For everyone in Fairy Tail, those three years truly belonged to the guild.
After Ultear used her Arc of Time to unlock the Second Origin of Fairy Tail's main fighters, the younger generation's dominance over the magical world only grew more overwhelming.
A Second Origin effectively gave them the kind of magical growth that would normally have required more than a decade of training.
Almost overnight, Fairy Tail's young mages became monsters with absurd reserves of magic.
They swept through the Grand Magic Games for the next three years and claimed three consecutive championships without ever looking seriously threatened.
And that was only counting those three years.
If anyone included the championships Fairy Tail had won before then, the number had already become ridiculous.
Ever since the Grand Magic Games were reorganized and moved permanently to Crocus, Fairy Tail had taken every single title.
There was no longer any debate over the strongest wizard guild in Fiore.
Before long, Fairy Tail also earned the title of strongest guild in all of Ishgar.
With Marco taking the lead and the Magic Council handling the organization, the first Ishgar Magic Tournament was successfully held.
Fairy Tail won the team competition with the same overwhelming ease as always, becoming officially recognized as Ishgar's number-one wizard guild.
The tournament also included an individual division, which everyone jokingly called the World's Strongest Tournament.
Its winner would supposedly receive the glorious title of "Strongest In the World."
Of course, the title was pure marketing.
No one from northern Guiltina had entered, and the Alvarez Empire on the Western Continent had sent no competitors either.
Calling the winner the strongest in the world was obviously impossible to take seriously.
That did not really matter.
It was only a catchy nickname for a tournament.
Even calling the winner the strongest in Ishgar would have been questionable unless Marco entered.
How could anyone claim that title without defeating him first?
Ironically, Marco's existence made the whole argument pointless.
Since he stood so far beyond normal competition, everyone simply treated the title as part of the fun.
The official award was only "Individual Tournament Champion" anyway.
"Strongest In the World" was something the audience had invented because it sounded exciting.
Marco had no intention of entering and stealing the title for himself.
He was the one who had organized the event, so competing would already have been inappropriate.
More importantly, with his current status and strength, entering would have amounted to bullying everyone else for entertainment.
After the first Ishgar Magic Tournament ended successfully, Marco began considering something even larger.
An Earth-land Magic Tournament!
He wanted to invite wizard guilds and independent mages from across the entire world and turn it into a massive international event.
In truth, he was mostly bored.
Organizing a tournament for all of Earth-land would be far more difficult than arranging one for Ishgar.
The distances alone created a serious problem.
Earth-land was enormous, and simply gathering everyone in one place would take a tremendous amount of time.
The Ishgar Magic Tournament had already been changed into an event held once every four years.
A worldwide version might need to happen only once every six or eight years.
No matter how exciting the idea sounded, making it work would not be easy.
Marco's answer was to build teleportation arrays.
Mages should have a more magical way to travel.
The railway network spreading across the continent was perfectly good for ordinary people, but wizard society could do better.
Researching a large-scale teleportation array did not take him very long.
All he needed was a magical formation capable of spatial transfer.
Once installed in major cities, anyone could activate it by supplying magic, select a destination, and pay an amount of power determined by the distance.
Marco installed these arrays throughout the largest cities in Ishgar and northern Guiltina.
They were one of the main reasons the first Ishgar Magic Tournament had gone so smoothly.
Competitors and spectators had saved weeks or even months of travel.
The Alvarez Empire on the Western Continent had not received any arrays yet.
Marco had kept forgetting one small matter.
He still needed to visit Zeref and tell him there was no reason to keep hiding anymore.
If the man still wanted to die, he was finally free to do so.
Buzz.
Marco appeared in a remote forest and found Zeref sleeping beneath the trees.
It would have been difficult to claim that Marco had forgotten him entirely.
The truth was that he had deliberately waited before coming.
He had not told Zeref that Acnologia was dead.
He had not told him that the Curse of Ankhseram had vanished either.
It was a small punishment for everything Zeref had done.
Living alone in the wilderness, Zeref had no easy way to notice that his curse was gone.
His mind had long since become unstable, and the idea that the curse might simply disappear would never have occurred to him.
"Zeref."
Marco called the founder of Black Magic by name.
"Hm?"
Zeref woke and stared at the man standing before him.
After a moment of confusion, recognition entered his eyes. They had met and spoken before.
"The Fairy Tail boy," Zeref said. "Why are you here?"
There were several things he had wanted to ask Marco, especially how he had managed to save Fairy Tail from Acnologia during their last encounter.
"Acnologia is dead. Ankhseram is dead too. I killed both of them. Mavis has been resurrected, her curse is gone, and yours should have disappeared with it."
Marco delivered everything in one breath.
Zeref stared at him.
"What... are you talking about?"
He looked genuinely convinced that Marco had lost his mind.
None of those sentences sounded like something a sane person should be able to say so casually.
"Forget it. I'll show you."
Marco raised a hand, and Zeref immediately lost the ability to move.
Buzz.
In the next instant, Marco brought him into the Fairy Tail guildhall.
The noise hit Zeref first.
The guild was as lively and chaotic as ever, filled with conversation, laughter, and arguments.
Zeref looked deeply uncomfortable, like a creature that had spent its life underground and had suddenly been dragged into daylight.
"Have you lost your mind?" he asked coldly. "Do you want everyone here to die?"
He was surprised that Marco could restrain him so effortlessly, but bringing him into a crowded guildhall was still suicidal.
The curse inside him could wipe out every living thing around them.
"Marco? And..."
A familiar voice made Zeref's entire body tense.
Mavis stood nearby with a bowl of ice cream in her hands. She had been smiling happily until she noticed who was standing beside Marco.
Her expression froze.
"Ma... Mavis..."
Zeref was the one who truly looked stunned now.
He could tell immediately that this was not Mavis's ghost.
She was alive!
'Wait!'
The sudden rush of emotion frightened him.
Zeref immediately fought to suppress everything he felt.
He could not allow the curse to activate—not here, and certainly not when it might kill Mavis a second time.
But nothing happened.
That was impossible!
In the past, an emotional reaction this strong would almost certainly have unleashed the curse. Yet no wave of death spread through the guildhall.
Zeref remembered Marco's words.
Ankhseram was dead.
The curse had been removed.
Could it all actually be true?
Was he really free?
"Is it true?" Zeref shouted, turning toward Marco with an intensity no one had seen from him in centuries.
"Is it really true?!"
The cold, distant man had vanished entirely.
And the fact that the curse still did not activate, even with his emotions this far out of control, had already given him the answer.
"Yes. It's gone," Marco said. "If you still want to die, you can do it whenever you like."
The blunt statement made Zeref freeze.
"Yes... Of course..."
Only then did he understand.
The death he had sought for centuries was no longer beyond his reach. Nothing would stop him.
He did not need to create more demons, manipulate more lives, or search endlessly for someone powerful enough to kill him.
"Zeref..."
Mavis watched him with obvious concern.
Anyone forced to suppress every human emotion for five or six centuries would have lost their sanity long ago.
The fact that Zeref had remained even this functional was proof of how strong his mind had once been.
"At last..." Zeref whispered, sorrow filling his face even though no tears came. "I can finally rest."
"I'll give the two of you some time to talk."
Marco waved his hand and transferred Zeref and Mavis into his private dimension.
The Fairy Tail guildhall was hardly the right place for a private conversation.
Zeref's outburst had already drawn a large crowd of curious guild members.
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