Chapter 234
After everything was over, Fairy Tail threw an enormous party to celebrate the spectacular success of its first full-scale guild deployment.
As for the damage Gildarts had "accidentally" caused, Marshall repaired all of it with Reparo.
Sometimes he genuinely wondered what would have happened if he had never developed that spell.
With this collection of reckless lunatics constantly destroying things, they might have bankrupted the entire guild through repair costs alone.
Naturally, all the remaining cleanup and administrative work was dumped onto Makarov.
That was what a guild master was for.
The Magic Council took the surviving members of Oración Seis and their subordinate Dark Guilds into custody and put them on trial.
The investigation revealed that Oración Seis had arranged the ambush against the allied guilds because they intended to capture the Legal Guild Mages as hostages and exchange them for Jellal, who was still being held by the Council.
Because Jellal had once served both as a Council member and one of the Ten Wizard Saints, he knew a considerable amount of confidential Council information.
That included the true location of the ancient Super Magic known as Nirvana.
Brain intended to take control of Nirvana and use its ability to reverse good and evil on a massive scale, ultimately plunging the world into destruction.
It sounded almost ridiculous when summarized like that.
Unfortunately, that really had been his plan.
Marshall had no idea where Brain had found the confidence to believe that obtaining one ancient Super Magic would suddenly allow him to wreak havoc across the entire world.
Only afterward did Marshall learn that the Magic Council had originally discovered the danger because Roubaul himself had revealed Nirvana’s location to them.
Roubaul’s lingering attachment to this world existed for one purpose: to continue guarding Nirvana’s seal.
His warning was what allowed the Council to notice Brain’s suspicious movements and organize the three-guild alliance in the first place.
Now that Nirvana’s location remained undiscovered and the immediate threat had passed, Roubaul chose to continue guarding the seal until the day his Thought Projection could no longer maintain itself.
In short, the entire Oración Seis incident ended rather anticlimactically.
At least, that was how it felt to Marshall.
For everyone else, the consequences were actually enormous.
Oración Seis had possessed a terrifying reputation throughout the criminal underworld, yet Fairy Tail had defeated them with almost embarrassing ease.
That naturally raised an unsettling question.
Just how powerful had Fairy Tail become?
Thanks to the guild’s countless loudmouths enthusiastically exaggerating the story afterward, newspapers everywhere began covering the operation.
One side was willing to boast about practically anything, while the other was perfectly happy to print it.
Fairy Tail’s public reputation exploded once again.
Dark Guilds were called "dark" for a reason.
They ignored the laws governing legitimate guilds and frequently harmed ordinary civilians.
Among the three major Dark Guilds of the Balam Alliance, Tartaros operated mysteriously enough that the average person barely knew it existed, while Grimoire Heart generally pursued major objectives and rarely left witnesses behind.
Oración Seis was different.
They accepted practically anyone under their banner, allowing countless smaller Dark Guilds to commit crimes in their name.
As a result, Oración Seis was arguably the most infamous of the three among ordinary people.
The public had suffered because of them for years.
Fairy Tail hadn’t merely defeated the six leaders; it had also swept up the swarm of subordinate Dark Guild members gathered around them.
Calling it a public service was hardly an exaggeration.
As a result, Fairy Tail gained far more prestige from this victory than from most of its previous achievements.
The Fairy Tail members got all the fighting they wanted.
Blue Pegasus and Lamia Scale enjoyed being carried to an effortless victory.
𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞
Makarov received exactly the public recognition he wanted.
The Magic Council barely had to do anything and still walked away with an enormous law-enforcement accomplishment.
And ordinary people got to celebrate the collapse of one of the largest criminal organizations hanging over their heads.
With Oración Seis defeated, practically everybody was happy.
As for Cobra’s snake, after Cubellios was brought back to Fairy Tail, Makarov successfully removed the curse affecting her.
The snake transformed into a slightly chubby young woman.
Unfortunately, she had lost nearly all memory of her time as Cubellios and could barely even speak properly.
She was given the name Kinana.
