Gildarts had the particular expression of a man who knew he was about to be criticized and had already accepted it.
"I taught her," he said. "But her magic power reserves aren't there yet. She can use it once, maybe, and then she's running on empty. And the control." He made a vague gesture that communicated his feelings about the control. "She can't modulate the output at all. If she could manage that, she'd be spending a fraction of the power she's spending now."
Noah looked at him for a moment.
"Gildarts," he said. "Your own control is famously terrible. The city of Magnolia has a dedicated infrastructure arrangement specifically because of your control. You understand that, right?"
Gildarts opened his mouth. Closed it. Then started laughing, the full unguarded laugh of someone who had been caught in something they couldn't argue with and had decided the only response was to find it funny.
Noah waited.
"I also want to learn Crush Magic from you," he said, when the laughter had mostly subsided.
Gildarts blinked. "You've already learned so many different types of magic."
"I'm interested in all of them. I didn't ask before because the gap between my strength and the requirements for that magic was too large. It wouldn't have worked. Now it's not." He spread his hands. "So I'm asking."
Gildarts considered this for approximately one second.
"Come by the house later. I'll walk you through it."
"I'll be there."
Gildarts turned to Makarov with the easy manner of someone whose reports were always delivered and whose business was therefore concluded.
"Master, I'm heading home to rest."
"Mm."
He crossed the hall to where Cana was sitting with the girls, wrapped both arms around her from behind with complete disregard for whether she was in the middle of a conversation, and pressed his face against the side of her head.
"Cana-chan. Papa's going home. Come with Papa."
Cana got both hands against his face and pushed. The push required more effort than it should have for someone of her size pushing someone of his size, but she had years of practice and the technique was refined.
"I'm staying. I'll come home later."
Gildarts, pushed back far enough to separate them, took the available momentum and redirected it toward the door, waving behind him as he went.
"Don't stay out too late."
"I know."
He was gone.
Erza watched the door settle closed, then looked at Cana, who had the expression of someone shaking off a minor weather event.
"He really adores you," Erza said. It came out quieter than she'd intended.
"He does," Cana agreed. "It gets overwhelming sometimes." She paused. "But yeah."
The happiness in her voice was completely unambiguous despite everything around it.
The silence that followed had a particular quality. Erza felt it before she fully understood why, and then she did understand why, and the understanding settled in her chest with weight. She looked at Sorano. Sorano was looking somewhere else. Around the table, the same recognition was moving through each of them in its own way. Of everyone here, only Ultear had both parents still in her life. Everyone else was doing the math from a different starting point.
Cana turned back from looking at the door and caught the expressions on the faces around her. Her own face changed. She understood immediately and started looking for an exit from the moment she'd accidentally created.
Noah appeared at the table.
"Tell me about the trip," he said, looking at Cana. "What happened out there?"
Cana looked at him, and the gratitude in that look was not small. She took the opening without hesitation, and by the third sentence the story had drawn Natsu and Gray over from wherever they'd been, and the table had gotten loud with questions and reactions and the particular energy of people who wanted to hear about things that had happened somewhere else.
The weight didn't disappear. It just moved back to where it usually lived.
***
In the days that followed, Noah went to Gildarts's house.
Crush Magic occupied a category that most magic didn't reach. Super Magic. The distinction wasn't just a label attached to power level. It referred to something qualitative, a type of magic that functioned at a level requiring not just significant magical reserves but a specific density and quality of power that most mages never developed. Gildarts used it the way other people used basic spells, casually, at will, without apparent cost. That ease represented something almost incomprehensible about where his baseline actually sat.
The magic itself was straightforward in principle and demanding in execution. It crushed. It dissolved the coherence of whatever it contacted, breaking down structures, magical or physical, into their component parts. Applied to a boulder it became gravel. Applied to a magical attack it became dispersed energy. Applied to most things it became considerably smaller and less organized things.
Noah's current reserves and the quality of his magical foundation were different from what they had been years ago. He moved through the learning process at a pace that Gildarts watched with an expression that moved between impressed and vaguely unsettled.
