Chapter 250
On November 31, X784, the first-ever World’s Number One Magic Tournament officially opened in Magnolia!
Fairy Tail had specially constructed a stadium capable of holding ten thousand spectators for the event.
Tickets only went on public sale a week earlier, yet every seat sold out within half a day.
Rumor had it that scalpers later pushed the price of tickets for the finals as high as one million Jewels.
That alone showed just how popular Fairy Tail had become among the public.
Some spectators had apparently traveled thousands of miles by magic train for no other reason than to watch the tournament in person.
Unsurprisingly, the event made the guild another enormous pile of money.
Ticket sales were only part of it.
A competition of this scale attracted huge numbers of visitors to Magnolia, and giant projection screens had been installed outside the stadium to broadcast the matches live on competition days.
Even people who failed to get tickets could still gather outside, watch the action, and enjoy the atmosphere.
Magnolia was now packed from one end to the other.
Tourists had arrived from all across the world, and for once, the city genuinely carried some of the atmosphere of an international metropolis.
The first day of competition would be a massive free-for-all.
Teams containing S-Class Mages would not participate in the preliminaries.
Instead, more than thirty teams without an S-Class member would compete for the remaining four qualification spots.
At the moment, four S-Class teams had already qualified automatically.
Laxus’s Team: Freed, Evergreen, and Bickslow.
Erza’s Team: Wally, Millianna, Sho, and Laki.
Mira’s Team: Elfman, Lisanna, Little Wendy, and Older Wendy.
Marshall’s Team: Cana, Juvia, Levy, and Lucy.
Gildarts had simply withdrawn.
According to him, Cana refused to team up with him, so there was no point participating anymore.
Tournament rules allowed teams of four or five members, but Laxus apparently thought using the maximum number would make him look less impressive and deliberately stopped at four.
In reality, it didn’t matter much.
Four-person teams were the most common anyway, and below S-Class, an extra member usually wasn’t enough to dramatically change the balance of power.
For today, however, Marshall and the other S-Class teams were merely spectators.
The spotlight belonged to Fairy Tail’s ordinary teams.
"Welcome, everyone, to the first World’s Number One Magic Tournament! I’m your host for today, Hajime!"
Since the entire competition had been put together rather quickly, there wasn’t much of an opening ceremony.
Not that the spectators had come to watch speeches anyway.
"And now... please welcome Fairy Tail’s thirty-two preliminary teams!"
"WELCOME!!!"
The stadium erupted.
"I’M ALL FIRED UP!"
Natsu launched himself into the arena with an enormous leap, and the giant screen overhead immediately filled with a close-up of his face.
The host’s excited voice boomed throughout the stadium.
"On your screens now is one of today’s most popular seeded competitors—the Fire Dragon, Natsu! Natsu is an inheritor of the Lost Magic known as Fire Dragon Slayer Magic!"
"His teammates are the talking cat Happy, Marcus of the Sand, the famously indestructible Nab, and the mysterious masked Mage Mest!"
"Can Natsu lead this unusual team all the way through the preliminaries and claim one of those precious qualification spots?! Let’s find out!"
Natsu threw his head back and laughed.
"Hahaha! Obviously I’m gonna win!"
"Idiot fireball."
Gray appeared beside him with both hands in his pockets.
"Try not to embarrass yourself. My team’s the one advancing."
Behind Gray stood Loki, Alzack, and Bisca, making theirs another four-person team.
"Hah?!"
Natsu immediately rounded on him.
"You ice-brain bastard! The second this match starts, you’re the first guy I’m taking out!"
"Hehehe."
A third voice interrupted them.
"Don’t worry. The one eliminating both of you is gonna be me."
Gajeel swaggered into view with an arrogant grin.
His teammates were Panther Lily... and, surprisingly, Jet and Droy.
Those two had once suffered a humiliating beating at Gajeel’s hands, yet somehow they had ended up forming a team with him.
Clearly, quite a few things had happened behind the scenes.
