For his first time leading a team on his own, Lin Yuan chose Natsu and Gray.
Three days later, Makarov received a very politely worded complaint.
The client thanked Fairy Tail for recovering the missing cargo, and especially thanked Lin Yuan for stopping his two teammates from burning down the warehouse, freezing the well, brawling in the square, and stuffing each other into shipping crates.
At the end of the letter, the client asked in all seriousness whether an additional escort fee could be charged for safely returning the two dangerous individuals to the Guild.
"I told you ages ago not to take those two together," Mira said gleefully.
"No, you didn't." Lin Yuan pulled out the record from before they had left. "You said, 'It'd be best if they tore down the whole town.'"
"Close enough."
After that job, Lin Yuan's mission records began to grow rapidly.
In late autumn, he led a team to clear out the water beasts occupying a canal without damaging a single cargo ship. Natsu was motion sick for an entire day because of the battle on the water, and when he woke up, he insisted it had to be the boat's fault.
When the first snow fell, he and Mira traveled to a ranch in the north. They rescued an entire herd of horned sheep from beneath an avalanche, only to argue all the way to the station over who should ride the biggest one.
Mira's Satan Soul grew increasingly stable. She could now maintain a full-body Take Over for long periods, and could also transform only her arms, legs, or eyes in confined spaces. Each time she returned to the Guild, she would put her newly earned completion stamp in front of Lin Yuan, then check whether he had secretly added another page to his records.
Laxus rarely stayed at the Guild.
He took one job after another, sometimes returning with the horns of a magic beast, and sometimes dragging a wanted criminal charred black by lightning. There were still plenty of compensation bills, but their number gradually declined as winter passed.
On one occasion, he dealt with a mountain fire and burned down only half of the client's warehouse. Makarov stared at the report for a long time, and in the end, he didn't know whether to scold him or praise him.
In spring, Lin Yuan began taking A-rank jobs alone.
He sealed a dam on the verge of collapse in a mountain town, and once folded forty miles of mountain roads in succession to deliver urgently needed medicine to a plague-stricken village two days early. The range of his spatial perception grew, and he became increasingly accurate at locating known coordinates.
But he still couldn't travel at will to places he had never seen.
Once, Natsu drew a campfire on a map and insisted that Lin Yuan could get there just by "thinking about this place." Lin Yuan folded the distance as he directed, and all three of them ended up falling into the chimney of Macao's house.
Because the map had originally come from Macao's house.
Before summer arrived, Lisanna and Elfman also began learning Take Over Magic.
At first, they could only make animal fur appear on their fingertips. The day Lisanna successfully took over a pair of cat ears, the whole Guild gathered around to look at her for half the afternoon; Elfman, on the other hand, took over a duck's webbed foot, which went slap-slap when he walked, and Natsu chased him around asking if he could swim with it.
"Big brother Lin Yuan, you try it too!" Lisanna ran over with white cat ears on her head.
"I don't know Take Over Magic."
"Then turn distance into cat ears."
"Distance doesn't have ears."
"What useless magic."
Lisanna walked away in disappointment. Lin Yuan stood there thinking for a long time, but still couldn't figure out why his magic had earned that assessment.
As Erza passed by, she patted him on the shoulder. "Don't mind her. Yesterday she said my Requip couldn't make cake appear, so it was useless too."
A year quietly passed amid job requests, completion stamps, and the clamor of the Guild.
Lin Yuan grew a little taller, and the pants in his old room in the dormitory out back became much too short. After Mira noticed, she laughed at him for three whole days. On the fourth day, however, she tossed a new pair of pants beside his bed, insisting that Lisanna had bought the wrong size.
Laxus also began returning to the Guild more often.
He and Lin Yuan fought four more times. Once, Lin Yuan touched the bronze bell first; once, Laxus forced him out of bounds; and twice, they were forced to stop because Natsu charged into the arena.
Neither of them won a decisive victory.
Then, one autumn morning, Makarov posted a sheet of paper bearing the master's seal beside the stairs leading from the first floor to the second.
As soon as the paper went up, the entire Guild fell silent.
The annual S-Class Mage promotion exam was about to begin.
Natsu was the first to squeeze his way to the front. When he saw that his name wasn't on the list, he immediately demanded a new selection. Gray laughed at him, then realized he hadn't been chosen either and turned to join the protest.
Erza said nothing and simply read through the list carefully. Mira stood outside the crowd with her arms folded, her gaze lingering on the paper for a moment before turning to Lin Yuan.
"Looks like our bet's about to be settled first."
"We're only candidates."
"You'd better not lose."
"You want me to win?"
"I just don't want my rival losing to someone else."
On the other side, Laxus had already taken off his headphones. His gaze met Lin Yuan's across the crowd in front of the list, and golden arcs of lightning leaped across the floor.
The Guild members looked back at the paper.
There was no third candidate this year.
There were only two names on the list.
Lin Yuan.
Laxus.