Chapter 544 - 544: What?! Fairy Tail?!

"I wonder what the absolute maximum speed actually feels like," Lyon murmured, staring out the reinforced glass at the sprawling coastline of Fiore.

"Yeah, I'm genuinely curious too," Simon nodded in agreement, his arms crossed as he watched the clouds drift by.

Natsu, who was still practically vibrating with excitement, overheard their conversation. He instantly spun around and vaulted over a sofa. "Noah! Let's test the top speed right now!"

Hearing Natsu's shout, the rest of the guild members in the lounge turned their attention to the captain's chair.

"Do you guys really want to see how fast she can go?" Noah asked, noticing the eager, sparkling eyes of his family staring back at him.

"Yes!"

"Mhm!"

The crowd nodded vigorously.

It was completely understandable. In this era, the most common forms of transportation were horse-drawn carriages and rudimentary steam trains. Even the fastest mages in the guild couldn't sustain a running speed of two hundred kilometers per hour. The opportunity to experience unprecedented, physics-defying speed was simply too tempting to pass up.

Seeing their overwhelming curiosity, Noah couldn't help but laugh. "Alright. Since you're all so eager, let me show you what our ship can really do."

He stood up from his relaxed posture and fully settled into the captain's chair. He tapped the holographic display, smoothly disengaging the autopilot and switching the mainframe to manual override.

With a series of sharp, mechanical clicks, the captain's chair transformed. A physical flight stick and a heavy throttle lever extended from the armrests, and two sleek rudder pedals deployed at his feet. Noah gripped the controls, his boots settling onto the pedals.

"Brace yourselves! Here we go!" Noah warned loudly.

"WOOHOO!" The guild cheered in unison.

Noah slammed his left foot onto the rudder pedal, throwing the massive airship into a sharp, banking turn.

Far below, down in Hargeon Port.

A group of fishermen were packing up their nets on the docks when one of them paused, looking up at a massive, rapidly approaching shadow in the sky. "What in the world is that?"

"Looks like an airship, but I've never seen a model like that before," another fisherman squinted, trying to make out the details as the colossal white-and-orange vessel descended slightly.

"Wait... that crest painted on the side... That's Fairy Tail!" an older fisherman shrieked, his eyes bulging in absolute terror.

"WHAT?! FAIRY TAIL?!"

The entire dock instantly erupted into a frantic panic. None of them had forgotten the absolute devastation that had struck their port less than a year ago—a disaster caused entirely by Fairy Tail's notorious Salamander. Even though the guild had paid massive reparations to rebuild the harbor, the mere sight of their emblem triggered profound PTSD among the locals.

Seeing a massive, heavily armed flying fortress bearing that cursed crest descending upon their town was the stuff of nightmares.

"Wait! Look! It's turning away!" a fisherman pointed frantically.

High above, the massive airship executed a sharp, aggressive banking drift, turning completely away from Hargeon and accelerating back out over the open ocean.

"Phew... looks like they're just passing through," a harbor master sighed, wiping a massive bead of cold sweat from his brow.

With the immediate threat of annihilation gone, the fishermen slowly recovered from their panic. They realized they had overreacted; Fairy Tail members passed through Hargeon all the time for missions, and they rarely caused trouble unless provoked. It was just the sheer, intimidating size of the warship that had spooked them.

"Still... that ship is insanely huge. And it's moving so fast!" a sailor muttered, watching the majestic vessel rapidly shrink into a silhouette against the horizon. He had seen a few magical airships in his life, but nothing that possessed that kind of raw scale and agility.

"Look at it climb... I wonder what its top speed actually is," another murmured in awe as the Fairy tore through the lower cloud layer, leaving a massive, swirling wake of displaced vapor behind it.

Back inside the lounge.

The aggressive, high-speed drift had subjected the guild to a sudden spike in G-force. Several members stumbled, frantically grabbing onto the reinforced sofas and handrails to steady themselves. Once the ship leveled out and stabilized, a collective sigh of relief washed through the room.

"Make sure you're holding onto something solid. I'm initiating the primary acceleration sequence," Noah warned, his voice echoing over the intercom.

Those who had let go instantly grabbed back on. Noah's warnings were never to be ignored.

Satisfied that everyone was secure, Noah pushed the throttle lever forward and gently pulled back on the flight stick. The Fairy instantly pitched upward and accelerated with terrifying smoothness. Within seconds, they were tearing through the dense, puffy clouds.

