Loke didn't understand why Cobra's movements changed so abruptly until he heard what he had. A roar that sounded vaguely like a name.
Natsu, carried by Happy, flew into the clearing. Cobra broke off from attacking Loke and moved to intercept Natsu instead. The flying snake's heavy tail smacked the pair out of the air. Loke twisted one of his rings to create a twister to keep them away from the unmerciful ground.
"Natsu, Happy, you ok?" He verified, keeping an eye on his tricky opponent. Most of his outer jacket had been melted by the acidic poison spat by the Dragon Slayer, he assumed he was a Slayer at least, he fought a bit like Natsu.
"Aye sir." Happy replied woozily, shaking his head and sending some dust flying from his fur. He steeled himself and recalled his wings, zipping into the air to gain momentum before picking Natsu up again. Natsu didn't respond, his burning eyes were fixed on the other man, a slight rumble coming off of him.
"Hey, you on the snake." His fists clashed together in a burst of orange fire as he growled his question as he moved forward: "Where's Fae?"
Cobra tilted his head, listening to something else that Loke couldn't hear.
"Be careful what you think, Natsu. He can listen to everything going on inside your head." This made Natsu bare his teeth in a parody of a grin.
"Then he knows I'm gonna kick his ass unless he tells me where Fae is."
"Why? Can't you smell her anymore? That's apparently how you got here, by following your nose." The taunt was there, buried in his voice.
"All I can smell right now is that gunk you've been throwing around. The scent's gone!" Natsu spat, the air and the ground around him starting to steam faintly as grass withered beneath his feet.
Loke could still sense vaguely what direction Orion had gone in, if he could start after it, he would be able to find them. They couldn't be that far away. But as long as Cobra was watching, he couldn't go without cluing him in to where she was.
"Natsu: You take this guy and I'll find Fae." Loke said, stripping off the rest of his ruined jacket and leaving him on only his button down shirt. "I'd have softened him up for you some more, but he's got better wings than I do." The snake was a huge asset in maneuverability and offense and despite Cobra not being able to understand his thoughts, he was extremely good at predicting his moves.
Natsu was a brawler who specialized in beating difficult odds and had a spontaneous, unpredictable fighting style. This, coupled with the fact that he was one of the most mobile combatants in the guild thanks to his partnership with Happy, gave him much better odds against Cobra than Loke on foot and alone, even with his protection against mind reading. Especially since it got one of them out to find Fae. Orion was strong for a Silver Spirit, but he didn't think he would be able to do much against a wizard of Jellal's caliber if he had someone to protect along the way.
Quick footwork and a helpful screen of fire from Natsu gave Loke the cover that he needed to make a break for the forest after Orion.
Running through the forest as quickly as he could, Loke started calling out Fae's name. He only had a rough idea of where Orion had gone...
It seemed like an impossibly short time later that Loke heard a loud roar.. That's Natsu alright, no one's got a set of pipes like he does. Dragon lungs and all.
After that, there came a final, bright flare of fire, and then silence.
Loke knew Natsu was loud, no matter what he was doing. And the conflict he had left behind was one Natsu would point blank refuse to lose as long as Fae's safety was still uncertain. That was why when he could no longer hear the echoes of a fight, he was certain the fight between the two Dragon Slayers was over.
He had been moving through the forest, trying to pick up some sort of trail of where Fae had gone from there, but it was slow going without Orion to point him in the right direction.
He had slowed down once he concluded that whoever had taken Fae was taking steps to hide their trail. Without Orion, he had to rely on physical clues instead of a scent trail.
Moving more slowly and carefully, Loke stopped in a clearing, eyes narrowed at the ground.
Human footprints? There were some unusual skid marks in the forest loam. As though someone moving at high speeds had stopped very suddenly. He had seen similar marks when Jet was coming down from a high speed run.
Ok...He stopped here.
Loke heard the brush rustle and his hands came up, powering with magic in case it was an enemy.
Orion bounded out of the brush, tongue lolling with exertion, but eyes bright and determined.
"Leo. They have laid false scent trails from here to confuse pursuit. I've run down four of them, but there are many more." False trails. They were expecting an enemy to be trying to track them by scent. Likely the big snake.
"If we can't track them by scent alone, look for prints, or someplace where the ground was disturbed that aligns with a scent trail. What can you tell about the people with Fae?"
