Marina's status as a magical girl didn't weigh too heavily on me really. What can I say?

What can I do about it? Nothing, that's what. My commitment to make the world a safer place for her to exist in won't change, but she didn't seem to particularly need my help to handle her business, and to be honest, she's been completely normal and not even mentioned it several days after the event.

What I can confirm, is that her little friend doesn't appear to remember the events that led to her almost getting assaulted. That's for the best, I suppose - I'd rather she not have to carry that in her memory.

I do, however, need to find something to do, and I have to find something that fits me.

According to the law, I am not a good person.

Mostly because I am a cat.

And also on account of my most favorite hobby in the world and my self assigned mission, but mostly the cat thing really. And speaking about being a cat, while eating, sleeping and stretching my legs is a life that I realize most people would envy, I am not satisfied with just that. Not when I've been reawakened. Not when I realize there are still monsters to hunt.

There are still predators who must be eliminated.

Unfortunately, they are not so easy to find.

In modern day, a lot of things have moved to the digital space, including communications, and along with that, people have discovered a hundred and more ways to hide their activity from prying eyes, to keep in private the things that would have them sought and destroyed by people for their disgusting, terrible and evil habits.

My paws make a very light noise as I walk, and I know humans can't hear it. As long as my claws are retracted, I'm quite stealthy in almost any environment, in the dark. The tiles that make up the roofs of most of the traditional structures in this town are a little slippery in the early days of the morning, wet from the morning dew that gathered upon them, the condensation from the night's chill.

But even so I can easily make my way across the roofs. I don't attract looks, cats walking about and jumping from dividing wall to dividing wall, from the wall to a roof, climbing easily up a wall. Nobody looks twice at me except those who simply like the sight of cats, which aren't few by any means.

But what's most important is that none pay attention to my movements nor do they think twice about the fact that I'm actively following someone.

A young man, in his early twenties if I had to guess. He stands out for sure, and if I had to guess, he is probably a member of the local gathering of thugs, which fancies themselves mafiosi, or Yakuza as they call them in this country. I've heard of these criminals, had my dealings with the Italians back in my home country, would rather not repeat them if at all possible, and I don't have any love for these knockoffs of organized crime pretending to be something they are not.

I've got it on good authority, those in authorized crime won't touch the stuff these people are peddling with a ten foot pole. Racketeering, vandalism, drug dealing, even murder, they would not bat an eyelash at, but none of the families back home, and I have a suspicion none of the families this far east, would ever find themselves peddling diddler feed.

And as for how I had found the man I'm following?

It might sound bad, but, well, I just followed a little girl in a park. Hey, it's fine for me to do it, I'm a cat. It's not fine for some twenty year old dude to stare intently into a playground for children where a bunch of little girls are playing around.

At first, I had thought him just a pervert, but seeing how different he is from the average man in the area, I decided to start paying some more attention. His hair is bleached blond, he packs quite a bit more muscle than the average and he has scarred knuckles, plus he dresses flashily, always with a button up and blazer but wearing ill-matched running shoes instead of the appropriate shoes to wear with such a getup.

He had some friends who were similarly thuggish, though they tended to wear more normal clothes, which marked him as something of a leader visually, and well, he was also the 'leader' in their little business.

And that business involved taking candid pictures of little girls somehow, which is the reason why I started following this man more intently, every time Marina went off for school or when she went to sleep, I'd set out and search for this man. I might not be a dog who can detect and follow someone across the city, but I'm more than sufficienty to find, track and follow a man who uses a tad too much cologne.

I've gathered enough information and today seemed to be my lucky day, because I finally learned what their organization was about as I tracked him down to a meeting point at a seemingly abandoned and closed down business, which had a large deposit building behind it. The group of thugs totaled five, and they were all present, near the center of the warehouse.

It was separated into four sections, and had four entrances, two large ones on what I assumed were the front and back, with huge shutters covering large doors and wide 'hallways', and two with personnel doors, in the middle of the broad side of the storehouse.

Each section was slightly different, one full of metal shelves, twelve meters from the floor to the ceiling, all filled with old boxes, rusted items and machinery, old tools and broken bits of technology I couldn't identify. one of them full of wooden boxes stacked on top of each other, one with tall shelves but empty, and the last one had a huge number of rusted and water-damaged metal tubes of many different sizes across its shelves.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I'm not entirely sure what this place used to be before, but what it is now, is useful.

After scanning the area, I moved across the tallest shelves near the metallic ceiling and observed what was happening at the middle under one of the few working lights. With the windows boarded up and blocked, the few working lights were the only source of illumination.

Not that it bothered me, if anything, I was more comfortable in the dark building than outside.

Or I would have been if I didn't catch sight of what they had brought into the building.

There was a setup in the middle for crude, homemade movies, and not the wholesome kind, with cameras, lights and a steel bed with a yellowed, dirty mattress.

On the mattress was a young girl, about Marina's age if I had to guess, and she had her hands tied, her mouth and eyes covered and her legs shackled to the bed. She was wearing only what looked to be her pyjamas, she had probably been kidnapped while wearing them, her long dark hair was frizzy and messy, she had bags visible under her blindfolded eyes and it became increasingly evident that she wasn't there of her own volition.

