Sunny unlocked the front door of his highly warded, obscenely expensive house, stepped inside, and let his head rest against the heavy oak frame with a long, world-weary sigh.
He was exhausted. The day consisted of secretly trailing Rain to ensure her school route was clear of hazards, dodging anyone he might know out of pure habit, and arguing with Aiko about the depreciating market value of Ascended monster bones. He just wanted a hot shower, a bowl of noodles, and absolute, uninterrupted peace.
He dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl. "I'm back," he called out, toeing off his boots.
"In the living room," Cielle's voice drifted back.
Sunny rolled his shoulders, dismissing the tension in his neck, and walked into the living room.
He stopped completely dead.
Cielle was sitting in the exact center of his plush rug, wearing one of his hoodies. But it wasn't her attire that made Sunny freeze. It was her aura.
She was vibrating with smugness.
It wasn't a loud emotion, Cielle didn't do loud, but her chin was tilted up a fraction of an inch, her green eyes were gleaming with satisfaction, and the corners of her mouth were pinched into a tiny, immensely proud little smile. It was the exact look a tiger gave right before dropping a severed head at your feet. Whatever a tiger was anyways.
Sunny's eyes narrowed to paranoid slits. "What did you do?"
"Nothing," she said, her tone perfectly flat, yet somehow dripping with self-congratulation. "I secured our territory."
"Our territory?" Sunny repeated slowly, his gaze scanning the room for damage, blood, or government agents. "From what?"
Cielle patted the rug beside her. "I got a new Echo."
Sunny blinked. His brain stumbled over the sentence. "An Echo? How? You haven't left the house. Did you pull something out of your soul sea that you've been hiding from me?"
"No," she said simply. "I acquired it today. Here. Through the window."
"Through the window." Sunny repeated, a cold knot of dread forming in his stomach. "Cielle. There are no Nightmare Creatures in this sector. The government has billions of credits worth of sensors blanketing the entire city block. You cannot get an Echo here."
"The sensors are garbage," she replied, completely unbothered. She raised her hand. "Watch."
A massive swirl of white sparks appeared, twisting with an intensity that made the lights in the living room flicker violently. The sheer density of the manifestation made Sunny brace himself. Given her track record, he half-expected a Corrupted terror, a fallen titan, or a demon clad in hellfire. He commanded his shadows to ready themselves.
The blinding essence faded with a soft pop.
Sitting on the rug was a fat, extremely fluffy orange cat.
Sunny stared.
It was the neighbor's cat. The one that sat on the brick wall and stared at them. It had a slightly smushed face, a missing chip in its left ear, and it looked like it ate exclusively premium canned tuna. It sat down heavily, licked its front paw with agonizing slowness, and looked up at Sunny.
It let out a single, raspy, distinctly unimpressed "meow."
Sunny stood in absolute silence for ten seconds.
"Cielle..." he said, his voice dropping into a dangerously calm register. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "That is not an Echo. That is Mr. Marmalade. You kidnapped Mrs. Gable's cat from next door?"
"I did not kidnap it," Cielle corrected smoothly, offended by the accusation. "I killed it. Then the Spell gave it back to me. Therefore, it is an Echo."
Sunny froze. The brewing headache vanished, replaced by an icy, terrifying spike of pure alarm.
"You… you killed a normal cat?" he asked, horrified. Why would she do that? Was it a trauma response? Did the cat trigger her flaw? Was he harboring a serial pet killer?
"It was not a normal cat," Cielle stated stubbornly. "It was plotting. I told you it was plotting weeks ago. Today, it climbed the rain gutter and tried to pry open the second-floor window. It was invading my sleeping quarters."
Sunny's alarm morphed into deep, profound bewilderment. He looked down at the fat orange feline. It was currently trying to catch its own tail, spinning in a clumsy, undignified circle.
"It's a cat, Cielle. It probably wanted a place to sleep because it's cold outside."
"Look at it," she insisted, pointing a finger at the orange furball. "Really look at it, Sunny."
Sunny sighed, channeling his essence. He activated the subtle, piercing sight granted to him by Blood Weave, allowing him to peer past the physical shell of reality and see the underlying soul
He looked at Mr. Marmalade.
Then, Sunny's heart stopped completely.
He staggered back a full step, his breath catching in his throat with a strangled wheeze. His gloomy shadow violently detached from the floor and plastered itself against the ceiling in pure terror.
Beneath the fluffy orange exterior, the creature's soul structure was a localized apocalypse. It wasn't an Awakened beast. It wasn't even a Fallen monster.
It was a Great Beast.
A creature of such incomprehensible, unfathomable power that its mere presence should have leveled the entire city block. It was a walking natural disaster, a cataclysm compressed into the shape of a house cat through some terrifying illusion or power. A singularity of world-ending power, currently licking its own flank.
And it had been living next door. For months.
Sunny's mind completely, irreversibly shattered. He pointed a trembling finger at the cat, his voice cracking violently into a high pitch. "What… what the fuck is that?!"
"An Echo," Cielle said, looking at him like he was the one being unreasonable.
