The outskirts of Magnolia. A certain abandoned factory.
Inside the rusty iron sheet walls, where industrial waste and broken equipment should have been piled up by rights, there was instead a clean, square platform taking up the entire open floor. Roughly the size of a basketball court. A lift on each side. At the top, an operating panel connected to magic power projectors sat above two rows of card zones inscribed directly into the platform surface.
"As expected, you didn't disappoint me. Something like this is easy enough to build in a world where magic power exists."
Chase stood on the lift in his dark blue cape, looking down at the projection of Blue-Eyes White Dragon materializing on the platform below with an expression of genuine satisfaction.
That's right. This was the Yu-Gi-Oh dueling platform he had spent five full days building specifically for the Fairy Tail civil war.
Fighting and verbal persuasion were not really his preferred methods when it came to settling something like this. So before he got around to dealing with Laxus properly, the condition he had set for anyone from either side wanting to win over the neutral party was elegantly simple.
Play cards.
It was a rare chance to do what he loved, and Chase had treated the occasion with full ceremony. He had even gone to a barbershop in Magnolia beforehand and come out with a hairstyle that could be generously described as non-mainstream and less generously described as shaped like a crab. He had no regrets about it. The atmosphere demanded it.
"Everything is ready. Time to let everyone know where I am."
He clapped his hands. Dark gold magic power gathered at his fingertips, compressed into light bullets, and shot up through the factory roof. They burst in the sky above in the shape of card-themed fireworks, bright and impossible to miss.
The display immediately caught the attention of Fairy Tail members scattered across the town.
Most of them glanced up for exactly one second before snapping back to their current situation. Nobody had time to spare. Freed had laid magic barrier runes across Magnolia in advance, and the rule was the same everywhere: to exit the barrier range, you had to defeat your current opponent first. There was no walking away.
Bang bang bang!
Rumble rumble!
All of Magnolia had come alive at once. Mages were fighting in streets, on rooftops, in alleyways, across open plazas. Tourists who had traveled here for the Harvest Festival stood around looking thoroughly bewildered. The local residents watched it all with the unbothered calm of people who had seen this particular show before.
Those Fairy Tail people just love making this kind of commotion!
Under normal circumstances, this many mages going at it in the middle of a populated town would have triggered a full Council emergency response. In Magnolia, life continued peacefully around the edges of it. That outcome was largely thanks to Fairy Tail's very particular reputation in this city, a reputation that Chase had contributed to personally through what the residents had come to refer to as the Chase Rules.
(Damn it, was this also part of his plan?)
In short, aside from some building damage here and there, the intense Fairy Tail civil war did not cause much of a wider stir.
Inside the guild hall, Makarov did not share the town's composure. He stood in front of the constantly updating magical text panel with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression tight with worry.
[Gray vs. Bickslow, Gray is unable to fight]
[Evergreen successfully persuaded Celtic Guardian, fighting Elfman, Elfman is petrified]
[Alzack vs. Giant Shield Guardian, then fighting Jet and Droy, Alzack wins]
[Wakaba and Max failed to win over neutral party Chase]
[Current remaining combatants: 17]
[30 minutes remaining until stone statues are destroyed]
"Ahahaha! Gray couldn't even beat Bickslow! That's genuinely pathetic!"
Natsu read the updates with enormous personal satisfaction and laughed freely at his rival's expense.
"I have so much material to use against the ice pervert later."
The laughter lasted about ten seconds before he turned and punched the air wall with a thud, his good mood evaporating.
"Damn it! Only 17 people left and I'm still stuck in here!"
Gajeel was crouched on the floor nearby, staring at nothing, counting something quietly on his fingers. His eyes were vacant. The mournful aura radiating off him grew heavier with each number.
"I am... already eighty years old..."
He kept counting.
Happy, scanning the updated list of remaining combatants with steadily widening eyes, had arrived at a personal discovery of some cruelty.
"Guild Master!!" He dropped out of the air and landed directly on Makarov with full commitment. "That Freed person is completely unreasonable! We need to file a formal complaint with the Council about discrimination against small animals! At minimum we are owed compensation! Two fish! No, five fish!!"
"Is this really the moment for that?!" Makarov snapped.
"Waaaah waaaah!" Happy immediately converted to tears, retreated to a corner of the hall at a trot, and began producing small concentrated bursts of crying.
Makarov pressed one hand to his forehead. He exhaled slowly.
He could not even fully blame Happy for treating all of this with such lightness. That was Chase's influence, spreading through the room whether Chase was physically present or not. Even sitting here trapped inside his own guild hall, watching the situation unfold through a purple text panel, Makarov kept finding himself quietly certain that Laxus and the Thunder God Tribe were not going to cause anything that could not be managed. And that certainty was not coming from himself.
