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Noah put a hand out and gently pushed Natsu back before he could get any further. Unless Natsu could unlock his true power, what the guild knew as END, he would not survive a single exchange with the Black Dragon. And even then, the outcome was far from certain.
Noah turned to look at Sonya, who had gone very quiet.
The person she had held onto as a hero for four hundred years had turned out to be Acnologia, the most feared name on the continent. That was not a small thing to sit with.
"People change, Sonya."
Irene set down her dessert and spoke in the measured tone of someone who had lived long enough to have watched the process many times. "Especially in an era like that one was. Despair does things to people that nothing else can."
She shared something she had heard once, a long time ago. A rumor, as she described it, but the kind that had always felt like it was sitting too close to the truth to dismiss.
The name Acnologia, according to what she had been told, was not the Dragon Slayer's real name at all. It was the name of the Dragon that had destroyed his village and everyone in it.
He had become a Dragon Slayer for one reason: to kill that Dragon and make sure no one else suffered the same way he had. His hatred had given him direction, and his direction had given him extraordinary power.
But the hatred had not stopped once it had what it wanted. It kept going, widening, until it had swallowed not just the Dragon that had wronged him but every Dragon that existed. At some point along the way, he had stopped remembering his own name and remembered only his enemy's.
People who did not know the story assumed Acnologia was his name. The assumption spread, and eventually it was all anyone called him.
In the end, that man had torn his way through the Dragon King Festival and come out the other side as something that no longer resembled what he had been. Bathed in the blood of countless Dragons, saturated with the negative energy that Dragon blood carried, he had lost the last of whatever human feeling had still been in him.
What emerged was not a Dragon Slayer anymore. It was a Dragon King, the only true one, in the most terrible sense of the title. One that needed no subjects, wanted no glory, and had no purpose left except destruction.
The Dragon race had spent hundreds of years searching for a King. The day they found one was the day they ceased to exist.
The banquet hall had gone quiet. Irene's voice was the only sound in it, calm and deliberate, carrying a weight that everyone at the table could feel.
It was a rumor. But placed against what Sonya had lived through, the image of a young man with dark blue hair killing Dragons in a burning village to avenge a child he did not know, it stopped feeling like a rumor.
Noah rested his chin on his hand and thought about it. "A Dragon Slayer who became a Dragon. What a waste."
Acnologia had been the World Will's chosen one, once. The Will had placed its hopes in him to resolve the growing catastrophe between the Dragon race and humanity, a conflict that had been building toward something irreversible for generations.
What the World Will had perhaps not accounted for was the direction that resolution might take.
Acnologia had resolved it. He had simply done so by eliminating the Dragon race entirely.
Natsu drove his fist into one of the hall's stone pillars. Flames shot up his arm without him trying. "I don't care what he used to be," he said, and his voice was steady in the way it got when something had gone past the point of being complicated for him. "What I know is that he will keep destroying things and killing people until someone stops him. And that someone is going to be me."
"Same," Gajeel said, short and flat.
Wendy nodded, and so did Sting and Rogue, all of them wearing the same expression: resolved, and past arguing about it.
Whatever Acnologia had been four hundred years ago did not change what he was now. He was a Dragon who existed for slaughter, and as people who had been raised by Dragons, who carried Dragon Power inside them, they were not going to stand aside and watch.
Gray unfolded his arms. "Count me in as well. Wendy's Enchantment can add Dragon Slayer attributes to other mages. If everyone in the fight has that, the immunity problem goes away."
A murmur of recognition moved around the table. The Black Dragon was immune to conventional magical damage. Dragon Slayer Magic was the exception. If everyone fighting him carried that attribute temporarily, even without being true Dragon Slayers themselves, the equation changed considerably.
And with Irene present, the one who had created Enchantment Magic in the first place, the ceiling on what that approach could accomplish was not small.
Noah watched his companions working themselves up with increasing enthusiasm about a Dragon they did not know the location of yet, and let them go for a few moments before speaking.
"Ambition is good. And that is a sound strategy."
"But right now, none of you are anywhere close to matching the Black Dragon. Dragon Slayer attributes or not, you would be sending yourselves to die, and I would have to go and collect the bodies."
The honesty of it landed like cold water. The energy in the room dipped. Nobody argued, because nobody had a counter-argument.
Noah looked at Natsu and the other four. "What you need to focus on is getting stronger. Strong enough to fully release Dragon Force, not just touch the edge of it. That is the threshold." He paused. "As for right now."
"Eat. Drink. Enjoy the food."
"If the Black Dragon does decide to come for the world, I am still here, aren't I?"
That single sentence produced a chorus of groans and exasperated noises from every corner of the hall. They had just spent a serious amount of time discussing the most dangerous being on the continent, and it turned out his contribution to the conversation was to remind everyone that he existed.
The unified booing that followed was loud and heartfelt.
Noah accepted it without any visible remorse.
The weight that had settled over the banquet lifted, as it always did around Fairy Tail, through some combination of absurdity and the genuine comfort of knowing that the tallest people in the room were still standing. Sonya's question was not answered. Acnologia's threat had not gone away. But the food was still hot, and the company was good, and for the moment that was enough.
Noah looked over at Sonya, who was still pale but had steadied herself. His voice came down a notch. "I am sorry, Sonya. This is not something our guild can help you find."
Sonya gave a small, crooked smile. "Even so, I know more than I did this morning. Thank you for that."
She looked down at the table for a moment. "The request still stands. If you ever learn anything more about him, or find out what becomes of him in the end, please tell me. That is all I ask."
Four hundred years of a life that had not been entirely her own, and this was the one thread she was still holding. Noah neither agreed nor declined. He reached across the table for a bottle of wine that was considerably more expensive than anything Fairy Tail would normally open, tucked it under his arm, and glanced at Erza and Mira on either side of him.
"I am going for a walk. Don't wait up."
"Who said anything about waiting for you?"
"We managed perfectly well the three months you were gone, thank you."
Erza and Mira, working in exact coordination, took him by the arms, walked him to the banquet hall door, and shut it firmly behind him.
Noah looked back at the closed door, smiled slightly, and stepped off the balcony into the night wind.
A breeze moved through the royal city, carrying a trace of coolness out past the streets and into the dense forest beyond the walls. Noah landed in the high canopy of an old tree and settled himself comfortably against a branch. He uncorked the wine, used his Magnetic Field Power to shape a pair of broad leaves into something roughly resembling cups, and filled both of them.
Across from him, perched in the canopy of the next tree, sat a man in a dark robe. Long dark blue hair fell past his waist. Brown skin. A necklace of unidentified teeth around his throat. The description matched Sonya's memory exactly.
Noah held out one of the leaf cups in the man's direction.
"I thought you would attack the moment you arrived. You are less bloodthirsty than people say." He tilted his head. "Is it because you saw Sonya? Did that bring a little of it back?"
He said the name without ceremony.
"Acnologia."