The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Brittle Bones, Part 2
-The Gehennan Princess-
Vistarion, The Present Day
Anyone entering the staff canteen in the palace compound that day would have invariably found their attention drawn to the two individuals sat in the far corner.
The first was a young woman with bright green hair and even brighter painted fingernails. She looked as though she hadn't been able to decide whether it was summer or winter, and had chosen her outfit to cover all bases: beneath a sumptuous, fur-lined cloak, she was wearing nothing but a rainbow-striped bikini, which would be on the front cover of À La Manière by tomorrow morning. She was eating neon orange ice cream straight from the tub and shivering in delight.
The second didn't even own a winter wardrobe. He could trace his lineage back through fifteen generations of desert tribesmen, and even if those who knew he had been born and raised in Vistarion suspected he wore tribal-style vest tops more to show off his muscles than through any real connection to his ancestors, they had to admit it was impressive that he did so all year round. As it was the height of summer, he might have blended in more than his companion, had he not been lounging on the spindly metal chair with his sandaled feet crossed on the table, heedless to the occasional glare his bare toes received from over the tub of ice cream.
No one did stare at the two of them, of course. No one wanted to risk being mistaken for eavesdropping on two of the Spriggan Twelve.
If they had, they might have found it a little harder to take their generals seriously.
"I just don't get that woman," Ajeel was whining. "Why can't she make up her mind?"
Brandish shovelled another scoop of ice cream into her mouth. "Yes, I had a great holiday, thanks for asking."
"One day, she's so flirty, and then the next, she won't even look at me. Take the stolen plane incident. First, she's all sympathetic and trying to cheer me up, and the next thing I know, she's told literally everyone about how I nearly got arrested by Invel! She even called Larcade to tell him; can you believe that? Those lacrima are supposed to be for military communication only!"
"I think Caracol Island was probably my favourite. It has thirty uninterrupted miles of beach, and the star mango gelato is to die for. The plan was to spend two days there and move on, but it somehow turned into two weeks-"
"Like this morning, I was trying to hold her hand on the way to work and she just looked at me like I was the intestines of some Fiorean soldier she had scraped off her sword – and I just wanted to say, well, you didn't have a problem with where I was putting my hands last night-"
"So, the funniest thing happened on safari with a parrot and a cocktail umbrella-"
Ajeel glowered across the table. "You're not listening to a word I'm saying, are you?"
"Are you still talking about yourself?" Brandish asked.
"Well, yeah-"
"Then no, I'm not listening."
"Oh, come on!" Ajeel moaned. "I need your help here! You're a woman, she's a woman; tell me what's going on in Mari's head!"
"Hmm." The spoon returned to the tub of souvenir gelato. Brandish pursed her lips, and the tiniest of wrinkles appeared in her forehead before vanishing almost at once. "Ah! I have a solution."
Dropping his feet to the floor, Ajeel leaned forward eagerly. "You do?"
"Yes." Brandish nodded sagely. "You would talk less if you were the size of a flea."
"Don't you dare- hey!" he protested, as her lips twitched; it was the closest she ever came to smiling when she wasn't on some sun-drenched beach. "Come on, Randi, you're my only hope-"
"If you don't want to be toyed with, pursue a different woman," Brandish remarked, returning her attention to her dessert.
"A different-!" His voice dissolved into the kind of outrage usually reserved for when Invel tried to make him skip training to meet with some finance minister or other. "How can you say that? There's no one even comparable to her! She's gorgeous and feisty and cruel and deadly and perfect!"
Brandish shook her head sadly. "Deluded." Scraping the last of the gelato onto her spoon, she tossed the empty tub over her shoulder and into the bin without looking. "There's nothing I can do. You're beyond help."
"I am not del- hang on, is that the last of the gelato?"
The spoon paused halfway to her mouth. "Yes. Why?"
"You said you brought that back to share it with me!" Ajeel accused.
"You didn't stop talking about yourself long enough for me to offer you any."
"But- but-" he spluttered, before changing tack. "Can't I at least have the last spoonful? Just to try it?"
"…I suppose," she granted begrudgingly.
His eyes lighting up almost as much as they had when he was ranting about his ill-fated love, Ajeel reached forward to take it – only for a gauntleted hand to swoop in first.
"Ah, star mango gelato," a familiar voice appraised. "The second-best thing that comes out of you going on vacation, Randi, after not having to look at your face for three weeks."
"Hey!" Ajeel protested. "That was mine!"