"Fine. Fine. I promise you the fish."
Happy's crying stopped with surgical precision. A pre-prepared compensation form appeared from somewhere.
"Wonderful! If you could just put the official guild seal right here..."
Makarov looked at the form.
He said nothing. He turned back to the text panel.
He had not been watching it long before his expression did something it did not usually do.
[Freed successfully persuaded Dark Magician, then defeated Reedus in the eastern suburbs. Reedus had been attempting to exit the barrier zone without completing a required battle.]
[Alzack vs. Laki, both eliminated simultaneously]
[Mob A vs. Mob B (Mob Recruitment), Mob A wins]
"That bastard Freed didn't even let Reedus alone, and..." Makarov stared hard at the panel, his pupils tightening. "Dark Magician chose their side?!"
As Chase's primary monster, Dark Magician was not simply powerful in the raw magic sense. His understanding of magic itself, the depth and breadth of his research into how it actually worked at its foundations, was something that Makarov, with all his decades of experience, had quietly admitted he could not match. Among every card monster Chase had released into Magnolia for this civil war, Dark Magician was in a category entirely his own.
Makarov ran quickly through the remaining active members in his head.
Nobody left standing could handle Freed and Dark Magician working together.
"Things are looking a little rough," Happy said, drifting over from his corner with a more serious expression than usual.
"Old man, that face is completely unnecessary." Natsu was grinning in a specific way that immediately set off every instinct Makarov possessed. "We still have someone right here who can beat that combination."
In the next second, Natsu turned and started walking toward the petrified Erza, cracking his knuckles, fire already curling around his fingers, wearing the expression of someone who had been waiting for a good excuse.
"Just need to melt the stone off her. Easy. Also this is a great chance to pay her back for everything."
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?!" Makarov roared.
"I'm just melting the surface a little! She'll be completely fine!"
"You will melt all of Erza, you absolute disaster of a person!!"
Crack.
The sound was quiet and very bad. A fracture line appeared across the side of Erza's stone face before Natsu had even made proper contact. He fumbled backward with both hands up.
"I HAVEN'T EVEN TOUCHED HER YET!!"
"Stop yelling and hold still." Gajeel was already pulling out his Iron Dragon Sword with a completely sincere, focused expression. "I'll weld the crack shut with iron. It'll be fine."
He was not joking even slightly. That made it worse.
"GET BOTH OF YOU AWAY FROM HER THIS INSTANT!!!" Makarov's voice filled every corner of the hall.
Crack crack crack.
The vibrations traveled through the floor and up through the statue. The fracture lines spread rapidly in every direction across the stone surface and then, with a sound like ceramic hitting tile, the whole thing shattered.
Everyone went completely still.
Erza did not crumble to dust. She stood exactly where the statue had been, fully herself, breathing, eyes sharp, already scanning the room and putting together what had happened.
"That was unpleasantly warm."
She turned. She found Natsu. She kicked him clean across the hall before he could form a sentence. He hit the far wall, left a Natsu-shaped impression in it, and slid down slowly. Nobody moved to check on him.
"Wait." Makarov looked at her carefully. "Erza, how are you intact? The petrification should not have reversed on its own."
Erza touched her right eye. "My artificial eye must have weakened Evergreen's magic. The effect never fully took hold." She straightened up and took a breath. "I heard everything while I was frozen, Guild Master. Let me handle Laxus."
She had listened to the full conversation between Makarov and Natsu from inside the stone, absorbing everything. She understood why Chase had positioned himself the way he had. The logic made sense to her. But without that specific certainty about how Laxus's story ended, without Chase's particular kind of foreknowledge, she could not simply sit with it the same way he could.
"Laxus is not someone to face on your own," Makarov said, and the worry in his voice was obvious. "My preference would be to get Chase back here first."
"Someone is already working on that." The corner of Erza's mouth moved slightly upward. She was obviously thinking of Lucy, who had charged out of the guild with a specific mission and a significant amount of confidence a while ago.
"Before I go after Laxus, I will find Evergreen first and make her undo the petrification on the others." Erza's voice was steady and direct. "The hostages are the only reason this civil war is possible at all. Once the others are free, we can end this without needing anyone to hold back."
Makarov looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded.
"Sound thinking. Be careful."
Erza ran.
According to how things were supposed to play out, she would spend a good while searching for Evergreen and come up empty. Evergreen was not where Erza expected to find her. Not this time.
***
Lucy had been running for a while by the time the abandoned factory came into view at the outskirts of Magnolia.
