These were definitely bite wounds!
“U-Um, Shinichi-sama!”
“Ahhhhhh!” There was a new, prickly pain, very different from when I had been bitten, that spread across my hand. None of the individual bite wounds were very large or deep, and it wasn’t critical to stop the bleeding or anything, but...
“Shinichi-sama...”
“What? What is that thing? What’s a dangerous monster like that doing around here?!”
“This thing... No, this child—it’s a lizardman infant.”
“Say what?” I blinked, almost forgetting my discomfort as I looked at the thing Myusel was holding.
The surface was still a dapple of burnt brown and dark green. But it wasn’t a sphere anymore. It had arms and legs—even though they were very short—and even a tail. They must have been folded in earlier. It looked almost like... a stuffed dinosaur or lizard. Except for the scales.
“A lizardman...?”
“Gyoo!”
The tiny reptile (or anyway, reptile-like person) flailed its little arms as if trying to get away from Myusel. Actually, “tiny” was purely relative: it was obviously bigger than your average lizard.
“But that means...” I leaned in for a good look at the child. I guess I was looking for family resemblance to Brooke or Cerise.
“Gyoo!”
“Naaaaghhhh!”
I had leaned too close and ended up with a bitten nose.
It sat in the sun shining through the window of the small building: a soccer ball split clean in half, like you could practically see a ba-dum! sound effect above it.
Except it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was a lizardman egg.
“So... that’s a lizardman’s egg?” I asked, studying it closely.
There was a rush mat on the floor, on which rested five other eggs that hadn’t yet hatched.
“It does look just like a soccer ball.” I guess if you measured really closely, it probably wasn’t regulation size, and it didn’t have the official black-and-white pattern. It had what was probably camouflage instead, to conceal it from predators. But it definitely gave off a soccer ball vibe.
“But it’s not,” Minori-san said from just behind me. “So Elvia, hands off.”
I shared her concern—it seemed like it would be all too easy for Elvia to forget herself and jump on the egg—but the beast girl replied with surprising composure, “I’m not gonna touch it.”
“Really?” Minori-san asked. “Even though it’s almost exactly the same size and shape as a soccer ball?”
“Yeah, but it smells,” Elvia said, her nose twitching.
“Smells...?”
“Yeah. That odor says bad news if you grab it.”
“Huh...” Minori-san said, cocking her head. I was surprised, too, but on second thought, I guess it was only natural—literally.
Werewolves in general, not just Elvia, got very excited when they saw something round. If they went and mindlessly attacked any lizardman eggs they saw, werewolves and lizardmen would have been mortal enemies before you knew it—in fact, it would practically have been a predator/prey relationship. We’re not talking about the sort of general annoyance that elves and dwarves felt for each other—this would be a struggle for survival. A bloodbath the minute they saw each other.
But Elvia claimed the smell of the egg told her to stay away. If that was true of all lizardman eggs and all werewolves, then whatever that odor was, it was preventing war between the two peoples.
All very interesting. Maybe I was overthinking it, or maybe this was specifically the egg’s way of telling any werewolves, I’m not your beloved moon, stay away from me!
I suddenly found myself wondering who would win in a fight: a lizardman or a werewolf. I guess it was sort of like asking which was better, judo or karate—not a very meaningful question. Who won would depend so much on circumstances and individual qualities, not to mention a bit of luck, that you could hardly say one would always prevail.
“I’ve never seen a lizardman egg before,” Myusel said, gazing at them with interest. “Or infant, either.” She turned back to look at Cerise, standing beside Minori-san and cradling the newborn gently. The same one that had been chewing on my nose shortly before.
After the nose-biting incident, Myusel and I had hurriedly sought out Brooke and Cerise. We had no specific proof that this was their child, but it seemed like the obvious conclusion—and anyway, we sure had no idea what to do with it.
Cerise, we found right away. She seemed awfully surprised when she saw Myusel holding the baby. Lizardman faces don’t show emotion quite the way humans are used to, but by now even I knew that little details like the speed with which their tongues flicked in and out could indicate when they were startled. The biggest evidence, though, was the way she breathed, “But why...?”
But why what, we didn’t know, but we explained the situation to her and she brought us to the little annex where she and Brooke lived. That was where we saw the six eggs, one of them split open.
“Why just one?” Cerise murmured. She seemed very perplexed.
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Well...” After a moment’s hesitation, Cerise explained to us. “As you know—as you can see—we lizardmen reproduce by laying eggs. How long it takes to hatch varies by season, but early hatchings are extremely unusual. I expected to wait at least another ten days...”
Lizardmen, apparently, laid eggs in pairs. So this meant Cerise had laid three pairs of eggs in a row. And somehow, not one of us had noticed.
Obviously, lizardman babies don’t grow in a womb, so they aren’t like humans where a mother’s belly gets bigger and bigger as the child grows, so much so that it starts to impact her daily life. Cerise could keep working just like normal. Maybe the reason she’d been absent the last few days was because she had been tired from laying eggs. It was why Brooke had told her to take off.
Come to think of it, Brooke had asked me at one point if it would be all right if he and
