Check out advanced chapters on P@treon: [email protected]/CosmicKaminari
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Noah looked at Mest, whose grip on reality was visibly loosening, and grinned. "Actually, Zeref has one more title you should know about. He is the Emperor of the Alvarez Empire, the nation that unified the entire Western Continent."
Mest made a sound that was not quite a word.
He sat very still for a moment. The Black Wizard. Husband of the First Guild Master. Emperor of the Western Continent. Each piece of information on its own would have been a scandal. Together they formed something that, if it ever reached the public, would send shockwaves through the entire Magic world unlike anything in living memory.
Noah gave him another friendly pat on the shoulder. "One more thing, while we're at it. Hades, the Guild Master of Grimoire Heart, the man who ran what was once called the strongest dark guild in Ishgar, is actually Precht. Our Second Guild Master. One of Fairy Tail's founders."
Mest's throat had gone completely dry. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. He reached mechanically for the glass Mira had just quietly placed in front of him and took a long, deep pull. The cold beer was bracing enough to remind him that he was, in fact, still conscious.
He looked out at the hall. His guildmates were eating and drinking and arguing with the cheerful obliviousness of people who had long since made peace with the impossible being completely ordinary.
He looked at the corner where the First Guild Master sat with her husband, both of them perfectly content. He looked at Noah, who was watching him with the expression of someone enjoying a particularly good performance.
Then Mest put it all down, accepted it, and let it go. Because clearly, that was the only way to survive in this guild.
Fairy Tail had never been an ordinary place. He had simply been away long enough to forget that it ran on revelations the way other guilds ran on mission boards. He let out a long, slow breath, and his shoulders dropped about two inches.
The smile that appeared on his face afterward was the kind that existed somewhere between laughter and a quiet breakdown.
At that moment, Zeref rose from his seat in the corner and made his way to the bar.
Mest straightened instinctively. Whatever he had just finished processing, this was still the man who had developed more dark magic than most mages could name. Not being slightly nervous would have been strange.
Zeref gave Noah a brief nod, then turned to Mest with a composed, unhurried expression. "There is no need to be on edge. I overheard what you said." A short pause. "Face was a failed project from many years ago. I had sealed the blueprints afterward, but it seems the Council managed to locate and reproduce them at scale. That is my oversight, and I take responsibility for it."
Mest's mouth did something that was not quite a smile.
A failed invention. Capable of killing every mage on the continent. He chose, very deliberately, not to think about what Zeref's successful work looked like.
"The good news," Zeref continued, "is that those three thousand Face units are not particularly difficult to deal with. The energy core of each one requires a specific activation frequency to function, and every activation key in existence traces back to the original magic formula I wrote. By reversing that formula, the master switch, every Face on the continent can be shut down simultaneously."
Noah leaned forward slightly. He had been working through his own solution, something involving his Shadow Eater soldiers relocating all three thousand units to the Shadow Kingdom, but this was considerably faster.
Zeref spread his hand, and a small magic circle materialized above his palm, dense with runes and layered notation that shifted as it rotated. He turned it counter-clockwise several times. A faint, barely perceptible pulse expanded outward from him in all directions, passing through walls, through earth, through everything, without disturbing a single living thing.
It spread across the hall. Across Magnolia. Across Fiore. In a few minutes, it had reached the full breadth of the Ishgar continent.
On the magic circle in Zeref's hand, more than three thousand pinpoints of light appeared, each one marking the location of a dormant Face unit.
Zeref pressed a fingertip to the center of the circle.
Every light went out.
"Done. All Face units are fully deactivated." He lowered his hand. "Shall we move on to Crawford?"
Noah was already nodding. He had made Erza a promise, and he intended to keep it.
Mest sat at the bar and did not move.
He had just watched the secret weapon that the Magic Council believed they alone controlled, the trump card that Crawford and the Black Magic Cult had been betting everything on, get switched off in under five minutes by the man who had invented it, over drinks, without leaving his seat.
Crawford had spent considerable time and effort acquiring that activation key. He and the Black Magic Cult had built an entire plan around the belief that they held the power to wipe out every mage in Ishgar. In reality, they had been operating in the shadow of Face's creator the entire time, without ever knowing it.
The enormous crisis that had sent Mest sprinting across the continent, convinced the sky was about to fall, had turned out to be a minor inconvenience that Noah and Zeref resolved without interrupting the banquet.
So this was what it meant to be genuinely powerful.
Mest picked up his glass and finished what was left in it, then set it down with more force than he intended.
"Guild Master," he said, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone who has arrived at a decision after suffering through too much. "Lahar has been talking about putting me forward for a Council seat."
Makarov looked at him.
"If you do not let me end my undercover assignment soon," Mest continued, "I am going to end up sitting on the actual Council. As a real member. With real responsibilities." He looked directly at the old man. "Is that what you want?"
Makarov's expression did something complicated.
The original reason Mest had been placed inside the Council was the Alvarez Empire. Two years ago, with the Western Continent's unification complete and the Empire sealed off from outside contact, Makarov had felt an unease he couldn't quite name about the superpower sitting just across the ocean.
Intelligence on Alvarez was nearly impossible to gather through ordinary channels, so he had sent his best operative into the Council with exactly that objective.
Then Noah had returned from the Western Continent, and the situation had shifted considerably, and Makarov had moved on to the next crisis, and then the one after that, and somewhere along the way he had simply forgotten that Mest was still in there.
Completely forgotten. Not set aside. Forgotten.
Mest watched the guilt spread across his Guild Master's face and felt something inside him give way.
All those years. The late nights. The careful maneuvering to build authority without drawing the wrong kind of attention. The constant mental gymnastics of feeding Makarov information about Alvarez without ever once managing to actually obtain any. He had worked himself to the bone for an assignment that his Guild Master had stopped thinking about entirely at some point he could not even identify.
He reached past Mest's glass, found a full bottle behind the bar, and began drinking directly from it. He did not have the nerve to actually shout at Makarov, so the bottle would have to do.
Nobody paid him much attention. The sound from the backyard had drawn everyone else to the windows and the back door, a deep mechanical roar building steadily into something that rattled the bottles on the shelves.
A large white Sky Warship descended slowly onto the lawn behind the guild, its hull catching the light from the hall's lanterns, the Fairy Tail emblem painted bold and clean along its side. It settled with a low, final thud, and the crowd watching from the doorway gave a collective noise of appreciation.
Hades stepped out through the hatch and found Noah in the crowd without any difficulty. "Repairs are complete. The new paint job is done to your specifications. She's yours."
Noah looked the ship over and nodded. He was not particularly sentimental about it. But the name was another matter. The vessel had belonged to Grimoire Heart, and that history clung to it. A new name felt appropriate.
"Noah's Ark," he announced.
The reaction was immediate and unanimous. Boos. Groans. At least two people threw something. The general sentiment was that naming the ship after himself was exactly the kind of thing Noah would do, and no one was surprised, and everyone objected anyway.
The objections did not last long, because the more pressing question was whether Noah would take everyone up. He would, he said. As it happened, he had an errand that direction anyway.
Noah turned toward the guild hall, where a sea of very eager faces was already looking back at him.
"Everyone on board. We are going to pay the Black Magic Cult's new base a visit and bring Crawford back."