Natsu, Gray, and Gajeel immediately started glaring at one another, and the tournament hadn’t even begun yet.
𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶
By the time it looked as though the three Dragon Slayers and Ice-Make Mage might start the first fight ahead of schedule, Hajime had finished introducing most of the notable competitors and moved on to explaining the preliminary event.
"All competitors, please gather in the center of the arena!"
Once more than a hundred Fairy Tail Mages had assembled, Hajime raised his voice dramatically.
"And now, the first event of the tournament will be—"
"BATTLE ROYALE: SURVIVAL!"
The moment he finished speaking, dense mist flooded the entire arena.
The competitors disappeared from sight.
When the smoke finally cleared, more than a hundred people had vanished from the stage.
In their place stood what appeared to be... an enormous miniature landscape.
...
"Wh-What the hell?"
Natsu blinked and looked around.
"Where am I?"
Only moments earlier, he had been standing on a flat arena floor.
Now he was surrounded by what looked like a dense forest.
Yet Hajime’s amplified voice was still clearly audible overhead, proving that Natsu hadn’t actually gone far.
"Competitors! Every one of you has now been shrunk to approximately twenty centimeters tall and placed inside an enormous sandbox battlefield!"
"Do you see the blue barrier in the sky?"
Hajime’s tone became almost cheerful.
"Friendly warning—that isn’t a barrier."
"It’s poison gas~!"
"If you remain inside the blue gas for longer than thirty seconds, your entire body will become paralyzed and you’ll be eliminated from the competition!"
"You are all currently positioned around the outer edge of the safe zone, and the poison field is slowly shrinking inward."
"Your objective is simple: avoid the gas and survive!"
"The match will only end once just four teams remain inside the safe zone!"
"And remember—even if only one member of your team remains active, your entire team will qualify!"
Hajime’s voice boomed over the arena.
"So start running, Fairy Tail!"
"OOOOOOOOHHHH!!!"
The spectators reacted even more enthusiastically than the competitors.
They had personally watched a completely flat arena transform into an enormous sandbox filled with forests, rivers, mountains, lakes, and even a desert region.
Tiny twenty-centimeter competitors were now sprinting through the miniature world, while the giant projection screens around the stadium followed individual teams from close range.
"This is incredible! What kind of Magic is that?!"
"I know this one! It’s Form Magic, right? Master Makarov must’ve done it! He can use Form Magic to turn himself into a giant!"
"This competition is amazing! Look, look! They’re already fighting!"
"Oh! I get it! The match ends once only four teams are left inside the safe zone, so the fastest way to qualify is to knock the other teams into the poison!"
"Hahaha! This is great! That ticket was worth every Jewel!"
"Damn, they’re really hitting each other hard! Aren’t these people guildmates?"
"That’s what makes it fun! Fairy Tail doesn’t hold back!"
"FAIRY TAIL IS AWESOME!"
Inside the sandbox, the competitors had already figured out the real nature of the game.
They had to outrun the shrinking poison zone while simultaneously hunting down members of rival teams.
And whenever one Fairy Tail team encountered another...
there was no hesitation whatsoever.
They attacked immediately.
Guildmates?
Those were exactly the people they wanted to hit.
For victory, Fairy Tail’s competitors pulled out every dirty trick they could think of.
Gray’s team climbed to the top of a mountain, where Alzack and Bisca turned the high ground into a sniper nest and began firing tranquilizer rounds across the battlefield, dropping competitors one after another before most of them even realized where the shots were coming from.
Teams containing people such as Macao, Wakaba, Reedus, and especially Warren had their own advantages as well.
In a competition like this, Warren’s Telepathy functioned almost like a live battlefield radar, allowing allies to coordinate from a distance and avoid countless ambushes before they happened.
And then there was Natsu’s team.
Mest could simply teleport the entire group straight toward the center of the safe zone.
Before the real fighting had even begun, they had already solved half the challenge.
On the very first day of the World’s Number One Magic Tournament, the event completely set Magnolia ablaze with excitement.
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