The return to the village on Galuna Island was less a triumphant march and more a collective shuffling of bruised bodies, punctuated by the sullen grumbles of Lyon, who now followed us with the downgraded status of "prisoner of honour," trailing silently and sulkily behind us, likely contemplating his poor life choices and the ineffectiveness of his grandiose plans. Gray, acting as a reluctant gaoler, had informed his former friend that the other members of his gang were conveniently gathered and already tied up in the village, which served as a surprisingly effective incentive for Lyon to follow us without further drama. At least for now.
We reached the village at nightfall, just in time to be greeted by the rise of that sick, purple moon, which seemed to hang in the sky like a cosmic bruise. The villagers received us with cautious hope, their eyes fixed on us as if we were the answer to years of desperate prayer. Moka, the hunched, bald chief, approached, the anxiety evident in his posture. "Well? The demon… the curse… did you manage to break it?"
Natsu, in his simplistic way and with his complete lack of timing for suspense or the possibility of failure, puffed out his dirty, battered chest, flashing a wide, toothy grin that was pure, naive confidence. "Of course we did! We kicked that ice demon's arse until it turned to dust! The curse is toast!"
Ah, the sweet, infectious certainty of victory. Adorable. And, as is customary in this sort of predictable script, entirely premature.
And then, as if the universe had a comedic script to follow and was waiting for the perfect cue, it happened. The purple moon reached its zenith, bathing the island in its spectral, nauseating light. And, one by one, like a macabre, well-rehearsed orchestra, the villagers began to groan. Their bodies contorted, shadows stretching in unnatural ways, the grotesque transformation into demons beginning anew, exactly as it had the night before, but this time, with an extra dash of bitter disappointment.
The panic was instantaneous. And, like everything in Fairy Tail, very, very loud. The villagers screamed, not from physical pain, but from absolute terror, from the cruel betrayal of a hope that had just been born only to be brutally crushed.
"No! It can't be! How is this possible?!" Lucy cried, her face pale with horror, taking a step back. "We saw Deliora disappear with our own eyes!"
Gray was in a state of shock, his mouth agape, looking at the transforming villagers and at his own hands as if the sacrifice of Ur, his master, had been a cruel joke, a tasteless anecdote told by a sadistic god. "But… all the effort… her life… was it… for nothing?"
Natsu, the most affected by the frustration, was furious and confused, a dangerous combination for him. "But… but we won! I saw him fall to bits! How is this stupid curse still here?! OI, CURSE, DIDN'T YOU HEAR ME?! I BEAT YOU!" he shouted at the air, as if he could intimidate the phenomenon into simply stopping. What an adorable idiot.
While everyone despaired in a beautiful chorus of panic and confusion, I just sighed, feeling a migraine forming. What a spectacle of melodrama. Amidst the chaos, Erza, as always, was the island of calm in a sea of hysteria. But her calm was tense, analytical. While everyone looked on in horror at the contorting villagers, the redhead remained motionless. And, crucially, she wasn't looking down, at the effects. She was looking up. At the apparent cause of the problem.
(Finally,) I thought, with a pang of genuine pride that surprised me, mixed with a healthy dose of my usual disdain. (Finally, Titania is using her eyes to see the whole picture, not just the enemy in front of her. It's taken a while, but she's getting there. Perhaps there's hope for the mages of this guild, who, for the most part, seem to operate on a philosophy of 'more brawn, less brain'.)
I saw the exact moment the cogs turned in her sharp mind. Her gaze, previously tense, sharpened. She noticed something strange. The purple moon… it looked too big, too close, almost as if it were a badly painted mural on the ceiling of a cave. And the light it emitted, as sinister as it was, felt… artificial, as if it were being filtered through a lens, not naturally radiated from a distant celestial body. Her head turned slowly, her eyes wide with sudden, shocking comprehension. It wasn't a curse 'coming from' the sky. It was a curse 'in' the sky.
And then, with the impeccable, absurd, and gloriously destructive logic that only a high-ranking member of Fairy Tail could possess, she reached the only possible conclusion. And frankly, as stupid as it sounded, it was the correct conclusion.
"Natsu!" her voice cut through the chaos, firm and filled with a new, terrible conviction that made even the half-transformed villagers pause to listen. She pointed her sword, which had appeared in her hand with a soft glow, at the sky, at the purple orb that watched us like a diseased eye. "The moon… this fake moon… it's the cause of everything! I want you to destroy it!"
