You work hard your entire life and then you die.

Such is life.

Lots of people believe in some sort of afterlife, whether it be a place where the dead go after they pass on, or in reincarnation. Some believe in cessation of existence. And me?

Well, I didn't much care what happened after we lived, I mostly cared about what happened during the time that we lived. So when the end came to me at the end of a smoking gun, I didn't really think about whether I'd ever open my eyes again, I just closed them and regretted only that I couldn't do more before I got a taste of my own medicine.

"Listen to this, Kuro! Today in class, Yoshiko just could not stop talking about her new older boyfriend!"

So you can imagine my surprise to find that there was indeed an 'after' life, and that mine, in particular, happened to take the form of a domestic animal. A cat, to be precise. A cat that had been abandoned by its own mother, and which had come perilously close to ending as abruptly as it came, were it not for the young girl walking into the room who had rescued me from death's door.

Her name was Marina, and she gave me the name Kuro because of my nearly uniform black fur. Somewhere around nine or ten years old, honestly hard to be sure since she hasn't told me how old she is and the Japanese school system is as alien to me as my country's would be to her, so I could only guess.

If I could ask her, I would, but as it turns out a cat has many advantages, a complex voicebox capable of reproducing human speech is not one of them.

"And she just wouldn't stop talking about how she was totally the cutest girl in class because she was the one he asked out! She's getting too big for her shorts just because some online star asked her out!"

My ears perked, and I stood from the cushion I had been lounging on. Shaking my body to get limber, I took a few tentative steps, touching onto the cool ground, then jumped off the cushion. I was lucky that I had grown reasonably quickly, because I went from the pathetic weakness of a little kitten to the grace of a grown cat in a mere few months under Marina's care.

As Marina put her bag beside her desk, she took out a workbook and put it on top of her desk, while I took my sweet time, leaping onto her bed, the mattress barely denting with my weight, and stepped over the bulge in her sheets where she had forgotten to move one of her plushies when she made the bed, and jumped onto her desk, almost knocking over a cup filled with pencils and fancy pens.

I also discarded the urge to bat at it with my paw, no matter how much noise and movement it made. I really did not expect just how intensely enticing the sight of small things moving quickly would be, I knew cats chased small things but I didn't think it was going to haunt me so much. I sat, brought one of my paws to my mouth, wet it with my tongue, and wiped at my face, before looking at her, trying to let her see I wanted her attention.

Marina, ever attentive, turned her look at me. Most of the world was dull during bright light conditions, but her shining blue eyes were something I could never ignore. It was the primary reason why I never left after I gained strength, her eyes are the only beautiful thing I've seen in this world.

"What is it Kuro?" she asked, tilting her head. "Do you also think Yoshiko is being too annoying?" she asked, raising her hands to grab my paws.

Marina's touch was soothing most of the time, but I find myself not particularly enjoying her affinity for my paw pads, as she takes my paws in her hands and forces me to balance on my hind legs, while she plays with them and presses her thumbs onto my paws, giggling as she does.

"Mrow..."

Luckily, she seems to understand that I don't particularly enjoy this act, so she lets me go after a few moments.

"Sorry Kuro, your paws are just so soft, they're the best, I can't get enough of them," she gushed, giggling as I cleaned off my paws from her unwashed hands. "Ahh, it's just- it feels like you can understand me sometimes, Kuro," she said, patting my head and scratching behind my ears, a place I normally cannot comfortably reach nor scratch as well as a human finger with a fingernail can.

I let her know how I enjoyed this by purring as she brought her hand forward to let me rest my chin on her palm while she gave me even better scratches between and around my ears, careful not to actually put her hands in my ears as I'd made clear that wasn't anywhere near enjoyable before.

"Hmhm, it's just weird you know? She started messaging him only like, a week ago, and they promised they'd be meeting in secret, she wasn't supposed to tell anyone, but she couldn't contain herself and blabbed in class, she was bragging all day actually!" she huffed. "Apparently they're meeting somewhere after school tomorrow, she's gonna miss cram school probably..."

Well then... something smells fishy here.

"Ah, but I should really finish my work! I'll get scolded if I don't do it in time!" she said. "Alright!" she said, grabbing her bag and pulling out a pencil case, taking a different pencil despite having quite a few on a cup on her desk, and starting to go through her workbook. "I'll play with you later Kuro!" she said, grabbing me under my front legs and depositing me on her bed.

Seeing as I wasn't going to get anything else out of her, I decided to curl up on her pillow and sleep on things.

Perhaps the best part of my reincarnation is that sleep comes easily, and though it is so light that even the slightest shift in my surroundings can wake me up, I also have an incredible ability to conserve and store energy, and I don't seem to need much in the way of exercise to remain healthy and strong. I suppose I am after all an apex predator in an urban landscape.

