Bound By Hate (Gale) {Book 1 of the "Bound" Series}

1: The Dragon Slayer

 I yawned as I watched the clouds above me slowly drift by. The setting sun had turned the sky a brilliant orange color, and the clouds appeared almost pink as the wind carried them away. I had been lazily watching them from my comfortable place on the grass for nearly an hour. It's been awfully quiet today. Usually by now Master Makarov would have given me an assignment.

“Levy!” The sound of my teammates' voices instantly perked me up. Hopefully a job has come in for the three of us!

“Hey, Jet! Hey, Droy!” I smiled, standing up to greet them. “Did Master assign us a job?”

“Yeah!” Droy grinned, excitedly. “It's a really big one, too!”

“Oh yeah? How much?” I asked, beginning to feel excited as well. It had been over a week since our last assignment, so I was eager to get back to work. Laying around all the time got boring extremely fast, so I had been ready for an assignment for a few days.

“Thirty million Jewel!” Jet told me with the biggest smile I had ever seen on his face.

“Thirty million?!” I gasped, staring at them with wide eyes. “Master usually only gives jobs that big to the S-Class hunters!”

“They are all out of town for the next few days, and Master wanted this taken care of immediately,” Droy said.

“Lucky us,” I chuckled. “So, what type of job is it?” For thirty million Jewel, I don't really care what it is! I smiled to myself, thinking of all the books I could buy with that much money.

“A Dragon Slayer,” Jet smiled.

“What?!” I exclaimed, incredulously.

A long time ago, a type of demon existed known as the “dragon”. They were the most powerful of all the demon species. As a way to stop these beasts from destroying the world, demon slayers created a new type of demon in which to fight them: the dragon slayer. These dangerously powerful new demons were made by fusing the power of a dragon to a human demon hunter.

Once turned into a dragon slayer, the hunter had to control the dragon's power inside them, and learn to harness it in order to fight with it. As with all power, this came with a great risk. If used wrongly, the power of a dragon slayer could become tainted, causing them to become more demon than human—also known as “defective”. In the cases where this happened, it was the duty of hunters to destroy the defective dragon slayer.

As the dragons died out over the years, so did the use of this dangerous technique. The dragon slayers that remained had mostly joined various hunter organizations where they were watched closely while they took part in normal hunter activities. Fairy Tail was lucky enough to have three dragon slayers as members: Laxus Dreyer, Wendy Marvel, and Natsu Dragneel.

Some defective dragon slayers have managed to evade the hunters council over the years, and are among the most feared and dangerous demons out there. So much so that even other demons were afraid of them! When hunting a dragon slayer, organizations usually sent large teams to deal with them—usually of about five or six extremely skilled hunters.

To the council's knowledge, there were only seven remaining dragon slayers. Five belonged to organizations, and one was being held as a prisoner by the hunters council. The only unaccounted for dragon slayer was defective, and was one of the most powerful dragon slayers on existence. Part of the first group of hunters to ever be turned into dragon slayers (known as first generation dragon slayers), he contained powers that could only be matched by another dragon slayer. He has been given the name “Black Steel Gajeel”—the iron dragon slayer.