No matter how many times Cholera was summoned to the mortal realm, she always found humans baffling. They were overflowing with desires, sometimes even holding multiple conflicting desires at the same time. Yet despite this, they often would simply...not act on those desires for no obvious reason. Occasionally, they would act against their own desires.

Honestly, it was a massive headache. Cholera enjoyed her visits, on the whole, because while the Infernal Abyss was certainly more comfortable than the mortal realm, spending too much time there honestly wasn't very fulfilling; but whenever she was around for more than a few days (which, thanks to her personal proclivities, was a surprisingly small number out of her total visits) the local humans ended up driving her batty.

Despite the fact that her most recent summoning was providing her with everything she'd ever wanted, it didn't change the fact that the humans always had to go and make things weird.

Although her current situation had several confusing aspects to it, Cholera's most pressing issue was that she was being relentlessly stalked.

There were certain things that a demon learned after turning multiple battlefields into charnel houses over the courses of their careers, and one of them was the feeling of being hunted. Cholera herself wasn't particularly interested in playing cat and mouse games in the grand scheme of things, but she had found that after she'd killed a significant enough percentage of the humans in any given conflict there inevitably came a point where both sides either started to flee or else banded together to fight back against her.

In those situations, it was sometimes better to foster a feeling of hope in her pursuers by ignoring them and mercilessly cutting down their fleeing brethren, because it gave them a sense of accomplishment and sometimes resulted in a last-minute rally against her, which ultimately extended the amount of time she could spend killing people. Cholera wasn't particularly familiar with human vernacular, but she believed this was what was known as a win-win scenario.

Maybe. She might need to ask Jonathan about that, actually, because she wasn't sure if "win-win" implied that one side was going to actually win or if feeling like they might win was sufficient. Maybe it worked because she effectively got to win twice? Food for thought.

In any case, when she realized she was being hunted, Cholera's first instinct was to pretend ignorance while she observed her hunters.

This was thankfully easy to do, thanks to her unique eyes. When she first manifested in the mortal realm so long ago, Cholera had some trouble with her eyes. They provided her with a fantastically wide field of view, and were so sensitive to movement that she could track nearby movement with a level of precision that was clearly impossible with boring human eyes.

Well, either that or all humans were incurably clumsy. Which on second thought was entirely possible, based on the things she'd seen people do.

In any case, the trouble was that while her vision gave her an almost godlike awareness of her immediate surroundings, she couldn't see much of anything that was too far away and after several summonings it became clear that she also couldn't see the world around her in as much detail as humans. That wasn't a huge problem for her preferred activities, but it did make it somewhat awkward when trying to do things like tell different humans apart…which could matter a lot; was it the third summoner she accidentally killed, causing her abrupt banishment back to the Infernal Abyss, that made her look for solutions? It was hard to remember sometimes.

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Thankfully, back in those days humans were still summoning demons en masse for their cute little battles, and Cholera had a chance to talk to an eyeless demon who had run into similar problems with their use of echolocation and the demon gave her a tip: if a human desired it, she could intentionally modify her own capabilities to a certain extent.

It took a bit of trial and error, but eventually Cholera had stumbled on the secret: specialized lenses. She couldn't change her eyes completely—nor did she have any desire to do so—but she could tweak the individual lenses that made them up up to create specialized groups of lenses for viewing details at different distances, clustering others to improve the level of detail she could see, and more.

In the here and now, she tilted her head slightly to widen her field of view, and started flitting through the some of the specialized lens groups she had clustered around the outer edge.

This had caused no end of headaches—quite literally—when she was first training herself to do it, but the payoff had been worth it. A series of images flickered past her awareness as Cholera paid attention to each individual lens group for a split second before moving on: a vertical line of shadow separated from light with a slight bump, a literal fly on the wall—hmm, she'd need to clean there later—what appeared to be human hair, a blurry shape peeking around the edge of the hall, several increasingly well-focused snapshots of that same shape, and finally she had the distance correct and started layering on lens groups with a similar focal distance until the image coalesced into one of the children. Based on the hair style and general stature, it appeared to be the child named Yanni.

This was a puzzle. Yanni had been terrified of Cholera and had actively avoided her for some time after she formed a contract with Jonathan. She had thought nothing of it; that was fairly typical response to her presence, after all.

And yet here he was. Well, there was no accounting for humans. They were all crazy.

But knowing that still didn't solve Cholera's dilemma, which was what to do about her small-statured hunter.

Her instinct was to either attack him, or pretend ignorance until he got closer and attack him then, but aside from the fact that she was contract-sworn not to harm Jonathan's contractors, she surprisingly didn't want to. After all, Yanni was a single living organism, give or take this "gut biome" that Jonathan had mentioned—which she was very interested in learning more about—and there were thousands of easier victims on the wall immediately in front of her. She'd slain so many bacteria in her days here in the orphanage that she'd experience entire minutes where she didn't actually feel like killing anything at all.

It was really uncomfortable.

She could do something to try and scare the boy a little in hopes that he would leave her alone to get along with her mass murder of microscopic organisms, but since he had started so terrified that he couldn't bear himself to even look at her…maybe that would backfire.

On the other hand, she didn't dislike the attention, really. It wasn't harming her ability to viciously clean every surface she could reach—and some she couldn't—so perhaps she would simply play ignorant for a little while and see what the child did.

She just hoped he didn't turn out to be like the young human Chris. She had never met such a voluble human in her existence. It was exhausting, although she had admittedly learned many useful things about the Way of the Maid which had made his attention not wholly arduous.

Out of curiosity to see what would happen, Cholera turned with exaggerated slowness toward where Yanni was peering around the wall. She could see him the entire time, of course, since her field of vision was much wider than a human's, but like most humans he didn't realize this and only whisked away out of view as she was halfway towards facing him.

Despite his laggardly attempt to obscure himself, however, he was perfectly silent.

Hm. As Chris had informed her, a great maid could be seen, but should not be heard. A lot of the things that Chris had said sounded like typical human craziness, but that was sound advice that she honestly wished someone had told her back in her early days in the mortal realms.

Perhaps Yanni showed some promise.