บท 62: 59. Fight Dirty
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Lyssa
The feeling of teleporting through fire is hard to describe. It's not instantaneous, for starters. The longer the distance the longer your body just simply doesn't exist. It's just pure energy, untouchable, unaware, unseen, travelling through the space of point A and point B. The sensations that ground you to reality, sight, smell, hearing, taste, are all gone. Except for one. Touch and feeling. You are constantly exposed to the sheer heat that pure energy is. Hotter than fire. Hotter than lightning. All without being able to comprehend the concept of heat as your brain and thought processes are gone. But then, as the colour of the flames that teleported you suddenly floods your vision, the heat is gone instantly as your body is reconstituted.
When your body is whole again, you are immediately bombarded with the sensations it was deprived of. In my case, it was the smell of a half-cooked vegetarian supper, the sound of pacing footsteps, and the sight of an antsy and angry Totomaru going back and forth in our living room, right in front of the stairs leading to the basement where my new books were.
When he realized I was there, his pacing immediately stopped as he rounded on me. "What the fuck did you do!?" he shouted gesturing to the armoured couple standing in a daze to the side.
I quirked my head in confusion at what he wanted from my response, and when he didn't elaborate I just dumbly answered "Retaliated?"
"Retaliated?" he mumbled as he rubbed his face in angered shock. "What is retaliated!? Where the hell did you go, Lyssa!?"
"Took a trip to the capital to raid a Beestenbloed hideout there, the one Himari had a friend that worked there at," I answered as I made my way into the kitchen to see what he had started to cook. 'Stir fry broccoli and cheese? Not bad, not bad.'
"Himari? As in the one that joined them?"
"Yep," I answered popping the p as I turned the stove back on. "It was a supply depot that used a diner as a front to keep itself afloat. People with mission reports would come in, drop them off where they'd be carried off to another block in the command chain. Since a majority of the members of Beestenbloed are ordinary civvies the supplies themselves are usually food and money that'll sustain those who aren't doing a normal job.
"Those that worked in the diner, however, would usually broach up a topic with each other in earshot of the customers or with the customers themselves where they'd criticise the actions of the Magic Council, Crown, or just wizards in general. 'Foot in the door' psychology. They'd pay attention to the ones that were receptive to their opinions and have members stationed in the mail companies send more anti-magic propaganda to them where they'd slowly try to recruit them. Or at the very least cement in their head that those fighting wizards are the good ones, so that in the case they need it they have a mob supporting them. Then they'd—"
"Stop! Stop, just— you're doing that thing where you ramble on with information again."
"Information retention is kinda my thing, chuckle nuts."
"Are you sure that's your thing, now?"
I turned my attention away from the stove to look at him. "What do you mean?"
"THIS!" he said gesturing to the couple again. More accurately, the collars around their necks. "Aren't those the exact collars they used on the transformed civilians back the train heist!?"
"Yeah."
"So what are they on them!?"
"Because I need to study how to remove them without killing the person they're attached to."
"Why!? The government hasn't even hired you to look into this, so what's the point!?"
"Let's just cut the bullshit. What are you really mad about here, Toto?" I asked with a sigh.
"Juvia! Her parents were here today, you little shit!"
My hand stopped stirring as he said that. "...What?"
"Yeah!" he said, hopping over the kitchen island to get into my space. "They came by the guild to see how she learned how to control her magic where they learned that she's been staying with us. You're lucky it was a school day because otherwise, they'd have been here when they showed up out of nowhere! How would I explain that!? 'Oh, my suicidal ward decided to wage a one-woman war against one of the most dangerous dark guilds on the continent. No big deal!'"
"I am not suicidal."
"Bullshit! I've seen what you do to your body. What else could this be but one giant death wish? If they discover who you are, you're inviting them to attack me, Juvia, who is twelve by the way, our neighbours, anyone we consider friends, and for what? To do the same thing they're doing to other people!?"
"They were attacking innocents. The guild openly attacked a government operation as important as transporting raw Etherion, which means they committed treason, meaning that if they do get arrested they're set to be executed anyway. Their lives are forfeit. Might as well use them for something good."
"...Do you even hear yourself right now?"
"Perfectly, and I'll remember it perfectly, too. As well as the memories I'll take from them and the information I get from reading the documents I stole before caving in the diner on top of the underground base."
"Were there civilians inside of the diner?" Totomaru asked, the rage gone from his voice.
