Aelius couldn't even make it to his room without yet another thing happening. He had barely made it into the lobby before his next step sent him through the floor, not a fall, closer to stepping through a door. One step and he was in the lobby; the next, he was somewhere else entirely.
It looked, at first glance, like a manor. Not a grand one, more like someone had taken a log cabin and scaled it up past any reasonable justification for the size, the ceilings too high, the rooms too wide. Trumpets blew from nowhere. A staircase that had not been there five seconds ago now occupied the far wall, and at the top of it stood Nehzhar, leaning against the banister with both arms folded and the expression he wore when he was pleased with himself, which was most of the time.
"And the prodigal son returns," Nehzhar said. "Nearly seven feet of bad, mysterious teen energy and enough 'it's not a phase, Mom' to cut a knife with—" he tried to continue, but a lance of pestilence forced him to duck to avoid being skewered through his open jaw.
The attack missed, but it still gave Aelius something. Instead of hitting and removing the wall behind Nehzhar, it simply disappeared beyond it with a small ripple, like hitting water.
"And here I thought you'd changed," Nehzhar laughed, and kept walking down the stairs.
"Why am I—" Aelius looked around the space and opened his mouth to continue before Nehzhar cut him off.
"You really don't recognise it? I know you were only here once, but I figured you'd remember the place you killed your second god in."
That was why it felt familiar. Aelius looked at Nehzhar. "And is this supposed to be some revenge for killing your father? Because you did deliver the final blow. Or let me guess, this is all for fun."
There was annoyance in his voice, and he didn't bother hiding it.
"Nah, dad had it coming." Nehzhar reached the bottom of the stairs and shrugged. "I mean, fuck, look at what he did to me. Power comes with its own price, and mine is a mind without a center. All fractured eggshells and rusted fragments." He laughed. "And all I got was the ability to copy and learn like ninety-nine percent of magic to ever, and will ever, exist."
"That still doesn't answer my question," Aelius said. "What am I here for? And why should I not be killing you right now?"
"Right, I almost forgot. I tend to get ahead of myself when I'm having fun." Nehzhar dropped onto a chair that hadn't been there a second ago. "Well, let me lay it out and see if this tidbit clicks. So a friend of ours has been up to some rather interesting... reading."
"Nameless," Aelius said immediately.
"HOW!" Nehzhar exclaimed. "I literally just started—"
"Poor use of wording," Aelius said. "What does Nameless, and more importantly me, have to do with whatever game you're concocting?"
Nehzhar stared at him for a moment. Then he pointed at him. "You know what, that's actually fair; I walked into that." He leaned back in the chair. "Okay then, let me be clear." Nehzhar took a deep breath. "What the actual fuck is wrong with you, Morvain? What the hell were you thinking giving Nameless that book?"
Aelius raised one brow. "So you know about that."
"More than know. I have never seen that thing brag, and it bragged to me about it, Aelius."
Aelius's eyes narrowed, but he didn't immediately respond.
If Nehzhar looked actually worried about something, enough to cut his theatrics and be clear, then it was bad. Very bad. Nehzhar didn't worry. Nehzhar found things amusing or interesting or occasionally inconvenient, but worry was not part of his architecture. Seeing it now, even in the stripped-down version of it that Nehzhar allowed to show, settled something cold in Aelius's chest.
He had known, when he gave Nameless the book of Zeref, written about his grandfather and what functioned as a seal for something considerably greater, that it would come back around eventually. Everything did. He had made the trade with full awareness that he was pulling a thread attached to something he couldn't see the other end of, and he had done it anyway because the alternative was going into the Labyrinth's training without the leverage to guarantee Nameless would actually deliver on its end.
He had banked on time; he assumed he could kill Acnologia first, get strong enough that whatever he had set in motion couldn't reach him before he was ready for it. Handle one catastrophic problem at a time in the correct order and trust that the order would hold. The noose had wrapped around his neck considerably faster than he had planned for. He looked at Nehzhar. "What did it do with it?"
