The automatic doors almost closed on him and he had to resist the urge to punch them before he stepped through them. What kind of messed up complicated place was this anyway?
So… where the heck was this bank place anyway?
...
When he finally found a place with a sign that read 'The Royal Bank of Scotland' and marched inside, he groaned when he saw another queue leading to the desk at the other side of the entrance hall. If he'd been in Phantom Lord still he would have punched his way to the front and have done with it. But, he was a Fairy Tail mage now and hurting innocent people needlessly was not their way so he reluctantly joined the back of the queue.
He got about halfway to the desk before the first gunshot went off.
Screams ripped through the bank as four men wearing black balaclavas and gloves barged in through the front door, each one of them carrying a firearm and one of them firing it up towards the ceiling, putting several holes in it.
As Gajeel spun around to stare, everyone else in the bank immediately dove for cover, cowering on the ground even as the man firing the gun yelled, "Everyone hit the floor! Stay down and you won't get hurt! Unless you try and call the police - if we see anyone with a phone we will shoot them!"
The men spread out across the room, roving their guns from left to right to keep the entire room covered, the clerks cowering behind their desks. Gajeel was now the only one still standing and he looked around at the shock on the faces of the others. Clearly this place didn't get much crime and yet he'd walked right into the middle of something.
"You there, big guy! Get down on the ground now!" the speaker aimed his gun at Gajeel, who turned back to raise an eyebrow at him.
"The hell do you think you're doing, kid?" he glowered, guessing that the man with the gun couldn't be any older than eighteen. "Get that peashooter out of my face."
"This is a bank robbery! We'll be taking all the money in this place. And this is a real gun!" he lowered it to fire a shot near Gajeel's feet, making everyone else scream though Gajeel didn't flinch in the slightest.
"Take my advice, boy," Gajeel sniffed at him. "Go crawling back home to your mother. I'm sure she can prepare a nice warm bottle of milk for you to suckle on."
"I said get down!" the robber pointed the gun right at Gajeel's face. "Do you wanna be shot!?"
"Have you got the balls to pull that trigger?" Gajeel leered, glancing sideways to where one of the others, despite the situation had thrust a bag to one of clerks behind the desk and demanded they fill it up with everything that they had. "You ever killed a man before, son?"
"Have you?" the man replied, faltering slightly.
"Nah… but I've come pretty damn close many, many times," Gajeel grinned, socking one fist into his palm and cracking his knuckles. "And just about all of them were tougher than some wet-behind-the-ears airhead like you."
"You don't think I would do it?!" the robber yelled thrusting his hand out even further.
"You haven't pulled it yet," Gajeel took a step forward and then another, slowly advancing across the room towards the robber, who was shaking a little now. "I bet this robbery idea sounded much better on paper than it does in practice, huh? This bank place is a stupid idea anyway - I prefer to keep all my money in one place… where I can easily cave in the heads of anyone that tries to nick it."
"I'm warning you…!" the robber took several steps backwards towards the door - and by this point the whole room including the robber at the desk and clerk had stopped what they were doing to watch the altercation.
"Pull the trigger," Gajeel suggested with a harsh grin. "It won't make a bleeding bit of difference."
"Oh for God's sake," another of the robbers raised his own pistol, prompting Gajeel to swing around to stare at him instead. "I'll do it then!" And the loud shot flared through the bank, screams erupting from every corner of the room as Gajeel's head snapped backwards from the impact, teetering on the spot for a moment…
…before slowly bringing his head back downwards to grin at the stunned shooter. The bullet was caught firmly between Gajeel's teeth and as a wall of shocked silence fell over the room, Gajeel casually bit the bullet in half, catching the end that fell out in his palm and tossing it into his mouth with the rest of it, chewing noisily for several moments before swallowing.
"Not the most appetising meal I've had for a while," Gajeel grinned, grabbing the bandages that covered his torso and ripping them away, revealing the scars on his arm before he clicked his shoulder. "Got any more?"
"What… the hell… what did you just…" the second robber stumbled over his words, unable to form a coherent thought let alone a sentence.
