A few minutes earlier, the competing guilds had been guided into waiting rooms beneath the arena, separated, and each room was soundproofed by magic and equipped with a large lacrima that served as the only window to what was happening above. Even through the walls, Aelius could feel the crowd, the weight of thousands of people responding to something at once. He sat in a chair in Fairy Tail's waiting room and watched the lacrima as it lit up with the announcer's face. "Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, I welcome you all to the Second Annual Grand Magic Games!!"
The crowd answered with a roar that made the walls vibrate faintly, and the announcer let it run for a moment before continuing. "Is everyone ready for the preliminary round!?" He let the next roar run as well. "Just like last year, only eight teams will qualify for the games themselves. But, to keep things fair, this year's preliminary will not be combat only."
The lacrima shifted, projecting an image of the arena from the sky. The open preparation space was gone, replaced by something that had risen from the floor while the competitors were below. Walls in configurations with no straight lines anywhere, crystal surfaces catching the afternoon light and throwing it in every direction at once. It climbed upward in layers that overlapped each other, going as high as the open top of the Domus Flau would allow.
"Allow me to introduce the Crystal Labyrinth!!" The announcer's voice carried the satisfaction of someone delivering something they were proud of. "Over one hundred guilds will enter a magical maze that shifts constantly. Hidden throughout are eight Grand Crystals. A team only needs to retrieve one crystal and carry it to the exit to qualify. Combat is permitted, but any competitor rendered unconscious will be removed from the labyrinth immediately by magical officials. The first eight guilds to escape with a crystal in hand will advance to the Grand Magic Games official rounds."
Aelius looked at the lacrima and thought about the game. A maze that moved meant it couldn't be memorized, which removed normal navigation and replaced it with something that numbers would help with more, but on top of all of it, if you couldn't defend your team until they escaped with the crystal, then you'd lose anyway.
A full team of five could split and cover ground at once, search multiple sections, guard whoever was carrying the crystal, and buy time for them to escape into the maze, meaning that even if they were weak, someone could escape and allow the guild to advance. Aelius sighed and rubbed his head through his mask; he was immediately seeing the downside of being an army of one, and he wasn't planning to use his wings just yet. Even if he could, he wouldn't have been surprised if the maze was enchanted to counter that exact type of magic.
"Competitors," the announcer said, his voice dropping from performance into an almost reverent tone. "Take your positions." The lacrima went dark as the door at the far end of the waiting room opened. Beyond it, the corridor led upward, and at the end of the corridor was the arena floor, and the noise that had been a pressure through the walls became something considerably more tangible as the noise from the crowd vibrated the air around him.
The labyrinth was brighter than it had looked on the lacrima, something he learned as he stepped out into the open. The crystal walls caught the afternoon sun and threw it in every direction at once, and Aelius could instantly tell the inspiration of this game was one from a kids' carnival. The entire maze was see-through, while simultaneously reflecting light, making every step a very real chance to run headfirst into a wall, which meant everyone could see everyone, and as if to prove his point, it also meant the crystals themselves were visible too. He could see one from where he stood at the entrance, suspended in a section three layers deep, glowing faintly in a way that made it distinct from the walls surrounding it. The two teams on either side of Aelius were already moving toward it from different directions, their paths converging without either of them being able to see the other yet, because seeing through crystal and navigating by what you saw through crystal were problems that had very little to do with each other.
Around him, the announcer's voice rolled across the arena with the enthusiasm of a man who had been given the best job he could imagine and intended to perform it accordingly. "And they're off, ladies and gentlemen, over one hundred teams entering the Crystal Labyrinth simultaneously, and what a sight it is! The walls are fully transparent, which means we up here in the stands can see everything happening inside, every move, every mistake, every collision, and oh, there's already one now in the eastern section, two teams going for the same crystal and neither one spotted the other coming! This is going to be a spectacular preliminary, I can feel it!"
