In a matter of seconds, the trio had felled every single one of the slime minions with their relentless volley of non-overboard attacks and no new slimes came to the baron slime's slimy aid, courtesy of Yuuvia plastering a layer of ice on all the slime engravings. Despite being incapable of verbal speech, the rapid and violent tremors across the baron slime's wiggly form made it apparent how angered the trio's actions had made it. The baron slime's angry jiggling brought an odd sense of pride to Yuuvia, forcing her to sport a cutely twisted grin as she cheerfully turned her attention to Inkaro.

  "Care to partake in your part of the plan?" Yuuvia asked calmly, swishing the top of the Crescent of the Waxing Moon staff a little bit to shake some ice flakes off. Inkaro nodded his head lightly before dashing off, with G.Galore and Shadeful Tribute trailing behind him as the two grimoires kept a V-shaped formation in relation to their creator at all times.

  Dashing out from behind a pillar, Inkaro booked it straight for the stationary baron slime, which barely wobbled in response as multiple chain-like gelatin appendages sprouted out from its rippling body. As it aimed these dripping tendrils in the guy's direction, the ends of its raised chains wiggled and jiggled, contorting and morphing into the shade of reflective drills as they fully solidified. The display from the boss monster caught G.Galore's attention as she made a little beep of intrigue, so she allocated some of her available memory to simulating and replicating what the baron slime demonstrated.

  With an oddly realistic-sounding machine whirl, the baron slime pumped an excess volume of slime into the base of the drills, overfilling them until the connecting points burst, unleashing those gelatinous drills at wind-whistling speeds and right at Inkaro.

  Employing the movements of a professional breakdancer, Inkaro ducked and weaved around many of the flying jello drills that zoomed by and shattered upon colliding with the walls or pillars. The shrapnel of gelatin was flung about with wild abandon. Some of those flying solidified slime hurtled Yuuvia's way, but she easily avoided the attack by-products by bending her knees and effectively crouching as the slime flew overhead. Yuuvia sported a contentious grin, one emboldened by begrudging respect.

  As she watched the guy's choice of evasion method, Yuuvia weakly bit their lower lip: "Gosh, is he really so brazen as to be breakdancing? Perhaps I could add some dance of my own to my combat repot..repo....repertoire."

  For a moment, Yuuvia lost herself in the myriad of ways to incorporate dance into her, picturing herself using ballet to increase her glyth tuning efficiency, imagining it to be a sort of meditation thing. But the crackles of the coppery mist snapped her back to her senses, ending her impromptu brainstorming.

  Following a faint pat of her cheeks, Yuuvia got to work behind the pillar. She closed her eyes and focused her breath into short, practised bursts of focus.

  In her mind, she envisioned the glyph nodes and chains of her staff, getting clicks of connecting components from her staff as she began to rearrange them: "The thin needles won't work on a slime of that... density, I'll have to-"

  "Evade!" Inkaro called out.

  Not even bothering to look at the threat, Yuuvia shot her eyes open before instantly springing from her spot like a rabbit, moments before a fairly large chunk of solidified slime smashed into the spot she once stood upon.

  Like all the slime chunks before it, smaller shrapnel of small slime chunks flew right at her, so she dodged to the left. However, her focus was a little too focused on the mini slime projectiles coming her way, so she missed and failed to take into consideration her proximity to a brick pillar.

  The natural course of events followed.

  Yuuvia caught her foot on the base of a brick pillar, and she crunched up her lips, mustering every ounce of her conviction to not cry her heart out from the unbridled onslaught of agony seeping into her ankle and general foot area. She looked like she bit into a lemon heightened to the pinnacle of sourness. The permeating stinging only ramped up as she straightened her injured foot, forcing her to support herself against the very pillar she unintentionally kicked.

  Yuuvia, practically keeping her gaze raised away from her feet, almost subconsiously acting in a way to try to avoid acknowledging it. Just imagining how bad the damage was made her uncomfortable to the point she shuddered and squirmed in her skin, quivering in dread at the mental image alone, let alone experiencing the pain from before.

