"Waaaah!"
"What's happening?"
"Didn't they say the candy was supposed to make you grow?! Why is it my clothes that grew?!"
"What the—!"
The elegant atmosphere of the courtyard — wisteria and banana trees, a little bridge over a trickling stream, the graceful old eaves — was shattered by a chorus of startled shrieks. A flock of blue-feathered sparrows burst into the air, flapping frantically over the rooftop.
To be precise, only one person was doing the shrieking: Little March.
And oh, she was very much little March.
A tiny, round-cheeked little girl of maybe six or seven, her Caslan-brand eyes — powder-pink and blue — blinking with wide, baffled incomprehension as she held up her sleeve and stared at it like it had personally wronged her. The sleeve dangled well past her fingertips.
The bewildered little March turned to look beside her — and immediately her eyes went huge.
"Stelle, why are you still getting bigger?"
Wait — no. That was wrong.
March 7th caught up to reality a half-second late, her pupils dilating.
The covered walkway, the courtyard, the old house, the stone table, the trellis — everything had gotten bigger. The eaves were so far overhead now. It wasn't that things had grown. It was that she had shrunk.
Her white pleated skirt with purple-blue trim slipped off her waist and dropped to her knees with a soft thwap. Her blue-and-white off-shoulder blouse pooled around her feet like a bed sheet.
Haxxor Bunny had been humming to herself and eating candy, perfectly content — until she felt a sudden chill at her thighs. She froze. Slowly, she looked down.
Her black cargo shorts had dropped to her ankles. Her blue socks sagged limply around her feet — those small, tender little feet that any grown adult could comfortably pop in their mouth whole. Her bunny-ear hoodie bobbed and swayed atop her head.
She looked exactly like an absurdly adorable little bunny.
Haxxor Bunny stood frozen, then slowly turned toward Caelus.
His outer coat — black on the outside, dark green within — had collapsed in a heap on the ground. The tiny creature buried underneath the pile of fabric made Haxxor Bunny suck in a sharp, involuntary breath.
His ash-grey hair had puffed up into a fluffy little cloud of a bedhead, glinting with fine sparkles in the warm morning light — like fresh snow piled onto a wisp of cotton wool. His golden eyes looked impossibly round and huge on his little round toddler face.
His T-shirt collar had slid down off one shoulder, baring a tiny, soft little neck. His cheeks were the color of a hard-boiled egg dusted in blush powder. He looked like a baby kitten begging for food.
Good lord. He was adorable.
Even Haxxor Bunny had to admit that the tiny creature in front of her was, by any objective measure, one of the most absolutely precious human infants in the entire history of human infants.
You could tell just from the way everyone around her had gone completely blank-eyed and vacant.
Caelus and Haxxor Bunny stared at each other. Looking at that face — unbearably cute, the kind that liquefied your heart on contact — she opened her mouth.
Haxxor Bunny poked her fingertip at Caelus's dangling sleeve: "Caelus, you… you've shrunk down into a little kid."
Caelus's mouth twitched. He fished out his bow-tie voice changer from inside the heap of clothing, raised it to his lips, and out came Conan's voice.
"Though the body has shrunk, the mind remains razor-sharp! There is always only one truth — it's not that I turned into a child. We turned into children."
For all that Caelus was attempting to project authority — even pointing a finger for emphasis — his current state couldn't even pass for elementary school. He looked firmly nursery-class level. Maybe one year younger than that, even.
"But then why is March 7th a little bit bigger than us?"
Little Haxxor Bunny's black tank top had transformed into something resembling a giant bib. With her pre-development chest having absolutely nothing to anchor it, a full third of her upper body was on display. She instinctively raised her hands to cover herself and hastily tugged her fallen black jacket back up.
At that moment, Little March turned around — and saw two tiny little creatures that barely came up to her chest. One tiny bunny. One tiny little boy.
Her gaze landed on Caelus.
Oh.
Oh no.
He was so cute.
"Based on our current situation, this batch of rainbow candy doesn't just accelerate growth — it can also revert a person back to a younger age. The effects stack. We two ate the most candy, and we were unlucky enough to get the entire size-reduction variety."
Caelus's voice came out impossibly milky — even more full-cream than Haxxor Bunny's usual tones. The sheer concentration of baby-softness was off the charts.
