This was the part of the story where things were supposed to get dark, right? The mentor dies, the hero cries, and everything goes to hell. But honestly, walking back into the house after Odin pulled his disappearing act felt… quiet. The staff in my hand was heavy, the green gem at the top humming a low, thudding beat like a second heart. It was Odin's heart. Well, his Lacrima. Same thing, really.
I pushed open the wooden door, and the smell of rosemary and roasting chicken hit me. It was so normal it almost hurt.
"Fifteen years, Merlin," Jason's voice cracked from the corner.
He was sitting in his usual chair by the fire, but he looked like a different person. His hair was a thin, snowy wisp now, and his hands were gnarled like old tree roots. Martha was standing at the stove, her back to me. She didn't turn around immediately. I saw her shoulders shaking.
"I'm back," I said, leaning the staff against the wall.
"You look like a proper legend, son," Jason whispered, leaning on his cane as he tried to stand. I moved faster than he could blink ,
"I look like a guy who's been living in a cave for a decade and a half," I joked, though my voice was a bit thick.standard Space Magic twitch and caught his elbow.
We spent the next few days just… being. It was the "Slice of Life" part of the apocalypse. We sat at that same old wooden table and talked. They told me how the world outside our little bubble was falling apart. It wasn't just a war anymore; it was a slaughter. Dragons weren't just fighting; they were losing their minds. The Ethernano in the atmosphere was getting toxic with all the hatred, and the dragons, being sensitive to that stuff, were snapping.
"People are desperate, Merlin," Martha said, pushing a plate of thick stew toward me. "They're looking for anything that can bite back. I hear whispers of people trying to eat dragons, or merging with them. It's unnatural."
"Dragon Slayers," I muttered.
"Is that what they're calling them?" Jason asked.
I just nodded, my mind wandering. I had three thousand years of Odin's memories rattling around in my skull now, thanks to Solomon. I knew exactly what was coming. I knew about Irene Belserion and the birth of the Slayers. I knew about the shit show that was going to happen.
"I want to roam for a bit," I told them a week later. "Not to fight, really. Just to see. I've spent fifteen years staring at the inside of a mountain. I need to see what we're actually trying to save."
Jason just looked at me with his one good eye and nodded. "Go. You've got more power in your little finger than I ever had in my whole body. Just… don't forget where home is."
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Roaming the world as a max-level mage is a weird experience. To everyone else, the world was a terrifying, dark place where death could come from the sky at any second. To me? It was a scenic hike with occasional pests.
I walked through a town called Enon. It was a nice place, or it had been. When I arrived, a Lesser Fire Dragon, some mid-tier lizard with an ego, was busy turning the town square into a giant barbecue. People were screaming, and a few brave knights were throwing spears that just bounced off the dragon's scales like toothpicks.
The dragon was actually laughing. It was a wet, guttural sound. "Burn, little ants! Burn!"
I didn't just end it immediately. Honestly? I was a little bored. I wanted to see what all that training with Odin actually looked like in the real world. I walked into the middle of the burning square, casually swinging my staff.
"Hey, lizard!" I yelled. "Your aim is trash!"
It lunged, snapping its jaws where I was standing, but I wasn't there. I used a bit of Space Magic to blink five feet to the left. Then I decided to have some fun with Illusion Magic. Suddenly, the dragon wasn't looking at one white-haired mage, it was looking at fifty of me and I made sure to fool his dragon nose .
"Over here! No, over here! Man, you're slow," the illusions all shouted at once.
The dragon went ballistic, snapping and clawing at the air, biting through nothing but light and mist. While it was distracted, I tapped my staff on the ground and called up some Forest Magic. Huge, thick vines erupted from the cobblestones, wrapping around the dragon's legs and wings like giant snakes. It roared, trying to burn them away, but I'd reinforced the plants with runes so they were basically fireproof.
I walked right up to its confused, angry face while it was pinned down. I wasn't even sweating. "Fun game, right?"
I didn't want the town to stay a wreck, though. "Solomon," I muttered. "Clean up the mess. Ward the area."
[Understood. Deploying Reconstruction Runes.]
While I stood there, thousands of glowing blue symbols started flying off my staff. They swarmed over the town like a cloud of fireflies. In an instant, the broken walls started putting themselves back together, the fire vanished, and the charred ground turned back into clean stone. It was like someone hit the "undo" button on the dragon's tantrum.
I looked back at the dragon. I was done playing. I raised my hand, pointing my index finger right between its eyes. A tiny, blindingly bright white spark gathered at my fingertip.
"Checkmate," I said.
A thin, silent beam of pure white light shot out. It didn't explode; it just erased everything in its path. The beam punched through the dragon's skull and took its entire head with it, leaving nothing but a steaming neck. The giant body slumped over, hitting the ground with a heavy thud.
The townspeople were staring at me like I was a god. I don't like their stares it. I didn't want to be their hero, so I just blinked away before they could even start cheering.
