Hiro Mashima (Jap: 真島ヒロ) is a Japanese manga artist.
He gained success with his first serial Rave, published in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine from 1999 to 2005. His best-selling work, Fairy Tail, published in the same magazine from 2006 to 2017, became one of the best-selling manga series with over 72 million copies in print. Mashima began the currently ongoing Edens Zero in 2018.
Fairy Tail won the Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga in 2009, and Mashima was given the Harvey Awards International Spotlight award in 2017 and the Fauve Special Award at the 2018 Angoulême International Comics Festival.
This volume was so much fun! The dream team separates as each of them goes after a lacrima forcing the 5 dragons gods into their evil dragon form. We mainly follow Natsu and Lucy, and their fights were so entertaining the volume just flew by.
Lucy’s fight itself didn't make her show off any of her strength (once again), but I absolutely loved that Brandish came back for her. Their relationship and reluctant friendship is so precious to me, especially with how the fight ended. It felt a bit rushed to me, but it was still a very sweet moment. It’s obvious the end is coming soon, as every loose end is slowly being tied up.
I expected Natsu to struggle a bit more against the Fire and Flame members, but this one fight was a bit of a letdown. I did find very sweet the friendship Happy is forming with Misfortune, and it added a very cute moment in all this fighting.
And of course the ending of the last chapter had me SCREAMING. Mashima truly knows how to hit us with the nostalgia because this is such a fun idea for a fight.
The true Dragon King Festival started with new player Dark wizard Faris who wants to destroy both dragons and humans vs Fire God Ingnia's guild who wants to destroy all humans vs Fairy Tail guild fighting for the humans.