"You picked one hell of a bad day to try this robbery," Gajeel snickered. And then he roared, "TETSURYUUKON!" and lunged forwards, his arm morphing into a blunt, flat-ended club that extended outwards like a piston and slammed into the robber's torso, shattering his gun and breaking several ribs while slamming him back against the wall hard enough to send him crashing straight through it.
The other three robbers, including the one that had been hesitant to shoot him, panicked and opened fire on him instantly, the other customers screaming and yelling as they covered their heads, shots flying over the top of them, only to bounce of Gajeel's skin, which had suddenly become iron scales and tinker to the floor around him.
Gajeel spun around and turned his feet into clubs, thrusting himself up into the air with them to fly across the room, slamming bodily into the robber by the desk and smashing him backwards, splintering the desk under the impact.
Seizing the gun and yanking it out of his hand, Gajeel tore a chunk out of the metal with his teeth and chewed it down before tossing it aside, grabbing the robber by the front of his shirt and spinning around, blocking several more bullets from another robber with the metal palm of his hand. He then sprang into the air, heaving the robber up with him and spun him around, seizing him by the leg and flinging him downwards to crash into his partner.
The one closest to the door that Gajeel had been talking to balked and dashed out and away, while the other two scrambled to their feet. The only one still armed immediately pointed the gun at a woman on the ground and yelled, "Back off, man! Or I'll shoot this…" He didn't get any further before Gajeel's arm shot forwards across the room on extending metal, his hand seizing the gun and slamming it up into the robber's face before he spun into a sweep kick, his leg becoming a club and lengthening in mid-swing to catch both the robbers in the stomachs and send them crashing back across the room.
"Shouldn't have done that, mate!" Gajeel growled, taking a deep breath. "Cos that made me angry! TETSURYUU NO… HOUKOU!"
With an explosion of magic, a huge grey breath attack burst out of Gajeel's jaws, a tornado of Iron Dragon power filled with little shards of metal blasting across the room and enveloping both the yelling robbers, slamming them into the air and flinging them backwards.
The attack smashed into the wall of the bank and blasted it to rubble, stone and brickwork cascading out into the street as the robbers were flung outside to sprawl, unconscious on the pavement with several broken bones and lashes across their skin from the metal shards. They were almost run over by a car whose driver had lost control with shock at the sight of half the bank being blown away.
Gajeel powered out after them and landed on the pavement, cracking it under his feet as he swung around in search of the final robber. He spotted him through the window of a car that was furiously pulling away from the pavement, the panicked robber behind the wheel as he shot off down the road and away. But Gajeel dashed out behind the car, summoning a green magic circle in front of his hand and morphed his arm into a spear, levelling it at the back of the retreating vehicle and ignoring the screams of the pedestrians.
"TETSURYUUSOU: KISHIN!" he bellowed and fired a multitude of large spears out from his arm in rapid succession, like a mini gun filled with giant arrows. The spears punctured the boot and the back tyres, bringing the car to a screeching halt as the driver was slammed into the wheel, having forgotten to put his seatbelt on. He cringed as another spear smashed through the back window and skewered into the radio right next to him.
The robber scrambled out of the car, only to find Gajeel had already crossed them distance between them. "No, please…!" he yelled as Gajeel seized him by his shirt and hauled him upright. "Don't… don't kill me!"
"I ain't killing ye," Gajeel rolled his eyes. "But let me ask you, do you think crime pays now?"
"No! No, it doesn't! No way!"
"And will you ever try and and take what don't belong to you again?"
"No, never!"
"Good!" Gajeel grinned, before he slammed his iron forehead into the head of the robber, knocking him out. "I'll take your word for it."
But, as he dropped the limp body to the ground and deactivated his iron scales, Gajeel looked around him at the people who'd seen this altercation. Almost every one of them was staring at him in abject horror and fear, except for a couple of children who were trying to run towards him crying, "Mummy, it's a superhero! A real superhero!" only to be held back by their wide-eyed mother.
"What the hell are you all looking at?" Gajeel growled. "You never seen a mage before?"
...
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