The Princess's lips parted in an expression of slight surprise.

Then she closed her mouth, looked directly at Adon, and slowly, thoughtfully nodded. He could see the beginnings of a smile playing at the edges of her lips.

"Yes, I remember we had discussed something prior to your hunting trip," Rosslyn said. She turned to William and Frederick. "I am confident that our conversation will not take long. Perhaps you could take the spiders with you and wait for me in the training room."

William pursed his lips and looked as if he wanted to say something—Adon felt a haze of annoyance around him, but the thoughts that inspired it were either held in check somewhere substantially below the surface, or they were unarticulated. The butterfly did not choose to pry deeper to understand William's feelings right then. He only had eyes for the Princess in this moment.

She does want to see me, Adon thought nervously.

His physical mass having increased, and his vigor now noticeably overflowing, Adon had already been interested in checking whether he was capable of completing a Transformation into a humanoid form. He had planned to attempt it on his own, but in the social situation he had found himself in—Samson suddenly asking Rosslyn, William, and Frederick if they would want company in the dungeon—Adon felt put on the spot. This was what he came up with.

The situation came with a natural edge of performance anxiety.

Will it work? Will I look all right?

Frederick placed a hand on his brother's shoulder.

"Ah, we will go ahead and let your man-at-arms know to expect you for the duel," William said.

Good, Frederick thought. Keep your cool, brother. The girl will be yours eventually.

Adon wanted to rebuke the brothers, but he quietly reminded himself that he had no reason to. There were some strange ideas formulating in the back of his mind, but he was a butterfly, not a human. He had to keep that fact at the forefront. The affairs of humans touched on his interests, but he would never be one of them again. Not in this lifetime.

But I will be able to assume a humanoid form, he reminded himself excitedly. Probably.

He waited for a couple of minutes as Goldie gathered her hatchlings around her, all the spiders mounted a pair of pillows, and the young lords acted the part of servants, carrying the mystic beasts and their kin out of the room to give Adon and Rosslyn some privacy.

There was something slightly funny about that—even Frederick seemed to notice it, as there appeared to be a cloud of a slightly amused emotion surrounding him now—but Adon could hardly pay attention to whatever humor there was in the situation.

Now is my moment to shine, he thought as the noble brothers stepped through the door.

Good luck, Adon, Goldie sent quietly just as she passed out of view. Alone among the people leaving the room, Adon thought that she probably truly understood what was going on.

Thanks, he sent.

Then the door swung shut behind the spiders and their human bearers. Rosslyn and Adon found themselves alone.

It was far from the first time that they had been alone, but this time felt different. There was a weight in the air. A sense of expectation.

Adon could see Rosslyn's hands shake slightly as she stood there looking at him. That was more nervousness than he had ever seen the Princess display aside from during the hunt for her father's poisoners. The butterfly just stared back at her silently for a moment.

Each of them seemed to be waiting for the other to speak.

"So," she began, her voice soft.

So, Adon sent back, feeling a little lame but also incredibly giddy. He was excited to show what he could do with his new Transformation. More importantly, he was excited to show her what he could do. Rosslyn was honestly the inspiration for most of his efforts so far. She was the main reason that Adon cared about protecting the Kingdom, too. It was strange how much influence the young woman had exerted over him with what seemed like relatively little effort.

Now, Adon was fairly certain that with the additional Biomass and sheer power that had accrued to him after fighting and consuming the Mystic Iron Bear, he should be able to transform, not just into the small elf-like form he had managed before, but into a full-sized humanoid.

"You had something you wanted to show me…" Rosslyn's tone was almost seductive. She allowed her voice to trail off at the end, but Adon was perversely reminded of playing doctor with one of the neighborhood girls when he was a child in his last life.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours, he thought—then immediately upbraided himself for the coarse idea. Of course it's not actually like that. Rosslyn's just interested in your personal growth, you creep!

I did have something I wanted to try in front of you, Adon sent back quickly, not allowing himself to dwell in a negative mental space right now. Could you, um, turn around for a minute? I'm kind of shy.