Due to bone conduction, it didn't sound quite as bad from his own perspective, at least.
"What we need to do now is eat the corresponding number of growth-type candies, and we'll return to normal!"
He wrapped his oversized coat around himself like a cape, then shuffled over to the stone table and began attempting to climb up the edge.
As for the wardrobe malfunctions of Haxxor Bunny and Little March — well, even the most depraved of individuals wouldn't be able to feel anything inappropriate toward girls in this particular state.
"Hopefully we haven't hit the stacking limit, otherwise it'll be — whoa!"
Unaccustomed to his suddenly miniaturized body — his leverage, his center of gravity, all of it was completely off — Caelus's chubby little hand slipped on the table edge. He tipped backward, his head heading straight for the ground.
The expected crash-landing never came. A pair of soft hands caught him gently.
But rather than feeling relieved, Caelus's heart lurched straight up into his throat — because of the face now looking down at him.
Somehow Stelle looked more mature than usual today, with a subtle note of wifely elegance about her, her whole presence gentled even when she said nothing. But faced with this version of Stelle right now, Caelus felt a dread he had never felt before.
"Wh — what do you think you're doing?"
"I'm warning you! I am extremely dangerous!"
In Caelus's current form, that second sentence landed in Stelle's ears as: I am extremely easy to mess with!
"Hey, keep your hands to yourself."
"Just hand me a growth candy — hey, Stelle, stop just smiling at me, say something!"
Faced with Stelle's wordless smile, Caelus felt, for the very first time, genuine fear.
"Heh heh~"
Stellebeamed. Caelus became even more afraid.
That was not her normal voice. Nor was it the gentle, wifely warmth of her matured tone. It was something else — something she had surfaced through her Persona Mask, diving back through memory into childhood, pulling up that scene from The Legend of Nezha where the villainess Lady Shiji threw back her head and laughed.
The laughter from that memory overlapped perfectly with the unhinged cackle now building in Stelle's throat as she slowly tilted her head up, eyes blazing bright enough to outshine the noon sun.
Every alarm in Caelus's body fired at once.
He made a break for it immediately — but he was one step too slow. Stelle moved faster than his eyes could track. Before he could process it, she had both hands under his armpits and he was airborne, dangling in midair.
"Little Caelus-baby~ Is it so bad to be held by big sis? Why do you look so unhappy?"
Stelledmly seized Caelus's tiny arms and began swinging them wildly, her bell-like laugh booming: "The early bird catches the worm~ Morning is for energy~ Let it out~ Let it out~! Hahahahahaha~!"
Little Gui and the two Sushangs had come to Fyxestroll Garden for their nighttime horror-stream adventure — night, after all, being far more atmospheric for that sort of thing. After the DanteMon incident, this was now the second morning.
"You must have missed Mama the very instant you couldn't see her — that's it, isn't it!"
Stellemaniacally kneaded Caelus's cheeks — softer and squishier than jelly, bouncing back from every squeeze.
"What the — let go! Let go of me!"
Caelus's physical strength had never matched Stelle's even at full size. Shrunken down like this, he had nothing. He was completely powerless in her grip.
"Accept Mama's good-morning kiss~!"
His outer coat was crumpled into a wrinkled mess by Stelle's enthusiastic handling. His golden eyes went perfectly, furiously round:
"You had better not — I swear I will — mmph!"
No matter how fearsome the threat, delivered in a tiny little boy's soft, doughy voice, it could only ever accomplish one thing —
"Ahahahaha~!"
Making the bell-like laughter ring even louder.
Every word of protest was thoroughly smothered under a rapid-fire barrage of kisses — ten big smooches on the left cheek, mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah, ten little pecks on the right, and then back and forth like a machine gun. His nose was deliberately nuzzled until it tingled and ached. All the while Stelle was burying her face into the crook of his tiny neck and rubbing against it with the frenzied devotion of a cat who had found a patch of catnip.
"See how you're not even fighting back — that means you want Mama to kiss you. A little Caelus-cub like you was born to be eaten up by Mama~!"
Caelus flailed his tiny hands uselessly, but Stelle had him pinned against her, squished flat like a little glutinous rice cake.
"Uh…"
Stellesuddenly going off the deep end like this left every girl present gaping blankly. Even White Seele stumbled back two steps, staring at Caelus — who was being kissed so aggressively he could barely breathe — before gathering herself and speaking up:
"Sister Stelle… Brother Caelus looks like he's really struggling."
