While Fairy Tail was still cheering and shouting over the battles in the ranking tournament, the cold wind blowing through Ishgar's northern frontier that night was unusually bitter, and the air seemed to carry an ominous presence.
The priests of the Dark Magic Group, clad in black robes, carved a huge black pentagram Magic Circle into the square of the abandoned Carlos City. At the center of the Circle, hundreds of thousands of bound civilians from two small cities knelt on the ground, their fear taking tangible form as it drifted through the Magic Circle.
The Dark Magic Group's priest, Yaroc, was devoutly worshiping something outside the Magic Circle. Beside him stood a one-eyed man, silently watching everything with an expressionless face. His left eye was covered by a black eyepatch, while his right eye glimmered with a profound light.
After Yaroc finished his worship, the man beside him spoke. "Are your people ready? Acnologia isn't far from here. If you make a mistake, I won't clean up after you."
Hearing this, Yaroc opened his eyes and gave him a cold look. "Hades, you don't need to worry about that. You only need to worry about whether you can do what you promised before—use the demon we summon from Zeref to subdue the Black Dragon, Acnologia. If you can't, your life ends here."
This man was none other than Hades, the person Makarov had been searching for all this time—Precht. He had once been Fairy Tail's second guild master and Makarov's long-lost master. However, as he delved deeper into the study of dark magic, he gradually fell into depravity and eventually founded the Dark Guild, Heart of the Demon.
In X777, Hades sensed the opening of the Eclipse Gate. When he went to investigate, he also sensed the Black Dragon,