11. Ice-Make: Reroute

"There's no way to undo it, as the damage has already been done. We'll just have to use a different method to counteract this spell."

Mages were no strangers to near death experiences, and while he knew Erza was no exception to that reality, Gray just couldn't find it in him to believe what his eyes were seeing.

Erza Scarlet, Fairy Tail's famed S-Class Wizard, sat there unconscious and immobile, her normally intimidating and fearless figure now appearing almost small and helpless under the blankets wrapped around her. Gray sat beside her, his hand on her shoulder to prevent her from falling off her chair. The uncomfortable chair hadn't been his preferred choice of seating for her, but the empty bakery next to the abandoned building he had rushed her to didn't have any better options. He was just grateful the owners had let them seek refuge there even though they were closed for the day.

He stared at her closed eyes expecting them to open any second and the peaceful expression on her face to transform into her usual serious demeanor. She was supposed to be ogling at the smell of strawberry shortcake wafting through the room, not sitting there completely unnerved by it. He wanted her to scold him for removing his shirt, not ignore his indecent act as if the heat coming from the ovens in the nearby kitchen really justified it.

He wasn't going to just sit back and accept that the great Titania, Queen of the Fairies, could be defeated by mere hypothermia. Any second now she would wake up. Any second-

"Erza!"

Gray immediately lurched forward and placed his other hand on the red haired mage to steady her as she gasped, her eyes widening and her breathing increasing. Gray could feel her shivering under the blankets as her arms moved instinctively to wrap themselves around her. He didn't have to touch her to know her body was freezing and as much as he hated to see her suffer, he knew it was a good sign.

"Erza," He said calmly as she looked over at him, her breathing still heavy and her body still shaking. "You're gonna be okay."

Erza tightened her embrace on herself and buried her head into the blankets. "What happened?" She asked, her voice muffled from under the blankets.

"We cornered Alvaro, remember?" He said, trying to remind her of what had just happened. "He left the Koppa Stone and escaped, telling us it would explode and destroy the whole building along with us."

He watched her silently as she continued to huddle beneath the blankets, the look of concentration on her face indicating she was trying to recall the incident.

"Apparently there was some other guy there with him. Korpus, I think his name was." He continued. "He used Hypothermia Magic on you, causing your insides to freeze until you fell unconscious."

"I remember now." Erza said, her eyes suddenly widening as she turned to face him. "You froze the stone, didn't you?"

Gray smiled. Even in the midst of near death, Erza still couldn't keep her mind off the mission. She was going to be alright. "Of course, I did. Froze it in permanent ice and then got you out of there before you froze to death."

He then stared at her in confusion as her body seemed to relax, her intense shaking diminishing. How the news could be so relieving that it removed almost all her feelings of pain was a complete and utter mystery to him.

But then he remembered who was sitting next to him.

"That's good to hear." She said, closing her eyes and leaning back in her chair. "If that thing exploded it could have caused a lot of destruction and chaos for the people in the area. It's a good thing we stopped it in time."

Yeah, just forget about the fact that you were about to die back there. Gray thought, though something told him that even if he hadn't been there, she would have somehow gotten out of it anyway.

"How do you feel?" He asked.

"Still cold," Erza replied, her arms still wrapped around herself beneath the blankets. "but I'm slowly warming up."

"Good." He said, forcing back the stupid grin that was pushing its way through. He was an idiot for thinking she had been so easily defeated like that. "That means you won't freeze to death, though you were nearly there. That was that warm feeling you got after you went numb and the coldness seemed to disappear. That's what trips people up though, the calm before the storm. The fact that you feel the cold now means you're going through that process again, just backwards."

"Based off how I felt before, I'd say hypothermia isn't such a painful way to die." Erza said, turning to him with a smirk. "Just remind me not to do it though if I plan on coming back."

"Sure thing."

Erza didn't say anything after that, so Gray just kept quiet as he didn't really know what to say either. Everything had happened so quickly that he hadn't really had time to think about it. They had lost Alvaro and his supposed partner, Korpus, so were they not done with the job? Gray figured the reason they had been destroying the museum was so they could destroy the Koppa Stone, but why would they want to stop it from going off? And not only that, but if Alvaro already knew it could only be stopped by permanently freezing it, then why didn't he just do it himself? He was an ice mage, after all. But after his attempt at getting rid of him and Erza with it, Gray could only wonder why he suddenly changed his mind about preventing the stone from exploding. None of it made sense to him. What was he missing?