Dimaria smirked down at them both with mango-stained lips. "You had your chance. You lost it."
Ajeel grumbled something unintelligible and looked altogether a little too pleased with the situation.
"I'm looking for Invel," Dimaria continued, as a disgruntled Brandish took her spoon back and eyed it dubiously. "Do you know where he is?"
"His office, maybe?" Ajeel guessed, and received a despairing look in return. Which, to be fair, was a step up from the open scorn he had subconsciously been expecting.
"Obviously he's not in his office, or I wouldn't be out here looking," she sighed. "I wonder why I ever thought it was a good idea to ask you, when any half-sensible idea of which you could possibly conceive will already have occurred to me ten minutes ago."
"That's not true!"
Rolling her eyes, Brandish pulled a tiny cube from the bag by her feet and returned it to its original size with a wave of her hand – revealing it to be a second tub of gelato surrounded by ice packs. She pulled off the lid and continued to eat, paying as much attention to the two of them as they were to her.
"Well, I bet you haven't checked the training ground yet," Ajeel challenged.
"The training ground?" Dimaria scoffed. "Given how far Invel considers battle training to be beneath him, why would any sane person waste time looking for him there?"
"Because," Ajeel retorted, "only yesterday, he showed up out of nowhere and froze the entire training ground so that we could practise fighting on inhospitable terrain. It's about time that he started taking an interest in the army, given that we're going to war in a month."
"Huh. I didn't know he'd done that." Dimaria patted his shoulder thoughtfully. It might have been an accident how long her hand lingered on his bare skin, if it had been anyone but her doing it. "Thanks. Guess it was worth asking you, after all. Keep heading down this route, and you might one day make a valuable contribution to the empire."
Caught somewhere between outrage and delight, Ajeel spluttered in response, and she ignored him, raising a hand in farewell as she walked off. "See you round, Randi. Welcome home."
"Such a pain," Brandish muttered.
"See what I mean?" Ajeel demanded, as soon as Dimaria was out of earshot. "How am I supposed to interpret-" That was when he tore his eyes away from her, and finally registered Brandish halfway through her second tub of ice cream. "How much gelato did you buy?"
Brandish gave a well-worn sigh. "If this is what you two are like all the time now," she muttered, "then not nearly enough."
Lucy was proud to say that she was the most sensible member of Fairy Tail, and she'd have put good money on Levy also making the top five, so she was feeling particularly optimistic about resuming their quest to reunite the guild together. So much so, in fact, that not even the sight of Levy meeting her at the hospital entrance in full Rune Knight regalia could shake it.
"Sorry," her friend offered, with a sheepish smile. "It's all I have. Natsu immolated my rucksack when I was Avatar's prisoner, and unless we take a detour to my flat in Magnolia, I don't have anything else I can change into."
"Walking around with a Rune Knight who isn't trying to arrest me?" Lucy teased. "No one will believe I'm a Fairy Tail mage!" She loved her guild, she really did, but travelling in the company of a respectable officer of the law was bound to make things easier. "Speaking of which, is it alright for you to travel to Alstonia? Don't the Rune Knights need you?"
"Nah. If Gajeel and Lily can abandon their duties to spontaneously chase Avatar halfway across the kingdom, I can go on one little mage job while I'm, uh, recuperating from my terrible ordeal as a prisoner."
Something about Levy's tone of voice made Lucy want to scrub the word respectable from her earlier assessment. Once a Fairy Tail mage, always a Fairy Tail mage, she supposed.
After a wonderfully uneventful journey by train, they arrived in the city of Alstonia. That was when things began to fall apart.
Not because of an enemy attack, or a cursed rainstorm, or anything like that. Their quest had hit another stumbling block, and it was probably the most mundane one yet.
"So," Levy said, running her eyes over the steel skyscrapers and colourful shops and multitude of bars that did absolutely nothing to mark Alstonia out as different from any other city in Fiore. "What do we do now, exactly?"
"That is a good question," Lucy agreed. "I'm too used to having an arranged time and place to meet the client… or just following Zeref to exactly where we need to go. But I've got no clue where this bar is that Mira's working in – The Gehennan Princess – and Alstonia isn't exactly small."
Levy nodded. "Normally, I'd go straight to the local Rune Knight station and ask. Alstonia should have at least one, given its size, but I've been to most stations in Fiore – thanks to Gajeel's constant redeployment – and I've not even heard it mentioned, let alone know where to find it."
