Reincarnated Without a Cheat, I Adopted the Former Hero as My Mom

Seraphina set her spoon down in the empty ice cream cup and turned to look at him.

Her eyes were impossibly calm under the streetlights. Her expression was dead serious, but her tone was the kind of flat, matter-of-fact delivery that made it impossible to tell if she was joking.

"We're currently in a dating relationship where you are being paid five hundred gold coins. Do you have a cold and you're worried about infecting me? Or do you have severe mysophobia and refuse to eat something after I've touched it?"

Uriel froze. He stared at her for a long moment.

This woman was on a completely different level.

Every single sentence sealed off his escape routes, and she delivered them with absolute, unshakeable logic.

He looked down at the ice cream cone in his hand. Then he looked back up at Seraphina's excessively calm face.

Fine. Eat it. She probably won't use this opportunity to poison her future husb— no, rental boyfriend.

Uriel hardened his heart, shoved the cone into his mouth, and took a massive bite. The cold instantly numbed his jaw.

Seeing him continue eating, Seraphina withdrew her gaze and went back to quietly drinking her milk tea.

Uriel chewed on the crispy edge of the cone, his brain running through several layers of calculation. Since the one paying him had said so, he probably needed to be a bit more proactive. He couldn't just make her do all the work. He finished the rest of the cone in three bites, dusted the crumbs off his hands, and stood up.

"Hold on."

He jogged over to a snack shop on the side of the street, scanned the shelves, and quickly found his target.

A pack of stick cookies. The long, thin kind, coated in a thin layer of chocolate.

When he got back to Seraphina, he tore open the packaging, stuck one in his mouth, and leaned the cookie toward her face.

"Let's play the Pocky Game. We both eat from—"

Snap.

The other end of the chocolate-coated stick was about half a finger's length from Seraphina's lips. The chocolate was starting to melt, giving off a cloyingly sweet aroma.

Seraphina glanced up at him. Then she raised her hand, pinched the middle of the cookie between her thumb and index finger, and snapped it cleanly in half.

She popped her half directly into her mouth and crunched down. The sound was sharp and decisive. Her eyes stayed fixed straight ahead as she chewed.

"You want to play that pointless game where two people chew a stick from both ends? Doing that in public will make passersby assume we've lost our minds. Also, that game makes a mess."

Uriel stood frozen in place, the remaining half of the cookie dangling from his lips.

He chewed the piece, swallowed, sat back down on the bench, and let out a long, long-suffering sigh.

"Such a high-maintenance woman."

Seraphina didn't take the bait. She just kept drinking her milk tea.

---

They sat for a while. Their feet had rested, and the sky had gone completely dark. All the lights along the commercial street were on now, and the pools of light stretched into one continuous ribbon.

Uriel leaned back against the bench. A question he should have asked a long time ago finally surfaced.

At the very beginning, he just wanted to take a rejection card and walk away. Instead, she had slapped a bank card into his hand, derailed the entire script, and he had completely forgotten to ask about the contract duration.

"Right. This rental arrangement. How long does it last?"

Seraphina pulled another cup of milk tea from the paper bag. Uriel remembered this one. She had bought it separately from a different stall. The cup had elegant script lettering on the side.

She pierced the seal with her straw, took a sip, and then answered at her own unhurried pace.

"Depends on my needs. Tentatively, until graduation."

Uriel nearly slid off the bench.

"That long? Why not just until you find someone you actually like?"

Seraphina took another sip. Her cheeks puffed out slightly as she chewed on whatever toppings were at the bottom of the cup.

She pulled her gaze away from the streetlights across the road and let it land on Uriel. There was not a single trace of consideration for his feelings in her eyes.

"You're getting paid five hundred gold coins a month to hang out with a pretty girl. You hold all the winning cards here. Finding someone I genuinely like is far too much work."

Uriel scratched his cheek. His voice came out a little hollow.

"But until graduation..."

Seraphina set the cup down, folded her hands on her knees, and tilted her head slightly to look at him. Her posture was absolutely perfect. The words coming out of her mouth were not.

"Finding another guy like you, who is perfectly average and does whatever he's told once the money is on the table, is not easy. Just thinking about the interview process exhausts me."

She tilted her head a fraction more. A strand of light brown hair slid off her shoulder.

"Didn't you promise to be helpful and assist a fellow student? Is your charity really on such a short timer?"

Uriel's mouth twitched.

"You're always so polite. So reasonable. I didn't know you had this side."

Seraphina caught the straw between her teeth and ground it lightly. The plastic made a faint clicking sound.

"You're different. You have plenty of flaws, but you also have a lot of merits. At the very least, I can call you annoying in front of you, and I can critique your acting. I can drop the noble daughter act, just a little."

Uriel leaned back on the bench, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared up at the sky at a forty-five-degree angle. The streetlights painted half his face in warm orange and left the other half in shadow.

"Thank you for the compliment, Princess."

He pulled his gaze down from the sky and glanced at Seraphina.

"You flatter me. But speaking of acting—which aspect are you referring to?"

He asked it casually. It sounded exactly like idle chatter, as if they were genuinely having a routine performance review.

But his ears were fully extended. Was she talking about him playing weak, or something else entirely?

Seraphina didn't step into the trap.

She didn't answer directly. She just curved the corner of her mouth. The smile was far shallower than her standard polite one, but it was infinitely more real.

Uriel saw she wasn't biting and didn't push it. He looked back up at the sky, his tone a shade lighter than before.

"I originally thought you were a flawless person. Now you seem a bit more real."

Seraphina's expression tightened for a split second. She wasn't angry. She had just shifted into serious mode.

She placed her milk tea cup on the armrest of the bench, folded her hands back on her knees, and spoke with noticeably more weight.

"Flawless people don't exist. If you ever meet one, or they're either a massive fraud, or there's something fundamentally wrong with their head. Not a real person."

The moment those words left her mouth, an image flashed across Uriel's mind uninvited.

Silver short hair. A perpetually gentle smile. The ability to beat down a dragon with one hand and stew potatoes until they were perfectly soft with the other.

Not a single flaw. She didn't even get angry.

Except her moral compass was completely busted, and she genuinely believed that stringing up two dozen assassins like sausages was a perfectly normal Tuesday. And the whole daughter-in-law thing...

No flaws... Does having a broken brain count as a flaw? Technically, no actual flaws. But the brain is definitely malfunctioning. Specifically the moral compass.

He swallowed that thought back down.

A loud sucking noise came from beside him. He snapped out of it and looked over.

Seraphina had her head down, the straw jammed into the empty cup. The sound was the unmistakable rattle of a cup that had been completely drained.

She was still sucking furiously at the straw, apparently determined to extract the final two tapioca pearls and the last three drops of sugar water. She looked entirely unaware that she was currently engaged in a losing battle against a vacuum.

Uriel's gaze shifted from the cup in her hand to the paper bag on the bench.

Empty. Both cups were finished.

"How are you already done? Where's mine?"

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