Chapter 159

Chapter 159: Chapter 159

Marshall’s home was enormous, so accommodating a few dozen guests wasn’t remotely difficult.

And since attractive young women were hardly rare in this world, the sight of so many girls filling Cake Tower with laughter, conversation, food, and noise gave the entire place the atmosphere of some fantastical gathering straight out of a storybook.

Marshall, naturally, was delighted with the situation.

Still, most of his attention remained fixed on Erza.

She had been avoiding his eyes for several days now.

Marshall found that baffling.

He was supposedly the "victim" of their embarrassing little accident, and even he had already stopped caring.

He had no idea why Erza was still tying herself into knots over it.

Although...

A flustered Erza was admittedly rather cute.

He liked seeing this side of her.

Erza, meanwhile, gradually noticed that Marshall was speaking to her exactly as he always had.

He never mentioned what had happened, never teased her about it, and behaved as though the entire embarrassing incident had already been filed away and forgotten.

The realization allowed some of the tension in her shoulders to ease.

Little by little, the familiar rhythm between them returned.

Her responses stopped sounding stiff, and she no longer felt the urge to look away every time their eyes happened to meet.

Even so, another thought left her faintly dispirited.

In the end, Marshall had once again been the one accommodating her feelings.

’Some big sister I am...’

She was supposed to be the older, more mature one, yet somehow Marshall was always the person quietly making difficult situations easier.

Then there was that unfamiliar fragrance she had smelled on him earlier.

Erza’s gaze wandered across the room.

There were beautiful girls everywhere.

After thinking about it for a moment, she relaxed again.

Marshall had grown up surrounded by women.

Mira, Cana, Levy, herself, and countless others had been around him since childhood, so picking up someone else’s perfume hardly meant anything unusual.

The thought still left her vaguely irritated for some inexplicable reason, but Erza decided not to dwell on it.

Instead, she found Lucy and asked about what had happened on Galuna Island.

That turned out to be a mistake from Lucy’s perspective.

After hearing the entire story, Erza’s expression became increasingly stern.

"You stole an S-Class quest?"

Lucy immediately shrank.

"N-Not exactly stole... Happy technically—"

Erza’s gaze sharpened.

Lucy shut up.

Erza then delivered a thorough lecture on the seriousness of violating guild rules, taking jobs beyond one’s authorization, and dragging other people into unnecessary danger.

"And you should be grateful Marshall was the one sent after you."

Lucy stared.

"Grateful?"

"Yes."

Erza folded her arms.

"If I had gone, you would not have gotten off nearly that easily."

Lucy visibly trembled.

"Marshall was far too soft on all of you."

’Too soft?!’

Lucy suddenly reconsidered her entire opinion of the punishment she had suffered.

Maybe being sentenced to maid duty really wasn’t so terrible after all.

Before Erza could decide that Lucy needed a practical demonstration of proper discipline, Lucy desperately searched for a new subject.

Then inspiration struck.

"Oh! Right!"

She hurriedly pointed toward Marshall.

"Marshall made seven new Gugas!"

Erza paused.

The surrounding girls immediately turned their heads.

Lucy knew she had found her escape route.

"They’re called the Seven Sins Apostles, and they’re way stronger than the old ones!"

That completely redirected everyone’s attention.

Marshall’s artificial creations could defeat Natsu now?

That was genuine news.

Under relentless demands from practically every girl in the room, Marshall finally gave in and summoned the seven new prototypes.

The response was immediate.

Silence.

Seven elongated penguin-like creatures stood in formation before them, each nearly a meter tall and possessing the familiar face of one of Fairy Tail’s girls.

Compared with the tiny, round Gugas everyone was used to, these newer bodies looked much more awkward.

Mira tilted her head.

"...They’re not very cute."

Cana circled one.

"They look stretched."

Levy crouched down and poked one experimentally.

"The old Gugas are way cuter."

Lucy nodded vigorously.

"Exactly!"

Wendy looked apologetic even while agreeing.

"Maybe... their bodies could be a little rounder?"

Within moments, Marshall was facing unanimous demands for cosmetic improvements.

"You need to patch their appearance!"

"At least give them proper proportions!"

"Why did you make them look like tall penguins?!"

Marshall crossed his arms defensively.

"They’re prototypes! Their combat bodies aren’t finished yet!"

Nobody cared.

Then Lucy, entirely too pleased with herself, revealed the second piece of information.

"Oh, and each one has a codename."

Marshall suddenly had a terrible feeling.

Lucy began counting them off.