They exchanged long-suffering glances. "Guess we'd best go and ask around, then," Lucy volunteered.
No one in the first bar they entered had heard of The Gehennan Princess.
"This is why you should never pick jobs that don't have proper addresses on them," Lucy sighed.
No one in the second bar had heard of The Gehennan Princess, either.
"They probably just don't want to help the competition," Levy grinned.
By the time every patron of the third bar – for the bubbling atmosphere had fallen flat as soon as they had stepped through the door, and their nervous request had carried through the silence – had denied the existence of a pub called The Gehennan Princess, Lucy was starting to feel uneasy. What were the odds that not a single person had heard of the pub they sought? If nothing else, wouldn't the landlords know the names of their competitors?
Lucy hung back as Levy stopped a handful of people on the street outside to ask – "It's a surprisingly effective method, when you're dressed like a Rune Knight!" – and she wondered when bad luck was just bad luck, and when it was something more.
The first person Levy approached, a woman barely older than the two of them, shook her head quickly and moved on; the second asked why she wanted to know, and when Levy explained that they were looking for a friend who worked there, he took one look at her and laughed. It was getting harder and harder to catch the eyes of strangers.
What are we doing wrong? Lucy wondered. Distrust of strangers was a quality she associated with tiny rural villages like Helvola, not great cities packed with bars and cafés and hotels.
Remembering Helvola led her to thoughts of her quest so far, and she recalled the mistake she had made on the very first day, when Zeref had deliberately tricked her into thinking Cana was in rehab rather than merely working as a security guard at a rehab facility. What if the Gehennan Princess wasn't a pub, but something else entirely? Something which merely asking about was drawing all the wrong kind of attention?
For every stranger who crossed the road to avoid them, she could feel the prickling at the back of her neck intensifying. Her hand drifted to her keys. Still she could see nothing unusual about the city painted in broad daylight, could sense nothing of the watchers she was certain were there.
So, reverse your thinking.
She heard those words as clearly as if Zeref had been there beside her. Nostalgia tugged her lips into a smile. Sure, that was exactly what Zeref would have said if he were here, but it was no fun when he wasn't around for her to point out how ridiculous it was. If she couldn't see anything wrong with the city, she was supposed to, what, focus on what she couldn't see?
Then her eyes opened wide.
All of a sudden she was glad Zeref wasn't around, so that he wouldn't have the satisfaction of knowing his memory-self was right.
"I give up," Levy announced. "Maybe we'd have more luck finding a guild. They'd probably be willing to help-"
"There aren't any," Lucy interrupted.
"What?"
"Guilds. I've not seen a single one since we got here. Bars, shops, offices… but no mage guilds."
Frowning, Levy considered this for a moment. "You're right. I haven't seen any, either. You'd think there'd be loads in a city as big as this."
"As many as there are Rune Knight stations?" Lucy inquired rhetorically.
Levy had nothing to say to that.
"I don't like this place at all," Lucy decided. "The sooner we get out of here, the better."
"We can't leave until we've found Mira and Lisanna, though."
"I know. Let's try a different approach." Lucy's gaze skimmed over the shops before coming to rest on a café bedecked in yellows and pinks. None of the bars they had tried had been particularly shady or sinister – and it was only late afternoon, besides – but there was nothing wrong with playing it safe. She nodded towards it. "Don't mention the Gehennan Princess. Let's get a table and sit in the window for a while, and take the temperature of the city."
They never got the chance.
They had barely made it through the door of the café when an arm locked around Lucy's neck.
She tried to fight, and that was her downfall.
Before she could command a Gate to open, before she could find a more favourable balance, before her lightning-flash instincts could select a method to throw off her attacker, she made the mistake of breathing in… and the taste of chemicals pooled in her lungs.
Convulsing, she tried to push away the cloth clamped to her mouth, but her arms weren't responding. Her second panicked breath brought no relief, and with the third, she was gone.
"Ajeel, Brandish!" August called out to them as he swept towards their table in the canteen. "Have you seen Invel anywhere?"
"Invel sure is popular today," Brandish yawned, swinging back on her chair as she gazed unhurriedly up at August.
"I see now why he never leaves the palace," Ajeel added. "The moment he does, everyone starts running around like headless chickens."
August gave him a look, but let it go without comment. "You've not seen him, then."
"Not since Mari asked us the same question three hours ago," he shrugged. "We've been here all afternoon-"
"All afternoon," Brandish muttered, with a glance towards the four empty tubs of gelato on the table.
