"Don't look so grim."
Seeing the way they were all frowning, Shane smiled and tried to reassure them.
"It's night now. This is its stage. As long as you search carefully… you're bound to run into it."
After all, what this illusion reproduced was the point in time where that Heroic Spirit's legend was at its most concentrated.
"One more thing."
Shane glanced up at the moon veiled behind the fog.
"If none of you can do it before this city 'disappears'…"
"then this exam will count as a total failure for all of you."
"There's a time limit too?!"
Everyone cursed inwardly.
"How long exactly?" Laxus asked in a low voice.
"Well, I don't know either."
Shane blinked innocently.
"Maybe a few hours. Maybe the whole night. In any case, this city won't last very long."
As he spoke, he waved his hand forcefully, like he was driving off a flock of sheep.
"Go!"
"No need to hold back! Any method is allowed!"
"This city—where prosperity and depravity coexist—is your playground now."
"Use it however you like!"
"So you mean…"
Hearing that, Mira's eyes lit up.
She took a step forward, purple magic rising around her, and a long-lost, excitedly feral grin—the kind that belonged to the "She-Devil"—spread across her face.
"No matter how badly we wreck this place… you're handling all the compensation afterward?"
Even though Mira had temporarily put the camera incident aside because of the exam, the thought of Shane bleeding money still made her way too happy.
"No."
Shane shook his head and corrected her:
"This place may feel real, but at its core, it's only a reenactment of the past—a false projection."
"So…"
He looked at all of them meaningfully.
"In here, there's no such boring thing as 'compensation fees' holding you back."
"No Master lecturing you. No reprimands from the Council."
"Break as much as you want! Fight however you want!"
"Of course, indiscriminately slaughtering 'bystanders' is forbidden. This may be an illusion, but I doubt the Master would want you developing a habit of killing innocents."
The moment Shane finished speaking, the look in everyone's eyes changed.
No need to pay damages?
No restrictions at all?
They could use magic inside a city without restraint?
This was… amazing.
As for hitting civilians?
What kind of joke was that?
Fairy Tail mages were best at tearing a city to pieces while still somehow avoiding every single bystander with pinpoint precision.
No one had ever taught them that, but somehow it was basically a built-in skill they all possessed.
"Then I'm off first!"
Mira couldn't hold back any longer.
Boom—!!
Her demonic wings spread, and like a beast being released from its cage, she shot off as a streak of light straight toward the thickest fog in the eastern district.
"Hmph."
Laxus followed right after her, vanishing in a burst of lightning.
Ur smiled, flowers of ice blooming beneath her feet as she slid off along an icy path in another direction.
Only Erza stayed where she was for a moment longer, turning to Shane with a trace of hesitation.
"Shouldn't we wait until Gray and Natsu get here before starting?"
Those two idiots still weren't anywhere in sight.
"No need."
Shane waved a hand carelessly.
"If they haven't made it in before the city disappears, then they've failed."
"And besides…"
He glanced at the flashes of lightning and distant explosions already beginning in the distance and said flatly:
"They're assistants to begin with. You four are the main ones."
"If they can't even make it onto the field, then they're not qualified to assist you."
"That makes sense."
With that reassurance from Shane, Erza nodded and finally relaxed.
Unlike the others, she didn't immediately rush off with magic.
Instead, she suppressed her presence, casually chose a dark alley, and disappeared into the fog with calm, steady steps.
…
Unlike Erza, who was taking her time and planning to work from subtle clues outward, Mira had already crossed over half the district with the speed of her demonic wings and arrived at the "east district" Shane had pointed out.
The moment she stepped into this area, her brows pulled sharply together.
This place looked nothing like the lively, prosperous district they had just been in.
The smell of coal smoke in the air had become even more pungent.
Mixed in with it were the rot of sewers, the sour stink of fermenting alcohol, and some indescribable old mildew that was downright nauseating.
The buildings along the street were no longer neat rows of red-brick houses.