"Well, almighty Aelius." Nehzhar gave him a stern look. "You gave it a corporeal body. Meaning its influence on our world is considerably more physical than it was. Just like how it was in the Labyrinth, but permanent."
"How." Aelius's eyes narrowed slightly. "I read through that book myself. There were spells, incantations, but nothing that should have or could have—" His words trailed off. There was one way Nameless could have acquired something actually useful from that book. "Unless the seal on the book was meant for it."
"It's halfway complete," Nehzhar said.
Aelius looked at Nehzhar. "Chaos."
Nehzhar looked back at him without saying anything, which was confirmation enough.
"How did it get the first book?" Aelius said.
"My father was a jackass who played more games than I did," Nehzhar said simply. "He woke up the book and trapped Nameless in the Labyrinth to see what exactly Zeref had created. And when we killed him, we let Nameless out into the rest of the greater world." It was odd to hear him like this, stripped of everything performative, just flat and straightforward. If Aelius were someone who was easily unnerved, he would have been.
"Why did it take so long for it to get another book then?" Aelius said, after a moment. "It wasn't exactly hard for me to get it. I was drawn to it, after some morons unearthed it. If it's after these books to complete itself, why wait so long?"
So Nameless had used the trade to get what it wanted. Aelius wouldn't put it past the thing to have set everything up specifically to get it from him, the Labyrinth, the training, the graveyard full of names, all of it arranged years in advance around the single outcome of Aelius walking in voluntarily with the right book in his hands.
"So why tell me this now?" he said. "Why recruit Caius, and whoever the hell that woman is? Seraphine."
"Oh, well, Caius was just to put a proverbial leash around his neck," Nehzhar said. "He and Neshi are the last two book holders, so I figure we might as well try to keep them close. Better to have them where we can see them than have Nameless get to them first without any of us knowing about it until it's too late."
"And Seraphine," Aelius repeated.
"At least take me out to dinner first, Aely." Nehzhar leaned back in the chair. "Let a man have some secrets. And a hobby."
Aelius looked at him for a long moment before he closed his eyes and leaned his head back, looking up at the wooden ceiling. "And why are you telling me this now? Or even at all? You nearly killed me the last time we met, and then you nearly killed one of Fairy Tail afterward. To the point that if it wasn't for the old witch, she likely would have never been a mage again."
"Ah, yes, water girl." Nehzhar hummed to himself for a moment. "I did say I wouldn't kill any of them. Maim was not part of that agreement, but I'm glad to see she recovered, even if she then went headfirst into a dragon's maw. But they're still alive, so it's fine." He said the last part with genuine cheer, as though that resolved the matter entirely.
"So you nearly killed me, traumatized a child after punching my heart out, instead of just telling me this." Aelius kept looking at the ceiling. "I'm sure even with our history I would have listened, at least somewhat."
"Honestly, it seemed easier at the time," Nehzhar said. "And I was really, genuinely bored. I thought after the Labyrinth, all the magic in the world would be enough, but it's a pain trying to get to any of it with all these rules and regulations in the way. Nirvana was so disappointing for all its hype, I have to say. Big ancient weapon with a moral compass stapled to it, very underwhelming."
"I'm leaving," Aelius said, and stood.
Nehzhar opened his mouth.
"Whatever you were about to say," Aelius said, "save it. I have had a long day; I fought Caius, I had a conversation I didn't ask for, and I would like to sleep before tomorrow's events."
Nehzhar closed his mouth. Then opened it again. "You're not even a little curious about—"
"No."
"But I haven't even gotten to the—"
"Nehzhar."
Nehzhar looked at him. Then he sighed, the long-suffering sigh of someone who had prepared considerably more material and was being denied the audience for it. "Fine. Go sleep. Very dramatic exit, by the way, very you." He waved a hand toward the door. "Same lobby you came in through. Try not to step through any other floors on the way out."