His co-commentator said something Aelius didn't catch, and both announcers laughed. "Quite right, quite right, and speaking of things worth watching, let's address something that has had this entire arena buzzing since the registration forms went public this morning!" He gave a brief, theatrical pause, while the sound of paper crinkling came over the stadium. "Fairy Tail. Sixth-place guild from Magnolia, the former number one until an unfortunate accident two years ago. Registered team size: one." The announcer made a grand show of flipping the paper, using the sound to fill the gap he was taking, letting the crowd's reaction breathe. "One member, ladies and gentlemen! And that member's name is on the registration as Aelius Morvain; for those of you unaware, the Tenth Seat Wizard Saint, entering solo against full teams of five, including one team with the Eighth Seat Wizard Saint, Iron Rock Jura! How amazing is that, folks? If you ask me, it seems like this Aelius has declared himself better than, well, everyone else here. Sure to strike up rivalries and animosity that will make for a great show!"
Aelius walked into the labyrinth while the announcer was still gushing over him. He was cold and couldn't see the walls, the light angling in so many ways, so that where it showed one, it hid two, and made fake walls where there were openings. He took a single step before the labyrinth shifted somewhere to his left, a grinding movement of crystal against crystal as a section rearranged itself, the walls sliding into new configurations. He adjusted his route without stopping, only slowing slightly so as not to slam into an invisible wall.
He could see two crystals from his current position, both of them several layers deep, their faint glow visible through the transparent walls between him and them. He could also see three separate teams moving through those layers, all of them navigating with varying degrees of difficulty, two of them having clearly already walked into walls they hadn't seen coming, one of them moving faster than most, obviously having figured out a trick that most haven't.
He picked the nearer crystal and moved toward it, and had gotten two sections away when a team got there first. There were four of them, each with a guild mark he didn't recognize, one of them already reaching for the crystal while the other three fanned out to cover the section. The one reaching for it looked up through the wall between them and made eye contact with Aelius before he turned and said something to the others that made all four of them turn.
They spread out across the section entrance, blocking it, which was a reasonable tactical decision given the information they had. A single mage, moving alone, was either not a threat worth worrying about or was exactly the kind of threat you wanted between you and the crystal before he reached it.
"Move," Aelius said.
The one closest to him, a broad man with a hammer across his back, shook his head. "Find another one. This one's ours."
Aelius looked at him for a moment, then he looked at the crystal and began walking forward, causing the broad man to swing the hammer, aiming to crush Aelius's ribs, and Aelius stepped inside the arc of it and put his palms flat against the man's sternum and pushed. To the eyes of all the ones watching the exchange. It looked like Aelius had touched the man, and then he was simply…gone, teleported out of the arena into the medical zone.
The other three looked at the space their teammate used to be, then back at Aelius, and made the collective decision that the crystal wasn't worth whatever they'd just watched happen, stepping back and to the sides, giving Aelius a clear path to the crystal, one he gladly took as he walked through the gap, picked up the crystal, and kept moving. Above him, through the transparent ceiling of the labyrinth's upper sections, he could see the stands, the crowd visible in every direction, and could hear the announcer's voice carrying down into the maze with the particular amplification of magic that made it audible everywhere at once.
"And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the Fairy Tail representative has a crystal, the first one retrieved in this entire preliminary, and from what our lacrima is showing us up here, the team he went through to get it is still trying to work out what exactly happened!" his voice broke for a moment, and carried genuine delight in it. "I think we may be in for a very interesting week."
Aelius wandered for about another minute, ignoring the crowd and the noise in general before he found an exit. But when he tried to go through it, the door didn't open
Above, the announcer's voice carried through the crystal with the delight of someone who had been waiting to deliver this since the preliminary began. "And there might have been something I forgot to mention to all our lovely contestants! There are one hundred and fourteen exits, one for each guild that entered. Now you may be thinking, that's a lot of exits, and you'd be right! But only one of those exits will open for each crystal, meaning for our Fairy friend who just found one exit that didn't work, he will need to find and test each and every one, hoping his crystal will be the key to his victory!" A pause. "Although he is still the first to have a crystal at all, so perhaps that counts for something!"
