A/N

Hi everyone. Wow, this story certainly got a good response from its first chapter! I wasn't sure how people would react to it but I have been loosely planning this story for a long time and thought I would put the first couple of chapters out there. Here is the second one. A little later than I had expected but I do try and give my pat-re-on supporters first crack at my works. Their support helps me to push myself and I can get more out for them.

If you wish to support me there, look up Bored Peasant's Written Works. Supporting me there helps me have more time to write for here. Every little bit helps.

Special thanks to Ranger and Kushtacah for their support.

On with the story!

…

CHAPTER 2 – SELF-REFLECTION

Feeling hot water rinsing the grime and filth of the road off me for the first time in weeks was what I imagined heaven felt like, even if only for a moment. It made me wonder why I had walked back in the first place. Then the memories of the last two years came unwanted to my mind. Oh yeah, that's why.

The war was something I hadn't expected from my new life here.

The war had been brutal in ways that took me by surprise. The fighting had been mostly close combat, as the kingdoms of Iceberg and Bosco both still preferred to outfit their troops with swords and spears instead of firearms. Anything that focussed on long range attacks were given mostly to mages, unless you were like me and had figured out how to make them for yourself. That had been one of the positives about remembering my past life.

I scrubbed myself clean as I thought about the things I had done in the wars. The lives I had taken and the crimes I had seen. Or committed. Some of them still made me sick to my stomach and I knew that I would never truly put it behind me. It reminded me of my first grandfather who had fought in Papua New Guinea in WW2. He was a hard man, set in his ways. He was a kind enough grandfather but there was a strong reason why my father had left home at seventeen. He had, like many other veterans, turned to alcohol as a way to escape his memories.

Still, he had never talked about the whole war. You could get a story or two out of the man but I could only remember him volunteering information once and it was a completely innocuous story. From what I heard, most World War 2 veterans were the same.

To think that I would be turning out like that was a weird thought. Without the alcohol anyway. I refused to do the damage to myself and any family I have that he had done.

I shook my head from that topic and allowed my mind to turn to how I even got to where I was now.

I remembered that I had been born on Earth and lived a life there for about twenty-five years, give or take.

All I know is that after I died, I was visited by an angel who called himself Manuel and I was offered the chance to come and live a life in the Fairy Tail universe. I don't really recall the details of my death, nor do I know what the circumstances were or the topics we discussed around the offer but I do clearly recall that I accepted the offer. And like that, I was reborn in Earthland as a child.

I still possessed the knowledge of my previous life, to a point. It gave me a few advantages in learning how to read and write, seeing as I remembered and therefore didn't need to learn. I remembered all the things I learned through my engineering studies in regards to making useful things, not to mention the little life hacks that I had learned along the way.

However, this was not as helpful as I wished it was because, for one thing, the technology of my old universe was so far ahead of the Fairy Tail universe that reverse engineering the tech was actually impossible for someone of my own abilities

Along with this, there was also the complication of having an adult mind in a child's body. To many, it seemed that I was essentially a freak of nature genius child, born to very overwhelmed parents. I had to act like I was still a child and still be overly intelligent. My parents were a couple of normal, supportive and loving people who were unable to have any more children for some reason that they never told me. As a result, they gave me anything I wanted which, if I wasn't already an old soul in a young body, might have led to me being spoilt.

Still, they were honest, hardworking and they loved me. I have no shame in admitting that I loved them in return. Even if I did feel a little stifled at being treated as a child, I took advantage of the fact that I was not an adult anymore and just let them look after me. I allowed myself to be treated as a child in many ways, if for no other reason than I was one and it was expected. In return, they were always willing to buy me everything I wanted.

I suppose it helped that the things I wanted were not toys or food. I wanted technology.