I woke to accompany Marina down for dinner, which was, predictably as it was nearly every single day, her sitting alone after setting the table for herself and her parents, eating on her own, cleaning up her dishes and leaving the food ready to be reheated for her parents to eat, before retiring to wash up and sleep, her parents would only arrive several hours later, would eat what she left, and then go to sleep.

Neither of them really seemed to even register my presence anymore. It was good. Better that than complaining about me.

The next morning, Marina's parents woke up first, and were gone before Marina could do more than get dressed to come down to greet them, she only waved at them as her father was picked up by a company car, and her mother took the family's own car to her job.

Not disheartened in the least by not being able to even exchange words with her parents in the morning, Marina cleaned up and prepared to go to school.

"Alright, watch the house while I'm gone, okay Kuro?" she commanded, as I sat in front of the steps that lead to her house. The hilly town had a lot of streets and houses on inclines, and Marina's house was one of them. The school was at the bottom of the hill, and Marina would put on her in-line skates and skate down that hill to get to school, sometimes joined by one of her friends who lived down the hill closer to school, and sometimes not.

However, I didn't wait in the house as she asked me to. Instead, I waited until she had turned to look forward, dutifully checking to make sure she wasn't bothering anyone by rollerblading down the hill, and then I used my superior cat agility, dexterity and speed to climb up the dividing wall that kept the large houses from touching each other and then leaped onto the next house over's tiled roof. The very traditional japanese look of the area came to my aid, because it gave me plenty of surfaces to jump and leap across buildings where Marina wouldn't be able to see me follow her to school.

I managed to sneak into school by jumping from a building past the wall that enclosed the school's grounds, it was an old and large building, a combined elementary, middle and high school from what I understand, hundreds of students across its many levels, though in theory it was three separate schools and had three separate buildings, they shared the sports facilities and a large auditorium.

Honestly it made me jealous that I attended a boring old school with none of that when I was young.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But that aside, the winding design of the school made it a little difficult to track my owner, though I eventually did find her, and I found her classroom just in time to catch who I believed to be Yoshiko bragging about having a date with a popular online personality.

Hm. I wouldn't really know if she qualified as cute. Even as a human man I hadn't much cared, my sense of aesthetics had always been quite poor, and as a cat, well, I have to admit, all humans just look big, clumsy and dumb to me, and I can definitely say her eyes are as dull as anyone else's. The school was a very old building but it had been modernized haphazardly, the very tall ceiling had been lowered and that created a crawl space too small for humans to fit in, but large enough for me and that rat I killed on the way to Marina's classroom, and my claws were just about strong enough to lift the panels to let me take a good look at the classroom.

Once I had a good grasp of her smell, I retreated, and waited until school finished for the day.

It was time to move and act. Rather than follow my owner home, I instead found my way out of the walls of the school, finding I could climb rough walls with the same ease I do the bark of trees, and followed Yoshiko, as she wandered away from school and into a somewhat rougher part of town.

Immediately upon hearing it, I knew what was going on.

Looking down from the roofs, I watched as Yoshiko walked to a somewhat secluded park, which made it easier to follow her as the trees in the park were closer together than the houses, and after a few moments, she sat on a bench and waited, while I climbed up the tree immediately behind the bench, and onto the branch directly above it.

As I suspected, it only took minutes for things to start going bad.

While Yoshiko was bringing up her phone - even little kids had smartphones these days, what had the world come to? - someone approached her, and it was someone Yoshiko clearly was not expecting, because she reacted with surprise when the man cleared his throat. He was a forty-something, overweight and almost comically ugly man, with ridiculously fat cheeks and beady eyes.

"Hey lil' lady, you waiting for someone?"

Yoshiko hummed. "Yes! I'm here with my boyfriend actually!" she said.

"Oh really?" the man asked. "Man, girls are sure blooming early these days, in my day," he huffed, clearly moving with some effort due to how fat he was, then he sat down beside her, pulled out his own phone, and showed a picture of her. A picture of her that was extremely inappropriate. "Well, if a girl was caught sending these sorts of pictures back in my day, her life would be ruined... what do you think'll happen to you if I send this picture to everyone at your school?"

"N-No! How could- where'd you get that!? There's no way, you-"

"Hihihi," the man snorted almost like a pig, "you sent it to me, silly girl, did you really think someone as famous as Baraou has time for someone like you?" he taunted her.

"B-But, how!? You- it was you, you were pretending to be Baraou all along!" she accused.

"Right in one!" the man laughed. "And now, you're gonna do everything I tell you to," she said, "if you don't want me to send all those amazing pictures you sent me and spread them all over your school- I'm gonna have so much fun with you..."

