Chapter 41: Chapter 41: At Least She Was Normal

Chapter 41: At Least She Was Normal

Two students had just walked back into the trees in front of Daphne, both claiming something had been dropped.

Daphne watched the gap between the trunks for a few seconds.

As a teacher supervising an off-campus activity, following them was technically reasonable. Students wandering off during a cooking workshop was exactly the sort of thing adults were supposed to check. The woods were not large, and the park staff had marked the safe paths, but teenagers had an impressive talent for finding trouble in places designed to prevent it.

Besides, Cyrus had gone first.

Faye had followed him.

Daphne adjusted her glasses and stepped off the packed dirt path, following them into the shade.

She had no way of knowing that the white-haired little boy she had been thinking about for days was, at that exact moment, hiding deeper in the trees with one hand clutching the waistband of his oversized pants while he breathed hard enough for pale mist to appear in front of his mouth.

Every breath came out cold.

The white vapor formed and vanished in the warm late-afternoon air, brief enough to be mistaken for imagination if anyone saw it from far away.

Cyrus wanted to curse his own mouth.

He had overestimated himself so badly that even thinking about it made his stomach tighten.

Everyone else had eaten the curry like it was normal food. Audra had looked completely fine. Faye had barely reacted. Owen and Iris had not seemed troubled either. Even Daphne, who had joined them halfway through, had praised the taste without so much as reaching for extra water.

So why had one bowl nearly sent him into emergency power-saving mode?

Spice was awful.

That was not right, actually. Spice was awful to him. The food itself had been good enough that he had kept eating even after his body started warning him.

That made it worse.

Alcohol was easier. Alcohol was liquid, and liquid could be cooled with a little hidden effort before it became a problem. Even if he drank something strong, once he chilled it enough, it went down almost like water.

Spice did not work that way.

Spice stayed. Spice crept. Spice settled inside his mouth, throat, and stomach like a small arsonist with nowhere better to be.

He could not ice his own stomach in front of everyone.

Cyrus pressed a hand to his chest and dragged in another breath. More white mist slipped out between his lips.

He would not eat spicy food again.

Then his mind betrayed him by remembering the curry’s flavor, the thick sauce over rice, the rich warmth, the way the taste had kept pulling him into another bite before the heat caught up.

He silently revised the rule.

He would not eat spicy food again while in his adult body.

If he had already shrunk, eating it might be acceptable. The small form handled some kinds of heat differently, or at least the consequences were already happening, so the loss would be less humiliating.

That sounded practical enough to count as wisdom.

The woods had quieted around him. The cicadas were still crying from the trees, but even their noise had dulled with the hour. No one seemed nearby, which was the only mercy he had received all afternoon.

Cyrus crouched in the shade, sleeves rolled up, pants gathered in one hand, and tried to calculate how long his body would need to return to normal.

The sun had not set yet. Even close to evening, the air under the trees still held too much heat. He could feel it pressing against his skin through the loose fabric.

He would need at least fifteen minutes.

Possibly longer if he had to keep moving.

The whole situation was his own fault. His survival experience had all been spent in the wrong direction. He had tactics for bad women, suspicious kindness, fake amnesia, emotional fishing hooks, and people trying to drag him into cages while calling it care.

He did not have enough experience with food.

That was the tragedy here.

The human world had too many good things to eat, and his body came with too many unreasonable settings.

A thin sigh slipped out of him, far too light and young for comfort.

Cyrus pulled his knees in, ready to wait out the transformation in silence, when a twig cracked somewhere to his left.

His head turned sharply.

Through the branches, he saw Daphne.

She had entered the woods with the careful, searching pace of an adult who knew she was supposed to look calm while checking on students. Her eyes moved over the undergrowth, the paths, the spots where someone might have dropped a phone or wandered too far.

Cyrus pulled back behind the tree so fast his shoulder hit the bark.

Daphne’s head turned.

She had not seen his face. He was almost sure of that.

A flash of white hair in the woods would be enough for her.

Was this what predator-level perception looked like? Did her interest in little boys come with tracking instincts?

Cyrus had no time to think. He gathered the loose clothes, held the pants up with both hands, and slipped away through a gap between the trees.

Moving quietly while drowning in an oversized uniform was miserable. The pants wanted to slide down. The sleeves covered his hands. Every step risked catching on roots or branches. If the situation had not been so serious, it might have been funny.

He did not laugh.

If Daphne found him like this, there would be no good ending.

She was not only a teacher. She was not only his neighbor now. She also knew the white-haired child, and that was the part Cyrus could not afford.

Worse, she liked that child.

If she connected the little boy to Cyrus, then connected Cyrus to the Frostborn traits, his life in Grayhaven would collapse before dinner.

The thought tightened his grip on the waistband.

On his way through the trees, he nearly stumbled into another problem.

A boy and a girl from one of the visiting classes had found a more private corner of the woods and were pressed together near a tree, kissing with the kind of desperate focus that made the rest of the world disappear.

Cyrus stopped before they noticed him.

For one helpless breath, he forgot his own crisis and stared.

Then he remembered that he was currently a white-haired child wearing clothes far too large for him, and being seen by two teenagers sneaking a kiss in the woods would create a story no one could explain cleanly.

He backed away and circled around them.

By the time he reached another patch of shade, Daphne was no longer in sight.

Cyrus crouched again behind a cluster of shrubs and listened.

There were no footsteps nearby.

There were no voices calling his name.

There was no teacher asking why a child had wandered into a student activity zone.

His heartbeat gradually steadied.

