“Little Sunflower Mommy Classroom is now in session~”

…Wait, no. It should be: “Granny Bonare’s Magic Classroom is now in session~”

Still worried your kid can’t learn magic? Still fretting that your baby has no magical talent? Granny Bonare’s got you covered—she’ll fix all your magic problems for you!

As much as I’d love to help this kind witch granny advertise her class, I seriously don’t understand a word!

My wife and I followed Granny Bonare to the Witches’ Home. I wasn’t all that surprised by what I saw. A witch’s house was just like a human’s: a small wooden cabin, not some mushroom house. Witches had to light fires, cook meals, and go out gathering food, just like humans.

Inside the old hag’s cabin, the little girl called Lulu had already prepared tea for us. The tea was steeped from some kind of leaves, with only a slight sour taste. My wife wasn’t into it—after a couple sips she was frowning nonstop. I was fine with it. We were guests, after all; I had to at least act polite.

“Wifey, what does ‘mama’—uh, ‘mamo’ mean?”

“I don’t know either. Ugh, this tastes awful…”

“Shh… don’t say it like that.”

I patted my wife’s back and started mentally rehearsing what I might need to say later, along with my standard social-smile.

The old witch seemed to have just finished giving orders outside. She came back in, closed the wooden door, then sat down across the table from us with a squinty smile and started talking.

“I already know why you’re here. Go ahead.”

“Bo… na… re, mamo? I want to ask… what does that ‘mamo’ mean?”

I really impressed myself: first question out of my mouth, and I just had to pick the least important one. What followed was Granny Witch spending ten whole minutes teaching my wife and me how to say “mother,” “father,” “grandpa,” “grandma,” and so on…

“I’m sorry, Granny Bonare. I’m not good with languages…”

“It’s fine, young man. Seeing you two makes this old granny very happy.”

“Don’t you find it strange? A human and a monster…”

“Well… let me show you something.”

She rummaged through a pile of scrolls and heavy books, then pulled out a framed painting. She blew the dust off the corners, and that ancient-looking picture stood up in front of us.

In the painting, a human and a succubus stood side by side. If the succubus was Leya, then that handsome guy grinning with a rifle in hand had to be Clefrey. He looked very young in the painting. Judging from their expressions, he and Leya had just fallen in love—my wife used to look at me with that exact same face. The background was the Witches’ Home, which meant Leya and Clefrey had been here before too. No wonder Granny Bonare seemed to know everything about us the moment she saw us.

“The two of them were just like you once. Those were such good days…”

“I see… but Clefrey is already…”

“Mhm, I know. I’ve heard about Night Fall Town too.”

Granny Bonare gently stroked the painting. For someone her age, it was like that couple’s story had happened only yesterday. Running into us today probably stirred up a lot of old emotions.

One thing was very clear to me now: my wife and I must never let anyone paint us. Whoever gets painted ends up in a memorial portrait. Well… even if Leya isn’t dead yet…

Anyway, that kind of flag is absolutely off-limits.

“Hubby, let’s get a painting too…”

“Wifey, how about we don’t…”

“Why not?”

“I’m not ready to die yet.”

“Huh?”

Granny Bonare seemed to guess what we were thinking and chuckled. She said the witch who did that painting had already passed away too. Even if we wanted one, no one could paint it now. Nice—successfully dodged one flag.

Either way, the mood lightened up a little, so I took the chance to toss out one of the big fundamental questions: what is magic?

The old lady didn’t answer me directly. She just smiled and led us outside. The population here at the Witches’ Home was way smaller than Night Fall Town, less than thirty people, and all of them were women. A few scattered cabins surrounded a single huge tree; it was hard not to think of it as some kind of divine Tree of Life.

Granny Bonare stood under the tree and made a hand sign.

“Use your ‘xxxxx.’ Medusa should know how.”

She was talking to my wife, and I understood perfectly: she wanted my wife to shoot her with that magic arrow.

“Is… that okay?”

“Granny Bonare, are you serious?”

“Hehe, come on now. I’m the ‘granny’ around here.”

