Growth
"Oh-ho. Have I grown taller?"
He had fretted for so long over the stubborn refusal of his height to budge—wondering, half-seriously, whether this so-called agelessness had frozen even ordinary growth—that the discovery left him faintly sheepish. It seemed he did grow, after all, in the normal way.
Perhaps the Dragon Heart had been exerting some adverse influence on his development.
Four whole centimeters. That made him one hundred forty centimeters now.
Whether the sudden spurt owed itself to the rise in his Circles, or to the beastification—dragonification? He still wasn't sure what to call it—he could not say. But if each Circle gained him another four centimeters, he might yet reach one hundred sixty-eight. And if he could grow taller still, so much the better.
Yes. I can hardly remain a child forever.
With Renie gone, immortality held little meaning for him now.
Pai chirped at him as he marked the wall with a pen, as if asking whether he had truly gotten taller, and Luke answered with a contented hum.
Yes. Far more than I expected.
Yerna watched him for a moment—this small figure humming to himself while measuring his height against the wall—then turned to prepare for going out, thinking dryly:
And that is supposed to be the Archmage from five thousand years ago.
Before she left, she called over to him.
"Luke, Unni's stepping out for a bit. Call me if anything comes up. And if you transform again, do not set one foot outside the dorm."
"Understood. I shall do so. But where are you going?"
"Mm. To buy you some underwear and pajamas. And your uniform needs altering, too."
It was one of the inevitable chores that followed a beastman child's first tail. Beastmen carried a great deal of sensory information in their tails; confining one produced a crushing sense of constriction. Restrict the tail's movement enough, and some lost their balance entirely. To a beastman, a tail was a sensory organ as vital as an eye or an ear.
Which was why, even in ages past, beastmen had gone about with their tails bare—weak point though it was. Hence the demand for clothing engineered with beastman physiology in mind.
"Ah. Of course. Then I leave it to you."
Underwear without a tail opening had, after all, been distinctly uncomfortable.
A quiet cocktail bar, tucked away somewhere unremarkable.
Even in broad daylight the place was dim and still, an atmosphere that left a strong impression—yet it held only a single customer. That alone might have been explained by the hour; few people parked themselves in a bar at midday. Still, something about it felt off. If business dried up in daylight, market sense would dictate closing the doors, would it not?
Perhaps for that reason, the bar carried a different air from any ordinary watering hole.
Jingle.
The bell hung from the doorframe gave a soft chime. The bartender glanced at the newcomer, recognized the face, and greeted her as though she were a regular.
"Karina. It's been a long time. Twenty years, is it?"
"Captain. I'm not Karina anymore."
"By that logic, I'm not your captain anymore either. Fair enough?"
"I suppose so."
"Well then. Have a seat."
After that brief exchange, Yerna settled onto a stool before the bar, and the easy warmth of the moment drained away at once.
"I'd love to pour something for an old subordinate I haven't seen in ages, but…"
"Let's skip straight to business."
He fielded the sudden steel in her eyes with an easy shrug.
"All right. A Dragon Heart, is it… Care to tell me why you're looking for one?"
"That's confidential."
"That important, then? Information, information… Well, Dragon Hearts are rare and expensive enough as it is…"
"No recent transaction records? No leads at all?"
"Hard to say. A Dragon Heart is such a scarce material that even a scrap of a clue is tough to dig up."
He kept that same sly expression, even whistling under his breath, until Yerna gave a short, dry laugh.
"…Which means you found one the hard way."
"Got it in one. It was a bit of work."
He laughed—ha-ha-ha!—ducked his head, and produced a sheaf of documents he had prepared in advance.
"I spent a full day combing through old records that don't even show up in the classified database search logs."
"I appreciate the effort."
Yerna took the papers, tapped them into a neat stack, and began to read.
A Dragon Heart: residual matter of a dragon, none of which remained in the present age. An extremely rare resource—a mana medium of overwhelming sensitivity, capable of a mana compression rate that defied belief.
So Luke's heart was made from one of these. That would more than explain that absurd mana sensitivity of his.
Whatever method they had used, implanting one in a chest first required acquiring a Dragon Heart. Trace that process far enough, and she would eventually reach the ones who had made Luke.
The first name that caught her eye on the sorted documents was the Proiten family.
"They're the house that most recently traded in a Dragon Heart."
"I see. And the other party?"
"No idea. Not a scrap of information on them."
"That's more than a little suspicious. Thank you for the help, Daren."
"Don't mention it. Call if you need backup."
"I thought you'd washed your hands of violence for good."
He waved her off with a shake of his head.
"Turns out I need a side job. A bar alone doesn't pay the bills these days. I've got a few useful people on hand, as it happens."
"Mm. Maybe later. My own record is a record, these days."
He snorted a quiet laugh.
"True enough. Even as a rookie, you handled yourself fine alone. Looking back on those days… hell. Still hard to believe you pulled half of that off."