The crowd's reaction filtered down through the walls, somewhere between amusement and genuine anticipation. Aelius turned away from the exit, perhaps a touch harsher than he needed to, his boot digging a groove into the sand, and looked back into the labyrinth.
One hundred and fourteen exits. One correct door somewhere in a maze that shifted constantly, with over a hundred other teams now aware he had a crystal and every reason to come for him before he found the right one. To say he was annoyed was putting it lightly; when he started moving again, the dirt under his feet had turned black, leaving a very obvious trail through the maze.
The labyrinth had rearranged itself while he stood at the wrong exit, sections shifting into new configurations that made the map he had built partially useless. He read the edges of the walls as he went, moving through the refracted light with his left hand loose at his side, crystal visible to anyone watching through the transparent walls. He pressed it to the second exit. Nothing.
A team caught up to him at the third exit, five members converging from two directions. The one in front raised a hand, and wind magic hit the corridor ahead of him, solid output from someone who knew what they were doing, pushing against him with acceptable force.
He walked through it, releasing his own magic, letting it form a green aura that ate the magic in front of him, dispersing it. He came out the other side a step closer to the nearest of the four than they had been expecting.
The caster looked at him and tried harder, and Aelius only felt more annoyed as he waved his hand and muttered an aegis to block the next attack, as he pressed the crystal to the third exit, and got nothing. He turned and looked at each of the five in turn, and they all tried to jump Aelius as he moved past them, the instant they got close, Aelius flared his aura of magic harder, and the team faded with a scream.
One could ask why Aelius was being so…lazy and lenient with his current opponents, and the answer was, he wasn't. He wanted to conserve his abilities, not for any reason as to keep the advantage, he wasn't Worried about a single person present. In truth, he wanted to preserve how horrifying his magic could be, until he could maximize the shock value with everyone currently watching.
He walked past where the guild used to be, only to be heard by the announcer's voice. "He's moving through that labyrinth like he's out for a morning stroll, ladies and gentlemen, and the teams trying to intercept him are finding out very quickly that the planning was the easy part! His fourth exit attempt is coming up, and the question on everyone's mind is, how long before he finds the right door!"
Fourth exit, nothing. Fifth. A team of three hit him from the left as he pulled away from it, one of them landing a solid hit across his back with a reinforced gauntlet that would have sent most people into the wall. He turned and swatted the man away with his hand, before heading back into the maze. He didn't have time, nor the patience to deal with every fool who came for him, he needed to secure his spot before he could teach them a lesson.
Sixth exit, sothing. Seventh. A pair tried to cut him off ahead and he went through the wall section to his left instead, reading the edge correctly, the crystal catching the light as he moved and throwing it across the corridor behind him in a brief, refracting sweep.
Eighth, nothing. The announcer had also been counting Aelius's plight. "Eight exits tried and eight have failed for the Fairy Tail representative, but ladies and gentlemen, look at the rest of this field, because three other teams have crystals now and they are searching too, this preliminary is heating up and we are nowhere near done!"
Ninth. Tenth. A team of five hit him together between the tenth and eleventh exits, coordinated and committed; they were disqualified after Aelius used spores to paralyse them and cause them to itch until they couldn't take it.
Eleventh exit, still nothing. The wall closest to aelius began to darken from his magic reading his extreme annoyance, before he stifled the flow before he got disqualified for something stupid like breaking the arena.
In the end it took an hour and a half. He tested exits one by one, ran into teams that tried to stop him and didn't, and navigated a maze that kept rearranging itself every turn he took, more than once causing him to run mask first into a wall.
The announcer had informed the crowd at some point that Sabertooth and Mermaid Heel had already escaped, both through what he described with obvious excitement as sheer fortune, their crystals matching the first or second exits they had tried.
