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Noah's sudden appearance and his offhand teasing cut through the frozen silence like a stone dropped into still water. The deadlock broke, but the atmosphere that replaced it was somehow even stranger than the one before it.
Princess Hisui, Arcadios, and the rest of the soldiers stared at him with undisguised confusion. Someone stepping out of the Eclipse Gate was already difficult enough to process. The fact that this person addressed the Black Wizard in a completely familiar, unbothered tone made it worse.
Everything that had happened in the last hour had slipped entirely beyond Princess Hisui's control.
Noah looked around the Dragon Graveyard, his gaze settling on the princess for a moment, taking in her pale face, then moving to Zeref, who stood nearby with his usual composure and deeply complicated eyes.
Before Erza could open her mouth to explain, Noah had already read the situation. His Magnetic Field Power swept quietly through the minds and reactions of the soldiers around him, and within seconds he had pieced together everything that had happened while he was on the other side of the Gate.
He had come very close to missing a genuinely entertaining scene. The only reason he was back this soon was that the damage to the Celestial Spirit World had temporarily pulled its time flow into alignment with Earth Land. A few more days and he would have arrived to find it long over.
His gaze settled back on Princess Hisui, and he looked at her with a light, appraising expression.
"You have big dreams for someone your age," he said. "But think it through. Setting aside the question of how exactly you plan to pinpoint the right moment in the past to arrive at, what do you think would actually happen once you got there?"
He tilted his head slightly. "That era was nothing like what you have read about it. Evil dragons were everywhere. The wars between human kingdoms never stopped, and magic that has been lost for centuries was still in everyday use. Fiore's forces would be lucky to survive a week before something killed them, and that is assuming you ever found Zeref and Acnologia in the first place, which you almost certainly would not."
Every point landed clearly and without decoration, each one a small, clean crack in the foundation of the plan.
Princess Hisui's lips pressed together. She wanted to argue. She searched for something to push back with, and found that every flaw he had named was exactly that: a real flaw. The plan she and her father had built so carefully, talked about so seriously, believed in so completely, looked very different from the outside.
Small. Fragile. Built on hope where there should have been strategy.
She lasted about as long as anyone her age could have under that weight before her eyes reddened and the tears came despite her best efforts to hold them back.
"But if we don't do something," she said, her voice catching, "the Black Wizard, the Black Dragon, one day everyone will..."
She couldn't finish the sentence.
Noah's teasing expression faded. He exhaled slowly.
It was a foolish plan, no question. But it had been built by a girl who genuinely cared about the people around her, enough to stake everything on a dream that had no guarantee of working, without even stopping to consider whether a changed past would erase the kingdom she was trying to protect.
He crossed the distance between them in a few easy steps.
The guards moved instantly, tightening into a defensive line. Noah glanced at them once and they stopped moving, every last one of them, as though their feet had forgotten how to operate. Arcadios kept his hand on his sword hilt and did not draw it.
Noah crouched down in front of Princess Hisui, bringing himself level with her eyes.
"Princess Hisui. Who told you that going back in time to kill the source of a problem is the only way to stop it?"
She blinked at him, caught off guard by the question.
"Strength borrowed from someone else, no matter how much of it you borrow, is not yours. The only power that cannot be taken away is your own. If you are strong enough, the things you are afraid of stop being threats." He let that sit for a second. "Is the Black Wizard frightening? I used him as a spinning top once. And look, he is standing right there, perfectly calm."
Zeref looked at Noah with an expression that suggested he was choosing, very deliberately, not to respond to that.
Noah reached out and patted Princess Hisui on the shoulder. "Instead of pouring everything into a plan built around a gate you cannot fully control, try thinking about how to make yourself stronger. Or find people you can actually rely on." He paused. "Do you understand?"
Princess Hisui stared at him. The shock of it, the sheer bluntness of that reasoning delivered with such easy certainty, had completely overridden her ability to cry. She had forgotten she was in the middle of doing it.
She also found herself stuck on something he had said. If he had turned Zeref into a spinning top, why was Zeref still alive? If this person could do that, why had he not simply finished the job and saved the world the trouble?
Noah noticed her thinking it and walked back over to Zeref, dropping a hand on his shoulder with the same casual ease he might use on an old friend.
"This one had a curse put on him by someone far worse, a long time ago. The curse made death follow him wherever he went, and it spread to everything around him. That is what caused all of it." He shrugged. "The one who placed the curse has been dealt with. The curse is gone. At this point, Zeref is really just a very capable researcher who happens to know an uncomfortable amount of dark magic."
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence than before.
Princess Hisui and her guards stood very still, trying to fit what they had just heard into the shape of the world they thought they knew.
The legendary Black Wizard, the figure that history recorded as an embodiment of death and catastrophe, was standing in front of them looking slightly resigned and entirely harmless. And if the man who had just spoken was to be believed, the actual source of all that death and catastrophe had already been eliminated.
Most of the soldiers would not have believed it. Hisui did.
Whatever she had expected Zeref to look like, to feel like, it was not this. From the moment he had appeared, she had sensed no hostility from him whatsoever. If he had wanted to harm anyone in this room, the Dragon Graveyard and everything above it would not still be standing.
She was still trying to absorb all of it when the light from the Eclipse Gate shifted and steadied.
A familiar figure stepped through: Loke, in his human form, adjusting his collar with his usual ease.
He looked first at Lucy, his expression apologetic. "I am sorry for worrying you." Then he turned to Noah. "The Celestial Spirit World has been fully restored. Celestial Spirits who hold contracts can now respond to their contractors again."
He paused, his tone shifting slightly. "The Celestial Spirit King also asked me to pass something along to you and Zeref. This gate carries a trace of Eclipse Power within it. That kind of power should not be left in the hands of people who cannot control it."
With that, Loke stepped away from the Eclipse Gate. Rather than return through it, he removed his own key from the gate's frame and handed it to Lucy, letting her send him back the proper way. After what he had just lived through, he had no interest in passing through anything touched by the Eclipse again.
With one of the twelve golden keys removed from its keyhole, the space-time vortex churning inside the Eclipse Gate began to slow. Noah stepped over and closed it the rest of the way with a casual motion.
As the Gate went dark, the remaining eleven golden keys dissolved into streaks of light and came back to rest in Lucy's hands.
Noah rolled his shoulders. "Right. That is everything. Let's go home."
Irene released the invisibility Enchantment she had maintained over the rest of the group, and suddenly the Dragon Graveyard had quite a few more people in it. Mavis, Erza, Anna, and Natsu materialized out of the air. The pressure in the room changed immediately.
Irene's Magic Power alone, fully unguarded, was enough to make the Cherry Blossom Knights instinctively hold their breath. Mavis's quiet, pure aura beside it created something between awe and unease.
None of them made any move toward the soldiers.
Hisui watched as Noah hoisted the Eclipse Gate, an enormous and ancient structure that probably weighed more than a reasonable person could calculate, onto his shoulder with the ease of someone picking up a travel pack, and turned to leave with his companions.
She made a decision.
"Wait," she called out.
Noah stopped but did not turn around.
"If Zeref has truly changed, then..." She steadied her voice as best she could. "Would you be willing to deal with the Black Dragon instead? I will pay any price you name."
A pause.
"I am sorry," Noah said, already walking again. "That particular request has already been taken."