I didn't lay down on the sickbed for long. Sneaking out of the infirmary wasn't hard, I just couldn't believe that the old hag Porlyusica had seriously shackled me down to my bed with thick metal chains. Such confinements might as well be non-existent for mages of my skill, but it's a fact that Porlyusica really resorted to using metal chains to confine her patients. Porlyusica would be hopping mad that I had dismissed her advice and left the infirmary when she returned, but I wouldn't be around to be on the receiving end of her wrath anyway.
Seriously, no one in Fairy Tail is sane.
Night had fallen when I had decided to sneak out, allowing the darkness to gradually replace the light of the sun. Upon my request, Wendy had healed me enough to be able to move freely but not to the point of being combat ready so that I have an excuse to be absent for the subsequent events, and it will be a while before I can get back to my original strength. It still doesn't matter though, because I have a spell or two that could immediately heal all my wounds. I just couldn't be bothered because the incantations for it were three pages long.
No way in hell would I be going to recite that.
I had a purpose in mind when I snuck out, because now is the best time to fulfil the purpose as to why I was placed on Team B in the first place. It was a little far, but it didn't take me long to locate them.
"Are you sure you are supposed to be moving about in your condition?"
"Wendy healed me. Not totally, but enough," I replied and took off my hood when I'm sure that there were only the four of us here. My original cloak was destroyed in my earlier match and I'm thankful that I had a spare one.
"Still…"
"Let's just get this over and done with," I suggested, and the members of Crime Sorciere acquiesced to my request soon enough. I had located them at the outskirts of Crocus, camping out in a small cave that was well-hidden and located at the top of a nearby mountain overseeing the capital. I'm just glad that I possess some form of flight capabilities or climbing up here would be such a chore.
"Did you sense anything during the games?"
"No," I shook my head at Jellal's question, and muttered my thanks when Meredy passed over a cup of drink to me. "But I'm surprised that there's such a huge space under the arena. Why would the Royal Family build the arena atop of a mine in the first place?"
The clash of Jura's and my final spell had decimated the arena and the ground beneath us, revealing a large empty space that was below our feet all along. Everybody who saw it recognised it as some sort of abandoned mine, which would beg the question of why there would be a mine in Crocus in the first place. That place is the capital of Fiore and I don't think building the arena right on top of an enormous abandoned underground mine was a decision made randomly.
After all, the arena is a property belonging to the Royal Family.
"If the Royal Family has involvement with the issue we are investigating…" Ultear closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation. She's right. Things would get so much more complicated if the Royal Family were actually involved and experimenting with anything relating to Zeref, because they are the Royal Family. What can we do? Accuse the King of treason?
"We could try sneaking into the mines for further investigation," Meredy offered, "but it will definitely be difficult, even for us."
"I would imagine that repair works are already underway, seeing that the games are still ongoing and they need the venue for tomorrow's events. There will be people there," Jellal cautioned.
"Just send in your Thought Projection and be done with it. You can just let it fizzle out whenever you want anyway," I retorted.
"Creating a Thought Projection that could do that is not as easy as it sounds."
"Yeah… So says the guy who successfully used a Thought Projection to infiltrate the Magic Council and played them for suckers for years, and that Thought Projection was a Wizard Saint."
"It's, not, as easy as it sounds," Jellal emphasised once more, telling me that no, my idea is definitely not going to work.
"Still, if we really have to investigate the mine below, this may be the only chance we have," Ultear brought the conversation back on track. "Like Jellal mentioned, the repair works would be done by tomorrow before the games begin and it will be harder to get into the mines then."
"That doesn't solve the problem of how we are going to sneak in there undetected, Ultear," Meredy reminded her.
"About that…" Ultear turned to look at me with a sickening pleasant smile on her face, and I immediately knew that her idea had to involve me.