I didn't need to be told twice what was going to happen to her, should I not intervene.

So intervene, I would. The first thing I had to do was call attention off of her. And that meant doing something that caught the five monsters' attention... luckily, I had plenty of things I could do that would cause noise. I walked along the tall shelves and looked for something sufficiently light, but made of metal, and the tubes held the answer. I had to be swift, and luckily I could just run and leap along the shelves, they were close enough for that, and I could easily cover the gap separating the section I was in with the one with the tubes by walking along the metal rafter things that these old storehouses used, which supported the metal roof on top.

Once I was where I wanted to be, and taking one last glance to see that they were fiddling with the filming equipment, I approached one of the smaller tubes and pawed at it, making it roll until it dropped off the shelf.

It sounded like a fucking bomb went off. It was so loud as it hit the ground that I felt it in my bones. The quiet of the storehouse was broken alright, and one of the guys straight up jumped in fright, while another drew a knife, while blazer guy, my primary target, removed his sunglasses and started to scan the area.

They zero'd in on the rolling metal tube, which carried enough momentum to roll despite having become quite a bit less round from the impact.

My ears stopped ringing and I caught what they were saying.

"Something just fell," Blazer said.

Camera Man nodded. "Y-Yeah, just- that scared the shit out of me."

"Shut up, focus on the girl, the client was very particular."

Not enough yet I see. I can't just go in and start trying to slice them to ribbons, even if my claws might be able to do it, if one of them takes the girl hostage then it would defeat the point of attempting to rescue her from her fate in the first place. No, I have to split them up.

And pronto, because the biggest, fattest and ugliest guy of the lot, alongside the second ugliest but not by much, who was as skinny as the first guy was fat, both started to remove their clothes, leaving them in white shorts and sleeveless shirts, while at the same time they were fiddling with masks that covered the upper half of their faces.

The urge to just jump down and claw their faces off rose, but I held it in.

Instead, I just knocked another tube down, and tried to close off my ears, but it still stunned me more than a bit to be subject to that explosion of noise.

I almost fell off, and it became immediately obvious that I was getting their attention this time, because they immediately began looking around, this time three of them were brandishing knives as they started to walk towards where I was, while the two dudes in their underwear stood guard near the filming set.

I led the three with knives deeper by knocking more tubes off as I retreated, and they immediately began to sprint towards me, even as my entire body trembled and was wreaked by agony due to the intense noises, I forced myself to keep moving.

However, it was too much, and I slipped off the shelf, and only my reflexes allowed me to catch myself, bouncing between the two rows of shelves, and eventually touching down safely, though my paws definitely didn't like that.

"Gotcha bitch!"

"Wait, it's a cat?!"

Blazer jumped at me with a switchblade type knife in hand and-

And then he was knocked to the ground, landing in a heap, and I realized the other two had been knocked into the shelves and didn't seem to be moving.

"Good job, kitty," the girl with long dark hair I had seen before spoke.

I turned to look at her. In the penumbra of the unlit section, she was hard to make out, but what I could definitely see was the blazing red of her eyes, so similar, yet so different, from Marina's, a terrifying kind of beauty, the eyes of a hunter.

Her pajamas were exchanged with a black bodyglove and a set of black armor over it, not too dissimilar from the armor worn by modern law enforcement, a vest looking like it was made out of kevlar but with shoulderpads on it, and armored combat boots, fingerless gloves and vambraces. On one hand, she held a long bladed spear, a Naginata I believe, and the other was extended towards me.

"I'll get you out of here kitty," she said. "But next time, try not to mess with a Dark Heart's business, alright?"

Her voice was soft.

Once again, I'm involved in this magical girl business.

This is the second time I've found a Magical Girl, I believe, involved in this whole thing. Is it a coincidence? Or is there something afoot?

The girl clicked her tongue. "Too late... Run away now, kitty!" she shouted.

Glowing bright red lights sprouted from behind her, and I knew immediately that the people she had either knocked out or killed, didn't really care which myself, were already starting to mutate into the same kind of monster I had seen before.

Alright then.

I suppose I'll have to take this magical girl business a tad more seriously.

I would remember this girl... something tells me she's probably got a lot more information than Marina does, she seems to be a lot more well put together. I'm more than convinced this entire thing was a sting operation she set up...

And if my mission happens to coincide with theirs, well, I've never been above cooperation, especially with industry experts.

"Mrow."

She turned to battle, and I retreated to the upper shelves once more, using the agility of my cat body to its fullest extent, observing her movements. Marina fought almost exclusively by firing beams, but this girl was more my speed, slashing at her enemies with her bladed spear, chopping the monsters to bits as she became a swirling whirlwind of movement, her glowing eyes seeming to shine brighter with every monster that she reduced to shredded giblets, even as they grew massively in size, causing them to have trouble moving in the tight confines of the storehouse's shelf hallways.

She was definitely an expert.

I'll have to find a way to approach this girl and learn more about the situation.

Gotta learn what this Heart business is all about, because it appears Magical Girl Business is Serious Business.

Can't help but feel every part of me that has become accustomed to my existence as a cat protesting all the work that I'm sure is coming my way.