Check out advanced chapters on P@treon: [email protected]/CosmicKaminari
----------
The wine glass slipped from Makarov's hand and cracked down onto the bar, sending a splash of red across his trousers. He didn't notice. He was already on his feet, voice jumping half an octave.
"What do you mean, Face?! Have they completely lost their minds?!"
The guild hall went silent all at once. Every laugh, every shout, every clinking glass stopped at the same moment. Natsu and Gray froze mid-grapple on the floor. Cana's barrel of wine hung suspended halfway to her mouth. Every head in the hall turned toward the bar.
"Master, take a breath."
Mira placed a steadying hand on Makarov's arm while Erza turned to Mest, who had enough cold sweat on his forehead to fill a respectable cup. "Forget Crawford for now. Start from the beginning. What exactly is Face?"
Mest did not make them wait. He laid out everything he knew.
The Magic Council held two major trump cards, the kind of weapons that were never publicly discussed and never officially acknowledged.
The first was Etherion: a super-dimensional destructive magic that used a magical satellite for targeting, coordinated across multiple mages of different attributes to deliver a strike of overwhelming precision.
The second was Face.
Both were secret weapons of the Council, but there was no real comparison between them. Etherion could level a city. Face could end a civilization.
Face functioned as a magical purge. Within its area of effect, every trace of magical particles would be completely erased, from animals, to plants, to the air itself. Every drop of magic, eliminated.
Earth Land was a world saturated with magic. Every human being carried some measure of it within their body. Strip that away completely, with no means of replenishment, and the result was magic deficiency syndrome, a condition that killed its victims within days and offered nothing in the way of a gentle end.
By the time Mest finished explaining, no one in the hall was under any illusion about what Face was. It was a weapon designed not to win a war but to end humanity itself at the root.
Someone raised a hand from the back of the crowd. Surely something this catastrophic must be limited in number. A handful of these weapons, terrible as they were, was different from an existential threat. Was Makarov's reaction really warranted?
Mest's answer dropped over the hall like a stone into still water.
"Face can be mass produced."
He paused to let that land.
"Based on the intelligence I have been able to gather, the total number of Face units that the Magic Council has deployed and left unactivated across the Ishgar continent over the past four hundred years exceeds three thousand."
Lucy's face had gone the color of old parchment. "Three thousand," she said quietly, more to herself than anyone else. "If Crawford activates all of them at once, every last trace of magic across Ishgar..."
"Gone," Mest confirmed, his voice flat. "And to prevent any leaks, the coordinates of every deployed Face are known only to the sitting Chairman."
No one spoke.
Three thousand units, scattered across an entire continent, locations known only to the man who had just defected to the Black Magic Cult. The silence that settled over the guild was the particular kind that came from a group of people simultaneously trying to process something too large to hold.
Then Natsu, who was still technically pinning Gray to the floor, looked up from under the table with a completely untroubled expression. "What is everyone so worried about? If it gets to be too much for us, we've got the First Master and the others, haven't we?"
The silence broke.
Within about thirty seconds, the music was back. Someone had started a new song at the far end of the hall. Cana resumed work on her barrel. Two tables over, a minor brawl had started up again.
Mest stood at the bar and stared.
His rank within the Council had been rising steadily since Lahar's promotion, and he had been rewarded for it with an unbroken string of increasingly demanding assignments. It had been a long time since he had set foot in the guild. The last news he had properly followed was Fairy Tail's victory over Grimoire Heart and Tartaros. After that, his work had consumed him entirely.
He had no idea that Mavis had been resurrected. He had never heard that August had joined. He was not aware of any number of things, apparently.
He turned back to the bar and found Makarov, who had been white-knuckling the countertop with fury less than two minutes ago, now sitting quietly with a glass of wine in hand, looking entirely at peace with the world.
"Master, how can you just..."
Mest stopped. He genuinely wondered for a moment whether someone had cast something on him, some illusion that was making the entire guild look like a group of people who had just been told the weather might turn tomorrow rather than that three thousand weapons of mass destruction were about to be activated.
Mira pressed a chilled glass of beer into his hand with a kind smile.
Mest looked at it. He looked at the hall. He looked back at Mira. "Will someone please tell me what is happening? This is Face we are talking about, created by the Black Wizard himself. If three thousand of them detonate simultaneously, every human being and magical creature in Ishgar is finished. All of them."
Noah reached over, put a hand on Mest's shoulder, and guided him into a chair before he could work himself any further up. "I understand. But just hold on for a moment and look over there." He nodded toward a corner of the hall.
Mest followed the direction and looked.
He went still.
He had been trusted deeply by Makarov for a long time, and that trust had included, once, a glimpse at an old photograph of the guild's founding four-person team. He knew what all of them had looked like in their youth.
The small girl sitting in the corner of the hall, laughing at something the dark-haired young man beside her had just said, looked exactly like one of those faces.
Not similar. Exactly.
Mest was not the sort of person Makarov would have sent to infiltrate the Magic Council if he were slow. He connected Natsu's earlier remark to what he was now looking at, and the answer assembled itself in his mind with uncomfortable speed.
That was Mavis Vermillion. The First Master of Fairy Tail. Alive.
Mest exhaled slowly. His first instinct, that Natsu had been referring to Warrod, now seemed rather optimistic. This was better. Strange beyond description, but better. A resurrected First Master was an extraordinary thing, but it was at least on the correct side of the ledger.
He was still reassembling his sense of the situation when Noah spoke again.
"I didn't actually point her out for you to look at," Noah said. "I meant the man sitting next to her."
Mest looked again at the dark-haired young man beside Mavis. He was neatly dressed, pleasant-featured, and gave off absolutely nothing that would mark him as remarkable in a crowded room.
Mest lowered his voice. "He looks completely ordinary. Are you trying to tell me the First Master has taken up with someone significantly younger than her?"
The sound Noah made was an actual laugh, full and unguarded. Mira and Erza both smiled at the bar. Even Makarov turned to look at Mest with an expression of deep, helpless sympathy.
Noah collected himself and patted Mest on the shoulder. "Let me make a proper introduction. That completely ordinary-looking young man is actually Mavis's husband. Their son is only a year younger than the Master."
A pause.
"His name is Zeref."
Another pause.
"Face was one of his magical inventions. And incidentally, all four members of the First Master's founding team were his students."
What happened to Mest's face over the next several seconds was difficult to describe. It moved through a remarkable number of distinct expressions in very rapid succession. His posture went with it. The tension drained out of his body all at once, and only Noah's hand on his shoulder kept him from sliding entirely off the chair.
One thought was occupying every available space in his mind.
Fairy Tail is a dark guild. It has to be. There is no other explanation.