Technology was tricky in Earthland. The truth of it all was that most of the technologies that existed in my first life on Earth could be found in Earthland. The difference being that none of it ran on machinery that I recognised from either of my previous lives. It was all run with magic. Either a magic user could run anything off their own magic, like Erza does with the magic car and the SE plug, or a normal person could use something through a lacrima. Considering only ten percent of the population could use magic naturally, this was a common but essential tool for everyday life in a society where magic was the power source of all technology.

My biggest problem, so far as technology went, was that I had no real idea how to make up a microchip, which would be the basis anything really complicated. I could still go with a lot of things but computers would be out of my reach. This in turn cut out far more technological options than I would have thought. So, I was left with only what magic could step in for.

To help me adjust, I spent lots of time testing and exploring new uses of common items through the use of lacrima. I learned how to use a lacrima to power all the basic household items and how to increase or decrease the power output of the stored magic to be able to make appliances and lighting more or less powerful. All basic stuff that had been put in by magic item manufacturers for anyone to use, regardless of magical ability.

At five I managed to convince my dad to get an old magic car so that I could learn how to take apart or convert the magic engines so that I could make my own plane later on, based around the engine design. I couldn't get the thing to run by myself though, which I assumed was because my magic was too low at that age to run the thing, so I focussed purely on the mechanical side of things, which was actually really basic compared to a petrol-based engine.

In my spare time I had ideas on how I would use my magic to be able to create powered flight for myself by making a propeller plane, kind of like a World War 2 Spitfire, so I could travel around a lot more easily around the world to complete all the various goals I had made. After all, I planned on joining a magic guild and leave my mark on the world by becoming the strongest wizard that I could be.

Then, during the standard testing that many children went through on their sixth birthday, I found out that I didn't have the ability to use magic.

That stumped me. I had naturally assumed that when I was offered a place to start anew in the FT universe that I would be able to have magic. A lot of my future plans at that stage depended on it. Not having a magical 'container', or just 'magic' as it was referred to, which would passively absorb the airborne magical energy known as ethernano prevented me from doing that. As a result, I basically stopped doing anything for about three weeks as I tried to think about what my next step was. I couldn't be a wizard, I couldn't use magic and so likely couldn't join a guild.

I decided to just keep experimenting with Earthland technology until an idea of what I could do in this universe came to me. My parents had taken my sudden lack of activity to be disappointment that I was unable to use magic so when I started working on creating items, they did their utmost best to be supportive and show me that life could go on in Earthland without being able to cast spells or having that magical container.

Their encouragement brought me out of my funk as I really took a solid look at the world around me. I drew on the inspiration of what I knew from my previous life and wondered how to apply it using magic and lacrima. There were plenty of things that my old world had that couldn't be found here. Not to mention plenty of innovations that could be made through the use of lacrima. Once I really cottoned on to the idea that a lacrima could be used as a replacement of a battery or fuel it let my natural engineering mind start to conjure ideas.

Then I remembered Runes; the magical language. It was something that Freed and Levy used extensively from what I remembered. It didn't take magic to be able to read them, just to project them and power them naturally. Once I had studied up on the idea more, I was able to figure out a way to create a 'pressure switch' with the Runes, meaning that I could use a lacrima to power a magic item independently.

Basically, I wrote a section of the paper that I had my Runes written on that was where the lacrima would power it, but the activation was delayed until my life force was running through the lacrima the same time that the lacrima was on the 'switch' or 'trigger'. That way only I could activate the things that I was creating. At least the more dangerous ones. Basic stuff could be written without that security function.

I created my own way to use and manipulate magic without being able to use it on my own. All thanks to Runes.

So it was that I developed my own expanded magical bag, like they had in Harry Potter, using Space Runes. It was taken with the idea of having almost a Requip space for people who couldn't naturally use magic, where a small bag would have a magically expanded space on the inside, powered by a rechargeable lacrima. It had the brackets to hold two small lacrima inside it to keep the magical space active, with the idea that you could either use one at a time while the other lacrima was being charged. You would then install the second lacrima when the first was running low on magical energy, then take the first lacrima out to be charged.

