This arc is slightly less planned out, and I had a few potential ideas I could’ve gone with plus a fair bit of variation even within those ideas. I’ll list some of the others at the end, but here will be the summary for the main idea.
This arc would pick up soon after the end of the last arc. Juvia, having had a direct look at how to become a Saint, has advanced her Eye Magic to Saint level as well, allowing her to do things like ‘hear’ conversations from really far away by looking at the vibrations, as well as read minds to a limited extent by seeing thoughts. She’s also picked up a second magic for her second lattice – Gem Magic. This magic works a lot like DnD 5e magic in that each Gem she makes acts as single spell with a very discrete effect, and she can pour magic into the Gems to create that effect. She’d have a limited number of Gems though the specifics of that and the exact spells would have to be determined when I actually got to this arc.
While Juvia is improving her magic and messing around with monster hunting and Cana, Makarov and the rest of the Fiore powers have been trying to figure out what the hell Zeref is trying to do with the Great Hearts. They haven’t figured it out exactly, but evidence suggests that whatever it is, he thinks it’ll let him conquer the rest of the world.
This is obviously a Very Bad Thing and now everyone has to team up to stop him.
Most of Fairy Tail are sent out over Fiore along with the rest of the guilds to perform Exterminatus on any Dark Guilds and monsters in the country so that they don’t interfere with war efforts, as well as find Warrod and get him coordinating with the war efforts.
But if Zeref thinks he can take the Gods on, that means they probably want the other Gods on their side in the coming conflict.
To get Wolfheim ‘Law of the Jungle’ on their side, they send the strongest person they have on their side so that hopefully Wolfheim will respect their strength enough to listen. This person is Gildarts, and he goes gallivanting off into The Wild Lands to go find Wolfheim.
Getting Draculos on their side is much more difficult proposition. Boravia is heavily xenophobic and also racist towards anything that’s not some kind of undead or necromancer, taking anyone or anything not under those categories as either slaves or experimental subjects. This is an issue since everyone trustworthy is not undead or a necromancer, and they don’t want to send someone who will fight through all the undead as mass murder doesn’t really lend itself well to diplomacy.
Juvia, however, comes up with a fun little solution to this problem by turning all of her body except her skeleton into water, getting a spatial enchantment in her skull to put the water into, and then using her Sight and Gem Magics to pretend to be a lich.
Lich Juvia then goes off into Boravia where she faces a crap ton of moral conundrums, body horror, politics, and convincing people that she really is a lich that was in hiding for years and that’s why no one knows about her.
This path eventually leads her to Draculos (think Castlevania Dracula, not the Draculos from the show) who, being a God, figures out what’s going on with her instantly and threatens to throw her to his vampire lords if her reasoning for intruding on his domain isn’t satisfactory.
Juvia explains the Zeref possibly going for world domination situation as seriously as she can, though Draculos is pretty dismissive because, as it turns out, he was the first God and has seen and lived through all of the previous God conflicts and knows that Zeref can’t kill him, let alone all 3 of the other Gods.
He is, however, willing to entertain the thought, so he says he’ll be part of this alliance if Juvia can go into Alvarez and get conclusive proof as to what Zeref is trying to do.
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Juvia is quite unhappy with this since Alvarez is a xenophobic/xenocidal theocracy guarded by legions of superpowered demons, but when a God is staring you down and the mission depends on it, there isn’t much choice.
Juvia would then go on a bit of an adventure to find someone both willing and capable of getting her into Alvarez, eventually finding a ship captain who invented for himself the practice of Ship Magic – a holder-type magic revolving around building and controlling a ship.
Sailing into Alvarez is still a bit of a challenge, but Juvia and the captain manage, though at some point Juvia would make her best impression of a Lovecraftian horror to keep a bunch of Giants from attacking them.
Getting through Alvarez to figure out Zeref’s plans would be something of a heist mission that would involve getting Brandish to switch sides.
Juvia eventually succeeds and runs back towards Fiore just in time to see the armies of all 4 countries lined up and the Gods all up in the sky and trying to negotiate. Well, three of them are, Zeref just seems smug.
The Gods get increasingly more wary as Zeref’s smugness doesn’t seem to fade regardless of what they say until, eventually, Wolfheim decides to attack Zeref. Moving at speeds that far surpass Juvia’s ability to register them, he utterly annihilates Zeref.
Unfortunately, Zeref seemingly pops back into existence a moment later, none the worse for having been destroyed. He then reveals his plan to win – Acnologia.
Acnologia has one of the Great Hearts implanted in him which Zeref is using to puppet him around and use him as a weapon. The other Gods freeze as they realize that this means Zeref can actually win, after all, dragons are the only beings who are immune to the direct effects of a God’s powers and whose attacks can actually destroy a God.
Juvia, however, has been watching this. More specifically, she’s been using her Eye Magic to observe their powers and she figures out that Godhood is just the next logical step from becoming a Saint.
Where becoming a Saint involves connecting your lattice to your soul, becoming a God entails connecting your soul to the outside world via your lattice.
Juvia promptly does so and ascends to Godhood.
As she ascends, she realizes that there is a reason Gods are held separately from everyone else. Where mages rely on magical power and skill to perform supernatural feats, a God simply wills them to happen. There is no limit to their power within their domain (what was their magic before ascending) besides their imagination and they cannot die while any amount of their domain exists.
What ensues is a battle of appropriately apocalyptic proportions.
Juvia and Warrod focus on directly attacking Zeref while simultaneously splitting the continent into pieces and juggling those pieces around to keep them out of the way of Acnologia’s attacks and the attacks of the other Gods. Juvia also has to open massive holes in the ocean and move any water out of the way of Acnologia’s attacks as his attacks destroy anything they come into contact with, meaning that he could eventually destroy all of the water and kill Juvia.
Wolfheim focuses mostly on throwing rocks really hard and distracting Zeref as even a single one of Acnologia’s attacks landing on him would kill him since his Domain is his body.
Draculos uses his Life Draining abilities to directly counter Zeref’s Life Make abilities.
As the battle goes on and the continent is split into more and more pieces as Juvia and Warrod try to keep it from becoming collateral damage, Juvia realizes that they are losing. They’re all Gods so their stamina is infinite, but Zeref can harm them, while they can’t harm him – anytime they destroy his body he simply creates a new one.
As she fights, she tries desperately to think of a way to win, and eventually comes up with one. Using one of her Gems, she sends a telepathic message to Cana, before calling a halt to the fight in an attempt to negotiate.
Zeref agrees and they approach each other.
He asks what she thinks she can give him. In response, Juvia casts herself out of her body and into Zeref’s just as Brain once attempted on her.
Zeref, however, is a God. His body may not already be claimed by an Outsider, but nothing is capable of possessing a God. It is a fight for him to throw her off and into the Outside again, but in those few moments his soul was unstable – the few moments Juvia could still use her Eye Magic to see into the world of Earthland – she sees him take the full force of her Domain going supernova to his face.
With Earthland saved from Zeref Juvia is content to let herself drift off to her next great adventure.