Kinana had been cursed into the form of a poisonous snake when she was very young and had spent roughly ten years living entirely as one.
Feeling sorry for her, Makarov allowed her to remain at Fairy Tail and work as a waitress.
Once Brain, the principal mastermind behind Oración Seis, was dead, the Council investigated the crimes committed by the surviving members.
To everyone’s surprise, their records were cleaner than those of many minor Dark Guild leaders.
More importantly, most of them had originally been victims of the Tower of Heaven themselves.
In the end, they received sentences of only ten years and were taken into Council custody.
That included Wally’s older brother, Richard.
Richard took the outcome remarkably well and even reassured Wally that he would behave himself, work toward a reduced sentence, and get out as early as possible.
For a Dark Guild as notorious as Oración Seis, their ending was surprisingly merciful.
From Marshall’s perspective, though, the entire operation had been fairly uneventful.
Fairy Tail had deployed nearly all of its strongest members at once.
Marshall genuinely couldn’t imagine how they could possibly have lost.
The only thing that continued bothering him was Angel’s escape.
When the other members of Oración Seis were questioned afterward, none of them knew how Sorano had vanished either.
With no leads to follow, Marshall had no choice but to temporarily set the matter aside.
As for what Marshall personally gained from the operation... there were a few things, though nothing particularly spectacular.
First, he had helped Ultear avenge herself.
Unfortunately, Ultear’s affection and loyalty toward him already seemed to have reached their practical limits, so there wasn’t much room for either to increase.
That made the whole thing feel somewhat less significant.
Ultear herself hadn’t displayed much emotion when she killed Brain either.
She had already stepped beyond that part of her past.
Compared with obsessing over old hatred, she cared far more about the future she had now.
Marshall’s second gain was successfully proving that his idea of deploying magic arrays from inside his Origin space was viable.
That laid the groundwork for his future research into Domains.
If he could prepare a teleportation array inside his body beforehand, then there was no reason other Jutsu-Shiki formations couldn’t be stored there in advance as well.
If Marshall knew an enemy’s abilities before a battle, he could potentially construct specialized formations designed specifically to exploit that enemy’s weaknesses.
The tactical advantage would be enormous.
His final gains were Brain’s soul... and Brain’s staff, Klodoa, a talking staff topped with a human skull.
Those two things were probably Marshall’s most valuable rewards from the entire operation.
He had already been trying to understand how a "dead" soul could be bound to a physical object, and Brain had conveniently delivered both experimental material and a successful example directly into his hands.
There was already a soul living inside Klodoa.
And it belonged to a complete coward.
Marshall barely had to interrogate him before he confessed everything.
Klodoa had once been one of Brain’s subordinates at the Bureau of Magical Development.
Apparently, Brain had considered him useful because of his intelligence, so after Klodoa died, Brain took his head and turned it into a staff.
That alone proved something extremely important.
The body was the body.
The soul was the soul.
Even after the physical body died, the soul could continue to "live."
If that was possible, then Simon—whose body and soul were both still alive—definitely had some way of returning to consciousness.
Marshall also discovered that souls could retain Magic Power.
After Brain’s soul was sealed inside the sword, Marshall detected approximately 10,000 Magic Power still emanating from it.
That supported another theory he had been developing.
The First Origin did not exist solely within the physical body.
It was also intimately connected to the soul.
That discovery finally gave Marshall a possible direction for solving the mystery that had stalled his research.
He had been unable to determine exactly what connected the soul to the body.
Now, however, he suspected the point of connection might be the First Origin itself.
Of course, all of this was still only theoretical.
Marshall intended to use Brain’s soul to test his hypotheses one by one.
It belonged to someone who deserved no sympathy anyway. Even if Marshall accidentally destroyed the soul during an experiment, nobody was going to care.
For the immediate future, Marshall planned to devote himself entirely to researching Soul Magic and find a way to bring Simon back as soon as possible.
Unfortunately... he never got the chance to settle peacefully into his experiments.
It wasn’t long before another problem came knocking.