"Big sis Himeko, Uncle Yang - we're back!"
March 7th came bounding into the parlor car first, chirping like a lark, her boundless energy shattering the quiet of the room.
"Perfect timing."
Himeko sat with her long legs elegantly crossed, lifting a steaming cup of coffee with a warm smile, red lips parting: "I just optimized the grind fineness of the beans and the water temperature control, and tried out a new technique. The flavor is remarkably full-bodied."
The red-haired beauty's smile was gracious and beguiling.
But shift your gaze to the seat across from her, and the entire art style changed.
There sat Old Yang, that reliable middle-aged gentleman, perched upright through what was clearly heroic effort. A thread of unidentified liquid clung to the corner of his mouth, his pupils were blown wide and unfocused, and he looked like someone had removed his skeleton - only his death-grip on his cane kept him from sliding to the floor.
His lips were still moving faintly, producing murmurs of no discernible meaning.
As a veteran Masked Fool, Caelus had long since unlocked the lip-reading skill. Unfortunately, Old Yang's lips were trembling, and the movements were small.
All he could pick out was:
'I'll form the head...'
'Birds... why do they fly?'
'Because... when Himeko's coffee is brewed... the birds of the Express... to escape their appointed doom... must... take to the sky...'
Fragments like that, drifting in and out.
"The hell?!"
Having deciphered those classic lines, Caelus's eyes went wide, his scalp prickling, alarm bells screaming.
Old Yang, Old Yang, what's happened to you, Old Yang!
Pull yourself together!
Has it already gotten this bad - delirious, babbling nonsense?!
"Ha - gah?!"
March 7th's cheerful skipping stopped dead, and Stelle, Seele and the others who had just stepped in behind her froze too, as if someone had hit pause. Collective petrification.
Only Miss Haxxor Bunny, who had yet to be introduced to true hell, blinked her silver-grey eyes in blank confusion and looked left and right.
What's wrong with everybody?
Is the atmosphere kind of... off?
It gave her the inexplicable feeling of a hero returning to the village to rest after slaying a monster, only to walk face-first into the opening cutscene of a boss fight.
And it wasn't only the young ones frozen in place.
Even Himeko, who had risen smoothly to brew coffee for everyone, stalled mid-motion once she got a clear look at the composition of the returning party. Mild astonishment crossed her lovely face.
The cause was not the grey-haired, gold-eyed little boy who appeared to be all of three or four years old.
The same trick doesn't work twice on the Holy Navigator.
That was unquestionably Caelus after eating a grow-and-shrink candy, not the child of him and anyone else.
The point was the willowy figure holding Little Caelus.
Black hair bound into a ponytail and half-gathered into a trailing-cloud bun, two strands slanting down past her cheeks into long falling threads, wisps scattered across her forehead framing an exquisite face.
A black patent-leather jacket draped half off her shoulders, oversized and hanging loose over a body with unmistakable curves, revealing a white cropped tee stretched tight over snow-pale skin.
A cold, hard metal chain choker sat with perfect precision around her slender, graceful swan neck.
Lower down, a pair of light black boots pressed against the polished floor.
Higher up, long legs sheathed in visually devastating diamond-mesh fishnets, smooth as set cream, flaring gently outward as they rose, supporting a green plaid pleated skirt that fluttered as it fell.
The look was trendy, faintly punk, and thoroughly youthful.
Mostly, though, it was that face.
"Miss... Ruan Mei?"
Himeko's red lips parted slightly, startled.
There was practically no one in the Galaxy who didn't know Ruan Mei's name, and as the Express's Navigator, Himeko certainly did.
That eccentric weir - ahem, that elusive Genius Society member who showed her head but never her tail. What was she doing here?
And carrying a shrunken Caelus, no less?
This outfit, dialed all the way up to trendy and youthful, hardly matched the cool, remote Miss Ruan Mei of her impressions.
Stelle and Caelus traded a swift glance.
"Surprise!"
Stelle flung her arms wide with theatrical flourish, like a curator unveiling a priceless treasure: "Himeko, we kidnapped Ruan Mei into visiting the Express~ Surprised? Shocked?"
"Hello, Miss Himeko. Sorry to intrude."
Ruan-Caelus's voice was like distilled water steeped in ice, clear and cold and utterly level.
While Caelus, in control of the body, handled the surface pleasantries with Himeko, a silent emergency rescue operation unfolded behind her back.
March 7th sidled up to Himeko at once, bouncing around to block her line of sight.
Stelle moved like a seasoned infiltrator, one bound carrying her to the coffee machine, snatching up the pot in a flash and pouring it with surgical precision into a specially made sealed canister.
This stuff was a strategic-grade weapon!
Run into an enemy who needs interrogating? Two cups down the hatch and he'd be clutching your leg, sobbing for his mother, confessing everything!
Time was short - no chance to wash out the residue clinging to the inside of the pot.
Stelle briskly produced a pot of ordinary coffee, kept on permanent standby in her spatial ring, and poured it in.
The teamwork was seamless. Clearly not their first time.
In the corner, the half-dead Old Yang watched it happen, and something in those clouded pupils seemed to register the switch.
