The guild hall had mostly emptied out by the time Macao dragged a chair over and sat down across from Aelius, Wakaba settling beside him with a fresh drink and the expression of a man who had decided that whatever was about to happen was worth being sober adjacent for. A few members lingered at the far tables, far enough to not be part of the conversation and close enough to hear it anyway, which was simply how guild halls worked, and none of the three of them bothered acknowledging it.
Macao put both hands on the table and looked at Aelius. "How much did I actually tell you over the lacrima?"
"That the games exist. That Fairy Tail is sixth. That the Council moved the date." Aelius looked back at him. "That's most of it."
"Right." Macao exhaled. "Okay. From the beginning then." He leaned forward slightly, settling into it. "The Grand Magic Games. Council introduced them last year, first time they'd ever done anything like it. Official line is that it gives guilds a clear picture of where they stand, prevents another Phantom Lord situation by making strength a public and measurable thing rather than something guilds just assume about each other." He paused.
"And the actual line, from what we figure anyway," Wakaba said, not looking up from his drink, "is that the Council gets to keep an eye on every major guild in Fiore in one place for a week, in front of a very large crowd that makes it difficult for anyone to do anything the Council would find inconvenient."
"Crocus, I assume?" Aelius asked.
"Crocus," Macao confirmed. "The capital, even the King attends, most of the nobility as well. It's become an event very quickly, bigger second year than first by a significant margin from what I've heard. The city is already filling up as we speak." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Which is part of why the Council moved the date, as you said: more people available in summer. The format." Macao pulled the chair closer. "Any guild that enters competes; there's a preliminary event first, all competing guilds at once. Last year it was called Sky Labyrinth, a floating maze above Crocus; the first eight teams to reach the end qualify. What it is this year we don't know yet; they announce it on the day of to avoid any preparation or cheating." He paused. "Each guild is supposed to send a team of five."
"Supposed to?"
"Supposed to," Macao repeated. "Technically you can have less, though it's not advised, so we, or you, should be fine to enter solo. If not, me, Wakaba, Bisca, and Alzac will fill in, which won't matter much, because we can choose you for any event." Wakaba snorted quietly into his drink, but didn't comment. "Each day of the Games has two parts," Macao continued. "An event in the morning, and battles in the afternoon. The event is different every day, something designed to test a specific aspect of the team: speed, endurance, magical output, coordination. Points are awarded based on placement in the event; the full team participates." He looked at Aelius steadily. "Then the afternoon battles. The host draws names, one member from one guild against one member from another, single combat. Win, lose, or draw, points are awarded accordingly. Wins give the most. Draws give partial points. Losses give nothing."
"Points accumulate across the week," Wakaba added. "Guild with the most at the end wins. Prize money, ranking adjustment, and the title." He set his drink down. "Which last year went to Sabertooth."
"I know who Jura is," Aelius said. "I....tolerate him. More than most. We had a brief encounter during the Oración Seis incident." He paused briefly. Nehzhar had disappeared after that, after copying Juvia's magic and vanishing with it. Two years and nothing. Which was either fine or wasn't, and there was nothing he could do about it either way from here.
He let it go and looked at Macao properly for the first time since sitting down. Two years had done more to the man than it should have. It wasn't gray hair or a stoop; it was something quieter, lines around his eyes, and the way he held his shoulders with the cadence of someone who had been carrying something without a break for long enough that it had started leaving marks in places that didn't show immediately. Wakaba had it too, though it sat differently on him, not quite as aggressive- but the man was quieter than Aelius had known him to be. Aelius didn't say any of that; he'd spare them that for now.
"Raven Tail came third," Macao continued. He glanced at Wakaba briefly before continuing. "We don't know much about them. They're not a guild with much of a public history before last year. What we do know is they don't fight clean, and they were comfortable enough doing it in front of a full crowd and a panel of officials." His jaw tightened slightly. "There were formal complaints. The Council acknowledged them and did nothing."
"Who runs them?" Aelius said.