"Wow!" Meredy and the others gasped, their faces pressed against the glass as they watched the ocean below blur into a streak of continuous blue.

"This is our standard maximum cruising speed. We are currently flying at exactly two hundred kilometers per hour," Noah announced with a grin.

"And what about the abnormal top speed?" Lucy asked, her eyes shining intensely as she looked at him.

"Yeah! Let's see the abnormal speed!" The rest of the guild immediately chimed in, their thirst for adrenaline completely unsatisfied.

"You asked for it," Noah smirked.

His fingers danced across the holographic interface. A dense, golden Ethernano shield instantly deployed around the hull before turning completely invisible, aggressively streamlining the ship's aerodynamics. Simultaneously, secondary and tertiary magical propulsion arrays flared to life at the stern, and the long-range radar pushed outward to its maximum 500-kilometer radius to ensure a clear flight path.

"Here we go! Pay attention to the windows!" Noah shouted, slamming the throttle to its absolute maximum limit.

300 km/h.

400 km/h.

1000 km/h.

1100 km/h.

The acceleration was violent yet flawlessly dampened by the internal gravity arrays. Outside, the world devolved into a smeared, indistinct blur of color. The Fairy violently breached the upper atmosphere, soaring entirely above the primary cloud layer.

"WOOOOOOHOOOO!"

As the ship continuously accelerated, the lounge devolved into an absolute madhouse of cheering. The guild members couldn't tear their eyes away from the windows, their faces flushed with the sheer, intoxicating thrill of raw speed. Flashbulbs went off constantly as Sorano and the others frantically snapped photos, desperately trying to capture the impossible scenery.

"Brace yourselves! We're about to cross a new threshold!" Noah roared over the cheering.

Suddenly, a massive, conical cloud of dense white vapor violently materialized around the ship, completely engulfing the hull and blinding the panoramic windows.

"What's happening?!" someone shrieked, momentarily panicked by the sudden blindness.

"Don't worry, it's a completely normal physical phenomenon! It'll clear in a second!" Noah shouted back confidently.

Exactly as he predicted, the vapor cone—the physical manifestation of a sonic boom—dissipated just as quickly as it had formed.

When the windows cleared, the view outside had fundamentally changed.

They were flying so incredibly high that the distant horizon possessed a distinct, undeniable curvature. Above them, the sky had transitioned from pale blue into a deep, profound azure. Below them, the sprawling, endless sea of clouds appeared to be completely frozen, resembling a static, textured white carpet simply because the ship was moving too fast for the relative motion of the clouds to register.

"Wow... Look! Stars!" Yukino gasped, pointing a trembling finger up at the heavens.

The guild looked up. Through the deep, atmospheric blue, they could clearly see the brilliant, glittering pinpricks of stars—a sight normally impossible during the daytime.

"SO FAST! THIS IS AMAZING!" Natsu roared, unable to contain himself. He sprinted laps around the lounge. He skidded to a halt right next to Noah's chair. "This is insane! We're flying this fast, and I don't feel a single vibration! It's completely smooth!"

"That's exactly why the engineering took so long," Noah smiled, keeping a firm grip on the stick. "To sustain this kind of velocity, the ship requires absolute structural integrity and highly advanced aerodynamic shielding. If the hull wasn't perfectly shielded, the atmospheric pressure and friction would tear the ship to shreds before we even reached this speed. Furthermore, if I hadn't perfected the internal inertial dampeners, your Dragon Slayer senses would be so violently overwhelmed you'd all be puking your guts out right now."

"Did we... did we just break the sound barrier?" Ultear asked, stepping up behind the captain's chair, her voice laced with profound awe. The rest of the lounge instantly fell silent, straining to hear Noah's answer.

"We did. We are currently cruising at one thousand three hundred kilometers per hour. We are officially supersonic," Noah confirmed. He tapped the console, projecting a massive, holographic digital speedometer in the very center of the lounge.

The bright, glowing numbers proudly displayed: 1,300 km/h.

"Woah..."

A collective gasp swept through the room. They stared at the impossible numbers floating in the air, then looked back out at the curvature of the earth and the daytime stars. It was difficult to fully process that they were hurtling through the sky faster than sound itself.

But the sheer, indisputable proof was right outside the window.

"YEAAAAAHHH!"

Unable to contain the overwhelming rush of emotion, the guild simply surrendered to the thrill. They cheered, laughed, and celebrated, absolutely losing themselves in the unprecedented, magical miracle their family had built.

~~~

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