Disembarking from him before Inkaro stored Mal-Co back into his Storage Golden Agate Type-41 curio, the trio sauntered their way towards Aunovile. With G.Galore hidden in her favourite resting spot, the Morilore trio returned to their haven within G.Galore's Crown to True Embodiment accessory, and Mal-Co stashed away, Inkaro and Co could enter the town without drawing attention. Although saying their arrival and passage through the town didn't draw a few eyes wouldn't be accurate. After all, a few town residents, who were particularly well versed in famous individuals, recognised Enetha, only to kid themselves for believing another country's princess would just be walking about without an entourage. The idea of Enetha being the real Enetha was especially hard for those people to believe with how the sight of Enetha sitting on Lizu's tail went in complete contrast to any of the little princess's public appearances.

  All of those happenings went unnoticed by Enetha, as she was still too preoccupied with deciding on who of her Mould Breaker chess pieces she'd be using today. She was also so focused on her decision that she barely paid any mind to the shape of her surroundings.

  Aunovile is a sizable town with a large, slightly wavy moat surrounding it. Its roads are wide, allowing for several transport vehicles or transport wagons to move side-by-side, and paved with light grey, square-cut marble tiles. The town's layout consists of all of the structurally and visually matching buildings being neatly organised into city-like blocks. Said buildings have grey marble walls for their first floors, while the storeys above the first are made from reinforced wood, and no building adjacent to another shares the same coat of paint.

  "From the quick bit of research I got from using the W.I.S.N is that this town's most frequented dungeon is one known primarily for possessing golem-like monsters. Sounds like the perfect place to obtain materials for Louailanye's golem body while searching for that magical anomaly, wouldn't you say, Inkaro?"

  "Indeed," Inkaro stated calmly before thinking over what the best monster to seek out, "I believe going for a wyven or a dragon golem would be the best options, that way we'll have collateral in the case of a failed attempt at making her metal body."

  Lizu faintly huffed at the guy's reasoning for his choice of target, knowing Inkaro was full of it, for the most part. So, she lightly nudged Inkaro in the side, while sporting a truly sneaky expression: "You're only saying something like that because you'd have ample supplies for your own creations, and I don't think collateral is the word you were looking for, you dumb cutie."

  Inkaro had not in the way of a response to that. Not that he'd want to. After all, Lizu had hit the nail on the coffin, so anything he could possibly say would only make Lizu's future teasing that much more potent.

  Inkaro knew it was fruitless, leading him to decide on not saying anything else as the trio arrived at their destination. At the centre of Aunovile is a large plaza that's shaped over two overlapping squares to create a type of eight-pointed star. Acting as the focal point of the plaza, and standing tall at half the height of the average height of the buildings surrounding it, is an obsidian structure which resembled an eastern shrine.

  Standing at the entrance of the dungeon, his purple direwolf ears twitched astutely, and Noaskou peered over his shoulders before lightly flicking his tail energetically.

  "Fancy running into you here," Noaskou mentioned in stern amusement as he fully turned to face Inkaro and co. His presence in front of a dungeon by his lonesome was certainly unexpected to say the least. Had Saruno been in the wolfy guy's hair, his appearance might've been more explainable, in Lizu's head anyway. Of the trio, Enetha was the most surprised at seeing the srulanoue in such an out-of-place location, given his personality.

  "Oh, Wolfgang," Enetha murmured, rather bluntly at that, despite her bluntness being entirely unintentional.

  Noaskou sharply flinched at the nickname, utterly displeased that abomination of a world Myendi concocted had found its weaselly way into Enetha's vocabulary: "That's not my name."

  Despite his protests of the name, Noaskou's subtly swishing tail didn't falter for a second; if anything, his tail actually picked up its pace to the point it could've been mistaken for a broom with how much loose dust he'd managed to kick up. Lizu especially found the thought of Noaskou being a sentient broom funny, enough so to use a little bit of memoria to sneak a peek at Inkaro's mind to see if he secretly agreed. However, her expectations were utterly snuffed out before even burning to life. In the guy's grimoire-obsessed head, such a mental image was lost on Inkaro, not so much as crossing his mind to the point Lizu had to question if he'd spent all his creative mental juices on Omens Befallen.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "I take it you're here because of the anomaly, Noaskou?" Lizu asked defeatedly, deciding talking to Noaskou was a more fruitful endeavour than trying to convince Inkaro something was amusing if he hadn't found it so in the first place.

