The shadowy mass, mixed with purple memoria and giving off an eerie shimmer, slithered its little way over to the gang, with Noaskou and Lizu putting their dukes up in retaliation. They weren't about to be caught off guard by some dumb sphere, while Inkaro and Enetha were more preoccupied with the logistics of a sphere talking to bother mounting a defence of their own. Not so much as flinching, whatever that would've looked like, and showing a lack of acknowledgement of the two's reaction, it continued on its merry way until it was floating only a few feet away from the lot of them. The sound of a single clap of hands rang from the shadowy sphere, leaving a rippling wave of tiny spikes to shoot out, which got Inkaro thinking about those bar-like audiovisualers.

  [{As much of a delight getting to scuffling with you lot using my own hands would be, doing something like that again prematurely before Kotou and his 'buddies' have reach they're peaks and encounter the... huh? Oh, Myu, do you want to join in?]}

  Before long, the Stigmai of Nightmares had completely taken his attention off Inkaro and co, leading the swirling mass of shadows to disipate, deeming this Myu individual's satisfaction was the most important thing in the whole world. Whilst the two stigmai playfully and not-so-playfully bickered among themselves, it left Lizu to ponder aloud: "Who and wait did he say...?"

  [{... what's that Misty Myu?]}

  [... ... ... stop calling me that... also...]

  [{Shouldn't have said that to them? Breaking what? Come now, it isn't a spoiler if the observers have no context for-]}

  "How do you know Kaizu Ultima Strife's real name!" Enetha blurted out indignantly, yelling with a seemingly unprompted explosion of passion that only someone who'd been betrayed beyond their comprehension could've mustered. It was that or petty saltiness she was feeling, not that she would know the difference between the two feelings. Catching everyone off guard, whether they be friend or stigmai, no one, especially Lizu, were entirely sure if they were hearing things correctly. But it was so abrupt and out-of-pocket for the little princess that it had Lizu shrieking at the top of her lungs long enough for her soul to almost fully leave their body.

  Then there was silence, periodically interrupted by Lizu's echoing scream bounding off the large boss room's surfaces and doubling back to the origin point of utterance. Exhaustedly so, from its controller realising his error in choice of name dropping, the shadowy sphere slumped forward, morphing in such a way as to vaguely resemble a person slumping if squinted at.

  [{I see, no wonder Tiny Tiara felt so natural to call her, I'd already encountered her before, now me sticking around would be rather problematic. So... I'll be off, for now. Make sure to tell Awa... Paruneha, I said high, Myu]}

  "I thought I was following whatever they were going on about, but now I'm drawing blanks," Lizu remarked deflatedly, resembling an abandoned kitten at a pet shelter.

  Lizu wasn't sure if she should be happy or not: on one hand, the embodiment of nightmares hadn't manifested, but on the other, heart-shattering hand, she wouldn't get the chance to get any of her copies of Tales of the Skycloud's series signed by its protagonist. For shame, Lizu wallowed away, wishing for nothing more than to at least see the cloud dragon in the flesh and not through a memoria screen, at the very least.

  "Ditto," Noaskou said calmly, concurring on how, charitably putting it, nonsensical the conversation between the stigmai duo. Given he wasn't entirely sure what had transpired, to the point he considered if he could even give a non-nonsensical report, Noaskou clutched the rim of his direwolf-esque ear. Had the little princess been more right of mind, she might've concurred with the concuring around her in abound; but instead of doing something like that, Enetha was presently too peeved by the Stigmai of Nightmare exposing the secret identity for one of her Teulani Archipelago friends to care about anything other than struggling to keep her face from deviating beyond her usual emotionless mask. But even keeping her face in check was a task and a half, leaving her straining her face slightly and leaving her cheeks resembling someone in the middle of being flustered by a love confession.

