REFDL 136
“No! You bad dragon! Put him down right now!”
Grr.
“I said put him down!”
I placed both hands on my hips. It was the “I’m really angry” pose.
……It might look like it would only serve to maximize my embarrassment and destroy my social standing, but no.
It was a tactic that had proven effective.
Once, a knight hesitated before suggesting, “M-maybe His Grace is cute, and that’s why the dragon is letting him get away with it?” The knight who made that suggestion received a one-month pay cut.
A duke as majestic as me could never be cute!
Anyway,
Grrrrr…….
“Ahem!”
Grr-grr.
“Ah, listen to me!”
Compared to what he’d done so far, the chandelier, windows, and other things I’d destroyed were nothing.
Kaelus, now a dragon, operated on a whole different scale. If he was in a bad mood, he’d start by knocking down the mansion’s walls; if he had a complaint, his snout and tail moved first.
His personality was so different from that of the human Kaelus that I sometimes wondered if this was really the real Kaelus, or if I was making a serious mistake.
Eventually, I became certain it was indeed Kaelus… but anyway.
Could this be his true personality? I mean, if the current Kaelus was the result of being indoctrinated from a young age to fulfill his duties as a noble, then a Kaelus who wore no mask…
Grrr…
…must look like this.
It was a plausible theory, but it wasn’t important right now.
Kaelus finally set down the guy he’d been holding in his mouth and shaking around. The count was unconscious, but he was in better shape than I’d expected. …He probably could’ve shaken him a little more…
“W-what am I thinking!”
Only then did Kaelus’s expression turn satisfied as he moved his frame toward me. A face the size of a standard carriage loomed right in front of me.
Grr. Grrr.
As if he were acting cute, he growled. I almost melted on the spot, but came back to my senses. This would have been a major disaster.
Following “stuffing the emperor’s head in his mouth” and “biting the Denos envoys until they were left in their underwear,” this was one of the most egregious acts he’d committed in the past month.
“Kaelus!”
Grr.
“You! If you do this again, I won’t let you get away with it…”
Grr.
“……But I’ll let it slide this once!”
…Hah!
I came to my senses too late.
Kaelus immediately stopped pretending to be pitiful, and hoisted me onto his back. Then he gestured toward the tethers.
“…….”
I’m the master now, and I’m the one raising Kaelus, so why do I still feel like he’s the master and I’m the one being raised by him?
Sweat beaded at the corners of my eyes. These weren’t tears. My eyes stung just a little… Anyway, it wasn’t tears.
Grrr!
As I gave up and hooked the tethers, Kaelus let out a satisfied roar and soared into the air with a mighty flap of his wings.
The wind pressure made the surroundings even more chaotic. The men who had barely managed to steady themselves rolled around again.
“…….”
Yeah.
It’s easier to just give up.
***
“No, I had no choice because of work.”
Grrrr.
“Haa. I wanted to send a proxy more than anyone else. But the candidates just weren’t up to the task.”
Grrrr.
“Okay. It’s all my fault……”
Grrr.
“Anyway, I didn’t have any plans to go out for a while. …I’ll stay by your side.”
Only then did the threatening creases on his nose smooth out.
What a difficult dragon…
Grr!
“…Alright, alright. I’ll stop cursing you in my head too.”
I sighed and gently stroked his now-smoothed snout. Kaelus growled as he stretched out in the vast garden specially created for him.
The Kaelus within the star(?) was similar to the Kaelus from the cavern, yet he was different. If that Kaelus had harbored the self of Firmus, then perhaps this Kaelus simply possessed the self of a dragon.
It felt as though, just as Irina had imagined, if Kaelus had been born a free dragon, he would be like this.
He was possessive of his belongings. Needless to say, his possessiveness and jealousy were intense.
“……Ah!”
Look at this.
Perhaps displeased that I was thinking about something other than him, Kaelus suddenly turned back into a human. He normally disliked transforming in such open spaces.
I guess he was pretty unhappy about it……
“Wait, hold on. Kael. Not here!”
As I floundered in panic, he laughed.
Ah.
Looks like I’ve really messed up.
