Fairy Tail: Swallow the Fire

41. Erza's Perspective

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Shattered.

Lost.

And betrayed.

All these emotions I carried with me for the past four years after I woke up on that beach after being cast out of the tower. That fall, that baptism from chains washed me of the burden of slavery and allowed me to see freedom once more, but new chains, forged and fastened from the bonds of betrayal choked out any joy I was allowed to feel for the first time in years.

Any air that I could suck into my lungs was dedicated to screaming into the night sky.

I had fought, and clawed out the chance for everyone to be free, rallying them all at the age of ten to take back our lives! But it had all been for nothing.

I didn't know what to do. So I just walked. I walked barefoot in tattered rags that barely qualified as a dress to the only place I could even think about.

My feet were numb, my heart was hollow, and the bit of feeling left in my body by the time I reached Fairy Tail was the constant stinging in my missing right eye caused by the sea salt. I had been fortunate enough to have been given a clean eyepatch for it, as well as a sack of food for the travelling by kind strangers, but that was all I had to my name.

I told Master Makarov, a short old man with a bushy moustache and an odd hat, everything. The extremely cheerful and grandfatherly demeanour that he maintains all the time faded as I did, being replaced with one of mourning and sadness.

He had taken me almost immediately afterwards to meet with Porlyusica, a pink-haired and cranky hermit who lived on her own in the woods near Magnolia.

She had managed to give me a new eye, and the operation and kindness had made me cry almost immediately upon seeing myself in the reflection. However, something became immediately obvious. I was only able to cry out of my actual eye.

Porlyusica had offered to remedy the problem and redo everything, but I wiped my tears and told her that I was fine, that I had already cried over half of my tears and that I was fine with crying the remaining half through one eye only.

But just because I was fine with how I was crying didn't mean I was ready to cry again.

I was distant, and still am for the most part, from almost everyone in the guild. I had taken up wearing armour all the time, only ever taking it off when I slept and bathed, just because I wanted to be able to fight should I never need to.

This desire to always be prepared expanded to my magic of choice, Requip.

Requip is a fairly common magic, but not one often utilised as a combative element. It allows you to store weapons and armour in a small pocket dimension that you can sort through with a small magic screen, and whenever you need to use something from that pocket dimension you can summon it and immediately make use of it.

My version of Requip in particular is Requip: The Knight, which allows me to immediately equip armour and clothing onto myself without the need to physically change into them.

I have dedicated everything to expanding the storage of my Requip as much as I could, and I have spent every Jewel I could earn to buy armour and weapons to fill it. The amount of armour and weapons I've bought has become so immense that I can't even store it all in Requip anymore, and have resorted to renting out two rooms from Fairy Hills just to store everything.

This need to protect myself even extended to how I've come to interact with others.

I started as the quiet girl who never talked to anyone until one day a boy named Gray caught me crying by the river. I grew closer to him and a few other kids our age, but since I was the eldest I took it upon myself to teach them correct behaviour. Anything that could be dangerous or incorrect I tried to correct, and this extended to adults and teens as well. This kept going until one day when a rather abrasive girl named Mirajane joined the guild with her siblings.