Intermission:
Ariane and Chiyome’s
Adventures in Babysitting
✦ ✦ ✦
Ariane and Chiyome inspected the remains of the hideout belonging to Hanzo, the Jinshin clan’s founder. It was exactly where the Dragon Lord Villiers Fim told them it would be, but all that remained of the shrine were moss-covered stone walls. The wooden roof had rotted away long ago.
A soul-wrenching scream came from the direction of the hot spring, where the two women had left Arc. They looked around in surprise.
“What was that?!”
“Whoa!”
Ariane and Chiyome, both blessed with impeccable hearing, exchanged a look and nodded. Ariane drew her sword and took off at a run toward the outdoor bath.
“Arc, are you oka—”
When she got there, however, Ariane was surprised to see a strange man lying on the ground beside the water.
“Hey, who are you?!”
She’d expected to find a familiar skeleton, either bare to the bone or wearing gleaming silver armor. Instead, she found a muscular, unshaven man with brown skin and long black hair. Ponta licked the strange man’s cheek furtively.
“Kyi! Kyiiii!”
Ariane’s knowledge that spirit creatures rarely took to humans, and that Ponta had stayed behind with Arc, left one possibility as to this suspicious man’s identity.
“Arc, is…is that you?”
Chiyome approached the man and looked him over, checking for injuries. “It’s got to be him. Seems like the hot spring had an effect after all.”
Arc, no longer a pile of bones, was now covered in powerful muscles. Although his new skin was warm to the touch, he shivered, his face pale.
Ariane moved up beside Chiyome to take a look at Arc herself. “What’s going on? If the spring brought back his flesh, then why did he collapse?”
Seeing Arc—a guy who’d returned to his easygoing demeanor moments after facing a Dragon Lord—lying naked in the open air was unsettling.
The man stopped moving, his groans going silent.
“A-Arc…?” Ariane’s lips trembled, her voice tense.
Chiyome put her fingers to his neck to check for a pulse. She pulled open his eyelids and examined his pupils. She lowered a catlike ear to his mouth and listened to his breathing.
“He’s okay, Ariane. He just passed out.”
Some of the tension left Ariane’s shoulders. “Don’t scare me like that, you jerk!” She shot Arc a steely glare, then turned back to Chiyome. “I wonder if the hot spring caused this. We both dipped our hands into it, but I didn’t feel anything. What’s going on here?”
Chiyome only shrugged. “I have no idea. Neither of us is cursed, so maybe that’s why it didn’t affect us.”
Ariane frowned. “We should’ve asked Villiers Fim about the spring’s effects when we had the chance.”
“Well, we can’t just leave Arc like this. We should take him somewhere he can rest.”
Ariane agreed and hefted Arc onto her back.
Dark elves were strong—so strong, in fact, that Ariane had no problem carrying the nearly two-meter-tall man, her feet stable beneath her as she walked. Her amethyst skin flushed, however, when she became aware of a certain body part dangling against her lower back.
“Why won’t you wake up? I’m going to be real upset if you just passed out from heat exhaustion.”
“Kyii?” Ponta hovered close to Ariane’s feet, looking at Arc with a great deal of concern.
Chiyome led the way back to the shrine. “How about laying him down here, on the counter in the old kitchen?”
There was a hearth-shaped indentation on the kitchen counter, and a flat, polished stone next to it that looked like it was used for preparing food. Chiyome swept away fallen leaves and debris before Ariane set Arc down on top of the stone. Ponta leaped onto the counter and mewed, licking Arc’s cheek again. That seemed to elicit a reaction from Arc; his eyebrow twitched, and his face tensed up.
The sight provided some small comfort to the women watching over him.
“Well, at least there aren’t any obvious injuries.”
Ariane gave Arc’s still-naked body another look, although she only made it halfway through before her face flushed a deep crimson. She turned away.
Chiyome covered Arc with one of the pelts they’d been using as sleeping bags. “I’d hate for him to catch a cold, exposed to the elements like that.”
Ariane nodding emphatically. “Y-yeah, you’re right!” She looked back at Arc, her face concerned. “Wait, what’s this?”
Ariane had assumed that the hot spring had lifted Arc’s curse, and returned his original body, but the man in front of her wasn’t human. Sure, he had black hair, beautiful brown skin, and a strong, handsome face covered with stubble. But his ears looked incredibly similar to elven ears.
Moreover, when Chiyome examined Arc, she’d discovered that he had crimson pupils—a color she’d never seen in a human or an elf—suggesting that he might be another species entirely.
“Do you think Arc might be an elf?” Ariane asked. “Humans don’t have ears like these.”
Chiyome looked down at Arc. “He’s definitely not human. Between his magical abilities and sheer physical strength, he strikes me as having both elf and dark elf characteristics. Do you know any elves with black hair and red eyes?”
Ariane shook her head. “Elves have bright green hair and green eyes, while dark elves have amethyst skin and white hair. It’s one or the other.”
“Hmm. And mountain people have different eye colors, depending on our parents. We’ll just have to wait and ask Arc directly.”
Ariane looked deep into Chiyome’s azure eyes, picking up on her unspoken question: what should they do next? She looked back down at the motionless Arc and sighed, turning to leave. “I guess we should start preparing the camp. There’s nothing else we can do until Arc wakes up.”
Chiyome nodded, then frowned. “Ariane, look!”
Ariane turned back. The flesh that had covered Arc’s body began to vanish, returning to bone. “The spring’s power must be fading!”
The two women looked at each other, but neither had any answers. They had no choice but to watch, helpless, as the transformation unfolded.
In a matter of moments, Arc’s muscular body was gone, leaving only the familiar skeleton in its place.
“Is…is he alive?” Ariane reached out an uneasy hand, brushing the cold, hard surface of Arc’s skull with her fingertips. All warmth had vanished.