"Oh buddy, sorry about that!! Didn't see you there," Natsu said as he easily picked up Sting with one hand.
Sting was still in shock at what had just happened and was unable to reply.
"Natsu, it's getting late. We have to go back and meet the others in the hotel room," Lucy reminded him from the side.
"Oh yeah!! Sorry about tripping you, man. I really have to go now. So bye!!" Natsu said with a smile and began walking with the others.
Sting, Rogue, and the two Exceeds, on the other hand, were left in the crowd, still shocked about what had transpired in the last few seconds.
It might seem like a simple thing. But for powerhouses of their level, a simple interaction was more than enough for them to find the difference between each other.
With the way Natsu shrugged off Sting's attack and the easy way he picked him up, the revelation was staggering for the two Dragon Slayers who considered themselves to be the strongest Dragon Slayers in all of Ishgar.
They believed that, as third-generation Dragon Slayers who had both the teachings of real dragons along with Dragon Lacrima, they were superior to both first- and second-generation Dragon Slayers. But reality was not what they expected it to be.
"Rogue, do you think Gajeel is the same as Natsu?" he asked while having a mirthful smile on his face.
Rogue did not reply. He just patted Sting's shoulder.
"Yeah, I thought so," he said as the four of them began walking back towards the hotels to prepare for the start of the Grand Magic Games.
Karna was watching everything that was happening from a distance.
"Well, I don't mind the fact that Natsu was not made a fool of by them like in the canon timeline, where they were still weaker than him. But it's also not a good thing for them to lose their motivation. If those missing dragons come back one day, every Dragon Slayer is a valuable resource that we can't do without," Karna mused as he looked at the Twin Dragon Slayers.
"Well, I'll take care of it after the competition."
Outside the time and space of Earthland.
"So, that brat has returned," Ankhseram muttered with distaste as he heard the rumours through the timeline of the present.
Once, he was able to traverse through the timeline without any problems from the moment he partially ascended with the dominion he gained through the destruction of Nirvana. From then on, till a certain point in time, he gained the absolute power to travel freely.
From the point in time when he gained dominion over death to a particular point hundreds of years later, Ankhseram believed that he was trapped between these points in time because of the incompleteness of his ascension. The starting point being the time he channelled the death energy he accumulated by devising the deaths of every individual in the city of Nirvana, and the end point being the time when he finally ascends to complete godhood.
All he had to do was experience every single point in time between these two points while getting a large amount of magic power so as to complete his ascension without any problems. He had the ability to move to the past or future between these points in time as long as there were no duplicates of him appearing simultaneously at a particular point in time.
But instead of waiting it out and experiencing the flow of time slowly from the past to the future, Ankhseram had shifted between multiple points in both the future and past to make sure that there were no problems.
But the problem arose just a few decades ago.
Suddenly, he was unable to access the future points of the timeline. It was as if the timeline itself had somehow broken apart.
It did not take him long to realise that a Fate Breaker had been born. The ancient archives of Nirvana contained pictures and inscriptions that described what a Fate Breaker is and how one affects the timeline.
"Karna Vermillion," Ankhseram muttered as he finally realised the anomaly from all those years ago on Tenrou Island.
He looked at a frozen image of the boy taken from the timestream.
"The boy might have survived due to Fairy Sphere, which he was somehow able to activate. But that does not explain why I cannot sense the presence of the death energy in his body right now," he muttered as he contemplated ways by which he could remove him completely from the world.
"As long as he remains within the timestream, my evolution will not move forward, and there also exists a chance of me being completely destroyed." He then looked at the timestream one more time.
There were many instances where he had already appeared once, so he had to be careful while appearing at a point in time. If he made any mistakes while trying to kill Karna at a particular point in time, he might not get another chance within that time again. So he had to plan several of his steps before making a move.
"But first, I need to cover the past timelines so that another anomaly does not get born," he decided as he began to move through the points in time in the past that he had never visited.
"Oh, what do we have here!" Ankhseram muttered as he found something interesting in the past timeline.
At the same time, in the capital.
"Hahaha, I should have expected this to happen," Karna muttered with a small laugh as he looked up at the circular structure of the first elimination round of the Grand Magic Games.
Just like in canon, the elimination round included a shifting maze created by the hotels in the city on the first night of the Grand Magic Games.
But unlike the sphere-shaped maze that existed in the beginning, currently only half of the structure remained.
Courtesy of the two teams from the same guild who wanted to eliminate the other in the first round itself.
A/N - Hope you like it.