Mizuki had been chewing thoughtfully on the end of her pen for so long that the wood had begun to taste faintly bitter.

  The small practice room was quiet except for the soft scratch of pencil against paper and the restless rustle of her sleeves as she shifted in place. Sunlight filtered in through the high window, painting a warm rectangle across the floor. Dust motes drifted lazily inside it, rising and falling like tiny planets caught in their own slow orbits.

  “Flying creatures…” she murmured, eyes tracing the half-finished magic circle in her notebook. “There are so many possibilities.”

  Birds were the obvious choice. Too obvious, maybe. Bats were interesting, but she wasn’t fond of the idea of upside-down sleeping. Butterflies felt delicate—perhaps too delicate for a first serious attempt.

  Her pen paused.

  “Insects,” she whispered.

  The word lingered in her thoughts, unfolding into images: jewel-bright beetles, shimmering wings, bodies built entirely around movement and air.

  “Something that flies well,” Mizuki said. “Something fast.”

  Her brow furrowed, then smoothed as an image crystallized.

  “A dragonfly.”

  The idea made her heart flutter. Dragonflies were elegant in a strange, alien way—long bodies, huge eyes, wings that seemed to hum with constant motion. They were creatures of water and sky both, born in one world and reborn into another.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s try it.”

  She straightened, raised the pen like a conductor lifting a baton, and began to channel mana.

  The air around her shivered.

  At first, it was subtle: a faint pressure against her skin, like standing too close to a running engine. Then the pressure thickened, compressing inward, and Mizuki sucked in a sharp breath.

  Her fingertips tingled.

  The sensation surged upward through her hands, into her arms, spreading across her shoulders and down her spine. It wasn’t pain—more like an intense, crawling warmth, as if invisible threads were being woven directly into her flesh.

  “Oh—!”

  Her body lurched.

  Bones softened.

  Not breaking. Not snapping.

  Melting.

  Her arms felt strangely hollow, as though their solidity were being quietly negotiated away. Weight slid off her frame in great, invisible handfuls. The floor seemed to drift farther away even though her feet hadn’t moved.

  Her vision warped.

  Colors sharpened, then split. The room fractured into overlapping layers—edges doubled, then tripled. Light grew too bright, shadows too deep.

  Mizuki barely had time to panic before the world folded in on itself.

  There was a moment of vertigo.

  Then—

  She was small.

  Terrifyingly, undeniably small.

  The pen was gone.

  Her hands were gone.

  In their place were thin, jointed limbs ending in delicate hooks that twitched without permission. Her torso had stretched, lengthened, narrowing into a sleek, segmented shape that felt at once fragile and impossibly light.

  And behind her—

  Something unfurled.

  Four translucent wings burst outward with a soft, papery whisper.

  They were enormous compared to her new body, veined with lace-like patterns that caught the light in shimmering gradients of pink and gold. She felt them before she truly understood them—felt the dense web of muscles along her back, felt tension and potential stored like coiled springs.

  “I… I did it…?”

  Her voice did not exist anymore.

  The thought echoed soundlessly inside a mind that suddenly felt… larger. Not smarter, exactly. Wider. Capable of processing too much at once.

  Her eyes—

  No.

  Her eyes.

  They were huge.

  The world was no longer a single image. It was thousands of tiny images stitched together into a dizzying mosaic. Every movement left trails. Every reflection fractured into rainbows.

  “It’s so… busy…”

  Instinct surged.

  Her wings vibrated.

  Not a conscious decision.

  Not even a command.

  They simply moved.

  A violent, high-frequency buzz exploded from her back, and the air beneath her collapsed.

  Mizuki shot forward.

  Not upward.

  Forward.

  Fast.

  The room stretched into a pastel smear. Walls became suggestions. The window became a glowing rectangle that rushed toward her with terrifying enthusiasm.

  “I’m flying—!?”

  She wasn’t gliding.

  She wasn’t floating.

  She was a living projectile.

  Wind roared across her tiny body. Her wings blurred into invisibility, beating so fast that she could no longer feel individual strokes—only a continuous, electric pressure holding her aloft.

  Joy crashed into her like a wave.

  “I’m flying! I’m actually flying!”

  She wobbled.

  Her sense of balance was completely different. Her center of mass felt misplaced, stretched along her elongated body. Turning wasn’t a matter of leaning—it was a matter of thinking about turning and hoping her wings interpreted it correctly.

  The world spun.

  “No—no—too much—!”

  She veered sharply, barely missing the window frame, and burst into open air.

  The outside world was enormous.

  Sky filled everything.

  Wind tugged at her wings, playful and insistent. Sunlight flashed across their surfaces, scattering into prismatic sparkles. Below, trees rolled past in green waves, each leaf a distinct shape, each branch a looming obstacle.

  Her vision struggled to prioritize anything.

  Everything was equally important.

  Everything was equally loud.

  “It’s… kind of overwhelming…”

  But also—

  Amazing.

  She slowed instinctively, wings shifting pitch, and her speed dropped from reckless to merely fast. The buzz softened into a steady hum.

  She hovered.

  Actually hovered.

  Her body remained suspended, bobbing gently in place like a living pendulum.

  “I can stop… That’s good…”

  A strange heaviness crept into her thorax.

  Fatigue.

  Not muscle soreness—something deeper. A drain, like a battery quietly dipping into its red zone.

  “Already…?”

  She scanned wildly for somewhere to land and spotted a low tree branch extending from a nearby trunk.

  “Okay. Gently. Gently…”

  She drifted downward.

  Her legs reached out on instinct, thin limbs finding bark. Tiny hooks caught, and she clung there, wings shuddering as they powered down.

  The silence afterward felt immense.

  “Fuuu…”

  If she’d had lungs capable of sighing, she would have.

  Resting, she became more aware of herself.

  Her body felt… resistant.

  Not hostile.

  But reluctant.

  Like wearing clothing several sizes too small, except the clothing was her own flesh.

  “So transforming into an insect has some resistance,” she thought. “But… it’s not as bad as I expected.”

  She shifted slightly, testing her grip.

  “Kind of… manageable.”

  A flicker of movement below caught her multifaceted gaze.

  A human.

  A boy, maybe middle-school-aged, standing beneath the tree. He had spotted her.

  “Ah.”

  He squinted upward.

  “A dragonfly!”

  Mizuki’s stomach dropped.

  “Oh no.”

  The boy’s face lit up.

  “I did it! I caught a dragonfly!”

  A hand surged upward.

  Too fast.

  Before Mizuki could even think about launching herself, massive fingers closed gently—but firmly—around her body.

  “Wha—hey—!”

  Her wings buzzed uselessly, pressed awkwardly against warm skin.

  She was lifted into the air.

  The boy brought her closer to his face, grinning in triumph.

  “Whoa, it’s huge!”

  Mizuki stared back at him, frozen.

  Her brain scrambled.

  “If I turn back now, I’ll… I’ll be naked… in someone’s hand…!”

  Panic spiked.

  “Don’t change. Don’t change. Don’t change.”

  The boy tilted his hand slightly, peering at her from another angle.

  “Huh?”

  Their eyes met.

  Mizuki’s enormous compound eyes reflected his entire face, distorted into countless tiny versions of the same surprised expression.

  For a split second, neither of them moved.

  She flexed one leg experimentally.

  The boy blinked.

  “…Did it just look at me funny?”

  Mizuki’s mind raced.

  “I need to get away. Calmly. Carefully. Please don’t squeeze—please don’t squeeze—”

  Her wings twitched, trembling with stored energy.

  The world felt precariously balanced, like a coin teetering on its edge.

  One wrong move—

  And everything would go very, very wrong.

  "Wow. It's funny."

  The boy explored Mizuki, turned her upside down in his fingers, casual as if inspecting a new toy.

  Mizuki’s world inverted.

  Gravity, which had already become a vague suggestion in this body, now pulled distinctly the wrong way. Her long abdomen curved downward like a weighted pendulum; the four wings, still half-folded, sagged toward what was now “down.” The delicate hooks of her feet scrabbled uselessly against nothing. Every instinct screamed right side up right side up right side up, but the boy’s warm fingertips were an immovable horizon.

  She could feel the subtle pulse in his skin—each heartbeat a distant drum transmitted through her exoskeleton. It was intimate in the worst possible way.

  He tilted his head, studying her from beneath.

  The boy tilted his hand slightly, peering at her from beneath.

  "Why is it fully skin-colored?" he inspected Mizuki's body more closely, turning her this way and that with the casual curiosity of someone who had just won the best prize at recess.

  Mizuki's compound eyes caught every micro-shift in his expression—thousands of tiny, identical boys all frowning in mild confusion at once. Her exoskeleton, smooth and segmented along the long abdomen, gleamed under the sunlight not with the iridescent blues or metallic greens so many dragonflies flaunted, but with something far more unsettling: a soft, warm beige. Almost… human. The exact subtle tone of lightly tanned skin, complete with the faintest suggestion of underlying vascular shadows where the chitin was thinnest.

  Because it's me, she thought frantically, the realization hitting like cold water. The transformation didn't invent new pigmentation. It reshaped what was already there—my own skin cells rearranged into plates and membranes. The magic copied the color palette it had to work with.

  In real dragonflies, bodies came in a wild variety—metallic emerald, scarlet, obsidian black, or cryptic browns and greens for camouflage. But newly emerged adults (tenerals) often looked pale and washed-out before their full colors hardened and developed. This one hadn't had time to "settle." Or rather, Mizuki's hastily cast spell hadn't bothered—or perhaps couldn't—override her baseline human pigmentation with proper insect patterning. No melanin reconfiguration. No structural interference layers for that signature shimmer. Just her own epidermis, extruded and hardened into an exoskeleton that now looked disturbingly like a doll made of stretched, lacquered skin.

  The boy poked gently at her thorax with one fingertip.

  "It's warm too. Like… alive-warm. Not cold like bugs usually are."

  Please stop touching, Mizuki pleaded silently. Each prod sent vibrations through her lightweight frame, ticklish, invasive, but also arousing. Like a gentle massage on her still human-like 'skin'. Her wings gave an involuntary flutter, buzzing against his palm.

  The boy’s fingertip lingered a second too long on the smooth, faintly yielding curve of her thorax.

  Mizuki’s entire nervous system—rewired, stretched thin, hyper-acute—translated the pressure into something embarrassingly electrical. The contact wasn’t painful. It was worse. It was personal. Every ridge of his fingerprint dragged slowly across what used to be the sensitive skin just below her collarbone (now reconfigured into the armored plate between wing bases), and the sensation arrived at her brain as something halfway between a tickle and a full-body shiver. Her wings gave another helpless, fluttering buzz—louder this time, almost indignant.

  The boy laughed, delighted.

  “It’s vibrating! Like a tiny phone on silent! Okay. I'll take you with me then," the boy smiled. The boy unzipped his school bag with one hand, the other still cupped carefully around Mizuki's fragile form. He fished out a small, translucent plastic container—probably the kind meant for sandwiches or leftover fruit, repurposed now as an impromptu insect carrier. The lid was already off, revealing a few stray crumbs and a crumpled leaf someone (maybe him) had stuffed inside earlier for "decoration."

  "Perfect," he muttered, sounding genuinely pleased. "You'll be safe in here until I get home. I've got a whole setup in my room—jar with holes, some twigs, the works. Mom says no more bugs inside, but she won't notice if it's quiet."

  Mizuki's compound eyes captured the scene in excruciating detail: every fingerprint whorl on his thumb, the faint sheen of sweat on his palm making her exoskeleton stick slightly, the terrifying scale of his eyelashes as he blinked. Her wings, pinned awkwardly against the soft pad of his fingers, twitched in futile protest. Each tiny vibration sent ripples through her rewired nerves—part panic, part that mortifying, inescapable sensitivity where human skin-memory lingered in the chitin.

  Don't squeeze. Don't drop me. And for the love of every mana circuit, do NOT put me in a box.

  She tried to summon the reversal spell. In theory, it should be simple: visualize her original body, release the mana lock, let the transformation unwind. But the magic felt distant now, muffled by fatigue and the alien architecture of her new nervous system. Her mana reserves—already drained from the initial change—flickered like a candle in the wind. Forcing it might shred her in half, or leave her stuck halfway: a grotesque chimera of girl and insect, sprawled naked on the grass.

  The boy lowered her toward the container opening.

  Click!

  The lid snapped shut with a soft, plasticky click that echoed like a gunshot in Mizuki's overamplified hearing. Darkness swallowed her instantly—complete, suffocating black except for the faint, diffused glow leaking through the translucent sides of the container. The world shrank to a handheld prison: stale air scented with old bread crusts, the scratchy rasp of that crumpled leaf against her legs, the distant muffled thump of the boy's footsteps as he zipped the bag closed around her.

  Trapped.

  Her wings pressed flat against the curved walls whenever she tried to flutter them, producing only weak, trapped buzzes that vibrated back into her own thorax. Each failed attempt sent fresh jolts of that humiliating sensitivity racing along nerves that still remembered being human skin. The boy's earlier touches lingered in phantom memory—warm, curious pressure now replaced by cool, impersonal plastic.

  Think. Think.

  Mana. She still had some. Not much—a thin, flickering thread where a river should be—but enough, maybe, for the reversal if she could just concentrate. The problem was focus. Her mind kept fracturing: thousands of viewpoints overlapping, the container's scratches and fingerprints appearing as giant topographic maps, the leaf's veins like fallen redwood trunks. Every tiny shift of the bag as the boy walked jolted her, scattering her thoughts like startled minnows.

  She forced herself to visualize: human hands, human legs, the familiar weight of hair against her neck, the practice room floor under bare feet. The original circle from her notebook. The mana signature she'd woven into her own cells.

  A faint warmth answered—deep in her core, where her thorax met abdomen. It felt like trying to light wet matches.

  Come on…

  The boy hummed tunelessly as he walked. Something pop-ish, cheerful. Oblivious.

  "Ugh?" Mizuki sniffed the boy's lunch leftovers inside the box beside herself. Being focused on her transformation practice, she didn't even prepared a breakfast. Mizuki's tiny dragonfly stomach—now a long, segmented tube running most of the length of her new abdomen—gave a faint, complaining rumble. Or at least it felt like one. Hunger translated strangely in this body: less a hollow ache in the belly and more a diffuse, jittery emptiness spreading through her thorax, making her wings feel heavier than they should.

  Right. No breakfast. No lunch. And now… this.

  The container smelled overwhelmingly of human food remnants. Stale bread crusts, a smear of what might have been strawberry jam once upon a time, the faint metallic tang of an apple core left too long. To her compound eyes, each crumb loomed like a boulder; the leaf fragment looked like a vast, dried savanna. But the strongest scent—sharp, sweet, insistently carbohydrate—was coming from a small, half-squashed piece of something near the bottom corner.

  She edged closer, six delicate legs picking careful steps across the uneven plastic terrain. Her abdomen dragged slightly, the tip curling instinctively away from anything that might snag her ovipositor (a horrifying realization: dragonflies had those, and apparently her transformation had included one). The motion sent another unwelcome shiver through nerves that still remembered human goosebumps.

  The morsel was a chunk of what had probably been a rice ball or onigiri—sticky grains clinging together, flecked with seaweed and a trace of salty filling. To a normal dragonfly, it would be useless; adult dragonflies hunted on the wing, snatching mosquitoes and midges out of the air with predatory precision. Plant matter? No thanks.

  But Mizuki wasn't a normal dragonfly.

  Her mouthparts—sharp, beak-like mandibles flanked by smaller maxillae—clicked experimentally. She didn't have teeth anymore, exactly, but she could bite, chew, mash. Tentatively, she leaned in and nipped off a single sticky grain.

  The texture was bizarre against her new mouth: gritty, yielding, then suddenly bursting with faint sweetness and umami. Flavor arrived in explosive bursts—her senses were tuned for movement and contrast, not subtlety, so even this bland leftover tasted vivid, almost overwhelming. Salt crystals sparkled like tiny stars on her palps; the seaweed fragment carried a faint oceanic bitterness that made her faceted eyes flutter.

  She ate another grain. Then another.

  It wasn't elegant. She had to tilt her whole head-body forward, mandibles working like miniature scissors, legs braced to keep balance in the swaying prison. Bits of rice stuck to her face, clung to the fine setae around her mouth. She probably looked ridiculous. A dragonfly trying to picnic.

  Mizuki paused mid-nibble, a single grain of rice still caught between her mandibles like an oversized pearl.

  "M-ph! Yummy!"

  The thought bubbled up unbidden—bright, childish, almost giddy despite everything. In her normal body, she’d have wrinkled her nose at day-old onigiri crumbs: too dry, too sticky, probably speckled with whatever mystery germs middle-school boys carried in their bags. But right now? Each tiny burst of salty-sweet umami hit her rewired senses like fireworks. Her palps quivered as she worked another grain free, mandibles clicking in a tiny, determined rhythm.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself. I'm a dragonfly eating someone's leftover lunch because I forgot to eat breakfast. Again.

  Still, the food helped. That jittery, empty buzz in her thorax eased a fraction with every bite. The magic hadn't turned her completely into a real insect—her metabolism was still partly human, or at least human-ish. She could process carbs, sugars, and salt. Thank every forgotten mana textbook for small mercies. A true dragonfly would have ignored the rice completely; adults were pure aerial predators, snatching mosquitoes and flies out of the sky with those basket-legs and razor mandibles. No scavenging crumbs like some desperate housefly.

  But Mizuki wasn't hunting midges right now. She was surviving.

  She scraped up the last few clinging grains, legs braced against the swaying plastic floor as the boy's footsteps kept their steady, oblivious tempo. Each step jolted her, sending rice bits tumbling like boulders in an earthquake. She chased them anyway—greedy, focused, almost feral in this tiny form.

