Casa and Larissa were hiding in a bush in the city surrounding the Great Library. The cobble roads were eternally clean, and kids ran past them playing tag with magically-charged sticks and stones. Hmm? Magically-charged sticks and stones!?

“Wait, is that safe—”

“Shh, don’t mind it.” Larissa winked, and she rushed from their hidey place to another corner. Casa tactically stumbled after her.

Larissa, native to the Kingdom of Toth, had always liked the Library City. She came from a last-stop village just 10 kilometers down Westwards Highway, so it wasn’t too hard to just walk the way here. The stalls were always different colors when she came, and the roads felt so free that she could run together with the other kids.

She was older now, though—not that she didn’t get up to other antics instead.

Today’s designated antic was following Miki and Zanderfon on their date.

“Ehehe, reminds me of when I first met them~” Larissa remarked. Zanderfon, some 20 meters away, was buying ice cream from a cart for himself and Miki.

“When you first met them—huh, you were following them? Stalker? Is Larissa Stalker?”

“N-no! I’m talking about the ice cream!”

“Ice cream? Ohhh come to think of it, you mentioned spilling Miki’s ice cream at some point huh?” Casa asked. “It’s kinda amazing that you’re still friends with her after that:—a noble and a commoner! Oh the fantasy!”

“W-what, a village girl can’t have friends in high places?!”

“Heh, what a showoff~”

“W-wuhh—mmph!”

Casa quickly cupped Larissa’s mouth and pulled her out of sight.

“They almost saw us!”

Casa hid the both of them behind a corner where a rose bush flourished. Just then, Larissa started muffling something. If there was such a thing as squinting with your ears, Casa was doing just that.

“Mmphhm! Mmmm—mPH! Ph vmh phmp mmPmmhm!” (W-wah! Huuhh—OH! We should find high ground!)

“What?”

“MmphhmphppHmhH!” (Sotheycan’tseeus!)

“Ohh, you’re right! Let’s go!”

Naturally, they chose to break into one of the city’s clock towers.

There were twelve of them equally spaced in a circle around the city, and they each, corresponding to their time, rang and emanated a pillar of light that could be seen from miles around.

Because of their prominence, there were almost no structures taller than them.

The one they went to was about the appearance of a light tower, though much taller, and there was a bell hanging from the top.

Guards flanked either side of the only door at its base. It was a simple door that could fit an honest caretaker—or two dishonest ones, though trenchcoating probably wouldn’t work?

“Hmm, how are we gonna get in?” Casa put a finger to her cheek.

Larissa snickered. “Behold.”

“N-no way?!”

The difference between Photocopy Magic and Forgery Magic was paper-thin.

The two academy students boldly walked up to the guards, who were at once alarmed and confused, at least until Larissa handed them the “Tour Permit.”

“Huh, I don’t remember the captain saying anything about this,” one guard remarked.

“Hmm, wanna call it in?” the other guard added.

Before the operation went bust, Larissa produced another paper. A letter this time—from the said captain.

“H-huh? W-well, that really is his signature, isn’t it?”

“Hmm, yeah. Still, wouldn’t he need supervisory approval? Girl, he should have handed you a form about this big.”

He showed the size with his hands. Meanwhile, Casa was sweating bullets passing a ridiculous amount of information to Larissa’s Photocopy spell behind her back.

There’s really only so much you could do with a shredded form that you dug up from the trash and taped together. Not only that, but it was filled with a bunch of magical anti-forgery mechanisms that she didn’t even know existed, and she had to bypass all of those in real time!

Larissa, too, was sweating bullets. This was her first time to try and copy enchantments, and not just some ink on paper. Casa’s help was more than welcome—it would’ve been impossible otherwise—but it was still a fresh experience with an 80% chance of fumbling.

But fumble, somehow, she did not.

Somehow, they actually managed to forge military-grade security vellum.

It only took them two seconds of “Ahh ahaha~ it should be around here somewhere~” before Larissa produced a perfect security permit from nothing but fake, non-animal vellum. She handed it to the guards.

