pointed out.
"See? I knew you were going to say that!" There was bitter vindication in Natsu's cry. "No one ever believes me!"
"That's 'cause you're talking nonsense. If anyone's kidnapped Lucy, it's me, by dragging her away from her quest to rescue Levy with me. She's downstairs right now, fighting Briar so that I could come up here."
"…Lucy's right here?"
"Surely you didn't think it was a respectable officer of The Law who smashed that grand piano?" Gajeel retorted, affronted.
"But…" Natsu wavered. "That can't be right. She's been kidnapped…"
"Odd place to keep a kidnapping victim, in their own home in Crocus," Gajeel commented. "I tracked her there by scent last night. Don't remember much, but she's the one who found a healer to save my leg, looked after me overnight, told me about her quest to revive Fairy Tail, and is helping me rescue Levy right now."
"And… you didn't see Zeref?"
"Nope. Maybe she was kidnapped and managed to escape?"
For the first time, Natsu met Gajeel's gaze, and his eyes were filled with perplexity and hope. "Then… she's okay?"
"Completely fine."
"Oh. Okay. Well… good." He exhaled deeply, though it seemed he struggled to let go of the last of his breath. "I need to talk to her."
"Knock yourself out. As long as you ain't really evil, I don't care what you do."
"Nah. It's like Gray said. If Avatar try anything seriously evil, we're going to turn on them from within. But they mostly seem to be looking for books…"
"Yeah, don't think I've forgiven you for stealing that-"
"Are you two quite finished?"
A dark shape loomed over Gajeel, blocking out the sun. Squinting, he could just about make out the features of a familiar Solid Script mage.
A very cross-looking Solid Script mage.
"Levy, you're alright!" Gajeel exclaimed, scrambling to his feet. "But what are you… I mean… I thought you were imprisoned…?"
He tailed off lamely. He was supposed to have been doing something about that, wasn't he?
"You set fire to the mansion!" Levy exploded. "If the roof hadn't collapsed, I'd have burnt alive before I could climb out!"
She pointed. Sure enough, half the roof had crumbled inwards – and the hole was widening by the minute, dropping timber and tiles into the fiery hell below in exchange for ominous turrets of smoke.
"That was Natsu, not me," Gajeel protested. "Something about thermal updrafts, and… uh… angular momentum?"
Levy sighed, shaking her head. "So much for The Law. The minute you see another Fairy Tail mage, we're right back to where we started."
"Actually, I was just about to, uh, apprehend this lowlife for arson…"
Levy could no longer suppress the smile upon her face. "I think it's about time we stopped inflicting you upon the poor Rune Knights and went back to Fairy Tail."
"But-"
"Gray told me while I was in captivity," she smiled. "First of September, at the old guildhall. Lucy's arranging the whole thing. Although, maybe this is something to discuss when we're on the ground, rather than, you know, on the roof of a burning building…"
"Yeah," Gajeel nodded. "Go back to the ground, Levy. Me and Natsu have to finish this."
Levy frowned. "You know, since I appear to have been rescued from Avatar's clutches by a heroic housefire, there's no need for you two to fight any more."
Gajeel and Natsu turned to stare at her.
"Yeah, you're right; I don't know what I was thinking," Levy sighed. She found an intact chimney, as far from the blaze as possible, and sat down, hoping that the structural integrity of the old house would last until a safe way down to the ground presented itself. "Fairy Tail's great and all, but there are some things about that guild that I really don't miss…"
"Loke, Forced Closure!" Lucy commanded.
He trusted her and didn't fight it. Lucy's magic pulled him from this world, and the strike that would have shattered his spine passed straight through his disintegrating body.
Loke could just about handle one enraged Briar, but three was too many, even with support from Sagittarius. Despite the archer's best efforts, one of Briar's duplicates had seized an antique watercolour from the wall to shield them against the volley of arrows, leaving the other two to gang up on Loke.
Still, even as Lucy lowered Loke's key in her right hand, she was raising another in her left. "Scorpio! Concentrate your fire on Sagittarius's target!"
The Scorpion Spirit understood perfectly. His feet hadn't even made contact with the ground when a miniature whirlwind of sand burst from his tail towards the Briar copy his fellow Spirit was attacking. She turned automatically, taking the lashing sandstorm against her stolen painting – and leaving herself wide open to Sagittarius. A flurry of arrows hit home, and she disappeared as quickly as Loke had.