"Whatever devious scheme you cooked up, get it out of your head. I just bloody fought a Wizard Saint and I'm still recovering. See these bandages here? Huh? No thanks to you guys who pushed me into participating in the GMG all for the sake of your mission, and I'm not even paid to do this shit."
"Oh really?" Ultear's voice went up a few semitones higher. "But why do I remember that you had a spell that could heal all your wounds in an instant, and all you had to do was to chant a loooong incantation to do it?"
"... I showed that to you guys before?"
"It was sometime during the week when we first met. We were being pursued by the Rune Knights, remember? You got careless and were pretty badly injured back then," Meredy helpfully added.
"You have to be much clearer than that. Everytime I'm with you guys, I'm almost guaranteed to be pursued by something or someone sooner or later. Why do you think I decided to go my separate way?"
"Hey! Don't make it sound like we bring bad luck to people or something!"
"You guys did bring bad luck to me. Look, I had to fight a freaking Wizard Saint for you guys. You want to try having a go with that baldy?"
"And you still won anyway."
"Yeah, at the expense of my muscles being shredded, bones broken, and my magical container damaged. It's a miracle I'm alive at all."
Meredy looked suitably alarmed after hearing what I had to say. The same goes for the other two older members.
"... You are kidding me, right?"
"No."
"Then how on earth are you here right now?"
"What else? Poof, magic," I shrugged. "It's not yet time for me to go anyway."
"Children," Ultear gave two claps of her hands, bringing our attention back to her.
"How should I reply to that? Yes Mum?"
"I'm not that old," Ultear made a slight frown at my insinuation of her age. "But what I wanted to say is that, your Light magic is able to create illusions to hide us, right?"
"So your endgame is that you are still trying to make me do all your work. Great, what was I expecting?"
"Hey don't say that, remember the good times we had together? I thought we were friends and friends help each other!" Meredy slung an arm around my shoulders, pulling me closer to her and I knew that she's doing this just to annoy me. She's starting to play the friend card with me now.
I simply replied to her with three short laughs filled to the brim with sarcasm.
"Ha, ha, ha."
"Argus! Is that how you talk to your seniors?"
"Only by two years."
"Still older than you by two! You should be calling me big sister! Say it! Big sister Meredy!"
"Big? You are shorter than me," I visually assessed her from top to toe, then from toe to top, pausing for a short while when my gaze landed on her chest area. "Well… Those are big alright, that I will admit."
"ARGUS!"
"There they go again," I could hear Ultear whispering to herself in exasperation, her palm meeting her face as she truly gave up on mediating the conversation between Meredy and I. It's just too bad for her that Meredy is really easy to rile up if you know which buttons to push.
Two years older than me? Meredy needs to do better than that before I would ever call her big sister.
In the end, I still somehow found myself roped into Crime Sorciere's shenanigans. I wholly blame Jellal and his glib tongue for my current predicament. He's a sneaky little rat and nothing he did would ever change my opinion about him.
So here was what happened. Crime Sorciere needs to go into the suspicious abandoned mine below the arena to further investigate the Zeref problem. Crime Sorciere needs help sneaking into said mine. Crime Sorciere decided that Argus would be the perfect solution to their problems. Crime Sorciere forced poor old Argus to use the recovery spell that required the recitation of an incantation that took up three whole pages so that he would be able to help them at his full strength.
As you can see, we have a wonderful friendship with each other.
"This sure brings back memories of how we first met."
"Bad memories for sure," I shuddered at Meredy's words, who decided to cuff the back of my head in reply.
"Careful there, what if you disrupted my concentration and I dropped the illusion?"
"Save it, you are too good for that."
Under the guise of the invisibility woven by the illusion created by my Light magic, the four of us carefully navigated through the guards, mages, and workers that were working round the clock to restore the arena back into its original state. A part of me felt a little apologetic for them, but a larger part of me couldn't bring myself to care. If they want someone to blame for causing them to work overtime, take it up to whoever decided that pitting me against Jura would be a fun thing to do.
"Meredy has a point though. It does remind me a little of how we first met."