"One is a man, recently injured, but recovered and very strong. The other is another girl-pup of near the same age as your fairy princess. She smells unusual, not fully human, like the fire eater that accompanies your wizard. She was very low on magic power when they stopped here."
The man was Jellal according to Cobra. Apparently he wasn't dead. And the fact that he was running away from the Oracion Seis meant that he probably wasn't on their side. That didn't necessarily make him a friend to Fairy Tail, though...
The only reasons for a strange girl to smell anything like Natsu would be if they were related or if she had similar magic. Natsu's only claim to family was the dragon Igneel...And Loke had met several other people who could be qualified as dragon slayers. It was a bit of a stretch, but maybe the other girl was a Dragon Slayer like Natsu...
"Alright, show me where the other trails are." Orion was a skilled hunter, but he was still a hound, and that meant he relied on scent. Loke could remember a time, back before his aspect had shifted to mirror humanity, when he had been more comfortable relying his sense of smell too. But he was mostly human now, and that meant he was a sight-based predator now.
Find the one trail that has disturbed ground from something, or someone, running at magical speeds, and we'll find Fae, Jellal and the mystery girl.
-vVv-
Brain stood in their original base, magic circles glowing around him. Several potions and paints lay before him on a small ledge and he was hurriedly preparing a dark paste with the ingredients before him. Only one seal remained. He had calculated that he would lose at least two in this endeavor, but it seemed he had underestimated the light guilds. Now he was down to his last line of defense against the darker parts of his mind.
Angel, Racer, Hoteye, Midnight and he himself had all fallen in battle, releasing the seals tied to their life forces. Only good fortune had allowed Brain to wake in time to even attempt this. Only Cobra remained awake and undefeated. And with how the Light wizards were fighting, he didn't like the odds.
His fingers were covered in paint as he raised his hand to his face to reapply a basic seal-
The last Seal of Prayers burned on his skin.
"No...No...!" Zero could defeat his enemies easily, but he would also destroy Brain's plans in the process. He was intimately familiar with them, after all. But Zero was only a force of pure destruction and whimsy. He couldn't see anything organized without wanting to ruin it, leaving Brain to clean up after him when he woke.
Dark paint smeared across his cheeks in uneven streaks as Brain clutched his head, fighting with all of his faculties to keep Zero locked away in the mental cage he had constructed.
Oh, that's so sweet and naive of you. Zero cackled in the back of his mind, sauntering forward with confidence and a horrifying grin. You honestly think you'll get control again? Oh no, I've got my own ideas. You had a wonderful tool at your disposal and you didn't think to use it when you had the chance.
I'd worry if I were you. G2.0 has no reason to care about you, after all.
-vVv-
You've been catatonic for five hours.
My magic, or...G2.0 reported.
Note to self: Give her a better name. Since I was aware of her, and knew that I owed the fact that I had an actual childhood to her, I felt a new name was the least I could do for her. Anything but what Brain had called her.
"Faerun?" A girl's voice sounded and an unfamiliar face appeared in my field of vision. Hope and worry filled her voice and her hands looked like they wanted to wring in distress.
Wendy Marvell of Cait Shelter. Sky Dragon Slayer.
...That means I'm up to how many Dragon Slayers now? Five? No, six with Sting. It feels like they're just falling out of the sky lately...
"I'm awake." I felt like my voice should have been hoarse, but then I belatedly remembered that all my defiant screaming had been internal.
Relief flashed across her face and she sat down.
"Oh good, we were worried. You haven't responded to anything the whole time." We?
That...that was right, I remembered the last thing I had seen before Brain reactivated G2 with her conditioning phrase was Jellal in a magical coma. It was a miracle that he was alive at all, what with being exposed to enough raw magical energy to light up the capital for months. He was here too?
He rescued you and Wendy.
The forest around us was mostly made of stone, and the trees were utterly massive. Every part of them was about twenty times larger than the average tree back home. We were sheltering under one, in a shallow cave made of roots with the large trunk forming a solid roof overhead.
Jellal was standing guard at the entrance of the cave.
My first thought was that he looked better. He wasn't the distant, calculating mastermind that had arranged for my 'testing' in the tower. He looked hesitantly relieved to see I was awake. Like he wanted to express more relief, but wasn't sure if it was his place to do so. Considering he had been partially possessed for most of his formative years, and had a lousy life before hand, I forgave him for not knowing what to do when I got up and moved.
Really, even Wendy seemed a little confused when I hugged him.
