“Hmm.”
I thought about what to say, and decided to simply ask directly.
“Why are you dressed as a cat…?”
Calypse looked appropriately sheepish.
Well, I could figure out the intent.
I’d been crying so much over my baby these past several days that he must have done all this to cheer me up.
…Though I’ll be honest—it’s a little bit terrifying?
Picture a man standing in a doorway in a full cat costume at this hour of the night—in America, this would be right up there with the clowns that make babies cry.
Of course, I’m not a simple five-year-old, so I won’t cry from this.
But my eyes were still puffed up like a blowfish from all the earlier tears.
Calypse stood there for a moment, lips pressed together, glancing around the hallway before letting out a long sigh.
“You’ve been crying every day since the cat disappeared. I thought even a small laugh might help. Knox gave me advice, so I tried it.”
“Knox is the chairman of MSLA.”
“That’s right.”
“Of course he gave you advice from his own point of view.”
“Yes, I see that now.”
Calypse crouched down to meet my eye level.
“I was desperate. Please stop crying, my daughter—just look at me and laugh if nothing else.”
“Hahahahaha.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Yes, sir.”
“……”
“…Pfft.”
The tension loosened a little.
Luckily, he seemed to feel it too—he gave a quiet half-smile, and reached up with one cold thumb to gently touch the corner of my eye.
“Aisha.”
“Yes?”
“There’s something Father needs to tell you. About the cat.”
“…Oh?”
I had assumed he was only here to comfort me. The unexpected words made my eyes go round.
He came dressed as a cat just to talk about the cat—?
…Could it be that he was going to say he’d become my cat himself? Some sort of declaration?
Chills!
I realized the cat costume must have been foreshadowing. I began bracing internally for a refusal—my pupils on the verge of an earthquake—when—
“The truth is that Father took that cat and—”
At that moment.
“Emergency! Emergency!”
Knights came sprinting down the corridor from far away.
“My lord! Your attention is needed immediately. A maid named Rose has just been found dead in the dungeon, my lord.”
“What?”
Father became instantly serious, composing himself into the face of Duke Calypse Krost.
In a full cat costume.
“And the Marquis Lilith, who had been held in the cell beside her, was found unconscious. When we revived him, he said a cat had attacked the maid—”
“!”
“!”
Both Calypse and I went wide-eyed at the exact same time.
“Let’s go immediately. Aisha, you wait here.”
As if to warn me not to do anything reckless, he gripped both my shoulders firmly—then pointed at one of the knights.
“Stand at her bedroom door. If she tries to come out, stop her immediately.”
“Yes, my lord.”
With that, Father imposed a strict bedroom lockdown and sprinted toward the dungeon.
“Young lady, please go back inside.”
“…Yes~”
Hmph.
I cast a resentful look at Calypse’s retreating back and went inside.
But who did he think he was dealing with?
I am Aisha. Former spy.
Crack. Crack.
I stretched my arms dramatically, and from somewhere inside my soft little body came a deeply unfair series of pops and cracks.
The truly skilled conceal their strength.
These soft fingers.
This soft belly.
These soft little toes.
Father had no idea how much power was coiled inside them.
If I can’t go through the door, I’ll go through the window.
“Sometimes Father genuinely treats me like an actual five-year-old.”
I mean—I am five. Technically.
“Hehe… hehehe…”
I was grinning to myself like a tiny villain and reaching into the bedside drawer for the scarf Mai had given me when—
Rustle—
“Hmm?”
A suspicious sound from the direction of the window.
Rustle. Rustle.
“……?”
Strange.
The only person who had ever entered through a window in House Krost was Knox.
But he should be with Calypse right now, investigating the incident—
Something was off.
The likelihood that this was an outsider scaling the walls was high.
Who is it?
I quietly drew a poison needle and suppressed my presence, creeping toward the window.
Then—a pale hand gripped the window frame from outside.
Let them show their face first, identify them, then shoot the back of the hand.
I was hovering like a ghost, poison needle at my lips, ready to blow—when—
Whoosh—
A white fluffy something launched itself through the window.
“I killed another person.”
And on top of that, dropping the most unhinged confession imaginable as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
“I tried not to leave evidence this time—wiped the blood and everything—but they still caught on.”
