Fairy Tail: My Magic is a Yu-Gi-Oh! Deck — Chapter 132

Chapter 132: Open! The Gate of Aquarius!

While Chase and Mira enjoyed a leisurely picnic off to the side, entirely insulated from the chaos, Lucy had already shifted into full combat mode.

“Open! Gate of the Golden Bull! Taurus!”

She gave the golden key a sharp twirl. A dazzling magical array bloomed across the stone floor, illuminating the dark corridor.

“Moo! Miss Lucy’s body is looking super hot today!”

Taurus erupted from the summoning circle, hoisting his massive double-bladed axe over his shoulder. True to form, his very first breath in the human world was spent praising his summoner’s figure. Then, his wide eyes locked onto the sidelines. Hearts practically bulged from his sockets.

“Whoa! Miss Mira, Miss Erza, and the lovely big sister holding the sword! When are we going on a date?!”

Chase, standing right next to Mira, was completely ignored by the perverted bovine.

Mira merely covered her mouth, a soft giggle escaping her lips. “Oh my, oh my.”

Lucy felt her face burn with second-hand embarrassment. She pointed a trembling finger at the grotesque, guitar-wielding man across from them. “I didn’t summon you for something impossible like that! Hurry up and take down that freak!”

“Moo! I’d be delighted to serve you!”

Seeing that their opponent was a bizarre, pale-faced rocker who looked neither entirely human nor ghost, Taurus flexed his bulging biceps. He gripped his axe with both hands and charged forward, his hooves cracking the stone beneath him.

“Sending a useless woman to fight me? Don’t underestimate the soul of rock and roll, you bastards!” Vidaldus Taka sneered. He had recognized Lucy as a Celestial Spirit Mage the moment the golden key appeared. He leaned back and began to violently headbang.

Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!

His disgustingly long, dark hair suddenly surged forward, expanding and twisting like the roots of a demonic tree. The thick locks shot directly toward the charging minotaur.

Lacking any concept of evasion, the brute-force spirit simply roared and swung his axe. The heavy, double-bladed weapon cleaved through the air, generating a localized hurricane from the sheer kinetic force. It was a devastating strike, but the moment the steel bit into the tough, flexible hair, the momentum died. The strands simply bent and wrapped around the blade like steel cables.

Within seconds, Taurus’s charge was completely halted. The prehensile hair slithered up his arms, binding his wrists and chest in a vice-like grip. With a heavy clatter, the giant axe slipped from his fingers and hit the ground.

“Damn it! Why is this hair so annoying?!” Taurus roared, straining his massive muscles against the bindings. The hair only tightened further, cutting off his circulation.

Watching her spirit get captured, Lucy didn’t panic. Instead, a confident smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth.

This was exactly the opening she had been waiting for.

“Gate of the Golden Bull, close! And now—” She whipped out a second key, her magic flaring instantly. “Open! Gate of the Crab! Cancer!”

Ding dong!

The golden zodiac chime rang out. Before the fading particles of Taurus’s dismissed form could even scatter, a stylishly dressed man with sunglasses and six red crab legs protruding from his back materialized in a flash of light.

Cancer spun his twin scissors around his fingers, moving as a blur. He dashed straight up the length of Vidaldus’s extended hair, closing the distance before the rocker could even think to retract his weapon.

“Oh no! Oh no!” Vidaldus shrieked, his eyes widening in horror as he instinctively threw his hands up to protect his face and vitals.

But Cancer, being a master barber, had entirely different priorities.

Snip-snip-snip!

Silver flashes danced through the air. Vidaldus suddenly felt a terrible, breezy chill strike the top of his scalp.

“I wonder if you are satisfied with this season’s most fashionable hairstyle? Ebi~” Cancer struck a cool pose, smoothly holstering his scissors.

Vidaldus stood frozen, his head now completely, flawlessly bald, gleaming under the ambient light.

“Well done, Cancer! The haircut plan was a total success!” Lucy cheered, flashing a thumbs-up. Having witnessed Vidaldus’s magic earlier, she had targeted his hair from the very beginning.

“Using Taurus as bait, and then having Cancer unexpectedly sever the opponent’s primary weapon…” Mira picked up a potato chip from her lap, crunching it thoughtfully. “I didn’t expect Lucy to have such a sharp tactical mind.”

“Her gate-switching speed is much smoother than before, too. Barely any lag between the dismissal and the summon,” Chase noted, his eyes tracking the lingering magic particles.

Just a few days of studying the Dark Magician’s training guide had yielded incredible results. She truly was a prodigy who had inherited the exceptional magical genes of the Heartfilia bloodline.

“But it seems Erza is having a much harder time over there,” Mira murmured, her gaze drifting toward the adjacent battlefield.

Flashes of steel and sparks illuminated the shadows. With every swing of Ikaruga’s blade, an invisible shockwave tore through the air, leaving deep, cleanly severed fissures in the solid stone floor.

Facing the terrifying sharpness of Ikaruga’s Mugetsu-ryu swordsmanship, Erza’s armor was proving as fragile as wet paper. Even after equipping her absolute strongest defensive gear, the Adamantine Armor, the thick magical plating was cleanly sliced open by the opponent’s casual slashes.

Erza’s breathing was ragged, her expression locked in a solemn, pale grimace.

When the heavy armor she used to conceal her inner fragility was stripped away, the deep-seated panic and fear buried in her memories began to bleed through. The cold, suffocating terror of the Tower of Heaven crept up her spine, spreading a paralyzing sense of insecurity through her limbs.