"Oh, right!" Rosslyn's face colored slightly. "Plus, you would be…" She quickly turned her back. "Let me know when I can turn around!"

You got it! Adon sent. Some of the giddiness had returned, and his whole body fairly throbbed with energy at the prospect of the Transformation he was about to attempt—and the thought of learning what Rosslyn's reaction would be.

There was only a tiny seed of doubt inside him. A little bit of stage fright, perhaps, or just a lingering memory of past failure.

Adon shoved that down as hard as he could—he refused to get stage fright after having built this up so much!—and he began the slow process of Transformation. He guided his body into a new shape, more ambitious and complex than he had ever attempted before. He used the schematic of the elf-like form he had taken on before, which was saved using his Impeccable Memory, as the model for a human-sized version. As he shifted his body, he noticed that it was initially much easier and less painful than it had ever been before.

In fact, it was almost painless.

Yes, this is how it was always supposed to be, he thought excitedly.

His wings twisted and extended, split and deviated into new shapes. They gradually formed into two new pairs of limbs: an arm and a leg on each side. His head and eyes bulged and grew, ballooning out until the exoskeleton became a skull, and the skull grew skin and hair. His exoskeletal body developed the rib cage and human-like torso that he needed to bridge the gap between his other parts.

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And everything slowly, steadily grew in all directions.

There was a sort of friction between the amount of mass that Adon's body contained and the mass that his new form required, but mana and Biomass made up the difference. There was a larger pool of both of those things than there had been before, and even though the Transformation burned through a lot of resources as he went through it, Adon estimated that he would make it to the finish line.

Rosslyn would get to see what he could become with full effort and commitment.

After a minute of this, Adon felt that he was very close to becoming the larger version of his elf-like form that he had envisioned. He had fine-tuned his face a little as he went on—he thought the features had ended up being slightly too feminine once enlarged to human size, and he basically stole his previous life's face completely now, subtracting only some of the softness that gradual weight gain had added onto his features.

"Can I turn yet?" Rosslyn asked quietly. She had her hands clasped behind her back, and her fingers twitched with nervous energy as she stood, obediently looking away from Adon as he transformed.

Adon was now almost fully formed. He opened his lips—he was getting used to communicating with his mouth when he had a humanoid mouth—and spoke.

"Not yet, I am naked," he said, his voice swinging wildly from slightly deeper than he remembered into the falsetto register.

"Got it," Rosslyn said. Adon could hear a smile in her voice as she spoke.

A moment later, something clicked into place inside his semi-formed body, and his full sensory apparatus came online all at once. He tasted the air, which was stale and slightly earthy—unsurprising in this room that was normally full of spiders. And he inhaled another scent. It was more subtle, but it smelled good.

There was an earthy quality to this other scent, too, but it was a more positive flavor.

Actually, as he breathed in again, he realized it smelled really good. A moment later, he recognized that the scent was Rosslyn. He had been up close to her before, as a butterfly, and this was just a slightly weaker version of the scent that he had smelled when he was in her hair.

It's kind of intoxicating, he thought. I kind of thought so that one time I basically just stood in her hair for a while, but this is something else.

His eyes played over Rosslyn's form and appreciated her in a way that they had not before, too.

She's really fit, he thought. I mean, she must be very disciplined to keep her body like that, unless mana does the work for her.

Conflicting feelings and thoughts surged through Adon's body and mind. His brain remembered that Rosslyn was his friend, the human who was consistently nice to him. His body responded to the sight and the smell of her, and in particular the way she seemed to bounce slightly on the balls of her feet as if she was excited to see him.

Adon became excited too. He felt a swelling in his lower body, and his mouth opened in a little "O" shape.

That's not supposed to be happening right now…

Rosslyn cracked her neck, and it felt for a moment as if she was trying to sneak a peak at Adon in a mirror to her right.

"H-hey, no peeking," he said nervously. His voice cracked as he spoke.

Rosslyn became still, but the back of her neck turned bright pink.