If the charge ran out or you removed both lacrima out at the same time, the magically expanded space would cease to exist, instantly crushing anything that was being stored in it if they were taken out at the same time. Or, you could use both lacrima brackets at the same time and have the Requip space last for a longer period of time. This was more useful if you were going on long journeys and didn't have your lacrima charge station on your person. If the magic was running low, you could take a lacrima out and replace it one at a time, or you could empty the Requip bag so nothing got crushed and just carry it all until you could get your lacrima charged.

It was a fairly inefficient system, but the issue with working with lacrima is that I was limited to only what power a lacrima could store. And most lacrima available to kids not associated with a guild were small things, barely more than batteries. As it was, I had to make do with what I could and be grateful that I could do that much.

I only had the materials to make two at the time and so I gifted one to my mother on her birthday. She was ecstatic and so very proud that her little boy had the brains to come up with something so useful and clever. She showed her next-door neighbour and couldn't help boasting that I was the perfect son.

I gotta admit, it did feel good to have been able to make something that could likely make me a lot of money if I could market it properly. Or maybe only make a couple and sell them at a massive markup. I could probably get away with that too. Magic items in Earthland seemed to allow for people who only made one or two of something. The people liked magic items to be rare. There was something about the appeal of having a rare magic item, even if the item wasn't really worthy of being a rare item. It was weird to me, but that is how this world worked apparently.

Either way, there was money to be made. Well, as soon as I was old enough to not have my ideas stolen. If I couldn't be a wizard, then I was going to use my knowledge, creativity and inspiration from my previous life to develop items that would normally run on magic to make myself rich, famous and safe.

Unfortunately, things were not to be.

Not long after my eighth birthday in Earthland, my village got attacked by dark wizards. Most of the villagers didn't survive the attack, including my own parents. I found their bodies not long after the attack started, having been stabbed in the back while they were enjoying an evening walk. I am not too ashamed to admit that it affected my deeply. I was so devastated that I didn't see the two mages come up behind me until one of them grabbed my arm.

After that, my old martial arts reflexes kicked in. Kinda.

I twisted out of the hold and punched the wrist of the wizard closest to me. Nothing happened. I cursed my childlike strength for being as lacking as it was. I ducked under a lazy wipe at my head and grabbed at a knife that was sticking out of the belt of the second mage. Next thing I know, I was covered in blood and the two mages were dead with slash wounds in their necks. I had tried to go for the chest of the taller one but I wasn't strong enough to punch through his ribcage. It was enough to hurt him enough to stop him trying to get me and hunch over in pain, which put his neck in my child-sized reach. I quickly left the area before anyone noticed what I had done.

And seeing as it was the first time that I had killed anyone, I was also not ashamed to admit that I vomited all over the outer wall of one of the buildings as I ran away and hid.

For a few days after the wizards left, I helped gather up the bodies for burial, which was more difficult to do when I was not strong enough to carry most of the people in the village without help. Then I went about scrounging food, as much as I could carry in both of my Requip bags, having reclaimed the one that I gave my mother. After that, I went to my parents' graves and said my final goodbyes before I left.

I had been deceiving myself, see? I had convinced myself that if I didn't have magic, then I would just be able to live a normal life away from the dangers that Fairy Tail were likely to be involve in. Being attacked by that random guild showed me that just because I didn't have magic, didn't mean I couldn't be a target. I mean, I already knew it logically, but I had been ignoring that because honestly, I was enjoying having a quiet life without any responsibilities or pressures. Just me and whatever little experiment I could think of to occupy my time.

After I left the village, I sat down and wrote out all that I remembered from the FT universe timeline and figured out the things that I would have to take note of. And I mean everything. All the arcs up to and including the Alvarez invasion. I remembered all the main events and most of the flash backs that would happen in my life time. I knew that the first few things would happen in XY784. The year I was orphaned was 772 so there was time to get myself stronger, trained up and properly armed.