The other two Briars had hardly been idle, even before their copy had fallen. Lucy had barely a second to think before they were upon her.
It was a second Laxus wouldn't have given her.
It was more than enough.
With a pulse of light and an explosion of wool, Lucy's least-likely combat Spirit appeared. Utilizing their shared magic through Star Dress, she drew Aries's fluffy wool around her body. By the time the Briar copies reached her, Lucy was fully armoured and ready to fight.
Armoured, that was, in a full suit of cotton candy.
Like a bright pink sumo-wrestling astronaut.
Fearlessly, Lucy took one Briar's strike directly to her puffy pauldrons, and the next against her raised forearm. There was a poof of pink smoke. Lucy's unusual armour absorbed the blow entirely – neither the force from the strike nor the fracture from the splitting magic could gain any traction amongst the mesh of fine fibres.
Admittedly, the cushioning worked both ways. Ramming one of the Briars shoulder-first was more of an annoyance than an attack, and only because Briar got wool in her mouth when she tried to inhale. But it did knock her back, giving Sagittarius and Scorpio a clear line of attack for their sandstorm and star shot combo on the other Briar.
As she vanished, Lucy and her last opponent grappled viciously on the floor. Well, Briar fought viciously, employing every dirty trick she knew in the hope of finding a chink in Lucy's armour. Lucy mostly just sat on her. Fluffy wool didn't make for the most mobile of battle suits.
When Scorpio called, she made her move without hesitation. She rolled off Briar, trusting Scorpio and Sagittarius to keep her opponent on the ground, and transitioned to her own Scorpio form. A flash of her steel-bladed tail sent poison surging through the Avatar mage's veins, and a swift strike from her fist finished the job.
Exhaling slowly, Lucy got to her feet next to Briar's unconscious body. "Thanks, guys," she smiled at her Spirits, and they disappeared along with her own transformation.
She hadn't quite let herself relax when the distant sound of destruction reached her ears.
She flinched. One couldn't be The Only Sensible Member Of Fairy Tail and not recognize a sound like that.
Belatedly, she remembered the smoke, and the fact that The Law himself was running around up there unsupervised… and all of a sudden, Lucy found that she didn't want to be in the mansion any more.
Her hand went to her belt, reaching instinctively for another key. "Taurus, take Briar and…"
Lucy fell sideways with the sentence still incomplete. The Bull Spirit caught her just before she hit the floor – and there she remained, draped over one thick arm.
"Would you like me to carry you too, Miss Lucy?" he chuckled.
Lucy gave an apologetic smile. "If you wouldn't mind…"
She was confident in her ability to summon three Spirits and maintain Star Dress at the same time, but that didn't mean it was easy. Taurus picked her up carefully, then slung the beaten dark mage over his shoulder with a lot less care, and the party abandoned the crumbling mansion to its fate.
As Natsu had insisted, his spontaneously named Fire Dragon's Ascent wasn't usually that bad.
It was usually worse.
Compared to Gajeel's wings, Natsu's method of flight actually had a lot of advantages. It was faster, more manoeuvrable, and had the added effect of cloaking his body in scorching razor wind. Unfortunately, these were not quite enough to outweigh the humungous disadvantage of it being completely uncontrollable.
Natsu had not, in the last five minutes, come up with a solution to the spinning problem. In fact, he had elected to tackle it in the same way he tackled most obstacles: he had shoved more power into it.
Which meant more spinning.
The result was an enormous fireball that careened crazily across the sky. Sometimes the updrafts he created carried him skywards as intended, and sometimes, for no apparent reason beyond the whimsy of the atmosphere, the vortices of hot and cold air formed on their sides, flinging him horizontally instead. The occasional rocket blast would have helped propel him in the right direction, if he had any idea which direction was 'right'. In lieu of that, every surge of fire projected from his feet seemed to select an angle at random and accelerate him that way.
Thus the living, breathing natural disaster that was Airborne Natsu Dragneel crashed unpredictably through the heavens, pinballing between invisible walls at blinding speed, and growing hotter… and hotter… and hotter.
To anyone else, the correct counter-tactic to Natsu's Fire Dragon's Ascent would be Stay The Hell Away, and wait for him to burn himself out.