"Ah...I'm glad you're alright?" He asked, looking sheepish. Like he didn't really know how to express relief, or if it was even right for him to show it. I glanced up at him, smiling.
I was feeling good. My identity crisis was behind me. I had answers as to where I had actually come from. I had decided who I was, and my magic was pretty much recovered from being suppressed.
"I am too. Thank you for saving us."
He had no idea what to do in response to this, so he settled for clasping my shoulder stiffly. I giggled a little at his awkwardness and heard a matching sound behind me. I threw a smile back at Wendy. The girl was about my age, and had the aura of a cinnamon roll. That is: Someone who was so unfailingly nice that it should be illegal. And she didn't have the aura of lethality that Mirajane could project so casually so she fell under the super-sweet category.
"I'm Fae, but I guess you both already know that. And you're Wendy. Or at least if I read it right, you are." She nodded, smile lighting up her face for a brief instant.
"Yeah..." She was still sitting down and was clearly very tired. Glancing back through what she had been doing, I saw how much of her energy had gone into both healing Jellal and trying to find what was wrong with me.
She was bottoming out and was still putting more power into trying to heal me from a traumatic brain injury that didn't exist. And she refused to stop.
She'll fit right in in Fairy Tail.
Granted, I wasn't certain if she one of the new members I had seen coming. Or if Jellal's name being cleared would make him one of them. (Because like hell was I letting him get arrested after this.) But she would fit right in. Even if she was already a member of another guild, I could easily see myself being friends with her.
"So, what exactly has been happening while I've been...out?" I asked my companions.
"The Oracion Seis is still planning on raising Nirvana and sowing chaos and ruin across the country and then some." Jellal said gravely. "They probably intended on using me to do so, and so they stole the both of you in order to get me back on my feet again."
"And the guild alliance had broken off of trying to intercept the Oracion Seis and the dark guilds to try and find you before they used you as leverage to make us surrender." Wendy added. "Jura and I were fighting one of their members, he said his name was Hoteye. And Gray and Lyon said they beat another one called Racer together." Jellel's brows furrowed.
"Just two of the six have been defeated?" Actually... "Good...that means that we only have Brain to deal with."
"I'm confused." Wendy stated, head tilting. "Isn't the whole point of the alliance to defeat all of the Oracion Seis?"
"Working towards a common goal is the function of any alliance. And yes, the defeat of the Oracion Seis is the goal. Or it was before I...left the Magic Council. " Left...Yeah, let's call it that. "But I doubt that the Magic Council or the other guilds knows about the Seal of Prayers on Brain."
Seal of Prayers. A versatile piece of magic that is used to lock something away, and separates the keys. Typically, into actual tokens. Brain's has living locks that are all attuned to the other members of the guild that he personally trained.
I then read what this seal was holding back.
My face blanched and my empty stomach shifted in an attempt to be sick.
And I thought Brain was bad by himself...He's just the watered down version of the real bad guy!
Brain had a Jekell-Hyde experience where he had attempted to open up his mind in order to perform more complex magic by himself. A crude, but accurate analogy would be he gave himself a couple extra mental 'limbs' to work with when using magic.
And it had worked. Brain was now capable of casting High Magic, magic where you had to focus on dozens of different points and facets, with childish ease. His processing power was kicked to new heights. And he had gotten to that point in five years instead of the forty or fifty that it took most wizards, if they managed it at all.
But like any mutation, it had unforeseen side effects. And it was a mutation. An unstable one that slowly started to break down because his mind just wasn't capable of handling it. Humans aren't supposed to be able to think like that. So in order to effectively use and maintain his new 'hands', Brain also created a mental avatar separate from his own, yet tied to him. This new personality was the equivalent of a computer at first, emotionless and logical. An AI whose purpose was to process what it was given and hand it back to Brain. But unlike a computer, or an Archive system, Brain still had emotions and feelings and hadn't thought to put measures in place to keep this other personality from absorbing them. And the only emotions he used were what fueled his magic and his desire to use it: A manic desire for knowledge and power above all else. These dark emotions imprinted onto the blank slate of the intellectual spirit in Brain's subconscious. After some years, it had surfaced as Zero.
Zero guilt. Zero mercy. Zero humanity.
Brain didn't like competition for his ambitions, even from himself. And Zero was not just competition, but his superior who emerged whenever he slept, or his concentration lapsed. So he had devised this version of the Seal of Prayers to lock Zero down before he grew strong enough to assert himself as the primary personality and force Brain into the back seat permanently.