The fight with the dark mages had also shown me that just because I didn't have magic, didn't mean that I would automatically get taken out by someone who does. I could fight back.

There were dangers to this, of course. A wizard's body is passively reinforced by magic. That meant that they could hit harder and take far more blunt force trauma than I could ever hope to. So, me just hoping to take one out by having a straight up fist fight was unlikely in the extreme, especially as young and weak as I was then. But wizards were still vulnerable to being stabbed or shot by a bullet. Like Kagura being stabbed by Minerva at the Magic Games.

Therein lay another problem. While guns did exist in FT, such as the ones Alzack and Bisca used, they all were fired by magic. Not lacrima magic, but the shooter's own magic. While I didn't doubt that I could install a lacrima to power a magic gun, it didn't really mean much because a magic shot, like any other magic attack, was defended against naturally by a wizard's inherent magic.

So, a regular bullet would penetrate skin, but a magic shot would not, but the concussive force from a bullet would then be negated by the wizard's magically reinforced body, meaning that stopping power was also negated. The stronger the wizard, the less damage that the shot would do. The problem extended further in that there was nowhere that I could find a gun that didn't run on magic. That meant I had to make one from scratch.

I was able to draw up the designs for a bolt action rifle and a revolver. Then I looked around for propellant. This turned out to be easier than expected. While the technology on Earthland is magic based, it didn't mean that people hadn't done their research into other areas of technology. It's just that no one used it on a large scale because magic was easier and cheaper. Also, it was hard to convince someone to sell it to an eight-year-old kid that wasn't affiliated with a guild, so I couldn't build them yet.

So I headed to Magnolia and went to meet Makarov at the Fairy Tail guild hall.

In all honesty that meeting had gone better than I expected. I didn't get to join the guild because I didn't have a magic core and using lacrima didn't count because every schmuck in Earthland can use lacrima regardless of magic ability, even if I was being 'revolutionary' with my use of them. At the same time, Makarov took pity on me being an orphan and let me hang around doing extremely low-level stuff, like delivering mail to other guilds and running small errands.

My time at Fairy Tail was a mixed bag. Granted, I was only eight years old physically when I first went there, but I was still considered a genius, which made it harder for me to relate to most children my age. It didn't make it easier that older people just looked at me and saw a young boy that shouldn't be there because I wasn't a wizard.

I did have what I thought were some friends among the younger generation of wizards and was on good terms with most of the older ones. Some, like Guildarts, were amused at some of the inventions that I had come up with and some, like Freed, were able to help me come up with some more by talking about Runes. They really were versatile once you could get them working the way you wanted them to.

I even managed to sit down with Mest Gryder before he began his mission to infiltrate the Magic Council to get information on the Alvarez Empire. From him, I managed to get the basic principle of teleportation magic and figured out a way to put that onto a Rune note, which I imaginatively called a portkey. In all honesty, I was probably the first non-magical person that discovered a way to use teleport without magic. Not that I ever told anyone about it or any of my other main inventions.

With the large number of dark guilds and dark wizards out there, I didn't entrust any of my inventions to anyone else. I knew enough to know that Phantom Lord, which was larger than Fairy Tail, became a dark guild and they were not the only ones. If I gave them, or heaven forbid, someone like Seigrien/Jellal the ability to teleport through a portkey, the only way he would even be caught was if he wanted to be.

As for Fairy Tail, I thought I had found a place where I could make a base for myself to grow. I was able to grow fairly close with Makarov, who was easy to look up to as a father figure. I had some step siblings of sorts in the younger generation of the guild, people to train with and money to keep me going.

Which is why being brutally rejected as hard as I was by Cana, who I had thought of as my closest friend, was so painful.

Even though I was never able to join because I couldn't naturally use magic, I had, over the five years that I had been associated with them, come to think of myself as one of them. I had done their jobs, eaten with their members, helped train them and been trained by them.