  When the container finally went still (the boy must have stopped walking—classroom? home? who knew), Mizuki settled onto the crumpled leaf, wings half-furled, abdomen curled protectively around her. Full. Sort of. The hunger pang had dulled to a background hum, and that gave her brain a little more bandwidth to think.

  "Ugh! Pee...", Mizuki's mind focused on the next task. The pressure had been building for a while now—subtle at first, just a vague, nagging fullness in her elongated abdomen, like too much tea drunk too quickly back in human form. But in this tiny dragonfly body, it translated differently: a prickling tension along the segmented tube that ran most of her length, a low buzz of urgency that made her ovipositor twitch involuntarily at the tip.

  "Pee!", the thought looped, half-embarrassed, half-desperate.

  In her normal body, this would have been straightforward: find a bathroom, sit, relax, done. Privacy guaranteed. Here? She was trapped in a plastic sandwich box the size of a small room, swaying gently with every step the boy took, surrounded by rice crumbs and a wilting leaf. No toilet. No discreet corner. And worst of all—no idea how this body even did this.

  She shifted on the leaf, six legs bracing awkwardly as she tried to assess. The sensation was like a full bladder.

  The pressure built steadily, no longer ignorable. In her human body, Mizuki could have crossed her legs, clenched, and waited for a convenient moment. Here, in this elongated dragonfly form, there was no such option. The sensation localized toward the rear of her abdomen—a segmented tube now pressed uncomfortably full, the urgency radiating in low, insistent pulses that made her ovipositor (that alien, needle-like appendage at the very tip) twitch and flex without her permission.

  How does this even work? She thought, frantic. No separate bladder, no urethra. Insects didn't "pee" the way mammals did. From hazy biology lessons and half-remembered mana-theory analogies, she recalled: most insects used Malpighian tubules—tiny blind-ended tubes floating in the hemolymph, acting like primitive kidneys. They pulled out nitrogenous waste (mostly uric acid in terrestrial insects, to conserve water), mixed it with whatever fluid was there, and dumped the whole mess out through the hindgut. One exit for solid waste, liquid waste, everything. No distinction. Just... frass. Or in dragonflies, apparently, something more liquid when they needed to flush excess water or salts.

  Dragonflies were special, though. Fast fliers, high metabolism, lots of sodium from their prey. Their Malpighian tubules secreted a more watery primary urine, sometimes modified in the rectum. Adults didn't have the rectal gills of nymphs, but the plumbing all converged on the same place: the anus at the tip of the abdomen, right beside where that ovipositor protruded.

  Mizuki curled her long body slightly, trying to assess. The feeling wasn't exactly like needing to pee in human terms anymore—it was a diffuse swelling pressure along the entire hindgut, a need to expel both fluid and perhaps a bit of solid residue from the rice grains she'd hastily eaten. Her tiny system had processed the carbs quickly; some waste had already formed, mixed with uric acid crystals and excess water from her still-part-human metabolism.

  If I don't do something, I'll just... go. Right here. In his lunch box. The thought was mortifying. The plastic floor already had rice crumbs; adding dragonfly frass (or worse, a little spray of liquid uric acid solution) would be disgusting. And undignified. And probably visible/smellable to the boy later.

  She shifted again, six legs bracing on the crumpled leaf. The container swayed gently—the boy was walking again, or maybe sitting. Each movement jostled her, making the pressure spike.

  Okay. Relax. Just... let it happen. Controlled.

  Mizuki focused on her rear segments. The ovipositor (which she still refused to think about too hard—magic had apparently decided her transformed body needed the full female dragonfly reproductive kit) flexed once, then relaxed. A small valve-like sphincter (or whatever passed for one in this rewired anatomy) eased open.

  A tiny droplet emerged first—clearish, faintly yellowish, more like a bead of excess fluid than proper urine. It glistened on the tip of her abdomen, caught the faint diffused light through the plastic. Then came the rest: a short, controlled squirt of liquid waste, mixed with a few darker specks of uric acid and undigested rice residue. Not a dramatic stream—just a quick, economical release, the way insects conserve water. It pattered softly against the plastic floor near the leaf edge, forming a minuscule wet spot no bigger than a sesame seed to human eyes.

  The relief was immediate and profound. That prickling fullness drained away, leaving her abdomen lighter, less taut. Her wings gave a tiny, involuntary flutter of gratitude.

  ...I just peed in a sandwich container. As a dragonfly. While naked in spirit, basically. The absurdity hit her like a delayed punchline. If she could have buried her (nonexistent) face in her (nonexistent) hands, she would have.

  But the act had cost her. A fresh wave of fatigue rolled through her thorax—mana depletion plus the sheer metabolic weirdness of forcing her hybrid body to function. The reversal spell felt even farther away now, a distant candle flicker instead of a flame.

  The boy’s muffled voice filtered through the bag fabric—something cheerful about “show my friends later” or “cool bug video.” Footsteps resumed, rhythmic, heading who-knew-where.

  Mizuki curled tighter on the leaf, abdomen tucked protectively, wings folded flat. She needed rest. She needed mana recovery. She needed this boy to open the container before he decided to add more "habitat features" like dirt or water that might drown her.

  Most of all, she needed not think too hard about the fact that, in this body, every bodily function felt amplified, intimate, and embarrassingly public—even when alone in a plastic prison.

  Next time, she promised herself, mandibles clicking faintly, I eat breakfast. And I pick something with bigger mana reserves. And maybe... no boys with grabby hands.

  For now, though, she simply waited—small, beige, exhausted, and quietly plotting the most dignified escape imaginable.

  The lid popped open with a soft, plasticky thwock. The boy's room outside was suddenly, violently huge.

  Light flooded in—warm afternoon sunlight slanting through half-closed blinds in golden bars that sliced across a cluttered desk, a rumpled bed, posters of soccer players and anime characters taped crookedly to pale blue walls. The air smelled different: teenage-boy complicated. A faint whiff of laundry detergent, old socks lurking somewhere, the sweet-chemical ghost of an air freshener that had given up weeks ago, and underneath it all the living-animal warmth of someone who spent most of his time here.

  Mizuki's compound eyes drank it all in at once, a thousand fractured versions of the same overwhelming scene. Every dust particle drifting in the sunbeams became a glittering asteroid; every fingerprint smear on the plastic container wall loomed like a topographic map of some alien planet. The scale difference hit her harder now that she could see the full context. The desk was a mesa. The bed was a distant mountain range of blankets. The boy himself—still holding the container at chest height—was a living skyscraper, his face filling half her visual field in overlapping portraits of mild triumph.

  "Eh? What? It stinks," the boy sniffed, wrinkling his nose as he brought the open container closer to his face for inspection. His breath washed over Mizuki in a warm, humid gust—faintly minty from gum, underlying notes of whatever he'd eaten for lunch (ramen? curry bread?). The sudden proximity made her antennae quiver involuntarily.

  The smell he was reacting to wasn't strong—not like rotten eggs or garbage—but it was unmistakable up close: a sharp, faintly ammoniac tang mixed with something vegetal and slightly sour. Her little puddle of waste had mostly dried into a minuscule dark speck on the plastic near the leaf edge, the uric acid crystals already crusting over, but enough volatile compounds lingered in the trapped air of the container to hit human nostrils when the lid came off. It wasn't overpowering to her own senses (dragonfly olfaction was tuned for movement and pheromones, not subtle odors), but apparently a boy's nose—trained on gym socks and cafeteria mysteries—picked it up instantly.

  He waved a hand in front of his face like he was dispelling smoke. "Ugh, gross. Did you poop in there already? That's fast." His tone was equal parts disgusted and fascinated, the way kids sometimes get when something is both yucky and scientifically interesting.

  Mizuki froze on the leaf, wings half-unfurled in instinctive alarm. He noticed. Of course, he noticed. Her tiny body felt even smaller now, exposed under the full glare of afternoon light and boyish scrutiny. The beige of her exoskeleton gleamed dully—no iridescent sheen to distract from how unnaturally skin-like she looked up close. If he looked too hard at the wet spot, or worse, poked around...

  He did poke. One finger descended like a fleshy monolith, nudging the crumpled leaf aside to get a better view of the container floor.

  "Ew, yeah, there's a little... spot. Man, you're a messy bug." He laughed, short and surprised, not angry—just the casual gross-out humor of someone who collected bugs and probably had worse things in his room already.

  Mizuki's mind raced through escape vectors. The container was still tilted slightly in his hand; if she timed a burst of wingbeats right, she could launch herself out, aim for the open window or the gap under the bed. But her mana was still a thin trickle—barely enough for sustained flight, let alone another transformation. And if she misjudged the launch, she'd end up splatting against his shirt or the desk or—worst-case—his face.

  The boy tilted the container again, this time to get a better angle on her. "You don't look like any dragonfly I've seen in books. You're kinda... naked-colored. And big. For a dragonfly." His eyes narrowed, curiosity overriding the initial disgust. He leaned in closer, breath washing over her again.

  Mizuki's ovipositor twitched once—leftover reflex from the earlier relief.

  Don't you dare flip me over again, she thought desperately, Mizuki thought.

  The boy seemed to reconsider. "Maybe you need water or something. Or... air. Yeah, probably air." He set the container down on the desk with surprising gentleness—right next to a half-built model Gundam and a scattered pile of manga volumes. The plastic bottom clacked softly against wood.

  The boy blinked, startled, as the small beige dragonfly erupted from the container in a sudden, furious buzz. Wings blurring into near-invisibility, Mizuki shot straight upward, veering wildly to avoid the ceiling fan that hung motionless overhead like a sleeping predator. The room—already enormous—now felt like an indoor stadium: every surface a potential landing zone or death trap.

  She banked hard left, skimming the top of the desk. Gundam parts rattled faintly in her wake; a loose manga page fluttered like a startled flag. Her compound eyes stitched together frantic mosaics: the boy's widening pupils, his half-open mouth forming a silent “whoa,” the posters on the wall suddenly alive with exaggerated motion lines as she streaked past them.

  Her head—her thorax, really—burned with a deep, radiating flush. In dragonfly anatomy, there was no literal blushing mechanism, no capillaries to flood with blood beneath transparent chitin. Yet the sensation was unmistakable: a hot, prickling wave that started somewhere behind her huge compound eyes and spread backward along her segmented body like embarrassment translated into heat. The beige exoskeleton seemed to darken fractionally at the edges, as if her human shame had managed to tint the very cells that now formed her armor. Whether it was psychosomatic magic residue or her rewired nervous system screaming: I just pooped in front of a middle-school boy, and he called me messy, the feeling was mortifyingly real.

  He saw. He smelled. He commented. I want to die.

  The desk lamp beckoned like a false sun—its warm incandescent bulb glowing steadily, a beacon in the relative dimness of the room's shadowed corners. Afternoon sunlight still poured through the blinds in bright slats, but the lamp's light was closer, more concentrated, pulling at something primal in her rewired instincts.

  Mizuki veered toward it without fully meaning to.

  Her wings thrummed at maximum frequency, propelling her in a tight, accelerating arc. The bulb swelled in her mosaic vision—thousands of identical golden orbs blooming across her compound eyes, each one screaming safe direction, up, open sky. Recent studies might argue that dragonflies (and most flying insects) weren't truly "attracted" to artificial light in the old romantic sense—no magnetic pull toward the glow itself—but rather disoriented by it. They tilted their dorsal side toward the brightest patch, assuming it marked the way up and out, the natural sky. Close to the source, that dorsal-light-response turned treacherous: constant corrections sent them orbiting, spiraling, crashing.

  To Mizuki right now, none of that mattered. The lamp simply felt like escape.

  She shot past the boy's ear—close enough that the displacement of air ruffled his hair—and aimed straight for the lampshade. The ceramic base loomed like a white cliff face. She banked at the last second, intending to skim over the top and keep going toward the window beyond.

  The shade was hotter than expected.

  Her wings brushed the fabric fringe. A faint sizzle—more felt than heard—rippled through her lightweight frame as one wingtip grazed the still-warm bulb. Pain flared, sharp and electric, along the delicate veins. Not a burn exactly (dragonfly wings were tough, chitin-reinforced membranes), but a stinging jolt that threw off her rhythm. Her flight stuttered.

  She tumbled.

  Not a graceful crash—a frantic, legs-flailing pinwheel. She struck the desk surface just beyond the lamp base, skidding across scattered mechanical pencil leads and a stray eraser crumb the size of a boulder. Momentum carried her into a half-roll; her long abdomen curled protectively, ovipositor tucked tight. Wings buzzed weakly once, twice, then stilled.

  The world spun in fractured afterimages.

  Above her, the boy's face reappeared—enormous, moon-like, eyebrows raised in fresh surprise.

  "Whoa—did you just kamikaze the lamp?"

  He leaned over the desk, elbows planted, chin in hands like he was watching the most interesting nature documentary ever filmed. His breath stirred the air again, warm and mint-gum scented, making her antennae twitch.

  Mizuki lay there, playing possum by necessity rather than choice. Every nerve screamed move move move, but her right forewing felt kinked, vibrating unevenly when she tried to test it. Mana reserves dipped dangerously low—another burst like that last one might leave her grounded for good. The reversal spell was a distant whisper now, barely audible over the pounding of her hybrid heartbeat.

  The boy reached out. Slowly this time. No grab. Just one finger extended, hovering like a hesitant crane.

  "Hey... you okay, weird bug?" The boy's fingertip descended with deliberate slowness, the pad broad and slightly damp from earlier nervous palm-sweating. When it made contact, it pressed gently against the smooth, warm curve of Mizuki's ventral thorax—the place where, in her human body, her sternum and the soft skin just below her collarbones had once been.

  'Mmm-ph,' Mizuki squirmed under the touch, a tiny, involuntary sound that existed only in her mind. No vocal cords, no air to push through them—but the sensation translated into a silent, frantic vibration that made her whole body quiver.

  The boy's fingertip was enormous: warm, slightly callused at the edges from pencil grips and game controllers, carrying the faint salt of skin and the lingering sweetness of whatever candy he'd eaten earlier. The pressure wasn't crushing—careful, almost tender—but it pinned her gently against the desk, right where her thorax met the softer, more sensitive membrane of her underbelly. Every ridge of his fingerprint dragged slowly across what had once been the delicate skin just above her human breasts, now reconfigured into smooth, beige chitin. The contact lit up every rewired nerve ending like a string of holiday lights switched on all at once.

  It wasn't pain.

  It was worse.

  It was intimate.

  A hot flush raced from the point of contact backward along her segmented abdomen, making her ovipositor twitch again in helpless reflex. Her wings gave a weak, fluttering buzz—half protest, half something embarrassingly like a moan translated into wing-muscle tremor. The boy felt it; his fingertip paused, then pressed just a fraction more firmly, as if testing the strange warmth and give of her exoskeleton.

  "Whoa... you're really warm," he murmured, voice soft with wonder. "And you're... shaking? Are you scared?"

  He tilted his head, bringing his face even closer. His pupil filled half her visual field, a vast black pool ringed with brown, reflecting countless tiny versions of her own beige body pinned beneath his finger.

  "I won't hurt you, promise. You're just... super weird. Like a dragonfly made out of people-skin or something."

  Mizuki's mind was a screaming kaleidoscope:

  Get off, get off, get off—

  Don't move, don't move, he'll think you're dead—

  Oh gods, why does this feel so—

  The sensitivity was unbearable. Dragonfly exoskeletons weren't supposed to be this responsive; they were armor, not erogenous zones. But her transformation had preserved too much of her original human somatosensory map. The ventral thorax—once soft sternum skin—still remembered every brush of fabric against her school uniform, every accidental graze of a classmate's elbow. Now that same patch of skin-memory was stretched thin across a curved plate of chitin, and the boy's fingertip was stroking it like he was petting a particularly interesting pet.

  Her wings buzzed again, louder this time, a high-pitched trill that made the boy's eyebrows shoot up.

  "Haha! You're ticklish. Do... Do you like this?" the boy continued to tease her long body. The boy's fingertip lingered, tracing a slow, experimental circle along the smooth ventral curve of her thorax.

  Each millimeter of movement sent fresh sparks racing through Mizuki's rewired nerves. The pressure was light—barely more than the weight of a pencil—but to her it felt like a full palm sliding deliberately across bare skin. The chitin yielded just enough to remind her how thin the barrier really was; beneath it, the living tissue remembered every human sensation it used to carry. Warmth from his finger seeped in, pooling where once her heartbeat had thrummed closest to the surface. Her whole segmented body tensed, then shuddered in a long, involuntary ripple that traveled from thorax to the very tip of her abdomen.

  The ovipositor flexed again—sharp, helpless—curling inward then flicking outward in tiny, embarrassed twitches she couldn't suppress. A soft, almost sub-audible buzz escaped her wing roots, not flight-ready vibration but something smaller, more private: the insect equivalent of a stifled whimper.

  The boy noticed.

  His eyes widened, pupils dilating in the warm lamplight. "Whoa… you're really reacting." His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, the kind kids use when they've discovered something secret and slightly forbidden. "Does that… feel good? Or does it hurt?"

  He didn't wait for an answer he couldn't possibly receive. Instead, he dragged the pad of his finger upward—slowly, deliberately—along the faint seam where her thorax plates met the softer, more flexible membrane just behind her foreleg bases. The motion followed the exact path that, in human form, would have traced the delicate hollow between the collarbone and the upper swell of her chest.

  Mizuki's entire frame arched. Not away. Not toward. Just… arched. A long, trembling curve that lifted her abdomen off the desk by the width of a single grain of rice. Her antennae quivered forward, then snapped back flat against her head in mortified surrender. The flush that had started earlier now burned steadily through her core—hot, liquid embarrassment that had nowhere to go except outward in frantic little wing-flutters and the rapid pulsing of her spiracles.