Where was Brain? I suddenly felt a keen, and vested interest in keeping track of him.
Natsu defeated Brain.
That's...good?
Zero has been active for the past hour.
...I believe this is where cursing would be appropriate, but I'm too scared to.
-vVv-
"How could you let her be taken!?" The enraged white feline shrieked. It would have been amusing were the situation not so serious. Jura was being treated for his injuries by Sherry and had just informed the group that Wendy had been abducted during their fight with Hoteye before Jura had defeated him. "How could you!? She's a child, you were supposed to protect her! Now these ruffians have two children in their hands!" Carla was on the verge of flying into Jura's face with claws bared when Erza caught her by the back of her dress.
"The situation is grave, Carla, but blaming others will not help the girls, nor will losing your head. Both Fae and Wendy are resourceful and clever, and Wendy grew up in this area. They'll find a way to go to ground and hide. Right now: You are our best chance of finding them and the remaining members of the Oracion Seis so that they can be safe."
"How many are left anyway?" Lucy wondered, looking around at her allies. She, Erza and Carla had heard the crash of the Blue Pegasus airship and had rushed to search for survivors. They had arrived in time to see Lyon and Gray pull Aria and Sherry from the wreckage and lay them with the others.
Lucy continued her thought when she realized everyone was watching her.
"I mean, there were only six of them to start, at least from the main guild. I know Erza and I took out two. Jura got one..."
"Gray and I defeated one as well." Lyon interjected.
"Everyone, point out the pictures of the wizards you defeated." Hibiki proposed, pulling out his Archive magic and producing a screen with half a dozen images on it. "Thanks to our interrogating some of the lesser members of the dark guilds, we now have sketches and names to go by."
"Yeah, only if you trust them." Gray remarked acidly.
"My Truth parfum has yet to fail me." Ichiya said boisterously. "Even I am not totally immune to it's effects."
Lucy made a mental note to never get near Ichiya ever again. She did not want to be exposed to truth serum, and if he had that, who knows what else he could cook up.
"Lucy and I defeated this one together." Erza pointed at the picture of the dark haired wizard. "Midnight. And then Lucy fought Angel alone." A touch on each of the pictures brought up an alert.
"They've both been taken into custody by the Rune Knights." Hibiki reported. Gray stepped up next and tapped on the picture of the long nosed, mohawk bearing wizard.
"We took out Racer, and he's been arrested too."
"My opponent proclaimed himself to be Hoteye." Jura said from where he lay.
"The mooks we talked to said they saw Brain shoot down the Christina. He didn't have anyone with him."
"That means only he and Cobra remain as potential custodians for the girls. Unless they left them without a guard from the main guild, which is also a possibility considering how stretched thin they are." Erza remarked, folding her arms.
Lucy shifted her weight slightly, trying to not let a sigh of weariness escape her. Two fights down and they still hadn't gotten any closer to rescuing Fae...They didn't even know where she was!
She heard a faint jingle from her hip and her mind jumped.
Loke!
Her hand flew down to her hip and touched his key, seeking the connection that their contract and friendship had forged between them.
"Loke, can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, princess."
The familiar sound of her strongest spirit mad her shoulders relax. But she was doing this for a reason...
"We're trying to figure out who has Fae right now. Have you come across any members of the Oracion Seis?"
"Just one. The guy with the snake. He said that Jellal had taken her and another girl and escaped from their custody. Orion doesn't smell blood, or pain in their trail." Lucy's eyes widened and she was suddenly very glad that only she could hear this update. Erza had been grieving for her childhood...friend (yeah, she was going to go with that) ever since he had regained control of himself and sacrificed himself for their sake to redirect the destabilizing magical energy of the etherion away from them. But he was apparently alive...somehow.
So if Jellal got away with them both, then they're probably safe. He was a Ten Wizard Saint, I don't think there's very much that could go up against him.
"Then he has both Fae and Wendy then. What about the Oracion Seis member?"
"Natsu and Happy took care of him."
"Loke says that Natsu defeated Cobra." Lucy reported, still holding onto her keys. "He's out of the picture."
"There was no one in Fairy Tail's group named Loke." Lyon said, eyes narrowed.