A meaningless rasp came from his throat, and a glimmer that could only be called hope surfaced in his eyes, as though someone had jabbed him with adrenaline. Even the fingers clamped around his cane tightened a fraction -
He lived!
"I like the enormous windows here. Excellent view. One can see the quiet stars."
Ruan-Caelus stood before the great observation window with a child cradled in her arms, posture elegant.
"Indeed. For those of us who travel the sea of stars, quiet skies are especially precious," Himeko answered with a smile, pushing down her doubts.
After a few more pleasantries she finally cut to the heart of it, her gaze probing as it settled on Ruan-Caelus: "May I ask what brings Miss Ruan Mei aboard the Astral Express? Is there something we can do for you?"
From what Himeko knew of Ruan Mei, this was absolutely a woman who never called without a reason.
Besides, there was something indefinably wrong about the 'Ruan Mei' in front of her - especially the way she held Caelus. Too natural. Natural to the point of... eerie?
"Caelus, once you've had your fun, get down. Don't make trouble for Miss Ruan Mei."
It was the tone of an older sister lecturing her mischievous little brother.
"Ahahahahaha -!"
What answered her was a peal of laughter utterly incompatible with Ruan Mei's cool persona, brimming with playful smugness and pure gremlin energy.
Under Himeko's abruptly frozen stare, the dignified aloofness on Miss Ruan Mei's face melted away like snow, replaced by an extremely familiar grin of triumph.
"Looks like my acting's pretty great, huh! I even fooled the wise big sis Himeko!"
The corner of Caelus's mouth twitched.
He was the one who'd done the acting.
"Heh heh~"
Stelle-Mei clamped her arms tight, arms and ample chest working in concert to squeeze the little Caelus-cub in her hold until he could barely breathe.
At the same time she lowered her head, and that peerlessly beautiful face belonging to Ruan Mei broke into a smile both radiant and deeply dangerous: "Little Caelus-cub, you were born to be eaten up by Mommy!"
And she proceeded to rain a storm of "mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah" all over Little Caelus's soft, springy pink cheeks.
"!!!"
Himeko petrified where she stood, the coffee cup she'd just raised nearly slipping from her fingers, her lovely face broadcasting a full "Who am I? Where am I? What am I looking at?"
Beside her, Old Yang - who had just felt a spark of hope kindle at the coffee swap and was struggling to prop himself upright - witnessed this horror show, rolled his eyes back, and let his head crash into the seat back with a solid thud.
He seemed to have... died again?
What was going on?
Himeko recovered quickly and ventured a guess: "You're Stelle?"
"Mm-hmm~"
Stelle-Mei tilted her chin up smugly and jerked a thumb at herself with a flourish: "Kono Stelle-Mei da!"
"What in the world is going on?"
Old Yang startled upright from his deathbed.
While Stelle-Mei and Stelle explained the whole chain of events to the two of them, Haxxor Bunny watched the little Caelus-cub wriggle free of Stelle-Mei's arms and flee toward her, and couldn't resist a jab:
"If you knew you'd get mauled, why eat the candy in the first place?"
"Haaah..."
Caelus picked up the coffee pot and heaved a sigh with all the weariness of an old man, delivered in a squeaky toddler voice: "All I can say is, luck wasn't on my side."
Last night, Caelus, Stelle and Stelle-Mei had thoroughly put the mysteries of the Path of Propagation into practice. A Stellaron spirit still green at piloting two bodies at once had given Caelus an experience beautiful beyond anything he'd known, beyond words.
The two of them wrapped around each other, and as for the specifics...
Insert hotdog.jpg here. If you know, you know~
For instance, when Stelle rode him up to the summit of the clouds, Stelle-Mei, seated on his face, shuddered right along with her.
It was Stelle who suggested afterward that Stelle-Mei try a grow-and-shrink candy.
Caelus had no objections, naturally. Watching Stelle-Mei transform from a pert young girl into a lush, mature older sister - a waist soft enough to loop around his neck, a chest whose curve pressed the breath out of him - was like falling headfirst into a honey jar.
Riding the high, Caelus blind-picked a candy of his own, and, well - he shrank into a pipsqueak, while Stelle turned into a big sister two heads taller than him.
Playing the pony and taking the occasional big ride wasn't bad either. The onee-san type had always been top three on his kink list.
Especially since Stelle's arms around him felt like being cradled as a kitten. Ridiculously warm.
Once the battle ended, Caelus went looking for a candy to restore himself - and drew the shrink candy again, which was why the effect was still running now.
So he'd given up and decided to wait it out.
"Ohh~ I don't know what happened, but that does sound unlucky."
Miss Haxxor Bunny nodded blandly, then turned a curious eye on the coffee pot in Caelus's arms: "Speaking of which, why were you lot sneaking around swapping out Himeko's coffee?"
"Because Himeko's coffee is soooo - good! Good things should be savored slowly, right?"
"Really? I don't buy it."
"Bronie, do you think your teacher would lie to you?"
