Days prior to Vergeltung finding out where John hid, the cat had been questioning people about anything related to the wave of Change. His conclusion had been simple, with how crazy and unique each description was, he thought the survivor had to be drugged. It would explain the warping and twisting of shape often described and mean their foes were manageable. After all, in the cat’s mind, the abominations were all described as breaking things like conservation of mass – an act described only for its esthetic and not its combat prowess. There weren’t the ghastly faces he expected when people retold how one of the abominations changed into a mountain. If it had this capability, what stopped it from first changing into a bird and going above the city to crush it…

Thinking people were drugged, Vergeltung recorded every possible source the drug could have been put into, such as food, water, air… The method he would have used was food. Yes, although it was inconclusive, the introduction of hallucinogens in specific sectors, such as the management of resources or military fields, would have been the path Vergeltung took to attack a sizable city. Still, he found out it was almost impossible to do in this specific city due to its lack of food and almost complete reliance on the food idol installed in the main marketplace, which acted like a granary. This odd mound with a sort of woman-like totem at its top was suspicious at first, but it was under regular testing and maintenance such that every grain of wheat was unsullied. Basically, it would be exceedingly hard to spike this reserve of food that might, in the end, not reach the mouths of important people. Still, this idol couldn’t be absolved of every accusation – Vergeltung knew very well that there was a chance it was the source of what he called a mass hallucination… He simply had a gut feeling that it wasn’t the culprit.

In the end, he found out that the city’s main sources of water all came from a specific river. It wasn’t an option he liked very much, as dumping any kind of drug in this body of water would reduce its potency to nothing. Still, with nothing better to do, he went to take a look with Mafdet, who strangely clung to him that day. Luckily, this meant he was out of the city when the strange sword appeared in the sky.

After that, he found John by pure chance, but found it was obvious that he had a hand in this ordeal. All throughout the conversation he had with this mysterious person, fear, like a cold blade at the back of his head, kept haunting his conscience. His animal instinct told him to run… but there was the young Mafdet by his size.

While he did his best to not incite any confrontation, this was how things ended due to Mafdet. His and John’s clash didn’t last long. The cat, as visually powerful as his flames were, was overpowered after his opponent warded himself from the heat using some odd art. The first trike was just a simple punch that came all too suddenly. Vergeltung avoided it by ducking to the right and followed by waving his large staff – the cat was blown away with his stomach burning up even before his own attack could reach John.

"What happened?!" thought Vergeltung, landing on his four paws about 15 meters away from his original position. He tried to get up but buckled back down in pain. His breathing froze momentarily as his left lung felt like it was under the pressure of a thousand needles. "A rib broke, surely. Pierced my lung… with what attack even?" he tried to whisper out, but the meaning was lost to all but him from his panting and coughing.

Tap Tap Tap Tap

The cat, crouching, heard a sound like naked feet running atop a hard floor and looked up from his belching. John was there, floating rapidly toward him with his neck elongating like a snake. He stomped his staff to the ground – Tap Tap Tap Tap – and created a structure like he had never seen before. All he wanted was to make an aegis, but this…

Bang

The snake-like head connected with a wall of yellow crystal that partly broke off only to allow the head inside. It instantly closed off, sealing John’s head inside the structure. He was like a bull panicking from getting trapped and losing its bodily freedom. There above, the cat who had been propped up by this structure saw a young child running like a beast toward the trapped snake. Her eyes were filled with bloodlust that could only be seen in a hungry predator hunting its prey. Little Mafdet looked nothing like a human and was more like an animal in this instant.

"DIEEEEEEE!!!!" screamed the child who jumped at the back of John’s neck. She dug her teeth as well as her fingers into the man’s flesh while growling viciously.

Vergeltung had the fur on his back rise as a chilling premonition arose in his mind. He tried to leave his post, but his feet, paws, and staff were enclosed inside the same amber-like crystal. Through his limbs, he could feel a strange connection through which information flew from and into his mind. It was as if the structure itself was alive, with each of its particles overfilled with a mystifying essence, almost addicting in nature. He knew that with some focus, he could alter the structure to the point where it could better be called a golem than a structure. With that bad premonition, the cat allowed his consciousness to drown in the structure’s flow of information. A flowery and earthy smell assaulted him before he could do anything. It was like a thousand roots were waiting for his input, and this input of his, it was quite simple, in truth. Not to kill John, whose head was ready to be chopped, but to protect and move the little girl who could never seem to think before acting. He vomited the concept of a sphere expanding and protecting Mafted and felt the flows of information turn this concept into data and, finally, into equations and functions. All that information came back in a pure and refreshing flow… But just before it came to execution, something interrupted the flow of information. It injected data, a lot of it. Vergeltung tried to stop this injection of data and sent a string of consciousness to its source. Once again, the cat was overpowered by the source – this miasma of shifting and changing—which punched through the cat’s string of consciousness. "Ahhhh, so that was how he got me last time," realized the cat.