Tok—
My hand went limp with shock, and the poison needle fell to the floor.
It was the same boy I’d seen before.
The one who looked like my baby—strikingly pretty, somehow strange, that—
“……”
Whether I was startled or not seemed entirely irrelevant to him. Those amethyst-coloured eyes were already glittering at me.
“…You…”
“When are you going to give me a name? You said you’d give me one the next time we met.”
Where on earth did this child come from?
Clap.
This was not the moment.
I snapped back to myself and slapped both palms against my cheeks.
Then I grabbed him and pulled him into the bedroom.
With my hands on my hips, I asked clearly and plainly.
“How did you get all the way here? And—what did you say? You killed another person?”
Saying something like that so casually—this child needs to be taken straight to a dungeon.
“You cannot kill people. What in the world is wrong with you! What would you do if I reported you?!”
Last time, I at least could tell myself that the person he’d killed had been trying to abduct me—but this time, who had he killed?
Under normal circumstances this would have made anyone’s skin crawl—but I had, unfortunately, been trained as a spy, which meant I couldn’t afford the luxury of being properly frightened by who had killed whom.
It was just that I was worried about him, and it made me angry.
At that, the boy clicked his tongue and replied with a flat, unimpressed pout.
“Lecturing me again. Every time I become a person, you lecture me.”
“Because you come back after doing lecture-worthy things! That’s enough of this. You’re going to stand in the corner.”
“A corner?”
Even the word corner seemed to catch him off guard—he blinked, eyes going round with what appeared to be genuine surprise.
“I’m being punished? Why?”
“Because you did something wrong. Because you made me angry!”
“Ah.”
He had taken zero apparent damage from my stern tone, but nodded thoughtfully all the same as he looked around the room.
Then he dug into the pocket of his trousers and produced something pale.
“I’ll give you this. I’m sorry.”
“……?”
It was boiled chicken breast.
Where did that come from—?
Swat—
I reached out with the speed of a hamster paw and flung the chicken breast out the window.
The boy’s mouth fell open slowly with the expression of someone who had not expected that at all.
This isn’t working.
Before he goes and kills anyone else, I need to tell Father. But first—
Proceed with attitude correction. Commence immediately.
I pulled up the most terrifying expression I had ever seen in my spy training days—the face worn by the instructor they called the Viper—and leveled it at him with narrowed eyes and a pointed finger.
“Kail.”
“…What?”
“That’s your name. You’re Kail.”
It wasn’t a name I’d chosen with any particular depth of thought—it had just come to me.
It was the name of a character from the novel Sword of Judgment.
A minor deity, I believe he was described as.
Not a significant presence in the main storyline—but an important figure in the lore of Sword of Judgment for a simple reason.
He was the cause behind House Krost erecting the ice wall.
The minor deity who had created the Creatures.
But that character died at the hands of humans well before the story even began.
Since I was never going to cross paths with that person in real life, it seemed safe enough to borrow the name.
“…Kail. Kail.”
Unlike me, who hadn’t given it much thought at all, the boy kept murmuring the name over and over to himself—and the tips of his ears went faintly, unmistakably pink.
“I’m Kail. My name is Kail!”
He planted both fists at his sides and burst into a self-introduction as if he were announcing something of great consequence—
“Yes, yes, Kail. Now go stand in that corner over there.”
“……?”
Kail blinked, thrown off balance, and stared at the spot I was pointing to.
It was the darkest corner of the bedroom—the part where not even moonlight reached.
“There?”
“Yes. Kail, go stand there.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re being punished.”
“I gave you an apology gift.”
“You gave it to me, but I didn’t accept it. That means it doesn’t count.”
“!”
The amethyst eyes wavered dramatically.
“If the apology doesn’t work, the next step is punishment. That’s how you earn forgiveness.”
I explained it step by step, patiently, matching his eye level. The flush that had been creeping up his earlobes slowly faded back to cold.
“…Alright.”
At least, to his credit, Kail did as he was told.
Trudge. Trudge.
Every reluctant footstep broadcast exactly how much he didn’t want to do this. But just as he reached the corner—
Slam—
Someone threw open the bedroom door without knocking.
“Boy. Come out.”
Father.
________________________________________