"Pride. Wrath. Gluttony. Envy. Lust. Sloth. Greed."

The room became very quiet.

Marshall slowly looked toward the seven women whose faces had been used as templates.

Erza.

Mira.

Cana.

Juvia.

Levy.

Wendy.

Lucy.

’...Oh.’

He had somehow failed to consider how this would sound when explained directly to them.

Seven pairs of eyes gradually turned toward him and Marshall’s back began to sweat.

Erza stepped closer.

"Marshall."

Mira smiled.

It was a very gentle smile.

Far too gentle!

"Would you like to explain something?"

Cana cracked her knuckles.

Juvia’s expression became dangerously dark.

Lucy folded her arms with tremendous satisfaction, finally enjoying revenge for Galuna Island.

Levy was suffering the worst.

Her face had turned completely red.

"W-Why am I Lust?!"

She could already feel several girls glancing at her.

Levy wanted the floor to open beneath her!

She turned toward Marshall with gritted teeth.

"Explain!"

Marshall found himself slowly herded into a corner by the seven original models for his creations.

The pressure was extraordinary.

"Why exactly am I Pride?" Erza asked.

"Why am I Wrath?" Mira added pleasantly.

Cana pointed at herself. "And what about Gluttony?"

"Marshall-sama," Juvia said darkly, "Juvia would greatly appreciate an explanation for Envy."

Lucy jabbed a finger toward her own chest.

"And Greed?! What did I do?!"

Wendy looked mostly embarrassed.

Levy looked ready to die.

Faced with seven accusations at once, Marshall suddenly discovered that his famous intelligence had abandoned him.

He had no good answer.

And whenever Marshall encountered a question he didn’t want to answer...

He simply stopped talking.

"..."

The girls waited.

Marshall looked left and right.

Erza’s eyebrow twitched.

"Marshall?"

He made his decision.

Escape!

Space folded around him.

"Hey—!"

Marshall vanished.

The girls stared at the empty corner.

Lucy’s mouth fell open.

"He ran away!"

Cana burst out laughing.

"The little coward actually ran!"

Marshall had left Cake Tower—and the entire party—to the girls and teleported somewhere safely beyond their reach.

He had somehow managed to turn his own perfect gathering into a tribunal against himself.

So much for enjoying the party.

There was no helping it.

He might as well work on something.

...

Fortunately, Marshall genuinely did have something far more important waiting for him.

The complete demonic knowledge extracted from Deliora.

Deliora’s Curse was fundamentally oriented around physical enhancement.

It could enlarge its body, greatly increase its physical strength, and regenerate damage with frightening efficiency.

In theory, Marshall now possessed the full design specifications necessary to reproduce the creature.

If he took the demonic knowledge he had obtained and rewrote it through Script Magic into a new book, he should theoretically be able to create another "Deliora" of his own.

At least, that was what Marshall initially assumed.

Once he actually tried to reconstruct the process, however, he discovered a problem.

Both demons and Celestial Spirits appeared to obey the same fundamental rule of artificial creation:

[A created life-form cannot possess an ability its creator fundamentally does not understand or possess.]

The Seven Sins Gugas were a perfect example.

Every ability they used ultimately came from something Marshall himself could already perform.

Even when he combined multiple magical systems into a new effect, the underlying principles still originated from his own knowledge.

In fact, of the seven current prototypes, Greed—Lucy Guga—was actually the strongest.

Originally, Marshall hadn’t even known what to give her.

Later, however, he added a Spatial Magic function.

That immediately changed everything.

Spatial Magic was one of Marshall’s highest-level disciplines, so Greed inherited an unusually sophisticated understanding of it.

Her ability to reposition the other Gugas during the fight against Natsu had been far more useful than the raw destructive power of several of the others combined.

That didn’t mean the remaining six were weak.

All Seven Sins Gugas benefited from another important foundation:

Marshall’s Level Four Script Magic.

Even when their individual elemental systems were lower-level, the depth with which their abilities had been encoded meant they possessed remarkably sophisticated magical logic for newborn artificial life-forms.

In theory, this restriction shouldn’t have troubled Marshall much.

If there was one thing he possessed in ridiculous abundance, it was skills.

Over the years, he had accumulated knowledge of so many different kinds of Magic that there were now very few ordinary magical systems he couldn’t imitate in some form.

Given enough combinations, he ought to have been capable of constructing nearly any desired effect.

Yet while organizing Deliora’s complete design, Marshall discovered something unexpected.