"The name on the registration is…. Ivan Dreyar, yes, Laxus's Father." Macao left it there for a moment. "What we know is they placed third; they cheated to do it. Blue Pegasus was fourth," Macao said. "Nothing that stands out beyond Ichiya, who has a reputation for performing above what you'd expect looking at him. Mermaid Heel was fifth; their strongest member is a sword mage called Kagura Mikazuchi. She didn't compete last year due to injury. She'll be competing this year." He paused. "From what I've heard, she's the kind of fighter that moves a team's placement on her own." He looked at Aelius steadily. "Then we're at sixth. Two points above Quatro Cerberus at seventh."
"Two points," Wakaba said, not quite to anyone. He turned his drink in his hands. "Two points and we're still technically respectable."
"Barely," Macao muttered.
Aelius looked between them. "The individual battles."
"Right." Macao straightened. "You can't push past a concession. If your opponent gives up and you don't stop, the officials can step in and strip the points. That's what happened to Minerva last year; she kept going after her opponent was down, and officials intervened just before it became something they couldn't ignore. You get one warning before you lose points." The look on his face said everything about what he thought of that. "The crowd matters too, not just the numbers. A guild that wins ugly loses something that doesn't show in the final standings until it's already cost them. A guild that wins clean, or wins in a way people remember...." He shrugged. "Gains something the points don't account for."
"What he means," Wakaba said, glancing sideways at Aelius, "is that if you walk in there and dismantle everyone they put in front of you, the way I think you're going to, the crowd is going to remember that regardless of where we place."
"We're not going there to be liked," Aelius said.
"No," Wakaba agreed. "But it doesn't hurt."
Macao leaned back. "Like I said earlier, at least some of what they design is going to be built around limiting what one person can do. Just like last year."
"Then the battles carry the weight," Aelius said.
"That's what I was hoping you'd say." Macao exhaled slowly, the sound of a man releasing something he'd been holding for longer than tonight.
"I'll register tomorrow," Aelius said simply, his tone distant as he was lost in thought.
Wakaba let out a long breath. "....The moment that goes in, everyone entering is going to know Fairy Tail has some sort of trick."
"Good." Aelius stood. He looked at Macao for a moment, at the lines that hadn't been there two years ago, at the way the man was sitting like he hadn't fully let himself stop since this all started. "Get some sleep."
Macao laughed, short and tired and genuine. "Yea." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Been a while since anyone told me that."
Aelius didn't answer. He turned and walked toward the door, and the few members still at the far tables watched him go without saying anything, the guild hall settling into a quiet murmur behind him, and for the first time in two years, he walked home.
And it was nice to be back home. The outside was almost exactly as he'd left it. His runes had done their job, dust glancing off the invisible barrier and swept elsewhere, leaves and twigs redirected before they could settle, the forest held politely at arm's length. From the path it looked almost preserved, like the years had simply declined to touch it.
The inside was a different matter entirely.
Vanessa had clearly designated herself his housekeeper at some point, which appeared to involve room and board and very little actual housekeeping. The kitchen told the story in two distinct halves, one side scorched in a way that suggested something had gone badly wrong at some point and simply been left as a monument to the event, the other a wasteland of mismatched containers and things that had been put down temporarily sometime in the last two years and never moved again. The common area was buried under a comfortable layer of clothes, books, cups, plates, and at least three things he couldn't immediately identify from the doorway.
He stood in the entrance for a long moment, looking at it. The bedroom, hopefully not his, was probably worse. He wasn't going to check yet. He moved a coat off the nearest chair and sat down, and the chair was….off balance, one of the legs messed with or broken, but it was comfortable either way. The forest outside was quiet through the walls, the kind of quiet that was full rather than empty, insects and wind and the occasional shift of branches, sounds that he hadnt heard hadn't had because his life had been a dead place even for two years. He hadn't noticed the absence of those sounds while he was down there. He noticed their return now.
He looked around the room again. A book had been left open and face down on the floor beside the far chair, which would have made Levy wince. One of Vanessa's cups sat on the windowsill with something dried and forgotten at the bottom of it. A scarf he didn't recognize was draped over the back of the sofa, and two more books were stacked on top of a third on the small table by the door, none of them with any visible bookmark system that suggested they'd been finished.
It was chaos by any reasonable standard. It was also, unmistakably, evidence that someone had been living here. Had been comfortable enough to leave things where they fell and trust that the house would still be the house tomorrow. Had treated the space like it belonged to them in the way people only did when they felt safe enough to stop being careful about it.
