"Obliviation, imbibition, deliverance; can any of you tell me what these words have in common?" the tall and bushy-bearded magic history teacher asked, his tone almost bordering on the lines of making his question turn into a rhetorical one.

  Lizu raised a hand, to which the teacher called on her with a hand wave. "They're names which belong to some of the Stigmai?"

  "Indeed, Stigmai; as the name implies, a stigmai is an existence that is the sole thing capable of bestowing a stigma upon others. For the most part, magic or abilities that are obtainable from receiving a stigma can range from magic that can be recreated using normal means; on exceptions, they can be alternate or mutated versions of existing magic that are effectively impractical to recreate. Rarely, Stigmai can possess a stigma that goes beyond the current understanding of magic and allow for some truly world-changing potential."

  The M.history teacher carried on with his lecture, going over the many catalogued methods for receiving normal stigmas and how the best place to find information on it is from a slate on the W.I.S.N. (World Intersecting Slate Network). While the teacher went on and on, a certain noble girl's interest in what he had to say began to slip further and further from the front of her mind.

  Yuuvia mentally yawned, her expression the perfect visage of an attentive student and a fair lady of a noble.

  Given she was who she was, Yuuvia felt no real need to pay attention that closely to the lesson, since the early lessons of this particular part of the subject wouldn't be relevant to her.

  The noble girl could hardly focus on the current material of the magic history class, as she began to recall the message imparted to the class during homeroom, words she had taken to heart.

  "You'll be heading to a nearby dungeon called Gelatomb Dungeon as your first dive," Alureino explained calmly, speaking with a voice full of relief as no outlandish nonsense had occurred in the morning. "And, when you arrive, you'll be put into parties of two by the adventurer instructor who shall be present at the dungeon when he gives you a rundown of your task. And no, I don't know which of you will be paired up together."

  Out of the daydream, Yuuvia fist pumped under her desk, trying her best to hide her excitement at the news that the class would be going to be assigned into duos for the dungeon dive. "Yosh, this is unbelievable, the chance to team up with Prince Myhail. What are the chances... one out of eleven, that's around ten, no nine something. Heh~."

  Her reminiscence of the news from a few hours ago continued to play on her mind, keeping it fresh, so her excitement never faded. The effort on her part to keep the scene clear as day managed to elicit a physical reaction from her: her cheeks turning faintly pink from a building feeling within herself.

  "Failing to pay attention will cost you, brat," the male voice in Yuuvia's head said teasingly, once again rearing his theoretical head into the forefront of the girl's mind, breaking her attention on her daydream. His sweet, yet somehow condescending, tone snapped the girl out of her daydream. She mentally pictured herself scowling at a golden silhouette of a man sitting at a tea party table, not allowing herself to do so physically, as not to draw attention to herself.

  "Shush, Hlyswo, you have a lot of nerves to interrupt my fantasising, it's not every day the chance to team up with someone so influential comes my way," Yuuvia grumbled mentally, chiding and politely admonishing the voice to the point he'd dismissively roll his eyes if he were using his physical form in that very moment.

  However, the following morning arrived, and with it the supposed fabled day for the bratty noble. In front of her stood the entrance to Gelatomb Dungeon: a very large smoothstone sculpture of a dumpling-shaped slime with a large open mouth that served as the entryway. She could already picture it, the prince gallantly defending her while she didn't have to lift a finger to defend herself.

  But, as she stood with her fellow academy students in front of the security gate for the Gelatomb Dungeon, something Yuuvia never dreamed of occurred; instead of the idealised infantilization that had gradually escalated into a full-blown delusion of romantic grandeur, Yuuvia was graced by two pieces of truely heartbreaking news: the instructor had done the darndest think of partying Myhail up with someone else, some purple haired boy with hair that would make a mop blush was one of those news.

  "I... but... Prince Myhail...," Yuuvia mumbled weakly, heartbroken, voice so soft it was barely above a whisper that not even the people right next to her could hear. She didn't want the disservice of being able to think; it was like some force majeure had swooped in to steal all the excitement she'd built up over the prior day.

  She was left in such a hazy mental state that when everyone split up into their duos and entered the dungeon, she just sort of waddled in aimlessly with them.

  With her eyes unfocused, desperate, and lost, Yuuvia felt her very will to live slip through her fingers and the indescribable urge to collapse onto her knees growing more tempting by the second. As she held up her hands, she reached to the far-off ceiling of the dungeon, looking for any kind of reaction from a higher power to soothe her dismay.

  The other piece of news that wrecked her soul, body, and mind all at once, to the point it even overshadowed the fact she didn't get partnered up with Myhail: she had the misfortune, in her personally motivated opinion, of being partnered up with Inkaro. It was utterly unthinkable; instead of a dashing adventure with the prince of her admiration, she was functionally shafted into babysitting a guy who couldn't use any combat or strong magic in his position.

  Or so she believed, given he didn't do any magic during the entrance exam's magic application test.

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

  The only thing keeping the noble girl from completely losing it was that Inkaro's knowledge of magical things seemed to rival that of Lizu, so at least he was not a total burden.

  Yuuvia uttered perfunctorily, "This cannot be real... how did this happen! Why were we partnered up?"

  "Because the partners were random?" Inkaro suggested, presuming the girl wasn't all that keen on being partnered up with a guy, as he peered at the grey bricks that made up the dungeon's wall, wondering what its composite was comprised of.

  "That's not what I meant by that," as she weakly side-eyed Inkaro and added, "I was referring... why am I even wasting my breath explaining myself, it doesn't matter any more.". She sagged her shoulders, still hung up on not getting to dungeon dive with the prince deep down, but defeatedly gave up on it as she itched her cheek with deflated grace. "So our tasks are: collect eight thousand watts worth of slime mana cores, find a D-Ranked treasure, and obtain one of the dungeon's achievement tokens. Great...."