  Stop. Please stop. Or don't stop. I don't know anymore—

  He circled again, this time pressing just a fraction deeper into the yielding spot directly beneath where her human heart used to beat loudest during gym class sprints or when a cute upperclassman smiled at her in the hallway. The sensation arrived at her brain in stereo: dragonfly tactile sensitivity (sharp, immediate, tuned for the brush of prey wings) overlaid with human erogenous memory (slow, blooming, achingly intimate).

  Her mandibles clicked once—sharp, involuntary—a tiny sound lost under the boy's soft laugh.

  "You're so weird," he murmured, almost to himself. "Like… alive in a different way." His fingertip paused, then slid lower, following the smooth ventral midline toward the first abdominal segment. Not quite reaching the more sensitive junction where the thorax met the abdomen, but close. Close enough that Mizuki felt the ghost-pressure of where he might go next, and her whole lower body clenched in anticipatory panic.

  A fresh droplet of fluid—clear, warm, not waste this time—beaded at the tip of her ovipositor before she could stop it. 'I'm cumming, I'm cumming, I'm cumming,' circled inside Mizuki's mind.

  The droplet trembled at the very tip of her ovipositor—small, glistening, perfectly round under the fractured mosaic of her compound eyes—before gravity claimed it. It fell in slow motion (or felt that way to her accelerated perception), a single transparent bead no larger than the period at the end of this sentence, landing soundlessly on the desk between two scattered pencil leads. The wood drank it instantly, leaving only the faintest darker spot, already evaporating in the warm lamplight.

  Mizuki's entire segmented body locked rigid for one long, shattering second.

  Then the wave hit.

  It wasn't the sharp, focused peak of human orgasm. It was deeper, stranger, more whole-body. Every spiracle along her abdomen fluttered open at once in tiny, frantic gasps. Her wings snapped out to full extension and then snapped shut again in a single violent shudder, producing a soft, papery whir that sounded almost like a sigh if you didn't know better. The flush that had been burning through her core now detonated outward: heat racing forward into her enormous eyes (making the world flare white-gold for an instant), backward into the long whip of her abdomen (making every segment ripple like a shaken rope), and inward to whatever still counted as her nervous center.

  Her ovipositor flexed once more—hard, involuntary—curling tight against her underbelly then flicking straight out again in a tiny, helpless arc. Another droplet followed the first, smaller, barely a shimmer. Then nothing. Just aftershocks: long, rolling tremors that made her legs twitch and curl beneath her like a dying spider, except she wasn't dying. She was embarrassingly, catastrophically alive.

  The boy froze.

  His fingertip—still resting lightly against the now-quivering ventral curve of her thorax—felt the change instantly: the sudden tension, the micro-shudders, the way her whole exoskeleton seemed to hum at a new, lower frequency. His eyes went very wide. The wonder on his face tipped over into something else—confusion, fascination, and the faintest edge of guilty delight that middle-school boys get when they stumble across something adult without quite understanding it.

  "…Whoa," he breathed. "Did you just…?"

  He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

  Mizuki wished—for one wild, irrational heartbeat—that the transformation had given her the ability to simply combust into ash and blow away. No corpse. No evidence. Just gone.

  Instead, she lay there, pinned under the warm pad of one careless, curious finger, every nerve ending screaming in overlapping languages of shame, overstimulation, and the lingering liquid afterglow that refused to fade. Her antennae lay flat against her head like wilted flowers. Her wings stayed half-open, trembling on every downbeat of her spiracles. The beige of her "skin" looked somehow darker now—not from pigmentation, but from the sheer blood-flow (or hemolymph-flow) rushing beneath the translucent plates.

  The boy finally lifted his finger.

  Not quickly. Not in panic. Slowly, as if afraid of breaking something fragile and expensive. The sudden absence of pressure was almost worse than the contact had been; cool air hit the warmed patch of ventral thorax like a slap, making her flinch and curl tighter.

  He sat back on his heels, elbows still on the desk, staring down at the tiny dragonfly-shaped disaster he had accidentally reduced to quivering jelly.

  "You're… not a normal bug," he said quietly. No teasing now. Just a plain statement of fact. "Like… at all."

  Mizuki couldn't answer. Couldn't even think coherently. Her mind was a looping reel of static and mortification:

  He made me come.

  With one finger.

  By petting me like a toy.

  I'm going to die of embarrassment, and then I'm going to stay dead.

  Mana. Need mana. Need to change back. Need clothes. Need to never exist again.

  The boy chewed his lower lip—a nervous habit that made him look even younger. He glanced toward the half-open window (freedom, so close), then back at her, then at the little damp spot on his desk that he definitely hadn't missed.

  "Okay," he muttered, mostly to himself. "Okay. New plan. I'm not gonna… keep you or anything. That's messed up. But also, I can't just… throw you out the window right now. You look kinda… wrecked."

  He reached for something off-camera—a small, clean tissue from a box on the corner of the desk. Very carefully, he tore off a tiny square, folded it once, and set it beside her like an offering.

  "Here. For, uh… whatever that was." His cheeks went faintly pink. "And maybe to wipe yourself off? Or… rest on? I don't know how bugs work."

  Mizuki stared at the tissue square. To her eyes, it was a vast white plateau, soft and fibrous and smelling faintly of bleached cotton and boy-room dust. It looked safer than the hard desk surface. Safer than staying exposed under his gaze.

  She forced her kinked wing to move—just enough. A weak flutter, a skitter of six legs. She dragged herself the inch-and-a-half onto the tissue, abdomen trailing, ovipositor still twitching with aftershocks. The paper fibers were enormous under her hooks, like climbing through tall grass. She collapsed there, wings sagging, body still trembling in long, slow waves.

  The boy watched every movement with the rapt attention of someone witnessing magic and not quite believing it.

  "I'm gonna… leave you alone for a bit," he said softly. "Get some water or something. Maybe food? Do dragonflies eat… stuff?" He paused. "Never mind. I'll figure it out."

  He stood up—carefully, so the desk didn't shake—and backed away toward the door, never taking his eyes off her until he had to turn to leave the room.

  The door clicked shut behind him.

  Silence.

  Sunlight continued to pour through the blinds in warm golden bars. Dust motes drifted. Somewhere distant, a clock ticked.

  Mizuki lay on the folded tissue square, small and beige and utterly spent, and finally—finally—let herself think the reversal spell again.

  This time, the mana answered.

  Faint. Thready. Barely a whisper.

  But it answered.

  She closed her thousands of eyes (or tried to; compound eyes don't really close) and began, very slowly, to gather what little power remained.

  One trembling heartbeat at a time.

  Mizuki didn't notice how much time had passed while the boy was busy with whatever middle-school boys did when they left their rooms for more than thirty seconds.

  The tissue square beneath her had warmed to roughly thorax temperature—soft, faintly dusty, smelling of cheap laundry softener and the ghost of spilled soda. She lay there curled in on herself, long abdomen tucked protectively around her wing bases, ovipositor still giving the occasional tiny, embarrassed twitch like a muscle memory that refused to shut off. Every few seconds, another aftershock rolled through her: a slow, liquid ripple from the ventral plates outward, making her spiracles flutter and her antennae quiver. Each one left her feeling smaller, more fragile, and somehow even more mortified than the last.

  The room had grown quieter without him. Afternoon light shifted; the golden bars from the blinds had tilted, lengthening, turning amber. Dust motes still danced, but slower now, as if the whole space had exhaled and decided to rest. Somewhere distant in the house, a door opened and closed. A refrigerator hummed. A television murmured voices too muffled to parse. Normal life sounds. Human life sounds. The kind of background noise she used to tune out while chewing pens and sketching magic circles.

  Now every creak of floorboards made her antennae snap upright.

  The door opened with a soft click, and the boy slipped back inside, moving more carefully than before—like he was trying not to startle a sleeping cat. In one hand, he carried a small, shallow glass dish (probably pilfered from the kitchen), filled with several small scoops of vanilla ice cream, the surface already beginning to soften and glisten in the warm room air. Creamy swirls clung to the sides, a few tiny beads of condensation forming on the glass. In his other hand dangled a plastic spoon, still wrapped in a napkin.

  He paused in the doorway, eyes flicking immediately to the desk where he'd left her.

  "You're still here," he said softly, relief mixing with surprise in his voice. "Good. I was kinda worried you'd… fly off or something."

  Mizuki hadn't moved much. The tissue square had become her tiny island: soft enough to cushion her lightweight frame, absorbent enough that the lingering dampness from earlier had mostly wicked away. Her wings stayed half-folded, still kinked on the right side from the lamp graze, and her abdomen remained curled in a protective loop. The aftershocks had finally ebbed to faint tremors—occasional ripples that made her spiracles flutter, but the memory of them burned hot under her exoskeleton. Every time she shifted, the ventral plates rubbed against the tissue fibers, sending tiny echoes of that unbearable sensitivity.

  When the boy approached slowly, Mizuki noticed a smell of fresh shampoo. The boy had clearly taken the opportunity to shower—quickly, haphazardly, the way middle-schoolers do when they suddenly feel self-conscious about smelling like gym class and old ramen. His hair was still damp, dark strands sticking to his forehead in uneven spikes, and a few stray droplets trailed down the sides of his neck before soaking into the white towel knotted loosely around his hips.

  'H-mph? A high schooler, huh?' Mizuki thought. The boy's bare torso caught the slanting amber light first. Already defined, the abdominal muscles were etched in soft shadows—six distinct ridges flexing subtly with each breath, framed by the sharp V-lines that disappeared beneath the towel's low knot. A faint trail of dark hair started just below his navel, drawing the eye downward before the white terrycloth cut it off. Water droplets still clung to his skin like scattered diamonds, tracing lazy paths from collarbone to the shallow dip of his sternum, then lower, pooling briefly in the shallow basin of his navel before slipping under the towel's edge. The fabric itself was thin, slightly damp, clinging just enough to hint at the shape beneath without revealing anything outright.

  Mizuki's compound eyes couldn't help but fracture him into a thousand identical, glistening statues—each one larger than her entire body, each one radiating that clean, post-shower warmth mixed with faint soap and boy-sweat. Her antennae twitched forward despite herself, pulling in the scent: clean skin, citrus shampoo, and something warmer, more animal, that made the lingering sensitivity in her ventral plates flare like a struck match.

  High schooler. Definitely a high schooler, she corrected herself, the thought arriving in a dizzy rush. Middle-school boys didn't have abs like that. Or shoulders that broad. Or... that much bare skin so casually displayed. The towel knot looked precarious, like one wrong move would send it pooling around his ankles.

  He set the glass dish down with exaggerated care, the spoon balanced on its rim. The ice cream had begun to weep—thick, creamy rivulets pooling at the bottom of the shallow dish, catching the light in translucent gold. A faint vanilla aroma drifted over her, sweet and cold, cutting through the room's ambient warmth.

  "Figured you might need to cool down," he murmured, voice softer now, almost shy. "After... earlier. That was weird, right? For both of us." His cheeks were still faintly flushed from the shower—or maybe from remembering the way she'd arched and shuddered under his fingertip. He scratched the back of his neck, the motion pulling the towel a fraction lower on one hip, exposing a sliver more of skin before he caught it.

  Mizuki stayed frozen on her tissue island, wings trembling. The cold from the dish rolled toward her in gentle waves, raising tiny goosebumps—except she didn't have skin to goosebump anymore. Instead, the chill made her spiracles contract in tiny, rhythmic flutters, her ovipositor curling tighter against her abdomen in instinctive retreat.

  The boy crouched slightly, bringing his face level with the desk. Damp hair fell across his forehead. Up close, his breath carried mint again—fresh, cool—and the heat of his skin felt like a furnace against her chilled frame.

  "Want to try some?" He scooped the smallest possible dab onto the very tip of his index finger this time—barely a pearl of melted vanilla—rather than using the spoon. "It's cold. Might feel good after all that... buzzing."

  He extended the finger slowly, the white cream glistening on his fingertip like an offering. The pad hovered a careful centimeter from her head, close enough that she could see the faint pulse in the dermal ridges, close enough to feel the radiant warmth battling the ice cream's chill.

  Mizuki's mandibles parted before she could stop them. The human part of her remembered ice cream—sweet, melting bliss on a hot tongue. The dragonfly part registered it as potential moisture, potential energy. She leaned forward—tentative, six legs braced—and touched the tip of her proboscis-like mouthparts to the cream.

  Cold exploded across her palps: shocking, crystalline, almost painful in its intensity. Then sweetness—rich, fatty, vanilla blooming in bursts her rewired senses couldn't filter. She lapped at it in tiny, frantic motions, mandibles clicking, legs shifting for balance. A stray drop slid down the boy's fingertip and smeared across the edge of her thorax, where it met her head.

  The contrast—icy cream against warm fingertip—was devastating.

  Her body shuddered again, not the full-body climax of before, but a rolling aftershock that made her wings unfurl halfway, and her ovipositor give one helpless flick. The ventral plates pressed harder against the tissue as she arched instinctively, chasing both the cold treat and the accidental brush of his skin.

  The boy inhaled sharply, eyes widening, but he didn't pull away. Instead, his finger stayed steady, letting her feed, the pad brushing feather-light against the sensitive seam where her head plates met thorax with every tiny lap.

  "Good girl," he whispered, almost under his breath, the words slipping out before he could catch them. His free hand tightened on the towel knot, knuckles whitening. "Just... take what you need."

  Mizuki's mind fractured into static:

  Cold—sweet—warm—too much—don't stop—oh gods he's still shirtless—towel—

  Another droplet of melted cream slid lower, this time tracing a slow path down the boy's fingertip before dripping onto the tissue beside her. She chased it, legs scrambling, her body brushing more deliberately against the warm pad in the process.

  The aftershocks deepened. Her spiracles flared wide, drinking air. The flush returned, hotter now, spreading from her thorax all the way to the tip of her abdomen in long, liquid waves.

  She was going to come again.

  Right here.

  On his fingertip.

  While he watched, half-naked and fascinated, feeding her vanilla ice cream like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “I want more,” Mizuki flapped with her wings, the motion small but deliberate—a sharp, fluttering buzz that sent tiny gusts rippling across the desk surface. She was hovering now.

  Mizuki flapped with her wings, the motion small but deliberate—a sharp, fluttering buzz that sent tiny gusts rippling across the desk surface. She was hovering now.

  Flying toward the dish felt like launching herself into open sky again, except the sky was only a few centimeters away and smelled overwhelmingly of vanilla and cold cream. Her kinked right wing still ached with every beat, producing a faint, uneven whine in the rhythm, but hunger—or something deeper, more insistent—overrode the discomfort. The aftershocks still hummed low in her abdomen, making each wingstroke feel amplified, electric, as though the nerves that had just learned how to come apart were now learning how to come back together.

  She landed on the rim of the glass dish with all six legs splayed, hooks catching the smooth, condensation-slick curve. Up close, the ice cream was a glacial landscape: soft white peaks already collapsing into glossy pools, tiny air bubbles trapped like frozen stars, the surface weeping pale rivulets that caught the amber light and turned it molten gold. The cold radiated upward in palpable waves, making her spiracles flutter open wider, drinking the chill like water after a long flight.

  The boy watched, motionless except for the slow rise and fall of his bare chest. The towel still clung low on his hips, damp fabric darker where it pressed against skin. One hand hovered near the dish—ready to steady it, or perhaps ready to intervene if she slipped—but he didn't touch. Not yet.

  Mizuki dipped her head. Mandibles parted, palps extended, and she plunged them straight into the softening cream.

  Cold shocked her again—brighter, sharper this time. Vanilla flooded every chemoreceptor: thick, fatty sweetness layered with the clean bite of dairy and the faintest undertone of whatever vanilla extract the brand used (artificial? real? her senses couldn't tell and didn't care). She lapped frantically, tiny mandibles scraping, legs braced wide to keep balance as the dish's rim grew slippery under her hooks. Cream smeared across her face plates, clung to the fine setae around her mouthparts, dripped in slow strings from her palps back into the melting mass below.

  Each swallow sent a fresh pulse through her core. Not orgasm—not quite—but something adjacent: a blooming warmth that started in her thorax and rolled backward in languid waves, making her ovipositor curl and uncurl in slow, rhythmic pulses. The contrast was maddening—icy mouthfuls sliding down her segmented gullet while the radiant heat of her own body fought to keep up. Her wings buzzed in short, involuntary bursts between laps, stirring the surface of the ice cream into tiny whirlpools.

  She ate like she was starving. Maybe she was. The rice crumbs earlier had been survival; this was indulgence. Pure, shameless, ridiculous indulgence. A dragonfly—barely bigger than a paperclip—was devouring vanilla ice cream from a kitchen dish while a half-naked teenage boy watched with rapt, wide-eyed fascination.

  The boy exhaled—a soft, shaky sound that stirred the air above the dish and made Mizuki’s antennae flick forward. He hadn’t moved closer, but the tension in his shoulders had changed: less careful restraint, more barely-contained wonder. His pupils were large in the amber light, swallowing most of the iris. The towel knot had slipped another fraction; one wrong shift of his hips and it would give up entirely.

  Mizuki didn’t care. Or rather—she cared so much the thought looped uselessly in her fractured mind and then dissolved under another mouthful of cream.

  She plunged deeper.

  Her head and thorax dipped until the cold cream touched the sensitive seam where her head plates met the smooth ventral curve of her thorax—the exact place his fingertip had pressed earlier. The chill kissed the still-flushed membrane like ice on fevered skin. She shuddered hard enough that her legs skidded half a centimeter along the rim; hooks scrabbled, caught, held. A low, continuous buzz rose from her wing roots—not flight vibration, but something smaller, throatier, almost purring if dragonflies could purr.

  Cream coated her entire face now. Pale streaks ran backward along her compound eyes in thin, sticky trails, turning the world into smeared prisms of white-gold-amber. Every blink (or the insect equivalent—brief darkening of facets) dragged more of it across her vision. She didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Each greedy lap sent fresh pulses of cold-sweet relief straight through her core, meeting the lingering heat from before and twisting it into something new: slow, rolling ecstasy that built without peaking, just kept climbing, layering, thickening until her whole segmented body felt like molten honey wrapped in frost.

