The moment Mirajane's screen cut to grey mist, the Fairy Tail tavern erupted into pure frustration.
"Are you kidding me right now?!" Natsu screamed, violently kicking a wooden chair across the floorboards. "It cut off right at the cool part! Did she hit it or what?!"
"Calm down, flame brain, look at the center!" Gray yelled, leaning his bare chest over the bar counter. "The magic is shifting again! The mist is clearing out!"
Floating in the middle of the air, the giant projection screen flickered wildly. The grey smoke spiraled away, locking its focus onto a completely different part of Merlin's sub-dimension.
The entire tavern went dead quiet. Six-year-old Romeo Conbolt gripped the edge of an empty barstool, his small eyes widening as he stared up at the image.
On the screen, fifteen-year-old Cana Alberona was standing on a narrow, crumbling stone ledge. Below her boots, there was absolutely nothing—
just a bottomless, pitch-black void that went down forever.
WOOSH!
With a sudden, deafening roar, a massive tornado of thousands of magical cards erupted straight out of the dark void, whipping around her head in a violent, screaming circle.
Then, Merlin's recorded voice dropped straight out of the sky, echoing through the guild's screen.
"Welcome to the Dealer's Table, card girl," Merlin's voice boomed, sounding completely relaxed. "No cheating, and no blasting your way out. Three real keys are hidden inside that moving deck. Touch a fake counterfeit, and it blows up in your face, giving you a long drop into the dark. Use your head."
Cana stood on the edge of the cliff, the wind ripping through her brown hair.
She panicked, her hand instantly reaching into her canvas pouch as her magic container flared to cast a card-locator spell.
PING!
The ceiling of her stone chamber flashed purple. A heavy, painful magic drain slammed straight into her chest, making her gasp as her knees buckled. Cana choked on the air, her tracking spell completely snuffing out before it could even form.
"Dang it," Cana muttered, wiping her mouth as she scrambled back onto the narrow path.
The storm of cards was moving too fast. The sharp paper edges of the counterfeits were whizzing past her ears, literally slicing tiny, bloody nicks into her bare arms and cheeks. She was panting, her heart hammering against her ribs as she backed up against the solid stone wall behind her. Her eyes couldn't track thousands of moving targets at once.
Down in the tavern, Gray crossed his arms, his face serious. "She can't use her locator magic. If she just reaches out blindly, those fake cards are gonna blow her straight off the cliff."
"She's too scared," Natsu muttered, his usual loud voice dropping. "She's hesitating."
Inside the room, Cana looked down at her shaking fingers. The blood from the paper cuts was dripping onto her knuckles.
I can't drop out here, she thought, her teeth grinding together as her mind raced through her secret thought-break. I didn't spend three years drinking at the bar and grinding my magic just to fall into a hole. I'm going to pass this trial, look Gildarts right in the face, and finally tell him the truth.
She let out a messy, ragged sigh. She didn't try another locator spell. Instead, she dropped straight down into a cross-legged seat right on the dirt ledge, ignoring the wind. She reached into her pouch, pulled out her favorite deck of fortune-telling cards, and slammed them onto the stone floorboards.
"She's doing a divination layout?" a senior mage murmured from the back, his eyebrows raising. "In the middle of a storm?"
"She's playing the odds," Master Makarov said quietly, his eyes fixed on her hands.
Cana didn't use a massive, flashy spell. She just guided a tiny, steady stream of Ethernano through her fingers, shuffling the fortune-telling deck frantically.
She wasn't looking for a vague destiny. She was using her Divination magic to actively map out the physical timeline of the room.
She flipped the first card onto the dirt. The Tower. The card pulsed with a tiny blue light, predicting a sudden shift in the magical pressure from the left side in three seconds.
She flipped a second card. The Wheel of Fortune. The card's magic linked directly with her mind, reading the exact rotation, speed, and trajectory of the swirling tornado above her head. It was turning the chaos into a literal card game she could read.
Cana tracked the countdown in her head, matching the movement of the future cards on the floorboards to the screaming wind.
Three... Two... One...
SWISH!
Her right hand snapped out into the blind paper storm with a lightning-fast gambler's reflex. Her fingers closed around a single card moving through the gale.
No explosion.
Cana opened her fingers. It was the first genuine key card, glowing with a soft gold light. Down in the tavern, Romeo threw his arms up, screaming in celebration. "She did it! She got one!"
Cana didn't look up to celebrate. She kept her eyes glued to the divination layout on the dirt, her fingers already shuffling the deck to calculate the next gap in the rotation. She flipped another card. Death. It mapped out an explosive pocket passing right over her shoulder.
She waited, her breath ragged as a fake card grazed her neck, leaving a fresh line of blood.
Now!
She lunged forward, her hand diving deep into the center of the vortex. SWISH! Her fingers snatched the second genuine key card right out of the air.
"Just one more!" Natsu yelled at the screen, pounding his fist on the table. "Grab it and get out of there, Cana!"
Cana's magic container was running dangerously low from the constant divination tracking. Her forehead was covered in sweat and trail grime. She looked at her deck, reading the very last path for the final key card. It was passing right along the outer edge of the void.
She stood up on her unstable legs, stepping right to the very brink of the pitch-black drop.
She reached her bleeding hand out, her fingers inches away from closing around the third, golden key card spinning through the air.
CRACK!
The loose gravel beneath her left boot suddenly gave way, crumbling straight into the bottomless pit. Cana gasped, her body violently wobbling as she lost her balance at the edge of the void.
At the exact same millisecond, the card tornado violently shifted its direction, and a massive, unstable wave of thousands of counterfeit explosive cards rushed straight toward her open, unprotected palm.
"CANA!" Romeo screamed, leaping off his stool.
SNAP!
The projection magic violently blurred into grey mist right at the peak of the disaster, cutting the feed completely and leaving the entire guildhall screaming in absolute, raging suspense.