Chapter 299

Chapter 299: Chapter 299

"Marshaaaall! Are you hoooome? I’m here to play with you agaaaain!"

Mavis’s cheerful voice carried through the forest as the little girl ran barefoot across Tenrou Island, moving from place to place like an energetic gust of wind.

Fortunately for her, Tenrou Island was relatively peaceful in this era.

A hundred years later, the island would be home to all sorts of powerful magical beasts, and a little girl wandering around without any protection might end up getting eaten before she even reached her destination.

"Marshall! Teach me some more Magic today!"

Mavis arrived at his house with her eyes sparkling like precious gemstones, practically overflowing with excitement at the prospect of learning something new.

"No. Go away! I don’t feel like playing with you."

"Ehhh?!"

Unlike the enthusiastic Mavis, Marshall looked like a completely different person from the handsome, mysterious Mage she’d met a week earlier.

His clothes were disheveled, his expression was listless, and his hair had been carelessly tied to one side.

He looked thoroughly exhausted, as though he’d lost all interest in maintaining his appearance.

Marshall had been living on Tenrou Island for seven days now, and those seven days had been absolutely miserable.

There was only one reason for his suffering.

He couldn’t summon Virgo anymore.

And without Virgo, there was nobody to take care of his daily needs.

On the seventh day of living without his beloved maid, Marshall’s longing for her had finally reached its peak.

He was forced to acknowledge an extremely embarrassing truth: somewhere along the way, he’d become completely spoiled.

He was now the sort of hopeless person who could barely manage his own daily life without a maid taking care of him.

Seven days ago, Marshall had arrived in the past brimming with ambition, determined to master the Curse of Ankhseram, advance his Magic, and eventually acquire enough strength to beat Acnologia.

Seven days later, those magnificent goals seemed rather less urgent.

Right now, he was beginning to think that creating a maid capable of handling his daily needs should be his highest priority.

If he didn’t find someone—or something—to take care of him soon, his entire routine would collapse, and his carefully prepared training schedule would become a complete mess.

Marshall was still wallowing in his misery when he happened to look up at Mavis.

The little girl was staring at him with an expression so pitiful that she seemed moments away from bursting into tears.

Worse, she was clearly trying her hardest to hold them back and appear brave.

Marshall immediately felt another headache coming on.

"All right, all right! I was joking." He sighed helplessly. "I’m conducting an experiment right now, so I don’t have time to play. Why don’t you find something to entertain yourself with for a while? Once I’m finished, I’ll teach you some Magic."

"Yay! Marshall, you’re the best!"

"..."

Marshall really didn’t know how to deal with little girls who looked as though they were about to cry.

He was far too softhearted to watch a child shed tears over something he could easily fix.

Having successfully secured her Magic lesson, Mavis happily began exploring his new house.

She wandered from room to room, looking at the various things Marshall had made, until something caught her attention.

"Oh my! Marshall, why do you have such a huge pile of dirty clothes? Don’t you ever do your laundry?"

"..."

Marshall stared at her.

Of all the things she could have asked about, why did she have to bring up the one subject he’d been trying so desperately to ignore?

"I’ve forgotten how to wash clothes!" he answered irritably. "My maid always handled the laundry for me before. Once I finish making a new maid, I’ll have her take care of it."

"Whoa! You have your own maid?"

Mavis blinked in astonishment.

"Are you some kind of noble?"

Then she looked at the pile of dirty clothes again, and an idea occurred to her.

"Hey, how about I wash them for you? In exchange, you can teach me some new Magic! I want to learn that Flying Magic you used!"

Marshall froze.

’Wait...’

’Have Fairy Tail’s First Guild Master do my laundry?’

That sounded like an incredibly bad idea.

If Makarov ever discovered that he’d traveled a hundred years into the past and made the legendary First Master wash his dirty clothes, the old man would probably beat him to death.

Marshall struggled with his conscience for several moments before finally admitting defeat.

