Mira finished the song, stood up, and gave a small bow.
The guild erupted. Glow sticks appeared from nowhere, waving in every direction. People were on their feet, yelling for another song, then another after that.
Lucy and the others were still somewhere inside the feeling of it, that soft warm sound still echoing in their heads, when the lights shifted again.
The curtain opened.
Gajeel was on the stage.
White suit. Legs crossed. Sunglasses. Electric guitar across his lap. He looked around at the room like he was doing everyone a considerable favor just by being there.
"You lot are lucky," he said. "This is something I wrote myself. It's called Graffiti Rave."
He didn't give anyone time to think about that. His fingers hit the strings immediately.
"Colorful, colorful!"
"This melody of love is made of hard steel metal, oh yeah!"
The rhythm was aggressive and stiff. The chord progressions went places no chord progression should go. His voice was loud, completely confident, and genuinely difficult to describe in polite terms. The sound that filled the guild hall landed somewhere between a construction site and a cat getting its tail stepped on, and it kept going.
If Mira's singing had been warm sunlight, Gajeel's was something that came up from underground.
"WHAT IS THIS? GET OFF THE STAGE!"
"You thought the white suit and the sunglasses were going to make up for that?! My neighbor's dog sounds better than you at six in the morning!"
"GET DOWN! GET DOWN!"
Rotten eggs sailed through the air. A stinky sock followed. Someone threw a slipper. Gajeel absorbed all of it without breaking rhythm, if anything playing louder.
"Man! Now that's what I call heavy metal flavor!"
"Go Gajeel! You've got this!"
"Honestly not bad for background noise. Really makes Mira sound better in comparison."
A few people called out in support. Aside from Juvia, who was cheering with complete sincerity, they were mostly just enjoying the spectacle.
"Metal storm, sha la la, thanks for the mop, brother!"
Gajeel seamlessly wove a thank-you into the lyrics without missing a single beat, face completely unbothered, clearly having the time of his life.
Even Lucy, huddled behind the bar with her knees pulled up and her hair full of dust, had to acknowledge it.
"Does he actually have musical ability? Should I be saying that? Is that the right word for whatever this is?"
"Also, throwing a mop at someone means they want you off the stage! That's not applause!"
"SHUT UP!" Natsu had his hands clamped over both ears. "I have never heard anything this terrible in my entire life!"
Dong.
The music stopped.
The electric guitar flew across the room and connected directly with Natsu's face.
"WAHHHH?!"
Gajeel glared from the stage, a fistful of jangling keys shoved into his mouth.
Everyone else could say whatever they wanted. This Fire Dragon in particular could not.
Natsu peeled himself off the floor looking extremely unhappy. He started toward the stage.
Gajeel was already moving to meet him.
The two of them had been waiting for an excuse. They found each other in the air halfway, and both landed a solid kick at the same moment.
"You want a fight?!"
"I'm performing a graffiti rave, what would a single-cell organism know about music?!"
"The old man who collects scrap metal outside shouts better than you!"
Gray put down his drink and stood up. "Can you two be adults for five minutes?!" His elbow caught the edge of the plate next to him.
A strawberry cake slid off the table and hit the floor with a soft, final sound.
Erza stared at it.
She reached toward it slowly. Her fingers were trembling slightly.
A wooden clog came down from above and crushed the cake completely flat.
Elfman stepped forward. "Man! Stop fighting!"
He did not see it coming.
"So annoying."
Erza turned and hit him hard enough to send him sailing ten meters in the opposite direction, which took out several bystanders on the way. Those bystanders had done nothing wrong. That was not something the hot-tempered members of Fairy Tail were willing to accept quietly.
Magic circles went up all over the room. Old grudges found new justification. Someone threw a table. A chair followed. A pot, a basin, and something unidentifiable arced through the air and disappeared into the general chaos.
The concert was now a brawl. This was very Fairy Tail.
"I feel like this was completely predictable."
"Aye!"
Lucy and Happy pressed themselves into the corner behind the bar with their knees hugged to their chests, watching the disaster unfold from a safe distance. Lucy had come a long way since her first day. She knew exactly which corners to use.
"Hahaha! Now we're talking! Let me add to the atmosphere!"
Lucy's head snapped up.