"-and he definitely hasn't been in here. Sorry."
Ajeel clearly intended for that to be the end of the conversation, but Brandish wasn't about to let the first change of topic in three hours walk away. "What do you need him for? Has something happened?"
"I don't need him for anything in particular," the old mage admitted. He wasn't lying, although Brandish did notice that he hadn't answered her second question. Surely, if something big had happened while she'd been away, someone would have filled her in… but on reflection, the only members of the Twelve she'd seen since touching down in Vistarion had been Ajeel and Dimaria, and did she really trust those two to tell her anything important?
That was why she narrowed her eyes at him, and perhaps that was also why he relented. "I merely want to know where he is. Or, at least… where he isn't."
"August!" This was Dimaria shouting, as she wove through the tables towards them at a jog. "You're right, he's not at his flat either-"
"Wait, Invel has a flat?" Ajeel interrupted. All three of them stared at him, and he gave a sheepish shrug. "I always assumed he slept in the office."
For once, Dimaria had nothing sarcastic to say. She had met Invel, after all.
"So if he's not at home," Dimaria resumed, "and he's not in the palace-"
"I am sure I would be able to detect some trace of his magic if he were," August said gravely.
"-then where is he?"
"Secret lover's house?" Ajeel quipped.
"What, on a workday?" Dimaria drawled, and he snorted.
Brandish didn't laugh, however. She was still watching August – his expression was as hard to read as ever, but she had never worked out why he bothered being enigmatic, when he knew he could not stop his magic from flowing with emotion. It was swirling in on itself, barely paying attention to the world that it usually found endlessly fascinating. Something was bothering him.
"What's wrong?" she asked of him softly.
"I… am concerned that he might have done something foolish."
"Something he could only do from outside the palace?"
"Something he could only do from Fiore," August confirmed, even softer.
"Oh, why didn't you say so?" Dimaria demanded. "It'll be easy to tell if he's left Alvarez! For one thing, he would have taken an airship-"
"I tried to check, but there are hundreds in the compound alone. We'd never know if one was missing. He's qualified to fly them, and he wouldn't have needed authorization; no one would have questioned him."
"But if he'd taken off in one, he'd have filed a flight plan," she reasoned. "If we looked through the records, we'd know for sure if he'd gone, and where."
Brandish rolled her eyes. "Do you really think Invel would file a flight plan ahead of his super-secret trip to Fiore?"
"Yes," Ajeel and Dimaria said in unison.
Brandish blinked. "Okay…?"
"You may be right," August said thoughtfully. "It's worth checking, at least."
As he swept away with Dimaria at his heels, Brandish also jumped to her feet, eager for the excuse to escape. Ajeel gave her a glower which would have sent any soldiers in his unit running for cover. It was kind of cute how he still thought that would bother her, given that it had only ever worked once, back when she was three and he'd caught her filching cookies from his rucksack. The threat hadn't stopped the filching, only made her more careful to avoid getting caught.
"Where are you going?" he demanded. "We're in the middle of something here!"
"It'll have to wait," she told him unapologetically. "I'm going to help find Invel."
Anything that could have August so on edge was probably more important than anything Ajeel had to say… and even if it turned out to be a wild goose chase, it would at least be more interesting.
With a groan, Ajeel got to his feet and followed.
The smell hit Lucy first.
It was nothing like the clinical kiss that had sent her into darkness, and the dissociation only emphasized the blow to her senses. There was the bitter tang of iron, and the faint stink of bleach not quite enough to overcome it, but above both of them was a taste both sweet and grotesque, a dangerous, dangerous scent that felt as though the very air was causing her throat to rot at its touch. She convulsed – and that was when she realized that her hands were tied behind her back.
Panic flared. Several seconds passed before she regained enough presence of mind to cease thrashing around, by which point the ropes around her wrists – and ankles – had drawn twice as tight. Eyes watering, she tried to breathe through her nose as little as possible, fighting the impulse to flee from the smell she somehow knew to be the smell of death.
"Lucy?" a voice whispered: Levy. "Are you alright?"
The sound of her friend's voice, of knowing she wasn't alone in the darkness, calmed Lucy's racing heart at once. "Been better," she grunted. It was a struggle to raise herself from the floor, but she managed it, getting her legs out in front of her and her back against the wall. The effort was too much for her spinning head, and she tilted it back until it rested against the plaster, her eyes closed.
"Where are we?" she murmured.
"A, uh… a warehouse," Levy answered evasively.
