"Bzzzzzzz——"
During the hours when adults were at work and children were in school, the small garden became the domain of stray cats. And today that peace was being disrupted.
The Wiggle Car was a toy designed for toddlers. In her cat form, Yimi could drape herself over it, grip the steering wheel with her front paws, and operate it freely—though the noise was, even by her own standards, unpleasantly loud.
"Mrow!"
Yimi the Great has arrived!
The other strays fled grumbling up onto the garden wall.
They hadn't gathered here by chance—they'd been summoned by the one Yimi had startled earlier. Standard procedure demanded they surround the newcomer and establish the pecking order with a proper thrashing. But this pest had shown up on a vehicle.
A battered one-eared orange cat on the wall, radiating the world-weariness of a veteran, crouched and waited for its moment. As Yimi passed below, it leaped—intending to make a point about who ran this corner. It hadn't even finished falling when Yimi's paw shot up and delivered two firm thumps directly to its forehead.
"Mommy—(corrupted text)—there's a kitty driving a car!"
A little girl who'd just gotten out of kindergarten ran toward Yimi in delight, mary-janes clattering against the path, having let go of her mother's hand.
"Little kitty, could I play with it for a bit? Pretty please?"
Her mother followed helplessly. "Cats don't answer—you should ask the owner—"
Yimi stared at this small creature—a little smaller than her own big-cat form, even—and climbed off the Wiggle Car. "You can play for a while. Give it back when you're done."
"Yay! Thank you, kitty!" The little girl clapped both hands.
"Hss—"
The mother, however, scooped the girl up in one terrified motion and sprinted backward, hissing in Yimi's direction as if trying to ward her off. Once a safe distance away, she was already pulling out her phone.
"Hello?? Police? There's a demon cat here—I'm serious! It talked!"
"Meow?" Yimi climbed back onto the Wiggle Car, perplexed.
Rude grown-up. Yimi will never become like that.(Corrupted text.)
"Notice to Host: under normal circumstances, cats do not speak. You just frightened that person."
Humans were truly baffling. Say a single word and they started panicking. Unimaginable what they'd do if they saw her in human form with four ears.
No more talking in front of humans while in cat form.
Sensing the slow, slow progress of Holy Corpse assimilation, and the hunger that had been with her since she arrived in this world, Yimi stowed the Wiggle Car back in her storage space.
Then she looked plaintively at the other strays—eyes round, all of them still too afraid to come closer.
If there was any local food source, they'd know where it was. Follow them and food would follow.
...
Ten thousand meters above (~32,800 ft), Ratatoskr watched everything from the sky.
"Generating objects at will… we can be fairly certain now. That cat is the Spirit we actually detected." Kotori was working furiously at a lollipop wrapper with her fingernail, surveying her subordinates, ultimately deciding not to resort to using her teeth.
"However, we detected no Reiryoku signatures when it generated the object," Reine added.
"Make sure what happened earlier doesn't happen again." Kotori meant the mother and daughter.
They didn't know the full nature of this Spirit, or what kind of personality the new arrival had. The correct approach was to restrict access to this area entirely and have only Ratatoskr personnel attempt contact.
When needed, they could construct an entire festival around a single Spirit's location—every vendor and passerby a potential plant—engineering a Truman Show on a neighborhood scale.
"Miku's sealing is already complete. Let's have Shiori attempt to make contact—" Kotori paused. "Actually, that feels weird."
Date a girl one day, immediately move on to the next target the day after—it wasn't the first time the schedule had been this punishing. Sometimes they had Shiori juggling multiple simultaneous dates without any of them ever finding out. But at least those were all people. This Spirit was a cat. She wasn't joking, was she?
Not that Miku had been a straightforward operation either. Gabriel could completely hypnotize people and command them—but it didn't take long to discover that Miku's preferred use was hypnotizing girls and dragging them back to her mansion. The only twist was that Shiori proved immune to the hypnosis, and Miku—rather than giving up—became morbidly curious, because Shiori was being so proactive about the whole thing. That curiosity quickly turned hostile: Miku pivoted to hypnotizing everyone around Shiori to force the issue—managing to hypnotize even the remote comms team through their own earpieces.