"Yeah, and I still hate you guys for it."
I first met the members of Crime Sorciere not long after I arrived at Fiore, about less than a month in if I recall correctly. I had nothing to my name and no money on my person and I was in a desperate need to find something to fill my pockets and empty stomach.
So naturally, I decided to try and take the easy way out, exploiting the fact that I am the user of Primordial Light magic, because being able to harness the power of the origin of all light-based magic and spells also meant that weaving a simple illusion to keep myself hidden was child's play.
My plan was to sneak into the largest and richest looking mansion I could find within the vicinity, steal some valuables and some good food, and then be on my merry way. One guess as to who I met there.
Everything went well initially. My rucksack and pockets were lined with money, I was taking my own sweet time to raid the kitchen and the sausages were delicious. Then, I heard commotion, and being the nosy parker that I was, I decided to see what the din was about.
By coincidence, Crime Sorciere had infiltrated the mansion on the same day I did at about the same time. The thing is, while all three of them are powerful S Class mages in their own right, they seriously suck at anything that has to do with stealth or requires some form of covert skills. The fact that Ultear chose to break Jellal out of prison through sheer brute force and kicking down the front doors of his prison cell spoke volumes about that.
So naturally, they were discovered by the guards, and from what I later learnt, it hadn't even been fifteen minutes since they snuck in. Like, come on, how hard could it be to avoid their notice?
Whoever the owner of the mansion was, it had to be someone very important because the Rune Knights were patrolling the place themselves. That was still none of my concern. I was at a comfortable spot far away enough from the battle, but close enough to spectate the wonderful show that everyone was putting up while munching on those delicious sausages that I had swiped from the kitchen. All in all, it was a good day.
Then Meredy just had to use her magic, Maguilty Sense.
Meredy's magic is an interesting magic and is one of a kind, allowing her to connect and share the senses of everyone around her that she chose to link with her magic. That was what she did, using her magic to link all of the guards' senses that were surrounding them. When that happened, all she needed to do was to knock just one unlucky chap into blissful unconsciousness and everyone would follow suit. It's a very useful magic to have for infiltration and assassination purposes but it's too bad that she had close to no talent in the stealth department and it's not for her lack of trying, but I digress. That's beside the point.
The point was that her Maguilty Sense had somehow connected itself to me as well even though I was hidden by an illusion. I was lucky that my body was naturally tougher than the useless Rune Knights so I did not pass out from the sensation, but the pain I felt through the link from Maguilty Sense was enough to disrupt my concentration and forced me to drop the illusion that was hiding me.
That was how the four of us found ourselves staring at each other awkwardly. I didn't recognise who they were initially and it was only after learning their names later on that I realised I had bumped into canonical characters. Thankfully, or not, depending on how you want to see it, that awkward silence did not last long. Another batch of Rune Knights found us and came charging at us soon after. We had no time to introduce ourselves and so the only thing we could do was to join forces and make our escape out of there.
The rest was history. We got to know each other a little better after we made our escape, and I actually stuck around with them for a short period of time before I went my separate way. They happened to be at that place because the owner of the mansion was keeping an artefact of Zeref in his treasury, which naturally attracted their attention. As we travelled together, I actually had no choice but to help them with some of their heists because God, they are seriously awful at infiltration. I had seriously expected better from two ex Wizard Saints and an S Class mage. It's a complete mystery how they managed to stay under the radar for so many years.
As to why I chose to leave their group, it was because I was really sick of being chased around every single time we went on another of our heists. No matter how hard I tried to conceal our presence to make our heists a successful one, every single time, one of them would somehow slip up in the most ridiculous manner and we would be found by one of the guards, and the whole cat-and-mouse cycle would repeat itself.
I got really sick of that very quickly. Crime Sorciere understood my frustrations and I wasn't even a member to begin with, so we parted on good terms. We still bump into each other a few times every year, sometimes a little more than that, because the places that we tend to venture to are similar in nature in the sense that they are places that the ordinary folk wouldn't go.