Lucy would have laughed, if she wasn't trying so hard to conserve her breath. "Yeah, right. What are they keeping in here, corpses?"
Levy was silent, and Lucy felt her heart plummet. "We're in a slaughterhouse, aren't we?"
"I think so, yes," her friend agreed dolefully.
Now that her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, Lucy could see the faint outline of a door, lit up by the light from the corridor outside. It should have brought a hope of escape. Instead, it only increased her fear. The door was closed, but her imagination was wide open, and in it, that dark portal led to row upon row of carcasses hanging from the ceiling, while a conveyor belt drew them deeper into a forest of merciless mechanical blades: an inexorable and horrifying death, where no one would look twice at another bloodstain on the walls, or stop to question if the burger they were eating was one-hundred-percent beef…
She shuddered, and then pulled herself together. If their captors wanted them dead, they'd have killed them already. And if they wanted information, well, regardless of the torture methods at their disposal, they'd made the mistake of leaving her and Levy unattended, and neither of them was about to wait around for their fate.
"The ropes are enchanted," Levy explained, guessing what was going through her mind. "No magic unless we can get them off."
"There has to be something sharp we can cut them with. My keys- they took my keys!"
"We'll get them back," Levy said at once. "Besides, your Spirits can look after themselves."
Lucy thought of Loke, clutching his fractured key, and she shook her head vigorously to dispel the image. "Yeah. We'll find them again. But for now, do you have anything else on you?"
"Well, they took my knife…" At Lucy's bemused look, she shook her head. "It's part of the standard-issue Rune Knight gear. I told them I didn't need it, but Gajeel made me take it, in case he felt like a snack. Hang on… I can feel something in my pocket… my light pen! They must have missed it!"
"But you can't use magic with the ropes in play, right? So unless your plan is to write an incredibly moving poem to convince them to release us…"
"No, but the pen has magic of its own," Levy reasoned. "That's how non-mages can use them. If I can write out some runes like Freed does, then as long as they don't draw too much power, I think I can get them to activate. Can you reach my pockets from there?"
With a bit of straining and shuffling, Lucy managed to retrieve the pen and place it in her friend's hand, while Levy continued muttering to herself. "How about 'all rope in this area will disintegrate'? That's fairly safe, and I think I know how to write it so that there won't be any ambiguity. But if they come in while I'm writing…"
"Have they come in before?"
"Twice. I pretended to be unconscious. You were unconscious. Night must have fallen by now. I don't know what they're waiting for, but I'd rather not find out."
"It's the best chance we've got," Lucy decided. "I'll cover for you."
She shuffled over to place herself between Levy and the door, trying not to think about what lay beyond it. Just because they were being held captive in an abattoir didn't mean they had been caught by people who regularly slaughtered their victims. Maybe it was just a convenient building, guaranteed to be empty at this time of night.
Maybe.
There was no sense of time down here. There were no windows – only a single oversized grill near the ceiling. It possibly led to an air duct, though if the smell was any indication, the old ventilation system had been overwhelmed long ago. Twice she heard footsteps, and her heart lodged in her throat, a soundless asphyxiation, until they passed by without stopping and allowed her to breathe again.
Once, low voices reached her ears, too quiet for her to make out any words; too quiet for it to be anything more than a reminder that they were in the heart of enemy territory… whoever those enemies might have been. Whatever they might have wanted. Whatever the hell was wrong with this city.
Clang.
Lucy sat bolt upright at the sound. It wasn't a loud noise, but it was so distinct from the monotonous buzzing of Levy's pen that it had caught her attention at once. It rang out again – not from beyond the door, but from somewhere in the ceiling, the walls – and then again.
Was it her imagination, or was it louder this time? Closer?
Lucy whispered, "Levy, are you almost done?"
"Nearly." The word came as a grunt of exertion. Levy's arms, still tied behind her back, were twisted at an awkward angle. Her wrists glowed like burning rubies in the pen's light, where the skin had been rubbed raw.
The clanging sound came again. Surely it was only a matter of time before someone came to investigate. Lucy shuffled forward until she was crouched on the balls of her feet, ready to spring up in an instant if their captors went for Levy-
This time, the metallic crash was deafening – and not at all from the direction Lucy had been expecting. She barely managed to dive out of the way as the ventilation grill clattered to the ground right where she had been crouching.
