Chapter 168

Chapter 168: Chapter 168

Phantom Lord’s fate was decided almost immediately after the guild war ended.

For launching an unauthorized war against another legal Mage Guild, the Magic Council ordered Phantom Lord to disband.

Jose Porla was stripped of his title as one of the Ten Wizard Saints and sentenced to life imprisonment, bringing the long rivalry between the two guilds to a rather decisive conclusion.

The version of events that eventually spread across Fiore only made Fairy Tail’s reputation more terrifying.

According to the official account, Makarov—himself a Wizard Saint—had respected the Magic Council’s regulations throughout the conflict and had barely taken part personally.

Fairy Tail had supposedly defeated Jose by sending only a handful of its elite younger Mages against him.

Whether or not that description captured every unpleasant detail of the battle hardly mattered.

The result was undeniable.

A Wizard Saint had challenged Fairy Tail on its own doorstep and lost to the guild’s younger generation.

Once news spread, the entire continent was shaken all over again.

By this point, there was practically no one left willing to question the weight carried by the name Fairy Tail.

That new prestige did, however, create a problem Makarov hadn’t anticipated.

Applicants.

A ridiculous number of them.

Young Mages began pouring into Magnolia from all over Fiore, eager to join the guild that had just crushed Phantom Lord and defeated one of the Ten Wizard Saints.

Fairy Tail’s guildhall had already been crowded before the war; now there were days when simply walking across the first floor became an exercise in squeezing between bodies.

Makarov found the situation equal parts gratifying and exhausting.

Marshall mostly found it annoying.

Through Makarov, he also learned that the Magic Council had quietly raised Fairy Tail’s threat assessment to the highest category.

Internally, the Council now considered the guild capable of opposing an entire nation through its own military strength, which meant every department had been instructed to treat Fairy Tail with extreme caution and avoid provoking it unnecessarily.

Marshall wasn’t particularly interested in that kind of bureaucratic nonsense.

As far as he was concerned, the best thing he had taken from the Phantom Lord incident was the Super Mage Giant.

The machine was cumbersome, certainly, but its technical value was extraordinary.

It could automatically construct large-scale magical arrays, and more importantly, it was designed so that even comparatively weak Mages could operate systems far beyond what their personal magic power would normally allow.

Then there was the magical convergence cannon.

A weapon like that could threaten an entire guild or town without requiring a Wizard Saint to personally stand behind it.

If Marshall could fully digest the technologies inside the machine, Fairy Tail would finally begin solving one of its long-standing weaknesses: the guild had plenty of absurdly powerful individual Mages, but comparatively few large-scale strategic weapons that ordinary members could operate.

For Fairy Tail as an organization, however, the greatest prize wasn’t machinery.

It was people.

Two members of Phantom Lord’s Element 4 ultimately agreed to join Fairy Tail.

The first was Totomaru.

The second was the man everyone had been calling Kisame.

His real name was Gill, and the truth behind his ridiculous appearance turned out to be even more embarrassing than Marshall had expected.

Gill was an obsessive fan of the Naruto manga, and after realizing that his natural features already resembled Kisame Hoshigaki to some degree, he had deliberately altered his appearance until the resemblance became nearly exact.

Marshall had no idea whether to admire the dedication or be horrified by it.

Totomaru’s reason for joining was considerably more respectable.

He had become fascinated by the Spatial Magic Marshall displayed during the guild war.

Once Marshall casually mentioned that Fairy Tail possessed one of the strongest spatial Mages around, Totomaru’s resistance weakened almost immediately.

Marshall then sweetened the offer by inviting him to teach at the guild’s future academy.

Totomaru accepted.

A few days later, Marshall dropped a mountain of documents into his arms.

"You’re handling the preparations for the Fairy Tail Magic Academy."

Totomaru stared at the paperwork.

"...What?"

"You’ll be Vice Principal."

That changed everything.

Vice Principal of a brand-new magical academy under Fairy Tail?

There were people who would fight for an opportunity like that.

Totomaru immediately straightened.

"I accept!"

Marshall smiled.

"Excellent."

Then he handed over the rest of the documents.

"And these are the land-use applications, curriculum drafts, staffing requirements, admissions standards, equipment inventories, budget proposals, legal filings, accreditation requests, and construction modifications."

Totomaru’s expression slowly froze.

Marshall patted him on the shoulder.

"Good luck, Vice Principal."

Only then did Totomaru realize he had walked into a trap.

Unfortunately, regret came far too late.

He could only thank Marshall through increasingly emotional tears for the tremendous "opportunity" he had been given.

The position of principal, naturally, belonged to the magnificent Makarov Dreyar.

At least on paper.

Marshall’s reasoning for establishing the academy was perfectly sound.

He was now a noble, and Magnolia was technically part of his territory. Supporting local education was therefore an entirely reasonable responsibility.

More importantly, Fairy Tail had far too many members whose academic education could most generously be described as questionable.

Marshall felt that a distressing percentage of the guild could benefit from being sent back to school.

A Fairy Tail-controlled academy would solve several problems at once.

It could continuously train young talent for the guild, provide future generations of Fairy Tail Mages with a proper education, improve the general magical literacy of Magnolia, and create a structured path for promising children who weren’t yet ready to become working guild Mages.

They didn’t even need to construct a school building.

Phantom Lord had kindly donated one.

The captured Super Mage Giant was enormous, durable, filled with magical infrastructure, and already designed to accommodate large numbers of people.