The guild was far from here, and the distance had cost her time. But starting later than almost everyone else had turned out to be its own kind of luck. The main group had already passed through the streets ahead of her, triggering Freed's barriers and fighting their way through. Lucy had slipped past all of it without being stopped once.
She stood in front of the heavy iron door, caught her breath properly, fixed her hair, made sure everything was presentable, and pushed it open.
"This is..."
Sunlight came in through the door and lit up the interior. The dueling platform filled her view, clean and precise and completely surreal inside the rusted factory shell. Lucy stared at it for a genuine moment.
"Didn't expect it to be you this time, little sis." Chase rose from where he had been sitting on the platform.
"Chase-san?"
Lucy looked at him. Her gaze went immediately to his hair and stayed there.
"What on earth is that hairstyle? It looks more like a crab than Cancer does."
"Ahahaha, pretty cool right?" Chase struck a pose that clearly had some practice behind it.
"Uh..." Lucy decided some things were not worth the energy of rating properly.
That was not why she was here anyway.
She reset. She pushed her golden hair back from her forehead with one smooth motion, stood up straight, put her best angle forward, and then blinked twice with precisely calculated charm while tilting her head at a winning angle.
"Kind, wonderful, incredibly handsome Chase-nii-san," she said, in the sweetest, most melodic voice she had available. "Won't you please help me deal with that awful Laxus?"
Chase went quiet.
He had already planned his opening move. He had the card combination ready and had been genuinely looking forward to deploying it.
This was not what he had prepared for at all.
"Heh heh. How genuinely sad."
An uninvited voice floated across the factory from the direction of the far wall. Evergreen walked forward at a deliberately unhurried pace, fan already open and raised to cover the lower half of her face.
"You actually thought that kind of cheap little performance was going to work on Chase." She looked at Lucy with the serene contempt of someone who had already done the math and found zero uncertainty in the result. "True beauty, true grace, true allure belong to me and me alone. Every other woman's appeal fades the moment I step into the room."
She snapped the fan shut and turned her attention directly to Chase with smooth confidence.
"Now then. If your standards have not completely failed you, you already know who you should be siding with here."
Buzz.
The factory shook.
Dark gold magic power erupted from Chase in a single hard wave that filled the entire space and made the rusty walls creak around them. He stood at the center of it with eyes that had gone somewhere firmly beyond gentle.
"This. Is not. A beauty pageant."
He said it with complete clarity.
"You have two choices. Play cards with me, or fight me. Those are the only two options on the table."
Using beauty tactics on a card player. What an absolute joke.
Evergreen stared into the magic storm surrounding him. The composure she had walked in with had developed a very visible crack. Whatever had worked perfectly well on Celtic Guardian was, she was rapidly discovering, not a general-purpose tool.
Lucy had gone completely rigid. Wide eyes. Every muscle locked. Her earlier confidence had temporarily left her body entirely.
"I choose to play cards."
"I choose to play cards."
Simultaneously. Without a pause between them.
Only an idiot picks option two when standing in front of something like that.
"Great." Chase pulled the magic storm back in like it had never been there and grinned. He tossed a pair of glasses and a small booklet to each of them. "Ten decks to choose from. All the information and rules are in the booklet. Use the wind song glasses to get through it quickly."
Wind song glasses: a magical tool that allows the wearer to absorb written content at accelerated speed.
Evergreen caught both items neatly. Lucy caught the glasses, bobbled the booklet, and had to crouch down to pick it up from the floor without making eye contact with anyone present.
A few dozen seconds of reading later, both of them had a working understanding of the rules.
Chase had gone with Yu-Gi-Oh DM, the original first-generation gameplay. Clearest structure. Most accessible mechanics. The best choice for first-time players who needed to be up to speed fast.
Evergreen made her selection almost immediately. Mai Valentine's deck. Her reasoning was that Harpie Lady was a Fairy-type monster, which suited her identity perfectly. It was not exactly a deep analytical process, but she had arrived at a conclusion and she was standing behind it.
Lucy chose Yugi Mutou's deck without hesitating for a single second. No explanation was given or required.
"Since you both showed up at the same time," Chase said, holding up one finger, "you play each other first. The winner gets to challenge me."
Neither of them objected. Now that they had the rules in their heads, something had genuinely lit up in both of them. The mechanics were interesting. There was real depth to it. They were actually looking forward to playing.
And the reward for winning was simple: beat Chase in a duel, win him as an ally for the civil war. In terms of pure efficiency, that deal was extraordinary.
Evergreen and Lucy each took their decks from Chase, stepped onto their respective lifts on opposite ends of the platform, and pressed the start buttons at the same time.
"Duel start!"
"Duel start!"
[Lucy: 4000LP]
[Evergreen: 4000LP]
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