VERiTY (Fairy Tail Fanfic)

39. Our Ideals

"What-- wait. Eir? You can't be serious."

"I am," Eir said again between bites of his onigiri. "I'm refusing the S-class position. I said I was going to do that all the way from before I participated in this bullcrap, didn't I?"

The crowd around them gaped.

Eir scoffed. "I only agreed because I wanted to fight Jura."

Makarov was in the corner, pretty much dead at this point.

"But look at your destruction! The both of you are definitely S-class, at this point," Macao had to argue with him-- it just didn't make sense to not promote both of them.

"Hell, I bet Gildarts-- wherever the hell he went-- is watching, and he'd totally agree!"

Eir groaned.

Dressed in an inn yukata, his left arm in a cast and his head bound in gauze, he murmured something inexplicably crude in a barely audible volume.

Levy then proceeded to repeat it very loudly to everyone in the room, and Bickslow burst out laughing, his dolls repeating the phrase as well. Gray and Cana proceeded to blast the totems to bits, ("MY BABIES!!") while Laxus simply patted Sherry on the head and told her that no, the words don't mean anything. Forget it.

Then, "huh? What's a carpetmuncher?" Erza asked, the picture of pure innocence.

The entire room gasped dramatically.

Ren and Karen, who very much knew what it meant, simply covered their ears and pretended not to hear a thing.

"This is why you shouldn't raise children in bars," Master Goldmine groaned.

"Says you and you have Bacchus in your guild?"

Having half of Fairy Tail and half of Lamia in one decently-sized hospital room was a bit of a squeeze, but they managed.

Jura laughed, laying upright in the bed beside Eir's.

"I suppose Eir would want to prove he's truly stronger than me before he advances, huh?"

To which Laxus has to remind them, "that's impossible. The Council declared this event a national emergency, you know?"

"Wait, seriously?" Jura hadn't heard yet.

"Yeah," Yuka and Toby sighed. "You guys are literally never allowed to fight each other ever again."

"All guild masters are now required to stop you guys if the situation occurs again."

"And mass evacuation will be enforced."

"By the way, Gildarts sent us a message, but it's just a really long lacrima recording of him laughing his ass off."

"He spent a couple thousand jewels just to laugh at me?!"

Last time anyone called a national emergency, it was for Deliora rampaging through the streets of Isvan. Who knew that people could be marks of national emergency?

"Eir, please understand," Makarov pleaded, "not even Gildarts has managed to cause enough destruction to get Article B2 called on him, okay?"

"Article B2?" Sherry asks.

"Article Baka. Two of them." Laxus immediately answers.

"Can you stop teaching them blatantly wrong facts?!" Macao snaps, then turns to the three Lamia kids, "it's just a designation, okay? For the national emergency clause. It doesn't stand for anything."