Chapter 150
That evening, back at Marshall’s home, Lucy was giving him an exhaustive report on everything her three-Mages-and-one-cat team had discovered during the day.
"The people in the village are all cursed! Whenever the purple moon rises, they transform into demons!"
"And the fisherman who brought us to Galuna Island was actually the village chief’s son! He’s already dead—he was a ghost!"
"And then the villagers said—"
Lucy continued without stopping while Marshall lightly tapped a finger against the table, listening thoughtfully.
He hadn’t spent the entire day merely chatting with Sherry either.
He had also heard Lyon’s version of the past—how he and Gray had trained under Ur, and why Lyon had spent years trying to release Deliora so that he could defeat it himself.
Years ago, Deliora had killed Gray’s parents.
Driven by revenge, Gray became Ur’s student and began learning Ice-Make Magic alongside Lyon.
Unfortunately, after only a few months of training, Gray had apparently decided that basic self-preservation was optional.
The moment he learned where Deliora was, he rushed off alone to kill it.
Naturally, that went horribly.
Ur ultimately chose to protect her student by sacrificing herself and casting the forbidden spell Iced Shell, sealing Deliora within her own transformed body.
Lyon, meanwhile, had deeply respected Ur.
He claimed that his reason for releasing Deliora was to surpass his teacher: since Ur herself had been unable to defeat the demon conventionally, killing Deliora would prove that Lyon had finally surpassed her.
Marshall suspected there was rather more emotion behind that obsession than Lyon liked to admit.
In any case, that was the tangled history connecting Gray, Lyon, Ur, and Deliora.
Marshall could only conclude that nearly everyone involved had a remarkable talent for making terrible decisions.
Gray had once charged Deliora despite being hopelessly outmatched.
Lyon was now trying to release the exact monster that had forced Ur to sacrifice herself.
Ultear had spent three years helping the process along because she desperately wanted an answer from her mother.
Individually, they were already troublesome.
Put them together and the situation became an entire circus.
There was another issue Marshall had been thinking about.
From everything he had learned, both Gray and Lyon genuinely respected Ur.
And if Ur had been the kind of person capable of inspiring that degree of loyalty from her students, Marshall found it difficult to believe that she had casually abandoned her own daughter.
There was almost certainly some kind of misunderstanding buried in Ultear’s past.
Unfortunately, Ultear had spent so many years trapped inside her own version of events that ordinary explanations were unlikely to reach her.
Marshall hadn’t been there.
Neither Gray nor Lyon knew the entire story of Ultear’s childhood either.
Everyone possessed a different fragment of the truth, which meant Marshall couldn’t confidently judge exactly what had happened back then.
One thing, however, was practically guaranteed.
When Gray and Lyon met...
They were going to fight.
As for Ultear’s obsession with Ur...
Perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong about one thing.
There were questions only Ur herself could truly answer.
The problem was—Ur had been an enormous block of ice for ten years.
Could she really answer anything anymore?
Marshall returned his attention to Lucy’s report.
Something about the Demon Village bothered him.
According to the villagers, this "curse" had already existed for several years.
If they had truly been ordinary humans cursed into becoming demons, why had none of them permanently transformed during all that time?
The village chief believed the moon was responsible and claimed that the transformations had only recently become severe.
That provided Marshall with a useful starting point.
What exactly had changed during the past three years?
The purple moon was the most obvious clue.
Marshall knew that Galuna Island’s moon appeared purple at night, and that the phenomenon had begun after Lyon’s group started conducting the Moon Drip ritual.
Yet Magnolia’s moon remained perfectly normal.
That meant the moon itself hadn’t somehow changed across the entire world.
The purple color was a localized phenomenon affecting Galuna Island.
Most likely, it was caused by the enormous quantity of moonlight energy being gathered by the ancient altar.
So the change in moonlight almost certainly had something to do with Moon Drip.
Whether the villagers’ supposed "curse" was genuinely caused by that moonlight, however, was another matter entirely.
Lyon’s people had been living on the island for years too, and nothing similar had happened to them.
Marshall had become increasingly interested in those supposedly demonized villagers.