But in the end, I was apparently never one of them. I was not a mage.

The self-deception was torn down in that instant and I left, refusing to let anyone see me as weak. I mentally shut myself off from the guild except for Makarov. I went to the other guilds that Makarov had set me up with. Blue Pegasus with Master Bob, who was just as weird as portrayed in the anime, was supportive, and as trippy as it was, I could hold a genuine conversation with Ichiya, if you could move past his 'parfume' talk. But in the end, I didn't really belong there either. The same with Master Goldmine and Quatro Cerberus.

Days bled to weeks before I ran out of money and I found myself needing jewels to keep going. Since guild jobs were no longer an option, I thought of something that I could do to earn the jewels that I would need to survive.

I turned to music and writing.

Having learned how to play guitar in my first life as a kid and being pretty good at it. Still, I was able to get a ukulele for free from an old rich man who was throwing it out and took pity on me. Then I practiced some old classic songs from Earth and took to performing in the streets.

It worked even better than I had hoped.

The music from Earth didn't exist in Earthland. That meant that I could claim that I wrote the songs here without there being a copyright issue. I kept it pretty age appropriate for what I was, playing old movie songs that I could get away without, without needing an obvious reference to a location on Earth.

I adopted the same principle in writing.

Many of the old classics I couldn't remember or they wouldn't make sense. However, there were a few books that I could remember pretty well and a couple of movies that I could write out as a book and get published. It was a much slower process though because the most advanced technology they had for writing was the type writer. The microchip didn't exist here so having a computer, let alone a laptop, was not possible, outside of Archive Magic. It made it a lot slower to write out the books so I only did a few. Thankfully paper was still cheap so that worked in my favour

It turned out that Earth stories sold well in Earthland. The Hobbit, The Fall of Troy, The Tragedy of Hercules, Rise of Sparta and Gladiator did extremely well in Fiore. I heard that some of them slowly spread out across to Seven, Bosco and Minstrel and the jewels kept coming in. And when I did, Levy McGarden suddenly seemed to be at every one of the book releases, begging for a signed copy, which I gave.

I hadn't had much to do with Levy because Droy and Jet didn't like it when I talked to her, but she was a nice and cheerful person most of the time. She wasn't at my 'eviction' from Fairy Tail, working in the city library at the time. She did apologise to me in private another time that I came to see Makarov, but I doubted she would have stood up for me if she had been there.

Between the songs and the books, I made decent money. I kept an ear out and any time that I got some information that would impact Fairy Tail or Blue Pegasus I would swing past and talk to Makarov or Bob. I owed the short guy a debt that I couldn't really express for how much support he had given me and even if I wasn't happy being forced out, I didn't want the guild he loved so much to be destroyed, regardless of how I felt about the members.

I still gave little bits of advice to people that I hadn't fallen out with as not everyone was there at my eviction from the younger members. I even managed to hire Erza to train me to use a sword properly. We became pretty close friends, confidants even. I would go so far as to say that Erza probably became my closest friend since my split with Cana years earlier. But I never stayed around. And honestly, outside of a few people, I didn't want to get too close.

In spite of all the money I made, I never forgot the lesson I had learned as a child: just because I couldn't use magic naturally, didn't mean I was going to be left alone. So even with the books and songs, I kept training. I knew the difficulties the future held and even if I wasn't a wizard, I refused to be helpless. Not again.

So, when I was attacked at one of my concerts by a small guild of dark wizards intent on killing me and stealing my money, I had a few tricks up my sleeves. The lacrima papers made perfect flash-bang grenades, which may or may not have been inspired by Naruto, that could be used to blind and deafen my attackers.

I fought back with my sword and knives. I managed to kill two and subdue the rest until the Rune Knights got there to take the rest into custody.