“What’s wrong, Titania? If this is all you have to offer, you’re no match for me.” Ikaruga rested her katana against her shoulder, a condescending smile gracing her lips.

After dominating the exchange, Ikaruga’s confidence had fully returned. Clearly, not all of Fairy Tail’s S-Class Mages were unfathomable monsters like Chase. As long as that terrifying man continued to stand by and watch, she just needed to take Erza down. Once she had the Fairy Queen at her blade’s edge, she would have the ultimate bargaining chip to secure her escape.

It was her only path to survival.

Sharing a similar desperation was Vidaldus, who was currently violently shaking his newly bald head while shredding a screeching, distorted riff on his skull-shaped guitar.

Beside him, Cancer was bent over, hands on his knees, aggressively headbanging to the exact same rhythm.

“Hell~ ebi~ hell~ ebi~!” Cancer chanted, his sunglasses askew as he completely surrendered to the heavy metal beat.

The entire scene was absurd enough to make one’s eyes water.

Vidaldus had originally intended to use his Rock of Succubus to take direct control of Lucy’s mind. But the blonde mage had reacted instantly, diving into the protective, soundproof pocket dimension of the celestial clock.

“It was the exact same thing on Galuna Island. Why am I so unlucky? Why do I always run into these weird control-type mages? She says.”

Horologium stood on his wooden legs, his glass door muffled, faithfully transmitting Lucy’s muffled complaints from inside his pendulum chamber.

Remembering her brilliant tactic of shifting the aggro to someone else, Lucy pressed her hands against the glass and shot a pleading, puppy-dog look toward Chase.

Chase, who was currently in the middle of a relaxed conversation with Mira about Juvia’s integration into the guild, paused. He met Lucy’s desperate gaze. Without breaking eye contact, he casually raised a finger and reinforced the magical barrier around his picnic blanket, sealing off any gaps.

This was a battle to test the results of her training. He wasn’t about to let her take a shortcut.

“So, so mean! She says.” Horologium’s mustache twitched. He glanced nervously at the corrupted crab spirit currently revving his scissors. “Um, Master Lucy, Cancer is preparing to attack us, you know.”

“Then why aren’t you running away?! She says!”

“You don’t need to translate my words at a time like this! She says!”

“Scissors! The scissors are coming! Ahhh! She says!”

“Just stall for time! I’ll force Cancer’s gate closed! She says!”

Horologium began sprinting wildly around the battlefield on his wooden legs, frantically dodging the possessed barber’s snipping blades, all while maintaining his deadpan, polite delivery of Lucy’s terrified screaming.

He was truly a professional.

After several near misses, Horologium’s non-combat frame finally took a glancing blow from the scissors. Reaching his damage limit, he vanished in a puff of golden smoke with a loud pop.

Stripped of her shelter, Lucy was thrown through the air, landing flat on her back in a deep, murky puddle of muddy water left over from a previous skirmish.

Ignoring the cold sludge soaking through her clothes, she scrambled into a sitting position, thrust the Gate of the Crab key toward the sky, and flared her magic.

“Close! Gate of the Crab!”

A split second before Cancer’s blades could snip her nose off, the golden array flared to life, forcefully yanking the possessed spirit back to the Celestial Spirit World.

“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Why couldn’t I have shaved her bald before she sent him back?!”

Vidaldus stomped his boots against the stone, his face twisted in pure malice. Losing his luscious, weaponized hair had inflicted massive psychological damage on the rocker. All he cared about now was making the blonde girl suffer the exact same humiliation.

“I’m really sorry, but Cancer only gives me cute hairstyles!” Lucy spat back, wiping mud from her cheek.

“Then I’ll just do it myself! I’ll passionately pluck your hair out, strand by strand!” Vidaldus advanced step by step, his fingers twitching toward her scalp.

Lucy felt the cold water seeping into her boots. She glanced down at the muddy puddle beneath her, and a wicked, desperate idea suddenly sparked in her mind.

“Don’t even think about it!”

She drew a different golden key, gripping it tightly before plunging the tip directly into the murky sludge.

“Open! Gate of the Water Bearer! Aquarius!!”

“Useless! Useless! Useless!” Vidaldus struck a violent chord on his guitar, sending a wave of dark, hypnotic sound magic rippling toward the puddle. “No matter what spirit you summon, they will only become my puppets!”

The muddy water bubbled and erupted. The beautiful, blue-tailed mermaid materialized from the sludge, her signature urn clutched in her arms. The dark soundwaves washed over her instantly.

And then—

Aquarius slowly turned her head. Her eyes were completely bloodshot. A thick, pulsing vein bulged on her forehead.

“How dare you summon me from a filthy puddle like this?!” Aquarius shrieked, her voice echoing with demonic fury. “Even without your stupid command, you bald bastard, I’m going to blast you and this stinky brat into oblivion!!”

The “mind control” had done absolutely nothing but give her an excuse to unleash her unbridled rage. Aquarius hoisted her urn high above her head, the water pressure inside screaming like a jet engine.

“AQUASTORM!!”

BOOM!

A catastrophic, roaring tsunami erupted from the tiny puddle. Millions of gallons of crushing water exploded outward in a blinding white torrent, indiscriminately engulfing Lucy, the screaming bald rocker, and every single piece of rubble in the corridor.

The sheer scale of the flood was so massive that it violently crashed against Chase’s reinforced barrier in the distance, and even swept across the adjacent battlefield, completely washing away Erza and Ikaruga’s tense standoff in a roaring tide of muddy destruction.