If Daphne found out both his species and this child form at the same time, he had a very clear instinct about what would happen. It would not be as simple as being scolded. It would not be as simple as being reported.

Everything he had built would start cracking.

The apartment, the school routine, the lounge job, the money, the bus rides, the food, the walks by the sea, all of it could turn into a dream that ended the moment someone locked the door.

Why did the women around him always have to be so strange?

For once, why could he not meet a completely normal woman with no strange interest, no suspicious kindness, no hidden angle, no dangerous access point, and no ability to complicate his life by existing nearby?

Then again, if he were a completely normal human in the first place, he probably would not be crouching in the woods holding up his pants after losing a fight to curry.

Cyrus closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.

The heat inside him was slowly fading. If he stayed hidden, he could recover.

Then a voice spoke from much too close.

"Hey, kid. Why are you sleeping out here?"

Cyrus nearly jumped out of his own skin.

He jerked sideways, shoulder brushing leaves, and looked up.

Faye stood a few steps away.

Her long bangs hung low over her eyes, and her thick glasses made her expression hard to read at first. She looked more confused than alarmed. Her gaze moved from his white hair to his oversized clothes, then down to his hands clutching the pants in place.

Cyrus’s whole body went cold in a different way.

Of all the people who could have found him, it had to be Faye.

He had clearly heard her stand earlier, but he had been too busy surviving to track where she went afterward.

She crouched slightly, careful not to crowd him. "What happened to your clothes? Where are your parents?"

Cyrus’s thoughts spun so fast they almost tangled.

The good news was that Faye did not seem to recognize him.

The bad news was that Faye was smart, observant, and close enough to notice details.

Hair color could be explained. Humans dyed their hair all kinds of colors. Some children naturally looked unusual, especially in a world with rare-blood rumors floating everywhere.

Shrinking from a teenage boy into a child was harder to explain.

If he answered badly, everything ended here.

Cyrus swallowed. He lowered his head, tightened his hands around the bunched fabric, and made his voice tremble like a child caught doing something terrible.

"I saw an older boy and girl playing in the woods without their clothes," he said, quiet and nervous. "I thought it would be funny to put their clothes on, but now I don’t know how to give them back."

Faye stared at him.

Cyrus pushed further before she could ask the wrong question.

"I’ll put them back right now. Please don’t tell them, okay? I know I shouldn’t have touched their stuff."

The lie was ridiculous.

It was also, unfortunately, supported by reality. Faye had entered the woods after him. If she had come by the same general route, she might have noticed the couple making out in the trees.

Children did foolish things. Children stole hats, hid shoes, wandered into places they should not, and created problems out of pure curiosity.

A child in oversized clothes was strange.

A child who had stolen clothes from teenagers sneaking around in the woods was also strange, but it belonged to the human world’s version of strange.

Faye’s shoulders eased.

She looked at him for a little longer, then reached out and gently patted his head.

Cyrus went completely still.

Her palm was warm.

She did not grip him. She did not tremble with excitement. She did not linger in a way that made his instincts scream.

It was only a light, careful touch, the kind an older sister might give a child who had made a foolish mistake.

"That wasn’t a good thing to do," Faye said softly. "You understand that, right?"

Cyrus nodded hard. "I understand. I’ll apologize too."

"You need to be careful in the woods. This area is part of a school event today, and there are a lot of older students around."

"I’ll go right away."

Faye patted his head once more.

Her fingers paused for half a breath in his hair, probably because his body temperature was wrong. Cyrus could feel the difference himself. His hair and skin had cooled fast after the transformation, and his whole small body carried a faint chill that no normal child would have in this weather.

Faye did not question it.

Instead, she gave him a mild, helpless look.

"You’re lucky you ran into me instead of a teacher," she said. "Go return the clothes and apologize properly."

"I will. Thank you."

The words felt physically painful to say, but survival had no pride.

Cyrus grabbed the pants tighter and hurried away before Faye could talk again.

He did not look back until he had put several trees between them.

Faye had not followed.

He checked again after another minute.

Faye still had not followed.

At least she was normal.

Compared with Daphne, Faye’s reaction was so normal that Cyrus almost wanted to thank the world. She had asked basic questions, accepted a stupid child-level explanation, scolded him lightly, and let him leave.

That was what a normal person did.

No strange excitement. No invasive questions. No attempt to take him somewhere. No offer to help him change. No sudden claim of responsibility.

Cyrus had never appreciated ordinary human decency more.

After confirming the area around him was empty, he found another shaded spot and released the rolled-up sleeves and pant legs. The repeated running had helped burn away some of the internal heat, and the spice-driven reaction had finally started to calm.

His breathing steadied.

The white mist thinned.

His bones and muscles shifted again, stretching him back toward his original height. The fabric tightened where it was supposed to, sleeves returning to his wrists, pants settling properly around his waist.

Cyrus exhaled, relieved.

The ability had restored his body, but his appearance was still a problem. His hair remained white, the strands loose and disordered from all the running. His bangs had separated enough that they no longer hid his face.

For a few seconds, the face he kept buried under the school disguise was exposed in the open woods.

Pale hair. Fine features. A beauty too clear and too sharp to belong to the gloomy student who slept in the back of class.

It was the face of a Frostborn.

Cyrus did not notice the figure standing some distance away.

The person had frozen between the trees, staring at his back with open shock, as if their mind had not yet decided which impossible thing it had just seen.

By the time Cyrus stepped out of the woods, he had already forced his hair back into place and buried his features under the familiar, forgettable shape of his school disguise.