"Loke is also known as Leo, a Golden Zodiac Spirit contracted to Lucy. He came here once he heard Fae had been kidnapped." Erza cut across Lyon firmly in a tone that brooked no argument. "He and a volunteer Silver Spirit have been tracking Fae the entire time. Lucy, any more news?"
"Fae and Wendy have escaped with another prisoner of the Oracion Seis. They haven't been hurt." The relief that swept through the gathered wizards was palpable. For one, Gray stopped emitting chilly mist and Erza's tension moved from razor taut with worry to strong with purpose. But Carla's relief was such that she simply sagged with a deep exhale.
"Lucy, I know you're low on magic, but can you help me track Loke's location?" Hibiki inquired. "I can use Archive to connect to you, and your connection with your spirits will allow us to find Loke and send back up. Everyone else can split up and look for Brain."
"Everyone who can fight should go in groups of at least three." Erza ordered. "Brain is the master for a reason, and we've backed him into a figurative corner by defeating the rest of his guild. He will be even more dangerous than before and we've all seen what he is capable of." The wreckage of the Christina made a solemn backdrop for her words.
Before Lucy stepped up beside Hibiki to plug into Archive, she caught Erza's wrist and whispered to her as quietly as she could.
"The other prisoner is Jellal..."
The Requip Mage's face went white.
Only Fairy Tail believed Jellal was innocent because of Fae vouching for him. If any of the other guilds found him first, they would react with hostility, potentially putting Fae and Wendy in danger. That, and they were currently in an area that was occupied by at least three squads of Rune Knights who all knew what he looked like and had orders to capture him if they could or do their best to kill him if they couldn't.
Erza regained control of her expression and nodded once. Conveying both that she understood the significance of what Lucy had told her, and that her feelings wouldn't hinder her. They had a new worry now. If Jellal had Fae with him, she wouldn't let any attempt on his life pass without protest. It would turn into a much bigger fight very quickly given Fae's resourcefulness and potentially lead to even more trouble.
"Tell Gray." Lucy whispered softly. "If we're going to save him, we need to be there as well as Fae to provide witnesses and evidence for him being possessed for the past ten years. The Knights won't listen to her if she's by herself. They'll just claim it as bias from him rescuing her." Without the two infiltrators who had fooled the Magic Council, there was a lot of turmoil and looking for someone to blame. Fairy Tail had escaped being the scapegoat, and their influence had protected the former subordinate mages. But without some kind of major intervention, Jellal would be crucified for the sake of restoring faith in the Magic Council if he were captured. Whether he was innocent or not.
It would be hard to prove Jellal's innocence, and even more challenging to have it be respected. This kind of battle was not one that Fairy Tail normally got involved in. But Lucy was determined to do whatever she could to save the man Erza loved. Oh, yes, the red haired wizard hadn't said anything. But she didn't need to for Lucy to tell how she felt about Jellal.
Yes, Fae could present evidence simply by showing what had occurred to anyone she wanted to. But not every human would be as reasonable as the Celestial Spirit King when it came to giving pardon for perceived crimes.
-vVv-
When I passed on the information that Zero was awake and active, Jellal ground his teeth. I'm pretty sure this was his alternative to cussing a blue streak. Very tasteful, that.
"Then we have even less time than I feared. Faerun, with your magic active and unhindered, could you find Nirvana?" I pushed my magic in that direction, trying to feel out how hard it would be to track the thing down. It was technically a secret, so there was a pretty good layer concealing its location, but it was also really important that I find it and there were two people that I had been in contact with who knew where it was.
"I'd need a couple minutes to track it down alone." Jellal knelt, offering me a hand.
"I know roughly where it is. I can give you that, and a spell to destroy it without activating it. If you and Wendy go and do this, I can stay and stall Zero. He'll come for me, and it would be safer for the both of you if you weren't here when that happens." I glanced at Wendy then, who was looking more than a little pale and shaky.
Her magic reserves are at 15% capacity.
Yeah, that would make travelling a little hard...Unless...
"You're a Dragon Slayer. Can you regain energy by eating your element? I could carry you, but it'd be better if you could defend yourself." She flushed faintly.
"I...can, yeah. But, because I'm a Sky Dragon Slayer, I can only eat air if it's pure. Really pure, like something that has never gotten touched by human pollution. It's...pretty hard to come by." I shrugged.
"If I fly you up, could you eat enough to recover your energy in less than...How long will it take you to make that spell?" I shifted my attention quickly to Jellal.
"A few minutes."
"Yeah, that." I looked at the other girl expectantly and saw her shrink in on herself.