Black Seele had eaten the growth-type candy, so right now it was White Seele standing there — her long hair reaching her waist, her face bearing a striking resemblance to Belobog's Seele with only the slightest differences. Yet those slight differences meant the two had completely different auras.
Gentle. You could see it at a glance. The timidness had become three parts warmth and seven parts softness. That is — provided she wasn't speaking.
There was also the matter of her chest. Seele had grown up in the lower district without a surname, undernourished. White Seele, on the other hand, had been the beneficiary of an entire orphanage's worth of accumulated nutrition — which put her two full sizes ahead of her counterpart.
"It's fine, don't worry. Seele — do you want to hold him?"
Intuitive as always, Stelle had known perfectly well that a portion of Caelus's suffering was theatrical — he had been waiting for exactly this kind of rescue.
Stelleovered Caelus's mouth with one hand and passed him over to White Seele.
Those perfectly round, luminously clear golden eyes — full of aggrieved ferocity from being terrorized by Stelle — instantly captured every last scrap of Seele's attention.
"C-can I really?"
Her voice trembled with barely-contained excitement.
Caelus went briefly rigid. Little White Seele, you too—
"Of course. Here, go ahead."
Stelleeset tiny Caelus into Seele's arms.
Seele's heart hammered. On instinct, her arms curved to cradle him, terrified this little bundle of soft «Brother Caelus» might somehow tumble and get hurt.
She held her breath. Her fingertips barely grazed Caelus's silver hair — and she was immediately magnetized, her trembling fingers brushing slowly over the crown of his head.
"Brother Caelus… so soft…"
"Seele — you!"
The last syllable drifted off like a sleepwalker's murmur. Hearing it, Caelus's eyes went slightly wide — the pure, stinging betrayal of it.
"Sorry, Brother Caelus."
Seele apologized in a fluster — but didn't loosen her grip.
"...Fine."
Being cuddled — obviously, on principle, Caelus was going to refuse. He was a fully-grown man of dignity. This was beneath him.
Well. That said.
White Seele's potential was genuinely impressive, wasn't it?
Not bad at all, «himself».
A notch beyond Silver Wing, yet without disrupting the harmony of the human form whatsoever.
Caelus decided to reward both himself and his little sister.
Seeing that Brother Caelus was no longer resisting, White Seele buried her face in the crook of his tiny neck, breathing in deeply, the corners of her eyes faintly flushed.
"Smells so good…"
That distinctive sweet milky scent — unique to infants and toddlers.
"Stelle manhandling Caelus is one thing, but Seele, you're joining in too?!"
March 7th thrust her camera at tiny Caelus and hammered the shutter button.
"N-no, it's not like that…"
Seele jolted back to reality, the tips of her ears burning scarlet, her voice going soft and flustered: "Brother Caelus is just too cute, I — I couldn't help it…"
The two Sushangs and Little Gui had both been watching in a daze.
Li Sushang was marveling at the wonders of candy.
Little Gui was equally mesmerized by tiny Caelus's cuteness — she wanted to hold him too, but didn't quite dare.
Dummy Sushang, however, had gone uncharacteristically solemn.
She was a Cloud Knight of the Xianzhou!
These were all close friends and family, yes — but she couldn't just stand by while they "picked on" a "child." That was criminal behavior!
That was the kind of thing that got you hauled off to the Realm-Keeping Commission to eat pork chop rice!
No, she had to put a stop to this!
Dummy Sushang steeled herself with quiet resolve, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin with the full authority of righteousness — and prepared to deliver a solemn speech about the seriousness of the situation.
Except — the moment she raised her head, she found herself locking eyes with tiny Caelus, who was resting against White Seele's shoulder, blinking his big golden eyes at her.
"…"
Dummy Sushang went silent.
One second. Three seconds. Five seconds.
"Oh my goodness! What IS this?! Can I touch — oh my goodness… what IS this?! Can I touch?!"
"He's too cute! Baby, you're a little grey cotton candy ball~ mwah, baby, mwah~!"
When faced with something this aggressively adorable, Dummy Sushang's self-restraint had never once stood a chance.
Little Gui: "…"
March 7th: "…"
Caelus's eye twitched as his head was petted and his cheeks were smooshed.
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