  Her ovipositor flexed in long, deliberate strokes now—curling tight against her underbelly, then sliding out again in time with each swallow. Not frantic. Rhythmic. Almost meditative. Tiny beads of clear fluid appeared at the tip again, trembling, then falling one by one into the melting ice cream below. They vanished instantly, swallowed by vanilla, indistinguishable.

  The boy finally moved.

  Not to grab. Not to stop her.

  He simply leaned forward—very slowly—and rested both forearms on the desk so his face hovered only a few hand-widths above the dish. His breath washed over her in warm, mint-scented waves that clashed deliciously with the cold rising from the cream. Damp hair dripped once, twice; a single droplet fell from the tip of a dark strand and landed with microscopic plink on the ice cream’s surface, right beside where Mizuki was feeding. The tiny ripple spread outward. She chased it without thinking, legs scrambling, body stretching long and low until her abdomen dipped into the shallow pool.

  Cold enveloped the sensitive ventral midline of her abdomen—right where the segments were softest, thinnest, most alive with human memory. She arched violently. Wings snapped wide. A sharp, high trill escaped her—a sound no normal dragonfly should make—before she clamped down on it, mandibles clicking in frantic rhythm against more cream.

  The boy’s voice came low, rougher than before.

  “You’re… really into that, huh?”

  He didn’t laugh. Didn’t tease. The words were quiet, almost reverent, like he was witnessing something sacred and profane at the same time.

  Mizuki lifted her cream-smeared head just enough to meet the mosaic reflection of his face in her eyes. Thousands of tiny boys stared back—each one flushed, each one breathing a little faster, each one utterly transfixed by the tiny, obscene spectacle of a dragonfly-girl drowning herself in vanilla while her body trembled through continuous, silent climax.

  She buzzed once—small, deliberate—then deliberately dragged the entire length of her ventral thorax along the inner curve of the dish rim where a thick ribbon of melted cream had collected. The motion was slow. Shameless. The cold dragged across every rewired nerve ending that still remembered being bare collarbone, bare sternum, bare stomach under summer sun. Her ovipositor flicked outward in a long, trembling arc, scattering more clear droplets like rain.

  Another aftershock—deeper this time—rolled from thorax to tail tip. Her wings stuttered mid-beat. Legs buckled. She slid half her body length into the shallow pool of cream, abdomen submerged to the second segment, wings splayed and fluttering uselessly against the sticky surface.

  The boy inhaled sharply through his nose.

  One hand moved—slow, careful—until his index finger hovered just above her partially submerged form. Not touching. Not yet. Just close enough that the radiant heat of his skin battled the ice cream’s chill directly over her trembling abdomen.

  “More?” he whispered.

  Mizuki’s entire body answered before her mind could catch up.

  She arched upward—abdomen lifting out of the cream in a long, dripping curve—ovipositor fully extended now, quivering, glistening—and pressed the sensitive ventral midline of her thorax deliberately against the hovering pad of his fingertip.

  The contact was electric.

  Warm skin. Cold cream. Her own frantic heat.

  She came again—harder, longer, quieter than before. No dramatic shudder this time; just a long, rolling wave that started at the point of contact and traveled outward in perfect silence until even her spiracles stopped fluttering for one suspended heartbeat.

  When it passed, she collapsed forward, half in the dish, half against his unmoving finger, wings sagging, body painted in streaks of white and amber, every segment still pulsing with slow, liquid afterglow.

  The boy didn’t speak.

  He simply stayed there—breath ragged, towel finally slipping another dangerous inch—watching the tiny dragonfly who used to be a girl tremble herself to pieces in melted vanilla ice cream on his desk.

  And for the first time since the transformation began, Mizuki didn’t feel mortified.

  She felt… seen.

  Ridiculously, obscenely, perfectly seen.

  Later, when the boy was lying on his bed, tapping on his Steam Deck's screen through VN's dialogues, the room had settled into the soft blue glow of late afternoon turning evening. The blinds were still half-closed, but the amber bars had faded to thin silver threads. The desk lamp stayed on—low, warm, unnecessary now but left burning like a nightlight for something small and strange.

  Mizuki had finally dragged herself out of the ice-cream dish.

  Her body was a disaster: cream dried in sticky crusts along her ventral plates, streaking her beige exoskeleton in pale, flaking ribbons; smears clung to the delicate veins of her wings, making every tentative flutter leave faint white trails in the air; even her long abdomen carried a thin glaze where she'd half-submerged herself, the segments gleaming wetly under the lamp like lacquered porcelain. The cold sweetness had long since turned cloying against her mouthparts, but the sugar rush lingered in her hemolymph—bright, jittery energy that kept the worst of the fatigue at bay.

  She had managed a clumsy takeoff from the rim of the dish, wings whining unevenly from the kink and the sticky drag. Flight felt heavier now, syrup-slow, but she crossed the desk in short, staggering hops—landing on the spine of a manga volume, then the Gundam model's outstretched arm, then finally the edge of the boy's bed when he shifted to make space without seeming to notice he was doing it.

  The boy lay on his back, knees bent, Steam Deck balanced on his stomach. Headphones dangled around his neck; tinny audio leaked out in snatches of Japanese voice acting and swelling piano OST. The screen light painted his bare chest in shifting blues and pinks—now naked, towel slipped aside sometime between the ice cream and whatever quiet decision he’d made while Mizuki was still licking herself semi-clean on the desk rim. He hadn’t bothered to cover up again. The room felt too warm, too private, too strangely intimate for modesty now.

  His erection rested heavy against his lower abdomen—unhurried, half-interested rather than urgently demanding. The skin there was flushed darker than the rest of him, veins faintly visible under the shifting glow of the screen. Every slow breath lifted it slightly, let it settle again. With his left hand wrapped around its base, fingers loose but deliberate, he began a slow, absentminded stroke—upward along the shaft in one unhurried glide, then back down, thumb brushing over the flushed head on each pass. The motion was casual, almost secondary to the dialogue scrolling on the Steam Deck screen; the visual novel's soft moans and breathy Japanese lines synced faintly with the rhythm of his hand, as if the game's soundtrack had become unintentional accompaniment. Pre-cum beaded at the tip, clear and glistening under the screen's shifting glow, smeared thin and shiny with each lazy pump. The scent reached Mizuki even from the edge of the bed—musky, warm, faintly salty-sweet like the lingering vanilla on her own body but deeper, more animal.

  She perched on the rumpled comforter, six legs hooked into the weave of the fabric, wings still half-sticky and trembling from the flight over. The bed was an endless plain of soft hills and valleys; each shift of the boy's weight sent gentle tremors through it, rocking her like a boat on calm water. Her compound eyes locked onto him—thousands of fractured images of that slow, rhythmic motion: the way the skin slid smoothly over hardness, the subtle flex of his abs with every breath, the way his erection twitched upward when the VN hit a particularly intense line.

  He's... touching himself. While I'm right here. Covered in his ice cream like some kind of dessert topping.

  Heat bloomed again in her thorax—not the cold-sweet pulse from before, but a deep, throbbing warmth that spread downward along her abdomen in slow, syrupy waves. Her ovipositor curled tight, then flicked out, a helpless little spasm that left another tiny bead of clear fluid trembling at its tip. The sugar in her hemolymph made everything feel brighter, sharper; every wing flutter dragged the dried cream flakes across her ventral plates like teasing fingertips.

  She didn't decide to move. Her wings just... lifted.

  The takeoff was clumsy, weighted by the sticky residue, but the jittery energy carried her. She crossed the distance in a low, wobbling arc—hovering uncertainly above his stomach, then drifting lower, drawn by the radiant heat rolling off his skin and the slow, hypnotic motion of his hand. The air grew thicker, heavier with his scent. Her antennae quivered forward, drinking it in.

  She landed—light as a feather, touching the hot tip of his member with the very lightest brush of her six delicate legs against the flushed, glistening head.

  The contact was instantaneous electricity.

  His skin was fever-hot compared to the lingering chill of cream still clinging to her exoskeleton; the bead of pre-cum she touched first smeared across the smooth curve of her forelegs like warm honey, sticky and viscous, clinging in thin strands when she instinctively tried to lift away. But she didn’t lift away.

  Instead, her body—still wired with too much human memory and too little insect inhibition—settled.

  All six legs splayed wider for balance. The hooks at their tips caught gently in the soft, yielding skin just behind the corona, tiny points of pressure that made the entire shaft give a visible twitch upward. Mizuki’s long abdomen curled forward in automatic reflex, bringing the sensitive ventral midline of her thorax flush against the slick, heated surface. The dried cream on her plates cracked faintly with the motion, flaking away in pale motes that drifted down like obscene snow onto his lower stomach.

  She pressed.

  Not hard—just enough weight to let her own trembling heat meet his. The contrast was devastating: her syrup-sticky, sugar-glazed body sliding slow and deliberate along the underside of his glans, ventral plates dragging through the thin film of pre-cum like a tongue tracing velvet. Every tiny ridge and seam of her exoskeleton caught and released in micro-friction; the cream residue acted as lubricant, turning each minuscule movement into a slick, teasing glide.

  The boy’s breath hitched—sharp, audible even over the tinny VN moans leaking from his headphones. His hand paused mid-stroke, fingers still loosely curled around the base, knuckles whitening as he registered the feather-light weight perched on him. His eyes flicked downward, away from the Steam Deck screen for the first time in minutes.

  Mizuki—small, beige, ridiculous, coated in vanilla crust and now smeared with his own arousal—met the mosaic reflection of his widening gaze with her own compound eyes. Thousands of tiny versions of his face stared back at her: flushed, astonished, pupils blown wide in the shifting blue-pink glow.

  For one suspended heartbeat, neither of them moved.

  Then his erection gave another hard, involuntary twitch beneath her.

  The motion lifted her entire body half a centimeter before settling again. She lost purchase for a split second—legs scrabbling, hooks slipping in the slickness—before she readjusted, pressing her thorax more firmly down. Her ovipositor extended fully now, quivering, the tip brushing the sensitive frenulum in a single, trembling line. Another bead of her own clear fluid welled up and fell, mingling with his pre-cum in a tiny, glistening pool that spread slowly across the heated skin.

  The boy exhaled a low, broken sound—half groan, half laugh of pure disbelief.

  “…holy shit,” he whispered, voice rough. “You’re really—”

  He didn’t finish. His free hand lifted—slow, careful, trembling slightly—and hovered above her like he was afraid touching would shatter the moment. Instead, he let his fingertips rest feather-light on the rumpled comforter to either side of his hips, caging her without closing in. The heat radiating from his palm washed over her wings, making the sticky veins flutter weakly.

  Mizuki rocked.

  Once. Deliberate. A tiny forward slide of her thorax along his glans, dragging cream flakes and pre-cum in equal measure. The friction sent a fresh rolling wave through her own body—deep, syrup-thick pleasure that made her spiracles flare wide and her antennae snap flat against her head in overwhelmed surrender. Her wings gave a short, stuttering buzz, not enough to lift off, just enough to vibrate through her lightweight frame and into his skin.

  He groaned again—louder this time. His hand finally moved, not to grab her, but to resume that slow stroke—fingers gliding up the shaft until they met the place where her tiny body was perched. He didn’t push her off. He curled his grip just below her, letting the motion of his hand carry her gently forward and back along the sensitive head in time with each pump.

  Up.

  Her ventral plates dragged through warm slickness; ovipositor flicked helplessly against the underside.

  Down.

  She slid backward, legs hooking tighter, abdomen curling to keep contact.

  Up again.

  The rhythm synced—his hand, her rocking body, the faint moans still leaking from the forgotten Steam Deck. The screen light painted them both in shifting colors: his flushed skin glowing violet-pink, her cream-streaked exoskeleton catching sapphire and rose like stained glass.

  Mizuki’s mind was gone—fractured into pure sensation:

  Heat.

  Slick.

  Pressure.

  Sugar-jitter pulse in her hemolymph.

  The slow, building throb beneath her matched the throb inside her own rewired core.

  She came first—quiet, rolling, endless. No violent shudder this time; just a long, liquid wave that started at her thorax and traveled the full length of her abdomen in perfect silence. Her ovipositor flexed hard once, twice—releasing a final scattering of clear droplets that pattered down onto him like warm rain—then curled tight against her underbelly as aftershocks rippled outward.

  The boy followed seconds later.

  His abs tensed. Breath caught. Hand sped up for three frantic strokes before freezing at the base.

  He spilled—thick, hot pulses that arced upward and landed in heavy ropes across his stomach, one catching the edge of her wing and painting a white streak through the dried vanilla crust. Another splashed warm against her side, soaking into the gaps between segments, running down the curve of her abdomen in slow, sticky trails.

  ~~ Cum voluptas culmen attingit, forma bestiae cadit. ~~

  The reversal spell flashed through Mizuki's mind, bright and sudden as a struck match in the dark.

  It wasn't a conscious choice. The thought simply arrived—whole, complete, urgent—like the final line of a half-forgotten incantation surfacing at the exact moment her body could no longer contain both forms. Mana, thin and flickering after hours of depletion, exhaustion, sugar overload, and continuous overstimulation, suddenly surged in one last, desperate pulse. Not gentle. Not controlled. Raw.

  Her tiny body locked rigid against the still-twitching head of his cock.

  Then light—soft, pearlescent, the color of moonlit water—erupted from every seam of her exoskeleton.

  The boy gasped, hips jerking once more in reflexive aftershock before freezing. His eyes went wide, pupils swallowing the blue-pink glow of the Steam Deck screen as the luminescence spread. Mizuki's wings flared wide, no longer sticky, no longer beige—translucent veining igniting from within like fiber-optic threads. The dried cream cracked and flaked away in glowing motes. Her ovipositor retracted in a single, smooth motion, vanishing into the lengthening abdomen as segments fused, reshaped, expanded.

  The change was violent in its speed and impossibly gentle in its precision.

  Bone and chitin dissolved into soft tissue. Compound eyes collapsed inward, facets melting into single, human irises. Wings folded and shrank, retracting into smooth shoulder blades. The long, segmented tail shortened, rounded, became hips, thighs, the familiar curve of calves. Heat bloomed everywhere at once—skin replacing plates, blood replacing hemolymph, breath replacing spiracles. The last traces of vanilla and cum and pre-cum clung for one heartbeat longer, then evaporated in the rising light as though the transformation itself refused to carry any evidence forward.

  When the glow faded, Mizuki was human again.

  Naked. Lying on her stomach. With face buried in the boy's crotch.

  Mizuki's cheek pressed against the warm, still-twitching skin of his lower abdomen, right where the last heavy pulse had landed moments earlier. The scent hit her first—musky, salty, mingled with the faint vanilla ghost still clinging to her own skin and hair. Her lips parted on an involuntary inhale; a thin strand of cum stretched between the corner of her mouth and the glistening head of his cock before snapping silently.

  She froze.

  Human lungs. Human heartbeat. Human heat flooding back into limbs that suddenly felt too heavy, too long, too solid. Her arms—real arms, soft-skinned, trembling—braced instinctively against the rumpled comforter on either side of his hips. Her breasts pressed into the mattress between his spread thighs, nipples hardening against the fabric from the abrupt shift in temperature and sensation. Between her own legs, she felt the slick, aching aftermath of her repeated dragonfly climaxes now translated into human terms: swollen folds, a steady throb deep inside, wetness already cooling on her inner thighs.

  The boy hadn't moved.

  His Steam Deck lay forgotten beside him on the bed, screen still glowing with paused dialogue, the tinny moans looping faintly from the dangling headphones. His erection—still half-hard, flushed dark and slick—rested inches from her face, a final bead of cum welling at the slit before sliding slowly down the underside in a lazy trail. His abs were locked tight beneath her; every shallow breath lifted her slightly, let her settle again. His hands hovered uselessly in the air above her back, fingers spread wide as though he couldn't decide whether to touch her or pull away entirely.

  For several long, suspended seconds, the only sound was their breathing—his ragged and uneven, hers coming in short, stunned pants against his skin.

  Then Mizuki lifted her head.

  Slowly. Very slowly.

  Her hair—long again, tangled, streaked with faint dried cream at the ends—fell across her face in messy curtains. She blinked once, twice; human eyes adjusting to single vision after hours of fractured mosaic. The room snapped into painful clarity: the half-closed blinds leaking silver evening light, the desk lamp's warm pool, the scattered manga and Gundam parts, the faint scent of boy-room and sex and melted vanilla hanging thick in the air.

  She met his gaze.

  His face was flushed crimson from throat to hairline. Pupils blown so wide the irises were thin brown rings. Mouth parted, breath still coming in soft, disbelieving huffs. He looked like someone who'd just witnessed a miracle and wasn't entirely sure it wasn't a hallucination.

  "You're..." His voice cracked on the first syllable. He swallowed hard, Adam's apple bobbing. "You're... a girl."

  Mizuki felt heat rush into her own cheeks—human blushing, unmistakable, burning from collarbone to forehead. She became abruptly, excruciatingly aware of every point of contact: her bare breasts against his thighs, her stomach pressed to the mattress between his knees, the sticky warmth of his cum still drying in streaks across her cheek and jaw, the way her own arousal had left a damp spot on the sheets beneath her.

  She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

  "I... I can explain."

  The words came out small, hoarse, cracked from disuse. Her throat felt raw after hours of mandibles and no vocal cords.

  The boy blinked. Once. Twice.

  Then—slowly, carefully, like he was handling something fragile and explosive—he lowered his hands. Not to grab. Not to cover himself. Just... rested them on the comforter to either side of her shoulders, caging her gently without touching.

  "You were the dragonfly," he said. Not a question. A quiet, stunned statement of fact.

