The group welcomed Aura as a new member, and they had a nice dinner together to celebrate it. Afterward, Maya and Sophia took their usual bath before getting ready to sleep.

"It's my turn to use your lap, right?" The cat-girl was talking about their sleeping arrangement. "Hurry up and lie down already~!"

"Hmm..." Sophia then alternatingly looked between the two wolves. "Aura... let's assume I want to use your side as a pillow for tonight, what would you say? How are my chances?"

"I don't particularly mind. Why, though?"

"Because you're so incredibly fluffy, and your fur's so nice to the touch!"

"Thank you very much. I'm quite proud of it, actually. Wait, how do you know how my fur feels?"

"A-Ah... When we found you, while time was still stopped... Maya got a little excited about your fur, and I ended up also touching it because she was praising it so much..."

"Hey! It was you! You're the one who buried her face deep into the fur!" The cat-girl complained. "It did feel nice, though."

"You two sure are an... interesting couple." The female wolf wasn't sure how to react. "Well, I still don't mind. Feel free to get comfortable."

"Yay! Thank you very much!" Feeling happy, Sophia immediately snuggled against Aura's side with a relaxed expression. "So fluffy~!"

"You're so spoiled." While Maya said so, she laid down and got comfortable on the tiger-girl's lap with the exact same expression.

"You both are." Fen could only roll his eyes.

Thanks to the supreme comfiness of Aura's fur, Sophia needed not even five minutes to fall asleep. Having a similar opinion about the tiger-girl's lap, Maya didn't need much longer, either, leaving the two wolves on their own together.

"These girls are something else..." Aura looked at her side.

"That's for sure. They usually use me to sleep, so it's nothing new."

"Oh? Jealous?"

"N-Not really..." He turned his head away.

"Ahaha, you've become quite the softie, huh?"

"Oh, shut up!"

"Ehehe~. Well, I might like this new side of yours."

"I'm not sure if I should be happy now..." Fen had some difficulties accepting this compliment. "I'm getting old. Becoming docile comes with age."

"It's only been 200 years since we last met, though?"

"I was just messing around." The two's sense of time was slightly different from the norm. "No... After you, uh, left, as I said before, I was really bored... That surely had an effect on me. Combined with our pushy Sophia here, which I ended up taking care of... I calmed down. In a way, at least. You have to constantly watch and keep her in check, after all."

"You totally are her father, huh?"

"..."

"Papa~." She was enjoying this very much.

"C-Could you not? Bad enough Maya implied the same..."

"Oh?" Aura was curious about that.

"Well... she talked about her feelings for Sophia with me of all people before... and I may have gotten a little overprotective, netting that retort from her, as well."

"Ahaha, that's great! The ferocious Fenrid became a doting dad. I didn't see that one coming."

"Were you always like this?"

"Whatever do you mean?"

"I don't remember you being this... playful." Fen remembered her being a bit more serious in the past.

"Thanks to my temporary loss of memory, I lived the last 200 years completely free, and I had tons of fun. I've become a lot more cheerful, I guess?"

"I see..."

"Do you like the old me better?"

"Hmm... No, I think it's good."

"Great." She looked relieved. "I like the new softie, daddy Fen, too."

"A-Again, could you not...?"

"Ehehe~. Even though it's only two or something years since I remembered… Still, I really missed this."

"What do you mean?"

"Us talking the night away."

"Ahh, yeah." Fen agreed. "Though our topics were vastly different back then. We mainly tried to invent new magic, after all."

"That's true."

"But, yes, I missed this, too. For the past 200 years, that is." Unfortunately, Fen never lost his memory.

"..." She wasn't sure what to reply.

"Say, Aura... are you really here?" He paused for a moment. "This isn't some sort of cruel dream, is it?"

"I'm back, and I'm here to stay."

"Thank you..."

----------------

The two chatted for a while longer but eventually turned in for the night as well. On the following day, after breakfast, Sophia and Aura were together and already up to no good.

"Alright, let's try out some ridiculous magic!"

"Let's do it!"

"Fen..."

"Maya..." Cat and wolf were awkwardly looking at each other.

"I'm not sure if like this pairing..."

"Funny, I was just thinking the exact same."

"Okay, what's your most impressive magic, my dear otherworldler." Aura was really excited.

"Hmm... I guess that would be my time stopping, but honestly, I don't want to use it too often... As cool as it is, it's at least twice as scary..."

"Definitely!" Maya instantly agreed from the sidelines.

"Other than that, let's see... I showed you my storage magic during dinner already... Oh, my darkness magic is really cool~." Her voice suddenly got a nasty undertone.

"No!" Fen and Maya's voices overlapped, trying to suppress her S-tendencies. Maya wasn't one to talk when it came to that, but Sophia's dark magic was something else entirely.

"I'm not really a fan of dark magic... too creepy."

"T-Thank goodness..."

"Aww..." Sophia seemed disappointed. "The sun's already long up... light magic's no fun now... Well, I guess it's my signature blue fire then, I guess."