Aelius walked to the door without looking back, and this time his next step landed on hotel carpet rather than dead god's floorboards, and the sound of the manor closed behind him like a thought ending.
He made it to his room without anything else happening, which felt like an achievement.
The second day of the Grand Magic Games arrived the way days arrived in Crocus during the games week, loudly and without consideration for anyone who might have wanted more time before it started. The city was already moving when Aelius left the hotel, the streets filling with an excited energy.
He could hear people talking about the battle as he walked. Not all of it flattering, some of it confused, most of it loud. The name Fairy Tail came up more than it had in years, and not always in the same sentence as sixth place.
He bought something from a vendor near the main thoroughfare and ate it while he walked, and did not think about anything Nehzhar had told him, because honestly, he didn't care at that moment.
The Domus Flau was already filling when he arrived. Macao was waiting near the competitor's entrance with the program for the day's events.
"Morning," Aelius said.
"You were gone half the night," Macao said.
"I'm aware."
"Do I want to know why?"
Aelius looked at him. "No."
Aelius looked at the program. "No."
Macao blinked. "No what? I haven't said anything yet."
"Whatever you're about to suggest about today's event." Aelius handed the program back. "No."
Macao looked at the program, then at Aelius, then back at the program. "I was going to say good luck."
Aelius looked at him for a moment. Then he turned and walked toward the competitor's entrance.
The waiting area beneath the arena had been modified overnight, the large lacrima screen already running, showing an aerial view of something that hadn't been there yesterday, a city, compact and dense, built inside the arena floor with the kind of speed that only large-scale magic produced. Streets, buildings, alleyways, plazas, all of it compressed into the arena's footprint and somehow containing considerably more space than the footprint should have allowed.
The other competitors filtered in around him. He recognized Caius before he fully processed the recognition, the size of him making the waiting room feel smaller than it was. Caius looked at him across the room and grinned, which Aelius returned with nothing, and Caius seemed to find that acceptable.
Seraphine was already in the corner when he arrived, standing with her hands folded and her pale coat undisturbed, watching the lacrima screen with the same patient attention she brought to everything.
She did not look at him.
He looked at her for a moment, then looked at the screen.
Above, the announcer's voice rolled across the arena as the stands filled to capacity. "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the Second Annual Grand Magic Games! Yesterday gave us mountains, thrones, and a man who regenerated his own throat in front of fifty thousand people, and today, today we are going to give you something entirely different!" The crowd's response came down through the stone. "This morning's event is called the Crown of Illusions!"
The lacrima shifted, showing the city below from above, its streets empty and waiting.
"Our competitors will enter a magical city where every single person appears identical. Names, voices, appearances, all of it concealed by magic. The contestants cannot tell each other apart; they cannot tell contestants from the city's magical inhabitants, and they have no idea who they are standing next to at any given moment." He paused for the crowd to process that. "Each contestant has been secretly assigned one of three objectives. Protect a hidden resident of the city. Assassinate another contestant. Or simply survive until time expires. Nobody knows who has which objective. Nobody knows who anyone else is." Another pause, longer. "But we do. Every screen in this arena will show our audience the full picture while our competitors walk around completely blind. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been doing this job for two years, and I have never been more excited about a morning event in my life."
The door to the competitors' entrance opened. An official stepped in and held up three sealed envelopes. "Each competitor draws one. Your objective is inside. Do not share it."
Aelius took the envelope closest to him and opened it. 'Survive until time expires.' Of course he got the one that required the most patience. He sighed, crushed the note, put it in his requip space, and walked through the barrier into the city.
The effect was immediate. The moment he crossed the threshold, something settled over him like a second skin, the magic of the event reshaping everything about his outward appearance, his height, his build, his mask, his voice if he chose to use it, all of it replaced by the same generic face and plain clothing that every other person in this city now wore. He looked at his hands. Ordinary. He looked at his reflection in the nearest shop window. A person. Just a person, like every other person in every direction.
