Unbeknownst to the very relieved Laeticia, her two unavailable partners had just summoned their courage and strength to embark on an epic, dangerous quest to resolve the curse that had befallen them.

 The location? Their own house. The target? Baiyi’s very own Mage Tower.

 “Everyone, I’ll hold your hand!” Mia said, extending her hands to her two younger sisters as a physical reminder that they would stick together no matter the challenges…

 She froze at the sight of what was passed as her hands: two snowball-like puffs. It hit her once more that she had now become a Mia plushie; part of her thought that she was incredibly cute but was embarrassed that she had no fingers to hold anything at all.

 “Maybe we should be the one holding your hand,” Bai Vye said, speaking far more quickly than her actual movement would allow. She reached out her hand in a very stilted, mechanical fashion until she barely held onto Mia’s puffball-hand.

 She tried to grab hold of Bai Yuu but realized she could not grip her at all. Since becoming a paper doll, Bai Yuu’s figurine-like palm could not close around the girl’s paper-thin body.

 Meanwhile, Noirciel was standing by their side, giving her a supportive and motivating cheer. “You go, girls! Good luck!”

 She wanted to join the sisters at first, but her current chibi form forbade her from moving regularly. For starters, her head was way heavier than her feet, while her legs were disproportionately short and stout. She could not go a few steps without tripping and yowling, and though that may be a staple of “kawaii-ness”, it made her a total burden for an adventure.

 Thus, Noirciel decided that she would help best by staying within the mansion with all the other maids — who had all turned into clay dolls — and waited for Mia’s good news.

 “Don’t you worry! There are very few things in this world that Dad doesn’t have a contingency plan for in his office. Even if this were one of those things, we could at least contact him from there. He will come and save us!” Mia promised as confidently as she could.

 With that, the three sisters began their quest.

 The route it took from the mansion to the lab was usually a few-minutes-walk, but this was not a usual walk this time. Mia could not stride because of her short legs, Bai Vye moved like a mannikin, and Bai Yuu’s feet would leave the ground if her action were a little too swift. Under their new conditions, even walking became an operation demanding utmost care and attention.

 Despite her own pickle, the only thing on Mia’s mind was Bai Yin. “You don’t think our little sister is in danger, do you?”

 “Remember what Dad told us? This world would never hurt us. It can’t; so there’s nothing to worry about.” Surprisingly, it was the youngest sister of the group who came to comfort her sister.

 “Ohh, but she must be frightened! I shouldn’t have been so harsh, should I? If I hadn’t been, this wouldn’t have happened,” Mia said, her tone filled with guilt.

 ‘Too harsh? I’ll fix it for you: you mean “too coddling“. She didn’t even need to spread honey on her own toasts,’ Bai Vye grumbled wordlessly.

 Unlike her younger sisters, Bai Vye spent her childhood not as a princess in the royal residence but as a typical fairy growing up in the fairy’s village upon her mother’s insistence. Although she was not left wanting affection and care, her upbringing was still a mile less privileged and pampered than her sisters. Besides, she inherited her mother’s vivacity and alacrity. She was no stranger to playing rough with woodland animals like unicorns and sabercat cubs.

 Then when Baiyi brought her home to begin formal schooling, her status as his firstborn daughter entailed the best education and expectations. These experiences shaped her into becoming the most promising heir to the throne.

 In comparison, Bai Yuu lived in a markedly more privileged environment since birth, but she had an incredibly austere mother as a counterbalance. The Warrior proved herself to be even more heavy-handed and ramrod than Baiyi was; coupled such a strict upbringing with Bai Yuu’s natural flintiness inherited from her mother, she was the very definition of an obedient, zero-trouble daughter.

 Bai Yin, however, went through none of these. Her mother was also a womanchild who did not care to discipline herself nor her daughter, hence planting the seed for today’s misfortune.

 ‘Maybe I bear some of the responsibilities for what happened today too,’ Bai Vye thought quietly. ‘I have my fair share of duty as the firstborn, after all…’

 The three sisters finally took a total of half an hour to finish a few-minutes-walk to Baiyi’s lab. No longer a basement similar to the one back in Isythre, Baiyi’s lab was now a medieval-styled mage tower, boasting an aesthetic that was incredibly rare in the New Empire. That was not the only change; nowadays, his lab was off-limited to everyone without his explicit permission. Even people who once held a free-pass, like Mia and Tisdale, were barred on the grounds that dangers and doom lurk at every corner.

 Bai Yin’s transgression when she was half her current age resulted in one of the most horrifying beatings the girls had ever seen. It scarred the girls enough that none of them had ever gotten within the perimeter of the mage tower ever since.

 “W-we’re not gonna get wrecked for what we’re about to do, r-right?” Bai Yuu whispered in fear as she stood before the door of the mage tower. Nailed on the dead center was the mage tower’s insignia: a giant feather-duster.