"Forget it. Once I finish making my maid, everything will be fine. As for Flying Magic, I’ll teach you that anyway, so you don’t need to wash anything for me."

In the end, he simply couldn’t bring himself to make an eleven-year-old girl handle his laundry.

It felt far too cruel, even by his increasingly questionable standards of laziness.

What?

What about Ruby?

Ruby was a cat, not a human being. She obviously didn’t count.

Mavis, however, had become interested in something else entirely.

"Making a maid? What does that mean? Is a maid something you can actually make?"

"Of course. I know Magic that can create life, you know. It’s pretty amazing stuff." Marshall sounded rather proud of himself for a moment before his enthusiasm faded.

"Although right now, I’m only trying to make a robotic maid."

That was another source of his recent frustration.

Traveling through time had introduced a major problem he hadn’t anticipated: his personal storage space had effectively been locked by spacetime itself.

Most of the materials he’d stored inside it were now inaccessible, sealed away by some mysterious force that prevented him from retrieving them.

Unfortunately, those inaccessible supplies included nearly everything he needed to create new Apostles.

An Apostle wasn’t something Marshall could produce by casually picking up a notebook and writing a few words inside it.

The Books of Apostles were genuine high-grade Magic Items, and manufacturing them required numerous precious materials.

Even obtaining the necessary ingredients for a single Book of Apostles could cost several million, or even tens of millions of Jewel.

If Marshall hadn’t been so good at earning money—and so thoroughly unconcerned about spending it—the enormous collection of Apostles living in his home would have bankrupted him ages ago.

But his current predicament was much worse than an ordinary financial problem.

He couldn’t even gather the materials.

Most of his existing supplies were sealed inside his storage space, and his uncontrollable curse made it dangerous for him to visit populated areas to purchase replacements.

Even if he were willing to take that risk, he didn’t have the money to buy what he needed in this era.

Consequently, Marshall had been forced into something he hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

He was genuinely living alone, with no servants, no Apostles, and none of the conveniences he’d gradually accumulated over the years.

For someone who’d grown accustomed to having practically every aspect of his daily life handled by someone else, the adjustment was proving extremely painful.

He hadn’t even bothered eating for several days.

Strangely enough, although he could still feel hunger, he discovered that he didn’t actually need food to survive anymore.

His body continued functioning normally regardless of whether he ate anything, apparently sustained by the enormous vitality provided by the Curse of Ankhseram.

So Marshall had simply stopped bothering.

After all, preparing meals required effort, and he had no particular desire to spend his valuable research time cooking.

In that respect, he supposed he really ought to thank the great god Ankhseram.

Without that wonderful curse, Marshall might genuinely have starved to death simply because he was too lazy to cook for himself.

What a magnificent blessing.

Unfortunately, the curse couldn’t wash his clothes, clean his house, or maintain a comfortable living environment.

Since creating another Apostle was currently impossible, Marshall had settled on a more practical alternative.

He was experimenting with Alchemy, trying to produce a functional intelligent golem maid from whatever materials he could obtain locally.

Compared with the complexity of creating an Apostle, constructing an ordinary magical golem was considerably easier.

All he really needed was some wood, steel, and a suitable magical control system.

Those materials were far easier to obtain, and while the finished product wouldn’t possess the same remarkable abilities as his Apostles, it should at least be capable of helping with the household chores.

At this point, that was more than enough to satisfy him.

"A robot?!"

Mavis’s eyes grew even brighter.

"That sounds amazing! If you’re making it yourself, doesn’t that mean you can make it look however you want?"

She clasped her hands together excitedly.

"Marshall! Could you make your robot look like a fairy? Then you’d have your very own fairy maid!"

"..."

Marshall looked at the little girl, who was now enthusiastically imagining what a fairy-shaped maid might look like.

Her mouth was moving almost nonstop.

Come to think of it, Mavis had been like this practically every day since he arrived on Tenrou Island.

Marshall hadn’t actively sought her out even once.

