A Dragon's Everyday Fluff
Let me go over everything one more time, piece by piece.
They say you should even knock on a stone bridge before crossing it, after all.
I, Cha Siu—somehow an eighteen-year-old dragon who woke up one day without the faintest idea why, to whom, or how I was born. And Lee Ha-yan, the Korean mage girl whose childhood friend just happened to be a dragon.
Thanks to Ha-yan’s mother and her “not-brainwashing-but-definitely-brainwashing” brand of education, I had learned to live a perfectly ordinary human life. Somewhere along the way I started feeling something more than friendship for Ha-yan—and she felt the same way about me.
…She did feel the same way, right?
Anyway.
We spent our days looking after each other and loving each other, and before we knew it time had carried us all the way into high school. Plenty of things had happened before that, of course. While teaching Ha-yan the kind of magic that comes as naturally to a dragon as breathing, I had managed to blow up an entire house. When I saw her surrounded by some random delinquents I completely lost my cool and left every last one of them crippled. (I cleaned that mess up with magic afterward, naturally. I didn’t even want to imagine the thunder that would have fallen on my head from Ha-yan’s mother otherwise.)
We also dipped into the world of mages from time to time, and I firmly cemented my place there—though of course none of them knew I was a dragon. Because of that, Ha-yan ended up stuck with the ridiculous nickname “disciple of some mysterious Archmage.” I never bothered correcting it. It wasn’t exactly wrong.
So we went on living our lives, both in the mage world and the ordinary human one, making our friends gag with how sickeningly sweet we were. Meanwhile the private investigation I had started years earlier—driven by the single question of whether I was truly the last dragon left in this world—had produced absolutely nothing.
And then, right in the middle of that, I suddenly sensed a completely foreign mana. The discovery of the magic stone that was giving off that mana. A quiet, peaceful(?) everyday life that was starting to feel like it was slowly cracking at the seams.
“Mmm… Japan? Japan, you said? Yaaawn…”
“That’s right. The letter said so, at least. Weirdly enough it’s not Tokyo—it’s Osaka.”
“Hmm. I’ve never been to Japan. Is there any water?”
“Yeah. Here, drink up. You’ve already been to Hong Kong and China before, haven’t you?”
“That barely counts as ‘been.’ We teleported in, I went whoosh with some magic, and we came straight back. Gulp gulp.”
Learning this new spell must have been pretty exhausting; Ha-yan had fallen asleep early Friday afternoon and only opened her eyes again around lunchtime on Saturday. With the previous spells she had learned, she would practice the mana control for a few hours and then play around with the magic on her own for ages. The fact that she had simply passed out this time said a lot.
Since she had fallen asleep Friday afternoon and woken up Saturday, school wasn’t an issue at all. Once she had blinked the sleep out of her eyes and gotten her bearings, I filled her in on everything that had happened while she was out. The letter itself had already burned away, but the news that her magic exam location had been decided left her looking equal parts excited and nervous as she turned to me.
“But I can actually use spatial magic now, right? I was planning to practice the mana control a bit more first. Tch.”
“It’s not an easy spell. If you’re that worried, why not try it right now? If moving your body feels like too much work, just teleport an object.”
“Really? Object teleportation, huh?”
As I spoke I floated a pencil over to her. Ha-yan accepted it with both hands, set it carefully on her palms, closed her eyes, and began drawing up mana while making a strange little sound.
“Hup!”
Thanks to me, the mana flow for spatial magic went incredibly smoothly. A moment later the pencil resting on her hands vanished without a sound—
Clack.
—and reappeared instantly back on the desk where it had originally been. Ha-yan looked up at me with a brilliant smile.
“It worked!”
“Of course it did. I taught you the mana control myself. How could you fail?”
Ordinary mages couldn’t teach someone else a spell the way I did—by directly moving their mana for them. Just controlling your own mana was hard enough; guiding someone else’s unused mana while casting a spell at the same time? You were lucky if your mana didn’t get tangled and put both of your lives in danger.
I moved closer to her side again.
“W-wait, hang on. Don’t come any closer than that.”
Startled by my approach, Ha-yan scrambled toward the corner of the bed. I tilted my head.
“Why all of a sudden?”
“W-well… thinking about it now, I was sweating like crazy right before I passed out. I-I probably smell like sweat…”
“That worry is completely pointless. And more importantly—do I look like the kind of person who stops just because you tell me not to come closer?”
“Huh?”
“Heh heh heh…”
“D-don’t come! I said don’t!!”
Ha-yan yelped and tried to escape, but I deliberately kept quiet about the fact that Rhea and the other homunculi had already cleaned her up thoroughly while she slept. I just kept closing the distance. When I finally reached her I leaned in toward the girl who was trembling like a startled kitten, brushed her black hair back behind her ear, and whispered:
“Don’t worry. Rhea cleaned you up perfectly while you were asleep.”
“…Eh?”
“So get over here!”
“Kyaaaaah!!!”
I scooped Ha-yan up and dove with her into the middle of the wide bed. Then I tugged her shirt up just a little and started tickling the smooth skin of her waist. Ha-yan twisted and writhed under the sudden attack, but she made no real attempt to escape my arms. Instead she reached out and tried to tickle me back—which had absolutely zero effect on me.
