Chapter 263
"What the hell is with all these fancy rules? Can’t we just fight normally?"
Cana was thoroughly unimpressed with the new format for the finals.
She had expected to coast through one more match and walk away with a championship, but now apparently she had to coast through three of them!
"The Master said a single match wouldn’t really justify what people paid for their tickets, so he wanted to give the audience more to watch..." Levy pulled out her terminal and checked the guild’s revenue report for the week without even looking up.
"We’ve made a ridiculous amount of money anyway. These three days alone brought in more than the guild used to earn in three years when we were kids. The Master’s been so happy lately he’s practically turned into a child!"
"That doesn’t mean he has to keep making us jump through hoops." Cana turned toward Marshall.
"What do you think, Marshall...?"
She paused.
"Why are you grinning like an idiot?"
"Hm? What?"
Lucy had to shove Marshall twice before he finally snapped out of whatever pleasant memory he had been lost in.
"It’s fine. Everything’s fine."
Cana glanced back at him and rolled her eyes.
"This brat’s been like that ever since he woke up this morning. Just sitting there smiling to himself. No idea what good thing happened to him."
Levy rose onto her toes and leaned closer to Marshall.
The moment she did, his face visibly began heating up.
Understanding dawned in her eyes.
"Oho~ I think our little brother had something very nice recently, and now he’s savoring the memory."
"N-No I didn’t! I’m just in a good mood today, that’s all!" Marshall immediately panicked. "Anyway! The match is about to start. Let’s go!"
He hurried away before anyone could question him further.
The four girls behind him reacted very differently.
Cana gave him a dead-eyed stare. Levy narrowed her eyes knowingly. Juvia suddenly became extremely alert.
Lucy had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Juvia’s expression darkened.
"Marshall... has he been cheating on us?!"
Levy rolled her eyes and pushed up a pair of imaginary glasses.
"When exactly was he ever exclusively dating anyone in the first place?"
Then she adopted the solemn expression of a detective who had already solved the case.
"Yesterday, he and Erza disappeared together and nobody saw either of them afterward. Then Erza stayed locked in her room all night. Hmph. Something definitely happened between those two."
"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh?! Erza?!"
Lucy covered her mouth in shock.
She knew perfectly well that Marshall had never exactly hidden his interest in his beloved older sisters, but...
Erza?
Lucy simply couldn’t picture the eternally serious Erza acting romantically with that little pervert Marshall!
The mental image was far too strange!
The water gathering around Juvia was practically beginning to freeze.
"How could this happen?! Is that idiot Erza trying to sneak ahead too?! Juvia will not allow it!"
Cana yawned and waved them off.
"Give it a rest. You’re all being way too sensitive. Marshall’s still just a kid. What could possibly have happened?"
She yawned again.
"Come on. Let’s finish the tournament and go home."
In truth, Cana was probably the one who cared the most.
When she returned home the previous night, she had carried out her usual "inspection" of Marshall’s room and found Erza’s scent everywhere.
After that, Cana spent the entire night imagining what might have happened between them.
She barely slept at all and woke up so exhausted that she nearly felt dehydrated.
Still, Cana had already promised Marshall that she would help him find a few more future wives.
If anything really had happened, then this was exactly the sort of moment when she was supposed to cover for him.
Cana herself couldn’t quite explain what kind of mindset had led her here.
But she had always been complicated.
Whenever she couldn’t make sense of something, she simply stopped thinking about it and followed her instincts.
...
The first event, Western Gunslinger, was essentially a no-magic demolition match.
The two teams would take on opposing roles: one side played a "terrorist organization" attempting to destroy a Magic Crystal vein, while the other acted as Mage Guild members defending it.
The Marshall Team would attack.
The Thunder God Team would defend.
The attackers would win by planting simulated explosives at the mining sites and successfully detonating them twice.
The defenders would win if they protected both sites until the time limit expired.
Only magical firearms provided by the tournament could be used, and Magic itself was completely forbidden.
Anyone struck by the special ammunition would be forcibly teleported back to their team’s spawn point.
In other words, the entire event was designed to test communication, coordination, and teamwork.
