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“Sir. We’ll come take a look too.”
The knight had been wary, wondering whether the situation was dangerous—but he yielded to my instruction with a brief nod.
I pressed close behind him and made my way toward the butcher shop.
“Sir knight—this little brat has been hiding a creature on the premises!”
The owner called out again the moment he saw the knight.
But—
“Then why is that child crying?”
Peek.
Before the knight could answer, I leaned out from behind him and asked bluntly.
The butcher’s eyes went wide.
“My—Lady Aisha? The Young Lady of House Krost?”
He recognized me at once. Clearly the news had spread well enough that people could now place my face on sight.
“Yes, that’s me, but—”
“P-please don’t throw my friend out…”
Before I could finish, a thin, mosquito-like voice cut across my words.
“…Hm?”
I wondered if I’d misheard, and tilted my head, poking at one ear.
“My—my friend isn’t a creature…”
There it was again. A mosquito voice, coming from somewhere.
“Are there mosquitoes that survive the winter here?”
I asked genuinely, and the escort knight leaned in with a slightly pained expression.
“That isn’t a mosquito, my lady. I believe it’s the boy clinging to the butcher shop owner’s leg.”
“Oh?”
Good grief. Of course.
I looked properly at the boy this time.
Our eyes met—the boy’s wide, round eyes fixed on mine. A soft, mild face slowly crumpled, and then—Waaaaah!—he burst into renewed tears.
Oh my. Whatever was making him this miserable?
The child was crying too hard to open his eyes, chest heaving with great hiccuping sobs.
I raised my eyebrows in the expression I reserved for matters of justice and fixed the butcher with a look.
“Before anything else, tell me what’s going on here. You said there’s a creature—but this child keeps calling it his friend.”
“It’s a creature all right! A Ferri, no less!”
A Ferri? What kind of creature was that?
My question dissolved in the sound of the escort knight’s exhale.
“…A Ferri, of all things. This could be complicated.”
“What’s a Ferri?”
“A beast-type creature, one of the smaller varieties—but it makes up for its size with speed, and it’s known for leaping onto people and attacking. The small body actually makes it harder to deal with than a larger creature, because it darts around so.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Very. Its claws are razor-sharp—you could lose the skin off your face if you’re not careful.”
“Goodness!”
That was alarming—but only for a moment. I rummaged in my jacket pocket and pulled out my poison needle.
“Then let’s open the door and have a look. Whether it’s truly dangerous or truly this child’s friend, I’ll judge for myself.”
“My lady, no!”
“She’s right—it’s too dangerous! I really should be the one to—”
Mai and the knight both jumped.
Which prompted me to turn toward the knight and add brightly—
“Oh, obviously I mean you’ll be looking, not me.”
“Pardon?”
I gave him my most winning smile.
“If I cause trouble, Father will scold me.”
Screeech—
The distance between the knight and me increased noticeably.
I drew an invisible line in the space between us, made a soft fist in the gesture of go get ’em, and nodded at him encouragingly.
“…….”
He seemed to briefly forget that he was speaking to the Young Lady of House Krost. A beat of silence—and then—
“…R-right. Let’s do this.”
He accepted his orders with admirable dignity, and drew his sword with a resolute expression.
You can do it!
I balled my hand into a silent fist of encouragement.
The knight—who clearly wanted to ask why I had taken out the poison needle in the first place—gave me a pained look, cleared his throat, and kicked the door open with his boot.
The silence that followed was absolute.
“…….”
Beyond the open door, in the dark of the storage room, something waited.
A pair of violet eyes—that telltale purple glow that marked a creature’s gaze—stared back at the knight, sword raised.
In an instant, the air around us went taut.
“…Ah—!”
The boy lunged forward, desperate to throw himself into the storage room.
But the butcher owner grabbed him by the collar and held him back, shouting to the knight—
“Go on, quickly—deal with it!”
The knight, however, was frozen in position—hand clenched around the hilt, locked in a standoff with whatever was inside.
If the knight can’t handle it—
Then this was exactly the moment I had brought the poison needle for.
“…….”
Keeping a careful distance, I stood behind the knight and tightened my grip around the needle in my palm.
I was just beginning to raise it toward my lips—
Pitter-patter-patter.
Something moved. Small and impossibly quick. A white blur shot between the knight’s legs and launched itself upward in a tremendous leap.
Fast.
There had been no time to prepare for anything.
If a living creature could move at the speed of light, it would have looked something like that.
And then—a small shadow landed directly on top of my head.
“My lady!”
The knight spun around too late. He raised his sword to slice whatever was hovering above me—
“No—don’t!”
The boy’s scream came almost simultaneously.
What happened next, no one had expected.
The boy—who had somehow finally broken free of the butcher’s grip—threw himself at the knight before the sword could fall.
“Ugh—!”
The knight staggered under the boy’s weight. The blade swung wide. And the white creature, having narrowly avoided the strike, settled its full small body over my face.
“Gyah.”
My vision went dark in an instant.
Very dangerous. You could lose the skin off your face if you’re not careful.
The warning rang inside my head like an alarm.
“Get your paws off my face!”
I might actually be about to die. The back of my hair stood straight up at the emergency—I reached up to grab the creature—
“St-stay still and you’ll be fine! It’s just saying hello!”
The boy’s frantic shout made my hand freeze mid-reach.
…Saying hello?
I went still, and stayed that way. Something warm and soft and slightly squishy pressed against my face—the creature’s underbelly.
And then—
“Sniff, sniff sniff…”
A tiny sound near my ear: delicate, inquisitive sniffing.
Shortly after, the body blocking my vision shifted away—
“……?”
The first thing I saw was the ring of startled faces staring at me.
The second thing I saw, at the edge of my vision, was a pair of stubby pink legs kicking cheerfully.
Whatever it was had clambered fully onto the top of my head and then—
“Kyuwut?”
—suddenly dipped its head forward to look me in the eye.
That face…
It looked remarkably similar to an animal called a white ferret, from a life before this one.
An extraordinarily cute one, at that.
* * *
A short while later—
“So you’re telling me—you were calling this adorable little creature a face-peeling monster?”
“…There was precedent for that sort of thing. The first time a Ferri appeared, it suddenly jumped at a knight’s face. When they drew a short blade to fight it off, it scratched them with its claws—”
“So—imagine something ten times your own size is about to stab you—”
The knight was in the middle of defending himself when the mosquito voice piped up beside me once more.
“Wouldn’t anyone—anyone at all—panic and fight back?!”
The mosquito squeak had been building itself up into something heroic, but dissolved into a helpless wail.
“Quiet, you.”
A small forehead received a firm knuckle-knock from the butcher, silencing the ever-escalating voice with a single thunk.
“Waaah… hic… a-anyway… Bibi didn’t do anything wrong… Bibi was just surprised, that’s all…”
Even with a tiny bruise forming like a walnut on his forehead, he was still determined to have his say.
That combination—the ready crying and the relentless words—told me something.
This one cries easily and talks even more easily.
“Hmm.”
I studied the boy and tapped my chin.
This just got complicated.
To summarize the situation: the creature the boy called Bibi had a long white body and charming little pink limbs—it was a beast-type creature that bore a striking resemblance to a white ferret from my previous life.
They apparently greeted one another by sniffing the tops of each other’s heads—but since they had to leap onto a person’s face to do this to a human, people mistook it for an attack and tried to kill them. Which was how so many Ferri had ended up dead.
And when it came to me, there was no face-peeling—just a sniff and a friendly greeting.
Even so, on the charge of assaulting a young lady, Bibi was currently sitting locked inside a portable cage.
I looked down at Bibi quietly.