  As he murmured away, Noaskou let his words somewhat spill from his mouth, allowing those around him to overhear. Sadly for Lizu, the relentless onslaught that was Noaskou's thought process had the dragolyte recoiling, like two negatively charged magnets, from unbridled disgust at hearing him talk so earnestly about such boring work. Sporting the face of someone who condemned the very notion of getting out of bed was a moral failing; Lizu felt the urge to gag at the thought.

  Lizu flickered her gaze towards Inkaro, hoping to find some refuge from her mental fatigue by seeing his face, before she exhaled in unsurprised disbelief at seeing the guy quietly muttering to himself, droning on and on about who knows what. At least it worked, in a distracting her from Noaskou's muttering sort of way. Although her mind had been purified from corruption, she hadn't the foggiest idea what string of words Inkaro was employing, Lizu knew at the very least that Inkaro talking to himself meant violence wouldn't be started by the grimoire reaper's hands.

  Muttering away whilst his eyes did little more than act like a set of pretty objects for Lizu to look at, with how blind he was being to the muted cyan clouds swirling about in front of him, Inkaro cupped his chin inquisitively. This continued ignorance didn't go over well with a certain stigmai who'd taken all the effort to talk to Inkaro, face to face, of course.

  "Oi," a young, distinctly contentious, and girly-voiced girl asked, drawing Inkaro's view down to where the muted cyan clouds had gathered. For a moment, all Inkaro could see was the vaguely humanoid silhouette standing right at his feet.

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  Before he could formulate a response, the memoria-made individual aggressively slammed her dragony tail against the dungeon floor, leaving a sizeable tail-shaped crater in her wake as her outershell of memoria shattered just as easily, easier than the dungeon if anything. Lizu whistled at the feat, only to snap to her senses as something, akin to putting the final puzzle piece in place, kicked in her mind. The protagonist of her favourite history series was right in front of her: The Cloud Dragon.

  [Myulinana "Misty" is an albino white-skinned, slightly short-kid-sized, humanoid stigmai with the appearance of an eleven-year-old human girl; she has knee-low and unkempt, mute cyan hair with glowing cyan ends that resemble arrow heads. Muted cyan eyes. A chonky, seventeen-feet-long, cyan dragon tail with muted cyan plating that are each shaped like arrow heads pointing to the tip of her tail. And, sharp fangs]

  [Myu is wearing a cyan, kimono-styled hoodie with muted cyan and white rope cuff around its hood. White fur shorts. And, muted cyan thigh-high stockings]

  The girl-looking stigmai wasted no time in confirming the thing that had piqued her interest, by glaring right at the guy's chest, poignantly focused on the spot where his beating heart lay under the surface. "How pitiable."

  That was all she cared to say.

  Myu turned on her heel, moving with a smoothness that mimicked a fictionless environment, seemingly made possible by the small clump of muted cyan cloud under her foot. As she twirled her whole body, Myu snaked her tail in such a way as if to wrap it around Inkaro, but stopped herself from doing so by leaving a five-inch gap around him. She quickly rescinded her chonky tail from the guy, doing so purely to get Lizu to stop glaring at her like a maniac. Little did she know the eyes Lizu had were those of a fangirl.

  "How interesting, your voice still sounds like how Gamai's did in her energy form," Inkaro whispered aloud, heeding no mind for the previous acts of the cloud dragon, even as said dragon's visual befuddlement was anything but subtle: an arriving train in the middle of the night would have more subtlety than Myu had.

  "That's what you're... deciding to focus on?" Myu murmured, defeated, voice now sounding right at home in the waking world.

  "What's this about Inkaro being worth pitying?" Lizu inquired, darting right up to the cloud dragon. Myu could be her favourite historical figure all she wanted, but insinuating something was wrong with Inkaro was off limits, mainly because the guy would take such comments at face value. That would then lead to a repetitive cycle of Inkaro not getting that he was being insulted until the person trying to upset Inkaro would be left comatose by the sheer Inkaroness being hammered against their skull. A truly heartbreaking fate for anyone unacustomed and unprepared, unlike Lizu.