"Gray?"

"Yeah?"

"I've been calling your name three times now." Erza said.

"Really? Sorry."

"You may want to look down."

Gray gave her a puzzled look and glanced downwards. "What the hell? Not again."

Gray stood up from the chair he was sitting on and glared at its new frozen state. Glistening ice covered its wooden frame and the bottoms of the chair legs were frozen to the floor. The first few times this happened he was merely surprised, if not a bit concerned, but now he was just finding it annoying.

"Something is seriously messing with my magic."

"No kidding." Erza said as she began to remove the blankets from on top of her.

"Hey, you should probably leave those on-"

"Nonsense." Erza said, standing up from her seat and tossing the blankets onto the chair. "I'll be fine. Besides, looks like the rest of the team found us."

Gray looked up at the bakery door just as Natsu, Lucy, and Happy strolled in. Their faces displayed a mix of panic and concern and Gray wondered what they could possibly be so worried about. They've separated many times in the past yet always found each other afterwards. They've been on some wild searches for each other, but they never feared the worst. Whatever it was, it had to be something quite terrible if even Natsu was openly showcasing his worry.

"There you guys are!" Natsu shouted as if he was accusing them of being somewhere they shouldn't. "We've been looking everywhere for you two!"

Erza cleared her throat and placed her hands on her hips while Gray looked on and wondered if this was the same girl who had almost died of hypothermia a few minutes prior. "We found Alvaro though we couldn't catch him. We did, however-"

"Don't tell me you froze it, Gray!" Lucy said, her brown eyes pleading, and for a second there Gray wondered if she was referring to the stone or the chair.

"I was trying to tell you that we got the stone." Erza continued after being interrupted by Lucy's outburst. "Alvaro had activated it in an attempt to stop us. Apparently, it's called the Koppa Stone and once activated it will explode and cause major destruction. The only way to stop it is to freeze it in permanent ice, so that's what Gray did."

Their reactions were anything but expected.

Lucy shook her head and facepalmed and considering that was her reaction every time Natsu did something stupid, it made Gray begin to doubt their decision. He could practically see the words "bad choice" written all over the glare Natsu was giving them, while Happy just went with the verbal approach.

"You guys were fooled, big time."

Fooled, huh? Well, considering the discrepancy Gray had noticed in Alvaro's behaviour, he didn't have such a hard time believing that. Erza, however, wasn't buying it that quickly.

"Fooled? What's that supposed to mean?"

"Alvaro lied to you guys." Lucy said. "The Koppa Stone wasn't an explosive, it was an indestructible stone created to counteract the Eliftis Spell. The only way to stop it is to freeze it in permanent ice and Alvaro tricked Gray into doing that."

I knew I shouldn't have been so quick to freezing that thing. Gray thought. No wonder Alvaro suddenly changed his mind, it had been a trap all along. He should've known. Now the stone was frozen, unable to reverse the Eliftis Spell, and it was all his fault.

"This means Alvaro and Korpus must have something to do with the Eliftis." Erza said.

"Wait, who's Korpus?" Lucy asked, unfamiliar with the name.

"Alvaro mentioned there being another guy with him named Korpus." Gray said, purposely not mentioning the whole hypothermia incident. It didn't seem to be of any importance at the moment.

Natsu grinned at Lucy. "See, I told you there was someone else."

"I never denied that." Lucy said, holding her hands up in defense. "I just said we lost him."

"Yeah, right. I knew you didn't believe me."

"What? That's not-"

"That's enough, Natsu and Lucy." Erza interrupted. "I think we need to go tell the master about all of this and then maybe the Magic Council."

"The Magic Council?" Gray asked, appalled at the idea of leaving such a crises in their incapable hands. "What are they gonna do about this?"

"I think Erza has a point, Gray." Lucy said. "We barely know how this spell even works and it's threatening the whole world. It just seems a bit out of our league if you ask me."

Gray shook his head. "Even so, I don't think we should just walk away from it. We can at least try and figure out what we can about all this."

He didn't want to just leave this to the authorities. In a way, Gray almost felt a sense of responsibility for it. It wasn't because he was an ice mage and he doubted it was because he froze the Koppa Stone, but something made him want to deal with the Eliftis Spell himself. After all, it couldn't have just been a mere coincidence that they wound up taking the job that had a connection to the Eliftis Spell.