  Mizuki nodded. The motion rubbed her cheek against his softening length again; she flinched, mortified, but couldn't quite bring herself to pull away yet. Not when every nerve ending still hummed with the memory of rocking against him, of coming apart in tiny, endless waves while perched on his cock like some obscene living toy.

  "I... didn't mean for it to go this far," she whispered. "The spell... it just... I got stuck. And then you... and the ice cream... and..."

  Her voice trailed off. There was no way to finish that sentence without sounding completely insane.

  Or completely depraved.

  The boy's gaze flicked down—taking in her naked body sprawled between his legs, the streaks of dried cream and cum painting her skin, the way her thighs pressed together instinctively to hide how wet she still was—then back up to her face.

  He exhaled a shaky laugh. Not mocking. More like relief mixed with pure, overwhelmed awe.

  "That was... the hottest thing that's ever happened to me," he said quietly. "Like... ever."

  Mizuki's blush deepened to nuclear levels. She ducked her head, forehead pressing back against his lower stomach, right above where his cock lay softening against his abs.

  "I'm sorry," she mumbled into his skin. "For... everything. The bug thing. The... riding you thing. The cumming on you thing. Multiple times. And then turning human while basically motorboating your—"

  He cut her off with another soft laugh—this one warmer, almost fond.

  "Hey." One hand finally moved. Hesitant. Gentle. His fingers brushed her tangled hair back from her face, tucking a sticky strand behind her ear. The touch was careful, reverent, like he still half-expected her to dissolve into light again. "Don't apologize. I mean... I kinda... participated. A lot."

  His thumb traced the edge of a dried vanilla flake on her cheek, then—very slowly—wiped a streak of his own cum from the corner of her mouth with the pad of his thumb. The motion was intimate. Filthy. Tender.

  Mizuki's breath hitched.

  She lifted her head again. Met his eyes. Held them.

  "I'm Mizuki," she said, voice steadier now. "And... I think I owe you dinner. Or at least... an explanation. And maybe a shower. A really long one."

  The boy smiled—small, crooked, still dazed.

  "I'm Haruto," he replied. "And... yeah. Shower sounds good. Together?"

  He paused. Then added, softer:

  "If you want."

  Mizuki felt the last remnants of dragonfly jitter melt away, replaced by something warmer, heavier, entirely human.

  She nodded.

  "Yeah," she whispered. "Together."

  She started to push herself up—slow, careful, every muscle trembling from the reversal and everything that came before.

  Haruto's hands slid to her waist—steadying, not restraining.

  And for the first time since chewing on that pen in the practice room, Mizuki didn't feel small.

  She felt exactly the right size.

  "Ugh... I'm a third-year student at the nearby magical college," Mizuki explained. Wearing his longest shirt as a makeshift dress, she sat cross-legged on the edge of Haruto's bed, knees drawn up modestly even though the hem barely covered her butt and crotch.

  With the cup of steaming coffee cradled between her palms, Mizuki took a slow, careful sip. The heat bloomed across her tongue—bitter, grounding, human in a way that still felt like a small miracle after hours trapped in compound eyes and buzzing wings. She exhaled through her nose, letting the steam curl upward and fog the tips of her lashes.

  Haruto sat opposite her on the bed, knees pulled up too, wearing nothing but a pair of loose basketball shorts he’d fished out of the laundry basket while she was changing. He’d also pulled on an old band T-shirt at her quiet request (“I’m not having this conversation while staring at your abs the whole time”), though the fabric still clung slightly to the drying sweat on his shoulders. The Steam Deck lay abandoned on the nightstand, screen dark at last. The room smelled like coffee now, cutting through the lingering sweetness of vanilla and the heavier musk of what they’d just done.

  “I’m a third-year at St. Celestine’s,” she continued, voice steadier now that she had something warm to hold. “Magical Theory and Practical Application major. Specialization in biomorphic transmutation.” A small, self-deprecating laugh escaped her. “Obviously, I still have some… kinks to work out in the practical portion.”

  Haruto’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t interrupt. He just watched her—really watched her—with that same dazed, reverent look he’d worn when she first changed back. Like she might vanish into light particles again if he blinked too hard.

  “The dragonfly thing was supposed to be a controlled test,” she went on. “Short-duration, low-mana signature, reversible in under ten minutes. I had the circle perfect. I had backup mana crystals in my bag. I had—” She paused, cheeks heating again. “I had breakfast plans. Which I skipped. Again.”

  He let out a soft huff of laughter. “That explains the rice-ball crumbs in the container.”

  Mizuki groaned and dropped her forehead to her knees, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “Please never mention the rice-ball crumbs again. Or the… peeing. Or the lamp. Or—” She gestured vaguely at both of them, the rumpled sheets, the drying streaks still visible on her inner thighs beneath the hem of his shirt. “—any of the rest of it.”

  Haruto leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees. “I’m keeping the memory of the ice cream part forever,” he said, dead serious. “That’s non-negotiable.”

  She peeked up at him through her lashes. Despite everything—the mortification, the mana exhaustion, the fact that she was currently wearing his shirt and nothing else while sitting on the bed where he’d just come across her dragonfly body—his expression was soft. Not mocking. Not freaked out. Just… warm.

  “I’m not going to tell anyone,” he added quietly. “Not my friends. Not my mom. Not even the group chat where we rank weird bugs we’ve caught. This stays here.”

  Mizuki lifted her head fully. Searched his face. Found nothing but sincerity—and maybe a flicker of something shyer, more vulnerable, now that she was human-sized and looking him in the eye.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Then, after a beat: “I… probably should have led with ‘I’m not actually an insect’ before I, uh… used you as a landing pad.”

  He shrugged one shoulder, the motion pulling the T-shirt tight across his chest. “I mean… I didn’t exactly push you off.”

  Another silence settled—less awkward now, more charged. The kind of silence that happens when two people realize they’ve already crossed several dozen lines and are still sitting less than a meter apart.

  Mizuki took another sip of coffee, mostly to give her hands something to do. “So… Haruto. Second-year? Third?”

  “Second,” he said. “General studies for now. Thinking about game design or maybe comp-sci. Nothing magical.” A small grin tugged at his mouth. “Unless you count speedrunning visual novels as arcane knowledge.”

  She snorted into her cup. “It’s definitely a specialized discipline.”

  He laughed—real, easy—and the sound loosened something tight in her chest.

  She set the coffee carefully on the nightstand, then hugged her knees a little closer. The shirt rode up dangerously high on her thighs; she tugged at the hem without much success.

  “I should probably… go home,” she said, though the words lacked conviction. “Shower. Change. Find my notebook. Figure out how much mana debt I just racked up. Maybe cry in the fetal position for an hour.”

  Haruto tilted his head. “Or.”

  “Or?”

  “You could stay a little longer.” He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly shy again. “I mean—not for… anything. Just. Coffee. Talking. I can make ramen. Or toast. Or… whatever normal humans eat after accidentally turning into a bug and then accidentally—” He waved a hand between them. “—you know.”

  Mizuki felt the corner of her mouth lift despite herself.

  “Accidentally,” she echoed, teasing.

  “Very accidentally,” he agreed solemnly. Then softer: “But I wouldn’t mind if some of it… wasn’t an accident. Next time.”

  Her heart gave a hard, human thud.

  She looked down at her bare knees, at the faint red marks where her own hooks had pressed into her thighs earlier when she was still small and frantic. Then back up at him—really looked. At the damp hair still falling across his forehead. At the way his hands flexed like he wanted to reach for her but was holding back. At the quiet hope in his eyes that matched the quiet hope suddenly blooming somewhere under her ribs.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Haruto blinked. “Okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll stay a little longer.” She unfolded her legs carefully, letting her feet touch the floor. The shirt slipped even higher; she didn’t bother fixing it this time. “But only if you promise not to call me ‘weird bug’ in front of your friends.”

  He grinned—wide, boyish, bright.

  “Deal. But I’m keeping ‘Mizuki the Dragonfly Girl’ for private use.”

  She rolled her eyes, but the smile stayed.

  “Private use only,” she agreed.

  And when he stood up—careful, slow—and offered her his hand to help her off the bed, she took it.

  Fingers laced. Warm. Human. Real.

  No wings. No mandibles. No reversal spell needed.

  Just them.

  In a room that still smelled faintly of vanilla, coffee, and the beginning of something neither of them had expected.

  "Haruto? Do you have a bathrobe or spare kimono?" Mizuki stood in the narrow doorway between the bathroom and Haruto’s bedroom, one hand braced on the frame, the other clutching a small white towel around her chest like a makeshift sarong. The towel was clearly one of his—too short for proper coverage, ending high on her thighs and leaving long stretches of damp, flushed skin exposed. Steam drifted out behind her in lazy spirals, carrying the clean scent of his generic body wash (something citrus-woodsy that now clung to her hair and made her smell faintly like him). Her dark hair hung in wet ropes over her shoulders, dripping slow dark spots onto the floorboards. The ends still carried the faintest trace of vanilla where the cream had stubbornly refused to rinse out completely.

  She looked soft. Vulnerable. Human in a way that made Haruto’s throat tighten.

  “Haruto?” she called again, quieter this time, as if suddenly aware of how small the apartment felt with both of them awake and clothed (mostly) and breathing the same air.

  Haruto, who had been sitting on the edge of the bed staring blankly at the now-dark Steam Deck like it might offer him life advice, snapped upright.

  “Uh—yeah. Yeah, hang on.”

  He stood too fast, nearly knocking the nightstand lamp sideways, then crossed to the small wardrobe shoved against the far wall. The basketball shorts he’d pulled on earlier rode low on his hips; the band T-shirt was inside-out from haste. He yanked open the sliding door, rummaged for a moment among hoodies and neatly folded school uniforms, then pulled out two possibilities.

  First: an oversized navy bathrobe, terrycloth, the kind hotels give out. Slightly frayed at the cuffs, belt missing one loop, but clean and clearly unused for months.

  Second: an actual yukata—light summer-weight cotton, pale indigo with a subtle white crane pattern. It had been a festival souvenir from two summers ago, still folded with the original shop tag dangling from one sleeve. He’d never worn it; too pretty, too much effort.

  He held both up, turning toward her.

  “Does this work? The robe’s bigger but… safer. Yukata’s lighter. Might feel nicer after the hot water.”

  Mizuki’s eyes flicked between them. She bit her lower lip—still faintly swollen from earlier nerves and kisses she hadn’t quite admitted to wanting yet—and stepped fully into the room. The towel slipped a precarious inch; she caught it with a quick forearm press, cheeks blooming pink again.

  “The yukata,” she decided after a beat. “If it’s not… special or anything.”

  Haruto nodded once, quick and decisive, like the choice had settled something small but important inside him.

  “Not special,” he said, voice low and a little rough around the edges. “Just… sat in there collecting dust. Mom bought it for me at a matsuri because she thought it’d look ‘elegant.’ I told her I’d look like a discount samurai. Never wore it.”

  He stepped closer—slow enough that she could retreat if she wanted—and held the yukata out between them like an offering. The pale indigo fabric caught the soft glow from the desk lamp, the white cranes seeming to shift and glide as the cotton moved. Up close, Mizuki could see the faint creases from years of careful folding; it still smelled faintly of cedar sachets and new cloth.

  She reached for it. Their fingers brushed—his warm and slightly callused from game controllers and pencil grips, hers cool and pruned from the long shower. Neither of them pulled away immediately. The contact lingered just long enough to feel deliberate.

  “Thanks,” she murmured.

  Haruto cleared his throat and turned half-away, giving her his back without making a show of it. “I’ll… uh. Face the wall. Or go make more coffee. Whatever you need.”

  Mizuki let out a small, breathy laugh—the sound surprising even herself. “You’ve already seen everything there is to see, Haruto. Multiple times. In multiple… forms.”

  He froze mid-step, shoulders rising toward his ears. “Yeah, but—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That was different. That was… bug-you. This is—” He gestured vaguely without turning around. “—real-you. Naked real-you. In my room. Wearing my towel. Asking for my clothes. It’s… hitting different.”

  She smiled despite the fresh flush crawling up her throat. The towel was starting to feel ridiculous now—heavy with water and slipping anyway—so she let it fall to the floorboards with a soft, wet thud. The cool air kissed her damp skin; goosebumps raced down her arms and across her breasts. She shook out the yukata once, then slipped her arms into the wide sleeves.

  The cotton was cool against her shower-hot skin at first, then warmed quickly. She drew the left side over the right (the proper way—her grandmother had drilled that into her during childhood Obon visits), tied the narrow obi in a simple bow at the small of her back, and smoothed her hands down the front. The hem fell to mid-calf—modest enough for moving around, light enough that she could feel every shift of air against her bare legs. The cranes seemed to dance when she turned.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “You can look.”

  Haruto turned.

  For a heartbeat, he didn’t speak. Just looked.

  The yukata suited her in a way that made his chest ache—soft indigo against her still-flushed skin, dark wet hair spilling over the collar, the faint crane pattern echoing the delicate way she held herself now: not small like the dragonfly, but careful, newly human, newly here. The sleeves hung long enough to cover her hands almost to the fingertips; she fidgeted with one cuff, suddenly shy under his stare.

  “You look…” He swallowed. “Really good. Like you belong in it.”

  Mizuki ducked her head, tucking a damp strand behind her ear. “It feels nice. Cooler than I expected. And it smells like your closet.” A tiny smile. “Which smells like you. Citrus and… boy.”

  He laughed under his breath, stepping closer again—this time without hesitation. Close enough that she could feel the heat rolling off him again, close enough that the faint scent of his body wash on her skin mixed with the clean cedar of the yukata and created something new.

  “Keep it,” he said quietly. “As long as you want. Or forever. Whatever.”

  She lifted her eyes to his. “Careful. I might take you up on forever.”

  The words hung there—light on the surface, heavier underneath.

  Haruto reached out slowly. Gave her time to step back. She didn’t.

  His fingers brushed the damp ends of her hair, then slid to the side of her neck—thumb resting lightly over her pulse. It jumped under his touch.

  “Then keep it forever,” he murmured.

  Mizuki exhaled a shaky breath. Leaned in—just enough that her forehead touched his collarbone through the thin T-shirt. His arms came around her automatically, careful, loose enough that she could pull away at any second.

  She didn’t.

  Instead, she tilted her head up, found his mouth with hers—soft at first, testing, then deeper when he made a quiet, surprised sound against her lips.

  The yukata shifted with the movement; one sleeve slipped down her shoulder, baring damp skin to the cool room air. Haruto’s hand followed the fabric—warm palm sliding over her bare shoulder blade, fingers splaying wide like he was memorizing the shape of her.

  When they finally broke apart—both breathing harder, both smiling in that dazed, slightly stupid way people do after a first real kiss—Mizuki rested her cheek against his chest.

  “Coffee’s probably cold by now,” she whispered.

  Haruto pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I’ll make more.”

  “Later,” she said, arms sliding around his waist. “This first.”

  He tightened his hold just enough to lift her the tiniest bit—enough that her bare toes left the floorboards for a second before settling again.

  “Later,” he agreed.

  The yukata smelled like cedar and citrus and him.

  And for the first time all evening, Mizuki didn’t feel like she needed to explain anything at all.

  "So, your specialization is a biomorphic transmutation?" Haruto summarized. Sitting together at the small kitchen table—really just a folding card table shoved against the wall under the single window—the two of them had migrated out of the bedroom sometime after the second (or maybe third) kiss. The apartment was quiet except for the low hum of the mini-fridge and the occasional drip from the faucet Mizuki had turned off too hastily after washing their coffee mugs.

  He leaned back in the mismatched chair, one elbow propped on the table, the other hand loosely curled around a fresh mug of instant coffee that had gone lukewarm while they talked. The yukata still looked impossibly right on her: the indigo fabric catching the warm yellow light from the overhead bulb, the cranes frozen mid-flight across her shoulders. She’d pulled her damp hair into a loose, messy bun with one of his spare hair ties (black, stretched-out, probably left over from some long-ago school project), a few wet strands escaping to curl against her neck.

  Mizuki nodded, tracing the rim of her own mug with one fingertip. The ceramic was chipped at the handle; she kept rotating it so the flaw faced away from her, a small, unconscious habit.

  “Yeah. Biomorphic transmutation.” She gave a tiny shrug, the motion making the yukata sleeve slip down to her elbow again. She didn’t bother fixing it this time. “It’s… basically shapeshifting with extra steps. You take a living template—animal, plant, sometimes even fungal if you’re feeling reckless—and you rewrite your own cellular structure to match it, at least temporarily. The theory is elegant: mana as a compiler, your body as source code, the target form as the new runtime environment. In practice…” She made a wry face. “It’s mostly debugging crashes. And occasionally turning yourself into a very embarrassed dragonfly who ends up humping someone’s fingertip in a fit of sugar-induced delirium.”

  Haruto choked on his coffee.

  She reached over without thinking and patted his back—light, steady—until he stopped coughing. Her hand lingered between his shoulder blades for a second longer than necessary.

  “Sorry,” he wheezed, grinning through watering eyes. “That mental image is never leaving my brain. Ever.”

  “Good. It’s character-building.” Mizuki leaned her chin on her hand, studying him with a small, tired smile. “The college has strict rules about field testing. You’re supposed to use approved containment chambers, supervised mana monitors, the whole sterile-lab thing. I… may have bent protocol a little. A lot. I wanted quiet. No observers. No chance of someone walking in and seeing me sprout wings in the middle of a lecture hall.”

  Haruto set his mug down carefully. “Have you tried any other forms?" he asked, voice quieter now, curiosity edging out the lingering amusement. His thumb traced slow circles on the chipped ceramic rim of his own cup, mirroring the way she'd been fidgeting with hers earlier. The question hung between them—gentle, but unmistakably interested.

