Chapter 1003: [1003] : Explanations

...

Lucy crossed her arms and looked at Gray squarely.

"You’ve been staring at me since we got here. Is there something you want to say, or are you going to keep doing that all day?"

Gray looked away, cleared his throat, and managed to sound almost composed.

"You look like someone I know. That’s all."

"Then stare at her instead."

Gray opened his mouth and shut it again.

Shin stepped in before the whole thing could go sideways.

"We’re from another country. We came here specifically because of Fairy Tail—the reputation travels." He kept his voice easy, unbothered. "We’re looking to join. If that’s not something you can process right now, we can wait."

Natsu wheeled on Gray.

"See? They said they want to join. What is your problem? I swear, Gray, you’ve been suspicious of everyone for the past two weeks and it’s getting old. They told us straight up who they are and what they want, and you’re still over there making that face."

"That face is called critical thinking. Something you’ve never experienced." Gray said flatly.

"I experience it all the time!"

"Name one."

"I... this is—the point is, they want to join and you’re making them feel like criminals."

"The point," Gray said, turning away from Natsu and back to Shin, "is that their story doesn’t hold up. If you just arrived in this town, you’d have heard some noise and some rumors. You wouldn’t walk up to us and drop the specific details you dropped, like you already knew exactly what was happening inside that building." He studied Shin with quiet, careful eyes. "That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from asking around at a tavern. It comes from someone who already knows us."

He paused.

"So either you’re with Laxus—which means you’re an enemy. Or you’re not, and there’s something else going on that you’re not saying." He looked at all three of them. "Neither of those is something I can just wave past."

Natsu had gone a little quieter. He glanced at Shin, and there was something sharper in his expression now, the animal instinct underneath all that noise starting to surface.

"Yeah, okay," he said. "I mean. He’s got a point. How did you know?"

Shin looked at them both for a moment.

’Gray is right, and he knows he’s right, and arguing won’t change that. The only way through this is to show them something they can’t argue with.’

He glanced at Lucy and Alice.

"Get behind me," he said. "Both of you. Stay inside whatever I draw."

He reached down and traced a slow circle on the cobblestones around their feet with one finger, leaving a faint pulse of energy in the line. Then he straightened up and looked at Natsu and Gray.

"You want proof. Fine."

He rose off the ground.

It happened without theatrics—just the quiet certainty of someone stepping off a ledge they know will hold them. His feet left the stone and didn’t come back down, and the Rinnegan opened in his right eye, that pale ringed glow turning the afternoon light strange around him.

Then the tree appeared.

It grew upward from the air itself, vast and pale, branching without sound into the sky above the street—the Shinju in its incomplete form, the Divine Tree given just enough shape to serve as a conductor. No roots touched the ground. It simply existed above them, drawing in ambient energy from every direction the way a black hole draws in light.

Natsu stared up at it with his mouth open.

"What IS that," he said. "That’s incredible, I want one."

"Natsu," Gray said quietly, and there was something genuinely careful in his voice now, the way someone speaks when they’re watching something they don’t have a category for. "Don’t move."

The energy Shin had gathered was enough. He exhaled once and let it go.

"Shinra Tensei."

The shockwave went outward in every direction at once.

It wasn’t fire, wasn’t ice, wasn’t any element anyone on that street had ever studied. It was force, pure and undirected, the kind that doesn’t care what’s in its way. Buildings shook. Loose stones and market stalls and weather vanes tore off their moorings and went sideways. Half the town lifted briefly off the ground and came back down wrong.

And Laxus’s barrier, the one that had been holding for hours, came apart in about a second and a half.

The circle around Lucy and Alice held perfectly. Inside it, not a hair moved.

Shin dropped back to street level.

He looked at Gray.

Gray was still standing, which said something about him. He had one arm raised to shield his face, and his expression was the controlled blank of someone choosing very deliberately not to show fear.

"So," Shin said pleasantly. "Your magical assessment?"

Gray lowered his arm. Looked at the debris field that used to be a tidy street. Looked back at Shin.

"I’ll talk to the Master," he said.

In the distance, the sound of running footsteps from every direction.

Fairy Tail was coming.

Shin turned and looked at them as they arrived—Erza first, sword half-drawn, scanning the damage with the practiced eye of someone who has walked into disaster scenes professionally. Then the others behind her, filling in around the edges of the ruined street, all of them silent for a second while they tried to figure out what they’d missed.

Erza’s gaze landed on Shin.

"Someone explain what happened here," she said.

Then it moved to Lucy... Shin’s Lucy, standing inside the circle, watching the new arrivals with a mix of curiosity and caution.

Erza went still.

The real Lucy arrived a few seconds later, slightly out of breath, and stopped short when she saw the girl standing across the street wearing her face.

She looked at her for a long moment.

"Okay," she said. "That’s unsettling."

The other Lucy tilted her head.

"You’re... older than me," she said, with the candid observation of someone who hasn’t yet learned to pretend they didn’t notice.

"A little, yeah."

"And your hair is longer."

"It is."

"Huh."

From the far end of the cleared-out street, Wendy picked her way through a pile of displaced cobblestones and stopped near Shin. She looked up at him with that particular gravity that didn’t match her age, the kind that comes from being raised by something ancient.

"I know you," she said. Not a question. "I don’t know your name. But I know what you are."

Shin looked at her.

"Sky Dragon’s daughter," he said.

Wendy blinked.

Then, before the conversation could go any further, a new sound cut through the square—familiar, loud, carrying the specific self-satisfaction of someone who has just walked into a scene they’ve decided they own.

"Well. Took you long enough to break that barrier. I was starting to think I’d be waiting all day."

Laxus stepped out from the far end of the street, headphones around his neck, taking in the debris with a slow, sweeping look that landed eventually on Shin.

"So this is what you called in," he said to Natsu, without much heat. "Interesting."

"They’re not... I didn’t call them—" Natsu started.

"Doesn’t matter." Laxus looked at Shin with genuine, unhurried assessment. "I’ll give you one thing. You got through my barrier. Nobody else managed that today. But standing in a schoolyard full of people who’ve never hit you isn’t a real achievement."

He rolled his neck slowly.

"So let’s find out if you’re actually worth something."

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