"See it? You mean that black-lake illusion just now?"
Faced with Shane's sudden agitation, Erza looked a little confused.
But seeing the way he stared at her, the girl still nodded seriously.
"Yeah. The black lake was real—huge—and it had this suffocating pressure… I saw it all."
The instant he got that confirmation, Shane looked like he'd been punched head-on. He froze in place.
Dazed, he lifted a hand and rubbed his face hard.
He didn't need a mirror to know—his expression had to be awful right now.
Erza could see the Heroic Spirit vision he experienced…
The impact of that information hit even harder than the frustration of missing Lancer's True Name.
His brain raced, and several unsettling possibilities surfaced at once.
First: the trend in the visions' evolution couldn't be clearer anymore.
From Arash's snowfield "visual replacement," to Muramasa's shared burning sensations, and now…
the vision had synchronized into reality—so much so that other people could observe it.
It was exactly like the direction he'd feared: deeper and deeper each time, more and more "physical."
Shane couldn't help worrying—would this strengthening influence keep escalating? Did it have an upper limit?
"Erza…" His voice tightened. "Tell me everything you saw—every detail. That illusion… what exactly did it look like to you?"
And then he heard the kind of intel that made the world collapse.
"No."
Erza shook her head.
"When I opened the door… the black mud wasn't confined to your room anymore.
It had already spread out from here—through the hallway, out toward the street…
It felt like the entire Magnolias had been swallowed by that black, stinking lake."
"And… the stench was so strong. It was like someone had literally moved a real swamp into the city."
"…"
Shane's expression turned into a full-on rollercoaster.
The whole city?!
The day before the Harvest Festival?!
He didn't even dare imagine what kind of "divine punishment" Master Makarov would deal out if he found out Shane had pulled a city-wide stunt at a timing like this.
"It's over… this time I really messed up," he groaned, covering his face.
Confession… absolutely. There was no way around it.
As a Fairy Tail member, causing this big of a mess and hoping to bluff his way through like before was impossible.
But compared to the inevitable lecture and punishment, Shane was more concerned about something else—
This Heroic Spirit vision, big as it was, still remained "only an illusion."
Disgusting, terrifying… but it hadn't caused real physical destruction.
But what about next time?
If the visions' erosion into reality deepened further—if they became completely real?
If those godlike Heroic Spirits actually manifested into the real world…
If their catastrophic battlefields, epic legends, even mythic scenes capable of tearing heaven and earth apart suddenly dropped into the middle of a city…
What kind of hell would that be?
Shane pressed down hard on his knuckles until they cracked.
Images flooded his mind—monsters rampaging through streets, heroes slaughtering each other between buildings, gods facing off in the sky.
That wasn't something you could joke your way through.
"The city… would probably be wiped out in an instant…"
He sighed inwardly.
The Book of Heroes was his foundation. He couldn't just abandon it.
But this danger hanging over his head like a sword… he had to deal with it.
"…Looks like from now on, whenever I feel a vision coming, I'll have to hide somewhere completely uninhabited."
After agonizing over it, limited by how little he truly understood the book's mechanics, that was the only "treat the symptoms" solution he could come up with.
"Maybe… once my permissions increase and I unlock more functions, there'll be a real fix."
He tried to comfort himself.
Once he'd calmed down a little, Shane brought his focus back to the present.
"Uh… Erza."
He chose his words carefully and—skipping over the existence of the Book of Heroes—explained "Heroic Spirits" and "True Names" in the simplest way he could.
"Basically… I'm training a special kind of magic. To gain power, I have to 'observe' the past of certain powerful beings.
And that silver-haired girl… she's the target I'm observing this time."
Erza looked completely lost.
These concepts were totally foreign to her, so she ultimately filed it away as: Shane is training yet another weird, dangerous magic.
But as they talked, Shane caught one key detail.
What Erza saw… was not the same as what he personally experienced.
In Erza's description, she didn't see Aurora's group at all.
Her vision contained only the surging black sludge-lake, and then the silver-haired girl emerging from the muck like a miracle.
That made Shane breathe a little easier.
"Okay… so the projection into reality still has limitations—or it's incomplete."
"At least, until the parts I experience become 'real,' I don't need to worry about illusion-people actually coming out and interfering with reality."
"Whew…"
With that confirmed, the boulder on Shane's chest finally dropped—at least halfway.
But there was no way he was sleeping tonight.
After calming Erza down and telling her to rest, he hurried to the guild.
The streets were empty at midnight. The black-mud illusion had already faded without a trace, as if it had never existed.
When Shane pushed open the guild doors, the hall was unusually quiet.
The usual late-night drunks were nowhere to be seen—apparently, for safety, Makarov had kicked them all home.
At the bar, Makarov wore a miserable expression, clutching at what little hair he still had, while Gildarts sat across from him, the two of them locked in a grim stare-off.
"Damn it… this is insane…" the old man sighed.
That city-wide illusion had appeared out of nowhere, then vanished out of nowhere—like it existed solely to disgust people.
Most terrifying of all: it left behind zero magical residue.
No motive. No source. No trail.
Was it a deliberate provocation? A warning aimed at the guild?
Or… some irresponsible mage losing control?
Then Makarov heard the door open.
He looked up—saw Shane—and his eyes lit up like he'd just found salvation.
"Perfect timing! Shane, your eyes can see causality, right?
Quick! Help me check whether that illusion left any trace we can follow!"
He clearly assumed Shane had come because he was worried about the city's situation.
Which, in a sense, wasn't wrong—but the truth was… not quite.
Makarov slammed the bar with his fist.
"I'm telling you, the entire city probably thinks this 'sludge incident' was Fairy Tail's doing!"
"If I find out who's behind this and they're making the guild take the blame—"
Watching the master's fury and murderous vibe, Shane instinctively shrank back and edged toward the door.
"Um… Master…"
He swallowed, voice so small it was practically a mosquito.
"I don't think… it's a misunderstanding…"
"Hm?" Makarov frowned. "What did you say?"
Shane took a deep breath and put on a face like a man marching to execution.
"I said… it really was done by someone from Fairy Tail."
"…?"
The air went dead silent.
Makarov and Gildarts both turned to stare at him in confusion.
Shane scratched the back of his head awkwardly and let out a string of dry laughs.
"Uh… that thing earlier was actually… my training magic… having a teeny-tiny little problem…"
"Ahahahaha…"
~~~
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