As soon as they took a look at it, however…

“T-this clearance level!”

“H-hey isn’t this a bit overkill!”

The guards had frozen white.

Tremble? Shake? No, they’d iced over.

Casa and Larissa were just relieved that their handiwork passed off as legit, but the guards’ reactions seemed a bit:… overblown. Larissa’s curiosity won out after a few seconds, and she huddled up next to one of the guards while saying “H-huh, I never really took a look at it, come to think of it~”

The moment she looked at it with the guards, she also froze white.

“Hm? Larissa?”

Casa went to her side and saw it too.

All involved: frozen white.

It was the Seal of the Royal Family of Toth.

One of the guards snapped out of it and produced a grey disk. “W-we have to be sure!” he said, moving the disk underneath the permit while his buddy was still frozen holding it.

There was a response, and runes of many colors hovered over the permit.

“M-my god, it’s real…”

Neither Casa nor Larissa actually knew what they were copying.

After all, they just stuffed all the shreddings in a bag, and Casa enchanted a roll of tape and threw it in. She shook the bag around with a glint in her eye while chanting “Chaos is order~ Order is chaos~”

The documents came out in one piece after that—mostly.

“A-anyway, l-let’s g-goo! C-casaa!”

“Y-yeeaahh! F-for our e-education!”

And that’s how they walked into the clock tower unimpeded.

Meanwhile, Miki and Zanderfon moved on to the public park, each one carrying a gallon-tub of ice cream.

They were about to have a serious conversation. As cooler heads should prevail, the temperature had to be kept low somehow.

“Is here okay?” Zanderfon asked, placing his tub of ice cream on the bench.

“Mm.” Miki placed hers on the bench as well.

They sat down. In front of them was a narrow brick footpath, and beyond that was a pond. Some ducks floated about, sometimes disappearing into the water, and resurfacing someplace else. There were few people in the park, otherwise.

“About before…” Zanderfon started.

Miki placed a finger on his lips, slowly shaking her head left and right.

“My fault.”

—But how could that be? He pulled her hand away from his face. “I sheltered you for so long! How could it be your f—oomp, mm, tasty…”

Miki pulled the spoon out of his mouth and stuck it back in the ice cream tub. It was mint chocolate, by the way.

“…I hurt Casa. Zanderfon didn’t hurt Casa. Zanderfon and Casa became friends, and I… I—mmmphh”

Before tears could crawl out of her eyes, Zanderfon shoveled in a spoonful of half-vanilla, half-coffee chocolate-chip ice cream. Tears crawled out of her eyes regardless, but for a different reason this time.

She really, really liked vanilla and coffee together.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I didn’t notice your feelings. So, actually! It’s my fa—mmmppphh!”

Meanwhile, Casa and Larissa were salivating as they watched this scene through a spyglass from some miles away, from their vantage point on the clock tower.

“C-casa, maybe we should—”

“No! I mean, I know! I want some, too! But we have an obligation!”

Casa balled her fist. They needed to see this through!

Miki and Zanderfon froze, but not from brain freeze.

“There’s two of them…” Zanderfon whispered. He and Miki communicated in peculiar, relationship-specific glances that couldn’t possibly be interpreted by an outsider.

Of course, they absolutely knew who the two spies were. Miki had their exact locations, so she and Zanderfon agreed to execute Plan T.

Wink wink blink nudge nudge sneeze.

Of course, this wouldn’t stop their make-up date. They got up from the bench and resumed walking.

“I think we can agree that we’re both at fault,” Zanderfon continued. “Ultimately, we’re both just tasting the consequences of your past. All I can do is support you, like I always have.”

“Mm.”

Zanderfon didn’t say anything more.

“…Zanderfon.”

“Yes, Miki?”

“…dissatisfied?”

“H-huh? N-no, well—lmmphh?!”