“Ahahahahaha!!! I-it tickles!!”
“Take that! And that!! How long has it been since we played around like this? You did great with the magic, so this is your reward!!”
“Kyahahahaha!!!”
And right at that moment—
Creeeak.
“Excuse me, Master. Young Miss. There’s a phone call from home… Oh my.”
“…”
“…”
Oh, for the love of—
Wasn’t this the most painfully cliché situation possible? Why hadn’t I seen it coming?
Right now Ha-yan and I were on the bed in the middle of some rather vigorous activity, clothes slightly askew. Her shirt had ridden up to just below her chest, exposing her cute little navel, and the shorts that had been covering her thighs had been shoved upward, leaving her pale, smooth thighs completely bare. My own shirt had been yanked up by Ha-yan while she thrashed from the tickling, and my face was a little flushed from pinning her down with my strength.
Rhea took in the entire scene without a word. She simply stared at the two of us for a long moment—
Click.
—took a single photo, and said:
“I’ll be sure to deliver this to Mother right away. Since the two of you appear to be busy, I’ll tell her you’ll contact her tomorrow morning. Well then, this meddlesome servant will take her leave…”
Click.
She shut the door and vanished.
“…Ugh… I can’t live like this…”
Ha-yan, who almost never said a bad word about Rhea, burrowed under the blankets with a look of pure despair.
“That little—! She knew exactly what she was walking into!! Hey! Rhea!! Get back here right this second!!! Stop that finger that’s about to send the photo to Mother right now!!!!!”
I roared with mana-laced volume and shot out of the room—though not before carefully straightening Ha-yan’s clothes first.
She could sense the situation inside the room perfectly well with her mana, yet she still put on that whole act just to walk in? That was one hundred percent impure(?) intentions at work!
And my prediction proved correct almost immediately.
“Ahahahaha!! As if I—this humble servant—would ever miss an opportunity like this!! Mother told me long ago! If anything ‘like that’ ever happened, I was to take a picture and send it to her at once!!”
“You little—!!”
Subordinate and dragon.
Rhea had clearly known she wouldn’t be able to run far. But that brief window was more than enough time for her to send the photo of moments ago to Ha-yan’s mother.
“Ghk! Urghrghnghrmgh!!!”
“You!!!! You crazy… little bastard!!! And you still call yourself my homunculus?!?!”
I had Rhea by the collar and was shaking her mercilessly when—
Riiing~~
“…”
“Aha! The call is already here! I’m saved!”
“I’m your master, damn iiiiiit!!!”
Ha-yan’s mother’s name lit up on my phone screen.
That day, I was verbally murdered by Mother.
“Did you die?”
“I’m not dead. I’d never die and leave you behind.”
“Hehe. Hearing you say something that romantic even in this situation means you’re alive and well, our Siu.”
“Mmm…”
“It’s been so long since I got to touch your wings and tail. They’re so soft and fluffy—it feels amazing. Hehe.”
“Ahem… Touch the tip of the tail too…”
“Okay! Hehe.”
The instant Rhea’s photo landed on Ha-yan’s mother’s phone, my own phone started ringing. I didn’t answer it. Instead I simply teleported straight to Ha-yan’s house.
The moment I appeared in front of Mother I dropped into a perfect full bow and used mana to transmit everything that had happened as politely as humanly possible. The second she saw my eyes she had clearly been about to say something along the lines of ‘You’re touching a minor? Do you even value your life…?!’—or maybe not? Her expression hadn’t actually been that bad, now that I thought about it.
Thankfully(?), once she grasped the full situation through the mana I had rapidly sent her, Mother settled for a few words of lecture and wrapped things up. The problem was that those “few words” of lecture turned out to be nearly three hours of nonstop scolding.
Afterward Ha-yan, who had used her newly learned spatial magic to return home, was also dragged over beside me and treated to the same lecture. Most of it was the usual “You’re both still minors, so…” type of parental worry. I already knew all of it, of course, but I also understood that a parent couldn’t help fretting about these things. So I simply knelt quietly and listened with full attention.
Once everything was finally over we returned to Ha-yan’s room. Between this latest incident and everything else that had been going on, I must have been more stressed than usual—because I started doing something I rarely did: whining at Ha-yan. I even went so far as to dig out the special clothes that let me show my wings, horns, and tail, partially released my polymorph, and flopped down with my head on her thigh.
It wasn’t completely unheard of. I almost never did this over school stuff, but company stress occasionally drove me to this kind of clinging with her.
Ha-yan, for her part, stroked my horns, wings, and tail with the most natural, gentle hands in the world.
“Mmm. Nice. Cool and smooth and soft. This addictive feeling never gets old no matter how many times I pet them. Hehe.”
“Is that so. To me they’re just uncomfortable.”
“The discomfort can’t be helped. But I like them, so you have to show them to me every once in a while, okay?”
“Got it.”
And so our positions were reversed from earlier. Before, I had been the one petting Ha-yan. Now Ha-yan was the one petting me, stroking the parts of each other that only we knew the other loved most. That was how we spent the rest of the weekend.
…There was one human—no, one homunculus—I seemed to have temporarily forgotten about, but that could wait until later.
Right now was what mattered, wasn’t it?