The following public trial where the Magic Council tried to roast me for defending myself probably soured my feelings towards them forever and I refused to let them take me down for doing their jobs for them. And because I wasn't a wizard, that meant I could appeal to the king.

When the king ruled in my favour, I could see the fury radiating out of half the Magic Council. Too bad suckas. If they did their job properly, then maybe this wouldn't happen.

The next time I returned to Fairy Tail, I got the cold shoulder from everyone except Makarov. Even Erza was wary around me, which hurt. Apparently, killing a wizard, even in self-defence, was frowned upon. Makarov, having lived through small wars of his own, understood that sometimes taking a life was necessary or unavoidable. He never rejected me, cementing in my mind that he was just a genuinely good person.

I still remember what he told me afterwards. He had pulled me out of the guild to go sit and watch the ocean from the cliff nearby. As the sun began to set, he said: "You and I understand that death is not always avoidable. There are unfortunately some situations where you need to take a life. But never should a person use that as a first option. And even if it becomes an option, a wizard needs to learn to control themselves to make sure that they don't go too far."

After that, I spent less time around the guild for a few months until I heard about Lisanna's death. I remembered how broken Mira and Elfman had become from that event. Which was completely understandable. Elfman thought that he killed his sister and Mira developed a mental block preventing her from using anything other than basic stuff.

I hadn't had much to do with Mira before then. She was still that punk-styled girl that cared only about being strong and I was beneath her notice as a non-magic user. Elfman was cool though. He was always polite and respectful to me and we exchanged a few book ideas on magic use. I used those books for inspiration in my Rune writing and he used them to better understand magic. And Lisanna was an angel. It was impossible to not like her.

When Lisanna vanished and the other Strauss's imploded, I decided to help out. They had never done anything to me. Lisanna was possibly the sweetest person I had ever met, and Elfman was still in his little gentleman phase. And Mira had been a fun little punk girl. She was never mean though, and she was possibly the most dedicated person when it came to family that I had seen in Earthland.

Mira had slowly opened up to me while I was helping them out. It was clear that Elfman was filled with guilt and shame, thinking he had killed Lisanna, while Mira was devastated and had a mental block preventing her from using her magic.

Drawing them out of their depression took time. It wasn't made easier by the fact that I had a deadline. Shortly after Lisanna's 'death', I heard about the conflict in Iceberg with Bosco. Apparently, they were being attacked by slave raids and were asking for volunteers to help fight back. I had volunteered for the simple reason that I was desperately short of the one thing that money could not get me.

Experience.

Fighting the occasional monster or low rank bandit was one thing. But S class criminals were on the horizon, not to mention the eventual invasion by the Alvarez Empire, led by Zeref. I needed experience in fighting more people and war seemed like a convenient way to do a get that experience, while also fighting against slavery.

With that deadline in mind, I decided to do something drastic to get Mira to use her magic again. It would be something morally unethical and borderline sociopathic.

Luckily, or unluckily, it worked a little too well. I knew that there was a risk of injury but I was legitimately certain that Mira was going to kill me once she transformed. The beating she gave me was her holding back for the sadistic pleasure of drawing out my suffering.

If it wasn't for the fact that I knew of a little Sky Dragon Slayer with awesome healing powers, I wouldn't have been able to do anything to help Iceberg.

Do I hate Mira for what she did? No. I knew that what I was going to do would cross some major lines of what was morally right. Making her think that I was killing her brother was cruel, especially seeing as how little time had passed since Lisanna's 'death'. Still, I was allowed to feel resentful of being beaten within an inch of my life and being left with what would normally be lifelong injuries.

Was I wrong to distance myself from Mira now that I had returned? Maybe. The girl was clearly sorry. But two years of having that go through my head, you kinda build your own narrative. I felt justified in my initial response. But after I had left the guild, I did feel like that would be something I could let go.

Did that mean I was going to be all buddy-buddy to the rest of Fairy Tail? Not a chance. I wasn't dumb enough to get burnt again.