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Five years went by like that. I became a ghost story. The "White-Haired Sage." The "Magus of Flowers." I'd pop into a village, fix a drought with a Water Rune, swat a rogue dragon, and then ,thanks to the absolute cheat code that is Space Magic ,I'd teleport back home just in time for Martha's dinner.
Jason and Martha were getting frailer, but they were happy. They had a "son" who could bring them exotic fruits from across the ocean in the blink of an eye. We'd sit on the porch, Jason smoking his pipe and me leaning on Odin's staff, watching the sunset.
But then, one afternoon, the air didn't just feel heavy. It felt wrong.
I was sitting on the porch whittling a piece of wood when the world shivered. It wasn't an earthquake. It was a conceptual shift. Like the universe had just hit a sour note on a piano.
"Solomon," I muttered, standing up so fast my chair tipped over. "Tell me you felt that."
[Warning: Divine Presence detected within the material plane. High-level conceptual magic is being enacted. Location: Mildian Academy ruins. Distance: 400 miles East.]
I didn't even say goodbye. I just activated the Eyes of Gilgamesh, pushing my vision across the continent. My sight blurred, the world turning into a smear of colors as I bypassed mountains and forests in a millisecond.
Then, I saw him.
A boy. He looked about eighteen, with dark, messy hair and eyes that were so full of grief they looked hollow. He was standing in a ruined lab, surrounded by ancient scrolls and glowing tanks. In the center was a child—Natsu.
"So that's the moment," I whispered.
I watched through the threads of time, my eyes peeling back the layers of reality. Zeref Dragneel was doing the impossible. He was trying to jumpstart a soul that had already moved on. He was insulting the very idea of Life and Death.
And then, the sky didn't just darken. It felt like the eye of a Great God opened and looked down with pure, cold disgust.
A shadow descended. It was Ankhselam. To a normal person, seeing a god would have turned their brain to mush. The pressure was so immense that the birds in the trees for miles around just dropped dead from heart failure.
I felt it too. It was like a heavy, oily weight pressing on my shoulders. It was annoying.
[Notice: Divine Pressure detected. Initialising 'Wisdom King Solomon' protective logic. Pressure nullified.]
The weight vanished. I stood there on my porch, four hundred miles away, watching a god throw a tantrum.
I saw Ankhseram speak, not with words, but with a ripple in reality. "You who seek to master life and death… you shall be cursed by them."
The Curse of Contradiction.
I watched as the black miasma exploded out of Zeref. The grass around him withered and turned to ash. The stone crumbled. Everything he loved, everything he cared about, was now his trigger for murder. The more he valued life, the more he would take it.
The boy fell to his knees, screaming, his soul being warped into something immortal and wretched.
"Damn," I said, taking a bite of an apple I'd forgotten I was holding. "That is one hell of a curse."
I could have interfered. With Odin's Runes and Solomon's logic, I probably could have intercepted that curse. I could have punched Ankhselam in the metaphorical face and told him to pick on someone his own size.
But I didn't.
If I saved Zeref now, the entire future would vanish. No Zeref means no Alvarez Empire. No Alvarez means no Mavis. No Mavis means no Fairy Tail. I'd be saving one boy and killing an entire era of friends I hadn't even met yet.
I watched Zeref wander away into the woods, a walking black hole of death. He looked so small. So alone. It was heartbreaking, really.
"Solomon," I asked, "Can you analyze that?"
[Analysis of 'Curse of Ankhseram' complete. It is a 'Rule-Based' loop. It operates on the target's emotional state. As long as the target values life, the 'Rule' triggers a life-stripping field. It is a perfect logical trap.]
"Can we break it?"
[Current data suggests a 74% success rate using Cosmic Runes to rewrite the target's 'Source Code'. However, doing so would alert the Divine Entity to yourexistence.]
"Yeah, let's not poke the god just yet," I sighed, leaning against the porch railing. "I'm a mage, not a suicide commando."
I watched the smoke from the ruined academy fade into the distance. The main villain was born. The timer was officially ticking. Four hundred years of Zeref being a depressed immortal had just started.
I looked at Jason, who was napping in his chair, completely oblivious to the fact that the world had just changed forever.
"Life is weird, Jason," I whispered.
He didn't wake up. He just snored.
I sat back down and picked up my wood-carving. The world was officially breaking, a god was on the warpath, and I was just chilling on a porch in the middle of nowhere, eating an apple and waiting for my parents to wake up for dinner.
I had plenty of time. But for the first time in twenty-six years, I felt the weight of it. Four hundred years is a long time to watch people suffer just to make sure a story happens correctly.
"Solomon?"
[Yes, merlin?]
"Keep an eye on that kid. The dark-haired one. If he gets too close to this valley... we're gonna have a problem."
[Understood. Monitoring 'Entity: Zeref' has been added to sub-processes.]
I looked out at the horizon. The Age of Dragons was ending, and the Age of Zeref had begun. And me? I was just the guy in the middle, holding a dragon's heart in a stick and trying to remember how to be a human.