________________________________________
Silence settled over everything.
The creatures continued to stare at me. Kyle stood among them, studying my face with an expression of complete incomprehension.
“But I…”
He hesitated for a long moment, casting glances at his surroundings, and then his expression darkened.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“What?”
“I said you don’t have to apologize. Because I really am a creature.”
As he said it, he quickly turned his face away from mine.
He seemed to have already understood. The way the people around him had looked at him. The creatures that had been waiting for him when he fled to this place.
I had awakened the tiny god.
“…….”
But this ordeal had given me something too. A realization of my own.
He was a creature—and at the same time, he was a person.
Yes, he sometimes frightened people with behavior that made no sense. But he had also learned to apologize. He had learned it from me.
Everyone had strengths and flaws. People had those too—all of them.
“Then…”
I thought I could accept him. All of him.
“Then does a creature not need a warm embrace?”
I stretched my arms open, and Kyle’s eyelids gave a small, startled flutter.
The word embrace made his eyes flicker—but like a child who had been hurt and refused to lower his guard, he wouldn’t let himself give in.
“…Creatures don’t need things like that.”
“Then I’m offering it as an apology.”
“An apology?”
But the word apology made him look at me again.
It seemed to dredge up a lesson I had once given him.
“Yes. I did something wrong. So this is my apology. Will you accept it?”
I rose lightly onto my tiptoes and smiled.
“…Hmm.”
That expression on his face right now—it was the same one he wore whenever he was learning something from me.
“…If I accept the apology, what happens? Does that mean I can come back to you, even though I’m a creature?”
“Yes.”
“Like before?”
“Yes—of course!”
I nodded vigorously, and Kyle’s eyes went wide.
Then—hesitant step by hesitant step—he began to move toward me.
One step. Then another.
Every so often he would jerk his head around to give a sharp look at the creatures surrounding us—a kind of silent warning—and then turn back to me.
He came close enough that if he tilted his head down, our noses might touch. He stretched out a cautious arm—and I pulled him into a hug with everything I had.
“!”
His shoulders startled.
“Aisha.”
But Kyle, who had always been quick to adapt, lowered his head almost at once and pressed his forehead against my shoulder.
“Kyle.”
I hugged him tightly in return.
“I want to turn back into a cat and sleep in your arms again.”
“All right. Let’s go back, turn back into a kitten, and get under the covers together.”
Then—
“Aisha.”
“Yes?”
Kyle murmured against my shoulder.
“…If creatures could embrace each other the way you and I just did… then maybe even here could become a place worth living.”
Satisfied, he curved the corner of his lips upward—and then, slowly, he began to shrink.
It was time to go home.
In moments, a tiny white kitten no bigger than my palm lay curled in my arms, fast asleep.
* * *
Meanwhile—
Calypse, who had been standing with one hand on his hip and his weight shifted to one leg, finally opened his mouth.
“It might be time to—”
Shhhh—
“Aisha. You can let go of Kyle now. Really, it might be—”
Shhhhh—
Every time he tried to say something, Aisha’s narrowed, triangular glare came with a sharp warning hiss—and he couldn’t get a single complete sentence out.
“Aisha.”
“…….”
“Aisha, Papa is also cold—”
“Button up.”
At his daughter’s curt instruction, Calypse silently fastened the buttons on his coat.
His daughter—who offered such generous mercy to kittens and creatures—had, sadly, none to spare for her father.
* * *
That evening, as if on cue, the creatures melted away from Calypse and the children the moment the kitten fell asleep. Their steady, unhurried retreat looked, somehow, like people walking home.
I wonder if they have homes to return to.
Calypse felt the thought rise in him, but there was no point in chasing it. He tucked the sleeping Aisha and the transformed Kyle against his chest and walked back to Krost Duchy.
“Oh—Lady Aisha’s state—!”
“She’s asleep. Have them both washed and put to bed.”
“Understood.”
After a bath, the two children were tucked into bed, soft and warm and utterly at peace.
Calypse stood over the quilt and looked down at the sleeping Aisha and the little white fluff ball nestled against her.
A beautiful pair.
His beautiful daughter, curled up around a tiny kitten, the two of them purring together—what kind of person would not smile at a sight like that?
It felt like no time at all since the boy had awkwardly introduced himself using his own name for the first time.
