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Princess Hisui was young, but her ambitions were anything but small.
Growing up with access to the secrets the royal family had quietly gathered over the generations, she had come to understand two terrifying truths that most of the world was not permitted to know.
The first was the Black Wizard's deep and enduring grip on the continent. It was not only that countless dark forces across Ishgar worshipped him. Even the Magic Council, the body responsible for keeping order in the Magic world, had built its ultimate weapon, the Face network, from his designs.
The second was Acnologia, the Black Dragon, a force of destruction so overwhelming that its very existence had been quietly buried by both sides of every conflict, as though simply not speaking of it might keep it away.
From those two truths, Hisui had built a dream.
Her magical talent was unremarkable, and by any measure she was still a young girl with no power of her own. None of that had stopped her. Buried beneath the royal capital, in the Dragon Graveyard, was the Eclipse Gate, a structure capable of crossing both time and space. And her father, the King, wanted the Black Wizard dead just as much as she did.
Father and daughter had come to an understanding quickly, and together they had shaped what they called the Eclipse Plan. The idea was simple in outline: use the Eclipse Gate to go back in time, find Zeref and Acnologia before they became what history recorded them as, and end them before the damage was done.
To gather the enormous amount of Magic Power needed to activate the Gate, they had begun constructing an arena on Mount Toms, built from special materials capable of absorbing and storing magical energy released during combat. Once it was complete, the Kingdom of Fiore would announce the Grand Magic Games, framed as a tournament to crown the strongest guild in all of Ishgar.
No guild would turn down that title. Guilds across the continent would send their best mages, those mages would fight, and every drop of Magic Power scattered during those battles would be silently drawn into the arena and stored. Run the Grand Magic Games often enough, and the Eclipse Gate would eventually have what it needed.
While all of that was underway, Hisui would be watching for Celestial Spirit Mages who carried golden Zodiac Keys, and when the moment was right, she would find a way to secure them.
It was, to put it charitably, an ambitious plan. It was also riddled with gaps that anyone who understood either Zeref or Acnologia would have spotted immediately. Where exactly the princess and the King had found the confidence to believe they could locate, let alone kill, two of the most fearsome beings that age had ever produced, in the middle of a war between humans and dragons, was genuinely unclear.
Lucy stood in full view of the princess and did her absolute best to keep her expression neutral.
She could not tell Princess Hisui that one of the two targets she was planning to travel back in time to eliminate was standing right behind her, perfectly alive, watching this entire conversation.
Princess Hisui misread Lucy's silence as stunned contemplation and pressed on, her voice dropping into something more earnest and persuasive.
"Miss Lucy, I understand this may sound overwhelming. But for Fiore, and for the future of all Earth Land, this step must be taken." She held Lucy's gaze with genuine conviction. "If it succeeds, every tragedy that Zeref and Acnologia have caused throughout history will be undone. Countless lives will be spared. I need your power, and the power of your twelve Zodiac Keys, to guide and stabilize the Eclipse Gate. Please help me. In doing so, you would be helping the entire world."
The more she spoke, the more certain she sounded. For someone so young, she carried a remarkable amount of conviction in that small frame.
Lucy listened, and while she did, her eyes drifted sideways toward the spot where her companions stood invisible.
Erza had a firm hand clamped over Natsu's mouth. The look on his face suggested he had several opinions he very much wanted to share.
Mira was maintaining her polite smile with visible effort. The corner of her mouth was doing something involuntary.
Anna pressed her fingers to her forehead and muttered quietly, "Travel back in time to kill Zeref and the Black Dragon to prevent disaster. Only someone raised inside a royal palace could produce a plan this confident and this uninformed at the same time."
Irene studied Princess Hisui with an expression of detached interest. "She has courage, at least. She simply has no concept of what power actually looks like."
Mavis stayed at Zeref's side, her expression still and unreadable.
Zeref himself had recovered from his initial moment of speechless surprise. His face was calm again. But something moved through his eyes, a complicated emotion that mixed absurdity with something close to self-reproach, and after a moment it settled into a quiet, barely audible sigh.
He could not argue with what the princess was trying to accomplish. The Contradictory Curse had killed countless people who had simply come too close to him. The demons he had created to find a way to end his own life had spread ruin in every direction. Those who had tried to use his power for their own ambitions, people like Hades, had caused devastation of their own. None of it had been what Zeref intended. That did not change what it had produced.
He watched Princess Hisui continue her earnest attempt to persuade Lucy, and then he stepped forward.
His invisibility dissolved, and he appeared beside Lucy without warning, the faint light of the Eclipse Gate outlining the calm lines of his face.
Princess Hisui and the captain of the Cherry Blossom Knights, Arcadios, both looked at him with immediate surprise. Based on everything they knew about Fairy Tail, this dark-haired young man did not belong to it.
"Who are you?!"
Arcadios reacted without hesitation, leveling his sword at Zeref. The guard mages closed ranks around Princess Hisui at once, Magic Power already building in their hands. Something about Zeref made every person in that tunnel feel, on a level they could not articulate, that they were standing in front of something they could not measure.
Zeref did not look at the soldiers. His gaze rested on Princess Hisui, and his voice was unhurried and quiet, the kind of voice that did not need volume to reach every ear in the room.
"I regret to say, Your Royal Highness, that the Eclipse Plan is flawed at its very foundation. It cannot succeed."
Princess Hisui looked out from behind her guards, her expression caught between surprise and indignation. "Who are you? And what makes you say the Eclipse Plan has problems?"
Zeref held her gaze. When he spoke, there was nothing theatrical about it. Only a simple, steady statement of fact.
"My name is Zeref Dragneel."
"I am the Black Wizard. The one your plan intends to kill before he can become a problem."
Silence.
A silence so complete and so sudden that it felt like something physical had descended over the entire Dragon Graveyard.
The sword tips of the Cherry Blossom Knights trembled. The Magic Power of the guard mages stuttered and lost its shape. Arcadios stood perfectly still, cold sweat tracing a slow line down his temple.
The color drained from Princess Hisui's face all at once.
She stared at him. The gentle-mannered, almost melancholy young man standing in the light of the Eclipse Gate bore no resemblance to any version of the Black Wizard she had ever read about or imagined. History had painted a figure of catastrophe and ruin. This was not what catastrophe was supposed to look like.
And she had just spent the last several minutes explaining, in considerable detail, her plan to have him killed. To his face. Without knowing it.
Whatever composure she had was gone. No matter how brave her dreams were, Hisui was still a child, and she had grown up with the Black Wizard as the monster at the edge of every dark story. Meeting the real version of that monster, at close range, with no warning, was a different thing entirely from dreaming about stopping him.
The Eclipse Gate blazed behind them.
A figure stepped through the light, moving with an easy, unhurried stride, and emerged into the Dragon Graveyard. Noah took in the scene in one sweep: a large group of soldiers standing frozen in place, a little girl on the verge of tears, and his companions arranged nearby with varying degrees of suppressed amusement.
He looked at Erza and raised an eyebrow.
"Are you all... playing the villains?"