So yes, we are friends, even if more than half of our interactions were me shooting passive aggressive remarks at them and being sarcastic, and the other half of it was them somehow managing to convince me to help them with another of their shit jobs whenever we bump into each other again. This is simply the basis from which our friendship was formed.
Going by that pattern, something would go wrong tonight sooner or later. I just knew it.
It took a long while, but ultimately we managed to reach what we believed was the deepest level of the mines and boy, were we in for a huge surprise.
"These are…"
"Dragon bones," I muttered under my breath, also reeling from the same disbelief that they felt. People like us have seen a lot of weird things in our lives, but the sight in front of us is definitely going to take one of the top spots in our mental list of the weirdest things we have ever seen.
We are in a dragons' graveyard. Dragons.
"So Zeref was associated with the dragons?"
"We can't say for sure. At least, I don't sense any of Zeref's magic here," Jellal answered, the expression on his face deadly serious because if dragons are going to be involved in one way or another, then the severity of this entire problem just got a lot higher.
And from what little I recalled from my foreknowledge, dragons are definitely going to be key players in the later part of the plot for the GMG arc. I just have no idea what the Royal Family is going to use this graveyard of dragon bones for.
Could it be necromancy? I cannot write off that possibility entirely, but I doubt it, because if there was a character with necromancy magic I probably would have remembered him or her. Fairy Tail was a children friendly series back in my world, so I doubt there will be mentions of necromancy.
In that case, just what kind of magic or event would result in dragons rampaging across Crocus, assuming that things would pan out as it did in canon?
"The Royal Family has to be involved," Meredy concluded with a grim look on her face, and her sentiments were one that we all shared.
"So what are we going to do about it? Walk up to His Royal Majesty and say, Hey brother, I heard that you are messing with magic relating to the Black Mage. You wanna talk about it? Yeah… cos that will go soooo well."
In response, Meredy simply crossed her arms and gave me a glare of warning.
"Argus, nobody would think that you are a mute if you don't speak for ten seconds."
"You guys were the ones who dragged me here."
"The presence of Zeref's magic could only be felt every year during the GMG. Assuming that this is not a coincidence, and assuming that the Royal Family is doing it on purpose…" Ultear began to try and fill in the missing links based on the information which we already knew. "They… need the GMG to be held at this period of time and at this specific place for a reason. I don't think that reason would be to cover up the existence of this mine because attracting spectators from all over the country already defeats that purpose, so that means the "timing" and "location" of the GMG is an important factor to their plans."
"The GMG is traditionally held in the first week in the month of July. What goes on in July? I doubt it's to enjoy the summer season."
"No, wait. The GMG does not only attract spectators. Every year, without fail, the GMG would attract mages from all over the country," Jellal quickly spoke up when he thought of a factor that none of us did. "And with mages, come magic. Let's take this a step further and assume…"
"The Royal Family needed mages to come here, because they need magic. A lot of magic," I lightly bit on my thumb, a bad habit that I had unfortunately brought over from my previous life whenever I am feeling extremely anxious. Jellal's words had sparked something in my mind, like there's something that I know that I should remember but for the life of me I just couldn't seem to recall just what was so important.
Damn it.
"That means that they have means to collect magic from the mages gathered here, and without anyone realising it," Meredy extrapolated from our current line of thought. "Problem is, whose magic are they collecting, and how?"
"The location. The arena," Ultear snapped her fingers once, having arrived at an answer faster than we did. "Timing and location. I will bet that the arena was what the Royal Family is using to absorb the magic they need every single year during the GMG. Just imagine, the kind of magical power they could absorb if the likes of Wizard Saints and S Class mages were to give it their all in the events. Like how Jura and Argus went at it earlier today and that was only the power released from two mages. Imagine the amount of magic they could possibly collect if every mage in Crocus released their magic!"