Out of the ventilation shaft dropped the strangest figure Lucy had ever seen. Bat was the first word her mind supplied, though once gravity had tugged its cape to the ground, the newcomer was quite clearly humanoid. He – or she, or something else entirely – was clad from head to toe in black armour. The only exposed skin Lucy could see was the bottom half of his angular face. The top half was hidden by a coal-black cowl, topped by two spiked ears.
When he spoke, his voice was the scratchy growl of a throat better suited to producing sounds above the range of human hearing. "What were you two thinking?"
Lucy stared. Even the buzz of Levy's pen had frozen.
"Snooping around Alstonia dressed like that, now of all times…" His head turned slightly towards the door. Lucy wondered if those ears weren't just decorative; perhaps the newcomer was reacting to footsteps she couldn't hear. "We've got to go. I'll explain later."
There was a faint click and tiny black blades sprung from the side of his gauntlets. With a slash like a blur of shadows, the rope at Lucy's wrists fell away. There was a second blur, and then Levy was capping her light pen, massaging her own raw wrists. She shot their rescuer a mistrustful look through the gloom, but let the runes wink out.
"You first," the black figure instructed, pointing towards the hole he had entered by. He linked his fingers to form a step, and, hesitantly, Levy allowed him to boost her up towards the hole. Once she had scrambled into the shaft, he turned pointedly towards Lucy. "You too. Go on."
After a moment's consideration, Lucy scrambled up after Levy. The shaft was just wide enough for a person to crawl through, all metal and unlit darkness.
Lucy twisted, and reached down to help pull their black-armoured rescuer up with them. Their hands met, just for a moment… and then there was a scream. Somewhere beyond the door, someone was shrieking in absolute terror – and Lucy flinched, because wouldn't that have been her, if their captors had arrived before their mysterious saviour?
She tugged at his hand urgently, expecting that horrified sound to spur him onwards, only for him to snap his fingers out of hers. "Not again," he growled, glancing towards the door. "Not here – not now!"
He took a step away from their escape route, and Lucy realized that he intended to stay. Impulsively, she called down, "I'll come with you. I can help!"
He just shook his head. "No. Sorry, but without your keys, you'll only slow me down."
Lucy opened her mouth to inform him that she could use Keyless Star Dress in an emergency, but paused. How had he known she was a Celestial Spirit mage? Worse, how had he known her keys had been taken from her, unless he was in league with their captors?
Ignorant of Lucy's internal dialogue, he ordered, "Go. Once you're outside, turn right onto Main Street, go through the tunnel with the faulty lights, then take the third left. I'll meet you there."
Then he struck the door off its hinges with a single kick, and was gone.
"That was surreal," Levy muttered.
"Tell me about it," Lucy agreed. "Let's get out of here."
By mutual agreement, they began crawling down the shaft. Odd noises echoed all around them. It was almost worse than being back in that room, for the hollow reverberations made it impossible to tell where the sounds were coming from. Surely there were too many thumps, too many snatches of breath, too many metallic clashes for the net of noise to be merely their own echoes. Here in the dark, she had no way of knowing if this was the sound of their rescuer engaging in a life-or-death battle with their captors, if that wasn't an innocent footstep but the groan of the slaughterhouse's machinery awakening…
"Lucy!" Levy hissed. "The tunnel's blocked up ahead!"
"It can't be! That man came in this way!"
"I don't think this ventilation system actually works," Levy considered. "It's too old. Maybe when he came through, he dislodged something, and caused the shaft to collapse…"
"Well, we can't go back the way we came. We'll have to drop out of the shaft. Levy, you ready?"
"For what-?" Levy squeaked.
"We're going down."
Then a rush of light swept all further conversation away, as the constellation of the Heavenly Maiden blazed through the dark. Steel softened and warped beneath Lucy's palms. Virgo's tunnelling magic ate through the shaft beneath them, and then they were falling into the unknown-
Whump.
The sound was a welcome change from the clanging of their metal coffin. Lucy scrambled free of Levy's hastily scrawled word – CUSHION – and was back on her feet immediately. She could see nothing but black on black, and mentally instructed her keys to light up before remembering that they had been taken.
A dim light flickered into being nonetheless. Levy was holding the word TORCH, the H of which was glowing with faint light. The Solid Script mage duplicated the word and handed the second to Lucy, who bit back her disappointment at having to rely on someone else's magic and took it with a smile.
She almost wished she hadn't.
The touch of light did not dispel fear, but transformed it from a vague nightmare into a tangible terror.