"How about this?" Erza suggested. "Let's tell the master everything we've found out, as he does have the right to know about what we're up to. We'll let him decide if we should notify the Magic Council, and from there we'll continue with our own investigation."

Figuring there wasn't much to argue with in her proposal, Gray agreed with Erza. The others agreed too and began to make their way back to their guildhall in Magnolia.

At the Magic Council's headquarters in Era, Chairman Gran Doma had called for an emergency meeting about the sudden change of weather Fiore, and apparently the rest of the world, was experiencing.

"I'm sure you're all aware of the severity of this situation." The chairman began. "Assuming we are correct in our theory of this being the result of someone casting the forbidden Eliftis Spell, that leaves us with only two options on how to stop it."

"I don't think one of those options is an option anymore." The councilman in the third seat said.

Another councilman seemed to agree. "The reason its been so long since the council had to deal with this was because the Koppa Stone had always activated and stopped the Eliftis before the process was complete. This time, however, the stone doesn't seem to be working. If it was, it would have already removed the spell."

"Do you think someone froze the Koppa Stone?" The chairman asked.

"Someone must have."

"It is the only way to stop it."

"But how? It's not possible for the caster of the Eliftis to freeze the Koppa Stone."

"Maybe they got someone unaffiliated to do it."

"Or maybe it was already frozen."

Realizing the debate was pointless, the chairman cleared his throat in an attempt to quiet the council. "The Koppa Stone has obviously been frozen, by whom doesn't really make a difference right now. There's no way to undo it, as the damage has already been done. We'll just have to use a different method to counteract this spell."

"There's only one other way to stop this." One pessimistic councilman said. "And there's no way it's going to work. That's why the Koppa Stone was created in the first place."

"The only other way to stop the Eliftis is for the caster to reverse it himself."

"And how are we supposed to find the caster? There are thousands of ice mages out there, it's not like we can investigate each one."

"Perhaps we can."

The chairman turned to the councilman who had just spoken. "How?"

"By using the Invenium. It can identify if someone is the caster."

"We'd have to use it on every ice mage out there, though. And I highly doubt the actual caster will come willingly, in fact once they hear about this, I'm sure they'll figure out a way around it."

"Not if we keep this all secret."

The chairman narrowed his eyes at the councilman who suggested the idea. "What do you mean?"

"We arrest all ice mages."

"We can't just lock up innocent people!"

"They're suspects and once they're clear, we can let them free."

"There are too many to arrest all at once."

"We can do one location at a time." The chairman suggested, beginning to agree with the proposal. "The Northern Continent has the greatest concentration of ice mages. The chances of the caster being there are also quite high considering that's where the Eliftis originated from and people there probably have more knowledge of it. If we can't find him there we'll keep searching other areas."

"Are you saying you're agreeing with this, Chairman?"

"Right now, I'm afraid this is our only option." The chairman replied. "If the caster doesn't reverse the spell himself, we'll just have to make him do it ourselves."

"I can't believe you're going along with this. This idea is ridiculous."

"When we do find the caster, our biggest priority is to keep him alive." One councilman warned.

"That's right. If he dies, the spell lasts forever."

"I don't think we're dealing with just one caster." Another councilman suggested. "To cast the Eliftis spell on such a large area such as the whole world, one would need an immense amount of power. It's simply impossible, as the energy needed to maintain the spell will eventually weaken the caster and drain them of all their magic power and physical energy until they die."

"So you think there are multiple casters?"

"It would surprise me if there wasn't."

"But doesn't the Eliftis Spell increase an ice mage's power to a point where one can take down something like a demon with just one blow?"

"That's if they can learn to control their power. With the Eliftis Spell, they even have the potential to reverse permanent spells that had already been cast."

"While that's true, it's incredibly risky to take on the role of caster by oneself. Even if they can control their power, it's still difficult to maintain."

"Then that settles it." The chairman said, concluding the meeting. "We begin by arresting every possible ice mage in the Northern Continent and using the Invenium to identify if they're apart of the casting. We have to try and keep this operation as quiet as possible. Meeting adjourned."

I think the council just likes to be over the top with their plans...

So what do you all think about this new turn of events? Will Gray end up getting arrested? He should be safe though, it's not like he cast the spell, right?

Well, you'll just have to wait and see :D

Thanks for reading, hope this was enjoyable. Reviews are always appreciated and they make my day :D

Have a lovely weekend and see you all next week!

-britishsconesahoy