Still, the immediate priority was allowing the Moon Drip ritual to reach completion.
At Gray’s current pace of exploration, his group would definitely discover the ruins by tomorrow.
And once that happened...
He would meet Lyon.
There was essentially a hundred-percent chance those two would start fighting.
Marshall was already looking forward to the show.
More importantly, Makarov had explicitly ordered him to teach the people involved in this illegal S-Class adventure a lesson.
Lucy had already been turned into his informant.
That left Natsu and Gray.
Marshall had no intention of simply teleporting them home.
If they wanted an S-Class request so badly, then he would let them experience what an S-Class mission was actually supposed to feel like.
"Hehehe..."
Marshall’s smile became increasingly sinister.
Lyon’s side had several competent Mages, but some additional preparation wouldn’t hurt.
Ultear herself was powerful, but her Zalty disguise restricted what she could openly do.
Using her usual Ice-Make Magic would immediately expose far too much, and Marshall didn’t intend to ruin her cover just to provide someone with a sparring partner.
Besides, he already had much more suitable opponents in mind.
Gray could have Lyon.
Those two had enough unresolved history to keep each other occupied for quite a while.
As for Natsu...
Marshall intended to arrange something a little more interesting!
He wanted that idiot to leave Galuna Island with a proper understanding of the difference between an ordinary job and the world of S-Class Mages.
"Hehehehe..."
Lucy, who was sitting across from him, suddenly felt cold.
Marshall noticed and immediately gave her a reassuring smile.
"Don’t worry, Lucy."
"This quest isn’t actually dangerous as long as I’m here."
"If anything genuinely goes wrong, I can finish the entire job whenever I want."
Lucy relaxed considerably after hearing that.
Once her report was finished, Marshall went to bed early.
If everything proceeded as expected, Moon Drip would completely break Deliora’s seal tomorrow night.
He needed plenty of energy.
There was going to be a good show!
...
The following morning, Marshall teleported Lucy back to Galuna Island.
He did not remain with the group.
Instead, he returned to his laboratory and maintained remote contact with Lucy while he adjusted a few of the "preparations" he had made.
Gray, Natsu, Lucy, and Happy continued exploring Galuna Island in search of the cause of the purple moon.
And, exactly as Marshall expected, they eventually discovered the Moon Drip ruins.
More importantly...
They found the enormous frozen body of Deliora hidden inside the mountain.
Gray stopped dead the moment he saw it.
His entire demeanor changed.
The sight of the demon that had destroyed his home and taken Ur from him dragged memories he had spent years trying to suppress straight back to the surface.
He became so irritable that, for a while, practically anything nearby seemed capable of annoying him.
At one point he even snapped at what he thought was a strange dog wandering past.
Only afterward did he realize it was actually a man who merely looked remarkably canine.
Lyon’s organization consisted of several dozen people, but only three of his direct subordinates possessed particularly notable combat ability.
Sherry Blendy, Yuka Suzuki, and Toby Horhorta.
Yuka, the thick-eyebrowed Mage, wielded Wave Magic, an unusual ability capable of neutralizing other Magic.
In Marshall’s assessment, it was almost like a severely downgraded version of an absolute magic-canceling ability.
As for Toby...
Well.
Marshall had honestly forgotten what the dog man’s Magic even did.
Whatever it was, Toby didn’t exactly give the impression of being a brilliant strategist.
Gray and the others avoided revealing themselves immediately.
Instead, they quietly followed Yuka and Toby deeper into the ruins and discovered that Lyon’s group appeared to be preparing some enormous ritual.
Only after night fell did the truth become obvious.
Purple moonlight gathered above the ancient altar.
A concentrated beam descended through the ruins and struck the massive frozen body of Deliora.
Gray’s eyes widened.
They were using Moon Drip to melt Iced Shell.
They were trying to release Deliora!
And then Gray discovered something even more shocking.
The mysterious man leading the ritual under the title Reitei—was his fellow disciple, whom he hadn’t seen in years.
Lyon Vastia.
For a moment, neither moved.
Then their eyes met.
The confrontation that had been waiting years to happen was finally here.