 “Are you sure we can break into the lab at all? I know Dad set up an excess of barriers and security after Little Yin’s trouble,” Bai Vye said, visibly worried.

 “I still remember a few spells up in my sleeves, let me try them on the barriers and see how they work,” Mia said.

 Baiyi had not homeschooled any of his daughters’ magic personally. Instead, he signed them up to a private institution to somewhat give them a sense of normal upbringing. Their magical training would have to wait until they were a bit older. Similarly, the Fairy had not taught her daughter how to shoot while the Warrior eschewed passing her martial arts prowess to Bai Yuu, leaving the Assassin as the only parent who passed some of her skills to her daughter. Though, to be fair, that womanchild aimed to give her daughter a leg up in a game of hide-and-seek; who would have known things could turn out like this?

 Mia, too, had not used magic since she had emigrated to the New World. Baiyi no longer pressured her to train, and any spell she needed to cast during Mass was done with a swish of the magical wand-shaped Arbiter’s Right. Mia could live comfortably even if the only life skill she had were “acting cute”, so she predictably chose to slack off. Little did she know that she would need to rely on magic today!

 “I’ve heard the stories, Big Sister Mia. They say you’re a powerful sorcerer who had rescued the fairies and an entire metropolis. Is that true?” A thought popped into Bai Vye’s mind.

 “Well, to be very accurate, it was mostly Sharkie. I didn’t do a lot,” Mia sheepishly said. She used to have a myriad of adventures with Baiyi and more frequently than not found herself in epic, larger-than-life, and, sometimes, close-to-losing-life situations; these experiences should have reasonably made her a seasoned veteran. Yet Mia was feeling none of the battlefield-honed confidence but a sea of anxiety. Was it because Baiyi, the source of her security, was not with her? Or was her physical age, frozen at twelve, affecting her mind?

Whatever the source of her nervousness was, Mia spent quite some time just to remember a fraction of her long-buried spell reserve. When the words rolled out of her tongue, she pooled her mana into her puffball-hand and waved at the door, casting a Detection Spell.

 Nothing happened.

 “Did I misremember the incantation? I don’t think so… Okay, let me try again,” Mia muttered to herself, shaking her head in confusion before trying again.

 There was still nothing; not even a formation nor runes appeared at the tail of Mia’s chant. No matter how wildly she flayed her hands around or pranced as though she was trying kawaii the door open, the mage tower remained close.

 “No. No, no, no… Where could it have gone wrong?” Mia could feel herself swelling with tears, but her beady, plushie-eyes were dry.

 “Maybe it’s because of your body?” Bai Yuu wondered.

 “You mean… I really am just a plushie?” Mia pouted her lips. “But, Sharkie is a plushie too, and it’s so powerful. So why am I any different?”

 The answer was, of course, because a Mia was just fundamentally weaker than a shark.

 “Now what do we do?” Mia turned to her sisters.

 “We could always just… knock on the door,” Bai Vye said.

 “No way! What if the spell enchanted on this door knocked us out?” Mia argued.

 “I don’t think that would happen,” Bai Yuu said pensively. “Contrary to the rumors on the internet, Dad isn’t a sadist who delights in abusing us. There’s no way he would cast any spell that could hurt us.”

 Her conjecture stunned Mia for a while before it convinced her enough to take a swift stand. “You’re right. I’m going to knock right now; the two you stay behind me. If there’s any danger, I want both of you to run and don’t look back!”

 Before her sisters could react to her heroic speech, she strutted toward the door, extender her puffball-hand, and rapped on the door.

 Thump. Thump. Thump.

 Nothing happened.

 “Why doesn’t anything that should happen ever happens?!” Mia murmured, increasing her strength so that her knock became a shove.

 The door creaked open to their surprise, revealing a bright, spacious complex that looked like a town square. Three gigantic stone pillars stood in the center as though they were skyscrapers. Formations that eluded the three sisters’ understanding were carved on its granite surface.

 “Wait. So… There has never been any spell on the door?” Bai Yuu remarked loudly as she glanced at the feather-duster insignia hanging on the door. “Dad thinks we won’t ever enter his lab for no reason, so he eschewed those measures after all, isn’t it?”

 “So should we?” Bai Vye asked.

 “Let’s go. It doesn’t seem like it’s dangerous in here,” Mia answered, squaring her shoulders and setting her back straight before marching forward.

 She was cognizant that the mage tower was much more spacious than its appearance suggested. Baiyi had used both space-contortion and space-folding techniques to create a building that looked neither tall nor large but was, in truth, a capacious, cavernous labyrinth.

 Admittedly, entering Baiyi’s lab without any knowledge or preparation was to beg to be lost in the complex. Desperate times, however, pressed the sisters to look for desperate measures.

 Mia had barely walked to the square when the formations engraved on the stone pillars suddenly lit up.