Fairy Tail: You Call This Celestial Spirit Magic?!

Mavis froze.

So much for keeping her composure!

Erza, who had been listening beside her with open curiosity, also stared at Marco with her mouth hanging open.

Neither woman seemed capable of processing the sentence.

"My... son?" Mavis stammered. "With... Zeref?!"

Her thoughts shut down completely.

"Who else would the father be?"

Marco could not resist the joke. It was not as though Zeref could have been cheated on.

"No—that's not what I meant!" Mavis snapped, finally forcing her mind to work again. "How is that even possible?! I've never given birth to anyone! I think I'd remember something like that!"

"Ahem. The situation is... complicated."

Marco carefully explained everything from beginning to end.

Even after hearing the full story, it still sounded completely absurd.

Yet it had happened.

There really was a very old son waiting outside, and that fact could not be ignored.

Mavis stood there with her mouth open, unable to decide what to say or whom she was supposed to blame.

Zeref?

He had known nothing about it.

Precht?

For all his mistakes, he had technically saved the baby. The child could hardly have remained inside Mavis's dead body forever.

Could she blame herself?

She had been dead.

"Oh my goodness..."

Erza was enjoying the revelation far more than she probably should have.

This was an incredible story.

Mavis truly was a legend.

Only Fairy Tail's First Guild Master could somehow discover centuries later that she had an elderly son she had never known existed!

"Do you want to meet him?" Marco asked again.

"Of course I do!"

Mavis did not hesitate.

Whatever the circumstances, August was her child.

Her and Zeref's child.

"All right. We'll handle that in a moment." Marco nodded, then turned toward Erza. "First, I need to explain your situation."

"Huh? My situation?"

Erza suddenly became nervous.

She had just realized that whatever Marco had to tell her might be every bit as shocking as Mavis's revelation.

Surely not.

There was no possible way!

Erza could not even imagine the chaos that would follow if Marco suddenly announced the existence of a child belonging to the two of them.

"Erza," Marco said under her increasingly anxious gaze, "I found your mother."

"Huh?"

Erza went still.

That was not an answer she had expected at all.

As an orphan who had never known either of her parents, she had long since stopped imagining they might ever enter her life.

Fairy Tail was her family. Its members were the people she loved and trusted.

She had never felt any need to search for the parents who had abandoned her.

"What... What do you mean?"

For perhaps the first time, the woman known as Titania looked completely helpless.

Erza could face almost any danger without losing her composure.

Emotional matters were another story entirely. When confronted with something this personal, she had no idea how to respond.

"I mean exactly what I said." Marco's voice softened. "She's... a tragic person in her own way. Do you want to meet her?"

He then told Erza the story of Irene Belserion.

The mother of Dragon Slayers was almost the perfect example of a tragic hero.

She had done nothing wrong at the beginning.

She sacrificed everything to protect humanity, only to be betrayed, tortured, and driven into madness until she lost herself completely.

Erza listened in silence, her eyes growing wider with every detail.

She had never imagined her origins could be so complicated.

She was Irene Belserion's daughter.

And Irene's life had been filled with a degree of tragedy and suffering Erza could barely comprehend.

Beside her, Mavis had now become the fascinated spectator.

The legendary First Guild Master could only marvel inwardly at Fairy Tail's younger generation.

Every one of the guild's strongest members seemed to carry some outrageous secret or unbelievable history.

Not a single one of them was ordinary!

...

"That's the whole story." Marco turned to Erza and left the decision in her hands. "What do you think? Do you want to meet her?"

"I... I do."

No matter how overwhelmed Erza felt, there was never much doubt about her answer.

Irene was still her mother—a mother who had endured more suffering than Erza could imagine, and who had once been a legendary hero.

"Then it's settled. Let's go."

Now that both women had given him a clear answer, Marco waved a hand and teleported them directly to the forest east of Magnolia.

August and Irene Belserion were still waiting there inside their crystal prisons.

No matter how much more time Marco gave them, neither would ever have broken free from his Crystal Wall.

That had not stopped them from trying.

Both still doubted Marco's story, though not simply because they were being stubborn. Beliefs built over several centuries were not easy to overturn.

August refused to believe Zeref could die.

Irene refused to believe Acnologia could die, and she was not particularly convinced about Zeref either.

Reality, however, was beginning to wear down their certainty.

The two greatest mages of Alvarez had used every method they could think of, yet the crystal prisons had not moved even slightly.

That forced an uncomfortable thought into their minds.

Neither Zeref nor Acnologia could have treated them this helplessly.

August and Irene knew they could never defeat either monster, but surely they would at least have survived a single exchange.

Marco had captured them as casually as if they were toys.

His strength was simply unreasonable!

"He's back!"

The moment Marco appeared, both prisoners became tense.

Then they noticed the two women beside him, and their expressions changed completely.

Erza was easy for Irene to recognize.

Their faces shared far too many similarities, and both had the same vivid red hair.

Standing together, their relationship would have been obvious to anyone with functioning eyes.

The resemblance between August and Mavis was less immediate.

As a child, August had looked strikingly like her. Now he was an old man in his eighties.

With careful attention, traces of Mavis could still be seen in his features, but no one would glance at them and immediately assume they were mother and son.

At most, someone with an active imagination might guess they were grandmother and grandson.

"This is Irene Belserion, and this is August," Marco introduced.

The explanation was hardly necessary. Erza had come to meet her mother, while Mavis had come as a mother to meet her son.

There was little chance of confusing which person belonged to whom.

"It's... really true..."

August stared at Mavis, visibly trembling.

All the calm confidence for which the Magic King was famous seemed to disappear.

Standing before his mother, he suddenly felt small and ashamed, with the irrational urge to hide himself somewhere she could not see.

Mavis looked back at him with an equally complicated expression.

She had prepared herself for this. Marco had warned her that her son was already over eighty years old and roughly the same age as Makarov.

Seeing an elderly man did not disappoint her.

It only hurt.

Mavis felt as though she had failed him.

She had been his mother, yet she had never cared for him for even a single day.

Compared with Zeref, she was the parent who had truly been absent from August's life.

Zeref had at least found him, raised him, and guided him into becoming one of the most powerful mages in the world.

Even though neither of them had acknowledged their blood relationship, Zeref had still fulfilled much of a father's role.

That was why Zeref had not died with as much regret over August as Marco had expected.

The curse had prevented him from loving his son openly.

Knowing the truth would not have changed that.

Aside from fatherly affection, however, he had given August almost everything he could.

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