I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and focused all my attention on this old witch who was confident she could take one of my wife’s strongest shots head-on. A bunch of witches gathered around us too, all of them very tense. Later I learned this was the first direct confrontation with a monster they’d had in over a hundred years.

Even from a distance, I saw Granny Witch cast some kind of spell—there was a faint, translucent, light-blue barrier right in front of her. My wife’s hand was steady. After she spoke those strange words, white mist quickly wrapped around the arrow on the string. As expected, she aimed straight for the head.

No matter how many times I see it, I can never tell when my wife is going to loose the shot. Once she enters that state, she’s like a statue, not a muscle moving, not a single hint. Then that white trail suddenly “grew” out from the short bow, racing toward Granny Bonare like a noose lunging for her neck.

My wife lowered the bow as the straight white serpent of force slammed into the light-blue barrier.

Unbelievable. Forget how that barrier even formed—in all this time, I’d never seen anything that could stop my wife’s magic arrows. Yet there it was, blocked. The arrow bounced off at an angle and shot into the big tree behind her. Granny Bonare just smiled, walked over like nothing had happened, and took out a pair of glasses to study the bow in my wife’s hand.

“We’re not done yet. My pretty young lady, may I borrow your bow and arrow for a bit?”

“C-can you… really?”

“Um, ma’am, you’re going to use that bow yourself?”

My wife and I still hadn’t recovered from the shock. We stammered our way through the question.

“Yes. Just watch.”

She chanted another spell. Then this at-least-seventy-year-old granny bent down, took the bow and arrow from my wife, and effortlessly drew a bow I myself couldn’t even pull to full. She let the arrow fly.

Maybe it wasn’t something to be surprised about. If magic couldn’t at least pull that off, it wouldn’t deserve to be called magic.

But my jaw still wouldn’t close.

“Now it should be a bit easier to understand.”

Back inside the cabin, the concept of magic slowly came into focus. Granny Bonare’s explanation was complicated, but my wife used the same method she’d used when learning language to help me follow along. If I wasn’t misunderstanding, magic in this world could roughly be split into two types.

One type acts on the outside of things, like that barrier that blocked the arrow. My wife’s magic arrows were actually this type of external magic too. My guess was that the white mist massively reduced gravity, air resistance, and so on, to boost the arrow’s power.

The other type acts inside things. The way Granny boosted her own strength to draw that bow was that kind of internal magic. By that logic, Medusa’s petrification would also be a magic that acts inside the body.

Then there was a tiny fraction of magic that didn’t fit into either category. The classic example was the succubus’ charm. Charm itself was pretty vague—falling for a woman is a man’s emotion, and emotions are hard to explain.

It all sounded very reasonable, but I knew I still had a ton of questions and just couldn’t spit them out yet. Take the simplest one: does this world have a spell like “Fireball”? In novels and games, that’s the most basic offensive spell there is. Which category would that fall into?

I shoved all those messy questions aside and kept “listening” to Granny’s lecture.

Well, “listening” wasn’t really accurate. I barely took in anything. As the explanation went deeper, more and more words I’d never heard before flooded my ears, and I just tuned out. I ended up appreciating my beautiful wife’s side profile instead. She was even more serious than I’d imagined—maybe she was learning all kinds of things she’d never known before.

“What about my husband?” she suddenly asked.

“Well… we’ll have to take a look to know.”

“What do we need to do?”

“We’ll need a tool… let me find it.”

Hold up, hold up—how did we jump from magic theory to experimenting on me? I’m just a human who doesn’t really belong in this world. Don’t use me for some weird experiment, okay?!

Just as I was about to say something, Granny Bonare pulled out something that looked a lot like a blood-drawing tool: a glass tube with a metal frame and markings along the side. At the very tip was a sharp brass point. I really couldn’t think of a second use for it besides sticking it into skin.

I was just thinking out loud in my head, but please don’t actually draw blood. I’m not from this world, sure, but I’m not a monster either—there’s nothing worth studying in me.

“Hubby, it’s fine. She just wants to see if you can use magic~”

My wife grabbed my trembling arm with a squinty-eyed smile…

All right, I’ll take it. If you have to draw blood, then fine. But I do have one suggestion—can my wife at least put on a nurse outfit first?