Chapter 1002: [1002] : Natsu

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"You said you could get us into the spirit realm," the king said, falling into step behind Shin for a few paces down the corridor. "I’ll confess I have no idea how that’s possible for a living person."

"Spatial transfer," Shin said. "I felt the fracture in the boundary when I was using Edo Tensei. It’s thin—thin enough to thread through, if you know what you’re looking for."

The king accepted this with a nod, the way people accept explanations they don’t fully understand but have chosen to trust.

He looked at Shin’s eyes.

"Your abilities seem to live in those," he said carefully. "If you don’t mind my asking."

Shin considered for a moment.

"Right eye is the Rinnegan," he said. "Revival, among other things—that’s what brought back your wife’s body. Left eye is the Mangekyo Sharingan. Spatial techniques. What you’re about to see is called Yomotsu Hirasaka."

"Remarkable," the king said, in a tone that suggested ’remarkable’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

They came to a stop in the open corridor. Shin looked at Lucy and Alice.

"Close in," he said.

Both of them stepped in without argument. Lucy slipped an arm through his right. Alice, after a half-second pause that she clearly hoped no one noticed, did the same on his left.

"Don’t let go until I say," Shin said.

He activated the technique.

The world folded.

It happened the way it always did—a sensation like the air being pressed flat, and then a violent lurch sideways, and then nothing, and then somewhere else.

The somewhere else was not the spirit realm.

Shin knew it the moment they landed. The ground under his feet was wrong—too solid, too present, too saturated with the particular kind of ambient magic that only exists in a world full of living, active mages. The spirit realm would have felt emptier. Older. This felt like standing in the middle of a city in the afternoon.

He looked up.

A young man with pink hair and dark eyes was staring at him from about ten feet away, with the uncomplicated directness of someone who had not yet decided whether to be confused or annoyed.

Shin’s brain ran the identification in under a second.

Natsu Dragneel.

’Of course,’ he thought. ’Of all the places.’

He had felt the fracture wrong. What he’d read as a boundary between worlds was actually a seam between time periods—the crack hadn’t been left by the Spirit King at all. It had connected across the timeline, and he’d walked straight through it without knowing.

He was standing in the present. His present, the main Fairy Tail timeline, in the middle of what his memory told him was the Laxus conflict.

Lucy and Alice, for their part, were looking at Natsu with genuine curiosity.

"Is that one?" Lucy asked quietly. "A spirit? He looks completely human."

Shin exhaled through his nose.

Before he could say anything, a second figure jogged into view—Gray, shirtless as ever, wearing the expression of someone who had been dealing with a headache for several hours and had just discovered it was getting worse.

"Natsu, what are you doing? Laxus already has the barrier up, we need to—" Gray stopped. He looked at the three of them. Then he looked more carefully. "Who are these people."

"No idea," Natsu said cheerfully. "They fell out of the sky."

"They fell out of the—" Gray pressed two fingers to his temple. "You know what, fine. Fine." He studied them. Something about Lucy’s face made him look twice. Then at Alice. Then back at Natsu. "Do you see this? They look like—"

"Yeah," Natsu said.

"That’s weird."

"Really weird."

Shin stepped forward before the conversation could go any further sideways.

"We’re mages," he said. "Came a long way to see Fairy Tail. We heard you were the best guild in the country—figured if we were going to join somewhere, it might as well be the top." He glanced around at the empty street, the distant hum of whatever Laxus had put up around the building. "Walked into an interesting moment, by the look of it."

"The whole town knows," Gray said flatly. "It’s not exactly subtle."

"We noticed."

Gray studied Shin for a moment with the particular suspicion of someone who has learned to take nothing at face value. "I can’t read your magic at all. Any of you. That’s either impressive or concerning."

"Bit of both," Shin said pleasantly.

Gray didn’t smile. But he looked less like he was about to do something about it.

"If you can actually back that up," he said, "I’ll take it to the Master. No promises until we see what you can do."

"Fair," Shin said.

Behind him, Alice and Lucy had drifted slightly closer together. Alice leaned toward her sister.

"So this isn’t the spirit world," she murmured.

"No," Shin said, without turning around. "We’ll talk about it later. For now—follow my lead, don’t ask questions where anyone can hear, and let me handle the introductions."

Both of them went quiet. They were sharp enough to understand the shape of the situation even without the full picture, which was exactly why he’d agreed to bring them.

Natsu was still watching Shin with that open, guileless intensity he carried everywhere.

"I’m Natsu," he said. "Natsu Dragneel. Fairy Tail."

He said it the way people say the name of something they’re proud of.

Shin looked at him—this boy who would eventually carry the weight of an entire world on his back and somehow make it look effortless—and felt something that was almost like nostalgia, except he’d never stood here before.

"Shin," he said.

Natsu grinned.

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