Light returned to the cat’s eyes – this small confrontation only lasted a fraction of a second – and pain assaulted his brain like a hammer had cracked it open. The structure he was above started to bubble in an unnatural way, as if it was made of many vertexes that were scrambled around randomly without a care for a consistent volume. It was like the embodiment of those abominations, with a waving pattern mixed with dangerous spikes.

"Mafdet!" thought the cat, whose flesh was being torn by the changing structure. He tried to move and screamed as the strange crystal that seemed to be fused to his very flesh was tearing his fur and flesh. Creating this horror was never his intention! A simple shield, followed by a counter, would have done the trick. Or so he lamented for a brief moment before remembering what happened in that world of pure information. He would have been beaten without knowing what happened if he had gotten his way, most likely. "GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" lamented the cat, bloodied and still bound by the structure like his foe.

Tap Tap Tap

"Again, that sound…" cursed Vergeltung before feeling the lightest touch on his spine drowning his brain in misery and pain. This simple touch, it was like a dewdrop falling into a muddied puddle of no importance. So insignificant, yet the rings and waves this dewdrop produced were like a perfect reflection of a sinusoidal wave describing every doubt, pain, sadness, rage, fear, panic, stress, hatred, and more afflictions consuming the cat’s mind, such that the dewdrop’s waves and afflictions all canceled one another. His mind was cleared and returned to its natural investigative nature. He thought, "There, behind me, is someone I know not, helping me. Someone with unknown talents, so unknown that they might be the true creator of this ember structure. If so, why was this done as it was? A dagger hiding beneath a pillow used but to sharpen its wielder? They could have slashed while still in the shadow! Why didn’t they do so? Was it just to show me this horrid man’s true power? To show me this structural world… To make me use the world of pure information…"

The cat’s mind moved at an incredible speed in its state of pure curiosity, and he saw the world around him change. It was as if time was slowed down and all light was pulled into a single point until all was black, with none of his senses seeming to work. None but his nose. Even in this slowed-down reality where light was devoured at a snail's pace, that one distinct smell presented itself for just a fraction of a fraction of a second. The cat wondered what exactly he had smelled and asked himself if this was the thing the unknown person wanted him to smell. As his nose saw something he couldn’t quite understand, he tried to stir his mind to strain his other senses. His ears, tensed at any change, saw what they had to see. Just the lightest fluctuation in waves as molecules pushing molecules to fill a hole where something had been. They, the unknown, were already gone. Yet, with the prickle and warmth left on his back and the fur and flesh displaced, he had truly been touched by something tangible. He tried to feel more with his every fiber what was already gone until light slowly returned to his eyes. It painted a close scene of John, mounted by a beast-like child thrashing around, and whose back was about ready to explode into a flurry of spikes.

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Vergeltung was so close to them, almost able to touch the two of them, almost close enough to pull Mafdet away from death. Even if he wanted to push her out of the way in this slowed-down reality, his body, as opposed to his mind, was bound by the same slowness of the world. He would never reach her in time. He felt a sudden rise of fear and rage, he felt it in his mind, like a body of water disturbed by a stone. "NO!" He focused to dispel those vile feelings. He needed this slow-moving world and a pure, inquisitive mind. "Think! Think! Think!" This was what he had to do. He closed his eyes to the obstructing scene and churned his nose up. That smell, he needed that smell. He focused and threw everything other than his sense of smell into the void. There was nothing around him. He was alone in an empty void, hoping to find a peculiar odor. It was quite hard, as his brain needed to parse every smell from his surroundings. The burnt wood, the upturned earth, the surrounding air, his blood, his matted fur, his own clothing, his transpiration, the wine he drank, the winter’s berries squashed… He parsed everything that wasn’t what he was looking for until something sweet, earthy, and strangely nostalgic entered his nostril. It wasn’t like the almost drowning sea of flowery smell before, but only a minuscule part of it. He focused on this one flowery smell such that it became stronger and stronger and stronger and…

A sense of nostalgia became overbearing for the cat. It was as if he had been there before, but it was impossible. What stood before him was pure emptiness. Emptiness over emptiness; a pure void of nothingness. Whatever that thing was, he needed it. Like how he presented a concept to the strange connections… He tried to think about means to save Mafdet and felt this concept go into the strange void of nothingness, but what returned was as much as what was in front of him: nothing.

"Hello?" he said. The answer was nothing again. He tried to think of every action he could take until it dawned on him that such thinking was useless. He didn’t know how much time he had to save Mafdet; maybe it was already too late. He could back down now to find the exact smell he was introduced to by the unknown being, but time would move forward and make actually finding this smell more of a losing gamble than anything else. At least, now, he had something or nothing in front of him. This void was, after all, a thing in itself. Vergeltung could describe it as nothingness for at least two reasons. One being a comparison with its surroundings, which were all also lacking but just felt less so. If it was such, it could mean that a greater emptiness existed, such that one was overfilled in comparison, and with Vergeltung just unable to comprehend it. The other reason… maybe it was just its intrinsic nature. This emptiness, being a thing in itself, like a compartment with nothing able to fit inside.