"A few. Its earliest hours are the morning with people getting breakfast before work, the graveyard shift returning home from work, and then the elderly going to eat at about ten. At around noon it is usually empty save for the workers and a handful of customers which would have most likely been people going on break or those already involved with the cult's operations to some extent."
"What if some of the workers were also civilians, hm?"
"Doubtful. They would be risking too much of their operation by doing so."
"Doubtful isn't certain."
"Fine then. I'm certain."
He walked over to the living chair and sat there for a minute rubbing his face and eyes. The only sound between us was the sizzling of the stir fry. I lowered the heat down to a simmer as I moved to get the rice cooker to add something filling to the meal.
"Lyssa?" he called with a tired voice.
"Hmm? What is it? Are we out of rice or something?"
"What are your plans with these two? Just out of curiosity."
"Oh, that's quite simple, actually. At least to explain." I said as a thought projection emerged from me and walked past Totomaru and towards the couple.
"The male I'm going to use to figure out how to remove the connection of the collar from the spinal cord without hurting the wearer. If I fail with him, I'll just get a new one." She spoke in my stead. "The female, however, will be used as an experiment for something else."
"You're not even treating them like humans anymore. 'The male'. 'The female.'" he critiqued.
"It doesn't matter if I do or don't. As I said, they'd be executed by the crown if arrested. Their rights don't matter anymore. They gave them up for the pursuit of a nonsensical greater ideal. Believing that magic was inherently bad and that by using it against the innocent they could persuade the greater populace to go back to the stone age. Sure, their hearts are in the right place, but they are foolish for believing that this would prove anything."
"Except you're proving them right. None of this is…"
"Humane?" I asked with a sardonic smile. "You shouldn't expect humanity from a demon, Toto. You're smarter than that. After all, what human would rob one of their own of their free will and subject them to misery for nothing more than their own personal gain? What human would-"
My thought projection glowed before it moved into the body of the woman, who then smiled and snapped her fingers causing a puff of smoke to cover her. When it disappeared, an identical copy of me stood there in her place.
"-enchant their own consciousness into the body of another so that they can effectively clone themselves?"
Disgust and fear riddled his face as he realised what I had just done, and the consequences of it. The woman my thought projection was in was gone. Permanently. Completely overridden and consumed by me.
"Oh don't look at me like that. I'm not even finished yet! Give me a month, no, a week and I'll master body alchemy enough to be able to completely and utterly transfigure the body of someone else to match mine, muscle density and all. They'll be true copies of me, mind, body, and so-Eh? Where are you going?"
Totomaru had stood up and walked toward the door. "On a job. I need to clear my head."
"So soon? Lunch should be done in a few minutes."
"Eat it all then. Since you clearly have enough stomachs to do so," he mumbled before closing the door behind him.
Both of my selves watched him leave through the windows before shrugging. More for me then!
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A/N: So, yeah, Lyssa's not a good person at the moment. Who knew trauma would do that to a person? But, spoiler, that's not solely what this is. There's more going on here because remember what I said all those chapters ago. She's cunning just as much as she's vindictive. And, for narrative reasons, she's going to be the third parallel in the Jellal and Erza situationship. No, she won't be romantically involved, but while Erza is the solid good person throughout the series, Jellal was the solid bad person when we met him. Why not throw a little nuance in there and make Lyssa the anti-hero who is objectively wrong but does things for a good reason? And just like she did for Jellal, Erza will try and fix her. By throwing Mirajane at her because that ship will sail dammit! Spoilers, I guess? I mean, it should have been obvious that Lyssa was going to go down a path like this. She hasn't been sane for a while now.
And while I hate to leave it here for the foreseeable future, I'll have to for reasons I explained in the previous chapter. However, that does not mean I'll stop writing. This story will be on hiatus until January, but I'll be writing in the meantime to build up a backlog and hope that I can write around the problem that's put me into this situation. But, I'll also be updating my Skyrim fic as I also said in the previous chapter. Things like mods, cut content, creation content, ESO lore, and other stuff will be in it so know it will not be just another Skyrim retold story. If you have any suggestions for content you'd like to see do tell me so on that story and will consider it. For narrative reasons, I can't fit in everything but I will try.
But for the readers here only for Fairy Tail, know that I love you, I'll miss you, and I'll see you in January when this story will kick into high gear. Explosively. Trust me.
Also, here's a quote from Mashima from an interview during Comic-con.
— ตอนใหม่กำลังมาในเร็วๆ นี้ — เขียนรีวิว
สถานะพลังงานรายสัปดาห์
-- การจัดอันดับด้วยพลัง 
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