Chapter 24

We walked in silence. If Truck-kun could hear us he probably would have made my head explode already. To the best of my knowledge that hadn’t happened since I was still using my head.

She was, well she was genuinely terrified. She jumped every time one of us stepped on a twig. Her hair stood on end, which honestly didn’t look that pretty but I found it adorable. It had never occurred to me that startling a catgirl might give her a bad hairday.

We stopped at a batch of roses. I could tell that they were beautiful. I could count them. They looked beautiful. They smelled beautiful. They felt beautifully silky and healthy to the touch. They didn’t make any noise that could be called beautiful or otherwise.

I checked the rock, which still showed no signs of a purple fire. What was I missing? I had considered all five sense, but I apparently wasn’t appreciating beauty. Well, I guess I hadn’t considered all of my senses.

“Uh, Seo, are you trying to eat that rose?” Nyarin asked, a laugh bubbling up even as she spoke. I wasn't trying, I was succeeding. It was good to hear her laugh after the terror she’d shown.

“Nothing else worked. And it doesn’t taste beautiful. Do you think I’m not hearing the roses well enough?”

She laughed, and in that moment I realized that every time I’d heard her laugh before this had been fake, an act that she put on for others. Even when she had found something funny her laugh was practiced to be perfect, cute, and flattering.

Not now. She was laughing ugly. It was not perfect or cute or flattering. But it was honest. Her laugh wasn't as attractive as a Christmas special bikini. Somehow, it was more attractive. I caught myself staring.

She bent forward hugging her stomach with how hard she was laughing. She covered her mouth, and once when she’d nearly stopped she looked back up to me and began laughing all over again. I had placed a plucked rose in my mouth and was chewing.

She had to sit down on the ground and catch her breath. She tried speaking, only to be shaken by more laughter. I sat down next to her in the garden’s perfectly manicured sand and she desperately tried to not notice the rose that was still sticking from my mouth.

Fanning her face with her hands to cool down, then wiping away tears she was finally able to control the laughter. Her cheeks were a rosy red.

Then I asked her, mouth quite full of flower, “Dah yu wan sum wose too?”

She fell sideways with laughter bending to put her head between her knees.

Eventually the fun and joviality ended.

It always does.

“That,” she said, covering her mouth daintily as the laughing subsided, “was not fair.” Her laughs had returned to the fake, flattering, practice type that she had always used before. Her mannerisms became careful again.

But I had seen past her mask. I hadn’t felt this happy since… well, since Sachiko.

Nyarin’s eyes widened, ears going back and flat as if she had just detected a deadly threat. I followed her gaze to the white stone in my hand.

It was burning purple. Not just a little bit, like the wisps of red that came out of Nyarin’s eyes when she struggled to use True Vision. This purple fire billowed and spread up my arm. I couldn’t feel it, but it fully covered my hand. It was massive.

I looked back at Nyarin and smiled.

Her mask cracked again. The perky and flirty and fake fell away and I was startled to see fear in her eyes. Well, fear and something else? Her ears practically tried to hide inside her head. She hadn’t been this scared when she was convinced Truck-kun might kill her at any moment.

She stumbled when struggling to stand. She turned from me, walking away and wrapping her hands around herself in a protective hug.

I tried to laugh it off. “Well, you’re a professional at getting men to fall in love with you.”

She didn’t laugh. She stood a few meters, off back toward me, shaking her head.

I stood, considering her. The white stone still burned purple whenever I looked at her. The fire double in height, almost climbing to my face when she turned and our eyes met.

She winced seeing how she made me burn purple. “The customers never fall in love with me,” she said, “that’s the point. I wear masks so they don’t see the real me. They fall in love with the masks. They fall in love with the inexplicably grateful maidens. Not the alley cats.”

Her ears flattened and moved back. I’m not a master of cat body language, but that seemed more like a defensive pose, as if she expected to be struck at any moment.

The purple flame burned. She watched it as I looked at her. She looked afraid that it would burn her. She looked like she was more afraid that it would stop burning. “Turn around.” she said.

My mouth opened. My mouth closed. And then I turned around. I faced the bed of roses, the ones that didn’t taste anything like their red color, mind you. The purple flame disappeared. I held the white stone out to my side so that she could see that the flame had gone.

“You don’t know what I really am,” she said.

“I saw you, the real you, in that first Isekai world,” I said, a little louder since I was facing away. I remembered the yellow cat’s eyes, disproportionately large, peeking out from the curled up ball of orange, white, and deep black cat fur.

“I’m not your type, you know. You’re a human.”

I shrugged. “We’ve already established that I’m bad at being a human. Maybe I’ll teach you how to be a bakeneko and you’ll teach me how to be human."

I heard a twig snap and tensed. Was she walking toward me? After a few seconds I realized that the sounds of feet walking were moving away from me. I turned around to see Nyarin walking away just as she vanished behind a particularly large tree.

I ran after her, but there was nothing behind the tree.

I looked up in time to see a black cat, or what looked more like a confused batch of shadows and black smoke in the shape of a cat, jumping from one tree branch to another.

She must have felt my eyes on her because the billowing orange, white, and black smoke in the shape of a cat turned two disproportionately large yellow eyes at me. They glistened with a fierce intelligence, fear, and something more. It was all elegant grace. It was Nyarin.

I noticed that the white stone had begun burning again. The Bakeneko saw the fire too. So it ran away.