“Ah, no! No! I’m, I’m really going to get mad…… hngh!”
For the record, unlike me, who always wore a shirt and pants when I transformed, Kaelus was always naked.
Because of that, I guessed that the reason he was reluctant to transform might be that somewhere deep inside him, the rationality of the human Kaelus still remained.
I thought that was a pretty reasonable assumption.
No!
Stop running away from reality and start thinking, brain! I’m telling you to come up with a way to resolve this situation!
And my brain spat out a stream of saliva. It declared a strike.
“……”
Aaaargh!
“Wait, hold on. Don’t take it off…”
“Your Grace.”
I stopped all movement.
When I tilted my head back, Nitan was standing upside down in my view with an expression that said he’d had enough of this.
“……I came to see you because I had urgent business, but it seems you’re in a more urgent situation.”
“No!”
“I’ll be waiting in the office, so once you’re done with this, please get yourself together and come to the office……”
“Listen when I’m talking to you!”
Nitan paid no heed. He bowed his head before turning and walking away.
I covered my face with both hands. The clever Kaelus knew when it was time to back off. He quickly transformed back into a dragon.
I inwardly sighed.
…Forget wanting to become human.
It would be easier on my mind to just live as a dragon…….
“Oh, really?”
“……?!”
“Do you really think that? You shouldn’t……”
Kaelus spoke with a somewhat dejected air.
Not as a human, but as a dragon. It wasn’t even that loud voice I used to produce so easily with my translator.
It was clearly a human voice, produced by human vocal cords.
But it wasn’t Kaelus’s voice.
“……What’s going on?”
My voice trembled.
“Who are you?”
“Minamao.”
The figure answered, still looking downcast.
“I am Minamao.”
……I’ve heard that name somewhere before?
Then it hit me. The fortress we’d visited in the desert! That city’s name was Minamao.
Wait a second. That means…!
At that moment, the sensations surrounding me shifted. It felt as if I’d been immersed in a dream and had just crossed over into reality. I felt as though I were standing on a precarious edge, where one wrong step would wake me up.
The truth.
Enlightenment.
They seeped into my mind.
Not much time had passed. In dreams, a single day can feel like a hundred years, and a hundred years can feel like a single day.
That’s right. This was a dream.
Something inhabiting Kaelus’s body fidgeted with his front paws and spoke.
“I thought you were Anuahan. Because you made that wish while holding onto ‘me.’”
“Anuahan? That wish?”
“You wanted to become human, and you wished for your mate to become a dragon. That’s the kind of thing Anuahan and I used to talk about all the time…”
“……?”
What is this crazy spirit talking about… I was thinking that when I suddenly stopped short.
Something clicked.
‘What if I had been born a dragon? What kind of dragon would I have been, and what kind of personality would I have had? Conversely, if my partner dragon had been human, what kind of person would they have been? It’s fun to imagine!’
……Excuse me?!
How is that a wish?! I was just thinking. It was unconscious! The moment I touched the star, I was only thinking something like, ‘I hope Kaelus is safe.’
“……I thought it was a hidden wish.”
…Wow.
The dragon was talking nonsense…
I stared at Minamo. Minamo looked away. I didn’t back down and kept staring.
“I-I guess I was mistaken.”
……A mistake?
“I’m sorry.”
…S-sorry?!
After keeping me trapped in some weird place for half a year and making me sweat bullets.
Sorry? You’re sorry?!
And what’s that supposed to mean? Why are you inside Kaelus?!
“Well, I thought you were Anuahan……”
She fumbled for words.
“I guess it was just self-justification. I missed him so much that the moment I spotted a speck of a trace in your latent thoughts, I just believed what I wanted to believe.”
Her voice trembled more and more as she spoke.
“Just as I became a star, I thought Anuahan had been reborn as a special dragon.”
“……”
“But that wasn’t the case.”
It wasn’t. Yeah, it wasn’t.
Those words, like a lament, echoed in my mind. With each echo, the scenery around me grew slightly blurrier. It lost its saturation and brightness, and eventually, even its shape became indistinct.
Everything was disappearing.
Even Kaelus.
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