Chapter 104: Auto-Parry

Uriel stood on the mattress, a half-meter goose-down pillow raised over his head.

All three girls stared at him. Nobody moved. Nobody could decode what had just happened.

"Ahem."

He shifted the pillow from his right hand to his left and began improvising at speed.

"Don't mistake this for casual recreation. Combat without mana — relying purely on physical ability — is the most direct stress test of your base fighting instincts. A pillow shares more in common with close-range melee weapons than you'd think. You three." He let his gaze sweep across them with deliberate authority. "How's your hand-to-hand training been lately?"

That landed.

Lumina and Fenria's eyes lit up simultaneously.

The confusion cleared from Lumina's face like fog burning off. She sat up straighter, released her hair, and her voice slid back into its usual composed register. "I see. Simulating close-quarters combat with mana suppressed — that would expose gaps in physical technique that regular magic-heavy training tends to conceal. The Scribe's methodology remains characteristically unconventional."

Fenria had heard the word combat and was already upright, pillow in hand, tail sweeping hard left and right. "Fighting! I want to fight!"

Only Kira reacted differently.

The corner of her mouth pulled down, almost imperceptibly. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. Her entire face read deflated. The expression was gone in under a second — fast enough that nobody else in the room could have caught it.

Uriel caught it.

She said nothing. She walked in quietly and took up a position at the foot of the bed.

"Right then." Uriel turned toward the foot of the bed, where Galatina still stood with her hands pressed together at her cheek, watching everything with serene amusement. He let a grin surface. "Rules are simple. Four versus one. We all go after the Witch. Everyone, attack."

Nobody moved immediately. Their eyes jumped between Uriel and Galatina.

Lumina spoke first. "Attack the Witch?"

"This is training." Uriel kept his face neutral. "She's the strongest opponent available. Highest learning curve. Unless." He let the pause sit for exactly one second. "You're scared."

Fenria launched herself at Galatina before the sentence finished.

The pillow connected with Galatina's raised forearm with a solid, muffled thump. She let out a soft oh my and caught the second one — Lumina had angled her throw from the flank, completely without warning, zero sportsmanship. The third pillow impacted the back of her head with clean precision. Kira, from the foot of the bed, arm extended, face blank.

Uriel threw his own pillow into the chaos somewhere in the middle, whether as covering fire or a cheap shot remaining strategically ambiguous.

The king suite descended into total war. Feathers drifted through the air.

What followed was less of a training exercise and more of a localized natural disaster. Pillows redistributed themselves across all available surfaces. Fenria went off the bed onto the carpet and then somehow ended up halfway under the frame. Kira took a pillow directly to the face during the general melee — friendly fire from Lumina, confirmed after the fact. Uriel maintained a policy of maximum opportunism, grabbing whatever landed near him and throwing it at whoever was convenient.

Galatina laughed through all of it. Fully, genuinely, like she was the same age as everyone else in the room — which formed a deeply strange contrast with the sound of pillows impacting people at significant velocity.

The four challengers eventually ran out of gas. They collapsed across the bed in various states of disarray. Nobody remembered to turn the light off. Nobody pulled a blanket over themselves. Their mother did both, moving quietly around the room in the dark.

---

Uriel woke up to warmth and dampness soaking into his sleeve.

He blinked his eyes open.

Kira had his arm in a full grip, face buried against his sleeve, hair demolished into a complete bird's nest, bangs pointing in four different directions to reveal a sleeping face that was entirely, deeply peaceful. She was smiling. Whatever she was dreaming about, she had committed to it fully.

The actual problem was the drool. A small, transparent pool had soaked through the fabric of his sleeve and was still expanding.

He craned his neck toward the foot of the bed. Fenria had rotated a full one-eighty degrees. Her head was buried in the pillow pile. Both feet hung off the edge of the mattress. She was flat on her back with one leg crossed over the other, tail flopped loosely across her stomach — the sleeping posture of someone who had simply stopped functioning mid-collapse. Lumina was curled on her side at the far left edge of the mattress, back to everyone, spine as straight as when she'd fallen asleep, only her hair spread out across the pillow.

The other side of the bed was empty. The blanket had been folded and placed at the foot. The pillows were stacked neatly on top. Galatina was gone, and had been for an unknown amount of time.

Uriel tested pulling his arm free from Kira's grip. Made it approximately two centimeters.

She made a sound.

"One more time," she mumbled, and tightened her hold.

Hearing that absolute bombshell, he gave up. He closed his eyes. He went back to sleep.

---

When he opened his eyes again, the bed was empty except for him.

A tray sat on the nightstand. Full breakfast. The fried egg had been made in a heart mold.

Galatina was seated on the edge of the chaise, watching him with an expression of entirely uncomplicated maternal warmth.