Marshall gathered everyone around the map.
"Look here. There are three routes leading to the two bomb sites. Let’s start by pushing mid together."
"Yeah!" Lucy immediately agreed. "They’ll definitely station someone at every entrance. If all five of us rush one route fast enough, they won’t have time to rotate. We’ve even got one more person than they do. I honestly don’t see how we lose!"
Unfortunately... the Marshall Team’s opening could hardly have gone worse.
The five of them had barely grabbed their guns and started rushing toward the middle route when Lucy stepped directly onto a land mine.
BOOM!
All five were instantly blown back to spawn.
Marshall stared at the battlefield in disbelief.
"What the hell?! They have land mines too? That’s cheating!"
"Calm down. Let’s clear our route properly this time," Cana said. "No need to rush. We’ll hit A slowly."
The team regrouped and approached the entrance to A Site.
Lucy cautiously stuck her head around the corner.
A sniper round immediately struck her square in the forehead.
She vanished.
Back to spawn.
Marshall instantly ducked behind cover.
"Sniper! Rotate, rotate!"
The remaining four rushed toward B Site instead.
The moment they stepped onto the broad open road leading toward the objective, machine-gun fire erupted from ahead.
A few seconds later, all four had been riddled with special rounds and teleported straight back to spawn.
Marshall’s eye twitched.
"Who the hell gave them a machine gun?! Does that guy have any humanity left?!"
After getting "killed" twice in quick succession, the Marshall Team finally held a small strategy meeting.
At least they had learned the defenders’ positions.
Evergreen was camping the main approach to A Site with a sniper rifle.
Freed had filled the center route with traps.
And B Site was guarded by Bickslow, the shameless machine-gun camper.
The defense was extremely solid.
But one question remained.
"Where’s Laxus?"
"Watch out!"
Marshall caught a glimpse of blond hair flashing past them.
Before anyone could react, a flashbang exploded nearby and blinded all five of them.
Their vision had barely begun recovering when a grenade suddenly landed at their feet.
BOOM!
The entire team was wiped again.
Laxus had somehow pushed so aggressively that he was practically camping outside the attackers’ spawn.
Marshall was furious.
The sheer disrespect!
The arrogance!
Marshall became so angry that... he got angry.
There wasn’t much else he could do.
Without Magic, his entire team consisted of women and a kid, and their overall combat effectiveness had dropped sharply.
Worse, four of the five members weren’t even in particularly good condition today, while Lucy seemed determined to play like a secret agent working for the enemy.
Somehow, the five of them were getting bullied by a four-person team.
Anyone watching without context might have assumed the Thunder God Team were the attackers.
Once Marshall’s team became more familiar with the game, they tried setting traps of their own and baiting the defenders into overextending.
The Thunder God Team immediately stopped pushing.
They pulled back to their sites, settled into defensive positions, and simply waited.
Marshall stared.
’They’re running down the clock!’
’What the hell?! Have these people never won anything before? Why are they playing like their lives depend on their rank?!’
The strategy was shamelessly effective.
And since Marshall couldn’t use Magic, he genuinely had very few answers for it.
The Marshall Team tried fake pushes, feints, full rushes, split attacks, and coordinated assaults from multiple routes, but the Thunder God Tribe defended the two sites like turtles hiding inside an armored shell.
Even when Marshall’s group finally broke through, the defenders rotated quickly enough to drive them back out.
After a long struggle, the Marshall Team finally managed to destroy A Site.
Then the Thunder God Team abandoned everything else and grouped all four members around B Site.
From that point onward, the place became practically impossible to breach.
When the match timer finally expired, the Marshall Team had destroyed only one objective.
They lost the first event.
Marshall could feel his blood pressure rising.
Five against four... and they had still lost?!
Forget it.
Magic had been banned, so this clearly didn’t count as a real defeat.
The Thunder God Tribe simply had better coordination and had shamelessly committed themselves to playing for the timer.
Marshall would graciously give them this round.
He turned toward the girls and raised his fist.
"Come on, girls! Get your heads in the game!"
His eyes burned with determination.
"We are absolutely not dropping the second round!"