User blog comment:FairyRaven/Fairy Tail Chapter 427: Pitched Underground Battle, Review and Commentary/@comment-5303512-20150406115839/@comment-87.202.73.50-20150406210110

Given the way that Happy behaves and not having warned Lucy about this, i bet that nothing happened to Natsu ( physically wise ). Also, i don't believe that something happend to Natsu and Happy is ignorant. Now, something else. Gray said that the Avatar dudes were not strong enough to defeat Natsu. Gray hasn' t seen Natsu for 1 year so he doesn't know how strong he is right now. This leads me to believe that Gray said that by judging how strong Natsu was pre timeskip. This means that the 3 noobs could be foderized by Natsy pre timeskip, so they were not that strong to begin with. Natsu 1 shotted BS. Mashima cannot just introduce chars stronger than BS like that.