  The girl's face winced as she felt the pain return from putting a little pressure into her step: "I think I sprained my ankle earlier. Of all the times."

  Yuuvia took a step back, and then there was a fairly dry "plop" from under her foot. She closed her eyes with a stoic expression to boot, refusing to scream on the sole basis that her foot didn't hurt from being sprained anymore.

  However, she knew a plopping noise of any kind, and its timing with her prior action, could only mean one outcome: she'd stepped on a slime. A live one if she had to guess, seeing how the calm pressure was all encompassing around her left foot. If things couldn't get any worse, as she looked down to inspect the slime she stepped on, she groaned exhaustedly. It was the sort of sigh someone would let out after going at full steam all day, only to be told they left something behind the second they got home: the thing being their house keys.

  In Yuuvia's case, it was a fully opaque silvery slime, and given how Yuuvia was right near the slightly ajar entrance, she rightly assumed the slime was from outside the boss room. While distracted by the small slime, a slime drill barrelled right in front of her face and barely missed her. Naturally, it startled her. With flailing arms, she tripped over her own feet, knocking herself off balance and tumbling on the floor, falling right on her belly and resulting in her bouncing a few inches off the floor. As she landed on the floor without bouncing again, Yuuvia let out a pained groan, rubbing the impact zone where she landed on her tummy; she was uncharacteristically thankful to her metabolism for being ultra-fast, saving her from the embarrassing scene of vomiting all over the floor or something even worse.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Almost like it was called upon by the act of her falling over, the little silvery slime wobbled some more before shooting up Yuuvia's entire left leg. It moved with the smoothness of a sliding door, a sheen of light casting across a lake's surface, or a magnet hovering over a magnetised surface, as it set itself in place on her leg. The slime and Yuuvia shudder, for different reasons: the slime doing so as it made itself flush with the girl's skin, while the girl herself shuddered from having a sudden tight pressure applied to her leg.

  "He-guh? G-get off!" Yuuvia demanded, frantically swiping her left leg about in a vain and fruitless effort to deprive her leg of its slime cast helper. The slime did such a good job alleviating her pain that Yuuvia failed to notice the obvious fact she didn't feel pain in her left leg any more. It could've removed itself from this point, but refused to remove itself on the basis that Yuuvia subconsciously ordered it to continue acting like a cast; such a fact went over the girl's head in her panicked state of mind.

  Her protests of the slime's actions didn't go unnoticed by Inkaro as he made a detour from distracting the baron slime to check on her.

  While G.Galore kept the slime baron busy by encasing it in a dome of coppery mist, which the slime made no effort to touch, Inkaro dashed over to Yuuvia, only to be momentarily speechless by the girl's agitated parading and predicament.

  "Do you need help getting that off?" Inkaro asked puzzledly, picturing how the noble girl could've ended up with such a misplaced slime attached to her leg.

  Following her cheeks reddening, Yuuvia scoffed, not at the offer itself, but because Inkaro thought she was in a position where she would need help. It was a slight to her as a noble, not that she could blame him; she did feel like Inkaro was an in-the-moment, attentive sort of guy, who would rather deal with an issue on the spot instead of seeing if things would get better on their own.

  "Pa-lease, if I needed saving... I'd've called you, Inkaro." Although she said that, the lower half of Yuuvia's left leg was still firmly stuck in the clutches of the fairly small slime monster, like a football in size originally, and was steadily having the rest of her leg pulled into its slimy embrace in search of more injuries. "And, wipe that smug look off your face, I am not stuck, nor am I secretly enjoying how it feels...ah~."

  Inkaro tilted his head, wondering and somewhat convinced his teammate was hallucinating from dehydration or hunger; after all, with a fast metabolism comes a high sustenance requirement, or so he guessed using basic math.

  In the middle of his musings, his expression stayed fairly unchanged, remaining a fairly flat smile that could hardly be considered a smirk. "Is she getting delirious?"

