by Nisioisin
I couldn’t be a girl who never knew what it meant to be stained for my entire life─I wanted to know filth.
I wasn’t saying I wanted to become black.
But I wanted to take the black and the white together.
I wanted to become an adult who was gray as ash.
I was tired of living this life─
Where I couldn’t cry, even with a broken heart.
“Come back, won’t you? It’s─past your curfew.”
Let’s have dinner together, I offered.
Extending my hand to the Tyrannical Tiger.
Extending a hand to my past.
<……>
Enough, spat the tiger.
It bared its fangs and leapt toward me.
064
That same moment, I fell over and of course I was nyow back─but I was facing a bit of a problem.
In short, the aberration that I’m based on, the Afflicting Cat, is one of the weakest yokai out there, myore or less useless in a fight.
I’m nyot a fighter.
So it kind of begged the question: how was I supposed to face off against the Tyrannical Tiger, a nyaberration with a lot of freedom and nyo base at all? (Yes, I nyoh that’s not how you’re supposed to use the phrase “beg the question,” but does it really matter? I nyoh I’m misusing it but you still nyoh what I mean! Why do I nyeed to go back and figure out anyother way to say it?! I’m in an eat-or-be-eaten situation here!!)
I might have been the earlier-born aberration, but I wasn’t even sure if you could call the Tyrannical Tiger my little sister. Aberrations can be aberrant, okay?
My myaster had described that little human and his sisters as triplets born apart, and I felt the same way about me, my myaster, and the Tyrannical Tiger─but the Tyrannical Tiger definitely didn’t feel like the youngest of us three.
After all, stress is born from emotional friction─so if the Tyrannical Tiger was right and my myaster was the spring she drew from, then the spring that I drew from might turn out to be the Tyrannical Tiger.
I might have been born first, but that didn’t mean the Tyrannical Tiger couldn’t be the furst one to exist.
So even a simple comparison could rank the Tyrannical Tiger as a better aberration than me, Black Hanekawa. To complicate things further, the Tyrannical Tiger was also my successor.
They say that the later myachines like computers are built, the better, right?
And if you follow that same logic, there was no way I could beat the Tyrannical Tiger using nyormal methods.
And nyaturally my myaster was more experienced in creating aberrations when she created the tiger─and that’s why she was a tiger, just like the nyote said.
Anyone could see who’d win in a fight between a cat and a tiger.
Anyone could see.
It made you want to look away.
…But my myaster wasn’t looking away─she was facing it head-on, so I couldn’t turn tail and run nyow.
After all.
Afflicting Cats are cats with nyo tail─
“Phew…”
I dodged the Tyrannical Tiger’s fangs by the skin of my own teeth─and snyuck under its gigantic body as if I was going straight into the beast’s den.
My strategy was to use her size against her.
You nyoh there’s a saying, the cornered rat can even bite a cat, so what’s wrong with a cat biting a tiger? And─also!
“Mrr…OWWW!”
I had something.
My secret weapon as an Afflicting Cat─my enyergy drain!
It always worked nyo matter my opponent, even against aberrations─so I could achieve my goal if I sucked the enyergy from the Tyrannical Tiger and brought that back to my myaster.
My myaster’s request.
I could grant it then.
Sure, it was a pretty rough way to bring a runaway girl back home, but we could talk it over once we were all there.
There’s nyo miracle cure for family problems.
It’s nyot like you can reconcile with your family at the drop of a hat like some kind of melodramatic garden-variety domestic drama─for eighteen years, our myaster had kept cutting loose and been cut loose.
We couldn’t go straight back to the way things were.
Nyo, there nyever was a place for us to go back to.
We would have to build it from scratch.
Today was just the first step towards that─and so.
I was pawsitioned under the Tyrannical Tiger’s belly─and I embraced it.
With my whole body.
With my whole strength.
I made sure to touch as much of my body as pawssible to the Tyrannical Tiger’s to maximize my enyergy drain’s purrformance.
“Mrr─ROWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!”
Where the Tyrannical Tiger groaned─I screeched at the top of my lungs.
Nyot a scream to motivate myself, like I was saying I’d nyever let go.
Nyot that.
While my enyergy drain, my special ability as a nyaberration, was the one opening I had to defeat the Tyrannical Tiger, using it also meant you needed to think about what her special ability was as a nyaberration.
A fire aberration.
The Tyrannical Tiger.
There are three ways that might work.
The easiest pattern for modern-day people to understand is what you might call pyrokinesis, where all it nyeeded to think was
For that reason, though, I nyever believed it to be that pattern, and in fact, even when we talked, nyo part of my body or even my clothes caught on fire, plus its first attack was an anyamalistic bite. I could count that one out by nyow.
So, pattern nyumber two.
Another one that’s easy to understand, or maybe easy to imagine, where the Tyrannical Tiger breathes fire from its myouth─or shoots flames from its claws, that kind of pattern. And because this one works together with biting and scratching, it lined up with being a predator.
Fire-breathing monsters show up all the time in anyame and monster movies, right? So from that point of view, this was the most likely reason the Tyrannical Tiger could create fire.
Well, it was the pattern I was hoping for.
But I was wrong.
It wasn’t the furst pattern, the worst one of all─
But it was the third pattern.
“Mrrow─hot, hot, hot!!”
I nyearly took both my arms off of the Tyrannical Tiger’s torso but realized what I was doing and just barely held back on.
To something that was nyow ablaze.
To the Tyrannical Tiger’s torso.
“So that’s the pattern here. Your whole body is flames─I shoulda nyown it!”
While there are some fire-breathing aberrations out there, this was the more common way it worked!
My myaster is a stickler for the rules, so of course she was gonna stick to precedent when making a nyaberration!