  Mizuki’s fingertip paused on her mug. She glanced up at him through her lashes, the overhead light catching the faint sheen still clinging to her damp hair. For a moment, she looked almost shy again, the way she had standing in the doorway wrapped in nothing but a too-small towel.

  “A few,” she admitted. “Nothing quite as… eventful as today.”

  She leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other beneath the table. The yukata parted slightly at the knee; she didn’t adjust it. The cranes on the fabric seemed to stretch their wings with the movement.

  “First-year practicals are mostly small stuff—safe, low-risk templates. I did a rabbit once, just to prove I could handle mammalian skeletal restructuring without turning my spine into jelly. Hopped around the containment room for about ninety seconds before the mana feedback made my ears too sensitive and I nearly passed out from the sound of my own heartbeat.” She gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Very undignified. My professor still brings it up at department mixers.”

  Haruto’s mouth twitched. “Ears that big?”

  “Ridiculously big. Like cartoon proportions. I looked like I’d lost a bet with a taxidermist.”

  He snorted, then sobered a little. “And after that?”

  She hesitated—just a beat, long enough for him to notice.

  “Second year, I tried something avian. Not a dragonfly—something sturdier. A peregrine falcon. Fastest animal on the planet when it dives, insane visual acuity, perfect for testing high-speed sensory integration.” Her voice softened, almost wistful. “It worked. Mostly. I launched myself off the roof of the auxiliary building at dawn—supervised, this time—and hit nearly three hundred kilometers an hour in a stoop. The wind felt like it was trying to peel my feathers off. Everything was so sharp. I could see individual lice on a pigeon three blocks away.”

  She paused, staring into her coffee like the memory was still playing behind her eyes.

  “Then the reversal hit mid-flight. Mana surge from an unexpected thermal updraft. One second I’m a falcon screaming through the sky; the next I’m a very naked third-year plummeting toward the athletic field in freefall.” She winced at the recollection. “Luckily, there was a safety net spell woven into the test zone. I bounced. A lot. Broke two ribs and my dignity. Professor made me write a fifty-page incident report titled ‘Unanticipated Aerodynamic Instability in Biomorphic Reversion Protocols.’”

  Haruto let out a low whistle. “You really don’t do things halfway.”

  “Apparently not.” Mizuki’s smile turned rueful. “After that, they banned me from avian templates for a semester. Said I had ‘reckless enthusiasm.’ Which is professor-speak for ‘please stop trying to kill yourself in interesting ways.’”

  He studied her for a long moment—the loose bun, the escaped strands curling against her neck, the way the yukata sleeve still hung forgotten at her elbow. The quiet of the apartment wrapped around them like a blanket: just the fridge hum, the distant city noise filtering through the single window, their breathing slowly syncing.

  “So dragonfly was… what? Redemption arc? Controlled experiment gone sideways?”

  “Something like that.” She met his eyes again, steady this time. “I wanted something small. Agile. Something that could teach me precision without the risk of terminal velocity. Dragonflies are perfect aerial acrobats—four independent wings, near-360 vision, reaction times that make fighter pilots look sluggish. I thought: low mass, low mana cost, easy to contain if something goes wrong.”

  She gave a tiny, helpless shrug.

  “Turns out ‘easy to contain’ doesn’t account for school boys with grabby hands and excellent taste in ice cream.”

  Haruto laughed—soft, warm, the sound rumbling through his chest. He reached across the small table and covered her hand with his. His palm was warm; hers still carried a trace of shower chill.

  “I’m not complaining about the grabby-hands part,” he said quietly. “Or the ice cream. Or… any of it, really.”

  Mizuki turned her hand over beneath his, lacing their fingers together. The chipped mug sat forgotten between them.

  “Next time,” she murmured, “I'll pick something bigger. Something that can actually reach the coffee pot without needing a ride on someone’s fingertip.”

  Haruto’s thumb brushed over her knuckles—slow, deliberate.

  "Mizuki. Haven't you even tried your spells on another person's body?" Haruto asked,

  Haruto’s thumb paused mid-stroke over her knuckles, the question hanging in the quiet kitchen like smoke from a snuffed candle.

  Mizuki’s eyes flicked up to meet his—sharp, curious, a little guarded now. The overhead bulb cast small shadows under her lashes, making her expression harder to read for a second.

  “Other people?” she repeated slowly, as though testing the weight of the words.

  Haruto shrugged one shoulder, trying to keep his tone casual even as his ears went faintly pink again. “Yeah. Like… theoretically. If the spell rewrites cellular structure using mana as the compiler, couldn’t you—y’know—compile someone else’s body instead? Or at least parts of it? Or is that, like… super illegal forbidden magic territory?”

  Mizuki exhaled through her nose—a small, amused huff that didn’t quite reach a laugh. She didn’t pull her hand away; if anything, her fingers tightened around his.

  “It’s not forbidden,” she said carefully. “Exactly. But it’s… heavily regulated. Think ‘Class-3 Restricted Research Protocol’ heavy. You need ethics board approval, multiple independent mana-signature verifications, informed consent notarized in triplicate, constant medical monitoring, and a supervising archmage who’s willing to stake their license on the fact that you won’t accidentally turn someone’s boyfriend into a very confused goldfish.”

  Haruto’s eyebrows climbed. “Goldfish?”

  “Hypothetical example from the textbook,” she said dryly. “Apparently, someone tried a partial piscine shift on a volunteer back in the ’90s. Reversal lagged. Guy spent three days in a quarantine tank breathing through gills he didn’t ask for. The ethics fallout was… extensive.”

  She traced a slow circle on the back of his hand with her thumbnail—absent, almost soothing.

  “The short answer is yes, it’s possible. Biomorphic transmutation can be externally applied. It’s just exponentially more dangerous than self-application. Your own mana knows your signature intimately—self-correction is built in. Someone else’s body? You’re basically hot-wiring their cellular runtime with foreign code. One mismatched loop and you get cascading rejection: organ failure, mana poisoning, chimeric malformations, the works. Even ‘safe’ partial shifts—like enhancing someone’s night vision or boosting muscle density—require donor-recipient compatibility scans that take weeks.”

  Haruto tilted his head, studying her face in the warm yellow light. “But you’ve thought about it.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Mizuki’s mouth curved—just a fraction, rueful and a little wicked.

  “I’m a third-year biomorph specialist who once turned herself into a dragonfly and accidentally dry-humped a stranger’s fingertip until she came. Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  She leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table now, their joined hands caught between them like a shared secret.

  “Theoretically,” she continued, voice dropping to something softer, more intimate, “a consensual, low-intensity external application could be… interesting. Temporary sensory overlays. Heightened touch receptors. Altered proprioception. Making someone feel every brush of fabric like it’s skin-on-skin. Or amplifying pheromonal sensitivity so a single kiss hits like a full-body current.”

  Haruto swallowed visibly. The pink on his ears had spread to the tips.

  “Or,” Mizuki went on, eyes never leaving his, “something more structural. Temporary wing membranes. Extra limbs. A tail with independent motor control. Imagine waking up with something new attached—something sensitive, something that responds to every touch like it’s wired directly to your nervous system—and knowing exactly who put it there.”

  She paused, letting the words settle.

  Haruto’s breathing had gone shallow. His thumb resumed its slow stroking over her knuckles, but the rhythm was unsteady now.

  “That’s… a lot of trust,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah.” Mizuki’s gaze softened. “It would be. Massive trust. Massive vulnerability. On both sides. The caster has to maintain perfect mana stability for the duration—no distractions, no emotional spikes—or the whole thing unravels. And the recipient…” She gave a tiny shrug, sleeve slipping further. “They’re literally putting their body in someone else’s hands. Code and all.”

  Silence stretched again—thicker this time, electric.

  Haruto finally spoke, voice rough around the edges.

  “Have you ever… wanted to try it? On someone?”

  Mizuki didn’t answer right away.

  Instead, she lifted their joined hands, turned his palm up, and pressed a slow, deliberate kiss to the center of it—lips lingering just long enough that he felt the warmth of her breath against his skin.

  When she lifted her head again, her eyes were dark, pupils wide in the low light.

  “Not yet,” she whispered.

  “But I’m starting to think about who I’d trust enough to ask.”

  Haruto’s free hand came up—slow, careful—and cupped the side of her face. His thumb brushed the damp curl at her temple.

  “When you’re ready to ask,” he said, equally quiet, “I’ll be here.”

  Mizuki smiled—small, real, a little shaky at the edges.

  She leaned across the tiny table and kissed him again—slow this time, unhurried, tasting of lukewarm coffee and the promise of something neither of them had quite named yet.

  When they parted, foreheads resting together, she murmured against his lips:

  “No dragonflies this time.”

  Haruto laughed—soft, breathless.

  “Deal. But I’m keeping the ice cream on standby.”

  She swatted his shoulder lightly, sleeve flapping.

  “Incorrigible.”

  “Only for you, dragonfly girl.”

  And in the quiet kitchen, under the single yellow bulb, with chipped mugs and mismatched chairs and the faint drip of a faucet that still wasn’t quite turned off, they stayed like that—hands linked, futures tangled—for a long, warm while.

  After returning to his room, Haruto closed the door with a soft click, the sound somehow louder than it should have been in the late-night hush of the apartment. The hallway light from under the door sliced a thin golden line across the floorboards before he flicked on the desk lamp instead—warm, dim, forgiving.

  Mizuki had followed him in without a word, still wrapped in the indigo yukata, bare feet silent against the wood. She paused just inside the threshold, one hand resting lightly on the doorframe as though testing whether the space still felt the same now that everything else had changed.

  The room looked different under the low light: the rumpled bed with its tangled sheets and the faint, lingering scent of vanilla and skin; the abandoned Steam Deck on the nightstand, screen black; the half-built Gundam model staring blankly from the desk like a silent witness. Everything ordinary. Everything suddenly extraordinary because she was standing there in it—human, real, no wings or mandibles or compound eyes to hide behind.

  Haruto turned to face her. He didn’t speak right away. Just looked.

  She looked back.

  "Any preferences before we start?" Mizuki asked. Wearing nothing under the yukata, she let the question hang between them, soft but deliberate, like the first note of a melody neither had practiced yet.

  Haruto’s breath caught—just a small hitch, barely audible. He stepped closer, slow enough that the floorboards creaked under him, closing the distance until the faint cedar-and-citrus scent of the yukata mingled with the clean warmth still clinging to her skin from the shower.

  “Preferences…” he echoed, voice low, almost reverent. His eyes traced the line where the yukata crossed over her chest, the subtle rise and fall of her breathing making the cranes shift like they were preparing to take flight. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Mizuki’s lips curved—small, knowing, a little nervous. She lifted one hand and let her fingertips brush the front of his inside-out T-shirt, right over his heart. The cotton was soft, warm from his body heat. Beneath it, his pulse was quick and unsteady.

  Seeing her naked, coming hard as a skin-colored insect, had already burned itself into Haruto’s memory in permanent ink. The way her tiny ovipositor had flexed and trembled against his fingertip, the way clear droplets had scattered like warm rain across his skin, the way her whole segmented body had arched in silent, rolling waves while she perched on him like living jewelry—it was obscene, impossible, and somehow the most intimate thing anyone had ever shared with him.

  And now she was here again: full-sized, human-skinned, wrapped in his yukata like she belonged in this room, in this moment, asking him what he wanted next as though they hadn’t already crossed every imaginable line.

  Haruto exhaled shakily, caught her wrist gently, and brought her palm flat against his chest so she could feel how hard his heart was hammering.

  “I want…” He swallowed. “I want to try it on myself too," Haruto’s breath caught again, sharper this time. His fingers tightened around her wrist—not restraining, just holding on like she might slip away if he let go.

  “On yourself too?” Mizuki echoed, voice soft but steady. Her thumb brushed the rapid pulse under his jaw, feeling it jump at the words. “You mean… You want me to cast the external spell. On you.”

  He nodded—once, decisive, though the flush creeping up his neck betrayed how much the admission cost him.

  “Yeah.” Haruto exhaled, slow and deliberate. “I want to know what it felt like. For you. The… everything. The sensitivity. The way the world fractures into a thousand pieces. The way every touch hits like lightning because your nerves are rewired into something new. I want—” He swallowed hard, eyes locked on hers. “I want to feel what you felt when you were small and perched on me. When you came apart just from my fingertip. I want to be the one who… who has to trust you completely. To hold still while you rewrite me. To let you decide how sensitive, how fragile, how much I become.”

  Mizuki’s breath hitched. The yukata felt suddenly too thin, the room too warm, the desk lamp’s glow too intimate. She searched his face—really searched—and found only earnest want layered over a quiet vulnerability that made her chest ache.

  “That’s…” She trailed off, then tried again. “That’s a lot, Haruto. More than just curiosity. That’s handing over your entire body—your senses, your control—to someone else’s mana signature. One wrong fluctuation and you could end up stuck halfway, or worse. I’ve never done a full external application on a living person. Not even in supervised labs. The risk—”

  “I know the risk,” he cut in gently. “You told me. Goldfish. Mana poisoning. Chimeric malformations. All of it.” His free hand came up, cupped the side of her face, thumb tracing the curve of her cheekbone. “But I also know you. I know how careful you are when it matters. How you debugged that dragonfly spell until it was perfect—until the only thing that went wrong was me catching you and… well.” A small, crooked smile. “Everything after that.”

  Mizuki let out a shaky laugh despite herself. “You’re romanticizing my fuck-up.”

  “Maybe.” His thumb brushed her lower lip now, slow and deliberate. “But I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking to share it. The vulnerability. The intimacy. The way you looked at me when you were tiny and trembling and still chose to press closer instead of flying away. I want that. With you.”

  Silence wrapped around them again—thick, electric, full of unspoken promises.

  Mizuki leaned into his touch, eyes fluttering half-closed for a second. When she opened them again, they were dark, pupils wide in the dim light.

  “Okay,” she whispered, the word barely louder than her heartbeat.

  "An earthworm," Haruto said. Looking at her bare chest under the yukata's parted collar—where the fabric had slipped open just enough during their earlier kiss to reveal the soft inner curve of one breast, skin still flushed from the shower and the slow-building heat between them—he added, quieter, "A creature at least two feet long."

  Haruto’s voice dropped even lower on the last word, almost swallowed by the quiet of the room. He didn’t finish the sentence, but the implication hung heavy between them—thick, deliberate, filthy in the most honest way.

  Mizuki’s eyes widened fractionally. Then a slow, wicked understanding curled the corners of her mouth.

  “An earthworm,” she repeated, tasting the word. “Two feet long. Something… naughty. Filthier.”

  She let the yukata slip another deliberate inch—enough that the parted collar now framed both breasts in soft shadow, the fabric clinging just below her nipples like it was waiting for permission to fall entirely. The cranes on the indigo cotton seemed to stretch wider, as though scandalized and fascinated at once.

  Haruto’s gaze dropped to the newly bared skin, then snapped back to her face—guilty, hungry, utterly caught.

  “Yeah,” he rasped. “I want to feel… helpless. Slippery. Blind. No eyes, no limbs, just one long, sensitive tube of muscle and nerve that exists to feel. Every inch of it. Every squeeze, every slide, every little twitch. I want you to be able to wrap me around your finger—literally—and make me come apart without ever letting me see what you’re doing to me.”

  Mizuki exhaled through parted lips. The air between them felt charged, almost visible. "Uh huh. A cockworm." Mizuki’s grin sharpened, playful and predatory in equal measure, the word “cockworm” rolling off her tongue as she’d just invented it and liked the taste.

  “A skinny thing, flexible and slick,” she finished for him, voice dropping to match his rasp. “No bones to get in the way. Just pure, continuous sensation—every millimeter hypersensitive, no off-switch, no dignity. You’d feel everything. The texture of my palm. The heat of my breath. The slightest curl of my finger wrapping around you. And you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it except feel it. And writhe. And beg without a mouth.”

  Haruto made a low, involuntary sound—half groan, half laugh of pure overwhelmed surrender. His hands flexed at his sides like he didn’t know whether to reach for her or brace himself against the nearest surface.

  “God, yes,” he breathed. “Exactly that. Make me… make me your living toy. Something you can coil around your wrist, stroke slow, tease until I’m shaking and leaking and completely at your mercy. No escape. No reversal until you decide I’ve had enough.”

  Mizuki stepped forward—slow, deliberate—until the toes of her bare feet brushed the tops of his. The yukata whispered against itself with the movement, the parted collar shifting just enough that one nipple grazed the thin fabric of his T-shirt before retreating behind indigo cotton again. She didn’t fix it. She let him see the deliberate tease.

  Her hands came up to rest flat against his chest, fingers splaying wide over the rapid thud of his heart. She tipped her head back to hold his gaze—dark eyes glittering in the desk lamp glow, pupils blown wide with the same mix of power and want that had flickered through her when she’d first arched against his fingertip as a dragonfly.

  “Then let’s make it real,” she murmured. “But we do this right. No shortcuts. No half-measures. You get the full experience—the vulnerability, the loss of control, the overwhelming everything—and I get to watch you feel it. Every second.”

  Haruto’s throat worked on a hard swallow. He nodded once—sharp, eager—then leaned down to brush his lips against hers in a kiss that started soft and ended hungry. When they parted, both breathing harder, he whispered against her mouth:

  “Tell me how it works. What I need to do.”

  Mizuki’s smile was slow, almost tender beneath the wickedness.

  “First, you strip. Everything off. I want nothing between you and the spell—no fabric to muffle sensation, no waistband to remind you you’re still human-shaped. Then you lie on the bed, on your back, arms at your sides. No touching yourself. No moving unless I say. You’re going to be my canvas, Haruto. My… worm.”

  He exhaled a shaky laugh, already reaching for the hem of his inside-out T-shirt.

  “God, hearing you say that should not be this hot.”

  “It is,” she said simply, stepping back to give him space. “Because you trust me enough to let it be.”

