What Adults Should Do

"Ruben! I heard all about it. You actually snuck food to that brat last night. What are you trying to do?!"

Early the next morning, while Ruben was still sleeping on the sofa, Mayuna roughly dragged him up. The mage girl's face was right in front of his, and that branch was perched on her shoulder. Wasn't it obvious who had tattled?

"Nothing."

Since he had already been woken up, Ruben had no intention of going back to sleep. He headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, answering Mayuna along the way.

"You... why don't you ever listen? Those dragon things..."

Mayuna stamped her feet in frustration. She absolutely did not want Ruben getting involved with those troublesome creatures. Ruben was a fragile human, after all, not even a mage. A dragon's sneeze alone could leave him half-paralyzed.

"Mayuna, we're adults."

Ruben, who had been listening to her nagging, suddenly placed a hand on Mayuna's shoulder and spoke with great seriousness.

"Y-Yeah, so what?"

Ruben's sudden seriousness made Mayuna hesitate. She had no idea what he meant. Was he telling her to stop meddling in his affairs? Or did it have some special meaning?

"Because our growth cycles are different, a dragon's lifespan of tens of thousands of years may seem unimaginable to humans. Even the youngest dragon could probably be the ancestor of both you and me. But didn't you just say it yourself? To you, Mers is only a brat."

"Isn't a brat just another word for someone who doesn't know any better? If we reject and hate him simply because he doesn't know better, then what makes us different from brats? Blindly ignoring him will only make him worse in the future. You wouldn't want to hear, decades from now, that some dragon massacred humanity over a broken heart, would you?"

"What you said makes sense, but we aren't that brat's parents. What does it have to do with me?!"

Mayuna admitted that Ruben was good with words, but she still raised her objection. Adults did not go around disciplining other people's children. Wasn't that just looking for trouble? If she was unhappy, the parents of a brat would not be happy either.

"The long lives of dragons determine from the very beginning that they can't care for their children the way humans do. They mostly just let them run wild. Their parents might sleep for decades at a time. It can't be helped if those children don't know better, can it?"

"What drives you to meddle this much?"

"Maybe it's just my first impression. Didn't he cry when you coldly rejected him yesterday? He's just an innocent child."

"Enough. I'm done caring. Do whatever makes you happy."

Mayuna returned to her room and sulked. That guy was really boring. But then again, wasn't it precisely because he was the sort of person who meddled that he had saved her? Thinking of it that way made her feel a little better.

Seeing Mayuna go off to sulk, Ruben prepared to get on with his work as well. The moment he stepped out of the cabin, he felt the sun's embrace. The heavy rain from the night before had stopped, and clear droplets fell from the tips of leaves, making soft splashing sounds as they struck the ground.

The lunchbox that had been placed before the black dragon yesterday was now empty. Not turning his hostility toward humans onto food was also typical of a child's mindset. Compared to adults who flipped tables or went on hunger strikes at the drop of a hat, he was much better, wasn't he?

"There you are."

Ruben soon found the missing black dragon. In the form of a little boy, he sat atop the cabin roof, seemingly lost in thought. Ruben went straight inside, then returned shortly afterward carrying some clothes. He skillfully climbed onto his own roof and handed them to Mers.

"What are these for?"

"Put them on. We may be in the mountains, but Mayuna is still a girl. If you keep standing naked in front of her, it'll be a miracle if she doesn't beat you up."

"Did you consider that my clothes will disappear if I return to my true form?"

"I did, but there isn't a better solution. With the materials I have now, I can't make clothes that stretch a hundredfold."

"You're a strange one. Did you mean what you said down there?"

Mers, who was supposed to be Ruben's mortal enemy, obediently put on the clothes Ruben had given him. Only after struggling to pull his head through the collar did the black dragon boy mutter the question.

"Yeah. To me, it's a small effort. To you, it might change your whole life."

Dragons had excellent hearing; Ruben had known that from the start. Naturally, every word he had exchanged with Mayuna through the wall had reached the black dragon's ears. An adult dragon might have wondered whether this human had deliberately said those things to lower his guard, but the young dragon was somewhat moved.