After some modification, it could serve perfectly well as the academy’s main campus.

And so, in one of the stranger consequences of Phantom Lord’s defeat, an enormous former war machine became a school.

Fairy Tail Magic Academy!

Tuition was completely free.

Students who graduated successfully would be offered direct employment opportunities.

Anyone with suitable aptitude was welcome to apply.

Marshall personally selected the school motto: Let Sleeping Dragons Lie!

With a little over a month remaining until September, the academy was expected to open its doors in time for the new term.

Makarov was delighted.

He had absolutely no objection to lending his name to the position of principal and had already begun fantasizing about retiring from guild administration altogether and becoming a full-time educator.

In fact, Makarov now seemed even more eager for Marshall to grow up than Marshall himself was.

The sooner that happened, the sooner the old man imagined he could hand over Fairy Tail and finally escape.

Marshall knew exactly what he was thinking.

Unfortunately for Makarov, the old man was dreaming.

Marshall had no intention of becoming Guild Master simply because somebody wanted to retire.

If he ever accepted the position at all, it would be as a Guild Master in name only.

The current arrangement was nearly perfect.

Marshall came up with ideas.

Makarov approved them.

Then Marshall found somebody else to do the work.

Why would he willingly abandon the ideal lifestyle of a hands-off mastermind and replace it with endless paperwork, Council hearings, disciplinary meetings, job requests, and responsibility for several hundred lunatics?

Makarov could keep dreaming about retirement.

...

The Phantom Lord battle had also given Marshall a clearer picture of his own growth.

Between his continuing research into Spatial Magic and the increasingly ambitious magical experiments he had been conducting, his magic reserves were rising at a pace that had begun to surprise even him.

The battle against Jose had also brought him a few unexpected gains.

Once his depleted Magic Power had fully recovered, his maximum reserves increased significantly, rising by a little over 2,000.

He was now only around 7,000 away from the 100,000 threshold.

There was still an enormous gulf between that and one hundred thousand, but Marshall could feel the rate of growth accelerating.

If his current progress continued, he was confident he could break through the two-hundred-thousand mark once the Tower of Heaven project was completed.

More important than the number itself was what the fight against Jose had taught him.

Fighting above his weight class was nowhere near as difficult as he had once assumed.

Raw magic power mattered enormously, but Marshall’s Spatial Magic made it exceptionally difficult for an opponent to convert superior reserves into actual damage.

As long as he controlled the battlefield, even someone with several times his magic power could be forced into a prolonged war of attrition.

And attrition favored Marshall far more than most people realized.

After replaying the battle in his head, he reached a conclusion that would have sounded absurd before the fight.

Even without Erza, Mira, Cana, Natsu, Gray, and Juvia helping him, Marshall believed he could have defeated Jose alone.

The battle would have been uglier.

It would have taken considerably longer.

He probably would have burned through far more resources and spent much of the fight avoiding direct confrontation.

But in the end, Marshall was confident Jose would still have been the one to fall first.

That realization changed the way he evaluated himself.

He no longer needed to describe his strength as merely "approaching" Wizard Saint level.

Marshall could reasonably claim to possess the combat power of one.

Makarov remained a different problem entirely.

After the battle, Marshall privately tracked down Aria and questioned him about the spell that had emptied Makarov’s magic power.

The answer was fascinating.

At some point in the past, Aria had spent time with a Mage religious organization on the northern continent known as the White Magic Cult.

The spell he had used against Makarov had been inspired by a branch of White Magic called Whiteout.

Aria himself did not actually know how to cast Whiteout.

Instead, he had used extremely advanced Wind Magic to imitate one particular effect associated with it—the ability to draw magic power out of another Mage’s body.

Marshall was both impressed and disappointed.

Impressed because Aria had taken a concept from an entirely different magical discipline and reproduced part of it using Wind Magic.

Disappointed because Marshall’s own Wind Magic had not yet reached Level Four, meaning he couldn’t simply copy the technique after seeing it once.

And the actual White Magic behind the concept remained unavailable to him for the moment.

So much for his secret plan to empty Makarov’s magic reserves and beat up the old man.

Not that Marshall had been planning anything like that, of course.

Probably.

Without a way to strip Makarov of his magic, Marshall still had very few reliable options against him.

Marshall might already have surpassed the old man in both Light Magic and Giant Magic, but the gap between their total reserves remained enormous.

Jose could be worn down.

Makarov was much harder to exhaust before Marshall himself ran out of options.

Still, that realization no longer bothered him much.

The reverse was also true.

Makarov would have an increasingly difficult time dealing with Marshall now.

At minimum, Marshall felt entirely justified in describing himself as possessing Wizard Saint-level strength.

And the discovery of White Magic had only reminded him how absurdly vast the magical world remained.

There were still entire disciplines he had barely heard of, hidden organizations on distant continents, and magical principles completely outside the systems he currently understood.

The White Magic Cult of the northern continent had immediately earned a place on his list of future destinations.

Calling it "studying abroad" sounded considerably more respectable than "showing up to steal their magical knowledge."

...

After the Phantom Lord incident finally settled down, Marshall’s life became peaceful again for a while.

That peace gave him exactly what he wanted most.

Time to research.

Time to experiment.

And, most importantly, time to improve the artificial lives he had already created!

The Seven Sins Gugas had only been crude experimental bodies when they first appeared on Galuna Island.

That was no longer the case.

By the time Marshall finished his next round of modifications, the seven little Apostles had changed dramatically...