Chase was standing in the center of the stage.
Dark Magician Girl was beside him. Elf Swordsman stood at the back. The full rock setup was out, instruments ready, everyone in position.
"Chase-san, WAIT, that song at a moment like this is going to cause a disaster!"
Lucy's voice pitched upward. The memory of the last performance was immediate and visceral. She remembered exactly what that music had done to her, the feeling of her magic swelling past its usual ceiling, the certainty that she could take on anything. She had felt that, and she was not the type who went looking for fights.
If these people heard it in the middle of an already active brawl.
"Don't worry, Lucy," Happy said quietly from beside her. "The guild master is here. It won't go too far."
Lucy thought about that. It was a reasonable point.
Something about Happy's voice made her look sideways.
The cat who had just told her to relax was standing several meters away from her, pressed against the wall near a window, positioned at a very specific angle that suggested rapid exit was being considered.
"YOUR WORDS AND YOUR BODY ARE TELLING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORIES!"
To be safe, Lucy abandoned her current position, ran across the room, and wrapped both arms firmly around Happy. If things went badly, she was not going down alone.
While she was still running, Chase and the card monsters hit the first beat.
Boom. Boom boom boom boom. Boom boom boom boom boom.
The prelude hit the room like a physical thing. It went through the walls and into the floor and up through the legs of everyone standing in it. The Fairy Tail members mid-brawl stopped what they were doing, not because they wanted to, but because their attention simply went there.
Then the actual music started and their blood followed it.
"My magic, it's expanding, I can feel it at the edges!"
"Something I've never felt before, is this what music magic does?!"
"Man! Even what Chase plays has such powerful energy in it!"
"Everyone come at me at once, I'm fighting all of you at the same time!"
Even Makarov, upon whom Lucy had placed all of her remaining hope, threw both arms in the air.
"OH OH OH OH! I AM COMPLETELY FIRED UP!"
"Guild Master, PLEASE calm down!"
"Ara." Mira was smiling. Her magic pressure was building. Satan Soul began to surface at the edges of her expression. "I suddenly feel like fighting too."
"No, why is MIRA using Satan Soul!"
"AHAHAHA! TAKE THIS, CHASE! I AM TERRIFYINGLY STRONG RIGHT NOW!"
"Natsu, don't, Chase-san, wait, nobody listen, STOP!"
Lucy had one idea left.
"NATSU! GO!"
Natsu turned and collided with Chase at full speed. Chase handled it in about two seconds.
"Aye," Happy said from somewhere deep in Lucy's arms. "Lucy really is quite calculating when she needs to be."
Boom.
Outside, the sound of the new guild doing something very loud carried all the way down the street and into the surrounding neighborhood. Magnolia residents gathered on the sidewalks and looked toward the noise, shaking their heads, trading the usual observations about Fairy Tail.
None of them paid particular attention to the tall blond man standing at the back of the crowd. Long coat, spiked headphones, expression like a storm system that had not yet decided where to make landfall.
***
Back inside, Makarov was the first one to pull himself together.
He noticed something in the music. The edge in it. He called the halt before the new building became a casualty of its own opening week.
The guild members came down gradually, still buzzing, eyes a little too bright, asking Chase to play it again and solemnly swearing they would not fight this time.
Natsu was flat on his back with a genuinely content look on his face.
That's the feeling. That's what this place is supposed to feel like.
Chase agreed to another round and distributed the sheet music. He asked Mira to play alongside him.
There was a prank element to it, he was not going to pretend otherwise. But Makarov had caught something real in it too. This wasn't only rehearsal material for the Harvest Festival Magical Parade.
Chase had encountered Vidaldus of the Trinity Raven before and watched music magic in actual use. He had asked Black Magician to explain the underlying principle afterward. The theory was interesting: magic power woven into music had a measurable auxiliary effect on the people hearing it, amplifying and drawing out what was already there.
He was not particularly skilled at it yet. But the performance just now had shown it worked.
If he developed it further, pushed the effect higher, built something more deliberately crafted. In the large-scale group battles that were going to come eventually, something like that could be genuinely useful. An S-Class mage carrying a speaker setup and running the Fairy Tail members straight into a fight as a coordinated force was a thought worth keeping.