I turned the water off and walked out of the shower and stared at myself in the mirror. I hadn't been able to eat on the road as much as I would like and it was showing. My muscles were clearly defined but the lack of food and the constant travel for the last few weeks meant that my ribs were also clearly visible. I needed to get back to eating regular meals. Now that I was back in Fiore, I could carry more in my Expandable Bags, which meant I could take more food.

As I stared in the mirror, my thoughts turned to after the war and even now, nearly a year later, sorrow burned through me.

My battalion had started the war at nearly a thousand strong, all of us foreign volunteers to help Iceberg. My company was about two hundred people who had all been from around Fiore. I had never met any of them before but there was a good mix of people from around the country, the majority of them were wizards of varying strengths, from D to high B class. There was maybe two A class from guilds based in Crocus but that was it. Still, there were plenty of people like me who couldn't use magic but wanted to volunteer.

By the end of the war, there were twenty-three of us from Fiore left.

The Iceberg generals had used our battalion to spearhead most of the battles against stronger enemies. We fought with swords, spears, arrows. Magicians fought with magic in all its varieties. It meant that we fought more battles and won more glory, but we died faster. Over and over we were thrown at the Bosco soldiers to hold the line or take a fortress. And it left a company of two hundred with twenty-three. A battalion of a thousand to little more than a hundred.

So our twenty-three, high from the victory of war, trying to distract ourselves from the horrors we had seen and committed, full of piss and vinegar, decided to do something stupid.

We took a century quest.

It was in the mountains of Seven as we walked home. There was a mining town built into the mountains that had been cut off by demons. We thought we were trained enough, tough enough, and smart enough to fight.

And our twenty-three went down to four.

We were fighting through minor demons for weeks in the caverns of the mountain. We fought and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of wailing, teeth-gnashing creatures that seemed to spawn from the very walls. Sleep was rare, all of us were injured, and we lost several of our group from ambushes. But when the big demon came, nothing we did could stop the beast.

It was a beyond S class demon. It looked like a balrog from Lord of the Rings, but the fires on its body were not regular flames. The flames burnt magic. Any foreign magic used, fuelled the cursed flames of the Demon King, as we called it. In the end, it took two of our people, my friends, sacrificing themselves to cause a major cave-in, dropping tons of rocks onto the demon to let us get away. And we still did barely more than scratch the thing.

After that, us survivors went out different ways. Fiorians we may have been, but the others, who were all wizards, just wanted to return to their guilds and forge the war and losses. We still had a bond, something that comes naturally to every soldier who fights side by side in the heat of battle, but even then, I wasn't in their guilds.

I retreated into solitude and busied myself with writing, recovering from the mental battles I had faced, and finally building the plane that I had thought of so long ago. It took months, but now, here I am.

I shook my head and picked up my lacrima-powered magic razor. Seeing Lucy told me that canon had started. I wasn't entirely sure where but that would be easy to figure out. I needed to check my notes again to make sure that I get up to date on what events I need to be wary of.

Still, Lucy was a naturally nice person, from the anime at least, and seemed to be friendly towards the locals of Magnolia. Maybe she wouldn't discriminate, maybe she would. If nothing else, she had something I needed, which meant even if she turned out to be a troll, I was going to be nice to her.

I sighed to myself as I looked at my gaunt face in the mirror. I was about to face Mira, probably Erza, and a bunch of others from Fairy Tail again, no longer experiencing the shock of seeing me after so long. That meant more questions, attitude and idiots like Macao and Wakaba the Simp.

In the end I shook my head and turned to get dressed. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. I could figure things out from there.

…

A/N Please review/Follow/Favourite as you please!

A little background from the MC and his thoughts on meeting Fairy Tail again. I have a large chunk of the next chapter written already and it will be released on my pat-re-on first as always. Bored Peasant's Written Works if you are wondering. Thanks for reading!