  Raising a hand to aid in her speaking, the cloud dragon found her words rather lacking, an issue made worse by her brain failing to think of any believable cover-ups for the truth: "Not only... no, can't say that yet."

  "Well?" Lizu uttered warmly, yet that warmth came off as politely cold. The bizarre combo of self-interest and corporate-laced platitudes hit Myu with a sense of second-hand nostalgia, the sort of facade she'd only heard about being synonymous with her grandmother whenever someone was talking about her, disrespectfully.

  Lizu took a step closer, intending to apply a little bit of pressure to make Myu slip up, verbally, of course, but Lizu wouldn't mind seeing a cute physical slip if things came to it. However, Myu's statue-like stance of not even flinching at Lizu's pressure attempt made either slip-up glaringly impossible, much to Lizu's lack of surprise.

  After all, Lizu knew only three people had ever managed to get under the cloud dragon's mental defences. By the time Lizu reached that conclusion, Myu had managed to cobble something together for a response.

  "He's already taken, so that's one of the reasons for my words," Myu stated matter-of-factly, despite nothing about what she had said was in any way factual. That was what Lizu believed, anyway; a belief made solely on the content of Tales of the Skycloud being pulled to the front of her mind thanks to its protagonist being up in her face. The two's hearts thumped up a tremendous song: one by the fanfare of meeting their idol, while the other girl was moments away from fizzling out into the wind.

  Once again, the topic of those three individuals Lizu had previously thought of resurfaced in her mind once again, particularly the one who was neither Myu's mother nor father. Lizu couldn't help but smile contentedly, knowing Myu's impending reaction would be golden and prime material for G.Galore's logic modules. So Lizu wasted no more time on thinking and readily fired her verbal denial: "Okay, now I know you're lying."

  "How so, youn-"

  "You have an unrequit-" Myu slapped a glob of muted cyan cloud right over Lizu's mouth, silencing the tattletale before she could shame the cyan-flavoured blushing cloud dragon any further. Beating out the dragolyte in terms of heartbeats per second, Myu couldn't believe that, of all the people, she'd manifested in front of, she just had to pick someone who'd read her mother's retelling of the cloud dragon's life. She was utterly embarrassed, unable to believe her father for putting her in this predicament, but she did find a silver lining in all of it; she'd gotten an answer to a question she'd had ever since her father's recent awakening.

  "I see why my father had deemed you, of all people, worthy of his stigma, you tease machine. And for the record, I was referring to two things: something I'm not premised to reveal, and him already possessing a stigma."

  Only after she'd said all that and seen the sparkles in Lizu's eyes did Myu comprehend she'd seemingly said something she shouldn't have, being the reveal of the nightmare stigma. Myu did have the brief consideration that Lizu was one of those physical touch as a form of endearment type of people, but quickly shook her head in a violent frenzy, for even considering such a whimsical idea could be real. Besides knowing her own luck, both of the options were true. [{They were]} Grabbing Lizu by the shoulders and pulling the girl towards herself until their foreheads tapped, Myu unleased a intensely desperate staredown onto her tail-matching accomplice: "If my father asks, you found out on your own. Understood?"

  Lizu raised her eyes, rocking them from side-to-side. Put on the spot and putting herself in a deep state of contemplation, the dragolyte considered her options, wondering if she should push her luck and demand something for her cooperation, only to recall her state of lacking-the-means-to-speak. So, deciding that bothering to do all that after freeing her mouth wasn't worth the effort, Lizu nodded to Myu, getting a deflatedly relieved exhale out of the cloud dragon.

  G.Galore popped out from Inkaro's hood unprompted, bounding through the air, moving an energetic twirl that would dazzle a fairy with all the purple sparkles the sentient grimoire's equally purple mana ribbons generated, before telling the guy something, using the proudest voice she could synthasize. "Creator, the Morilores have procured all the required materials from the lower floors. We can return home now."