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The guard's words hit the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Crawford, Zash Caine, and Abel all went still at the same moment, their expressions shifting in their own distinct ways. An unidentified airship, at this particular moment, flying directly over the capital of an island kingdom that almost no one outside it even knew about, was not a coincidence. Anyone with half a brain could see that.
"The Magic Council?" Abel's fingers moved to the magical artifact concealed inside his robe, the one he had originally prepared for Animus.
"I don't think so." Zash Caine's voice was unhurried. "I know how those bureaucrats operate. When the Council comes for someone, they come with numbers. They don't send a single ship."
Crawford crossed to the window. The airship was already visible, growing larger as it drifted steadily toward the palace. He leaned forward, squinting at the emblem painted along its hull, and the color drained out of his face.
"This is bad. That's Fairy Tail."
The name landed in the hall with a weight that made the air feel heavier. Even Animus, speaking through Sonya's body, went quiet for a half-second.
There was no one in Ishgar who had not heard of Fairy Tail. The guild had made itself impossible to ignore in recent years. They had dismantled two of the continent's most powerful dark guilds in a single day without taking a single casualty. That record alone put every other guild on the continent at a distance they could not even begin to close.
And they had a well-established habit of inserting themselves into other people's problems.
"Let us go and see."
Animus's voice settled back into its cold register. Sonya's body turned and walked toward the balcony at the front of the palace.
Crawford and the other two exchanged a glance and followed, though each of them was already quietly mapping out their exit routes. They had brought Animus into this arrangement for exactly one purpose: to have someone else absorb the worst of whatever came at them.
The balcony opened out above the city, and what they saw when they stepped onto it made every one of them catch their breath.
The Noah's Ark hung in the sky above the royal city, enormous and absolutely still, its pure white hull catching the sunlight and throwing it back in every direction. Its shadow swallowed half the palace complex. The Fairy Tail emblem on its side was unmistakable.
Noah's voice carried down from the ship's broadcast, filling the streets below.
"Crawford, you fat slob. You are completely surrounded. Come out and surrender while you still can, or I will break your legs myself when I drag you out."
Crawford's face turned a deep, mottled red. The sheer audacity of it, a guild mage addressing him, a former Chairman of the Magic Council, in front of a foreign palace, in those terms. His hands balled into fists, and his whole body shook.
But his trump card was gone. There was nothing behind the fury.
Zash Caine and Abel were less personally offended. Crawford's humiliation was not their problem. Animus, however, was another matter entirely. Sonya's features, controlled by a Dragon who had ruled this island for three centuries with absolute authority, had gone cold in a way that was distinct from any expression Sonya herself had ever worn.
"Give the order. Activate the city's Star-Light Cannon. Knock them out of the sky."
The sneer that followed was sharp and confident. Stella's geography made it a fortress, and the royal city of Altair had been shaped and reinforced by Animus over hundreds of years. The Stellanium deposits beneath the island had been absorbing starlight for all that time. Whatever Fairy Tail had brought with them, she had faced worse.
"Yes, Your Holiness!" The guard saluted and ran.
He had not been gone ten seconds.
The explosion that followed shook the palace to its foundations. A concussive boom rolled across the city and then the sound of crumbling stone came after it, and then silence.
A second guard stumbled in from the corridor, barely keeping his footing, his face white.
"Report! Your Holiness, the Star-Light Cannon was destroyed the instant it fired! A single beam from the airship, and the entire cannon platform and its surrounding fortifications are gone!"
The expression on Sonya's face froze.
The Star-Light Cannon's power source was the Stellanium deposits deep beneath the island. It had never been destroyed in a single exchange. That was not possible.
Above the city, the Noah's Ark drifted in a slow, deliberate circle, unhurried, its forward cannon still radiating the aftershock of whatever it had just discharged. It moved like something that owned the sky it occupied.
On the deck, a group of figures stood in clear view.
At the front was a white-haired young man with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the city below with the relaxed expression of someone surveying scenery. Behind him stood an armored red-haired woman, a white-dressed mage whose Magic Power radiated even from this distance, an Ice Mage, a Celestial Spirit Mage, Dragon Slayers of different elements, and more figures beyond them, every one of them carrying the unmistakable weight of serious power.
Fairy Tail had not sent a delegation. They had come in force.
"They... how could they..." Crawford's voice had lost all its authority. His legs were not entirely cooperating with him.
Zash Caine took a slow breath and steadied himself. "They came for us specifically. The Face units going offline was not a malfunction. Fairy Tail was behind it."
Abel, by contrast, broke into a sharp, unhinged laugh. His eyes were bright with something unpleasant. "Fairy Tail. Of course. The guild that has derailed our plans at every turn. And now they have delivered themselves to us." He spread his hands. "What better material for a blood sacrifice?"
Animus was not laughing.
Sonya's face had gone very still in the way that precedes something dangerous. Animus had sensed something from the deck of that airship the moment it came into view, something she had not expected to feel again, ever.
Irene Belserion was on that ship. The woman who had given birth to Dragon Slayer Magic. Still alive, after all this time.
Whatever arrogance Animus had been carrying a moment ago had curdled into something closer to cold fear. Dragon Slayer Magic wielded by someone like Irene was not a weapon to be endured through pride. And worse, Irene's Enchantment magic could forcibly separate a Dragon from its human host. If that happened, it was over.
The decision came quickly. Animus had managed the Stella Kingdom for over three hundred years. That was long enough. As long as she survived, she could rebuild everything from nothing. The three humans below her, all of them with their own schemes and their own exit plans, could deal with whatever came through that door.
Sonya's arms spread wide.
The ground beneath the entire city of Altair began to tremble. Dozens of magical automatons, built from Stellanium and powered through the deposits below, rose up out of the streets and plazas and rooftops. Animus had spent years constructing these things quietly, originally intended as the opening move of her campaign against humanity. Now they would serve as cover for her escape.
Then a light breeze moved through the city.
Every automaton stopped at once. The Stellanium powering them went dark, its accumulated starlight fading as though it had never been there, leaving behind nothing but dead stone. The backlash of it hit Sonya's body like a physical blow. She stumbled. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes found something behind her, and what was in them was not fury.
It was fear.
A hand had come to rest on her shoulder, completely without sound.
Noah looked at the girl in front of him and his voice was quiet and flat. "She is not a puppet for you to use. Get out of her body."