She's afraid of heights.
I tried to be sensitive and considerate about the information I got from my magic. But this? This was...ridiculous.
"You're a Sky Dragon Slayer and you're afraid of heights?" I asked slowly.
"I can't help it! I got stuck on a cliff face when I was little and Carla was too small to fly me down then! I was up there for hours, and then a storm came and I almost slipped-" An amber rune floated in front of her mouth, momentarily halting her speech.
I sensed both fear and shame in her words, and posture as she admitted the fear. It was probably something she felt the same as me. That it was a very ironic and frustrating fear to have for someone who by nature was supposed to be at home in the open air.
"Alright, we'll handle the phobia later. For now: We need something wind, or air based, that's very pure to get you back on your feet." What do I have...?
My mind flicked through every reference I had to wind, air, sky...
Airbending? That's just manipulating what's there. Ooh, the Wind Waker could be useful, or maybe the Gust Bellows from the Lanayru factory... Rasen-shuriken? No, too big for me to make, and probably too much for her to eat all at once.
-all at once.
The stone trees that surrounded us.
The idea came to me and I plopped down and started scribbling on the root of the tree we were sheltering under. Jellal's hands were glowing as he held them together, occasionally shifting his fingers and the concentration of his magical energy.
"What are you doing?" Wendy asked, watching as I traced runes first with my finger, and then cut them into the fossilized tree with my finger and a Cutting Charm. Since I didn't have my slate, or writing utensils, I had to improvise.
"This forest is so old, it's fossilized and turned to stone. That means they spent years and years just sitting here, doing nothing but remove impurities from the air. And in any forest, all the roots are always interconnected, meaning that to affect the entire forest, you just need to start with one tree." Purify air, condense to immediate vicinity, link to the whole forest, let them power the range of the spell, go back...332 years is when the fossilization was complete, so they stopped producing clean air then...
"What?" With most of my mind on figuring out how to make my idea work, I wasn't making a lot of sense.
"Let me finish thinking this through!"
I looked at what I had scored into the tree bark, gnawing my lip as I tried to go over every nuance and phrase mentally before I tried to activate it.
I didn't have my slate to help me run a simulation, but I could tentatively reach out for the end goal of what I had created here...
I saw a rush of heady, forest scented air filling our small cave, and then concentrating to painful levels. The smell was so strong that it knocked Wendy out cold and gave Jellal and I both a headache.
Oh, of course! Filter out micro-scents from the forest gathered during that time. I added the clause to the rune work and tied it in before trying my test again. Then I hastily added a fire retardant rune outlay. This was reactivating the oxygen these trees had produced over the course of centuries. Even altering the percentages of the air mixture a little increased the overall likelihood of a fire starting on accident.
And while that could be useful sometime down the road, not what we need right now!
I ran it about five times, making minor adjustments when needed, and even removing one whole line of text from the original thought. If I was reading the possibility correctly, it should work...Maybe. It only got so far as bringing the air here, I had no control over what Wendy would do afterward, so I couldn't see what would happen to her.
"I think I've got something." I told her, reordering my rune work so that it ran in a linear fashion. I didn't want it to work more than once, so I didn't need to link it into a circle, or figure eight. "When I activate it, it'll take the tree's natural ability to purify air and mimic it. Basically, I'm rewriting the forest's story so that its still been producing clean air for all these centuries. I've limited to the forest, so the air in the immediate area will get processed several times and it ought to be clean enough for you to get down without getting sick. But you have to be ready to grab it when it gets here, it'll disperse very quickly. Ok?" My hasty design had taken about five minutes of precious time, and I quickly glanced through my mental map of the area, now free and unhindered by both the suppressor and G2's lack of concern for her surroundings. I didn't see Zero anywhere close by, but that could change real quick.
"Yeah. Have you done something like this before?"
Fly by the seat of my pants and hope I don't crash, burn, explode, melt, vaporize, etc?
"Yeah." I'd apologize to Wendy later for misleading her. But we had to go now.
Jellal gave me a look that I daresay was amused. His expressions were uncannily like Mystogan's and his body language mirrored him too, which was odd. They were physically identical, but otherwise fundamentally different people. So how could they still share so many similar traits?
Questions about Edolas vs Earthland mirrors: Saved and filed under 'Not now.'
I read my work aloud, infusing it with magic and felt as it took.
The air shivered, the trees around me groaned slightly...
