-and a new friend
Gajeel has been going after the wolf in anticipation of new battle, but it was not a single opponent he found. In the magnificent room he got to throught all the tunnels have waited many more mechanic creatures of the same kind, and class, ready to battle the Iron dragon, who only grinned at the new challenge.
Meanwhile, Juvia is busy not only with finding her missing companion but also to find out why all their enemies wear the strange mechanical armour. She is caught up in a fight with more spiders and gets the chance to interrogate one of them, finding out that they are the surviving members of the destroyed villages, bound to the machine armours by the master of the Twins. When asked further, he reveals, though unvillingly, that the men were not all he brought fro mthe villages, as there was also some kind of metal they were ordered to gather.
With the spiders defeated and the new information, Juvia heads off to find and warn her fellow quild member.
Gajeel is seen again, standing beat u, but victorious above a pile of mechanics parts of his defeated opponents, though it seems many more await in the great hall to fight him. It is at that moment, that the Master of the Twins decides to finally show himself.
Gajeel recognizes his aura as the one of an evil spirit. He reveals his plans of abtaining a powerfull body that was sealed in this peak tample ages ago. He was burning down near villages to get enough gold to lead his lightning magic, and the souls he obtained from binding the men to his machines, into the sacred barrier in the great hall, shattering it and posessing the giant body.
He welcomes the Iron mage in his hall and challenges him to a fight, wanting to use him as a final part of his lightning rod.
Gajeel accepts the challenge, but finds out he can not hurt the spirit so easily as it does not have an actuall physical form, and that he can hurt him quite easily, using his supperior energy attacks that he is weak against, yet he does not give up and tries to use the surrounding soldier around him as cover while thinking of a strategy.
This does not last long however, as the final strong storm the spirit was awaiting starts, and he finishes the duel with a powerfulllast blow, striking the Iron dragon unconcious.
It is at the beginning of the ritual that Juvia finally finds the great hall and while witnessing the spirit using natural lightning to get the final power and Gajeel as a rod to open the door, she pts it all together and in a final desperate try to stop him from breaking the barrier, uses her water to transfer all that power from it into her and the surrounding soldiers.
This gives Gajeel the opportunity to get free and finally strike the spirit, who has gained a partly physical appearence, with his Dragon Slayer Secret Technique: Karma Demon Iron Sword, with which he also destroyes the great hall and burries the barrier beneath the peak of one of the Twins.
With the death of the spirit, the storm above the peaks ends and the villagers wake from their curse. The Iron dragon finds wounded Juvia and thanks her for the rescue, as he alone would have surely died under the final blow and they both proceed into the temple in the second peak, where they finally find the promised golden treasure, that the spirit was using.
They také some time to recover and head back with quite a load of valuables, leaving the rest for the villagers to rebuild their homes.
Finally at the quild, Makarov complains about the lenght of the quest and is surprised as the mage duo reveals the existence of the dark spirit and the ancient barrier, as he has only send them there to get enough gold to repay the town superiors for all the trouble Fairy Tail has caused over the years, and also for the fees connected to the rebuilding of the quilds headquarters as well, which was the real reason Gajeel was send, as he has destroyed the old one.
Juvia is given a single golden chalice to repay her debt at Fairy Hills and Makarov seizes everything else, leaving the mage duo standing in front of the FT building.
At that moment Gajeel turnes to Juvia to thank her one more time, that she accompanied him on the long journey and also that she had asked him to the quild.
When she remarkes it was Makarov and not her who has asked Gajeel-kun to join, he responses that Makarov was the one who came to him but were her words that made him do it.
At that moment he also gives her a butterfly ornament covered in gems and they both enter the main Fairy Tail hall together, with Juvia stating :
„…This quild is a lot of fun, isn´t it?"
„They´re all fucking crazy…" Gajeel grins.
And proceeds to invite her for a bear as she pins the butterfly in her blue hair.
XXX
This chaper came in a bit of a quicker way, more as a synopsis, as I do not have time to finish this the normal way, yet I do not want to simply cut this in the middle of the story. I will be continuing with my other stories, yet this one is very time consuming and that is why I decided to end it like this, please understand and feel free to expand any part of it you like in your own fanfics.