There was a second of absolute silence. Even the transforming demons seemed to pause to process what had just been said. Natsu, confusion plastered on his face, blinked once, twice, probably trying to grasp the logic of attacking a celestial body. And then, his eyes lit up with the pure, unadulterated joy of a child who has just been given unrestricted permission to break the most expensive, shiny, and forbidden thing in the shop.
"DESTROY THE MOON?! Erza, you're the best! The best leader ever! That's the most incredible plan I've ever heard!" he shouted, already firing up. "Why didn't I think of that before?! Let's punch the moon!"
"HAVE YOU TWO GONE COMPLETELY MAD?! DESTROY THE MOON?! THAT'S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE AND WILL PROBABLY MESS UP THE TIDES, THE CALENDAR, AND THE ENTIRE NATURAL BALANCE OF THE PLANET!" Lucy screamed, her voice shrill, the personification of panic, logic, and common sense being brutally and enthusiastically ignored by the force of concentrated stupidity.
[Actually, Lucy,] Eos commented in my mind with the tone of someone correcting a slow, desperate student in a basic physics exam, [the destruction of this secondary celestial body would have minimal impact on the tides. Everyone would die from a rather inconvenient meteor shower and possibly a localised ice age. However, the premise of Erza's order, based on the observation of a visual anomaly, is… tactically interesting.]
(Silence, Eos. Don't ruin this moment of glorious and inspiring irrationality with your irritating logic,) I thought, a genuine, amused smile forming on my lips for the first time that evening. What a gloriously stupid plan. And perfect for this guild.
Without allowing time for further protests, Erza acted. "Requip: Giant's Armour!" In a blinding flash, her armour changed to the Giant's Armour, a massive yellow cuirass that made her look like a Valkyrie ready to fight gods, and in her hands appeared an immense spear, nearly twice her height, its sharp tip glowing with concentrated energy.
"NOW, NATSU! WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!"
With a cry that made the ground tremble, she, along with Natsu's power, hurled it, not directly at the centre of the 'moon', but at a precise angle, aiming for a specific point in the 'sky' that looked thinner, more unstable. The spear flew like a silver comet, piercing something invisible with a sharp sound, like glass cracking, creating a small but visible fissure in the air, from which the purple light seemed to leak.
The impact was spectacular. A real firework display for maniacs. The entire 'purple moon' shuddered violently and, with the sound of a million crystals shattering at once in a deafening cacophony, it broke apart. The dome, the membrane of moon magic that covered the island like an inverted glass bowl, disintegrated into countless fragments of purple light that fell upon us like glittering snow before vanishing completely into the air. Behind the broken illusion, the real night sky was revealed, deep and dark, sprinkled with bright stars, with the real moon, white, serene, and wholly intact, shining down on us with its gentle light.
The soft, white light of the real moon bathed the village, bringing a calm that felt almost sacred after the hysteria and chaos. Moka, the chief, who still retained his demonic form, approached Erza, his eyes wide with admiration and confusion. "The purple moon… it's gone. The curse is gone… but… we haven't returned to normal. Why? What was happening to us?"
Erza, with the firm gaze of one who had finally understood all the pieces of the puzzle, looked at the villagers with a serious expression, but not one of pity. It was one of deep understanding and a newfound respect. "It wasn't a curse that was transforming you. At least, not in the way you thought. It was your true nature being revealed. You are not humans cursed to become demons," she paused, letting the heavy truth settle in the silent village air. "You are demons who assumed the form of humans. That magical membrane, created by the residual energy from Lyon's Moon Drip ritual, was merely temporarily undoing, each night, the magic that gives you this appearance. The brutal transformation process was erasing your memories of who you truly were, and it was the fear of your own forgotten form, which seemed monstrous to you, that haunted you."
A shocked silence, deeper than any we had yet witnessed, fell over the village. The villagers looked at each other, touching their own faces, trying to process this impossible and terrifying truth. At that exact moment, Moka's son, Bobo, the one everyone thought was dead, emerged from the shadows, but now with large bat-like wings. His expression, however, was not one of fear, but of clarity.
"It's true, Father," Bobo said, his voice clear and unwavering, drawing all eyes. "This was never a curse about changing our appearance. It was always about our memories. I ran away because… I remembered. A little. Every night." He continued, and the memories seemed to return in flashes, not just for him, but for the other villagers, who now murmured amongst themselves. "The magic from those men's ritual… it was interfering with ours, creating false memories."
With Bobo's words, the dam broke. The other villagers' memories began to return, not as a nightmare, but as a forgotten part of themselves. They remembered their past, their decision to abandon a life of conflict to seek peace on the island. The fear in their faces gave way to a bittersweet acceptance. They were no longer cursed. They were free, at last, to choose who they really wanted to be, without the fear of the curse of forgetfulness and false memories.
