"You…you!" Edolas Gajeel was speechless for a moment as he heard the name of the person standing in front of him.
BAM!!
He immediately punched his own face, shocking Karna, who watched the entire process happen in front of his eyes in slow motion.
"Woah, are you alright? What the hell was that?" Karna asked as he tried to help the wobbling reporter in front of him. The punch was actually so strong that it made Edolas Gajeel's head spin for a moment.
Gajeel hit himself so hard that his eyes were shaking for a few seconds. But he put his hands on Karna's shoulders and finally managed to stabilize his equilibrium.
The moment his senses came back, he grasped Karna's shoulders tightly as if wanting to ensure once again that he was not under any sort of illusion.
"Can you repeat your name, please?" Edolas Gajeel asked again.
"Karna Vermillion," Karna simply answered once again, while having a bad feeling about the effects he had on the guild because of his disappearance.
Edolas Gajeel's face went through a variety of expressions—disbelief, sadness, terror, frustration—and finally looked as though a large amount of weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
"Karna Vermillion, please save us," Edolas Gajeel said as he began to narrate what had happened in the last few days.
From Edolas Gajeel's point of view, all problems started the moment the last person was released from the Lacrima and all the Lacrima on the floating island were completely transformed.
He remembered the happiness of the civilian family group who gained a member back. But as a reporter, he was able to keep an eye on everything, even unconsciously. So seeing the Fairy Tail members suddenly go silent made him think something was wrong.
He watched as a few of them looked confused, and one of them—Gray—suddenly pulled the researcher aside and aggressively asked him whether there were any more Lacrima left in a building somewhere.
"Where the hell are the rest of the Lacrimas from using the Anima? There are still some people left who disappeared!" Gray began shaking the main researcher in charge of the Anima project. But the researcher, a devout follower of the king of Edolas, began to cackle mockingly.
"Hahaha, well, what do you know? Even with all that power, you can't save everyone after all." The researcher started laughing like a madman at the anguish on the faces of the enemies of Edolas.
Bam!
"Guh…" The researcher suddenly got punched by Gajeel, knocking the air out of his lungs.
Gajeel knew that the Fairy Tail wizards might be good at fighting and winning, but they were too kind with prisoners and enemies when it came to obtaining intelligence. The most they would do was beat someone up and break a few bones to get information. But those tactics would not work on madmen like this, who laughed even knowing they were in a bad situation.
But Gajeel had taken many missions to destroy dark guilds. He had also had to use many unsavoury methods to extract information from them. Although he only used them when innocent lives were at stake, he had done it so often that he had no qualms about using them now.
He pulled the researcher from Gray's grasp and began dragging him toward the nearest room he could find. While doing so, he shouted back:
"Look in every room and for every Lacrima piece you can find. I'll try to get as much information as possible from this scumbag," Gajeel said as he entered a room.
Immediately all the Fairy Tail wizards began to scour every inch of the castle to gather every piece of Lacrima they could find. Most of them were only tiny pieces, but they made sure to collect them so that not even a single problem would arise.
They then combined every piece they could find to form a small mountain in the Anima room and activated the Lacrima again.
But the result was horrific: this time, the room was suddenly filled with body parts and many inanimate objects.
This horrified the Fairy Tail members, but Natsu and Wendy immediately informed them that the blood and body parts were not human due to their distinct lack of human smell.
They decided to investigate further, but Edolas Gajeel and Earthland Wendy went to see how far Gajeel had gotten in the interrogation.
The sight that welcomed them was not a good one. The researcher was crucified to the wall with many iron weapons stabbed into different parts of his body, from which blood was leaking.
Levy suddenly had flashbacks of the torture she had suffered under Gajeel's hands before. But she pushed those memories away, as there were more important things right now—mainly the fact that Gajeel was splattered with blood and had a dead look in his eyes.
"Gajeel, what… what did you find?" Levy asked gently while shaking his shoulder.
Gajeel just turned his head with the same dead look in his eyes and muttered slowly:
"Sorry, pipsqueak. We were too late." Gajeel then explained everything he had learned from his interrogation about the use of a large amount of Lacrima at the beginning.
Levy immediately ran back to the other guild members in disbelief, tears in her eyes.
Edolas Gajeel began to follow her but was suddenly held back by Gajeel, who pulled his hand.
"What is it?" Edolas Gajeel asked, confused as to why Earthland Gajeel stopped him.
"You need to run," Gajeel said simply.
"What do you mean run? Right now you guys need all the support you can get," Edolas Gajeel replied in confusion. Gajeel suddenly had a distant look in his eyes as he responded:
"Once, the guild I was in decided to go to war against Fairy Tail and tried to provoke them by destroying their building. Nothing happened. But then we attacked and injured a member of their guild to incite a fight. The end result was the complete and utter annihilation of the guild that had been contending with Fairy Tail for the title of strongest guild on the continent."
Edolas Gajeel's eyes widened as he took in this information. But Earthland Gajeel continued.
"That happened just because I injured a few members. What do you think is going to happen when they find out one of their own died? So listen to me—get as many people as you can in the capital and tell them to run."
Edolas Gajeel did not expect the destruction to reach the level Gajeel described. But he was thoroughly mistaken, as he saw the entire kingdom fall in the next few days.
A/N- hope you like it.