"Hahaha, Cana, that tickles!"
Wendy and Yukino were both giggling so hard they could barely stand, and Cana was showing no signs of stopping. Noah watched this for a moment with a quiet smile, then said, "Let's head inside. Everyone's waiting."
Cana straightened up, keeping one small hand in each of hers, and looked at Meredy standing nearby with the open curiosity of someone who catalogued new faces quickly.
"New member?"
"She just joined a few days ago," Wendy said, before Meredy could answer. "This is Meredy."
Cana turned to Meredy fully, keeping her voice easy and warm.
"Hey, Meredy. I'm Cana."
"Hello." Meredy's reply was careful, a little stiff. New people still took some adjustment.
Cana read the nerves immediately and smiled in a way that made the situation smaller rather than larger.
"Relax. We're all family here. I'm glad you joined."
Something in Meredy's shoulders came down.
Behind them, Gildarts had been looking at Noah with an expression of genuine surprise, as though he was encountering someone unexpected rather than a person he had known for most of that person's life.
"Noah! You've grown so much!"
Noah gave him a look that communicated what he thought of this.
"We saw each other a few months ago," he said. "Let's go in."
They came through the fence gate together, and Cana got her first proper look at the transformation. The tables and benches spread out under beach umbrellas in front of the building. The souvenir shop with its Fairy Tail merchandise arranged in the window. The building itself, larger, different in its lines, unmistakably intentional in a way the old guild had never quite been.
"Did they completely rebuild this?"
"Rebuilt, expanded, renovated," Noah said. "You'll see the rest when you go in."
He pushed the door open.
Natsu had apparently been positioned somewhere with a direct line of sight to the entrance, because he was in motion before the door had fully opened.
"GILDARTS, LET'S FIGHT!"
He launched himself across the hall from a running start, already committed before Gildarts had fully registered he was there.
Gildarts moved slightly to one side. One hand came out, tapped, and Natsu hit the floor hard enough that the stone cracked in a neat pattern outward from the impact point.
"Next time."
Natsu lay there for a moment in the specific posture of someone recalibrating. Then he pushed himself upright with an expression of pure admiration on his face.
"Gildarts is incredible!"
Gildarts was looking around the hall with the unhurried interest of someone taking in a room they thought they knew.
"The guild really has changed."
"You and Cana can have a proper look around later. There's a lot to see," Noah said, and left it at that.
Cana had already found Erza and the others, pulling Meredy and Yukino along with her, Wendy close behind, the group collapsing together with the ease of people who hadn't seen each other in a while and had a lot to catch up on.
"Gildarts."
Makarov's voice carried from the counter, and Gildarts turned toward it with the expression of a man who respected certain authorities.
"Oh, Master!"
He crossed the hall to Makarov, and Noah drifted to a nearby table, opened his book again, and let the report happen around him. Gildarts ran through the details of the quest in the particular way he reported things, which was thorough in the broad strokes and casually vague about certain specifics, and Makarov listened with the focused attention he brought to anything that came from one of his strongest members after a long absence.
When the formal part was done, they kept talking. Noah tracked enough of it to follow the thread without actively listening.
Then Makarov's tone shifted, and Noah looked up from his book.
"Noah. Come here."
He closed the book and walked over.
"Gildarts wants to take the Hundred Year Quest," Makarov said. "I want your read on it."
Noah looked at Gildarts.
Gildarts, for his part, had already worked out what he wanted to say and said it directly.
"I've hit a wall. My growth over the past period has been real but slow, the kind of slow where you almost can't feel it day to day. That tells me I need a different kind of pressure, something that actually tests me rather than something I can work through on familiar ground." He glanced across the hall toward Cana, and the look on his face was different from his usual expression. Softer. "And Cana doesn't need me watching over her the way she used to. She's capable. She'll be fine."
"Have you talked to her about this?" Noah asked.
"We discussed it on the way back. She doesn't like it, but she's not trying to talk me out of it."
That tracked. Cana worried about her father the way people worried about forces of nature, with a kind of helpless affection that accepted the nature of what he was even while wishing it were otherwise.
"S-Class requests?" Noah asked. "Ten Year Quests?"
"Cleared them. They're not a challenge anymore." Gildarts said this with complete sincerity and zero performance, the tone of someone stating a logistical fact.
Noah considered it.
The logic held. When growth had slowed to the point of near-imperceptibility at the level Gildarts operated, the only thing that meaningfully addressed it was encounter with something genuinely beyond current capacity. The Hundred Year Quest was exactly that by design.
"Before you go," Noah said, "I want to fight you first. I want to see where the gap actually sits."
Gildarts's expression sharpened immediately. Not hostile. Interested.
"Confident, aren't you."
"The last time we actually fought was my S-Class Exam. That was over eight years ago. I've made significant progress since then."
"You've made progress," Gildarts said. "I haven't been standing still either."
"I know. But I think I can put real pressure on you now. We'll find out."
"I'm looking forward to it," Gildarts said, and meant it. He had watched Noah grow from close enough to have a genuine sense of the trajectory. The idea that the gap had closed to something interesting was not hard for him to believe.
Makarov had been following this exchange with an expression that had progressed from attentive to deeply concerned.
"You are not fighting here," he said, with the flat certainty of a man who had paid for structural repairs too many times. "If you want to spar, you go to sea. Open water. Both of you."
He had specifically not said mountains or forest. He had done the mental arithmetic on what disappeared from the landscape when either of them fought at full capacity, and had decided not to add those options to the conversation.
"Noah's going to fight Gildarts?"
Natsu's voice came from entirely too close. His hearing was extraordinary and he had apparently been tracking the counter conversation from across the hall with complete attention.
The effect on the room was immediate and total. Every head turned. Every conversation stopped. Cana and Erza and the others looked over from the girls' table.
"Yes," Noah said, before the noise level could escalate further. "We're going to spar. Not today. When Laxus and the others are back from their quests, so everyone can watch. There's nothing to get excited about right now."
This was, as a strategy for reducing excitement, completely ineffective.
Natsu lunged at him from three steps away with the energy of someone who had just been given excellent news.
"I'm watching! You can't cut us out of this!"
"Obviously not," Noah said, catching him by the head before the impact landed and holding him at arm's length. "That's why I said wait until Laxus gets back. Everyone watches."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah!" Gray and several others had materialized nearby and were enthusiastically seconding this.
Across the room, Erza and Mirajane had oriented toward the conversation with the focused intensity they brought to anything involving the question of how strong Noah actually was. Several other female guild members were looking over with expressions that suggested they had thoughts about the probable outcome.
Within approximately ninety seconds, the guild had divided itself into two camps debating the result of a fight that hadn't been scheduled yet. The majority were confident in Gildarts. Erza, Mirajane, and a smaller but vocal group were not ready to count Noah out, and were saying so at volume.
It was threatening to become its own fight.
Noah removed his hand from Natsu's head, let him drop, and turned back to Gildarts.
"Have you taught Cana your Crush magic yet?"
---
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