He picked up the nearest book from the floor without looking at the title and set it properly on the table. Then he sat back down, becuase for the first time in two years he had absolutely nothing that required his immediate attention. It was a strange feeling. He wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.
He didn't want to put more thought into his problem. The dragon would still be unkillable when he got back, the wall would still be a wall, and sitting in a chair in a messy house in the forest outside Magnolia was not going to produce the answer that two years away hadn't. So he left it alone.
And if he was being honest with himself, which he generally preferred to be even when the honesty was unflattering, he was treating this less as a mission and more as a vacation. He would never say that out loud. The number of people who would find it personally offensive was high enough to constitute most of a nation. But the reality of it was simple enough. He wasn't going to lose, not in any sense that mattered. Even if Fairy Tail didn't place first, even if the event formats carved into their score exactly as the Council intended, nobody who watched him fight this week was going to walk away thinking Fairy Tail was a guild worth pushing around. That was the actual goal. The placement was secondary.
He had learned something the first time he went into the Labyrinth. Used correctly, applied at the right moment, and in the right measure, fear was a motivator; it pushed people into action, got things moving that had been standing still. But applied with force, with totality, and no room left for hope or alternative, it didn't spawn rebellion. It crushed the conditions rebellion needed to exist in before they could take root.
The guilds circling Fairy Tail weren't afraid yet. Twilight Ogre had walked through the front door in broad daylight and put their hands on the Guild Master, which was about as clear a signal as anything that the fear wasn't there. After this week, it would be. Because, for what might be the first time, Aelius would put on a show.
The guilds circling Fairy Tail weren't afraid yet. Twilight Ogre had walked through the front door in broad daylight and put their hands on the Guild Master, which was about as clear a signal as anything that the fear wasn't there. After this week, it would be. Because, for what might be the first time, Aelius would put on a show. He wasn't built for performance. He had never particularly cared what a fight looked like from the outside, had always been more interested in the most efficient path between the start of something and the end of it, and efficiency rarely made for spectacle. But efficiency and spectacle weren't mutually exclusive; they simply didn't overlap naturally, and for one week in Crocus he was willing to find the overlap.
Not cruelty for its own sake. What he intended was closer to clarity, though clarity through cruelty was what he deemed the most effective path. There was a difference, even if nobody on the receiving end of it was likely to appreciate the distinction. Cruelty for its own sake was Minerva holding a broken opponent on the ground because she could and because she wanted to. What Aelius intended was something with a purpose underneath it, every painful moment of it pointing at the same conclusion, making the gap between what he was and what they were so undeniable that the crowd did the rest of the work themselves.
People remembered pain more clearly than they remembered loss. A clean defeat faded. Something that had made them feel small in front of thousands of witnesses did not. He wasn't going to be excessive about it, he wasn't going to drag anything out past the point of usefulness, but he was not going to be gentle either, and he was not going to pretend that gentle was something the situation called for.
Fairy Tail needed people afraid to touch it. Fear required evidence, and he was going to provide it. It wasn't as though he didn't know how to be cruel. He had demonstrated that the day he returned, and more than once in the weeks afterward when someone pushed far enough to find the edge of his patience and discover there was nothing soft on the other side of it. His mind went briefly to Evergreen. The specific pressure of her eyes giving way under his fingers. He hadn't enjoyed it exactly, but he hadn't flinched from it either, and she had walked away understanding something about the distance between them that she hadn't understood before. That was the point. That had always been the point.
Laxus was perhaps the cleaner example of what he intended for Crocus. The man had built an entire identity around the belief that power was the only truth worth respecting, which Aelius didn't entirely disagree with; the disagreement was in the application. Laxus had used that belief as a reason to take, to push, to make himself the center of every equation regardless of what it cost everyone else in the radius. So Aelius had removed the thing he believed in most. Had taken the magic away cleanly and completely and left the man with nothing but the shape of who he was without it.