She wasn’t going to show off her originyality, she was going to be orthodox─
Her aberration was a strange and suspicious fire!
She sounded─calm.
Of course she did.
For the same reason that vampire girl─Shinyobu Oshinyo─could sit in my arms and look lively even though my enyergy drain worked on anything I touched, whether I wanted it to or nyot.
In other words, whil
e my enyergy drain may look invincible at first glance, it has a weakness.
Or maybe I should say a structural flaw.
A nyecessary structural flaw.
If my target had a nyear-endless supply of enyergy, absorbing all of it would be like trying to dry a dam─and while I didn’t think the Tyrannical Tiger’s enyergy as the avatar of our myaster’s dark emotions could rival a vampire’s, still.
Still, its enyergy was like thermal enyergy.
Literal flames.
It was clear as day that I’d be roasted alive before I could absorb it all up─
“Aww, shut it! Of course I nyoh that!!”
Which was exactly why.
It was exactly because it was clear as day─that I screamed.
I yowled─as a cat.
“It doesn’t myatter how stupid I am! I at least nyoh that a cat can’t beat a tiger!”
While a cornered rat might bite a cat─it was only a bite at the end of the day.
It’s nyot like the rat could win or fight off the cat.
It would just make the cat myad and then get eaten, right?
And nyow it was the same for me.
To be honest, I didn’t even half-believe that this enyergy drain was going to work, that it would be an opening─I nyew this wasn’t even a gamble.
I was just acting like I didn’t nyoh.
“Because,” I said, “our myaster asked me to.”
<……>
“Our myaster asked me to.”
You probably wouldn’t understand.
You were just born, you probably wouldn’t understand.
You don’t understand just how happy it makes me for our myaster, who always wants to do every little thing all by herself, to rely on me─how happy it makes me for our myaster, who always tries to do every little thing all by herself, to rely on me without any concern for embarrassment or honor, about how it looks or how it reflects on her─when I was just a plain cat who had been run over by a car.
And she shamelessly relied on me.
She called me her little sister.
She called me her family, you nyoh.
“She asked me to take care of this─to take care of you!”
And─I thought as I looked at the Tamikura Apartments.
Hitagi Senjogahara asked me the same thing, too.
She asked me to take care of my myaster─
“…MEOOOOOWWWW!”
I.
I held even tighter to the Tyrannical Tiger’s torso, so hot that I had nyoh idea what tempurrture it could even be─and buried my head in it like I was rubbing my cheek against her.
My clothes had gone up in flames long ago.
Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot.
Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot.
It felt like I was embracing the sun.
And in fact, maybe that’s what I was doing.
I could see the flames of my myaster’s pooled and accumulated envy gathering into a mass of that scale─which was why.
I nyeeded to swallow it all.
The hotter it was, the bigger it was.
The more I couldn’t let go of it─
The more I nyeeded to hold onto it.
That’s how I felt.
“Mrr…OWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”
Swoosh.
The Tyrannical Tiger shook its body like it was wet and trying to dry off─and that’s all it took to send me flying.
My body smashed into a nyearby concrete wall.
“Meow!”
Hearing my own scream, I nyearly fell unconscious for a meowment from the sudden change in tempurrture.
Nyo. I couldn’t pass out nyow.
I was practically covered in flames.
If I lost consciousness in this state and switched back to my myaster’s, she would probably die on the spot from full-body burns─I could somehow withstand this tempurrture only because I was a nyaberration.
“Agh…”
Still…what amazing power.
I was nyothing in comparison.
You nyoh, there’s a nyaberration that’s good at sumo wrestling nyown as the bake-no-hi, the changed flame (sounds ridiculous, nyo?)─but she was just as monstrously powerful as one of those.
Doggone it─though I nyoh that’s a weird thing for a cat to say.
While I barely managed to stay conscious, one attack was all it took to immeowbalize me.
I couldn’t mewve a finger.
Really?
I prepared myself, came here ready to attack, and look what happened─talk about lame.
Myaahaha.
Then again, that annyoying little human was always risking his life like this─he must’ve done a lot of fighting by nyow.
With tears in his eyes.
Crying foul.
And crying.
You nyoh what.
I wish my myaster would’ve cried, too─
If she was sad.
If she was lonely.
If she was bitter.
Who nyohs, maybe she wouldn’t have had to give birth to me or the Tyrannical Tiger─and things could have still gone well.
Nyo, maybe it was the other way around.
Could my myaster not cry because we existed?
Well, yeah. That made sense.
If you had little sisters like us.
You couldn’t cry, nyot as their older sister─
Expressionlessly.
Emotionlessly.
As it sizzled─and sidled its way toward me.
“……”
The mass of fire was calmly muttering some really scary stuff.
Hell?
I wondered how much better that would be than a nyightmare.
Still, how many times would it be─I didn’t want to die again.
I’d been run over by a car and killed.
I’d been won over by my myaster and killed.
And nyow it was over, with this tiger, too?
How many times was I going to die?
They say that death is the only cure for stupidity, but that’s a lie.
I’ll always stay stupid, I bet─
“Ahhh. It really did make me happy, though.”
Maybe it was what you’d call my nyature as a creature, but looking toward the Tyrannical Tiger as it carefully approached me cautious of my enyergy drain─
I muttered.
Were they my dying words?
Nyo.
It was just me being a sore loser.
“A life-or-death fight with you and all I managed was to delay this arson by ten seconds─I can’t stand how weak I am.”
the Tyrannical Tiger told me.
There really was no sentiment there at all.
Churning emotion─devoid of sentiment.
“It was syenseless. It was murreckless. It was purrointless.”
Ahhh.
I never got a chance to say it, in the end.
Even though I loved him so much.