"Blasted life," lamented the cat before venturing inside…

⸙

The cat, to his surprise, found himself by a cliff overlooking large, boisterous fields, ready and waiting with anticipation to be harvested. The landscape was painted in a solemn, melancholic hue that was exacerbated by low, trudging winds that caressed the scenery with their only movements. Houses, all empty, were secluded in small pockets that made it easy to work the many fields. On the distant horizon, like a mirage of something that once existed, a city, the greatest the cat ever saw, was just there, laying without its blood to animate it. Not a song of any birds or a call of insects dare prove their existence in this lonesome place.

"Have I seen this place before?" wondered the cat as nostalgia tried to pour from his every pore.

"I suppose…" whispered back something under its breath. The cat turned around to find nothing. There, in front of him, was nothing—not like the nothingness of before, but a nothingness that cannot be understood and just acknowledged. He could see fields of flowers basking in a waning sun, mountains with snowy peaks untainted by any life, and forests that hid within themselves all but what they were. Still, there was a nothingness there, just in front of him, unnoted, unseeable, and simply acknowledgeable of its existence. This, talked with no voice but only with moved ideas inside the cat’s head: "We have all been there once…"

This time, the nothingness was by a large tree, sitting on a swing, in the form of his very own daughter… She was looking down a pasture that would have been perfect for any animal to graze on.

"You…" growled the cat, angry to see something take the form of his child. This one turned its little head toward the father, tears in her eyes. It shocked Vergeltung, as those weren’t the tears someone would have from seeing a loved one after a long time. Or, in fact, those tears would have never come from his daughter. The one he was seeing was simply presenting itself using his daughter’s form, while the one inside… Vergeltung got closer to this being who felt so weak, so little, so fragile, and silently pushed on the swing in this place lacking life.

"Mafdet," said the strange melancholic emptiness, this time in the form of the one they called. "She’ll live." Little Mafdet returned a smile, or at least an attempt at one. "You will ask something like: I want to protect her." This time the emptiness was walking down a rice field in the form of Vergeltung himself.

"And?" responded the real detective. Unable to look at the sad expression of his clone, he turned to his reflection in the water from the patty next to him. He seemed old and tired. His current life had been less than ideal, but…

"You will die," responded the voice of John. Vergeltung tensed and only calmed down after seeing this person, unmasked and with an all too familiar expression.

"Then so be it…"

"NO!" shouted a voice he was familiar with. "My adjutant can’t just die like so!" Vergeltung returned a wry smile at the form of Tsuki, whose movements, intonations, and expressions were all wrong. The clone’s cheek reddened before changing into Hoomaikai’s form.

"Do you think I can survive?"

"Yes…" They were now at sea on a small embarkation. A thin mist laid over the water, not so much as to make it hard to see, but just enough to not be able to see land in the distance if there was some somewhere. With no wave attacking the ship, Hoomaikai’s clone was looking down at the water that offered a reflection of Kanga’s where Hoomaikai should have been. The cat found it curious but waited for this being to say anything, seeing thin lips trembling with hesitation. "My daughter, she’s a fool and will need a noble soul to save her one day…"

"Daughter? Who? Do you mean Hoomaikai by using her form?"

The emptiness looked into the distant mist before changing the scenery again. This time, they were around a dead fire camp surrounded by large hills either made of salt, ashes, sand, or finely crushed chalk. The emptiness was in the form of someone the cat had never seen before yet recognized instantly. "That name, Tsuki, it was here that I imparted it to her." A girl around 25 years old with long black hair and two-colored eyes was hugging her knee while looking at the dead fire. In the ashes was a fish turned to charcoal.

"That one, it’s Tsuki, right? How come you know what she will look like?"

"Yes… My daughter… When she was born, I named her Muto. I didn’t even know who she was when I gave her the name she’s now using… But as for her appearance," the older version of Tsuki returned a teasing smile and said, "It’s the oldest she ever managed to get."

The surroundings changed, and Vergeltung knew the other person wouldn’t give more explanation. That smile, it was as if it was telling him to figure things out by himself. "Were you the one to help me before?" asked the cat, thinking about the strange sounds of someone running around he heard.

"Her?" The emptiness had taken the form of the one who would later help Tsuki and teleport her next to the dying Vergeltung. "Think of her as God. She’s always had a soft spot for small animals like you."

The revelation confused Vergeltung even more. "God?" he asked, and was returned a simple nod. He thought about how the person in front of him had casually taken the form of what they called God as if was the same as any other person. "Then you? Who even are you?"

The scenery changed again to that of a cave inside a forest, and this time, the cat saw someone… someone whose name and description can only fade from those pages...

…

Mother, she didn’t look strong; flesh almost on bone is just a slight exaggeration. She had long hair that almost dragged on the ground and wore the pelt of a bear, as well as a strange headdress that completely covered her facial features… She was blind, after all, and this didn’t impact her much, I guess.

Haaaa… I tried to come up with the best way to describe her that wouldn’t just fade away… This eulogy, I think, is slowly working, as before I wouldn’t even be able to talk about her blindness. As for her name, well, it seems that only one letter out of five can be written at a time after a lot of testing. So, that little emptiness my great and adorable adjutant managed to talk to will go by K until reality starts accepting her once again…