"Oh great, now you are making me to be some sort of accomplice of the Black Mage. So is Crime Sorciere going to put me down?"
"Argus."
"So if the arena is one big instrument used to collect magic… where does all the magic go?" Jellal asked the million dollar question that none of us had an answer to. At least, there's no way in hell we would arrive at an answer given what we currently knew.
"The solution's actually pretty simple," I spoke up, catching their attention. "Look, by now we can agree that the Royal Family is shady as hell. They definitely know something we don't, and it definitely has got to do with Zeref and all his wacky magical nonsense. So…"
"Argus," Jellal calmly cut me off before giving his answer. "No."
"Why not?"
"Look, you were the one who always complained that we were awful at stealth. Now you want us to infiltrate the Royal Palace?" Meredy looked at me as if I had gone crazy and yes, I think I'm going crazy because I know for a fact that dragons will be involved and I really wish to avert that outcome at all costs. The power of a God by my side or not, I don't wish to fight dragons, thank you very much.
Zeref + Dragons + Royal Family. The results from this equation are seriously no laughing matter and we have to quickly find a direction to start our investigations upon. Zeref is out of the question, we hit a dead end with the dragons when we found their bones, so the only way left to continue our investigations is to direct our focus at the Royal Family. I don't think that there is a problem with my line of reasoning.
"Look, face it, we are heading nowhere and the Royal Family is the only clue we can go on. We have less than seven days to find the truth, and may I kindly remind you, that the Royal Family had already been hosting the GMG for a few years. Who knows just how much magic they had been collecting in this period of time? And this year? People like the baldy, Lyon, Ichiya, me, Fairy Tail, we are all part of the games this year. Imagine the amount of magic that the fat ass King could collect just from having them participating in the games. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of magic from my fight with Jura had been a generous donation to whatever shit these people are planning. The Royal Family is going to have a grand harvest this year and we got to be quick about it because something is telling me that the amount of magic being collected this year would be enough for the Royal Family to bring their grand plan to the next stage."
"Okay, let's say we somehow managed to infiltrate the Royal Palace without getting caught like always. What next?" Meredy questioned.
"I don't know… Maybe kidnap the King or the Princess and force the truth from their mouths?"
"... Are you crazy?"
"Am I never crazy?"
"There has to be a better way-mfph!"
Meredy tried to dissuade me from going through my original idea, but it was at this moment that I sensed additional presences heading towards our way and I quickly covered her mouth with my hand and bent the light around us to cover us in a shroud of invisibility. Crime Sorciere immediately caught my memo as we silently shifted ourselves to a corner and waited to see just who had decided to visit the very bowels of this abandoned mine.
"Has anybody come here?"
"No sir."
"Good. Make sure it stays that way," A tall muscular man in armour with a square shaped nose came into view as he walked into the large cavern, his footsteps sounding heavy with every step he took thanks to his metal armour. Whoever this is, he looks important.
The royal knight that accompanied that man left to leave his superior alone, who did nothing but stare at the graveyard of dragon bones in silence. It was a long while before the man let out a soft sigh before turning to take his leave.
"Are we following him?" Meredy mouthed in silence and all four of us shared a look with each other. It was a no-brainer, really, because this person who just left was obviously working for the Royal Family and had to be important enough to know some of the secrets that we were trying to dig.
"He is Arcadios, Chief of the Cherry Blossom Holy Knight Squadron. He's known to be highly loyal to the Royal Family," Jellal whispered as we silently tailed after the knight in question. We soon realised that the underground passage that Arcadios used had led him to a secret underground entrance to Mercurius, the castle where the King of Fiore resides.
At this point, I'm just glad that I had the foresight to change my attire completely, including swapping out my signature cloak to a similar one that Crime Sorciere uses. At least this way, nobody would immediately associate me with Fairy Tail should our presence be discovered like how it usually happened.