I could only describe it as every tree in the forest exhaling at once. A long, deep, content sigh that drifted through the air and curled around us. My nose wasn't strong enough to identify many smells, and I was filtering out most of it for Wendy's sake. But the young Sky Dragon Slayer sniffed cautiously...then opened her mouth and inhaled.
I didn't see the air go into her mouth, but I could feel as the pressure changed.
Watching Natsu eat fire, of Gajeel some metal, wasn't like this. I could feel the decrease of heat when Natsu ate, and see the chunks of metal that vanished down Gajeel's throat. But in Wendy's case, I felt my ears pop. The air she was drawing in was literally being consumed, vanishing into her body as her magic converted it to energy.
She seemed to inhale forever, but when she stopped...
Her magic reserves are at 55% capacity.
Yay! Success!
"How do you feel?" I asked. She took a few more deep breaths, and I felt her suck down the last bits of clean air the trees had surrendered to my spell.
"Better." She looked better too. There was color in her face now, and she seemed a bit steadier. "I think I'm good to go."
"So is this." Jellal told me, touching his finger tips to mine and-
I was used to having information just appear into my head, but this was literally like being plugged in and being messaged a file in an instant.
"Is that Archive magic?"
"It's an Archive spell useful for communicating information. It doesn't save it anywhere and the recipient can only access it once." I carefully didn't touch the times Jellal had used this spell in the past. It revolved around the Tower of Heaven and how he had kept it hidden for so long.
I reached into my mind and pressed on the new piece of knowledge I had there. I felt the power attached to it, packaged up and tied neatly. I could release the catch now, but that would leave me holding a maelstrom of carefully structured magical energy with no where to put it. So I left it alone.
Zero is coming.
I relayed this to Jellal and he sprang into action.
"Fae, you and Wendy need to go find one of the Light Guilds, and take them with you to destroy Nirvana. You're both brave and capable wizards, but this is not something girls your age can do alone. Between the two of you, I don't doubt you'll be able to find some help. Now get going, quickly."
-vVv-
Jellal hurried the two girls on their way. They had to get out of here and far away before Zero closed in. His hands left sigils on the backs of their clothing, hiding them from being followed by Zero should Jellal fall to him.
A lot of his magic power had been placed into the key he had given to Faerun in order to destroy Nirvana. And while Zero wasn't fresh either, he had absolutely no compunctions about burning through his energy if it meant his goals were accomplished. This would be a fight for his life, and it wasn't one Jellal had high hopes of surviving.
The most he could do right now was ensure that Nirvana was destroyed, removing it as a possible tool of the Balam Alliance, and make it so he didn't rob two more children of their innocence by having them witness his death.
-vVv-
I was focusing on locating Nirvana while Wendy guided us through the trees. We were moving hand in hand to stay together more easily and so I could work my magic on her history of the area to find our final destination. She picked up a scent that she recognized as an ally and started leading us towards them.
Holding Wendy's hand let me benefit from her experience in these forests, so I was delving through her memories of travelling through these woods throughout her childhood. I was searching for some area that set off her instincts as unusual. Dragon Slayers typically had a very precise sense of what was dangerous. Most of the ones I knew typically thought this meant something was interesting or worth fighting. But Wendy was different, she was...pretty much normal. If she thought something was dangerous, she'd stay away from it.
There were a few landmarks that Wendy had spent some time around, but none really stood out.
Ok...Wendy grew up in her guild, and we're here at their request.
"Wendy, was there ever a place where your guild master told you not to go?" Wendy would have listened to him, so...
"Yes! The head of Niro spring."
Focusing on the history of the area...
The magical device Nirvana is the size of a large city and capable of mobility. It's entrance is located behind Niro Spring, where it's sealing and burial rerouted a natural source of water to the surface.
Bingo!
Wendy's hand tightened in mine as the wind shifted to blow in our faces..
"I smell someone, but they're not human!"
There came a triumphant bay from behind us. It didn't sound like anyone I knew, but-
"FAE!" -I knew that voice.
Hope and happiness blended with sweet relief in a cocktail of emotions that made me feel like I could fly au natural. My hand tore out of Wendy's as I reversed my direction as fast as I could manage, throwing myself back the way we had come.
"Loke!"
We both were running for each other, so when we collided, it hurt a little on impact. But I didn't care. Because for the first time since I had been shoved into a sack a full day earlier...
"You're safe now."