  Inkaro tilted his head in the opposite direction, to which Yuuvia matched as she noticed him still standing around. Tilt his head to the right, she did the same. Tilt to the left, she did with extra vigour just to spite the guy, not that he noticed.

  Unlike Inkaro and still on the floor, Yuuvia peered around the side of the pillar to make sure Inkaro hadn't dispatched the slime to ensure he could fully focus on ensuring her safety. The thought did somehow stir up some feelings of gratitude and appreciation from within her core. But she wasn't about to go and say it out loud, so she settled for a more reserved and less pouty huff.

  "How did I end up being the deadweight and burden?" Yuuvia grumbled in frustration, lacking any hint of malice or disdain, and more along the lines of self-pity for her situation. With her mood in the dumps, Morilore slowly poked her grinning head out from G.Galore's accessory before zipping over to Yuuvia. As she got in the noble's face, Morilore's dress underwent a transformation in the colour department, switching from the emotionally neutral white to a snarky blonde in a panning fade effect.

  "So you have a crush on the prince, doust thou?" Morilore said cheekily out of the blue, speaking in a way that her snarkiness couldn't be overlooked in no uncertain terms. Yuuvia faintly hummed in frustration as she frowned and recoiled back a little, trying to put as much distance between herself and the oppressively obnoxious, ear-to-ear grinning Morilore, without retreating from the mana girl outright.

  "For the record, it's doest or dost not what yo-."

  Yuuvia's attempt to rectify Morilore's error in pronunciation was cut off by the harmonic beat from the bundled grimorie humanoid projection, most likely the sentient grimoire's version of a disapproving hum from pouting too hard.

  Morilore's dress turned from blonde to a deep pink before Morilore burst into particles like confetti that were soon sucked up back into the Crown of True Embodiment on G.Galore's grimoire body. G.Galore shuttered a little in the air, weakly fluttering towards Inkaro before collapsing into the guy's hands with a loud slap.

  Inkaro and Yuuvia looked at the unresponsive grimoire in Inkaro's hands, then at each other for a puzzling second, before going right back to eyeing G.Galore's unmoving form. Both were befuddled, both truly stumped by the sudden situation: one from a technical standpoint, while the other was wondering if she'd broken G.Galore and would be financially responsible if it were permanent.

  Slightly stunned, Inkaro could only mutter out, "That... is a first."

  "Her becoming unresponsive."

  "No... that's happened plenty of times."

  Keeping her head aimed at the grimoire, Yuuvia raised her glare to the grimoire's father, half chalking up Inkaro's response to mean that G.Galore not only speaks like a bratty child but also acts like one on occasion: "Then what is a first for her?"

  "Her going unresponsive from being corrected... must be a brat-related variable going over her cognitive capacity." Inkaro nodded his head as he thought it over, juggling between her expression value overflowing or her intake being the cause, before an entirely different train of thought derailed his original one: "Sooo... do you?"

  Yuuvia put on a deadpanned stare, maintaining direct eye contact with the guy for a brief moment, before deeply groaning: "I wouldn't say I do... I just you know... thought it would've been enchanting to go on an adventure with a prince. Fairy tale sort of endeavour, but... wait... G.Galore basically acts as your magic assistant, right?"

  Not following the girl's words, Inkaro stared down at the girl with lost puppy-dog-like eyes, making the girl bite her lip softly to stop herself from uttering the word cute.

  "Yeah. Why do you ask?"

  Almost impressed by the guy's sudden return of obliviousness, Yuuvia watched with conflicting feelings of satisfaction and concern, as Shadeful Tribute was sucked into the body of the baron slime: "So if she's out of commission, what happens to the spells she's controlling?"

  "Ah-." Inkaro blurted out before looking over his shoulder, seeing the situation the defenceless grimoire was in. A switch flipped in his mind. Like a thunderstorm breaking out, Inkaro snapped from normal mode to unnervingly serious as his eyes narrowed into a scowl: "I'm using my experimental magic now."

  Having misheard him somehow, Yuuvia thought Inkaro said he was going to get serious: "It's not that serious... wait, your what magic?"