Fairy Tail: Swallow the Fire

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August 12th, X778 - The day before the Obon Festival

What would you expect someone to learn when training under a man who could melt a mountain with his presence? 

The reasonable answer would be they'd be taught to do the same thing, but you'd be wrong.

Day after day the captain would break me down as much as he physically could in daily exercise. When the weights began to feel light, I'd have to use enchanting to make them "heavier" and the only way I would be ready the next day would be to use the Chiyu Flame magic to heal myself unconsciously while I slept.

Those healing flames became my only way to survive, to the point where I ended up using a Magic enchantment to permanently fuse my Fire Body magic and the Chiyu Flame magic. The captain saw this as a way to make me learn a unique way to fight that combined the previous method I had come up with. 

Using my Fire Body to turn my entire body into a flaming tornado or blazing disk, I would purposely grow more reckless and utilise my ability to heal myself to take damage so long as I could hurt my opponent even more. This meant I had to practise so I could heal more and more damage as easily as I could.

Captain Tatsuo didn't let me slack on deepening my pyromancy, however. He told me once that mastering one element was his pride, something that only existed because of a rivalry he had with someone else. 

"I'll melt the world if that copycat bastard ended up being weak after all these years," were his words.

His way of making me master the element faster was brutal. Every day he would make me feel the full heat of his magic aura. When we sparred, when I trained, when we ate, and even when we were in the same room together he would concentrate all of it on me leaving everyone else to be unaffected. 

The only saving grace I had was when I meditated in front of Allaheargh's Test. Sitting in front of the bonfire had replaced my sleep, and I honestly longed for the comfort of a bed. Within a year under the brutality of the training, I had quickly made it to the seventh of the eight rings, only one ring away from the bonfire itself.

The captain even enlisted me into training with the Elite Guards of Himura alongside another new recruit to the guard named Totomaru, a seventeen-year-old with a split-dyed ponytail, with the left being black and the right being white.

He was enlisted for a similar reason to me, having a fighting style that didn't rely on simply throwing flames like most of the guards and police. He fought with a sword and had a high talent for pyrokinesis which made it easy for him to defeat other pyromancers. On top of that, he also created a peculiar form of fire magic called Rainbow Fire, and none of us like that he has it.

Totomaru outwardly reminded me of Akihiko, both having a cold face but a fairly friendly demeanour otherwise. But then came the swordsman's pranks. His rainbow fire allows him to create flames that have various quirks or effects, just like how the Chiyu Flames heal instead of hurt. For example, he can create a blue fire that freezes instead of burns, but his favourite is the orange and yellow flames that...stink. That's all they do, smell like moldy socks bathed in a fat man's bellybutton sweat.

Other than that, the two of us got along with the other Elite Guards quite well. 

But the friendship I had with my new colleagues didn't change my routine. 

Currently, my entire body is impaled upon a tree. The large metal stakes were stabbed into each arm and leg, with longer metal poles stabbed into my stomach and lungs. Breathing was agony, and each second had me choking on the blood that I had to regularly spit out. What made it worse was the fact that my blood boiled even inside of my flesh throughout the torture.

Standing in front of me was the one who had stabbed me into the tree in the first place, my sensei, Captain Tatsuo. Beside him was a folding table with a hammer, nails, stakes, and more poles. He grabbed one of the longer poles before pointing the sharpened end toward me and stabbing it into my shoulder without ceremony.

"Arrgh!!"

"Breathe. Never let the pain blind you. Recognise it, process it, but don't be consumed by it. Otherwise," he stabbed another pole into my other shoulder, "You'll bleed to death."

I spat out more blood before trying to calm my breath. Pale blue flames leapt out of my wounds causing the bleeding to temporarily slow down only to gush with renewed vigour as my body generated more fresh blood. 

I had to clench my teeth as the captain drove nail after nail into every ligament of my hands and fingers. The ringing of metal echoed around the woods around us, barely overlapping the pained grunts I let out with each one.

When the captain finished with the nails, he stood in front of me with the last pole in hand and a nervous expression on his face.

"I'm only doing this out of your request, Lyssa. If you want me to stop, I will. Even I find this particular idea... extreme."

"Just...do it..."

My voice was weak and raspy as I spoke, but the captain did as I asked. Pain shot through my being harder than any of the other impalings I've been forced to endure as black clouds crept into my vision. After having driven the last pole into my heart, the captain sighed before collecting the rest of the tools and turning around.