  Noaskou nodded, apprechiatve Lizu had the decency to not use that forsakened nickname: "Not of my own volition, my father got a request from a friend, and I was the nearest to it. Seeing as you're here, I'd appreciate some backup to speed things up, so I can get back to my free time."

  With a threatening amount of unforeseen passion, Lizu stood at attention, like some sleeper agent protocol had been awakened in her mind at the mention of 'freetime.' It was certainly a sight to see Lizu acting like how her reputation would suggest, to Noaskou and Enetha at the very least. Inkaro was used to such abrupt shifts in energy output from Lizu.

  "You have my full support, fellow freetime connoisseur!" Lizu announced boldly and assertively as she shot up a triumphantly imposing thumbs up. The sheer assertiveness behind her voice almost hit Noaskou like a truck, leading to the world as a whole to suddenly be frozen on a temporal level as the guy acted on mostly instinct; had he not caught on in time, the guy might've not had enough time to pause time and give himself a breather. With everything around him shrouded in a muted, dark purple colouration, Noaskou took multiple heavy-handed breaths as to intake as much air as possible. He just had to wonder if this chest-squeezing feeling was what the other students were blabbering about when referring to Lizu and how she'd earned herself the nickname of Judgment Dragon.

  After a few extra laboured breaths, acting as a byproduct of activating his noble family's unique magic, Noaskou ended the impromptly activated timestop, allowing everything to return to its normal colouration and continue to move through time as normal.

  "Fascinating, I wonder how Shadeful Tribute's and the Time Noble Demon family's time magic differ on a foundational level," Inkaro muttered mentally, while pulling at his cheek to stifly his giddy smirk at seeing his counter timestop spell in Shadeful Tribute worked without issue. Lizu, still mentally connected to the guy via memoria, side-eyed Inkaro while mentally picturing herself with an awestruck expression so strong it left her mental self slack-jawed like a cartoon character.

  "You better not go and say that out loud, Inkaro! You'll give the guya heart attack if he knew you recreated his family's private magic," Lizu exclaimed mentally to Inkaro, before lightly jabbing the guy in the side. Inkaro barely budged from the strike. Lizu, on the other hand, tensed up as her face scrunched up in an unquestionably pained expression.

  "...Why are you reinforcing yourself so much?" The girl staggered, recoiling from a shuddering wave of pain as she slowly pulled her elbow away from Inkaro. Inkaro, still physically unfazed, lightly itched his forehead, perplexed: "I forgot to turn it off."

  "Of course you did...," Lizu grumbled as she wrapped her other arm around her injured elbow. Slowly, the initial spike of pain Lizu felt petered away, yet that phantom pain of the pain she'd caused herself was still enough to leave her plated dragon tail to bend and writhe against her conscious will. If anything, it made her want to howl at the top of her lungs; the pain was just that bad. But, given what happened the last time she'd scream in such a way, Lizu wasn't too eager to find out how a child her's outburst would compare to her current self. Somehow, the idea that her kid self might be stronger or her current self could have a stronger emotional outburst was both annoying to think about. Because how could someone be happy to know if an outburst from them as a kid packed more of a punch than their current self's attack magic?

  The thought filled Lizu with an irrational anger, leaving her squeezing her fingers into fists so tightly that they were redder than her blushing cheeks. It left her fiddling with the zipper of her charcoal grey fur hoodie, just barely reining in whatever feelings were simmering within her. Barely managing to keep her fingers on that zipper, Lizu struggled to do so but eventually managed to zip up her hoodie after several failed attempts to get the two metal bits at the bottom to click together. With herself more aerodynamic, Lizu did the motion for deeply exhaling, despite no air travelling through her, before marching into the dungeon.

  "Is she okay?" Noaskou asked as he saw a few sparks of various elemental elements escape through the gaps of Lizu's plated dragon horns. He only felt mildly concerned, having read about how dragolyte's biological magic can be influenced by strong emotions to the point that they can even leak out of their bodies unintentionally.

  Calmly tilting his head at hearing the question, Inkaro pondered over his response before he asked, "Physically or mentally?"

  "If you have to specify, I think I have my answer," the other guy remarked softly, already resigning and mentally stoking himself up for his current task at hand. It was bound to be a chore if his father figured it was safe for him to deal with. He and Inkaro follow after Lizu and Enetha without much delay.