"Little Uri's awake. After last night’s big battle, is your lower back sore? Mom will rub it."

"...I'm fine." He pushed himself upright and started in on the breakfast.

"Where did everyone go?"

"Kira left early — said she had business operations to manage." Galatina counted on her fingers. "Lumina went out to run surveillance. She said the Kingdom has been making noise lately and she wants to keep an eye on things. Fenria is downstairs running physical conditioning with the Magical Girls."

Uriel nodded without comment. Witch Brigade ran itself. Everyone had their lane. He, the Scribe, was currently the least busy person in the building.

---

The top floor of the Golden Iris during the day was genuinely peaceful.

He found a spot, settled in with his notebook and a pen, and mostly stared out the window. Wrote a few lines. Crossed one out. Stared some more.

Witch Brigade's next strategic direction needed thinking through. He'd get to it.

When writing lost its appeal, he watched his mother work in the open kitchen — she hummed something unidentifiable while assembling pastry after pastry, hands moving with the unhurried confidence of someone who had made this specific dessert ten thousand times.

She also came down to the training room occasionally. Sparring partner was the official term. In practice, she stood in the center of the room and let the Magical Girls take turns throwing everything they had at her. They lined up, filed forward one by one, hands trembling, spellwork stumbling over itself on the way out. Uriel watched from the side with a blank face and found himself genuinely curious whether his mother had ever stubbed a toe, and how that compared to the present situation on the pain scale.

The whispering from the Magical Girls, meanwhile, had never stopped.

He wasn't doing anything. He was staring out a window. But their voices floated over anyway.

"The Scribe has been sitting by the window for thirty minutes without moving — he must be deep in some extraordinarily complex strategic calculation..."

"He just wrote three lines and crossed out two of them. He's probably revised the script several times already."

The next few days, the whole floor hummed with a specific flavor of collective delusion.

He shuffled into the common room half-asleep to find water, and caught two of them whispering: "Look at that exhaustion — he must have been up all night managing a Cult threat."

He went downstairs for a walk and came back to find the story had evolved: "Personally collecting field intelligence — probably neutralized a few Cult operatives while he was at it."

Uriel carried his food tray back to his room, closed the door, and pressed his forehead flat against the wood.

These girls were going to chip away the last shreds of his sanity, one deranged headcanon at a time.

He made a decision.

This can't continue. I need to address the actual problem directly and put the bed situation to rest once and for all.

---

On the fourth morning, he waited until Lumina, Fenria, and Kira had all left. Then he took Galatina by the hand, pulled her to the corner sofa in the common room, and sat her down.

"Mom. I need to talk to you about something."

Galatina straightened up immediately and waited, attentive.

Uriel's expression went very steady.

Perfect solution. Fight fire with fire.

He took both of her hands in his, looked her directly in the eyes, and deployed his ultimate technique without hesitation.

"Mom." His voice was clear and unhesitating, carrying the full, unguarded weight of four years of genuine feeling — with perhaps ten percent theatrical inflation on top. "There is no woman in this world more wonderful than you."

He held her gaze and pressed forward.

"You’re the only kind of woman I could ever want. If any future partner isn't as capable, as kind, as strong as you —" He shook his head slowly. "I could never fall in love with her."

A beat of silence.

After hearing that utterly shameless Oedipal declaration, Galatina's eyes went red. She reached up and pressed her fingers against the corner of one eye. She made a sound — somewhere between a sniffle and a held breath — and Uriel's chest tightened for exactly one second before he registered what was happening on her face.

She was smiling. A full, satisfied, deeply content smile.

"Mom understands." Her voice was soft and certain. "Mom understands completely."

Uriel exhaled internally.

Good. It worked.

Wait.

Understood WHAT exactly —

No. Wait. What does she think she understood. What route did this just unlock —

Galatina clapped her hands together once, sharp and decisive, and Uriel nearly went into cardiac arrest. She rose from the sofa, both fists raised at chest height, eyes radiating something that went well beyond bright.

"Leave it to me! Mom will make sure Lumina, Fenria, and Kira all develop into exceptionally accomplished women!"

Uriel did not follow the logic fast enough.

"Mom will personally guide them — combat, yes, but also cooking, household management, how to care for someone properly —" She was already moving toward the door, each step lighter than the last, practically walking on air. "All of them, raised to the same standard as Mom! And if little Uri has other girls he likes, they're welcome too!"

Uriel had just been executed by his own ultimate technique.

She disappeared through the door, still talking to herself — "Where do I begin... Lumina's combat is excellent but her cooking still needs work... Fenria has the physical foundation but could use some polish on etiquette... Kira is too shy, she needs more one-on-one time with little Uri..."

The door swung shut behind her.

The common room was very quiet.

Uriel sat on the sofa.

K.O.