User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 538: When the Flame Goes Out, Review/@comment-7418318-20170602104813

I was kind of hoping for a reverse on Haru and Elie, with Lucy being the one to temporarily disappear, but oh well... it's a shounen series so of course it has to be Natsu who does the disappearing act himself... unless of course he wobbled of toward Acno. That would be one huge asshole move by Natsu and a huge troll move by Mashim though...

Now for the ravines of time... it could of course be the obvious and the split in mid-air is Acnologia breaking out again, but I'll go with another possibility first.

The title of next chapter is "World Collapse". That could mean that rather than Acnologia coming back, that rip opening could be another kind of apocalypse happening. Maybe now that Zeref and his creations are disappearing, the Eclipse Gate is also vanishing. But instead of the Valley of Time disappearing with it, instead the rift in time is destabilising and threatening to swallow the entire world (hmm... Endless?) and the final chapters show how the mages try (and eventually succeed in) preventing this from happening. Could be a scenario like the end of Final Fantasy 8 where multime points in time flow together to form some weird shit through which the protagonists have to travel... though with just 8 chapters left that seems a bit unlikely.

But back to the obvious and how it might be possible to defeat Acnologia with a minimum of asspull (which is a revised version of my theories from 2 days ago):

Since Acnologia in his Dragon form is still missing the left arm that Igneel tore off, but has both arms in his Human form, we know that wounds don't carry over between the forms. So my theory is that when Acnologia got sucked into the Ravines of Time (or maybe while he breaks out) his Dragon body was so badly mutilated that he can't do anyhting in it, so he is forced to stay in Human form.

But in Human form he does not have Dragon scales and thus he's far more vulnerable to at least physical attacks. Where before victory was impossible, this new weakness would give the Fiore mages a small fighting chance. Additionally losing his Dragon form that way might also have disrupted his ability to eat magic and leave him only highly resistant, but no longer immune to magic attacks. Or alternatively he might be vulnerable to specific kinds of magic, though this would probably have also applied to his prime condition if this turns out true. Space-time magic would be a prime candidate since that would retroactively explain how he was affected by Universe One... though that would mean that it would fall to the Celestial Spirit Mages, rather than the Dragon Slayers, to deal with Acnologia... unless Lucy can do Star Dresses on other people and not just herself.

Hmm... that could be potentially awesome in it's own right, to have Lucy clad the main cast into Star Dresses (or suits for the males). Maybe Loke/Natsu and Capricorn/Gray (or the other way around. These two are pretty obvious since they are unarmed close-combat specialized mages with unarmed close-combat based Spirits.

For Wendy I could imagine Aries, Scorpio or Cancer. Aries due to support+support (and kawaii), Cancer due to speed+speed and Scorpio because I think Wendy's air magic might sync well with his sands.

For Erza I imagine Taurus, since they both use weapons and brute strength.

And Lucy would probably use Sagitarius, which would allow her to stay at range while maintaining the Dresses and Suits of the others. It'd be beyond awesome if with this better overview over the battle situation, she would take charge and decide on tactics and formations... but that's probably just a pipe dream.