I had no idea if Lady Luck was truly smiling down or us, or if the Royal Knights were truly that incompetent, but somehow or another the four of us remained undetected as we tried our best to keep our footsteps silent while trailing behind Arcadios under the cover of the invisibility provided by my Light magic. Soon, Arcadios climbed up to reach a private balcony on one of Mercurius' many rooftops.
"Princess," Arcadios got down to a single knee and greeted his princess. I wasn't expecting to see this country's princess and future monarch here, but then again this is her home we were trespassing. Her name should be Hisui E. Fiore and… I think she had some role to play in the original plot. I'm not too sure about that.
"What's the status of the repairs?"
"It will be completed before morning."
"Good," The princess released a soft sigh of relief as she turned outside to look at the sight of the capital below. "I wasn't expecting the arena to be blown apart and reveal what's beneath, but then again it was a battle between the Aces of two powerful guilds, and one of them is a Wizard Saint. Nevertheless, it should be fine as long as nobody went close to the mines and saw what's within."
"I swear upon my sword that nobody would take a step into the mines."
"Thank you, Arcadios," The Princess thanked the knight with a soft and tired smile before looking back out into the night sky once more. "I just… hope that there wasn't a need for the Eclipse Project. Zeref… Why is it always him?"
The Princess released another sigh. At this point the four of us who were eavesdropping just a few metres away had more questions than answers the more we listened into their conversation.
Eclipse Project…? That kind of sounded familiar but I… just cannot recall a single thing about it.
The Princess and Arcadios continued talking, but at this point the topic of their conversation had turned towards the direction of pointless chatter that would not be of help to our investigations. The four of us swiftly exchanged silent looks, trying to reach a consensus if we should continue eavesdropping or if we should just leave before it gets impossible to do so. Only heaven knows what else might happen to prevent our exit the longer we stay.
"Stay, or leave?" I mouthed my question in silence. Jellal looked like he wanted very much to stay and continue to eavesdrop, but it is also a fact that the current conversation between the knight and the princess had nothing to do with this "Eclipse Project" and it didn't seem like they would go back to discussing that topic anytime soon. Furthermore, the longer we stay here, the higher the risk of us being discovered and it might very well implicate Fairy Tail as well.
"Let's leave."
"Who's there?!"
I facepalmed. I truly facepalmed because that was the only thing I knew that could convey the sheer absurdity of our current situation.
"You goddamn genius, couldn't you just mouth your answer to us in silence?"
Yes, Jellal Fernandes, S Class mage and previously a Wizard Saint, actually forgot that we were trespassing into the royal castle and voiced out his reply when he should have done it in silence.
What a stupid mistake. I just knew something would go wrong tonight in the stupidest way possible.
There was no longer a need for stealth and to be perfectly honest, the four of us were too used to being discovered for the weirdest of reasons whenever we embarked on a stealth related mission. So, the moment Arcadios opened his mouth, turned around with his sword drawn, Meredy and I were already moving. The shroud of invisibility faded away and by the time Arcadios saw us I had already knocked him out with a well-placed punch to the side of his head.
"W-Who-"
Meredy knocked the princess out just a second later. Thankfully, it didn't seem like Arcadios' shout from earlier had attracted any attention from anyone nearby.
"Jellal," I hissed with my arms crossed, conveying to him extremely clearly about the annoyance that I'm feeling right now.
"My fault," Jellal graciously admitted.
"Oh great, now we have to add assaulting a member of the Royal Family onto our already long list of crimes," Meredy remarked without a care in the world as she dusted her hands, the Princess of Fiore lying motionlessly by her feet. Still, I could tell that she was equally annoyed at Jellal's slip up which by all accounts, shouldn't have happened. It was a very amateur mistake.
"My fault, my fault. I'm sorry, I apologise."
"I think the question that we should be asking now is, now what?" Ultear joined in the conversation and we all looked at the unconscious bodies of Arcadios and the Princess. That actually stumped us into silence once again because seriously, now what?
"You know, the suggestion I made previously still stands…" I trailed off.
