The Fire Spell’s effect on the hawk was even more serious than I’d expected. Not only did the fireball knock them from the sky, it did so by searing through their wings, leaving trails of hot metal. The bird hit the earth, unable to stifle their shriek of pain.

I would’ve gone in with more attacks if not for that Fire still burning on their head, across their back and limbs. They struggled to their feet…

And literally whipped off the traces of flames. It was one of the coolest things I’d seen: two wings giving the jolt you’d use to shake water off after washing your hands. The blobs of flame and melted metal landed on tree trunks and petered out.

Honestly, it would’ve been cooler if the hawk was still in a condition to fight. It wasn’t just their wings that were out of commission. Melting pockmarks ran riot across their body. Still the hawk was giving me a determined glare. They wobbled toward me on feet just strong enough to carry them forward, and with a Skill-less beak and claws, they moved to bite and rend.

Great! I switched to more of a wrestling mode. Wrestling was close enough to playfighting that it always served as a good time to experiment, a safer way to test my limits. All the better if the hawk was now kinda-sorta willing to walk into their own demise.

The Attack and muscle strength of the hawk was probably equal to mine…or would’ve been on a good day, at least. After some scuffling, tumbling, and cringing as I rolled onto those feathers in my back (ouch!), I got my back legs onto the hawk’s chest and flung them straight into a rock. The hawk’s eyes went wide open. Then the animal fell face-first in the grass, the battle won.

Victory! EXP: 89% (3996/4500)

HP 31% (265/855) SP 1% (5/820)

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the burst of EXP that made me feel good about the win. It was the reminder of that 1 percent SP.

Wandering over to the hawk, I found that they were still breathing, however slowly. Already the feathers and flesh were regrowing—in real time?! This was probably what happened when I went to sleep, but I hadn’t expected the healing process of creatures in the Vencian Wood to be so…visible.

Then I backed away, and looked around. I’d been unintentionally defending someone in this fight, right?

Seconds passed. Then a chittering started. One young squirrel, followed by several others.

Half a dozen animals came out of the torn-up bushes, five adults surrounding a child. The band of squirrels stayed well away from the hawk, but as I approached them, they didn’t flinch. Instead, they looked steadily at me, watching with what I decided was respect.

I’d once vowed to have a squirrel rematch here, but maybe that wasn’t so big a priority anymore.

Change name of SQUIRREL REMATCH?

Yeah, of course.

Name changed from “SQUIRREL REMATCH” to “Squirrelhawk Haven.”

Kind of made it sound like squirrel-hawk hybrids lived here, but it didn’t matter, I knew what I meant.

***

When I was close to Reed’s cabin again, it was barely scratching evening. I was panting again from another long run. Or, well, I’d wanted it to be “one” long run, but the landscape was so varied that I’d done a lot of ducking and dodging, stopping short of crashes, and failing to pivot in time before spotting a fall too big to make in a simple jump and yet too short for me to reliably land on my feet.

It had still been a workout. Even if I hadn’t gained any EXP since defeating the steel hawk, I had hopefully gained a little bit of the normal, brain-and-muscley kind of experience.

To my surprise, I smelled the cabin before I saw it. Mercifully, that rank old garbage smell was long gone, replaced by the mere hint of garbage that told me nearby raccoons were still receiving their tribute. No…more than that, I smelled pastries.

Chocolate. Frosting. Caramel. Buttercream.

Surely a cat couldn’t eat any of these things. And yet, as I dragged my still-panting body through the thicket, I wondered if I could find a way. Tap the surface of a donut with my tongue, then spit it right back out. That couldn’t hurt me.

I sat down. A long fantasy of trying that bewitching chocolate for the first, oh-so-fleeting time wafted through my mind—

Message from Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata Please never eat chocolate.

I smiled a devilish smile.

Wow, Sierra, I thought you were supposed to be smart or something! Turns out you’re just a gullible loser, I thought-beamed through the Goddess Hotline, and by bullying your own nekomata surrogate children, you take out your insecurities on others!!

Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata has disconnected.

AND THAT’S PROOF!

Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata has reconnected.

Message from Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata Ha! Just kidding. I just left for a second because I thought it’d be funny and that you might appreciate the win. Bravo!

Like I believe that.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

So you’re trying to direct-not-direct me to this dungeon where your friend is being held captive, right? What’s the—

Wow, why would I answer the questions of someone who freely insults me and didn’t even create me? It’s not like you can strike me down at any moment.

Um… I shifted uncomfortably. I do this because being nice to you doesn’t usually get results.

…Y’know, usually the nekomatas I’d summon would be harsher and more resistant than you. I tended to pick either the cat equivalents of alpha wolves or the snarkiest-and-yet-laziest housecats.

You, though…you have it in you to be genuinely nice, and (here’s the difference) you know it.

You’re like the most naïve and least intelligent catgirl I’ve ever launched into existence, and the kindest, and there’s really not much more of value I can say to you.

Except that I get genuinely frightened when you even threaten to eat chocolate. Geez.

I squinted, fully aware that I was squinting into a box, which was tantamount to squinting into thin air. But…you’d just bring me back to life?

Once, maybe! Or even twice! But Arkmagus powers have a limit, and if you happen to like eating literal poison…that means you’ll be dying more than twice.

Inwardly, I decided that I certainly would try chocolate and spit it out. Whether or not Sierra intended to be hyping it up, she really was just hyping it up.