"I wish you luck, lass. I'll have a steak and baked potato prepped for you, so you better get through this."

I couldn't even see him, but I could faintly hear him as he stepped away. My entire body was enwreathed in the pale blue flames that had been keeping me alive throughout all of this. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm aware that my behaviour is foolish and self-destructive, I mean I did ask a beast of a human being to stab me in the heart, but I have my reason for doing so.

One thing I'll hardly ever be lacking is magic power, at least in quantity, due to the rewarding effects of Allaheargh's Test. That fact alone is what makes my new fighting style feasible in the first place. I could always attack with flames, sure, but if there's one thing I've been able to determine through trial and error is that most wizards neglect their physical bodies in favour of their magic. 

Acceptions occur, Totomaru and Tatsuo are such examples, with the former using a sword combined with fire magic to overpower foes and Tatsuo covering his body in heat barriers to fight his opponents at close range. 

While I've practised with barriers and memorised the captain's principles on the magic, developing my healing magic and martial arts has been my aim. After all, when it comes to combat one's nerves are an important factor everyone needs to consider. If you can unnerve your opponent you can gain an advantage, and while someone using magic to repel an attack or just dodge it can be intimidating, watching someone run at you and let themselves get hit with the attack and just ignore the wound it caused can be much more terrifying.

Especially if that attack is aimed at the heart or brain.

This is why I'm voluntarily impaled to this tree, stabbed in my shoulders, stomach, lungs, heart, limbs, and hands. My vision is foggy, all I can taste and smell is the iron of the blood that's dripping off my chin after having leaked out of my nose and mouth. And I can't even hear anything at this moment other than the strangled beating of my heart that's barely holding onto life. 

But having my senses deadened to such a degree was all I needed to know that I was mastering this healing art. 

Hours I sat there, strung up in the early morning of dawn yet patiently watching as the sun slowly set over the horizon in front of me. After a while, I stopped thinking about actively healing myself, instead letting my instincts do it for me. I became numb to the pain; aware of it, but ignoring it. 

It was a...surreal experience. 

Sitting on the constant brink of death, as if you've taken all the steps into the grave needed to be considered a corpse. But at the last second, you hear your swan song. Enraptured by the serenade, you stop your descent. The cold hands of death keep pulling on your shins, encouraging you to step into the grave and just simply die, while the warmth of music gives you something to gravitate to, something other than the comfort of eternal rest.

That's where I sat. On that balance, for hours.

No one came to check on me, no one other than the captain knew I was there. And I was determined not to come back tomorrow as a ghost.

After the sun had fully set, the only light was the blue flames covering my wounds. Slowly, excruciatingly, I pulled myself off of the tree. My hands broke even further as the nails either stayed stuck to the tree, ripping my fingers in the process or followed my hand out. The stakes in my limbs followed a similar story.

After waiting for my hands to heal and the nails to fall out, I gripped the ends of the poles in my lungs and started to slide myself along them. Blood oozed out of me onto the muddy ground below, but no grunts of pain followed. 

When I had gotten myself off the only thing suspending me, I fell unceremoniously to the floor. It only took a few seconds for my heart and organs to heal fully, but the amount of blood I needed to vomit up and drain from my lungs was excessive. 

After having pulled the last bits of metal out of me, I slowly made it back down to the compound. People, reasonably, screamed and gasped at the sight of me as I walked through the streets. But I didn't care, I wanted a shower, and the steak I was promised. 

After having gotten both, I sat in my room with a proud smile on my face. Mia wasn't in there, getting ready to celebrate the festival with her family tomorrow. The only reason the captain stayed behind was because of me, and I didn't feel like going to Taiyo's room to tell him what I'd just done. He is a nurse, after all, and would likely pass out if he heard. 

Instead, I simply waited. Last year I got to spend the festival with my dad, who taught me what he could about music. And this year, I even bought a cello to perform for both of my parents if I got the chance, to show them how much I progressed in both transformation magic and music. 

And I could even tell them of what I've been able to accomplish in terms of pyromancy!

I was gitty, and that was putting it lightly. I had good feelings about tomorrow's festival, especially since I could prove to Mom that I did what she asked and got stronger!

But all I could do was wait, so I did. I fell asleep on a bed for the first time in a year and a half with a happy smile on my face.

I knew that tomorrow was going to be important, but I was wrong about how in every possible way.

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