As she swept the magical torch around, indistinct shadows became shining blades; cobwebs became bloodstained chains; a vast, empty hall was revealed to be a chamber of slaughter, criss-crossed with conveyor belts beckoning them down a route of no return. The floor seemed to lurch beneath her. Startled, Levy grabbed her arm, and Lucy realized that the horrifying expanse of machinery was stationary. Scythes winked in the flickering torchlight, but did not come any closer.
Lucy took a deep breath, shuddering at the contradictory tastes of disinfectant and decay. They had stumbled into an area of the slaughterhouse where no living human was supposed to go. No doors graced those red-tinged walls, only steel shutters drawn across numerous archways. The rails and conveyor belts leading into them left no doubt as to what lay beyond. Anything that came from one end of that chamber alive would not be by the time it reached the other.
"Up there," Levy whispered. Her face was paler than Lucy had ever seen it before, but she pointed her torch up and away from the grisly doors.
The texture of the reflected light changed, and Lucy knew they were looking not at metal or bloodstained tiles, but glass: an observation point for the room's overseer. They would have to climb to reach it – a task that would be far easier if their captors hadn't taken her Fleuve d'étoiles along with her keys, but she could always use her Taurus form's whip as a makeshift rope. "That's our way out," she breathed.
She started towards it, but Levy didn't follow. "Lucy, I think there's someone up there."
Squinting, Lucy tried to catch a glimpse of movement in the gloom. "I can't see anything-"
As if in response, a light switched on in the observation room. It lasted just long enough for her to spot the person Levy had seen before the floodlights in the slaughter chamber blazed like the word of the creator, and both of them flung their arms up to shield their eyes, torches discarded.
Someone was up there. They could see him – and he could see them.
"He's wearing a uniform," Levy reported. "Lucy- I think it's a security guard!" The Solid Script mage began waving her arms over her head, shouting. "Hey- we're stuck down here! Please, help!"
The only answer was a great, mechanical groan.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, a tremble in the floor, an awakening. The shutters clicked and folded upwards like a dozen opening eyes.
"Lucy, he's with them-!"
Lucy's eyes strained against the light, trying to confirm the details. Because their enemies had had plenty of opportunities to kill them before now, and yet they lived; because it was hard to tell through the glass, but it looked like the security guard was standing stock-still with his hand on the lever that had activated the room, staring not at those he'd just condemned but blankly off into space…
Then the floor beneath her began to move.
No, not floor. Conveyor belt. One she'd stumbled onto in the dazzling light. Panicking, she jumped aside – right into the path of a scything blade.
Levy's hand pulled her down. She sensed more than saw the blade slashing overhead; heard the dull thunk as it stole a chunk of flesh from the first carcass dragged into view, rather than her. It could have been her, though. Panic rose like bile in her throat.
Levy hunched next to her, trembling. The blade skimmed by again. If they moved- if they timed it wrong-
And yet if they didn't move, what then? No one was coming for them. Zeref was long gone, as was Natsu. They had run off without informing Gajeel, or any of Levy's superiors in the Rune Knights. They had no means of contacting their mysterious saviour, and no guarantee he was on their side even if they could.
But she glanced at her friend just as Levy turned to her, and she knew they had reached the same conclusion at the same time. Maybe neither of them could melt the abattoir around them or eat the deadly blades or freeze time and saunter through the killing floor unharmed, but they were every bit as brave as their friends – no, braver, for they had never been able to rely on overwhelming power like that, but they were here all the same.
They weren't going to die like cowardly hunks of meat waiting to be butchered.
They weren't going to die at all.
"On three?" Levy asked, and her voice wavered but her eyes didn't.
"On three," Lucy confirmed. "Let me go first. Star Dress gives me a bit of protection." Levy didn't ask questions, just gave a single nod.
Sorry, Zeref, Lucy thought, as she turned her attention to the observation room, their goal, but I'd rather there was a hole in the universe than in me.
"One… two… THREE!"
It was a battle-cry. She bounded upwards, following the blade's blind swing. Before her foot had touched the ground, she had entered her Taurus form, and her second step powered her forwards twice as quickly at the first. She dived through a gap between two swinging carcasses, Levy taking the adjacent one, and they slid under a table conveying severed heads to a disposal chute.
Lucy rolled, and as such, she saw the incoming guillotine as a blur of silver and fear. Disorientation did not slow her magic. By the time she broke out of the roll, Ophiuchus's pitch-black greatsword was in her hands, and she parried the mechanical blade with enough force to smash it clean in two.