"That is a Great Beast!" Sunny yelled, his carefully cultivated composure completely disintegrating. "That is a world-ending threat! It was living in Mrs. Gable's garden! How is it here?! How is the city not a crater?! How did the sensors not detect it?!"
"I told you, the sensors are garbage," Cielle explained calmly. "It had a very good cloaking ability. It felt like a normal animal until you got very, very close to it."
Sunny grabbed his own hair, pacing in a frantic, manic circle around the coffee table. "And you… you killed a Great Beast? Alone?! In the middle of a residential district?! Without causing any damage?!"
"It was trying to open my window," Cielle said, her tone sharpening with a hint of aggression. "I opened the window first. It lost its balance. I grabbed its head and twisted it. It went crack. Then it exploded into a lot of light."
Sunny stopped pacing. He stared at her, his brain struggling to process the sheer, terrifying absurdity of the situation.
A Great Beast????? And it had been masquerading as a lazy Waking World pet. And Cielle, acting on pure territorial spite, had simply opened her bedroom window and wrung its neck before it could even drop its disguise? It had rolled a critical failure on its Waking World infiltration stealth check against the worst possible target.
"You… you snapped a Great Beast's neck? Because it scratched at your window?"
"Yes."
"It didn't even fight back?"
Cielle tilted her head. "Its physical durability was very low for its rank. I think it put all of its evolution into hiding, sneaking, and absorbing ambient essence. It was basically just a very dense, magical rat."
Sunny let out a high-pitched, semi-hysterical laugh. He dropped onto the couch, burying his face in his hands.
"I am questioning every life choice that led me to this moment," Sunny mumbled into his palms. "The Spell is broken. Reality is a joke."
"Do you want to see its runes?" Cielle asked helpfully.
Sunny peeked through his fingers, morbidly curious despite his suffering. "Yes. Void take me, yes. Show me."
Cielle obligingly shared the Spell's evaluation of her new echo
[Neighborhood Menace]
Echo Rank: Supreme.
Echo Class: Beast.
Attributes: [Perfect Disguise], [Indestructible Nuisance].
Description: A terrifying entity born from the depths of the dream realm, it chose to adopt the most insidious camouflage known to mankind: a slightly overweight, heavily pampered feline. It is exceptionally lazy, completely invulnerable to physical harm, and enjoys canned tuna.
Sunny stared at the glowing runes hovering in the air.
Supreme!? She had a Supreme Echo!? And its official title was literally 'Neighborhood Menace.'
"It is functionally just a cat," Cielle informed him, reaching out to scratch the Echo behind its missing ear. The Supreme Beast leaned into her hand, purring. The sheer acoustic density of the purr rattled the coffee table and made the windows vibrate. "It doesn't have any attack abilities. I tested it by throwing it at the wall. But its defense stat is absolute. You cannot hurt it."
"You threw a Supreme Beast at the wall!" Sunny repeated blankly.
"It bounced," she confirmed. Cielle picked the orange furball up and placed it squarely on Sunny's lap. "It is very heavy. You hold it."
Sunny looked down at the Neighborhood Menace. The Great Beast looked back up at him. It yawned, displaying a terrifying lack of sharp teeth, then circled twice and settled heavily against his stomach.
It weighed roughly as much as a small car. Sunny grunted, the air rushing out of his lungs under the pressure.
At that exact moment, the shadow beneath Sunny's boots shifted. The Soul Serpent, sensing a new, overwhelmingly powerful entity resting directly on its master's lap, materialized. The massive, elegant shadow snake uncoiled from the floor, rising up to its full, terrifying height to inspect the intruder.
The Serpent loomed over Sunny, its eyeless, shadowy head tilting aggressively as it stared down the orange cat. It let out a silent, menacing hiss, expanding its aura to intimidate the beast.
The cat opened one eye. It looked at the terrifying shadow snake.
Slowly, deliberately, the cat reached out a single orange paw and booped the Serpent directly on its shadowy snout.
The Serpent froze.
It snapped its jaws forward, trying to bite the cat in retaliation. Its shadowy fangs struck the fluffy orange fur and literally bounced off with a dull thud. The cat didn't even flinch. It just looked at the Serpent, entirely unimpressed, and went back to sleep.
The Soul Serpent recoiled in confusion. It looked at Sunny, then at the indestructible cat, utterly unsure of how to process an entity that it couldn't intimidate, bite, or eat. Defeated and deeply humiliated, the giant snake slowly shrank down, slithering to the far corner of the room to sulk in the shadows.
"Meow," the Neighborhood Menace said in its sleep.
Cielle nodded approvingly. "It is very brave."
Sunny leaned his head back against the couch cushions, pinned down by a thousand-pound cat, staring blankly at the ceiling. His house now contained an oblivious, highly lethal angel, a traumatized shadow snake, and an indestructible Supreme feline that used to shit in Mrs. Gable's petunias. Of course the nonchalant kid of a daemon too.
"I need stronger coffee," Sunny whispered to the void. "And maybe a new timeline."