Gray lay sprawled over a table in the guild hall, fingers tapping absently on the wood, eyes drifting to the door every few seconds.
"What's that guy Shane doing, rushing out like that…?"
Across from him, Cana clutched her hands together, anxiety prickling at her. A bad guess was forming in her mind.
"Shane… might've gone after Ivan," she said at last. Regret flickered across her face. "I… shouldn't have told him where the master was. After he came back down, his reaction was off. Then he just bolted—"
"What? Shane went after Ivan?"
Gray shot upright like he'd been jabbed with a needle.
"Are you kidding me?! I know he's strong, but Ivan—that bastard's the master's son. A real S-Class mage! Why didn't you stop him?!"
His voice was laced with obvious panic.
"You're very worried about Shane, huh, Gray," Erza said from the side, sitting straight-backed and composed as ever. She even had the leisure to lift a cup of hot tea, blowing gently on the surface.
Gray's tone cracked. He turned his head away. "This… this isn't the time to talk about that! He's annoying, yeah, but what if something really happens? Ivan's the kind of bastard who'd kill his own comrades!"
He stared at Erza, who calmly took a sip of tea, baffled. "You're closest to Shane. Why didn't you try to stop him? Aren't you worried at all?"
Erza set her cup down with a light clink.
"I don't know Ivan," she said quietly. "But I know Shane."
In her mind, the image rose unbidden—
That burning wasteland filled with broken swords, stars of fire drifting over a plain of endless flame.
The heat that felt like it could melt down the world itself had seared itself into her memory.
If someone wasn't an absolute "monster," there was no way they could win against Shane in that form.
And Ivan… was not a monster.
Her gaze sharpened, certainty settling in. "Shane will win."
…
Out by the rocky hideout—
"Show me true despair? Hahahah… hahahahaha!"
Ivan blinked at Shane's calm declaration—then burst into loud, derisive laughter.
"Playing at being spooky now? At this point, what's the point of clinging to ridiculous fantasies?"
Shane didn't respond.
He simply closed his eyes.
The moment his lids met—
A hot, dry wind roared into existence from nowhere, like a blast from a furnace, sweeping over the battle-scarred ground.
Ivan's laughter cut off.
In dawning horror, he watched the world around him peel away like flaking paint—colors blurring, contours twisting.
The stones underfoot, the snowy fields, the distant train whistle—everything distorted—
And vanished.
In their place stretched an endless, dead, scorched wasteland.
The sky overhead was a suffocating dark red, as if eternally baked by unending fire. Smoke rolled over the horizon. Blinding sparks leaped here and there, burning the eyes and pricking at the skin.
Everywhere he looked, swords rose like a forest—thousands of them, of every shape and size, rusted, broken, or intact, stretching as far as the eye could see.
Flecks of flame danced and wove between the cold steel, feeding a sea of karmic fire that never died.
The stench of iron, burning, and something poisonous and nameless slammed into him with the heat.
Ivan's eyes went wide, pupils shrinking to pinpoints.
He stumbled back, kicking a half-buried broken sword. It rang faintly on the blackened ground.
"W–what… is this place?! What did you do?!" His voice shook in a way even he didn't recognize.
Instinct took over. As a master of illusion, he immediately searched for flaws in this "mirage."
His magic perception flared to its limit. He tested sight, sound, smell, touch—
The soul-scorching heat in the air, the solid bite of charred soil under his boots, the smoke burning his lungs—
He tested everything.
And realized, shaken, that—
Every bit of it—
Was real.
"Impossible… this is impossible!!" he screamed, panic cracking his voice.
Reason buckled under reality.
If it wasn't illusion, then—
Had this brat really teleported them in an instant?
Or worse—dragged him into a constructed reality? A real, self-contained space made by magic?
Either way, it would take an unimaginable amount of mana and an impossibly deep understanding of magecraft. How could some kid barely into his teens pull that off?!
"Reality Marble."
Shane's voice rolled across the burning plain, calm as ever.
"A magic that rewrites reality into the caster's strongest internal landscape."
Ivan's head snapped toward the sound.
Shane was standing on a rise bristling with swords, silhouetted against the red sky.
"Once activated, it overwrites the surrounding space with an entirely different world," Shane continued, like a patient lecturer explaining the rules of the prison.
"It's the manifestation of the inner world. The size of 'me' and 'the world' gets flipped. The world gets locked into a small container."
He watched the cocktail of shock, confusion, and disbelief on Ivan's face and smiled faintly. "Confused? I was too, when I first learned about this ability. Why would something this absurd exist?"
Then his smile tilted into a thin, self-mocking line. "Fortunately… it's my ability."
"M–magic?" Ivan snagged onto the word, voice going shrill. "You're telling me something like this—this power that overturns reality—is just some parlor trick used by normal people? Are you mocking me?!"
He couldn't accept it. Everything he knew about magic was being shattered.
"Call it whatever you want," Shane said, shaking his head, feeling a touch of pity at this total worldview meltdown.
"The point is—give up."
"In here, you can't accomplish anything except learning what despair feels like."
~~~
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