  Inkaro nodded calmly, "Right, that is, and based on Morilore's calculations, we'd need to gather around seventy from the normal slimes of the upper levels."

  "Urrg, what? Why? Why do....". She paused her impending rant before it even began, slowly turning her head as she clocked something in her mind. "Mori-who?"

  "Lizu said it's better to refrain from answering those sorts of questions," Inkaro asked cheerfully as he walked on without a care in the world, excluding the current academic tasks at hand.

  Yuuvia, unlike the walking Inkaro, forced her pace to an unmoving halt, feeling a sudden, unyielding urge to scream at the top of her lungs: not out of any sort of fear but from the kind of sensation upon learning something so secretive it feels illegal. Naturally, she was unable to keep her question to herself and aggressively blurted out in shock, "You two have a kid?"

  Inkaro found himself bringing himself to a halt as well as he looked over his shoulder cautiously: "It's not in the way you're thinking... if you mean the..."

  "Of course I mean in THAT way, how else does a baby get made?!" Yuuvia yelled in a hushed voice, the reddness of her face slowly creeping up and spreading to the rest of her face as the idea of her classmates being a couple became ever more prevalent in her mind. "What, are you suggesting else... now that I think about it, a kid being good at maths to do calculations that quickly wouldn't make sense... if you did have a kid, they'd only be what two?"

  As he watched her spiral and devolve into a rambling mess, Inkaro peered around, feeling the tiniest bit of guilt for Yuuvia's current state, as he ensured no prying ears were nearby. "...How'd she say it...? Oh yeah. Ahem, if you cool your jets, I'll explain things to you in the simplest way possible."

  Dropping her tone as she turned a calculating gaze to the guy, Yuuvia lowly uttered, "Go on."

  But before he could go on with explaining where his party member got the wrong idea, a certain grimoire, known for her glorious quirk for loving the brat aesthetic, stuck some of her book-bound body from Inkaro's hood, eyeing the bratty target with her crown-shaped accessory as a stand-in eye. "Father, you are functionally and objectively incapable of completing such a task, and I said it was only an estimate, since the amount of mana stored in any given mana core isn't a constant."

  Yuuvia could only allow her mind to function for a brief few seconds more before going utterly blank, finding her words lost for the moment from the oddly familiar voice's appearance, along with its amalgam-ish traits of people she knows she'd heard somewhere before.

  Then it hit her, the baby thing was clearly not the case; the talking grimoire was most likely the thing Inkaro was referring to, and he had simply given the grimoire a human-sounding name. "Ooh, you were referring to a magical device. Ha, to think I made such a grave error as to believe something so absurd as Lizuranti having a kid."

  Although shaky, Yuuvia's tone of voice displayed a clear way of relief, not that Inkaro could really blame her for feeling unease: after all, it was most likely her first time doing a proper dungeon dive.

  However, the sentient grimoire, spurred on by the playback of Lizu getting defensive and clarifying herself from the night prior, currently playing on their syntax-crafted mind, felt a similar feeling that Inkaro does when he needs to clarify the incorrect information: so she did.

  Bursting forth from the Crown to True Embodiment with the fury befitting millions of angry bees, minus the symphony of irate buzzing, Morilore got right up in Yuuvia's face, startling the noble girl so badly she almost lost her footing from the sentient grimoire's mana body with both the proximity and sheer intensity behind Morilore's eyes. "Morilore is so much more than a simple 'm.a.g.i.c.a.l d.e.v.i.c.e' you pompous hindrance to my programming."

  Inkaro and Yuuvia, both equally confused at the speaker-found-outburst, befuddledly peered at one another: one wondering if what Morilore said was true, while the other wondered where Morilore got off on talking to her in such a way that reminded her of Lizu.

  Reaching out a hand and plucking at her collar, Inkaro pulled Morilore away from Yuuvia before a cat-on-cyber-cat-fight could break out. And, with the girmoire's puppetted mana body extracted from causing Yuuvia any more strife, Inkaro finally had a chance to ask his question to her. "Is she actually doing that? Is it because of her magical attributes?"

  While dangling like a hapless kitten in the grasp of its mother after getting caught causing mischief, Morilore swivelled her head in the vague direction of Inkaro's face, doing so with enough rigid movements that she could have been mistaken for an old-school family restaurant animatronic. "Negative, her amplification affinity isn't the cause; it's because she's just such prime noble-type bratty girl data that I can't possibly will myself to allocate all my processing power to environmental analytics and calculations. I am obligated to glean at least twenty minutes of observation from her to satisfy my syntax"

  "... Is she insulting me? I can't tell."

  Finding Yuuvia's question the faintest bit endearing, Inkaro half-heartedly chuckled in embarrassment: "There's no need to-."

  Inkaro suddenly lurched forward as Morilore effortlessly broke free from her creator's clutches and intentionally slammed face-first into the guy. He found a tightness forming in his chest.

  Allocating most of his willpower to keep himself conscious, Inkaro surmised the cause of the sensation boiled down to him being exposed for having a gravitation towards bratty attitudes in front of someone who wasn't Lizu, but mainly from Morilore latching onto him and bear-hugging his chest with a passion to put the binding force of atoms to shame. The grimoire would be dammed if her creator showed any affection toward someone whom she identified as her mother's rival.

  "Given I- she likes bratty attitudes and is insistent on replicating such demeanours, it's probably the highest compliment she could manifest if she is calling someone a brat."