Amidst the silent celebration and the tearful relief of the villagers, with everyone on my team congratulating and hugging each other as if they'd just won a war, I let out a long, sleepy, and entirely deliberate yawn.
Lucy, her face radiant with happiness, turned to me. "We did it, Azra'il! We really did it! Erza, you were amazing! And to think they were demons all along! What a twist!"
Natsu, proud as a peacock, beat his chest. "Yeah! I 'destroyed the moon'! The Dragon's Roar solved everything, as always!"
And I, with my patience already at its limit, could no longer hold back. "Frankly," I began, my voice cutting through the celebration with the delicacy of broken glass, "it took you all long enough to figure out something so painfully obvious."
Everyone turned to me, the joyful expressions freezing on their faces, replaced by a confused shock.
"What do you mean 'obvious', you grumpy white wolf?" Gray asked, his eyebrow arched.
I examined my nails with feigned interest. "The magical membrane in the sky? The demonic nature of the villagers? Please. I noticed that on the first night I slept here, while you were all busy chasing giant rats and complaining about the food. The villagers' magical signature was never purely human; it always had a residual demonic aura, faint, but unmistakable to one who knows what to look for. And the 'curse', as you called it, had the inconsistent and cyclical fluctuation of a large-scale, unstable, and reactive illusion magic, not the fixed, oppressive density of a proper demonic seal." I looked at them, a condescending smile forming on my lips. "It was a puzzle for a child with a modicum of magical perception and the ability to think for more than five seconds without resorting to punches."
The silence that followed was deafening. Even the wind seemed to have stopped to listen.
"You..." Happy's voice trembled, his large green eyes wide with pure disbelief. "You… you knew they were demons and that the purple moon was fake… the whole time?"
Lucy exploded. Her patience, apparently, also had its limits. "IF YOU KNEW, WHY IN THE DEVIL'S NAME, FOR ALL THE CELESTIAL SPIRITS, DIDN'T YOU SAY ANYTHING?!" her high-pitched shriek echoed through the village, probably startling the bats in the nearby caves. "WE WENT THROUGH ALL THAT HELL! I WAS ALMOST DEMON DINNER! GRAY ALMOST SACRIFICED HIMSELF IN AN ACT OF SUICIDAL NOBILITY! WE COULD HAVE DIED!"
"YEAH! I ALMOST THREW UP MY INTERNAL ORGANS SEVERAL TIMES!" Natsu agreed, indignant, which, in his mind, was probably a valid argument. "WE COULD HAVE DESTROYED THAT STUPID 'LENS' ON THE FIRST DAY AND GONE HOME FOR SOME MEAT!"
I faced them with an icy calm, my expression unshakeable, letting their hysteria dissipate into the air. "Because," I began, my voice low and precise, each word falling like a shard of ice, "it was not my mission. You, driven by nobility, by compassion, and, let's not forget, by a questionable desire for a financial reward, accepted the job. Your task was to understand the problem and solve it, not mine. It was your mission. You needed to go through this, you needed to rack your brains and use your noble hearts and your occasionally functional brains to arrive at the truth on your own. To grow a little in the process." I paused.
"My task, as I understood it upon being dragged into this mess, was to ensure you didn't die in a particularly stupid and embarrassing way in the process. I am a glorified lazy babysitter, my dears, not the answer sheet at the back of the book." I turned, beginning to walk with a deliberate slowness towards the beach, feeling the stares of shock, indignation, and perhaps, a reluctant understanding, burning into my back. "Now, if you'll excuse me, all this edifying talk about self-discovery, accepting one's demonic nature, and the importance of breaking illusions has made me terribly thirsty. And if there isn't a good, strong jasmine tea waiting for me when I get back to the guild," I stopped and looked at them over my shoulder, a dangerous, the first genuine, smile of the evening on my lips, "then there will be mass destruction. And this time, it won't be an illusion. I promise."
The celebration, or what was left of it, was… strange. The villagers, now fully aware of their demonic nature, were radiant, a peace they hadn't felt in years etched on their faces. They surrounded us, offering exotic fruits, hugs (which I dodged with the agility of a shadow), and eternal thanks. In the midst of it all, Moka, the chief, approached Erza, carrying a large, heavy sack of Jewels and, more importantly, a beautiful and ancient golden key.
"We can never, in a thousand lifetimes, thank Fairy Tail enough," he said, with genuine emotion in his voice. "Please, as a small token of our gratitude, accept this. It is the reward we promised. The 7 million Jewels and the Celestial Spirit Key that our family has guarded and protected for generations."