"Blue fire...?"

"Yeah, this." Sophia opened her palm, and her usual oddly-colored flame appeared.

"Ohh... Wait, is that a complete combustion of pure magic power you're doing there?!"

"Pretty much. Eh...? You actually know what this is? Even I'm not sure what I'm doing…" The tiger-girl had not seen this reply coming.

"More or less. I've heard about it in the demon capital. They were trying to get it done there, too, but never got this far. I didn't know pure magic power could burn with a blue flame. A fairly light white was the hottest I ever saw. How high is the oxygen concentration you're letting it burn with to reach full combustion?" Aura seemed pretty knowledgeable about it.

"Huh? Doesn't every flame burn blue when in an area with enough oxygen?" Sophia didn't know about the properties of fire to that extent.

"It also depends on the fuel, as far as I heard."

"Oh, it seems like I mixed that up... I never went in that deep into the topic after all. Eh...? Wait a moment, Aura, you know what oxygen is?"

"Roughly. It's part of the air, and it's what you actually need to breathe in the right mixture with other gases to survive as the body needs it for some kind of function that I forgot the name of... Much like fire, which needs it to burn."

"Wow, the demons sure are advanced." Sophia had gotten even more impressed by them.

"Yeah, they have a bunch of interesting stuff going on."

"Sounds like it'll be a fun visit in the future."

"By the way, how destructive is that blue flame?" The female wolf came back to the topic.

"Hmm... Well, I used it in an explosion that turned a plain into a crater... I can also probably burn down an entire forest in a matter of seconds." While she said so, the girl found an innocent tree nearby and instantly burned it to nothingness.

"Oho, we definitely have to go dragon hunting together in the future!"

"Urgh..." That wasn't Sophia's intention.

"I look forward to it~."

----------------

Afterward, the group continued their travels towards the beastfolk capital once more, but after around two hours, Sophia suddenly stopped.

"Ah..."

"Stop that already!" Maya instantly retorted, being tired of her ominous reactions.

"No, this one of these rare times where it's a positive 'Ah'."

"Really...?" She naturally was dubious.

"Yeah. I adjusted my detection magic to include the beastfolk again. I'm getting, I don't know... many tens of thousands of reactions. I think I'm detecting the edge of the capital now."

"Oh, you're right." Aura concentrated for a second and nodded. "My range's a bit higher, and even I don't see the end yet."

"Finally! It feels like we're traveling for a year already!" The tiger-girl was getting excited.

"It's not nearly been that much, though." Fen corrected her.

"Minor details! Urgh... 45 to 50 Kilometers? With Maya's and mine speed... Whatever, it's way too long! Ahh... now that I'm detecting the capital, I want to reach it instantly!" She was getting impatient.

"Want a ride?" Fen gestured at his back. "Aura and I should reach the capital in a fraction of that."

"Really?!"

"I don't mind."

"Me neither." Both wolves were okay with it.

"Thank you very much!" Sophia was happy. "Alright, since I used Aura to sleep last night, I'll ride on Fen to even it out. Are you okay with that, Maya?"

"Sure, she's the fluffier one, after all. No offense, Fen."

"None taken."

----------------

The couple climbed on the two's backs, and they began their high-speed travel. Not even 20 minutes passed before the group arrived at a hill from where almost the whole capital of the beastfolk could be overlooked from.

"Wow!"

"So huge!" The cat and the tiger were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the capital.

"It really has grown a lot since the last time."

"Yeah, it's been a while, but it's way more impressive than I would've thought." The two wolves had been there before, but it was in the distant past when the capital was just a tiny village, incomparable from the metropolis they were looking at now.

It was a gigantic circular city, being multiple kilometers in diameter. Right in the middle of it, there was a huge gray and white castle with many towers and some extra buildings with a greenish roof. All around it was a vast and colorful garden, and the area was protected by a brownish-red wall with a single gate for entrance and exit.

Outside the wall, there was a huge green patch with smaller palaces in the four cardinal directions. Between those castles, many dozens of mansion-like buildings with fancy gardens could be identified. From the look of it, this was the noble layer. Around this area, there, too, was spanning a wall all around it—this time with a gate near every one of the four palaces.

The last and outer layer of the capital was by far the biggest and made up for at least 90% of the whole city. There were next to no green patches because the place was filled with many thousands of houses of various sizes. Almost every one of them was orderly build and had a uniformly red roof, making for a well-thought-out look. The entrance to the capital was handled by four large gates in every cardinal direction. From the biggest main gate led a huge road all the way to the castle in the innermost layer, while the streets from the other three gates terminated at the smaller palaces in the middle layer. Many other roads obviously connected every part of the capital with each other, though.

Every gate was packed with people, and especially the main one was so busy that it was impossible to count just how many people were going in and out. Coincidentally, this main gate was also the one closest to the group. After the two wolves turned to a more reasonable size, they headed towards it, blissfully unaware of what kind of uproar they're going to cause.