Here, the houses were packed together like wild weeds with no planning at all—low, broken, and on the verge of collapse, as if one good gust of wind could flatten whole rows of them and bury everyone inside alive.
"A place like this… really does feel like the perfect breeding ground for a serial killer."
Frowning, Mira endured the stench and landed lightly on the roof of one of the buildings.
Crack!
But even though she hadn't put any real force into it, even that natural landing was too much for the rotten boards, which had long since been weakened by damp. They collapsed instantly, leaving a huge hole.
"Ahhh—!"
"Fuck! What the hell was that?!"
Through the broken roof, with shouts and curses rising below, Mira saw two naked bodies entangled in the dim firelight inside.
"…"
Her face instantly flushed bright red, like she'd been burned.
She had not expected that one random step on a roof would land her in the middle of something like this.
And what made it worse was that even after the roof caved in, the two people below just cursed a couple times and didn't even stop.
"How unlucky."
She muttered under her breath, kicked off again, and fled to a different rooftop with a look of utter disgust.
This time, she deliberately restrained her weight.
After calming herself a little, Mira refocused and went back to searching for clues about the "murderer."
But what she saw—and heard—left this girl from a magical world completely stunned.
In the maze-like network of dark alleys—
women in cheap, revealing dresses huddled in the cold wind, smiling ingratiatingly at every passing laborer, drunk, and even beggar.
"Hey, handsome, just three pence…"
"Want to have a little fun? I'm nice and warm…"
Even from a distance, the crude flirtation, the haggling, and the intimate noises drifting from the corners seeped relentlessly into Mira's ears.
And this wasn't some isolated case.
Throughout this district shrouded in thick fog, transactions like these were as common as breathing.
"So this is…"
Mira stared at the women below, her brows knit so tightly they almost locked in place. Her eyes were full of disbelief and incomprehension.
"So this is what that bastard Shane meant by… 'women desperately struggling to survive through a cruel night'?"
"You've got to be kidding…"
Even with the tragic life she had endured—being shunned by villagers since childhood and treated like a demon—
Mira had never truly experienced the kind of despair that comes from being ground into mud beneath the weight of an entire era.
To her, no matter how hard life became, basic human dignity was something one should still have.
"Why… can someone sell their body so easily?"
"When they've still got hands and feet…"
Not only could she not understand it, she also felt a vague, ugly irritation rising inside her.
After all, in her Fiore—protected by magic and guilds—even with war and conflict, the underlying tone of the world was still one of adventure and romance.
Not this suffocating, naked hell of survival.
What this young S-Class candidate didn't understand was just how laughable her idea of "dignity" was here.
In this era of chaos, there was no such luxury as social welfare. Labor laws didn't exist.
The idea of protecting the weak didn't exist either.
Here, seven-year-old children were shoved beneath roaring textile machines,
risking their fingers being torn off while doing heavy labor even adults could barely endure—just to earn a few moldy crumbs of bread.
Hard work itself meant nothing.
Women toiled day and night in match factories, only to earn not a respectable life, but phosphorus poisoning that ate away at their gums until their jaws literally rotted and fell apart, leaving them to die in agony.
Even selling brute labor was hopeless.
Strong men fought each other bloody at the docks for the chance to work as porters. Even if they split their heads open or broke their backs, it still wasn't enough to feed their families.
Eight people crammed into a single airless, mold-ridden cellar as a home was the most ordinary thing in the world.
It could be said that, in the imperial capital of the so-called sun-never-sets empire—the strongest, richest nation on Earth, the "heart of the world"—
poverty was the greatest original sin of all.
In a society built to consume human beings like this, dignity was a luxury only the rich could afford to talk about.
For the women here, having "part-time work" was itself considered lucky.
If they didn't stand on the corner tonight and sell this body, which wasn't worth much to begin with—
then by tomorrow morning, the dirty water of the Thames would simply have one more nameless female corpse frozen stiff from hunger.
~~~
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