He walked toward the center.
The city was more detailed up close than it had looked on the lacrima, the buildings real enough that the stone had texture under his fingertips when he brushed past a wall, the streets laid out in a pattern that suggested someone had actually thought about the geography rather than just dropping facades in a row. People moved through the streets, the magical inhabitants the announcer had mentioned, all of them wearing the same face as every contestant, all of them moving with the easy randomness of a crowd that hadn't been told anything was at stake.
The central plaza opened up ahead of him, a wide square with a fountain that wasn't producing water so much as a slow, luminous mist that drifted across the cobblestones. Several people were already there when he arrived. Six, seven, he couldn't tell which were contestants and which were the city's population, which was presumably the point.
One of them was standing in the center of the plaza looking around at the newcomers. "Right," that person said, to no one specifically and therefore to everyone nearby. "This is a murder mystery." Several heads turned. "Think about it," they continued. "We've all got objectives we can't share. Some of us are protecting someone, some of us are hunting someone, some of us are just trying to outlast everyone else. There are clues built into this; there have to be, otherwise the protecting and the hunting objectives are completely random, and that's bad event design." They looked around the plaza. "Which means this city has information in it somewhere. Things that tell you who's who if you know what you're looking for."
Nobody said anything for a moment. "They're not wrong," someone else said, from the left side of the plaza.
"It's still a terrible position to be in if your objective is assassination," a third voice said, from somewhere near the fountain. "You have to find your target before your target figures out they're being hunted, in a city full of identical people, with no idea who anyone is."
"And if your objective is protection," the first voice said, "you have to find the person you're protecting before the assassin does."
Aelius stood at the edge of the plaza and listened to all of it; it wasn't wrong. In fact, it was pretty spot on, but he didn't care to dwell on it too long, because it was already distracting him. The only reason he even knew what a murder mystery was was because of Levy forcing him to read them when he was younger. And thinking of her, of the rest in general, was not something he wanted to do.
Since his objective was to survive until time expired, it required none of what they were discussing. It required him to still be standing when the timer ran out, which in a city full of people who couldn't tell him apart from anyone else and at least one person actively hunting another contestant was a straightforward enough problem. Stay moving, stay unremarkable, avoid becoming collateral in whatever was happening between the protectors and the assassins, and let time do the work.
Since his objective was to survive until time expired, it required none of what they were discussing. It required him to still be standing when the timer ran out, which in a city full of people who couldn't tell him apart from anyone else and at least one person actively hunting another contestant was straightforward enough. Stay moving, stay unremarkable, avoid becoming collateral in whatever was happening between the protectors and the assassins, and let time do the work.
He was already bored, and he knew it wouldn't change. Worse, hiding wasn't an option. Someone standing alone in corners or moving through empty streets read as either a target or an assassin to anyone paying attention, and drawing that kind of attention served nobody's objective except the person hunting. He needed to be in the crowd without being of it, present enough to be unremarkable, engaged enough that nobody looked twice.
He walked back toward the center of the plaza and stood near the fountain.
"Any thoughts on the clues?" the first voice said, to the group in general.
"The city has districts," someone said. "I noticed coming in. Different architectural styles in each section. That might matter."
"Or it's set dressing," another voice said.
"Could be both," a third offered.
Aelius looked at the fountain. The mist coming off it drifted in a direction that had nothing to do with the wind, which meant it was being directed, which meant it was probably pointing at something.
"You're very quiet," someone said, close enough that they were talking to him specifically.
He looked at them. Same face and voice as everyone else. This would be the real challenge, because if he didn't change his speech pattern, it could be the same as simply wearing a shirt that says im Aelius in bright letters.
"Just watching the fountain," he said, forcing his voice not to sound so monotone.
"Why?"