Instead, the little girl had taken it upon herself to visit him whenever she had the opportunity, chatting about whatever happened to cross her mind.

Ever since she’d decided he wasn’t dangerous, she’d begun sharing practically everything about her life with him, from her childhood experiences to her favorite books and her dreams for the future.

Mavis was undoubtedly intelligent, but she was still a child.

More importantly, she’d spent the last five years living in near-total isolation on Tenrou Island.

Now that someone relatively close to her own age had finally appeared, she seemed determined to make up for all those years without anyone new to talk to.

Whenever something occurred to her, she immediately wanted to tell Marshall about it, regardless of whether he’d asked.

As a result, he’d already learned quite a lot about her past.

For example, Mavis’s parents had once been Mages belonging to Red Lizard, the only Mage Guild on Tenrou Island at the time.

Both of them had died while carrying out a mission, leaving the young Mavis behind without anyone to care for her.

Rather than showing the orphaned girl any kindness, Red Lizard’s Guild Master claimed that her parents had owed him money.

He then forced Mavis to work for the guild to repay the supposed debt.

Her childhood had been miserable.

The Guild Master treated her terribly, frequently beating her or shouting abuse at her whenever she failed to satisfy his demands.

She’d even had shoes once, but after the Guild Master confiscated them, she’d never worn another pair.

That explained why Mavis continued running around the island barefoot, seemingly without thinking anything unusual about it.

Marshall had also learned about her mysterious friend, Zera.

According to Mavis, Zera was the daughter of Red Lizard’s Guild Master.

Their relationship hadn’t always been particularly friendly.

In fact, Zera had originally treated Mavis rather badly and frequently bullied her, much like her father.

It was only after they began living together on the deserted island that their relationship gradually improved.

Over the following five years, the two girls had supposedly become inseparable friends.

Of course, Marshall now had reason to believe that the situation was considerably more complicated than Mavis realized.

Nevertheless, he hadn’t challenged her account.

There was little point in upsetting the girl without first understanding exactly what had happened to Zera and why her Life Point continued to exist.

Besides, the more Marshall learned about Mavis, the more obvious it became that books had played an enormous role in her life.

She absolutely loved reading.

Over the years, she’d worked her way through practically every magical book remaining in Red Lizard’s library.

Because she was so young and had never received proper instruction, many of those books contained theories and techniques she couldn’t fully understand.

Even so, she’d diligently memorized their contents, storing away enormous quantities of magical knowledge that she hoped to comprehend someday.

That explained both her unusually broad theoretical knowledge and the limitations of her actual magical abilities.

She knew far more than an ordinary child should, but without a teacher, she had been forced to work out how to apply that knowledge entirely on her own.

Mavis had also told Marshall about her greatest dream.

She wanted to find the legendary fairies.

It was a wonderfully innocent ambition, particularly considering that Marshall knew exactly what that dream would eventually inspire.

And those were only some of the things she’d shared.

There were countless other little stories about her experiences on the island, the books she’d read, the things she enjoyed, and the adventures she hoped to have someday.

For someone who had only lived a little over a decade, Mavis didn’t have an especially long personal history to recount.

Yet somehow, she could spend hours talking about it without ever seeming to run out of things to say.

Marshall was beginning to understand why.

The poor girl had been lonely for far too long.

That was probably why, despite having an enormous amount of research and training to complete, he never seriously considered turning her away whenever she came to visit.

As long as Mavis wanted to talk, he was willing to listen.

He wasn’t particularly good at entertaining children, and he certainly didn’t know how to comfort them with clever words or cheerful games.

But listening was something he could manage, even while he worked on his own projects.

And if occasionally teaching her a little Magic made her happy, he didn’t see much harm in that either.

After everything she’d endured, the girl deserved to have someone who would listen to her.

Besides, Mavis wasn’t the only child he had to keep company.

Marshall’s supposedly peaceful life of isolated magical research was already becoming far more complicated than he’d planned.