  Haruto pulled the shirt over his head in one fluid motion, tossing it toward the desk chair without looking. The basketball shorts followed a second later—kicked off, left in a careless heap beside the bed. He stood naked in the warm lamplight, cock already half-hard again from nothing more than her voice and the promise in her eyes. No embarrassment this time. Just raw, open want.

  He climbed onto the bed, stretched out on his back exactly as instructed: arms loose at his sides, legs slightly parted, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. The sheets still carried faint traces of vanilla and earlier release; the scent wrapped around him like a reminder.

  Mizuki followed more slowly. She didn’t shed the yukata—not yet. Instead, she knelt on the mattress beside him, knees sinking into the rumpled comforter, and let her hands hover just above his skin—close enough that he could feel the radiant warmth of her palms without contact.

  “Close your eyes,” she said softly.

  He obeyed instantly.

  “Good boy.”

  The words landed like a spark on dry tinder. His cock twitched visibly against his lower stomach, a fresh bead of pre-cum welling at the tip.

  Mizuki leaned down until her lips brushed the shell of his ear.

  “I’m going to start with a locator sigil,” she whispered. “Just a tiny anchor point on your sternum. It lets me map your nervous system without hurting you. You’ll feel a warm tingle—like static crawling under your skin. If it ever turns sharp or cold, say ‘red’ and I stop. Immediately. No questions. Understand?”

  “Red,” he echoed, voice rough. “Got it.”

  Her fingertip—cool from nerves, warm from intent—touched the center of his chest. A soft glow bloomed beneath her nail: pale silver-blue, the color of moonlight on water. The sigil drew itself in delicate, looping lines—simple, elegant, nothing flashy. Haruto sucked in a breath as warmth spread outward in slow ripples: first across his pectorals, then down his arms, along his ribs, pooling low in his belly before threading into his thighs and groin.

  It wasn’t painful. It was… intimate. Like being seen from the inside out.

  “Feel that?” she murmured.

  “Everywhere,” he breathed. “Like… like you’re touching places you haven’t even reached yet.”

  “That’s the mapping.” Her voice stayed calm, professional, even as her free hand finally settled on his hip—grounding, possessive. “Now the template.”

  She shifted, straddling his thighs without putting weight down—just hovering, the yukata pooling around them like spilled ink. The parted collar framed her breasts fully now; when she leaned forward to trace new sigils along his collarbones, the soft weight of them brushed his chest in passing. He groaned low in his throat.

  “Cockworm,” she said, almost clinically. “A meaty double-sided shaft. No eyes. No limbs. No rigid structure. Just cavernous body," she whispered slowly, savoring each syllable, “two feet of thick, glistening muscle—soft enough to bend, firm enough to throb. Segmented on the inside like an earthworm’s coelom, but externally smooth, slick like a human male dick. No head, no tail that matters, just two glans on both sides. One continuous tube of hyper-sensitive flesh, ridged faintly along the inner walls where the segments meet, every ring packed with nerve clusters that fire like fireworks at the lightest pressure. Lubricated from within—your own body producing that slick, warm fluid constantly, so you’re always ready, always sliding, always feeling. No bones. No skeleton to anchor you. Just pure, boneless length that can coil, stretch, curl tight around anything I give you. And every centimeter—every single millimeter—will be as sensitive as the head of your cock right now. More. Amplified. No desensitization. No refractory period unless I allow it.”

  Haruto’s breathing had turned ragged. His cock—still fully human for the moment—stood rigid against his stomach, flushed dark and leaking steadily now, each bead of pre-cum rolling down the shaft in slow, glistening trails. His hips twitched once, involuntarily, seeking friction that wasn’t there yet.

  Mizuki’s hand slid from his hip to rest lightly over the base of his erection—not stroking, just cupping, letting him feel the heat of her palm through the thin barrier of anticipation.

  “You’ll lose your eyes first,” she continued, tracing a new sigil just below his navel with one fingertip. The silver-blue glow pulsed once, then sank beneath the skin. “Vision fades to black. No compound mosaic, no sudden blindness panic—just… darkness. Comfortable darkness. Then the limbs go. Arms soften, dissolve into smooth muscle. Legs merge at the hips, lengthening, rounding out into one seamless extension. Your torso collapses inward, ribs vanishing, spine liquefying into flexible cartilage rings. Everything funnels downward, forward—into that long, thick body. Your cock becomes the template core: duplicated, extended, mirrored at both ends. Two sensitive tips. Two urethras that leak constantly. One mind trapped inside a living sleeve of pleasure.”

  She leaned down until her lips hovered just above his. Close enough that every word brushed his mouth like a kiss.

  “And when it’s done,” she whispered, “you won’t be Haruto anymore. Not in shape. You’ll be my cockworm. My pretty, writhing, two-foot toy. I’ll be able to wrap you around my wrist like a bracelet. Slide you between my breasts. Coil you around my fingers and stroke you slow until you’re shaking and spurting from both ends. I’ll press you against my clit and let you feel every flutter, every pulse, every time I come because of you. And you’ll feel it all—every texture, every temperature, every squeeze—without ever being able to beg for mercy. Without ever being able to stop it. Just… feel. And come. And come again. Until I decide you’ve had enough.”

  Haruto made a broken sound—half moan, half plea. His whole body trembled under her, muscles locked tight with the effort of staying still.

  “Color?” she asked softly, checking.

  “Green,” he rasped immediately. “Very fucking green.”

  Mizuki smiled—slow, predatory, tender all at once.

  “Good.”

  She straightened slightly, still straddling his thighs, and let the yukata fall open completely. The indigo cotton slid down her shoulders and pooled at her elbows, baring her breasts, her stomach, the dark triangle between her thighs. She didn’t remove it entirely—just let it hang like a ruined frame around her body.

  Her hands moved to either side of his head now, palms flat on the mattress, caging him. She lowered herself until her nipples brushed his chest—light, teasing contact that made him arch upward instinctively.

  “The final weave,” she murmured. “This part… you’ll feel it everywhere at once. It’s going to be intense. Overwhelming. If it’s too much—”

  “Red,” he finished for her, voice wrecked. “I know. But it won’t be. I want it. I want you to do it to me.”

  Mizuki kissed him then—deep, claiming, swallowing the small, desperate sounds he made into her mouth. When she pulled back, her eyes were glowing faintly — a silver-blue reflection of the sigils now spreading across his skin in delicate, branching patterns like lightning frozen under flesh.

  She sat back on her heels, straddling him fully now, her slick heat pressing against the underside of his cock without letting him inside. Not yet.

  Both hands settled on his sternum, right over the original anchor sigil. Light flared brighter—warm, pulsing, alive.

  “Feel me,” she whispered. “Feel every inch of what I’m giving you.”

  The mana surged.

  Haruto gasped—sharp, startled—as the first wave hit.

  Warmth exploded outward from his chest: liquid sunlight under his skin, racing along every nerve pathway at once. His vision dimmed—not black immediately, but softening at the edges, colors bleeding into gray, then sepia, then nothing. Comfortable nothing. Safe nothing.

  His arms tingled next—fingers going numb, then soft, then melting. He tried to flex them; they didn’t respond. Instead, he felt them shorten, retract, fold inward, and vanish into smooth, lengthening muscle. Legs followed—thighs merging at the groin in a slow, liquid slide, calves dissolving, feet gone. The sensation wasn’t pain. It was loss—strange, erotic loss—followed by sudden gain: new length, new surface area, new nerves blooming like flowers in fast-forward.

  His torso compressed. Ribs softened. Spine liquefied into flexible rings. Everything funneled downward—down, forward, outward—until his human cock was no longer separate but the pulsing heart of something much larger.

  He felt it happen.

  Felt himself stretch—thicken—double in length, then triple, smooth skin glistening with fresh, constant lubrication that welled up from within. Two tips formed—one where his original glans had been, hypersensitive and leaking; the other mirrored at the far end, identical, throbbing in perfect sync.

  No eyes.

  No mouth.

  No voice.

  Just… body.

  Long.

  Thick.

  Slick.

  Alive.

  Every inch screams with sensation.

  Mizuki’s hands—enormous now—closed gently around his new form. One palm wrapped loosely near the middle; the other cupped one sensitive tip, thumb brushing slow circles over the slit that still leaked steadily.

  Haruto—cockworm Haruto—arched.

  No spine to arch with, but the whole length curled violently anyway, coiling tight around her wrist in helpless reflex. The movement dragged every nerve cluster against her skin—hot, soft, textured—and pleasure detonated like a bomb.

  He came instantly.

  Both ends pulsed at once—thick ropes of cum jetting from the duplicated tips, splattering across her forearm, her breasts, the sheets. No refractory drop. The orgasm kept rolling, wave after wave, because every slide of her fingers kept the nerves firing.

  Mizuki laughed—low, delighted, a little breathless.

  “Oh,” she murmured, lifting him—two feet of glistening, trembling muscle—until he dangled between her breasts. “Look at you.”

  She pressed him against her sternum—slow, deliberate—letting him feel the soft weight, the rapid beat of her heart beneath skin and bone.

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered. “And you’re mine.”

  She coiled him once around her wrist like a living bracelet—tight enough to feel every throb, loose enough to let him writhe.

  Then she brought him lower.

  Between her thighs.

  Pressed the entire slick length along her folds—slow drag from one tip to the other—letting him feel how wet she was, how swollen, how ready.

  Haruto writhed harder—coiling, uncurling, sliding against her clit in frantic little pulses.

  She moaned—soft, real—and rocked against him.

  “Feel that?” she breathed. “That’s me coming undone because of you.”

  Another orgasm ripped through him—both ends spurting again, painting her inner thighs, dripping down onto the sheets.

  Mizuki kept moving—slow, relentless—using him like the toy he’d begged to become.

  The other side of Haruto—the free, mirrored tip—kept wandering between Mizuki's thighs with blind, instinctive purpose.

  It nudged blindly against her inner thigh first, slick and fever-hot, smearing a fresh trail of his own constant lubrication across her skin. Then, higher—sliding along the crease where thigh met hip, trembling as it brushed the soft outer lips of her vulva. The contact was electric for him: every millimeter of that duplicated glans registered the heat, the velvet texture, the faint musk of her arousal like a full-body current. No eyes to guide him, no hands to steer, just pure sensation driving the boneless length forward in helpless, seeking twitches.

  The free tip—blind, insistent, slick with its own endless lubrication—pressed against the tight ring of her anus.

  Not forcefully. Not demanding. Just… there. A slow, trembling nudge, the same fever-hot pressure that had once been Haruto’s glans now reduced to pure seeking instinct. The contact sent a fresh shockwave through his entire length: the hypersensitive flesh registered every microscopic texture—the faint crinkled pucker, the subtle give of muscle beneath, the radiant body heat that felt like sinking into molten silk. For him, it was indistinguishable from pressing against her clit or sliding between her breasts; every point along his two-foot body was wired the same—raw, unfiltered, no hierarchy of erogenous zones. The whole of him was cock. The whole of him was pleasure.

  Mizuki’s breath hitched.

  She froze for half a heartbeat—thighs tensing around the thick, writhing coil draped between them—then exhaled a low, shaky sound that was half laugh, half moan.

  “Oh… you found that, did you?”

  Haruto couldn’t answer. Couldn’t beg. Could only pulse—both tips flaring at once, leaking more of that warm, viscous fluid in helpless little spurts. The tip at her anus flexed again, instinctively, curling slightly as though trying to burrow closer without force. The motion dragged the ridged inner segments along her perineum in a slow, slick glide; every ring caught and released against her skin like tiny, living beads.

  Mizuki shifted her hips—deliberate, experimental—tilting just enough that the seeking tip slipped half an inch higher, pressing firmer now. Not penetrating. Not yet. Just… resting. The blunt, swollen end throbbed against the tight muscle in perfect time with his racing heartbeat (or whatever passed for one in this form). She could feel the constant, gentle leakage—warm pulses of his fluid seeping out, coating her rim, easing the way without her needing to ask.

  Finally, both sides of him entered her at once.

  The front tip—the one that had once been his human glans—slid slowly, inexorably forward between her slick folds, parting her inner lips with a wet, velvet glide. Every hypersensitive ring along his length registered the stretch of her entrance, the rhythmic clench of her walls, the molten heat that enveloped him millimeter by millimeter. No friction burn, no resistance beyond the delicious drag of muscle yielding to slick muscle; his body produced its own endless lubrication, turning penetration into one long, continuous caress from base to tip.

  Simultaneously, the mirrored rear tip—blind, eager, already coated in the warm seepage of his arousal—pressed past the first tight ring of her anus. The stretch was sharper here, more intimate, more vulnerable. For Haruto, it registered as pure, overwhelming pressure: the slow parting of resistant muscle, the velvet grip that squeezed every segment in sequence, the deep internal heat that felt like sinking into liquid fire. No difference in sensation between front and back—both ends were identical, both were wired to scream pleasure at the lightest touch, both throbbed in perfect sync as they burrowed deeper.

  Mizuki gasped—sharp, surprised, delighted.

  Her thighs trembled around the thick coil still draped across her lap. One hand flew to her mouth; the other gripped the base of his transformed body where it looped around her wrist like a living shackle. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she rocked forward—slow, deliberate—taking more of him inside at both ends.

  Haruto writhed.

  The whole two-foot length convulsed in helpless ecstasy: curling tighter around her wrist, uncoiling in frantic pulses along her clit, thrusting shallowly into both openings with boneless, instinctive rhythm. Every movement dragged fresh nerves against her walls—ridged inner segments catching and sliding like living beads, the constant internal lubrication making each thrust slicker, deeper, more obscene. He felt everything: the flutter of her vaginal walls gripping one half of him, the tighter, hotter clasp of her ass around the other half, the way her clit throbbed against the middle coil every time she rolled her hips.

  He came again—immediately, violently.

  Both duplicated tips flared at once. Thick, hot pulses jetted deep inside her: one flooding her cunt in rhythmic spurts that painted her walls white, the other filling her ass with the same warm release until it leaked out around the intrusion in slow, creamy trails. No refractory pause. The orgasm simply rolled onward, cresting into another, then another, because every slide, every clench, every tiny shift of her body kept the nerves firing without mercy.

  Mizuki moaned—low, broken, real.

  Her head tipped back, damp hair slipping from its messy bun to cascade over her shoulders. The yukata hung uselessly from her elbows now, indigo cotton dark with sweat and streaks of his cum. She rocked harder—short, grinding rolls of her hips that dragged him in and out in tandem: front half plunging deep enough to nudge her cervix, rear half stretching her rim with every withdrawal and re-entry.

  “You feel so—” Her voice cracked. “So full of you. Both ways. God, Haruto, you’re everywhere inside me.”

  She reached down with trembling fingers and wrapped them around the middle of his length—the part still coiled loosely over her mound. She squeezed—gentle but firm—feeling the way his whole body pulsed in response, the way the ridges inside her fluttered in perfect time with that grip.

  Another orgasm tore through him. Then another. Each one shorter, sharper, more desperate—cum leaking steadily now from both ends, mixing with her own wetness, dripping down her thighs in warm rivulets that soaked the sheets beneath them.

  Mizuki’s breathing turned ragged. Her free hand slid between her legs, fingers finding her swollen clit and circling fast—rubbing herself against the slick, writhing coil still draped there. The added friction pushed her over the edge.

  She came with a soft, shattered cry—walls clenching hard around both intrusions at once, milking him in rhythmic spasms that dragged fresh spurts from his duplicated tips. Her thighs shook. Her back arched. The yukata finally slipped free entirely, pooling around her knees like spilled ink.

  When the aftershocks finally eased, she collapsed forward—careful, reverent—bracing her palms on either side of where his “head” had once been. She lifted the front half of him slowly out of her cunt; the withdrawal was slow, wet, obscene—thick strands of mixed release stretching between her folds and his glistening tip before snapping.

  She brought that end to her lips.

  Pressed a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the leaking slit.

  Tasted them both—salty, sweet, faintly musky.

  Then she guided the same tip to her nipple—dragging it in slow, lazy circles around the hardened peak, letting him feel the pebbled texture, the way it stiffened further under the slick pressure.

  Haruto shuddered—whole length trembling in long, rolling waves.

  Mizuki smiled down at him—tender now, beneath the wickedness.

  “You’re perfect,” she whispered. “My beautiful, helpless cockworm. Still coming for me?”

  Another weak pulse answered—smaller this time, but unmistakable. A final spurt of cum beaded at both tips, one dripping onto her breast, the other trailing down the inside of her thigh.

  She gathered him carefully—coiling the long, boneless body around her forearm like the most decadent bracelet—then lay back against the pillows, cradling him against her chest.

  “Rest now,” she murmured, stroking slow lines along his length with gentle fingertips. “You’ve been so good. So brave. So sensitive.”

  Haruto—still blind, still voiceless, still nothing but two feet of quivering, oversensitive flesh—curled tighter around her wrist in silent, grateful surrender.

  Mizuki pressed another kiss to one glistening tip.

  “I’ll let you stay like this a little longer,” she promised softly. “Just feel me holding you. Just feel how much I want you.”

  She closed her eyes.

  The desk lamp glowed warm and low.

  The room smelled of sex, vanilla ghosts, and cedar.

  And somewhere inside the long, slick, trembling length draped across her body, Haruto floated in perfect, overwhelming darkness—safe, loved, and utterly undone.

  In the morning, with the first rays of sunlight slipping through the half-closed blinds in thin, pale gold stripes, Haruto woke slowly. Coiled between Mizuki's bare breasts, he felt the gentle rise and fall of her breathing like the slow swell of an endless warm sea. No eyelids to open, no limbs to stretch—only the soft, boneless length of him registering the world in gradients of pressure, heat, texture, and scent.

