"Arzhen... now, with her pregnancy, you can force the divorce. Like this, you will finally be free... and we... we can..."

Ruby let the sentence trail off, hanging in the air like perfume. We can finally be together.

Cecilia watched. Ruby’s timing was, as always, impeccable. The demure clasp of the sleeve. The wide, earnest eyes. The way she positioned herself just slightly behind Arzhen, as though she were his support rather than his puppeteer.

Cecilia would have applauded if her cheek were not still stinging and her mouth were not still bleeding.

Arzhen, for his part, looked the part of the wronged husband beautifully. The suit helped. It was an immaculate thing. Dark, tailored, cut to emphasize the breadth of his shoulders and the trim line of his waist. It made him look taller, more handsome, more important. Everyone would’ve appreciated the view.

"This is your fucking fault."

Elara’s finger jabbed into Cecilia’s shoulder, hard enough to bruise. Her face was still contorted with fury, but beneath the fury was triumph.

"If only you had signed the divorce papers obediently..." Another jab. Another bruise blooming beneath the fabric of whatever dress Cecilia was wearing in this world. "...now everyone will know my son’s wife cheated on him with three men in a broke people’s club!"

Divorce papers?

Oh. She understood now.

But other than that, the emphasis on broke people’s club was almost funny. The Vasilievs, even in this alternate universe, were apparently still obsessed with status.

The infidelity was bad, but the venue, a ’club’, whatever it was, frequented by men in ’McKing uniforms and dark worker overalls’, whatever that meant, men who were perhaps, in this world, equivalent to not of noble blood, was somehow worse.

The class betrayal compounded the marital one, huh? The shame was not merely that she had strayed, but that she had strayed downward.

Arzhen’s face, which had been twisted with disgust, coldened by several more degrees. The disgust was still there, but now it was joined by rage. The rage of a man who had been publicly humiliated and could do nothing to undo it.

In Iondora, to file a divorce, especially if money was involved and if your spouse refused to sign, they must go to court. They would need to specify the reason for the divorce suit in legal documents, and the scandal would spread.

It would be everywhere the next morning. In the newspapers, the gossip columns and the whispered conversations at every noble gathering for the next decade.

Arzhen Vasiliev, cuckolded by three working-class men. The humiliation would slap him twice as hard as any physical blow.

Interesting.

Cecilia turned the situation over in her mind, examining it from every angle. In this world, she was married to Arzhen. She was pregnant, allegedly by someone else. She was being accused of infidelity in front of witnesses.

Well. She had nothing to lose anyway.

"Divorce..." She looked straight at Arzhen, the man who had killed her in another life and was now standing before her in an immaculate suit, his tiger tail bristling with anger, his face full of disgust and rage. He flinched.

"I will sign it."

***

Cecilia’s jaw hit the floor.

Yes, her actual, physical jaw unhinged itself from the rest of her face and plummeted toward the pristine white tiles.

The ultrasound image appeared before her on a screen. It was not painted or drawn. It was not the artistic rendering of a healer who had learned from cadavers to illustrate an illness. It was something else entirely.

A moving image, black and grey, rendered in real time on a flat, glowing panel that appeared to be made of neither wood nor stone.

The image inside her womb was faint. Uncertain, the nurse said, just the beginnings of a round shape that had not yet decided what it would become. And around it was a calcium deposit.

Calcium.

Of course. She was not carrying a tiger’s child. She was not carrying a mammalian child at all. The calcium deposit around the egg meant only one thing. The baby growing inside her was oviparous. Egg-laying.

A child that would not be born in a rush of blood and fluid, but would emerge into the world encased in a shell, waiting to hatch.

No wonder Elara could accuse her so confidently. No wonder Arzhen looked at her with such disgust. No wonder Ruby was so smug.

Arzhen surely would not touch her in this world, just like the real world. Just like every world, apparently, where the two of them were bound together by politics and misery. Arzhen’s cold contempt to a wife he never wanted was just that strong.

If he had not touched her, then the pregnancy was irrefutable proof of her infidelity. The calcium deposit was a calling card. The unmistakable evidence that whoever had fathered this child was not tiger.

But that was not what had dropped her jaw.

It was the technology.

What was this technology?

She leaned closer to the screen and her reflection stared back at her superimposed over the image of her own womb.

Electronics. Ultrasound, the nurse just said? Using... sound?

She turned to the physician. She was a calm, professional woman in a white coat who was clearly accustomed to patients having emotional reactions to their scans but probably not quite this reaction.

Cecilia’s brain spiralling by itself. This—this was without magic? Without mana? Whose invention was this? A human’s? A human made this?

Wow.

Cecilia straightened, her hand rising to her still-aching jaw. She closed her mouth manually, pressing her palm against her chin and forcing the hinge back into alignment.

Still. Wow. So this was how far humans can go? Wow.

The physician exchanged a glance with a nurse who had been hovering near the door. Seeing Cecilia having such reaction, they were silently agreeing that she might need additional evaluation.

Cecilia did not notice nor did she care though.

She was staring at the ultrasound machine, her eyes wide with the hungry fascination of a woman who had just discovered an entirely new category of information and wanted to absorb all of it immediately.

Sound. She knew sound waves bounced off everything. But apparently, it could be used so effectively using sophisticated machines like this.

Yes, the sound, it was bouncing off tissue and fluid and the tiny, calcified egg inside her womb, translated into imagery by a machine that appeared to run on lightning. No mana? No divine intervention? This... this was science! Human ingenuity, pushed to heights she had never imagined possible?!

This was a world in the future, she realized.

Yes, the Romance Trope Scenarios took her to different worlds. The Athenaeum had been a magic academy. But this—

This was wild. This was a world where humans had learned to see inside each other’s bodies without magic! And she could barely do it after lots and lots of training and trials and errors.

This was a world where machines did the work of healers, and without guessworks!

Alright, it was confirmed. Everything she knew was fucking useless.

The physician cleared her throat. "Ma’am, your results are ready. Would you like a printed copy?"

A printed copy. Printing. With ink? They were going to print her an image?

"Yes," Cecilia said, her voice distant, her eyes still fixed on the glowing screen. "Yes, I would like a printed copy."

This... was fun!