The sword vanished – she wasn't accustomed to running with such weight – and then, for good measure, she switched to her Leo form. Below her yawned a vat of- bleach? Acid? She didn't need the white smoke curling lazily from its surface to know it would be lethal. Everything here was designed to kill and then butcher.
It didn't matter. With Leo's magic channelled through her legs, she cleared it in a single jump.
"Lucy!" Levy had skidded to a halt on the other side. Whether she was asking for help, or advice, or telling her she was going to find another way around, Lucy didn't know, and didn't waste time trying to find out.
Her actions were smooth, unhesitant. With barely a grimace, she wrenched a butchered animal body from its hook and threw it aside. The bloody chain she swung towards Levy. Her friend took the invitation, gruesome as it was, leaping and clinging on as it swung back to Lucy's side. She pulled Levy free, steadying her-
But the solid ground she'd found wasn't solid ground. It was another automated one-way road, and it led straight through a storm of knives to the yawning mouth of a graveyard beyond. They exchanged glances, and then jumped by unspoken agreement, falling between certain death and permanent mutilation until they found their feet on another conveyor belt below.
And then they were running, grim and desperate and a little more alive with every step they took, and Ophiuchus's sword ripped apart a killing machine on their left and the word SHIELD was too durable for the blades on their right, and Lucy was back in her Taurus form and her whip had coiled around a lamp bracket up on the wall, forming the best rope they had.
They climbed like they'd never climbed before, Lucy in the lead. They were going to get through that window, no matter how many enemies waited on the other side.
The window was almost close enough to touch when it shattered. Lucy cried out, startled; Levy wrote one-handed in the air and threw up another hasty SHIELD word to keep the shards away from their heads. Glancing up, Lucy saw the blue-clad uniform of the security guard in the broken window. She wondered if he'd realized his mistake and smashed the window so that they could climb through.
He reached out his hand, perhaps to help them up – except his eyes were oddly dull. In that outstretched hand there gleamed a knife.
"Lucy, drop!" Levy screamed.
Lucy didn't stop to think. She let go of the rope entirely as the guard struck at her, falling back towards the whirlwind of hungry blades, trusting that Levy had a plan-
She was still far above the floor when her feet made contact with something. It wasn't strong enough to stop her fall, at first, but it pushed against her with more force the further she fell. A brief glance down revealed that she was standing on one end of the word SPRING, the letters squishing together as her weight compressed it.
She was only inches from the scything blades when the word reached its limit. All that stored energy was released at once, propelling her towards the heavens like a rocket. It took all the Bull Spirit's formidable strength for her to flip in mid-air and shoot through one of the other window panes, where she finished the fight before it could begin with a solid flying kick.
The guard smacked into the far wall and slumped down to lie at its foot. Taking no chances, Lucy took his knife and hurled it out across the killing chamber. Then she helped pull Levy up into the observation room – whereupon they both promptly collapsed onto the floor.
"Let's not do that again," Levy remarked. There was a wry smile on her lips, although her voice trembled, and Lucy realized that she, like herself, needed to distract herself from what had very nearly happened.
"Right. Next time I'll be sure to let our captors know that we want to be kept in an ordinary warehouse, not the set of the Gameshow of Death."
Levy's chuckle was weak, but genuine. They grinned at each other for a moment, and then Lucy said, "We should get out of here while we can."
They stuck close to each other as they wove through the (fortunately blade-free) corridors in what was clearly the administrative side of the slaughterhouse. Both were on their guard – Lucy still hadn't let her Taurus transformation fade – but although they occasionally heard the sound of conflict in the distance, they didn't encounter another soul until they jumped out of a first-floor fire escape and landed in the street below.
The night air was clean and cold, and Lucy had never tasted anything more delicious in her life.
Neither of them wanted to linger, so they set off again. Right onto Main Street, looking for the tunnel with the faulty lights… when they had decided they would follow the black-armoured stranger's instructions, Lucy didn't know, but one thing was for sure: they may have escaped the slaughterhouse with their lives, but they'd found no answers there. Friend or foe, that mysterious man was the only clue they had.
I'll meet you there, he'd said. On one hand, it was a hopelessly vague instruction, given that his directions had led them to the centre of the city, and there had to be thirty different bars, restaurants, and hotels in sight.
On the other hand, there was only one to which he could possibly have been referring.
There in front of them, sandwiched between a many-eyed office block and a shop specializing in camping gear, looking for all the world like a perfectly ordinary establishment, stood the pub called The Gehennan Princess.