The demon’s true core involved a branch of magical knowledge he had never actually studied before.

That alone was surprising.

What bothered him even more was how strangely familiar it felt.

He had definitely seen concepts resembling this somewhere.

Marshall leaned back and began sorting through his memory.

With his enhanced intelligence, searching through years of magical study was far less difficult than it would have been for an ordinary person.

Concepts, spell structures, research notes, and fragments of old theory flashed through his thoughts until the sense of familiarity finally connected to a source.

His expression changed.

"...No way."

The closest comparison wasn’t another demon.

It was one of Fairy Tail’s Three Great Magics.

[Fairy Law.]

Marshall stared at Deliora’s information again.

Then at the spellbook Makarov had given him.

Then back at Deliora.

’Seriously?’

He had never expected Fairy Tail’s most closely guarded magic to overlap conceptually with the principles used to create demons.

Marshall had originally intended to postpone serious study of Fairy Law.

He had several other projects in progress already, and there was no reason to spread his attention even thinner.

Now he had no choice.

He opened the spellbook and began comparing the two systems in detail.

...

Hours passed.

The similarities weren’t superficial.

There was something deeper underneath both forms of Magic—a concept that neither Deliora’s demonic design nor Fairy Law directly explained, but which both depended upon.

Marshall followed that thread.

Then another.

And another.

The more he compared them, the clearer the hidden structure became.

At some point, he stopped merely reading.

He understood.

A familiar sensation passed through him as scattered magical concepts suddenly aligned into a coherent whole.

Marshall’s status panel changed.

A new entry appeared.

[Life Magic LV1]

Marshall stared at it.

"Oh."

Then his eyes widened.

"Wow."

This was not a path he had expected to discover today.

Until now, Marshall had always assumed most abilities dealing with vitality belonged somewhere beneath Wood Magic.

That assumption turned out to be wrong.

Wood-element Magic certainly interacted with life force, just as Sky Magic could heal and manipulate aspects of living bodies, but neither one was the same thing as Life Magic itself.

They merely touched upon pieces of the broader concept.

Life Magic dealt with something much more fundamental.

Its domain extended into the underlying structure of living organisms, growth, death, and the mechanisms that separated living existence from ordinary matter.

Some of it could be described through physical concepts resembling genetics.

But only some.

Beyond that point, the subject rapidly became abstract.

What exactly constituted "life"?

At what point did organized information become a living consciousness?

What separated a living body from an identical dead one?

How were soul, body, memory, and vitality connected?

The deeper Marshall looked, the more Life Magic began to resemble Time Magic—one of those disciplines whose principles could be used long before the user truly understood why reality permitted them to work.

Even Marshall couldn’t immediately reduce everything to a complete underlying theory.

For once, he knew how to perform certain operations without yet fully understanding the deepest reason those operations were possible.

That alone demonstrated how terrifying the field was.

Zeref had used knowledge like this to create demons.

Marshall’s estimation of the legendary Black Mage rose another level.

Whatever else could be said about that lunatic, his magical accomplishments were absolutely monstrous.

But now...

Marshall knew Life Magic too.

His eyes drifted toward his accumulated Inspiration points.

[Inspiration: 1,189,675]

Marshall stared at the number for several seconds.

He had barely spent any recently because nothing had seemed urgent enough to justify it. Without noticing, his reserve had quietly passed one million.

That was enough to force a newly acquired skill from nothing all the way toward Level Four if he really wanted to.

Marshall tapped a finger against the table.

’Should I?’

Life Magic looked absurdly difficult.

Studying it normally could take a very long time.

Dumping Inspiration into it would be much faster.

His finger hovered.

Then stopped.

"No."

Marshall leaned back.

"Forget it."

He had learned this lesson before.

Raising an incomprehensibly complicated skill too quickly could be dangerous.

If Life Magic developed some passive effect he couldn’t properly control, he might create an entirely new problem for himself.

Better to understand the basics first.

He could always spend Inspiration later.

Marshall looked back toward Deliora’s design, then toward the seven unfinished artificial-life books resting nearby.

His earlier annoyance at being chased out of his own party disappeared completely.

A new question had already taken over his thoughts.

The Gugas had been artificial life created primarily through Script Magic, Information Magic, and carefully structured magical systems.

But now he possessed actual Life Magic.

So...

What would happen if he used that Magic from the very beginning?

What kind of existence would emerge if he created life not merely by imitating the structure of living things—but by directly touching the magical concept of life itself?

Marshall’s eyes gradually lit up.

He really wanted to know!

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