"Please put something on, if you are still naked," she said in a quiet but defiant tone. "I am not trying to look at you, but it is not appropriate that a Claustrian Princess stand alone with a naked man who is not her husband. Then we can talk. If you have taken on a humanoid form, then you must act a bit more like a human instead of a mysterious magical creature…"

A part of Adon wanted to laugh at Rosslyn's reframing of what was happening, but he was also concerned about the rising tumescence in his bottom half. That was embarrassing and probably genuinely inappropriate.

Putting himself in Rosslyn's shoes, suddenly finding herself in a room with a naked man in that condition would be creepy, perhaps even frightening. He quickly grabbed a nearby sheet and wrapped it around himself like a toga.

Adon's body shivered slightly as the cool cloth wrapped around him, and he realized that he had been cold. The room itself was probably cold. Then another little shudder went through his whole frame. That felt like it was unrelated to the cold entirely.

It smacked of something else.

Instability? Shit…

With an effort of willpower, he suppressed the next shudder before it could begin.

Then his mind jumped back to something else that had just happened. His voice had cracked.

Well, that's annoying, he thought. The one good thing about my last incarnation was my voice. Even Rosslyn said she liked it. That's the thing I had to screw up, of course.

He decided that he would need to work on that with his next iteration of this humanoid Transformation—and then, somewhat impulsively, he changed his mind.

No, I'm not going to spend the next ten minutes talking to Rosslyn with a cracking voice like I'm in the middle of puberty, he thought almost furiously. We're fixing this now.

Adon reached within himself, focusing on modifying his vocal chords slightly with Transformation.

Just a little bigger. That's what makes the voice deep. Larger vocal chords. Adon did not know where he had learned that piece of trivia, or how accurate it was, but it entered his mind unbidden as he tried to change his voice.

"Are you, um, decent?" Rosslyn asked a little nervously, her head tilting to the side in a gesture of apparent doubt. Adon could also sort of smell the doubt with his telepathic sense. It hung like a cloud around her, and it was easily perceptible to his improved powers as a mixture of anxiety, hope, and excitement, with the slightest undertone of fear. "Can I turn around now?"

"Ye—"

Adon's voice stopped working in the middle of the word, "Yes." At the same time, there was a sudden snapping sound inside his head, and he felt his Transformation begin to slip. In front of him, he saw that the Princess was beginning to turn around, but Adon's attention shifted to entirely focus on himself for the moment.

No no no…

Adon tried desperately to hold himself together, to maintain his new form, but he could not immediately tell how successful he was. As Rosslyn's head swung to face him, he recognized that she was now looking down at him.

That was a bad sign. His height had apparently declined sharply after his Transformation came partially undone. He could not feel his limbs anymore either. The combination of those two pieces of sensory evidence suggested he was almost certainly no longer in a humanoid form.

Rosslyn sucked in a sharp gulp of air and took what appeared to be an involuntary step back. Her expression was somewhere between puzzlement and disappointment.

"Are you all right?" she asked slowly, carefully, stooping slightly to get closer to eye contact with Adon.

How did this happen? he heard her think. Will he be stuck like that? Can I help him?

No, I'm all right, Adon thought desperately. Don't look at me right now!

But he couldn't say those words or send them as a telepathic message. He would sound pathetic. No, he already was pathetic.

Ugh… why now? I thought it had finally gotten it down perfectly.

"I'm." Just. "Fine!" The butterfly's words came out in a mixture of broken speech and Telepathy, with the last word almost shouted. Adon felt his body quiver as he spoke. The lungs his partially transformed body had relied on for speech had been slightly crushed as his Transformation snapped partially undone. The pain that had miraculously disappeared from the Transformation process was suddenly back with a vengeance.

Adon counted it a minor victory that he had not experienced incontinence as his self-modification came apart. That would have been the capstone on this humiliation.

The only improvement to his condition was that he no longer felt the surge of hormones that he had experienced in his human form. There was a calm that came from that.

I'll just fix this and go back to my human form in a second, Rosslyn, he sent, resorting to pure Telepathy again.

Rosslyn swallowed, still looking down at him. Her face had settled on concern as she got more control over her emotions.

"You should see yourself in a mirror," she said carefully.

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