When the correct exit finally opened for Aelius, he had touched the crystal to the door, causing both to seemingly evaporate before he stepped inside, the door closing behind him and leaving aelius with the underground air of the arena.
"AND FAIRY TAIL QUALIFIES!" The announcer's voice hit the arena with everything he had. "Third team through, ladies and gentlemen, and I think we can all agree that third place in this preliminary tells us almost nothing about what this man is actually capable of, given that he spent ninety minutes testing exits one by one while every team in that labyrinth took turns learning why interrupting him was a bad idea! Aelius Morvain, Tenth Seat Wizard Saint, representing Fairy Tail alone, and he is through!"
The crowd was louder in response, the roar only growing as he walked to Fairy Tail's marked section on the arena lobby floor and stood there, and the noise continued around him, and he looked up at the stands until he found section nine and the small cluster of Fairy Tail colors in it.
Macao was on his feet. Wakaba had his drink raised. Romeo was shouting something that didn't carry over the general volume. Even Jet, standing slightly apart from the others, was watching with an expression that had stopped being hostile and become something more complicated that he apparently hadn't decided what to do with yet.
Aelius looked at them for a moment, and waited until the fourth qualifier emerged from the labyrinth before deciding that standing in an empty section on the arena floor was less useful than being somewhere else. The waiting room restriction applied to competing members during the preliminary itself, and the preliminary was not over, but there was nothing in the rules that said he had to remain on the floor once he had already qualified, so he simply left.
The corridor beneath the arena was quieter than the floor above, the crowd noise settling into that same pressure through stone rather than direct sound. He found the stairs that led up to the public concourse level without difficulty and took them, emerging into the flow of people moving between vendor stalls and archways with the general purposeful energy of the crowd.
Section nine was on the northern side. He moved through the concourse normally, for him anyway, people moved around him the way people moved around someone they had clocked as not interested in being approached, which was accurate and saved everyone time.
He heard them before he reached the archway. Romeo's voice first, explaining something to Droy, who responded, and then Jet cutting across both of them with a correction that sounded like it was probably right and was definitely delivered with more confidence than the situation required.
He stepped through the archway into the seating section. Macao saw him first and said nothing, which was its own kind of greeting. Wakaba raised his drink without looking up from the arena floor below. Romeo turned at the sound of someone entering and his face shifted into Awe for a moment before he calmed himself, with a cough.
"You're not supposed to be up here yet," Jet said, not looking at him, eyes still on the arena floor.
"The preliminary is over for me," Aelius said, and sat down in the empty seat at the end of the row that nobody had taken, which may or may not have been deliberate on someone's part.
"Fair enough," Droy said.
Below, the labyrinth was still running, the crystal walls catching the afternoon light in shifting patterns as the remaining teams moved through it. The announcer was narrating the progress of the remaining qualifiers as well, keeping everyone in the loop on what was happening, even if they didn't want to know. .
"Sabertooth came through first," Romeo said, to Aelius, in the tone of someone delivering a briefing. "They found the right exit on their second try apparently."
"I heard," Aelius said with an unseen roll of his eyes.
"Mermaid Heel was second. Then you." Romeo paused. "Then a guild called Quatro Cerberus came fourth, they came through about ten minutes after you. If the get lucky, Blue Pegasus will pass next.."
"Ichiya is carrying the crystal," Bisca said, from two seats down, without looking away from the arena. "I don't know how he is without without breaking it, but he is"
"Ichiya," Alzack said, beside her. "I've heard of him."
"Everyone's heard of him," Wakaba sai with a shudder.
Below, the announcer's voice rolled across the arena. "And Blue Pegasus takes fifth place in the preliminary, ladies and gentlemen, making it through with their captain carrying the crystal, what a performance! Three spots remaining, and I count at least six teams still visible in the labyrinth with crystals, so this final stretch is going to be a fight, folks, a genuine fight for the last three qualifying positions!"
