CH 48

kahi~n   kahi kahi   kahiiiin!!

“… Su, what are you doing?”

I woke up to a strange sound that echoed through the morning air.

I went out to the yard, where I thought the sound was coming from, and I found Su shaking her bright red head back and forth. She was groaning and flapping her wings and rubbing her nose everywhere. The fence we’d just repaired was sounding dangerously close to breaking because of her wild behavior. Should it be made of iron next time?

Whenever Su’s head shot upwards and then downwards in rapid succession, I heard another one of those ‘kahi~n’ noises.

Looks like it was Su’s sneezing that was making the ‘kahin kahin’ noises in the otherwise quiet morning.

“Hm, I wonder if dragons catch colds too.”

“C’mere, c’mere,” I called, holding Su’s head when she got closer. Her fangs were bared, her tongue sticking out, and her little arms were squirming about, making me think she was very frustrated.

I didn’t know what the symptoms of a dragon’s cold were, but maybe they were similar to those of a human’s cold. 

Though for someone with a cold, her nose, whose nostrils were foot-long vertical slits, wasn’t runny and her eyes hadn’t changed. She was sneezing and moving strangely, but there were no other symptoms that reminded me of a cold.

“Hmmm… a summer cold, is it?”

Kahi~n! – was the reply I received and, as she shook her head, an arm wrapped around me from behind. Ah, it was just Fikar rubbing his head against me. When I told him about how Su was acting a little strange, he separated from me to get a closer look at Su – although I saw a hint of annoyance through his expressionlessness for a moment there. Then, he bent down and pointed at the tip of Su’s nose.

“N? Something there– Ohh…”

I fixed my eyes on the spot in front of Fikar’s finger and saw what looked like a thin stick in her right nostril. Su’s head was being held in place by Fikar and she was swinging her tail while grumbling. It must’ve been just an itch, then, because there was something stuck in her nose that she couldn’t get out.

“I’ll get it out, so stay still~,” I told her as I stuck my thumb and index finger into her nostril, gently pulling on the stick so it wouldn’t snap halfway through. 

“Guu… gYaUUU!”

It’s itchy! – was what Su was probably thinking. I stroked her head with my other hand as she squealed in discomfort, but I still couldn’t see the other end of the stick. The stick that slowly slithered its way out was a thin tree branch, with the occasional leaf hanging onto a small spur. When it finally came out from her nose, the branch I was holding was probably over 30 cm long.

“Su, how did you– Ahhahahaha! How did you get this stuck in your nose?”

Looking at that long, thin twig, I couldn’t help but laugh. Su’s way of hunting in the forest was rather chaotic. Sometimes she might eat animals perched on branches, or she might just rest on one large tree while hooking her tail around another. This branch must’ve entered her nose with great force during one of those movements, but how did she not notice it at any point? The fact that the branch had cleanly traveled so deep could’ve meant that Su had pushed it in the opposite direction when she tried to get it out.

I burst into laughter at the thought of our clever dragon getting caught up in such a silly incident.

“Guururururu… GAU!”

As if she knew she was being laughed at, Su let out a throaty growl and curled up into her ball-like sleeping position, even though it wasn’t nighttime, and hid her face between her stomach and her tail. Her reaction, although I couldn’t tell if it was because she was embarrassed or sulking, was also amusing.

I threw aside the twig that had caused Su’s suffering and hugged her neck.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m not laughing~ There, there. Su is a cool dragon~!”

Uguguu… I tried comforting the pile of red scales, who only returned a weak roar, but Su was unexpectedly stubborn. I’d heard that dragons were prideful, so perhaps it’d be better to just leave Su alone for now.

Holding back my laughter, Fikar and I went back inside to have breakfast.

When we entered, Anemone-chan was running with a tap-tap-tap on her little root-legs around a pot of soup that Fikar had put over the fire. Soon enough, she spotted us and ran over.

Anemone-chan, who slept in a vase on my nightstand, was surprisingly agile and could climb down to the first floor as long as I left the door open. However, she needed either my or Fikar’s help getting back “home” since she couldn’t go up as easily as she could go down.

I picked Anemone-chan’s water dish off the floor and washed it before refilling it, and all the while Anemone-chan ran in a figure-eight pattern through my legs. When I put it back on the floor, she jumped for joy and raised her leaves in the shape of a V.

I added a handful of new ingredients to the leftovers from last night’s soup and, once they were cooked, Fikar and I sat down at opposite sides of the table. Anemone-chan also joined us at the table, bouncing back and forth between Fikar and I for a while, but when she got tired, she would sit on the edge of the table and let her flower sway from side to side.

“So that’s what Su’s sneezing sounds like~. I’m glad it’s not a cold, but can dragons even get sick?”

Fikar cocked his head to the side.

In general, dragons were highly adaptable to changes in their environment and I’d heard of dragon species that lived in the most remote regions where no human could live. During the rainy season when it could rain for weeks on end, they looked unaffected, and Su probably wouldn’t be hurt at all if she were put over a bonfire thanks to her fire magic. Plus, their hard scales were impossible to puncture with most blades, making them the toughest of all creatures.

“We can’t do a medical checkup on such a big body, can we? Maybe we should be more careful about how much salt we eat.”

I imagined Su with a big belly and burst into laughter again. Dragons were apparently light for their body size, so she might not be able to fly if she put on too much weight. Though, Su was so cheerful that she might also just end up enjoying life in the forest as a terrestrial dragon…

I wonder if I was punished for laughing like that.

The next day, I was the one who’d caught a cold.