And months later Laxus was different. Not reformed in any clean or simple sense, the fundamental character was still there, the pride, the hardness, the refusal to bend toward anything he didn't respect. But the direction of it had shifted. Something in the removal had forced him to sit with the question of who he was when the power wasn't available to answer it for him, and whatever he'd found in that sitting had changed the texture of him in ways that were still becoming clear. The way he was around Mira. The day he came back to the guild and the specific quality of the silence between him and the members who had watched him leave.
That was what cruelty used correctly looked like. Not damage for its own sake. Damage that pointed at something, that forced a reckoning that comfort would never have produced. The people in Crocus who faced himwere going to walk away understanding something they hadn't understood when they walked in, about themselves, about Fairy Tail, about the distance between confidence and capability.
And the ones watching from the stands were going to carry that understanding back to wherever they came from.
He leaned back further in the chair, the book open in his lap and largely ignored, the forest dark and easy outside the windows of his thoroughly destroyed house, and thought about what a week in Crocus was going to look like.
Aelius woke to the sound of birds chirping, and the lake brushing the shore somewhere through the trees. He had fallen asleep in the chair, the book still open in his lap, which he noticed and set aside without looking at the page.
He sat there for a moment, listening to the songs. It was peaceful. Genuinely, completely peaceful, the kind that didn't ask anything of him, that simply existed around him the way the forest existed, without agenda or expectation. The birds didn't care who he was. The lake didn't care. The light coming through the windows had the soft quality of early morning, unhurried, the day not yet committed to being anything in particular.
He hated it. The feeling crept in sideways, starting as discomfort and becoming something worse the longer he sat with it. The peacefulness felt wrong, foul, more foul than anything his magic produced, which was saying something, given what his magic produced. He stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the treeline, the early light filtering through the canopy in long, pale strips, the lake behind him, continuing its gentle rhythm
They were in stasis. Natsu was in stasis inside a Fairy Sphere on an island that no longer existed above the waterline, and had been for two years, and would be for five more. Gray was in stasis. Erza was in stasis. Levy was in stasis. Makarov was in stasis. All of them suspended in the exact moment Acnologia had decided that Tenrou Island was something that needed to stop existing, frozen there while the world continued without them and Aelius stood in a forest outside Magnolia listening to birds and finding it peaceful.
He turned away from the window. The book was on the table where he'd set it. Vanessa's coat was still on the floor. The cup on the windowsill with the dried something at the bottom of it caught the morning light and threw a small shadow across the sill. Everything in the room was ordinary and comfortable and his, or close enough to his that the distinction didn't matter, and all of it felt like an accusation he didn't have the standing to argue with.
He went to the kitchen. The scorched half he ignored. The other half had enough intact to produce something functional, and he moved through it without thinking too hard about what he was doing, because thinking too hard about what he was doing led back to the same place and he had been in that place for less than five minutes and already wanted out of it.
Acnologia was alive. That thought landed differently than the first. The others in stasis was grief, manageable grief, grief with an endpoint attached because they were coming back; they had too. Acnologia was something else. Acnologia had done what it did to Tenrou Island because it could, and Aelius had spent two years in a dead kingdom failing to kill a dragon that wasn't even Acnologia.
He set down whatever he'd been holding and looked at the kitchen wall for a moment. The birds outside continued. The lake continued. The morning continued with the cheerful, absolute indifference of mornings everywhere, and he stood in his kitchen in his house in his forest and felt the peacefulness of it pressing against him from every direction like something he hadn't earned the right to be inside of.
It was suffocating, as if the very filth he produced had begun wrapping around him. His fists clenched and unclenched, his eyes narrowed at nothing in particular. He felt disgusted by himself. Here he was, just existing, even if for a moment. He didn't deserve it, not while the dragon was still alive, not while it hadn't learned to suffer. He had failed, and failed, and failed even more; all his life was failure, and until he learned to stop, he didn't deserve something so simple as a peaceful morning.
He moved back to the common area, picked up Vanessa's coat from the floor, draped it over the back of the chair, and stood in the middle of the room looking at nothing in particular. The self-recrimination was not useful. He was aware of that. It was not producing anything actionable; it was not moving him toward anything; it was simply the weight of someone who had gotten very good at surviving things and could not stop noticing what that survival had cost everyone around him.
The birds were still going outside. He deeply wished they would stop.