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"Mavis... come on... not again," Zeref choked out, his voice completely cracking. "Why does this always happen? Why?"
I dropped my perception filter and stepped out from behind a dead tree, my white coat rustling as my staff clicked against a rock.
Zeref didn't even jump. He didn't turn around either, but the black smoke rolling off his shoulders instantly turned the surrounding grass into black ash.
"You've been lurking there a while," Zeref muttered.
He didn't sound angry. His crying just stopped. His shoulders leveled out, and the panic in his eyes vanished into a flat, dead stare. The guy was literally forcing his own brain to go numb, turning his emotions off to freeze the curse before it wiped out the whole mountain side.
"I'm taking her back to the guild," Zeref said, his voice sounding completely hollow, like a corpse talking. "She shouldn't be out here."
Before I could even answer, the dark Ethernano around his cloak flared, and he vanished from the clearing, taking her body with him.
Solomon, I thought, my gold eyes tracking the spatial ripple he left behind. Where did he drop?
[Notice: Spatial coordinate lock confirmed. Target location: Magnolia Town, Fairy Tail Guildhall. Initiating short-range warp.]
The pink flower petals swallowed my boots, and I flashed out of the woods.
Back in Magnolia, the front doors of the guildhall didn't just open—they violently shattered inward off their iron hinges, splintering across the floorboards.
Precht was sitting alone at the bar, a sharpening stone freezing mid-air in his hand as he jumped up. His daggers cleared his sleeves in a split second. The air inside the tavern dropped freezing cold, making his breath hitch.
Zeref walked straight through the ruined doorway, his black cloak dragging on the wood as he carried Mavis's limp form.
The second Precht locked eyes with him, his hands started visibly shaking against his daggers. Twenty years ago, when they were just amateur treasure hunters starving in the woods, he had looked at this guy as a kind, eccentric traveling mentor who taught them the basics of magic [1.5]. But Precht wasn't an ignorant amateur anymore. Four years of grinding war and reading continental records had taught him the objective truth. The teenager standing in his tavern holding Mavis wasn't just an old teacher—it was the literal, immortal Black Wizard from the forbidden history books [1.5].
Zeref didn't say a single word to him. He didn't even look at Precht. He just walked over to a long wooden bench, laid Mavis's body down, turned around, and walked straight back out into the rain, vanishing into the dark street.
Precht stood there like a statue, his chest heaving as he stared at the empty doorway, completely paralyzed.
"Stop staring at the mud and grab her," I said, stepping out of the shadows.
I dropped my usual lazy smirk. For the first time since I'd got into this world, I was dead serious.
Precht blinked, his eyes darting from me to Mavis. "Merlin... what... who was that? What happened to her?! She isn't breathing!"
"That was Zeref," I said, grabbing the shaft of my staff. "Her container is frozen in a paradox because of his curse. Pick her up and get her down to the basement vault right now."
My tone didn't leave him any room to argue. Precht swallowed hard, sheathed his daggers, and carefully scooped Mavis up, sprinting straight down the stone steps toward the hidden basement beneath the floorboards. I followed right behind him, slamming the heavy iron vault door shut behind us.
Down in the dark stone vault, Precht laid her onto the central stone table, his hands trembling. "Can we cure her? With your magic, you can wake her up, right?!"
"If you try to wake her up normally, the contradiction loop will just trigger again and instantly kill everyone in this town," I said, walking up to the altar. "We aren't curing her. We're locking her container in a permanent stasis matrix."
I lifted Odin's staff, my index finger rapidly cutting through the air to trace a complex, burning chain of golden characters. The ancient Elder Futhark runes locked together, forming a blinding, fluid chain of primordial heat directly in front of my palm.
"ᛁᛋᛖ, ᚲᛟᚾᛏᚨᛁᚾᛗᛖᚾᛏ, ᛏᛁᛗᛖ, ᛱᚱᛖᛋᛖᚱᚠᚨᛏᛁᛟᚾ"
"Space-Time Magic: Glacial Preservation Vault," I murmured, my voice echoing off the stone walls as the golden runic sequence ignited.
A sudden blast of crystal light burst from the runes, rapidly expanding into a massive, flawless block of pristine preservation lacrima right around Mavis's body. The green gem on my staff hummed, anchoring the stasis field directly into her core container to freeze the curse in place.
But right as the crystal layer was about to completely close over her chest, my Eyes of Gilgamesh flared, reading the deepest level of her structural code.
My hand stopped on the staff.
"Merlin? What's wrong?" Precht gasped, sweating as he watched the light stabilize.
"Precht, look at her container alignment," I said, my voice dropping low. "Look past her primary Ethernano pool. Right at the secondary anchor."
Precht focused his sensory magic, his eyes widening in total shock as he caught the tiny, hidden frequency pulsing deep inside the crystal matrix. It was incredibly faint, but it was there. A secondary, independent heartbeat was vibrating inside her frozen system.
"There's... there's a second life inside her," Precht whispered, his jaw dropping as he stumbled back. "A child? With Zeref's energy?! Merlin, what do we do? If that thing wakes up—"
"You leave it exactly where it is," I cut him off, snapping my wrist to connect the final line of the rune.
The pristine lacrima sealed shut with a loud ring, trapping Mavis, the child, and the infinite magic loop she was generating inside a permanent block of crystal.
I adjusted the sleeves of my purple coat, resting the heavy staff back over my shoulder as I turned toward the vault stairs.
"Keep this basement locked, Precht," I said, looking back over my shoulder. "Don't tell Yuri, and don't tell the kid when he grows up. If the Council or the capital nobles find out what's locked down here, Magnolia becomes a graveyard. As far as the world is concerned, Mavis is gone, and so am I."
"Where are you going?" Precht called out, his voice desperate as he stood alone in the dark vault with the crystal.
"I'm getting bored of watching this era's drama," I muttered, a lazy smirk returning to my face as the flower petals of my teleportation magic start to swirl around my boots. "I'm going to take a long nap up north. See you in a few centuries, Second Master."
The petals swallowed my robes, and I vanished from the founder era for good
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