  Her heartbeat thumped steadily beneath him—deep, reassuring drumbeats that vibrated through every ringed segment of his transformed body. The skin of her sternum was satin-smooth and still faintly damp from night sweat; each inhale lifted him slightly, each exhale settled him back down in perfect rhythm. The valley between her breasts cradled him like a living hammock—soft curves pressing in on either side, nipples soft now in sleep but still sensitive enough that the lightest shift of his slick length against them sent tiny aftershocks rippling along his nerves.

  He was still two feet of glistening, hypersensitive muscle. Still blind. Still voiceless. Still leaking—slow, constant, warm pulses of fluid seeping from both duplicated tips in helpless little beads that rolled down her skin and soaked into the sheets beneath her shoulder blades.

  And he was still coming.

  Not the sharp, explosive peaks of last night, but a low, rolling, continuous simmer. Every small movement she made in sleep—every sigh, every unconscious shift of her hips—dragged fresh nerve clusters along her skin. The faint friction of her breathing alone was enough: the subtle expansion of her ribcage, the microscopic slide of skin against skin, the warmth of her body heat seeping into his lubricated surface. It built in slow, liquid waves that never quite crested and never quite faded—just kept him trembling, pulsing, leaking in quiet, endless surrender.

  One tip—the front one—rested against the underside of her left breast, pressed gently into the soft swell. Each heartbeat pushed it fractionally deeper into yielding flesh; each exhale let it slide back a hair’s breadth. The motion was glacial, torturous, exquisite. Pre-cum (or whatever endless equivalent his new body produced) welled up and trickled in warm rivulets down the curve of her breast, pooling in the dip of her collarbone before spilling sideways toward her neck.

  The mirrored rear tip had wandered during the night. It now lay curled loosely against the small of her back, nestled in the shallow dip above her tailbone. Every time she shifted in her sleep, it dragged along the fine downy hairs there, registering them like electric filaments brushing glass. The contact was feather-light, almost nothing—and therefore devastating. Another weak spurt escaped, painting a thin, glistening line across the small of her back before gravity pulled it sideways to drip onto the sheet.

  Haruto had no way to moan. No way to beg. Only the involuntary coiling and uncoiling of his entire length—tightening around the soft weight of her breasts like a living ribbon, then loosening again in helpless little twitches. Each contraction squeezed more fluid from both ends; each release let fresh nerves taste the air, the sweat, the lingering traces of last night’s mingled release.

  Mizuki stirred.

  A soft hum escaped her throat—half-asleep, contented. One arm lifted lazily, hand coming to rest over the coiled length of him between her breasts. Her palm settled warm and possessive across his middle, fingers splaying wide. She didn’t stroke. Didn’t squeeze. Just… held.

  The simple contact—broad, steady heat—was enough.

  Haruto convulsed once—hard, full-body—both tips flaring as another slow, rolling orgasm washed through him. Thick pulses jetted from each end: one splattering softly against the underside of her breast and trickling downward in warm streaks, the other spurting against the small of her back and sliding between her shoulder blades. No dramatic arcs this time—just quiet, copious release that painted her skin in slow, glistening ribbons.

  Mizuki’s eyes fluttered open.

  She blinked once, twice—drowsy confusion giving way to slow, sleepy delight as she registered the warm, trembling thing still draped across her chest.

  “Morning, pretty worm,” she murmured, voice thick with sleep and fondness.

  Her fingers curled gently around his middle—loose bracelet grip—and lifted him just enough to bring one leaking tip to her lips. She kissed it softly—open-mouthed, languid—tasting salt and sweetness and the faint echo of herself still clinging to him.

  Haruto shuddered again—shorter this time, but no less intense.

  Mizuki smiled against his slick flesh.

  “You’ve been busy all night, haven’t you?” she whispered, thumb brushing slow circles over the sensitive slit. Another bead welled up instantly; she caught it on her tongue. “Making such a mess of me while I slept. Good boy.”

  She lowered him carefully—still coiled loosely around her wrist like decadent jewelry—and let the full length drape across her stomach. Both tips twitched toward her navel, seeking blindly, instinctively.

  Mizuki laughed—soft, breathless—and rolled onto her side, propping herself on one elbow so she could look down at the glistening, quivering length that used to be Haruto.

  “Want to stay like this a little longer?” she asked, even though he couldn’t answer. “Or should I start the reversal weave? Let you be human again… let you tell me exactly how many times you came just from me breathing on you.”

  One tip curled toward her wrist—pressing against the pulse point there in silent, frantic little nudges.

  She interpreted it correctly.

  “Longer, then,” she decided, voice warm with amusement and something deeper, softer. “I like you like this. Helpless. Needy. Mine.”

  She drew him up again—slowly this time—and draped the full two feet of him across her chest like a living stole. One tip rested against her collarbone; the other trailed down between her breasts toward her stomach. She pressed both palms over him—holding him close, letting him feel the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, the warmth of her skin, the faint vibration of her contented hum.

  Sunlight crept higher across the bed in golden bars.

  Mizuki closed her eyes again, not quite ready to wake fully.

  Haruto—blind, boneless, endlessly sensitive—settled into the cradle of her body and let the slow, rolling pleasure carry him under once more.

  Safe.

  Seen.

  Utterly, perfectly hers.

  Mizuki prepared the late breakfast for herself with slow, unhurried movements, the yukata loosely tied around her waist now—sleeves pushed up to her elbows, the front parted just enough to let the morning air kiss her skin. Sunlight streamed stronger through the kitchen window, painting the small space in warm gold. She’d left the blinds half-open, letting the pale stripes fall across the counter and the tiny folding table.

  Luckily, Haruto's parents weren't home.

  They were away for the weekend—a family trip to visit relatives in the countryside. The apartment belonged to them alone until Sunday evening: no risk of footsteps in the hallway, no sudden key in the lock, no awkward explanations about why a strange girl, a student of the magical college, in an indigo yukata over her naked body, was humming softly while cracking eggs into a pan in their kitchen.

  The eggs sizzled gently as she tilted the pan, coaxing the edges to curl just so. She added a pinch of salt from the small ceramic jar on the counter, then reached for the soy sauce bottle—Haruto’s brand, the label slightly peeling at one corner—and drizzled a thin dark ribbon over the surface. The aroma rose in lazy curls: buttery egg, sharp soy, faint char from the edges beginning to crisp. Simple. Comforting. Human in a way that still felt novel after the night they’d spent.

  She glanced toward the bedroom door—still ajar, the way she’d left it.

  On the rumpled sheets, coiled in a loose, glistening spiral between the pillows, Haruto remained exactly as she’d arranged him before slipping out of bed. Two feet of thick, smooth muscle lay quiet now, no longer writhing in frantic little pulses. The constant, slow leakage from both duplicated tips had slowed to a faint, steady ooze—clearish fluid pooling beneath one end in a small, pearlescent spot on the pillowcase, the other tip resting against the cotton in a soft, boneless curl. In sleep (or whatever passed for it in this form), the hypersensitive ridges along his length had relaxed; every few seconds, a faint, involuntary twitch would ripple through him, like a dream chasing its own tail, but the violent convulsions of the night had finally ebbed into something gentler, more sustained.

  Mizuki smiled to herself as she slid the eggs onto a plain white plate, added two slices of slightly stale toast she’d toasted anyway, and poured the last of the coffee into a chipped mug. She carried the tray back to the bedroom—bare feet padding softly across the floorboards—set it on the nightstand, and knelt beside the bed.

  She reached out, fingertips brushing the middle of his length in the lightest possible stroke.

  Haruto responded instantly.

  The whole boneless body quivered—slow, rolling wave from one tip to the other—then curled toward her hand in a single, languid arc. One end lifted, seeking blindly, and pressed itself against the inside of her wrist where the yukata sleeve had ridden up. The contact was warm, slick, trembling. A fresh bead welled at the slit and rolled down her forearm in a slow, warm trail before she caught it with her thumb.

  “Good morning again,” she murmured, voice soft enough that it barely disturbed the sunlight. “Still sensitive, hm?”

  Another ripple answered—smaller, but unmistakable. The free tip wandered higher, nudging against the parted front of her yukata until it found bare skin: the soft swell just below her breast. It pressed there, gentle but insistent, smearing a thin line of his own fluid across her sternum like a lazy signature.

  Mizuki laughed under her breath—quiet, fond—and gathered him carefully with both hands. She lifted the full two-foot length from the sheets and draped him across her lap as she sat on the edge of the bed, legs crossed beneath the yukata. The indigo cotton parted further at her thighs; his middle settled into the warm cradle there, one tip resting against her inner thigh, the other trailing down toward her knee.

  She picked up the plate with one hand, balanced it on her knee, and began to eat—slow bites of egg and toast, sipping coffee between them—while her free hand stroked him in long, unhurried lines from one end to the other.

  Each pass made him shudder.

  Each shudder made more of that warm fluid leak from both tips—dripping onto her thigh, soaking into the yukata fabric, leaving dark wet spots that spread slowly across the indigo.

  She didn’t hurry.

  She fed him sensation the way she fed herself breakfast: deliberately, savoring every small reaction. The way one tip curled tighter against her thigh when her thumb brushed the sensitive ridge just below it. The way the whole length flexed and relaxed in time with her chewing, as though trying to match her rhythm. The way another slow, rolling orgasm built beneath her palm—quiet this time, almost meditative—until both ends pulsed weakly, spurting thin ropes across her skin in soft, warm pulses that she let drip without wiping away.

  When the plate was empty and the coffee gone, Mizuki set everything aside on the nightstand.

  She leaned down until her lips hovered just above one glistening tip.

  “You’ve been so patient,” she whispered. “Letting me eat. Letting me wake up slowly. Letting me keep you like this.”

  She kissed the tip—soft, lingering—then opened her mouth and took it inside, just the first few centimeters. Warm, slick, salty-sweet. She sucked gently once, twice—tongue tracing the slit, feeling the way the whole length jerked in her lap like a caught fish.

  Haruto came again—silent, helpless, flooding her mouth with warm pulses that she swallowed without hesitation.

  When she lifted her head, a thin strand of cum stretched between her lower lip and his tip before snapping. She licked it away slowly, eyes half-lidded.

  “Time to decide,” she said softly. “Do I keep you like this all day? Let you spend the weekend wrapped around me, coming every time I move, every time I breathe? Or do I bring you back… let you be Haruto again… let you kiss me properly, touch me properly, tell me exactly how many times you lost count last night?”

  Ping-ping.

  Haruto gestured with his 'upper' end toward the bathroom. The 'upper' end—still blind, still seeking—lifted slowly from her lap. It curled once, twice, then extended in a deliberate, trembling arc toward the half-open bathroom door across the hall. The motion was unmistakable: not frantic, not pleading, but clear. A single, slow point toward the tiled threshold, then back again, pressing gently against her wrist like a nod.

  Mizuki followed the gesture with her eyes.

  Mizuki's smile softened into something warmer, almost tender, as she interpreted the deliberate curl of his upper tip—the slow, unmistakable point toward the bathroom, the gentle press back against her wrist like an affirmative nudge.

  "First wash yourself, then return?" she echoed quietly, thumb brushing along the sensitive ridge just below the tip in slow acknowledgment. "Smart boy. You want to be clean when I bring you back. No sticky sheets, no dried trails—just fresh, slick, ready Haruto."

  The whole length quivered once in what felt unmistakably like agreement. A small, fresh bead welled at both duplicated ends—clear, warm, anticipatory—before rolling down in slow, glistening paths along her thigh and wrist.

  She gathered him carefully with both hands, cradling the two-foot coil against her chest like something precious and fragile. The yukata shifted open further as she stood; the indigo fabric slipped off one shoulder entirely now, baring the curve of her breast to the morning light. She didn't bother fixing it. Let the sunlight kiss her skin the way his boneless body had all night.

  Mizuki carried him into the bathroom with the same careful reverence she'd used to drape him across her lap for breakfast. The tiles were cool under her bare feet; the air still held traces of last night's steam—faint soap, faint sex, the clean mineral scent of water long gone cold in the pipes. She nudged the door shut behind them with her heel, the soft click sealing the small space into privacy.

  Sunlight slanted through the frosted window in pale, diffused bars, catching motes of steam that still lingered from her earlier shower. The mirror was half-fogged; she didn't wipe it. No need to see reflections when she could feel everything instead.

  She knelt beside the tub—old-fashioned, deep, white enamel chipped at one corner—and laid Haruto carefully along the rim. His length draped in a loose, glistening S-curve: one tip hanging just over the inner edge, the other resting against the cool porcelain. Even that small temperature contrast made him twitch—a faint ripple traveling end to end, another bead of fluid welling up and dripping slowly down the smooth inner wall of the tub.

  "Easy," she murmured. "We're just getting you clean. No teasing… yet."

  She turned the faucet. Warm water rushed out in a soft roar, steam rising in lazy curls. Mizuki tested the temperature with her wrist—perfect, just shy of too hot—then stoppered the drain. While the tub filled, she reached for the bottle of his body wash (the same citrus-woodsy one she'd used last night) and squeezed a generous dollop into her palm.

  The scent bloomed instantly—bright, grounding, familiar.

  She scooped him up again—one hand under the middle, the other supporting the heavier, dangling end—and lowered him slowly into the rising water.

  The moment his slick length touched the surface, Haruto convulsed—whole body curling tight, then unfurling in a long, shuddering wave. Warm water enveloped him like a second skin; every hypersensitive ring registered the gentle current, the buoyant lift, the way tiny bubbles clung and popped against him. No eyes to see the steam, no limbs to flail—just pure, overwhelming immersion. Both tips flared at once; thin pulses of cum jetted into the water, clouding it faintly milky before dispersing.

  Mizuki laughed—soft, delighted—and cradled him against her forearm, letting the water lap around them both.

  "Shhh. It's just a bath."

  She began to wash him.

  Slow strokes of soapy hands along his entire length—fingertips tracing every ridge, every subtle segment, every place where nerves clustered thickest. She worked from one tip to the other, methodical, tender: cupping the duplicated glans in her palm and rolling it gently, letting suds slide down the smooth shaft, then following with long glides that made his whole body flex and quiver. Warm water sluiced away the dried trails from the night, the sticky remnants of breakfast, the endless leakage of the morning—leaving him gleaming, fresh, impossibly sensitive.

  Every pass drew another small, rolling orgasm from him. No violence now—just quiet, liquid releases that clouded the water further, milky swirls drifting around her wrist like spilled cream. He coiled loosely around her forearm between strokes—living bracelet again—then loosened to let her continue, trusting, helpless, utterly given over.

  When the water reached her elbows, Mizuki turned off the tap.

  She lifted him dripping from the tub—water streaming in thin rivers along his length—and laid him across a thick towel she'd spread on the closed toilet lid. The terrycloth was rougher than her skin; the texture dragged delicious friction across every nerve. Another weak pulse—both ends spurting softly onto the towel, darkening the fibers.

  Mizuki knelt in front of him, yukata fully open now, hanging from her elbows like forgotten wings. She leaned down until her breasts brushed the towel on either side of his coiled form.

  "Almost done," she whispered.

  She patted him dry—gentle dabs at first, then slow, deliberate strokes with the towel's soft pile. The friction was torture and heaven at once; his length arched, curled, trembled under each pass. When he was mostly dry—still glistening with his own constant lubrication—she set the towel aside.

  Mizuki gathered him once more, this time draping the full length across her bare shoulders like a living stole. One tip rested against the nape of her neck; the other trailed down her spine toward the small of her back. She stood slowly—steadying herself against the sink—and let him feel the warmth of her skin, the faint salt of her sweat, the steady rhythm of her pulse everywhere he touched.

  She carried him back to the bedroom that way—naked beneath the open yukata, sunlight painting gold stripes across her breasts, her stomach, the glistening coil around her shoulders.

  At the bedside, she paused.

  Lowered him carefully onto the clean section of the sheet she'd straightened while making breakfast.

  Then she knelt beside the bed again—close enough that her breath stirred the air above him.

  "Ready to come back?" she asked softly.

  One tip lifted—slow, deliberate—curled once in a clear yes, then pressed gently against the inside of her wrist.

  Mizuki smiled—warm, a little wicked, mostly tender.

  She placed both palms flat on either side of his middle. Silver-blue light flickered to life beneath her fingers—fainter now, softer, the reversal weave already familiar.

  "Deep breath," she murmured, even though he had no lungs left to fill.

  The mana flowed—gentle this time, unhurried.

  Haruto felt the world return in reverse order.

  Length shortening first—bones blooming like crystal under muscle, vertebrae clicking back into place. Legs separating, feet forming, toes flexing instinctively. Arms lengthening, fingers tingling as sensation rushed back. Torso expanding, ribs solidifying, lungs inflating with a sharp, grateful inhale. Vision returning last—darkness peeling away to soft morning light, colors blooming, Mizuki's face swimming into focus above him.

  He gasped—real, human, ragged.

  His cock—human again, flushed and still leaking—twitched against his stomach, oversensitive from hours of amplification. Every brush of air felt like a tongue.

  Mizuki leaned down, hair falling around them like a dark curtain, and kissed him—slow, deep, tasting of coffee and salt and the faint echo of him.

  When she pulled back, her eyes were bright.

  "Welcome back, Haruto."

  He reached up—shaky, human hands—and cupped her face.

  His voice came out wrecked, hoarse from disuse.

  "…That was…"

  He swallowed. Tried again.

  "…I lost count at seventeen. Maybe eighteen. Everything after that was just… one long wave."

  Mizuki laughed—soft, delighted—and climbed onto the bed beside him, yukata falling open completely now.

  "Good," she whispered, pressing close until her bare skin met his. "Because I want to do it again sometime. But next time…"

  She kissed the corner of his mouth.

  "…you get to choose the form."

  Haruto pulled her fully against him—arms wrapping tight, heart hammering against hers.

  "Deal."

  Sunlight continued to pour through the blinds in warm gold bars.

  The apartment stayed quiet.

  And for the rest of the weekend, they had nowhere else to be.