NO

I advanced on the cabin, already envisioning my pastries, my targets.

Lights in the kitchen and the den were already on, beaming a little cheer to the forest around. I walked up to the front door, knocked hard enough with my paw that it could’ve been a knuckle, and meowed loud.

Familiar clacking footsteps came pattering up to the door. Then Bayce flung it open, looking simultaneously tired yet energized—pushing through a desire to nap. “Taipha!” she shouted.

“Taipha!” cried a very Reed-like voice in the busy kitchen. “Come in! Rest! You can sleep upstairs if you need to!”

“Oh, she doesn’t wanna rest,” Bayce cried over her shoulder. Before I could react with confusion, she said, “She just wants to eat some treats, as a coping mechanism, just like the rest of us.”

“Hey, don’t call it that! You can make sweets anytime!”

“That’s just proof that we need constant coping.”

I meowed, opening my mouth exceedingly wide.

“…I’m clearly not holding any treats for you, can you save it for when we’re inside? I know you don’t want me to scritch your uvula.”

I agreed, and she backed away to let me in through the short, thin hall.

The den wasn’t a lumpen lair of pillows and thick blankets like it had been on a certain late night. It was simply a lounge, with a couple of books sitting on either couch. I also glimpsed some larger, grayish papers sitting on the hearth (and luckily not in the fire). Maybe a newspaper?

But I had more interest in veering away toward the kitchen. Seeing certain places on shelves and counters empty where there should have been vases and decorative plates still rankled me, but it seemed Reed had already started replacing what was lost—as well as could be done. A couple of figurines I recognized from upstairs had come down, a ram here and a frog there.

Sure, I had a lot of important things to tell them after meeting in private with the shady lepidot, but it could wait just a little bit.

So could that lovely hairpin I found and wanted to give away to someone worthy. Gosh, all these little and massive things I had to remember! But how can you bring up anything when people are making…treats?

Reed was shuffling through the kitchen in a busy flow that Bayce carefully, tentatively reentered…only to come back out a minute later after Reed told her, as politely as possible, that she’d take out that tray because she had the good mitts.

When Bayce emerged again, she was holding a cupcake in one hand. A chocolate one, with a swirly dollop of frosting on top.

“We just finished these ones,” she told me. “Reed did, um, pretty much everything except the frosting. I’ve got those steady hands.”

I stared. My eyes became like dinner plates.

Bayce stood there, not budging at all.

She smirked, almost the same way I had when my false-but-maybe-not-so-false fantasies of eating this very same chocolate coaxed Sierra out of hiding. “Are you gonna ask for it?”

“Bayce,” Reed called out, “don’t you know most animals are allergic to chocolate? That’s why we made the rolls!”

The witch slapped a hand to her forehead. “Oh, shoot! I forgot! No, we’re not killing you tonight.” Immediately she flung the entire cupcake into her mouth, paper and all.

I would’ve assumed she did that with perfect comic timing on purpose, just to goad me further, but the way she ran upstairs not even waiting for my reaction…suggested otherwise.

When she returned, it was with a few surprises. One was a box of things like tiny index cards. The other was a guitar, which she held at one end like a bludgeon.

“Here,” she said, squatting before me and cradling the box in both hands. I sniffed the rows of cards below me. A baffling flood filled my nose—something like a feast. “You can’t eat it, but you can try it. Sorry, we didn’t want you to feel left out, and I really messed up.”

I shook my head lightly, and looked into her face with compassion.

As she pulled out a brownish card that, as I now realized, was about the size of a human tongue, my mind was already running to distant planes, to scarcely imaginable islands of flavor.

Bayce pulled out the chocolate card, held it out to me so I could bite down and take it, and as it dissolved, revealing its secrets…

Okay, the real joke was the idea that I liked sweet things. Or could even tolerate them.

Being a nekomata for as long as I had…adapting bit by bit to Vencian human culture…it was apparently all for naught. It couldn’t make me like chocolate.

At first, I just winced. The wince was so deep, so bracing, that it stretched my lips painfully across my teeth. I had to fidget just to distract myself from the chocolate flavor: a nauseous cloud of sweet on a foundation of bitter, a pang of milk that only struck me as sour, a maelstrom that, that…

Something inside of me shifted. My throat shuddered.

I needed to get upstairs or onto the lawn as fast as possible, and yet my limbs, though they kept me standing, had practically turned to jelly.

“Ecch!” I rasped. “Ecch! Yecch!”

Bayce reacted with utter terror—and paralysis! The worst thing possible! “Oh god, what’s happening?” she murmured.

Perhaps my deepest regret in this moment was having cleaned myself as much as I had. Not because licking the hairs all over my body “is gross” (it’s way less gross than being coated in forest stuff full-time, and layers and layers of it), but because I’d been doing just as much self-cleaning lately as I had when I first appeared in Vencia.

Yet I had never coughed up a hairball once.

And now a hairball of astounding size was being set free, thanks to the stomach-gyrating power of the horrific chocolate taste.

“Ecch! Yecch! Eargh!”

Bayce, without even calling out to Reed, or picking me up so she could toss me in the bathtub, ran up the stairs!

NO, TAKE ME WITH YOU!

I had rarely felt so alone in my life.

A minute later, Bayce “solved” the problem by coming back with a thin towel and sliding it under my chin, in the vomit zone.

No towel would have been thick enough.