It was preliminary. Just something to turn over on a slow afternoon. For now the priority was his own strength.
And right now, the next real target for card drops was standing somewhere nearby.
Chase played the second run with Mira, purely the notes, no magic behind it. While his hands stayed on the instrument, his eyes moved through the hall and out toward the street beyond the main entrance.
Laxus was back in Magnolia. The civil war was coming.
Finally.
He had been waiting to give that particular rebellious idiot a proper beating for a while now.
The song finished. The guild was still going, yelling for another, hands in the air.
Chase put the card monsters back into his deck and stepped off the stage.
The troublemakers groaned and complained loudly. Not one of them moved to stop him, because everyone present knew exactly how that would end. Natsu was right there as a recent, visible reminder.
Dark Magician Girl saw her opening. She grabbed Mira's arm with both hands before anyone else could claim her attention, eyes bright, already pulling her toward the door to explore the new building.
Mira laughed and went along without any resistance.
The two of them walked out hand in hand.
Chase came over and dropped into the seat across from Gray.
"By the way, Gray. Your teacher came by the guild yesterday looking for you."
"Ur?" Gray looked up. "She's already back?"
He had known it would happen eventually. He'd said what he needed to say on Galuna Island. Still, hearing it put plainly like that landed differently.
Lucy, Erza, Natsu, and Happy all turned toward Chase at once, curious.
Erza especially. She had not been part of the Deliora incident and had only heard pieces of what Gray's teacher was like. Someone worth that much to Gray was someone she wanted to understand.
Chase gave them the short version. What happened at the guild, the encounter with the debt collector, the decision that got made, the outcome.
"Wait." Gray's eyes had gone wide. "Ur is the new guild master of Sabertooth?!"
"Sabertooth," Natsu repeated, frowning hard, tilting his head sideways. "That name is really familiar. Where have I heard that before?"
"It's the guild that sided with Phantom Lord and helped them come after us!" Lucy stared at him. "How do you forget things like that?"
"Oh!" Natsu's face cleared. "The muscular old guy that the guild master knocked out with one punch!"
"The way you remember people is genuinely impolite."
"Based on the Council's investigation, it was Jiemma acting alone," Erza said, fingers against her chin. "The members themselves apparently had no part in it. If Chase and the guild master both speak well of it, there must be something worth seeing there."
"Then let's go visit!" Natsu was already on his feet.
Lucy grabbed the end of his scarf before he made it two steps.
"We literally just got back. You can wait five minutes."
"Ur just took over," Gray said. "She's going to be buried in work right now. Walking in unannounced would just get in her way." He paused and looked sideways at Natsu. "Something an idiot wouldn't think about."
"What did you just call me?!"
"Idiot."
They were forehead to forehead in about three seconds.
Chase looked at them and briefly considered whether there were literal magnets inside their skulls. Positive and negative, permanently oriented toward each other.
"Sit down." Erza picked up her tea. "Haven't you both caused enough today."
Natsu and Gray were back in their seats immediately, hands flat on the table, backs straight, the picture of cooperative behavior.
"Although," Happy said very quietly, "Erza was also fighting Mira pretty hard a few minutes ago."
Erza's eyes moved to Happy.
"Aye! Natsu! Gray! You two are the worst!" Happy spun immediately.
"You are the most disloyal creature I have ever met," Lucy said.
Chase used the gap to reach across and take the fried chicken leg off the plate in front of her. He bit into it.
"Oh, and Gray. Before I forget. Ur took everyone out to dinner last night. She said to put it on your tab."
"Why would I pay for that?!"
"THAT WAS MY CHICKEN LEG!"
Chase ignored Lucy and looked at Gray. "Because apparently when you were small, you ran over to the neighbor's house with no trousers on and"
"HOW MUCH. JUST TELL ME THE AMOUNT." Gray's face had gone red from the neck up.
If Natsu heard that story, the next argument was already over before it started.
Under the table, Juvia had gone very still. She was barely breathing. Every cell in her body was pointed at Chase, willing him to continue.
Please. Please keep going. Please tell me everything.
While the table dissolved into its usual comfortable noise, Gajeel had quietly slipped away with Jet and Droy, following Shadow Gear out toward one of the parks in Magnolia.
---
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