Lucy's eyes turned into hearts, or perhaps Jewel signs; it was hard to tell. She was already visibly dreaming of having her rent paid for a year and, more importantly, of a new and powerful celestial friend to add to her collection. Natsu and Happy, on the other hand, were practically drooling, thinking of mountains of fish and meat. Gray, with his usual pragmatism, seemed simply relieved, thinking that perhaps all the suffering, the cold, and the family drama had, after all, been worth it financially.
Erza, however, instead of accepting the reward with a victorious smile, raised her hand, her expression serious, rigid, and as unshakeable as a statue of a warrior queen.
"I cannot accept."
A shocked silence, deeper than the one that had followed Deliora's death, fell over the group. Even the island's crickets seemed to stop chirping.
"WHAAAAAT?! WHY NOT, ERZA?! HAVE YOU GONE MAD?!" Natsu was the first to explode, as always.
Erza didn't even blink. "This mission was taken from the S-Class mission board without the Master's express permission. It was an act of insubordination, a breach of our guild's most important rules. We cannot be rewarded for indiscipline, no matter how good the outcome. We greatly appreciate your generosity, Chief Moka, but the honour of Fairy Tail and respect for our laws do not permit us to accept this payment."
Erza's declaration, so noble and so terribly… 'Erza', hit the team like a punch to the gut. Natsu fell to his knees on the sand, his soul leaving his body in a dramatic sigh. "ALL… ALL THAT FIGHTING… ALL THAT SICKNESS… WAS FOR… NOTHING?!" Happy began to cry rivers of tears, forming little puddles at his feet. "My fish… my luxury fish… my lobster with melted butter… all my dreams…"
But it was Lucy's reaction that, I admit, touched me in an unexpected way. She wasn't just thinking about the money. Her large brown eyes were fixed on the Golden Key, Sagittarius's key, which Moka was still holding in his hands. And silent, thick, genuine tears began to stream down her face, each one a tiny crystal of a broken heart.
"But… the key…" she sobbed, her voice choked. "I… I promised myself I would gather all twelve… A spirit is right there… waiting for a friend, for a home… and… and I can't take him with me…" She sat on the ground, hugging her knees, crying inconsolably, not out of greed, but from the pain of leaving one of her precious spirits behind.
And the sight of that blonde girl, usually so optimistic and resilient, genuinely heartbroken, was, apparently, too much even for the steel discipline of the great Titania. Erza watched Lucy crying, and I saw, for the first time in a long while, her façade of the rigid, inflexible disciplinarian begin to crack. Her gaze softened, the stiffness in her shoulders disappeared. She looked at the grateful villagers, at her exhausted friends, and let out a long, heavy sigh, the sigh of an older sister who, deep down, could never keep up the tough act for long when one of her loved ones was suffering.
"Chief Moka," she began, and her voice, though still firm, was now a little softer, less imposing. "About the monetary reward… my decision stands. The honour of the guild is above any payment. We cannot, and will not, accept it."
Lucy sobbed even louder, and Natsu and Happy's shoulders slumped in final despair.
"...However," Erza continued, and there was a new light in her eyes, a spark of her true nature. "The key… the key is different. That is not payment for a service. It is the transfer of guardianship of a living being, of a potential friend. It would be a disrespect to the spirit and to celestial magic itself to leave him here when a mage as dedicated and caring as Lucy is present to look after him." She turned to Moka, and a small, almost imperceptible, but undeniably genuine smile appeared on her lips. "In the name of Fairy Tail, and in the name of the bonds that unite us… we will accept the key. As a symbol of our new friendship."
Lucy's eyes widened, the tears stopping instantly, replaced by a glint of pure, absolute disbelief and joy. And, in a burst of happiness that defied all her previous exhaustion, she leapt up from the ground and threw herself into Erza's arms, hugging her with the force of a small hurricane of gratitude.
"ERZA! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! YOU'RE THE BEST, THE MOST AMAZING, THE MOST PERFECT!" she cried, her face buried in Erza's armour.
Erza, caught off guard and clearly uncomfortable with such effusive and sudden physical contact, stiffened for a moment, like a statue, unsure what to do with her arms. But then, slowly, she relaxed, and with a clumsy gentleness, she awkwardly patted Lucy's back. And the rare, true smile that lit up her face in that moment, a smile of genuine affection and satisfaction, was brighter than any of her armours. And, for an instant, just an instant, I found myself smiling too. What a bunch of sentimental idiots. And, against all my better judgement and my desire to remain a cynical, detached observer, I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was one of them. What a terrible and wonderful thought.