"The mist is drifting weird. It's like it's being controlled," he said.
There was a pause. Then the person looked at the fountain, and the mist, and the direction it was drifting toward, and said nothing for a moment. Several others in the plaza had caught the exchange and were now looking at the fountain too, the group's attention shifting to the new mystery.
"It's moving toward the eastern district," someone said.
"Consistently," Aelius confirmed. "It hasn't changed direction since I started watching it."
"So the NPC we're supposed to protect is in the east," the first voice from before said. "Or the target for assassination is."
"Or it's pointing at nothing and the event designers wanted us to waste time walking east," a different voice said, from somewhere behind the fountain.
"Then we should split," the person nearest Aelius said. "Half go east, half stay here, see what turns up."
"We don't know who we're splitting with," someone pointed out. "For all we know, the person suggesting we split has an assassination objective and is trying to herd us somewhere convenient."
"That doesn't make sense," another voice said. "It can't be a trap if we don't know who each other is. The assassin doesn't know who their target is any more than we know who the assassin is. Herding us somewhere doesn't help them unless they already know something we don't."
"Which they might," the first voice said.
"How."
"I don't know, that's the point. We don't know what information anyone else has. Maybe the assassination objective comes with a description. Maybe the protect objective names the person you're protecting. We're assuming everyone is as blind as we are."
The plaza went quiet for a moment while people sat with that.
"Mine doesn't name anyone," someone said carefully, and then immediately seemed to regret saying it, because it confirmed their objective without confirming which one it was.
"Neither does mine," someone else said.
"So we're all equally blind," the first voice concluded. "Which means the trap argument doesn't hold. An assassin can't set a trap for a specific person if they don't know which person they're looking for."
"Unless the clues in the city tell them," a new voice said, from the edge of the plaza. "The mist, the districts, whatever else is built into this place. If the clues lead to the NPC, and the NPC is the target, then following the clues puts everyone in the same place at the same time, and at that point it doesn't matter that the assassin doesn't know who their target is. Everyone's in one location. The odds work themselves out."
That one landed differently than the others. Several people shifted their footing.
"So following the clues is dangerous," someone said.
"Following the clues is the whole event," someone else replied. "That's what we're supposed to do. The question is whether you do it with other people or alone, and whether that makes it safer or less safe depending on what your objective is."
"Safer if you're protecting," the person nearest Aelius said. "Numbers help when you're defending something. More eyes, more bodies between the assassin and the target."
"Riskier if you're surviving," another voice said. "More people in one place means more chaos, more chances of getting caught in something that isn't your problem."
"And if you're assassinating," the first voice said slowly, "you want the crowd, because the crowd makes it harder to tell who made the move."
The conversation had built itself into something that was generating more questions than it was answering, which was probably what the event designers had intended. Aelius looked at the mist drifting from the fountain, still moving east, still consistent, and made his decision. He started walking.
"You're just going?" the person nearest him said.
"Yes," he said.
"Without knowing if it's a trap."
"It's probably a trap," he said, without stopping. "But standing in the plaza discussing whether it's a trap doesn't change what it is."
He heard footsteps behind him, two or three people following without discussing it, pulled along by the same logic that made crowds follow whoever moved first when nobody had a better option. The debate behind him continued for another few seconds before it too began to dissolve as people started making individual decisions, the group splitting not because anyone suggested it but because standing still had stopped feeling like a strategy.
The eastern district closed around him as he entered it, the streets narrower, and the buildings pressing closer overhead. He would admit to underestimating the intelligence behind the game; normally, he would have said the reason he was going, whether it was a trap or not, was because no one would be able to actually touch him if he willed it. He also noticed that magic wasn't fully allowed in the city, something the contestants were not told. And Aelius might have been the only person to actually notice. He couldn't rest his hypothesis without alerting who he was, but he had a feeling offensive magic was banned,
Another question was how someone was supposed to be assassinated, but one he would ignore for now.