"A fish turned into a human?!!"
The waiter wiped cold sweat from his face with one hand as he explained,
"I accidentally turned into a fish during my afternoon nap. Has that never happened to you?"
Lucy roared back, "No! Absolutely not!!! How would anyone have that kind of experience?! We're human!"
'So is he a fish, a human, or using Transformation Magic?'
Ultear rubbed her chin as she studied the waiter.
Natsu was much more direct.
"So are you a fish or a human?"
"That's a very important question," Happy added gloomily.
The waiter struggled with it for quite a while before finally answering,
"If I have to choose, I'm probably a fish."
"???"
Erza, Mira, Kagura, and the others all wore matching looks of confusion.
Erza shook her head.
'A fish working the front desk... I must have gotten up too fast. I'm definitely still asleep.'
Mira's thoughts had already gone in a completely different direction.
'Is competition this fierce now? Even fish are trying to steal my job? Should I go take more training...?'
"There aren't many travelers here, so feel free to choose whichever rooms you like."
After Raizel and the others took their room keys, the front desk clerk suddenly remembered something and warned them with a serious expression.
"I nearly forgot. If you plan to stay in this town, please, absolutely make sure you drink the complimentary beverage in your room!"
His expression darkened slightly as he said this.
"If you don't drink it, humans have no chance of surviving here."
But when Ultear and Erza pressed him for an explanation, he refused to say more.
Claiming he had to go on a date, he rushed out in a hurry without even collecting their money.
"Hey! Aren't you going to take payment?!"
Lucy shouted as hard as she could, but the waiter ran off like a wild horse with no intention of looking back.
Ultear shook her head.
"Forget it. We can leave the money in the room or at the front desk before we go."
Everyone turned to Raizel and asked,
"What do we do? Are we staying here?"
Raizel thought for a moment before nodding.
"Inns don't seem easy to find here. Let's go upstairs and take a look first."
The keys from the front desk were all for twin rooms with two beds each. The rooms themselves were surprisingly clean and tidy, and they even came with sofas.
"Happy, what's wrong?" Carla asked when she saw Happy looking depressed.
"I don't know why, but I suddenly don't feel like eating fish anymore."
"That... I can understand."
Happy and Carla both had dark lines over their faces as they sighed together.
Meanwhile, Raizel, Ultear, and the others were looking at the so-called complimentary beverage placed somewhere obvious in the room.
A wooden sign beside it read WELCOME, and the cork was even shaped like a skull.
"Poison?"
Wendy stared at it with wide eyes, her lips pressed together.
"Are we really supposed to drink this?"
Everyone stared at the bottle, then at one another, unable to make a decision.
Ultear turned to Wendy.
"Wendy, can you check what's inside?"
"I'm not sure, but I'll try."
Wendy first opened the bottle, gently fanned the scent toward herself, and smelled it. Then she used Magic Power to sense it carefully.
After weighing her words, Wendy answered,
"I don't know exactly what it is, but it shouldn't be poison. I don't sense anything abnormal."
Raizel looked at Ultear.
"Did you bring antidotes?"
"I did. Common ones and uncommon ones."
Ultear snapped her fingers, and a pile of antidotes appeared on the table.
"In that case, Natsu and I will drink it first. We'll test the reaction."
Raizel and Natsu each poured some into a cup and drank it in one go.
Natsu smacked his lips and tasted the afterflavor.
"It's actually pretty sweet..."
Raizel also checked his condition.
"I don't feel anything."
Everyone waited for a full hour, but nothing unusual happened.
Ultear, Kagura, and the others exchanged looks and nodded.
"In that case, let's drink it."
...
Raizel's group had drunk it in the afternoon, and even after dinner that night, there were still no strange reactions.
Lucy came to one conclusion.
"Maybe that waiter was just joking!"
Night fell, and a full moon hung high overhead.
Raizel and the others were asleep.
When Raizel sensed something strange and opened his eyes, he was already underwater.
And judging by the feeling...
it seemed to be seawater.
'A dream?'
But Raizel immediately denied that possibility.
The water had appeared out of nowhere, and it had appeared far too quickly. In the blink of an eye, it had already risen over his head. It had not slowly flooded upward.
When Raizel woke, Natsu and Happy woke up too.
"Ultear, Erza—eh?"
Only after calling out did Raizel belatedly realize that he could breathe and speak normally underwater.
Ultear and the others also came out of their rooms, already changed into swimsuits. Clearly, they had adapted even faster than Raizel.
Ultear frowned slightly.
"We looked out the window just now. Outside seems to be... the ocean."
Mira added,
"In other words, this city is under the sea."
"I mean, it is under the sea..."
"But we can breathe!"
Lucy and Wendy swam around underwater with great excitement.
Plenty of fish swam past them as well. Even a shark appeared.
And the shark could talk.
Erza was excitedly chatting with the shark beside her.
"Do you want to race? I'm not afraid, Shameko!"
Raizel looked at Erza helplessly.
"You're actually enjoying this quite a lot..."
"So everyone obediently drank the medicine."
The fish from the front desk swam over to them.
"Medicine? Didn't you say it was a drink?"
The front desk fish ignored Raizel's correction and continued,
"That medicine helps creatures other than fish adapt better to life underwater."
Kashima bowed politely with his fish body.
"I apologize for the late introduction. I am the owner of HOTEL JOURNEY. Please call me Kashima."
After all that, the person Raizel and the others had assumed was just the receptionist was actually the boss.
Raizel continued asking,
"So what exactly happened to this city?"
Kashima answered very calmly,
"It's nothing serious. The tide simply came in."
Ultear looked puzzled.
"Doesn't that mean the whole city has been flooded? Why are you acting like nothing happened?"
A school of fish passing by answered that question.
"This is what the city originally looked like when we fish lived here, so this is the city's true form."
Wendy blinked.
"Then why does everyone look human during the day?"
"If we stayed in fish form, we'd frighten the children, wouldn't we?"
Raizel cut him off.
"You could have told us beforehand, couldn't you?"
Kashima wore the smug look of someone whose prank had succeeded and shook his head.
"NO WAY! Then it wouldn't have been a surprise!"