He filed Crush alongside everything else he carried and kept building.
The notifications went out. Guild members on quests received word and came back, one by one, until the hall was as full as it got. The last one returned, and Noah checked the list, confirmed everyone was present, and locked the front door of the guild.
"Let's go."
Instant movement took all of them at once.
The ocean appeared below them mid-step, the full expanse of open water stretching to every horizon, no shore visible in any direction. The younger members had no preparation for this and reacted accordingly. Wendy made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a question. Yukino grabbed for something that wasn't there. Several others voiced their feelings about the sudden absence of solid ground in terms that were expressive if not entirely dignified.
Erza, Ultear, and the members who had been doing this long enough to trust the process looked down at the water with the composure of people who had stopped being surprised by Noah a while ago.
Noah was already moving.
"Ice-Make: Ice Age."
The cold spread outward from him in every direction across the surface of the water, the sea freezing in a rapidly expanding circle, thickening as it went, building a platform broad and solid enough to hold everyone comfortably with room to spare. By the time the last person landed, the ice beneath them was dense and stable.
A few members in lighter clothing were shivering before they'd fully oriented themselves.
Noah raised one hand.
"Attach: All Attribute Resistance Up."
"Attach: All Physical Abilities Up."
"Attach: Five Senses Enhanced."
"Attach: Balance Enhanced."
The enhancements settled across the group simultaneously. The effect was immediate and noticeable, the kind of noticeable that made people stop and reassess what they were feeling in their own bodies.
Natsu came off the ice in a single jump, threw two punches at the air, landed, jumped again, landed again.
"This is incredible! I feel like I could fight three Gildarts right now!"
He had been flat on the ice approximately thirty seconds earlier, which nobody needed to say out loud.
Noah had seen the way Natsu landed and recognized it. The motion sickness problem, the particular vestibular disruption that came with Dragon Slayer Magic once it had developed far enough, had arrived for Natsu. The mechanism was the same as what had appeared in Laxus significantly earlier.
He looked across the ice toward Laxus.
Laxus was already looking back at him, and the expression on his face was extremely clear on the subject of what would happen if Noah said anything about it.
Noah smiled. It was a genuinely bright smile.
Laxus's expression darkened by several degrees.
The examinations Noah had run on Laxus when the issue first appeared had revealed the underlying mechanism. The gradual dragonification process that Dragon Slayer Magic created as a side effect had introduced some degree of damage to the specific organ responsible for maintaining balance. This should have caused broader symptoms. The fact that Laxus only experienced the problem in moving vehicles and not in other situations was something Noah hadn't been able to fully explain yet, and had filed under Dragon Slayer Magic's specific and idiosyncratic tendency to produce effects that didn't follow conventional magical logic.
The fix was simple regardless of the cause. Enhancement of the balance sense directly compensated for whatever the dragonification had disrupted. The Attach spell handled it cleanly.
Wendy's Troia accomplished the same thing through a different mechanism, but the effectiveness declined with repeated use and it had a time limit. The Attach approach was more reliable for extended exposure.
Noah pulled his attention back to the group.
"I've enhanced your senses. You'll be able to follow the fight from distance, sight and sound both. Everyone is going far enough back that you're clear of anything that comes off the exchange."
He looked at Makarov.
Makarov, standing on the ice with the dignity of a very small man who had chosen to bring his entire guild to the middle of the ocean and had already committed to this decision, nodded.
"Go ahead."
Noah raised his hand. The guild members, every one of them except himself and Gildarts, were lifted and moved, carried across the ice and then across the water to a distance that put sufficient space between them and whatever was about to happen.
The ice stretched between, wide and empty, with two people standing on it.
Noah looked at Gildarts.
Gildarts looked back at him, and the sharpness that had appeared in his eyes back at the guild when this was first proposed had settled into something cleaner. Not competitive. Curious.
"Been a long time," Gildarts said.
"Eight years," Noah said. "Give or take."
"Let's see what eight years looks like."
---
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