The giant magic screen in the middle of the tavern blurred, the smoke clearing away to show Erza's canyon again. She was still stuck in the dirt, her silver sword pressing hard against the giant teeth of the massive alpha beast.
"Archers!" Erza yelled, her voice cracking from the smoke as she looked up at the left cliff. "Stop shooting the small ones! Hit that loose ledge right above us! Drop those rocks on him!"
The eight phantom archers turned their bows and shot a heavy volley straight into the cracked stone line on the ridge.
BOOM!
The cliff side cracked apart, and a huge pile of boulders came crashing down. The heavy rocks completely flattened the alpha beast into the dirt. Erza scrambled backward onto her feet, shaking the dust off her armor as she pointed her sword forward.
"Spearmen, clean up the rest!" she ordered, panting.
She didn't even stay to watch the end of the fight. She turned around and ran straight through the stone exit door that had just opened in the wall, passing her first test.
The screen immediately cut over to Mirajane's stone room. Her right hand was still a sharp carapace needle flying at the monster's neck.
SNAP!
She drove the needle straight into the nerve joint behind the broken armor. The giant, bone-covered Behemoth froze up completely, its yellow eyes rolling back before it hit the floorboards with a heavy thud.
Mirajane let out a loud, cocky laugh, wiping the dirt and blood from her lip as she dropped her transformation. "Take that, Merlin."
She marched straight through her newly opened iron gate.
The screen shifted one more time, locking onto Cana. She was still wobbling right on the edge of the bottomless black pit, with the giant wave of exploding fake cards flying straight at her face.
Cana didn't drop into the hole. At the last millisecond, she deliberately threw her whole weight backward, falling flat on her back onto the solid stone path. As she hit the dirt, her hand snapped upward, plucking the third golden key card cleanly out of the air while the exploding fakes flew right over her head.
"Yes!" Cana gasped, scrambling up and shoving the key into the door lock.
The lock clicked, the door popped open, and she ran through, breathing a massive sigh of relief.
Down in the guildhall, the entire tavern erupted into loud cheers. Mages were slamming their mugs together on the tables. The three fifteen-year-old girls had completely beaten the first stage.
Eleven-year-old Lisanna blinked, looking away from the cheering crowd and turning her head up toward the second-floor balcony. "Hey... Master Merlin? What about the other three? How are Alzack and the old guys doing?"
Merlin was standing right next to the railing. The serious face he had been wearing completely vanished. He nervously rubbed the back of his head with his hand, sweat forming on his forehead as he let out a goofy, strained laugh.
"Uh... well... you see, Lisanna," Merlin muttered, his voice cracking a little bit. "My dungeon doesn't really like it when people try to take cheap shortcuts. It tends to punish them."
The floating screen split into three separate rows, showing the absolute disaster happening inside the other cave paths. The entire tavern went dead quiet for a second.
In the first row, Alzack was hanging completely upside down from the ceiling like a trapped spider, totally tangled up in a giant web of glowing magic nets. His dual pistols were sitting in the dirt below him. He was swaying back and forth, groaning miserably. "Uh... a little help here? I think I shot the wrong switch on the wall."
In the second row, Macao Conbolt was lying flat on his back, staring blankly at the stone ceiling like a dead fish. He had tried to use his Purple Flare fire to burn markers on the walls so he wouldn't get lost, but the dungeon counted it as brute-force magic. The room had violently drained every single drop of magic from his container, leaving him completely paralyzed and exhausted in the dirt.
In the third row, Wakaba Mine was trapped inside a tiny, sealed glass room. He had tried to flood his maze with dense pipe smoke to clog the trap sensors, but the room's ventilation system had completely inverted. He was hacking his lungs out, his face bright red as he frantically banged his hands against the glass, crying comical tears through the thick purple smoke.
The entire tavern floorboards erupted into a massive wave of roaring laughter.
"Look at them!" Natsu screamed, rolling around on the floorboards as he pointed his finger at the screen, tears spilling from his eyes. "They got completely wrecked! They're supposed to be the old veterans?!"
"Macao looks like a frozen log!" Gray yelled, laughing so hard he was pounding his fist against the bar counter. "And Wakaba is smoking himself alive! This is the greatest thing I've ever seen!"
In the corner of the bar, Master Makarov was holding his bald head in his hands, his face turning completely dark with absolute embarrassment for his thirty-two-year-old mages.
Up on the balcony, Merlin just kept rubbing his head, letting out another nervous laugh as the three grown mages continued to groan and choke on the screen, completely failing the Trial of Wit.