"Which suggestion are you talking about?" Meredy asked cautiously.
"What else? Kidnapping our precious princess and forcing the information out of her mouth. We are on a time limit here, is there any faster way you can think of to get the job done?"
"That's-"
"Let's do it," Jellal spoke before Meredy and I could get into one of our usual arguments, where we argued simply for the sake of arguing because that is just how we communicate ever since we knew each other. To be perfectly honest, Jellal would be the last person I expected to support my idea. He can be cautious to a fault at times.
"Are you sure?" Meredy questioned.
"Like he said, we really don't have time and besides, we are already fugitives on the top of the wanted list of both the Magic Council and the Royal Family for what we had done. Adding another crime on top of it wouldn't affect us much, assuming that they managed to figure out that this is our work in the first place."
"This should be fun," Ultear let out a low whistle, and I knew that she's on my side as well from the playful look on her face.
"Ultear… This…" Meredy wanted to argue otherwise, but chose to give up in the end and released a loud sigh, visibly deflating in defeat.
"We are going to regret this."
"Hey, look on the bright side," This time, I chose to be the one to sling my arm around her shoulders instead, acting all buddy-buddy with her like she would have done if she wanted to annoy me but this time, it's my turn to annoy her. "If the worse comes to worst and there's no place for y'all to continue hiding in Fiore, you are always welcomed to join me in my pilgrimage back to Alvarez."
"Didn't you say that you were wanted over there? Like, every city has a bunch of bounty posters with your face on it and that was why you escaped to Fiore? How is escaping to Alvarez with you any better? We will be wanted criminals over there too!"
"Oh trust me, the bounty poster thing is just the ice prick trying to be a smart aleck to suck up to the Emperor. He's the only one that has beef with me, I'm actually on quite friendly terms with a few of the Spriggan Twelve. I told you how powerful they were before, did you seriously think I could have made my escape if one or two of them hadn't been turning a blind eye?"
"Wait. You mean that someone tried to get petty revenge on you by making you a nation-wide wanted criminal? What did you do to him or her?"
"He was there to invite me to join the Spriggan Twelve on behalf of the Emperor. I was being polite at the time, actually, and told him that I respectfully decline. I even followed all the stupid royal etiquette thingy and did a perfect bow, even. But being the suck up to the Emperor that he was, that guy couldn't take no for an answer, so he started to demand that I obey the Emperor's summons-"
"Get to the point."
"I got pissed, he was also pissed, we fought, I broke his precious spectacles, dragged his face through the mud, and from then on he held a grudge against me. End of story."
"That's it?"
"Yep. A few of the other Spriggan Twelve were also there to witness the fight, actually, and some of them don't really like that ice prick too. So we befriended each other over our shared dislike of the ice prick, and got along quite well for a few days until the ice prick somehow convinced the Emperor behind our backs to issue the Spriggan Twelve an order to hunt me down for crimes against the imperial family… Well… Friends or not, when the Spriggan Twelve received a direct order from His Majesty… You get what I'm saying?"
"That's so petty."
"I know, right? That petty little shit, I swear, when I get my hands on him…"
"Children," Ultear clapped her hand twice to cut our conversation short, bringing our attention back to the matter at hand. "If you are done chit chatting, more walking, less talking?"
"You heard the Mum here. Less talking," I borrowed Ultear's words which I emphasised and directed towards Jellal, reminding him of his stupid slip up from earlier. To his credit, Jellal simply sheepishly rubbed his nose with a finger and silently volunteered to carry the unconscious Arcadios to redeem himself for his earlier mistake, slinging the unconscious knight over his shoulder.
"So, how are we going to leave this place?" Meredy asked as she piggybacked the Princess and everyone turned their attention on me, the resident stealth expert. I simply did an exaggerated motion of looking around.
"You asked a very good question, Meredy."
Honestly, I really have no clue either. I certainly didn't plan that far ahead.