It was not a gentle spoonful of ice cream. There was an element of interrogation inlaid upon the voluminous glob of coldness—something that prevented Zanderfon from tasting the sweetness that was supposed to be there.

He looked Miki in the eyes, and her eyes said Truth, truth, give me the truth. Hence, he resigned to those eyes. He finished eating the ice cream.

“I just… sometimes wish you would trust me for different reasons, too…”

Miki’s head snapped towards him. He was startled, but upon seeing her puppy eyes, he scrambled to scoop up as much ice cream as he could and stuff it in her mouth.

He was too late, however, and she was tearing up while experiencing vanilla-coffee goodness.

“N-not like that!” Zanderfon said as he frantically shook his head. “It’s just! You know—you trust me because I helped you back then…”

“…reason not good enough?”

Zanderfon was taking on damage-over-time.

“I-I don’t think it’s wrong! It’s just—guh, there’s no better way to put this.”

He stopped and placed his hands on Miki’s shoulders, making her face him.

“I don’t want you to love me because you’re thankful. Be thankful all you want, and love me all you want, but neither should be a reason for the other. Neither shmphmm?”

Miki had enough and shoved a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. Then, taking his face between her palms, she said…

“…Zanderfon reliable, I fell once. Zanderfon kind and honest, I fell twice.”

Elsewhere, two girls were excitedly chanting “Kiss! Kiss!”

Then, as the two were about to kiss:…

“Last one,” Miki said.

Zanderfon drew a wand and stuck a piece of chalk on the end. He drew a circle, about a meter in diameter, where Miki was pointing.

The two spies in the tower were confused. Was this some sort of love ritual? Were the two of them under some sort of literal spell called Love? The Love Magic they knew wasn’t innocent at all:—unless Miki and Zanderfon were daring and:—oh no.

“Alright, it’s done,” Zanderfon said.

Miki poured a tiny amount of magic into the chalk circle, making it part of her Index.

She and Zanderfon had had their date, touring the city in a small circle that surrounded the spies’ vantage point.

Zanderfon’s chalk circle was the last of five that they had secretly drawn, all equally-spaced on the circumference of a circle whose center was the suspect clock tower.

Miki and Zanderfon held hands. They stared into each other’s eyes, then nodded.

Spatial information and supplementary magic flowed from Miki into Zanderfon: the absolute positions of all five circles, and the relative position of the clock tower to each one. By having five such circles equally spaced and equally far from the clock tower, errors in precision in targeting the clock tower could be reduced to within a millimeter.

Once Zanderfon grasped the world in the eyes of Miki’s magic, he yanked on an invisible cord between him and all the five chalk circles.

The world distorted around each of the circles, but the one in front of them distorted the most. It was like a spatial lens that made the space of all five circles coincide and become a single point, but Zanderfon was not done.

By suddenly collapsing all five distortions at once, a spatial explosion is generated, and propagates throughout the world. It wasn’t such an apocalyptic thing, though:—an ordinary person wouldn’t notice it, and even sensitive mages would just feel a tingling sensation. Such mages regularly experience tingling sensations, though, so it was easily dismissable.

With five spatial explosions propagating at once, they would all meet in the center and, momentarily, create a new gash in space.

Hence, momentarily, five interconnected spaces would become six.

He stood in front of the portal and blew upon it five different spatial collapse spells, each timed to detonate just microseconds apart. At the same time, he stuck his hands straight into the portal.

The spells collapsed the portals.

He yanked out two spies.

The portals disappeared.

Casa and Larissa were on their butts and terribly confused.

“Huh? Where are we? I thought I just tripped and:—wow, have I actually become pretty bad at standing?”

“Casaa, I’m scared~”

Larissa yanked on Casa’s sleeve. Casa looked to her, who pointed to the hovering figures above them.

They looked up to see the faces of Miki and Zanderfon, being very annoyed while eating ice cream at a ferocious rate.

Casa and Larissa got stuck in an infinite loop of trying to hide behind the other’s shoulder, to which Miki and Zanderfon watched on, mildly bemused.