The tone was grave and solemn, but paired with Caelus's current milk-soft appearance and childish voice, the gap-moe went straight through the stratosphere - enough that Haxxor Bunny couldn't stop herself from pinching his little cheek.
"Coming from you looking like that~ the credibility~ is highly questionable, little~ tea~cher~"
Sinful little fingers seized Little Caelus's plush, bouncy cheek meat. Haxxor Bunny's eyes curved into crescents as she kneaded and drew the words out.
Disrespecting your teacher?
Then don't blame this teacher for being ruthless.
Caelus laughed coldly to himself while his small face maintained an expression of pure, harmless innocence. He briskly poured out two cups of dark brown liquid and pushed one toward Haxxor Bunny: "It's really delicious. Try it if you don't believe me."
"Ha? You think I'd be dumb enough to drink something you handed me?"
Haxxor Bunny pulled a face.
"Suit yourself. I'll drink it, then."
Caelus took a sip from his own cup and wore the expression of a man tasting bliss itself.
That perfectly adorable, utterly unaffected look of satisfaction, combined with the zero-threat shota shell he was currently wearing, nearly zeroed out Haxxor Bunny's HP bar on the spot from sheer cuteness.
Damn it...
Alarm bells rang in Haxxor Bunny's head, but her reason wavered under an image that cute.
If it were Caelus in his normal state, not a soul alive would believe that line!
But in this pipsqueak form... he came with a built-in Charm Aura.
In the end she couldn't fully resist the temptation of cute-equals-justice. Cautiously, she spun up Aether Editing's visual scanning function and ran a quick analysis on the liquid in the cup.
Composition: coffee beans, water... all normal ingredients. No weird additives detected.
Try it?
The thought surfaced without permission.
It's just coffee. How bad could it possibly taste?
Thinking that, Haxxor Bunny cupped the porcelain cup and took a small sip.
The dark brown liquid slid down her throat.
An indescribable flavor - as though every bitterness, every scorched thing, every rot and every despair in the universe had been concentrated and extracted into a single essence - detonated like a nuclear blast across her taste buds and cerebral cortex simultaneously!
That taste bulldozed every taste nerve she had, and along with them, every scattered worry, every ounce of wariness, even thought itself - all of it scoured away clean by that violent flood of death.
Thud!
Her eyes spiraled into mosquito-coil swirls, and Haxxor Bunny collapsed limply onto the sofa like someone had pulled out her spine.
"Heh heh. Young. Far too naive."
Caelus set down his own cup, a smile curling at the corner of his mouth.
Unhurried, he drew the genuine, unaltered Himeko special-blend coffee out of his spatial ring and swapped it into the place of the cup at his elbow - the one loaded with heaps of sugar cubes and creamer.
A single trick alone can never let you escape the fate of death.
Consider that a lesson from your teacher.
"You... are vicious..."
However long it took, Haxxor Bunny clawed a thread of consciousness back from the brink of death, coffee stains running from the corner of her mouth like blood.
"This... this stuff... you drank it without your face even twitching? And acted like you were... enjoying it? How... how did you hold it in?"
"Look at my face."
Caelus tipped his little head to one side, blinking those clear, innocent eyes, and ran through more than a dozen impeccably natural cute expressions for her.
Puffed cheeks, pursed lips, a squint-eyed grin, guileless puzzlement... finally settling into the purest, most artless child's smile.
"Does this look like holding anything in?"
"My cup really is delicious~"
Between the charm bonus of the adorable shota shell and that unnervingly convincing look of innocence, Haxxor Bunny - freshly returned from hell - was still running at half-crashed processing speed.
She looked blearily at the cup by Caelus's hand, which seemed... a shade lighter than the one she'd drunk, with fine milk foam floating on top.
Had she picked up the wrong cup just now?
As if guided by a ghost, Haxxor Bunny reached out with a slightly trembling hand, lifted it, and took another small sip.
On the tongue... it was the sweet, rich flavor of milk tea?
So she'd been right...!
A rush of warmth and sweetness surged up, instantly banishing the hellish memory of bitterness.
Haxxor Bunny's strung-tight nerves went slack.
She'd misjudged her teacher.
That was a special milk-tea layer Caelus had blended himself. Lower density, so it floated on top of Himeko's coffee. He used it to swindle Stelle and March 7th all the time.
I never should've trusted him!!!
The saved-at-last smile on Haxxor Bunny's face twisted in an instant into utter terror and disbelief. She didn't even get out one complete accusation before her vision went black and her body slammed down onto the table again like a marionette with its strings cut.
This time the sinful coffee cup went over with her, the dark brown liquid gurgling out to sprawl freely across the polished tabletop.
"That's lesson two."
Caelus patted Haxxor Bunny's little head and said gently: "Big sis Himeko, Bronie's wasting coffee!"
Little Duck, who had watched the entire performance, felt his mouth twitch uncontrollably.
"You..."
Caelus turned to look at him, and Little Duck had been about to say: could you maybe act like a decent person?
But then he glanced at the flattened Haxxor Bunny... hnn. This one has designs on Seele.
Little Duck gave Caelus a thumbs-up: "Please, crank it up harder!"
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