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Even with her Celestial Spirit Magic temporarily out of reach, Lucy felt no particular urge to run.
Her greatest gain from her time in Fairy Tail had not been growth in magic or the surge in Magic Power that came with her Second Origin awakening. It was the hand-to-hand combat skills she had drilled into her body, and the Armament Haki that now let her throw herself into a fight without holding back.
"Momon, Éclair, get behind me."
Lucy raised her fists. Hand-to-hand combat was something every member of Fairy Tail had to master. In the guild, you could be hopeless at plenty of things, but fighting was not one of them.
The Cloaked Man gave a cold snort at her tone. He was a veteran dark mage who had carried out more assassination contracts than he could remember. In all that time, he had never met anyone quite so cheerfully overconfident.
She wasn't the target, anyway. Killing her would be no great loss.
He raised his right hand, extending a second hidden blade, and looked at Lucy with the flat patience of someone watching a problem solve itself. "Since you're so eager to meet your end, I'll be happy to oblige—"
"Aagh!!"
The words died in a scream.
Momon and Éclair, sheltered behind Lucy, caught most of what happened next. In the darkness, a massive two-meter shape opened its jaws wide and clamped down around the Cloaked Man's torso, dragging him bodily into the shadows while his screams faded into nothing.
The moment he vanished, the lights in the room came back on.
Momon stared at the spot where the Cloaked Man had been, feathers visibly ruffled. "He's... gone. What on earth was that thing? That was terrifying..."
Lucy blinked, then recognized it. That enormous creature was the Shadow Eater soldier Noah had summoned back in Sun Village, though it had been considerably smaller at the time.
He left a guard behind without saying a word. She stared at her still-raised fists. Not so much as a chance to throw a single punch.
She had trained hard for exactly this kind of moment. To have it vanish before she could do anything was, frankly, a little annoying.
"Oh! Momon, you're hurt!"
Lucy turned and finally saw him: stuffing scattered across the floor, his plush body torn open where the blade had caught him. It came back to her then. Momon had knocked her out of the way, not knowing she had already wrapped herself in Armament Haki.
What a good soul.
Lucy turned to him and Éclair with an apologetic look. "I'm sorry. I should have noticed sooner—"
"It's fine."
Éclair cut her off quietly. She had already drawn a needle and thread from her small bag and was mending Momon's body with practiced ease, as though she had done this many times before.
"That person came for me," she said, not looking up from her stitching. "I've been through this more times than I can count. Every time before, Momon was the one who stepped in front."
She paused.
"Thank you, Lucy. Without you and Fairy Tail, I don't know how much longer we would have kept running."
The calm in her voice made it worse, somehow. That matter-of-fact acceptance of a life spent constantly fleeing left Lucy with a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the fight.
Over the course of their conversation, Lucy gradually learned how Momon had come to be.
Long ago, during one of Éclair's countless wandering days, she had passed a child carrying a rag doll. On a passing whim, she had wanted one of her own. Having no money to buy one, she had made a small yellow chick doll herself from scraps of cloth, then fallen asleep. When she woke the next morning, the lumpy little thing had come alive.
Wary of the inexplicable, she had chased it out of her ramshackle shelter. That same night, a pack of wolves surrounded her.
She spent the night wide awake.
When morning came and the wolves finally withdrew, she stepped outside to find the rag doll standing guard at the entrance, tattered and clutching a bloodstained stick, fiercely planted in place.
He looked up at her and said:
"I will always protect Éclair."
From that day forward, the amnesiac girl's endless journey had a companion. She named him Momon.
Lucy wiped her eyes.
Perhaps sensing the mood had grown heavier than he liked, Momon shifted in Éclair's lap and looked at Lucy with his round eyes.
"Lucy, you seemed to recognize that creature from earlier?"
"Of course. That was a Shadow Eater soldier, one of Noah's. It only consumes shadows."
Lucy found herself genuinely curious now: where exactly would a Shadow Eater soldier take someone it had grabbed?
In a secluded alley of Rose Garden, rarely visited at this hour, the Cloaked Man lay slumped against a wall. Four small shadow portals had materialized on the brickwork around him, each one locking one of his limbs in place. Standing nearby was a white-haired young man working his way through a large skewer of grilled lamb.
Noah finished the skewer and pressed the empty stick into the Cloaked Man's backside. He glanced around. Eleven or twelve sticks were already planted there. The effect was thoroughly hedgehog-like, and wholly undignified.
One had to wonder whether the man would leak when he drank water in the future.
The Cloaked Man let out a grunt through gritted teeth. "I won't say a word. Do what you like. You won't get anything out of me."
"Oh? Quite resilient."
Noah finished another skewer and added its stick to the collection. "Though I should mention," he said pleasantly, "I haven't actually asked you anything yet."
The Cloaked Man's composure stuttered. He was right. Since being dragged here by that monster, this infuriating white-haired youth had not said a single word, not posed a single question. He had simply been methodically skewering him. The Cloaked Man's dramatic declaration of unyielding resolve had been aimed at precisely nobody.
He felt, in hindsight, rather foolish.
"Shall I start, then?"
Noah looked at him with an expression of cheerful interest. "Who sent you? Why are you after Éclair? What exactly is the objective?"
"Hmph. Not a word."
The Cloaked Man resumed his defiant posture with the air of someone who had made peace with whatever came next.
"What a tough customer."
Noah produced a durian from somewhere unspecified and held it up for the Cloaked Man's inspection. "For someone as resilient as you, ordinary persuasion clearly won't work. So I'll need to try something a little more creative."
"This football-sized object is called a durian. I will count to three. If you haven't spoken by then, your dignity is going to have a very bad night."
"You understand what I mean?"
Noah's tone was perfectly conversational. To the Cloaked Man's ears, it was the murmur of something far worse than a demon. A demon would have simply killed him. This man had apparently spent time thinking of something worse.
An agonizing internal debate. Confess, and betray the mission. Stay silent, and live with the consequences forever.
There was, in the end, no real choice.
Noah did not give him long to reach this conclusion. He began swinging the durian back and forth with a serene smile. "Starting the count~"
"One... Three!"
"What a stalwart soul. Farewell to your dignity—"
The jump from one to three left the Cloaked Man's face the color of old paper. He stared at the durian in genuine horror.
His professional integrity lasted approximately one more second.
"Stop! I'll talk! Everything, I'll tell you everything!"
"Too late, I already read your mind. Every last detail." Noah grinned. "Hehehehe."
"NOOOO—!!!"