Gajeel, however, was not Anyone Else. He was the Rune Knight who enforced The Law with a literal iron fist. He was the Dragon Slayer who never backed down from a challenge. He was the Fairy Tail mage who, barring yesterday, hadn't had a decent opponent in ten months.
(He also happened to be fighting in front of his girlfriend. Not that Levy was watching, mind. She had placed her hands over her eyes the moment it had become clear that Gajeel wasn't taking the smart approach to this battle.)
Needless to say, such cowardly, sensible tactics were beneath him. Wings spread, he dashed after (and sometimes accidentally away from) his out-of-control opponent, trying to hit him with a breath attack or his iron sword.
Through sheer fluke, Natsu spun out of the way of an Iron Dragon's Roar and arced back round towards his opponent. Cursing, Gajeel folded his wings and dropped beneath the fire tornado. Heat washed over him and he winced – Natsu hadn't been all that close to him, and it still burned his skin. This was going to be a problem.
Realistically, he knew that his best option for ending this quickly would be to use his Dual Dragon Mode. Phasing in and out of the shadows would give him the agility to keep up with Natsu. Unfortunately, he knew that if he used his Dual Mode, Natsu would do the same… and the only thing worse than an out-of-control fire tornado was an out-of-control fire tornado which spat lightning bolts and was drawn towards electrical conductors.
No, he'd be better off saving that until he was certain he could use it to win.
And in the meantime…
Natsu shot towards him so quickly it made Gajeel dizzy just to watch. Shifting his arm into a short pole, the Iron Dragon Slayer used his wings to brace and hit Natsu for six. Pain shot through his arm. Although the iron transformation had prevented the worst of the burns from accruing on his skin, it was enough to warn him off making direct contact again.
As Natsu tumbled away, he unleashed a breath attack of his own – which of course went nowhere near Gajeel, but as he spun, the intense flames traced out a plane of plasma in the sky. Gajeel was forced to dive again to avoid being bisected by it, and he retaliated with a ranged attack of his own, but the vortex around Natsu effortlessly parted the iron shards.
No, that wasn't going to work. He needed an opening.
One came when he was least expecting it. When Natsu's erratic flight path brought him too close to the roof of the burning mansion, Gajeel folded his wings from high above and dived. Right before impact, his wings snapped open once again. At that speed, they didn't slow him down as much as induce rotation. A mid-air forward roll ended with his iron-spiked heel crashing down towards Natsu in an improvised Iron Dragon's Gravity Smash.
Thus he scored a direct hit… with slightly less force than that with which the updraft of superheated air was currently pushing Natsu skyward.
So Gajeel found himself flung head over heels, landing clumsily on the mansion's roof and skidding to a halt just in time. The tiles directly behind him tumbled into the smoke-filled pit below.
As luck would have it, his opponent immediately rolled a natural twenty on his direction-generator, and the Natsu-nado descended straight towards the staggering Gajeel. Worse, Natsu finally had the presence of mind to dismiss his burning vortex – leaving him perfectly placed for a devastating strike.
Grinning, Gajeel fell backwards into the blazing hole, and vanished.
It was all for dramatic effect, of course. The instant the smoke plume had swallowed him, he activated his Dual Mode and entered the shadows dancing amongst the flames. He reappeared behind Natsu, the enormous iron sword of his Secret Art already forming in his hand. The moment Natsu turned round, he would get a face full of Karma Demon Blade.
That had been the plan, anyway.
Unfortunately, Natsu may have stopped spinning, but he was far too dizzy to tell that the black plume of smoke in front of him wasn't Gajeel.
Magic crackled triumphantly around his fist. "FIRE DRAGON KING'S-"
Gajeel's expression became one of panic. "No, wait, I'm-"
"-DEMOLITION FIST!"
"-behind you," Gajeel finished weakly.
Natsu's fist smacked into the roof.
There was a moment of delicate silence.
"…Did he just hit the mansion with a move called 'Demolition Fist'?" Levy asked.
"Time to go," Gajeel breezed.
He and Levy ran for it as the building erupted beneath them. Reaching the end of the roof, Levy flung herself straight into the void. Halfway to the ground, Gajeel caught her, and they glided the rest of the way upon steel wings.
Behind them, in an explosion of fire and stone, the once-grand building crashed to the ground, and Natsu crashed with it.
A/N: Thanks all for your continued support despite the slower updates! It really means a lot, and I love reading your comments and seeing that people are still interested in following the story. Next chapter in a fortnight. ~CS