But Calypse had seen it.
He had seen the creatures prostrate themselves before Kyle.
“…….”
The smile fading slowly from his lips, Calypse let a half-formed memory begin to resurface.
He had suspected this from the moment he understood what a Mage-Beast was.
Children grow faster than one expects.
Aisha—who had been crying alone in a heap of garden dirt—now knew how to reach out a hand to someone else. And the boy who had once said he wanted to remain a kitten forever was beginning, however faintly, to understand what he truly was.
Like it or not, this has to be addressed.
Calypse’s gaze dropped and settled.
“You have returned, Your Grace?”
He left the bedroom and slipped into his study. Knox, who had been working late into the night on reports, pushed up his monocle.
“What is that?”
Something unfamiliar sat on the desk—several suspicious-looking vials, lined up in a row.
“Lady Aisha left them here without a word, Your Grace. They appear to be Affinity Amplifiers.”
“…Good lord.”
He hadn’t expected this from the child.
Calypse inspected the vials lined up on the desk and let out a short, disbelieving laugh. He’d thought the girl had simply gotten into a fight with Kyle—but she had gone out alone to procure these?
Where had she even managed to find them?
“I just wanted her to grow up ordinarily. She really does not listen.”
Knox responded to that.
“She was never an ordinary child to begin with, Your Grace. Though, for what it’s worth—thanks to her, things did resolve themselves rather quickly, did they not?”
“She’s under house arrest.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Calypse dropped into his chair and pressed his fingers hard against his throbbing temples.
“She’s going to put me in an early grave with all this worrying. Last time she gave me a scare, and now this.”
“She is five, Your Grace. An age perfectly suited for causing chaos.”
“Kyle went into the snowfield.”
The abruptness of the revelation made Knox’s pen hand go still. Calypse caught his expression and quickly continued.
“He ran away because he had a fight with Aisha and threw a tantrum. They’ve made up properly, and both of them are asleep now, so don’t worry. But—”
“But?”
“Kyle found out. That he’s a Mage-Beast.”
Thud.
This time, Knox dropped his pen entirely.
…Ah. So this was Knox’s worst-case scenario.
Calypse watched his aide scramble to retrieve the pen and clicked his tongue quietly.
“He—realized it himself?”
“Yes.”
“How does one realize something like that on one’s own? Did he have a moment of self-reflection in the middle of the snowfield?”
“The creatures around him were bowing to him.”
“Good heavens. Your Grace, are we quite certain this is reality and not a novel?”
“Don’t exaggerate. I’m tired enough already.”
It wasn’t an exaggeration. It was something worth being shocked by.
But Calypse’s head already ached with nothing but thoughts of the children, and he had no energy left to validate Knox’s reaction item by item.
Fortunately, Knox recovered quickly and returned to his usual, rational composure.
“If the creatures have recognized the Mage-Beast’s presence, they’ll begin making sincere attempts to communicate with him. Just as the Alohsia creatures once tried to imitate human language.”
“Yes.”
Knox asked the question.
“What will you do?”
A moment of quiet stillness followed.
It wasn’t a simple question. It was asking everything—where to house Kyle, how to handle the power of a Mage-Beast that was tied to the very fate of humankind.
So they called me a hero, and now I’m left with this, too.
Calypse exhaled slowly.
What to do with Kyle.
In truth, he had no intention of killing him. If he were the kind of man who would kill a child so guileless he had been talking back in informal speech since the moment they met—simply because the child was considered ominous—he would have had Aisha locked up the very first day.
But he had absolutely no intention of releasing Kyle, either.
Tap, tap—
A pensive hand drummed against the mahogany desk.
“He’s still young. Knows nothing of the world yet.”
“That’s true.”
Knox inclined his head.
He knows nothing. Which means there is still a chance he could be shaped in the right direction.
Perhaps Aisha bringing him here was not entirely a bad thing after all.
“Better to be molded toward good than to drift toward evil.”
“Indeed.”
“Then isn’t it better for us to raise him ourselves—and cut out whatever it is that makes him ‘king of creatures’ or whatever he’s meant to be, right from the start?”
“That’s right—”
Knox had been agreeing automatically—and then his monocle flashed white.
“…I beg your pardon?”
