Chapter 196: Chapter 2: The Difficulty
"Meow meow meow meow! Meow meow meow meow meow! Mrrooow—" Yimi wriggled free of Homura’s grasp and let loose a torrent of abuse.
This cat-killer! Not a good person!
"..."
Homura looked down at the inexplicably furious cat.
Being distrusted by everyone except Madoka was something she’d long since gotten used to. But why was she being misunderstood by a cat today, of all days?
Perhaps a little put out, the girl lifted her gaze toward Kyubey. Too numb to bother defending herself, she murmured at the cat instead: "This is not a good cat. Watch—this thing can’t die."
"Meow?"
"Honestly, what a waste."
Before Yimi’s disbelieving eyes, another Kyubey hopped into view, lowered its head to its predecessor’s bullet-riddled corpse, and began to eat.
Killing Kyubey was a pointless exercise.
No emotions. An unknown number of spare bodies. Taking one out amounted to nothing more than waste, at least from Kyubey’s perspective.
After several attempts over the loops, Homura had mostly stopped bothering even when the thing showed up right in her face. But whenever Kyubey went hunting for new girls to contract, she would still intervene like this.
Her primary goal was saving Madoka, but any other girl she could rescue along the way, she’d try. Not that anyone had ever appreciated the effort—even when she all but begged them to believe her.
The scene still puzzled her, though. Why was there no girl at Kyubey’s side being sweet-talked this time?
"You’re a Magical Girl too, aren’t you? But you’re a face I’ve never seen before. I don’t really understand, but this should be our first meeting, shouldn’t it? Why are you showing me such hostility?" The new Kyubey spoke with flawless calm.
First meeting—from this timeline’s Kyubey’s perspective, that was technically true.
The reason was that Homura was a Magical Girl who wielded the power of time. In the first timeline, she had wished to redo her meeting with Madoka Kaname—to go back and start over. She could loop time back to just before that meeting.
She’d lost count of how many resets she’d been through.
Under no obligation to explain, she emptied another clip into the replacement Kyubey, then turned to leave. No victim meant staying here and shooting Kyubey was just burning through ammo.
But then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught the cat that had just been cursing her out hesitate for a moment—then trot over to Kyubey’s second corpse in quick little steps, give it a sniff, and tentatively open her small mouth for a bite.
"Blech!"
Awful!
Nutritious, probably, but disgusting beyond question. In the pirate world she’d occasionally run into fish that tasted this bad, but with Frightening Monsters she could consume targets directly through the ability. The quest demanded she serve this to other people, so that shortcut wasn’t an option.
The little cat was beginning to understand the real challenge: turning something this revolting into a dish someone could honestly call delicious.
"Don’t eat dirty things off the ground." Homura gently lifted Yimi away.
Strange cat. A moment ago it had been raging as though a fellow cat had been murdered. Now it was treating the body like groceries.
Neurotic. In that instant she fully understood why dog people outnumbered cat people.
But just after she pulled Yimi away, the Kyubey corpse in front of her vanished. She was certain the cat had done something, though she couldn’t quite grasp what.
Only then did it belatedly dawn on her: the creature Kyubey had been talking to might not necessarily have been human.
In all her loops, in all her run-ins with Kyubey, she’d never once seen it approach a cat.
Homura turned Yimi around to face her. The kitten was still dry-heaving from the taste.
Homura furrowed her brow slightly and thought for a few seconds.
Come to think of it—this cat had moved during Time Stop.
"A Familiar?"
Not even close. It felt like nothing more than an ordinary cat. And when the Kyubey corpse vanished, there’d been no magical signature beyond the visual disappearance.
...
Since her home was nearby, and because there had been times in past loops when Kyubey had deliberately used its Telepathy to contact Madoka or someone else, Homura brought Yimi back to her place first.
She had exactly one month. She certainly didn’t have the leisure to adopt a pet.
One month from now, the most powerful Witch—Walpurgisnacht—would descend upon this city. That thing was the one enemy she could never defeat alone.
If she failed to stop it, Madoka’s kind heart would inevitably fall for Kyubey’s pitch and plunge into the Magical Girl trap.
Homura set Yimi down on her desk. Ever since witnessing Kyubey’s nonchalant resurrection, the cat had grown considerably more docile.
Because Yimi had finally remembered why Kyubey looked familiar. A long time ago, someone her mother disliked had shown her mother an anime, and this thing had appeared in it.
Then something in that anime had happened—she didn’t know what—and her mother got so scared she fled the room and moved Yimi’s nest under the bed, making her stand guard for three days straight.
So Kyubey was a bad cat!
Homura pressed a handgun against Yimi’s forehead. "What exactly are you? An accomplice of the Incubator? Or another species from the universe that’s hostile to them? No... judging by your reaction earlier, neither of those fits."
A normal Incubator had no emotions. It shouldn’t exhibit the kind of mood swings Yimi had just displayed. But calling her hostile didn’t fit either, given that she’d berated Homura for killing it.
"Meow~" Yimi raised a paw and gently pushed the gun aside.
Homura pushed it back. Expressionless. "Do you know what a gun is? Kyubey came to you—or you went to Kyubey—what was the purpose? You have three seconds to answer. When three seconds are up, I pull the trigger."
"Three. Two. One."
She didn’t count especially fast, but Yimi adhered to the "cats must not speak in front of humans" rule and held perfectly still. Homura didn’t actually shoot, either.
"Can you not speak? Or is it an intelligence issue?"
"Meow!"
The "intelligence issue" remark earned Homura a slap from Yimi’s paw. One wasn’t enough—she followed up with several more in rapid succession.
This black-haired person had made a terrible first impression, but Yimi would let it slide for now: she’d correctly identified Kyubey as bad, and more importantly, the kitty needed to borrow something from her.
Yimi sniffed the air. Under Homura’s wary gaze, she scampered into the kitchen.
She hopped onto the counter, slammed the Kyubey remains onto the cutting board, and gripped a kitchen knife with her other paw. Cat paw structure wasn’t made for gripping, so she stuck the utensil to her pad with mana, then set to work on the ingredients with what limited knowledge she had. Transforming in front of someone had caused problems in the last world—Joseph ended up getting thrashed by Suzi-obaachan over it.
"What are you doing?" Homura watched the cat standing on her cutting board, butchering a Kyubey carcass, then dumping the cut pieces into a pot.
Unhinged.
But affection inexplicably +1.
No—what she really needed to focus on was the energy coating the cat’s paws. The essence felt slightly different, but Homura could tell it was something akin to mana.
She mulled it over.
The Incubator recruited human girls into contracts primarily because the emotional energy they produced was the most potent. But there was no guarantee this world—or this universe—didn’t harbor other beings with similar aptitude.
Also: the cutting board, the knife, and the pot were all write-offs now.
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