It had ended with Shiori, in a display of raw last-ditch desperation, clutching her last pair of panties in both hands and delivering the most heartfelt improvised speech of her life to talk Miku down, narrowly preventing the whole operation from becoming something decidedly adults-only.
Even now, Kotori still wasn't sure whether Shiori's words had genuinely moved Miku—or whether Miku, being fundamentally strange at her core, had simply found a girl desperately defending her last line of decency while simultaneously trying to persuade her endearing.
"Commander." A subordinate reported from below: "Situation developing. We've detected Nightmare in the area."
"Ah—she's still here? (Corrupted text.)"
Come to think of it, Nightmare was the one who had covered for Shiori when Miku hypnotized them all over the comms yesterday…
Nightmare. Real name: Kurumi Tokisaki. In appearance, the image of a graceful young noblewoman—jet-black hair styled into two long tails draped over her shoulders, the left fringe deliberately lengthened to curtain an entire eye.
The Spirit who commanded time. Also, currently, the only known Spirit confirmed to actively hunt humans: by her hands alone, not counting Spacequake casualties, the death toll ran into the tens of thousands.
Perhaps sensing the killing aura clinging to someone who had ended so many lives, the cats fled whenever Kurumi approached—even the ones that seemed less "prejudiced" would casually flick their tails and walk away the moment her hand came near.
Possibly just the ordinary wariness of strays—but the cats that had snubbed her had happily accepted Shiori's petting during their last encounter.
Like today. She had barely even approached—she hadn't gotten close at all yet—and the cats were already scattering with excessive, theatrical haste.
"Meow?"
Yimi lifted her nose and sniffed at the air. Something in her instincts registered a faint unease. But underneath that, drifting from the newcomer's direction, was the metallic scent unique to canned food—something she hadn't tasted in what felt like a very long time.
She fought down her appetite. She turned and followed the other cats —
— at which point those treacherous animals, upon seeing her follow, escalated from walking to running, muttering unkind things as they fled.
Yimi raised her head, thoughtful.
Were these idiots fleeing not because of the woman—but because of her?
"My, my… been ostracized by your companions?" Kurumi Tokisaki crouched down, opened a can of cat food, and slid it gently forward, keeping her movements as small as possible. "What a poor little thing."
Yimi couldn't understand the words—her seven-year-old vocabulary didn't include the word "ostracized"—but her eyes had already locked onto the cat food and could not be redirected.
Yimi crept forward, tentatively. Nightmare, the most dangerous Spirit in existence, held her breath without thinking.
She hadn't sensed the anomaly hidden inside this cat. She wasn't here for any particular reason. Her purpose was entirely simple—a fondness that had existed long before she became a Spirit.
While Yimi ate with focused, single-minded devotion, pale white fingers reached out and gently poked the top of her furry head. When the cat didn't bolt, they moved back in a smooth, unhurried stroke—smoothing down her fur.
She got to pet a cat.
Satisfaction +10.
It lets people pet it.
She had to go tell her other clones about this immediately.
"You're adorable."
"Mrrp."
One can of cat food was never going to be enough. Yimi retracted her claws and hooked her front paws over Kurumi's black-stockinged thigh, the soft flesh yielding slightly under her weight.
Matching the position, Yimi let out a long, shameless, thoroughly coquettish:
"Nyaaaa~"
"That's all I have, I'm afraid." Kurumi gave Yimi's head a gentle pat and lifted her off—reluctantly.
Two small pawprints pressed into the thigh of her stocking. She made no move to brush them off. They were, after all, evidence to show her other clones.
The black-haired girl raised her eyes, as if catching the gaze of something unseen. She smiled—quietly gathered the empty can from the ground, leaving no trace—and stepped backward into her own shadow.
"Meow?" Yimi tilted her head and poked at the spot where the woman had been with one outstretched paw.