"It's an embarrassing past, seen from here."
Yerna smiled, a little bitterly, gathered the documents, and left the bar behind.
True to the notice she had given Luke, Yerna returned with an assortment of pajamas and underthings.
Among the nightclothes were ordinary pajamas of the sort he usually wore, a one-piece style faintly reminiscent of the set he had borrowed at Mery's dorm, and one thoroughly peculiar-looking garment besides.
"Whatever for did you buy three kinds of nightclothes? Two would have been quite enough to rotate between. This seems a touch wasteful."
Ever since the three-million-gil incident, Luke had grown exacting about Yerna's spending. He had no wish to burden her financially any further.
Yerna only laughed—ha-ha—and answered lightly.
"Just because…"
Because they'd all look cute on you was a line she swallowed whole. She knew well enough he did not care for being called cute.
"Well. My thanks, in any case."
"Try the underwear first. Can you manage on your own?"
"But of course."
Underwear, in truth, had not been so finely differentiated in his own era; the first time he received a set, he had found the whole concept rather novel. Back then, the notion of underwear as such had not existed. One might line a garment with cotton on the inside, but call those scraps of cloth clothing and the answer was no.
Now that he was used to it, though, putting on underthings before dressing felt like the most natural act in the world.
Or so he thought—until he drew out the set Yerna had bought, and found himself briefly nonplussed.
The hole for the tail struck him as faintly indecent. On someone without a tail, it would simply leave the cleft of the backside fully exposed.
But the change awaiting him this time was something new again.
What he had been given was a pair of children's beastman drawers. The sole difference from ordinary ones was a medium-sized opening cut at the base of the tailbone. Since a tail was, for beastmen, essentially a mark of secondary sexual characteristics, Yerna had followed the clerk's recommendation and purchased a two-piece set—top and bottom. At least the design did not look as though the pieces belonged to different outfits.
"Hmm…"
He would have to put them on regardless. In this age, dressing without underthings first was simply not done.
The top gave him no particular trouble; it was little different from what he already wore. The bottom, however, was another matter. An organ that had never belonged to his body had grown there, after all. The process of dressing was rather like a person with an extra leg trying to pull on trousers.
Controlling the tail was easy enough by now, so getting into the garment posed no real difficulty—but fishing free the fur that had caught inside the fabric left Luke with a distinctly peculiar sensation.
Hah. Never in my life did I imagine I would live to tidy tail-fur snagged in my underwear…
It was true. The task itself did not take long, but the mere fact that such a process now existed drove home, with quiet force, that he was no longer entirely human.
A chimera… is that what I am.
Luke smiled, self-mocking.
Dragon. Magical beast. And one more faint presence he still could not name. Of all of them, the only feature that proved he was Luke Irushi was the Mana Sight in his left eye—barely holding its shape, a token presence at best. And even that was a trace too slight to serve as evidence to the people of five thousand years later.
Why did you, Luke Irushi, leave behind a self coherent enough for me to believe I am Luke Irushi? Was it truly necessary? I cannot, for the life of me, say.
There had been no need to load a chimera with memories. Even if one did, it would have been far more efficient to birth an entirely new self than to install the identity of Luke Irushi.
Was I not always one to weigh efficiency so carefully?
He knew, because he was Luke Irushi, that the other course would have been far more rational—and free of risk.
But… well. It was a question with no answer, no matter how long he turned it over. How was one to complete a puzzle when the necessary pieces were missing?
He was still turning that thought when he turned around, and Yerna asked in a gentle voice:
"Well? Manageable on your own?"
Luke answered in a tone of mild difficulty.
"Indeed. Hah… this is rather uncomfortable after all. The fur that doesn't quite clear the opening keeps catching my attention…"
"You're just not used to it yet."
Beyond that, Yerna produced beastman stockings, beastman trousers, skirts, and the like in a smooth succession. He had worn stockings often enough already; naturally, they had not been left out this time either. Every piece followed the ergonomic design of beastman clothing, each with its carefully cut tail opening.
"Here—I'll put these away. Wear whatever's comfortable later."
Setting aside one set of pajamas for him to change into, she folded the remaining clothes neatly into the drawer. Luke fastened the buttons of the nightclothes and answered with a nod.
"Very well. You have my sincere thanks, Yerna."
"By the way—I saw you measuring yourself this morning. How was it? How much do you think you grew?"
"Hmm. About four centimeters. I can now say my height is roughly one hundred forty centimeters."
"I—is that so?"
Yerna was briefly thrown by the bright expression on his face and the almost buoyant note in his voice.
Was four centimeters truly such a dramatic growth? In ordinary terms, yes—four centimeters was a growth worth noting. But this was a child who, transformed into that peculiar dragon form, had stood nearly three meters tall… and here he was, delighted over a mere four centimeters. It was a little…
Adorable.