Aelius watched the game from the stands and found it considerably more legible from above than it had been from inside. The transparent walls showed the full shape of the maze from this angle, the sections and their shifting configurations visible all at once in a way that hadn't been available to anyone navigating through it. He could see two separate teams converging on the same exit from different directions, neither aware of the other yet, and could already see that neither of them was going to make it through that particular door because the crystal one of them was carrying was the wrong one for it, which they would discover in approximately thirty seconds.
"Hard to believe you were in there for an hour and a half," Romeo said, watching the same thing.
"The exits are random," Aelius said. "It had nothing to do with speed."
"Still." Romeo looked at him briefly. "You didn't stop moving the whole time. The lacrima screens were showing it. Whenever they cut to you, you were just..." He gestured vaguely. "Moving."
"What else would I do." Romeo thought about that and apparently didn't have an answer for it.
Jet said something under his breath that Droy responded to quietly, and whatever the exchange was it didn't escalate, which was its own minor achievement given the last two years of whatever had been building between them and Aelius. He let it go and kept his eyes on the arena.
The sixth qualifier came through twenty minutes later, Lamia Scale, which meant Jura was through, their full team of five emerging together with the composed efficiency of people who had treated the preliminary as a problem to be solved rather than a spectacle to perform in.
"That's Jura's guild," Macao said, for the benefit of anyone who hadn't been paying attention to that particular detail.
"I know," several people said, at varying times and in varying tones.
"Lamia Scale in sixth place for the preliminary, but don't let that fool you, ladies and gentlemen, because last year's second place finishers are absolutely a force to be reckoned with this week, and their Iron Rock is looking as steady as ever coming through that exit!"
Seventh came eight minutes after sixth, a guild called Raven Tail, their five members moving through the exit with the close formation of a team that had stayed together through the entire preliminary, which either meant they were cautious or that they had a reason to stay grouped.
"Raven Tail," Wakaba said, flatly.
"No one said anything further, and the row went quiet for a moment, before the chatter picked up slightly as two teams began to clash in the maze below
The eighth spot took another forty minutes.
The labyrinth was visibly thinning by then, the remaining teams fewer and more desperate, the shifting walls rearranging the same sections repeatedly as the teams inside tried exit after exit with the focused urgency of people who understood that one qualifying spot remained and several of them were competing for it. the commentary filling the space with updates on which teams were still inside and which exits were being tested and how many teams had been eliminated by the unconscious ruling.
When the eighth qualifier finally came through, it was a guild Aelius hadn't heard of called Asteria, each member wearing a cloak with star patterns woven into them.
"And that is it, ladies and gentlemen, eight teams qualified, and what a preliminary it has been!" The announcer's voice climbed to the upper register he reserved for conclusions and announcements of significance. "Let's hear it for every team that made it through the Crystal Labyrinth! Sabertooth! Mermaid Heel! Fairy Tail! Quatro Cerberus! Blue Pegasus! Lamia Scale! Raven Tail! And Asteria!" Each name got its own reaction from the crowd, some louder than others, Sabertooth drawing the largest and Fairy Tail drawing something that was harder to categorize, somewhere between uncertain and intrigued, the sound of a crowd that hadn't decided yet what it thought and was reserving judgment.
"Now, our eight qualifying teams will have one hour to rest, refresh, and prepare, before we begin the first official event of the Second Annual Grand Magic Games!" Another pause, the kind that was designed to be filled with anticipation. "Do not go anywhere, folks, because you will not want to miss what comes next!"
The crowd settled into its break with the noise of fifty thousand people all deciding simultaneously to get food, find a better seat, or tell the person next to them what they thought about what they had just watched.
And Aelius was almost close to regretting his choice to compete, the constant noise had given him a headache, one his flask wouldn't seem to fix for longer than a couple of seconds.