"But I'm a dragon. I'm dangerous, and everything on me is valuable. Whenever humans see me, they either scream and run away or try to hunt me down..."

Though still young, Mers understood himself very clearly. Every time he appeared in the human world in his true form, he received countless unfair treatments. Even so, he still longed for the bustling human world. Even being hunted was better than staying in an empty dragon nest.

"Then how did you become infatuated with Mayuna?"

"She... she's different. Even though she's human, she defeated me easily. She could have killed me and taken the treasures on my body, but she didn't. She was the first human to truly see me for who I was!"

"So, it's because her view of you was different from everyone else's?"

"Yeah, but she hates me... Why is that? For the first time, I found someone who could defeat me, and someone I truly liked. Those two joys should have overlapped and... Ow! That hurts! What are you doing?"

The black dragon boy lowered his head dejectedly, muttering sorrowful words. Before he could finish, however, a huge hammer struck him in the forehead. The brat who had not made a sound even when Mayuna sent him flying now clutched the spot where he had been hit and cried out.

"You little brat, keep talking and don't blame Lord Dragon for getting rough. See this hammer bigger than a sandbag? Killing a romance-obsessed fool is as easy as swatting a fly."

For some reason, Dragon was unusually furious. He had transformed into an enormous hammer, muttering meaningless phrases like, "Eastern Third Sprite."

"What's wrong with him?"

"Who knows? Maybe he read too many comics and lost his mind."

"Back to the point. If you don't truly like her and only see her as someone who acknowledges you, then there's no need to chase after her and demand marriage. Mayuna isn't suited to being a wife. She clearly needs someone to take care of her, yet she's surprisingly headstrong, so she's very troublesome to look after."

"You say that, but don't you take care of her every day?"

"I can't help it. I owe her a lot, but..."

"Oh? Is that so? So I'm troublesome, am I?"

Mayuna's voice rose like a wind from the underworld. She had only come to see whether Mers had killed Ruben, but she had unexpectedly heard such an evaluation. Her anger made her laugh instead, and the gentleness on her face was nearly overflowing.

"Ghk..."

The black dragon's body suddenly went rigid. Never before had he felt death so close. His traitorous heart began pounding even faster. Just being caught in the crossfire was already this terrifying. He could hardly imagine how horribly Ruben, the one who had said those words, would die. Yet this scientist without magic merely waited calmly for death to descend.

"How much did you hear?"

"From 'Mayuna isn't suited to being a wife.'"

---The girl was casting a spell---

"By the way, why am I hanging up here too? What did I do?!"

A quarter of an hour later, both Ruben and Mers had been tightly bound by plant magic and hung from the branch of a large tree. Mers wriggled in the air like a caterpillar, but the reinforced vines showed no sign of loosening.

"Sorry. I got you dragged into this."

Ruben looked even worse off than Mers. Mers was merely hanging normally, while Ruben was suspended upside down. If the blood rushing to his brain killed him, he would probably become one of the transmigrators with the most ridiculous cause of death.

"Forget it. My wife scolds me all the time anyway. Just make me that tasty stuff as compensation."

"Okay."

"You hadn't finished what you were saying before, had you? But what?"

"But once you get used to trouble, it stops feeling so troublesome. It gradually becomes a habit."

"You despicable human! Even if you say something like that, I won't give my wife to you!"

PS: Please bookmark and recommend.

PS: Dragon had already turned into a hopeless fat shut-in, so the following sort of thing might happen.

One day, people from the Time-Space Administration came to investigate an illegally smuggled transmigrator.

Mayuna: Reading, reading.

Ruben: Baking cakes, baking cakes.

Dragon: Where are the July anime releases from the year 2XXX? And the third season of Idiot World?! Where did you put them?! If true love has a color, it must be blue! Where did my Rem figure go? What are you looking at? Never seen a handsome guy before? Why are you arresting me? The transmigrator is over there, hey!