His voice was hungry, his eyes roved over her body, and he leaned over her, pushing her aside and almost off the bench as she recoiled in horror.

Well, I'd had enough of that.

One thing I hadn't mentioned?

I didn't just grow far faster than I'm supposed to, and I didn't just have an adult cat's grace and strength.

I'd say I'm quite a bit stronger than that, and the reason I could climb walls as easily as a tree is because my claws had no problem finding purchase in brick, mortar or concrete. So it's really not surprising that I have no trouble cutting through even a thick tree branch, doing it with a single swipe of my claws.

And the fake 'Baraou' had gone and sat directly under the branch I was seated on top of. For a man like me, this was simply too good of an opportunity not to take it.

The thick branch was about as thick as my entire torso, and quite heavy, and even though I didn't add much weight, I still rode it on the way down as I landed with the full weight of the limb of the tree I had just cut onto the back of the man's head. I hadn't noticed, but he was also balding, geez, reunite all the stereotypes why don't you?

He didn't even have time to protest as I struck him and knocked him down, and with a kick of all four of my legs, I managed to hit the right timing to send the man and the branch away, kicking him off the bench and jumping off of the mess just in time to avoid getting splashed by the blood that burst from the back of his head.

The crashing noises alerted the girl, who in terror threw herself off the bench, though I was certain she would've been safe if she stayed still, in her panic, she scratched herself a little, scrapping her knees and likely hurting her hands as well.

"Meow."

The girl's panic seemed to be cut by the absurdity of my entirely nonchalant meow, then I batted at the still unblocked cellphone. The screen was cracked, of course, it had fallen quite harshly after all, but more important than that...

"A-A cat?" she said, "wait- his phone!"

It seemed that I was right to bring attention to it, because she was clearly smart enough to realize what she had to do, grabbing at the phone and immediately deleting the pictures of her off of it, however, she quickly realized there were more. "T-There's so many, and, there's- different girls," she said, "I probably should give this to the police..."

"Mrow."

I couldn't quite say 'you should' as I wanted to, but I could agree in spirit.

"I- I need to call the police!"

Smart girl. That was good.

I wet my paw with my tongue and wiped some of the dirt that had gotten on me when I climbed the trees to follow her sneakily, before turning around and starting to leave.

However, as I began to leave...

I felt a chill down my spine, and I turned around just in time to see the guy that I thought knocked out or possibly dead suddenly getting up, muscles and fat bulging, the sound of ripping and tearing cloth heralding him bursting out of his clothes as he grew massively in size.

His skin turned a bright red color and he tossed the large branch off his head, swiping his hands as he roared and seemingly attacked blindly, shattering the wooden bench, Yoshiko screaming in terror and fainting, and one of the man's enlarged hands swiping just where I'd been, and by the way his fingers fused into his hand and his arms became long and multi-jointed tendrils that ended in spikes of bone...

I clearly wasn't looking at a human anymore.

His growls became more animalistic by the second and more tendrils burst from his skin.

Perhaps... I am not the only unusual being around. Though seeing what this man became after death, I'd say I definitely got the better end of the deal.

He turned to me and attacked me with one of his tendrils. I imagine that to a human, it looked quite fast.

But to me he might as well have been moving in slow motion. Overpowered actual cat reflexes go!

Good thing I dodged too because when the disgustingly slimy, spiked tip of his tendril arm hit the ground where I'd been stood, the paved path that crossed the park, it shattered, the concrete even becoming powdered from the impact, and I immediately began to perform evasive maneuvers.

This isn't looking good as more of his tendrils join the fray, smashing the ground even as I ran and weaved across them, dragging the man away from the unconscious girl even as he continued to grow, becoming a ball of wobbly fat supported on some ridiculously overmuscled legs.

And then, as the tendrils all struck around me, closing off my options to dodge, suddenly, a pink beam cut through the crisp evening air, and cut several of the tendrils, striking the mass of red fat somewhere in the torso and knocked it back, the monster screeching in agony and anger as it fell and rolled.

"In the name of the Healing Hearts, I won't allow you to lay a hand-err, tentacle! on that kitty!"

I turned to face the speaker. Her hair might be pink and she might be wearing a positively ridiculous looking poofy white and pink dress that looked more at home in a ballroom than a park, but there was absolutely no mistaking those blazing blue eyes, shining brighter than ever. That was Marina, and that was the moment I realized...

I'm in a magical girl show. The kind my older sister used to love.

I looked at her, and at the slowly recovering monster, and then I moved out of the way, as Marina rushed forward.

With a trembling roar, the monster got back on its feet and launched a half dozen tentacles towards Marina, but as I moved out of the way, she launched a pink beam at the monster, and annihilated it in a single attack, the red fat and muscle disappearing and leaving only the form of a naked fat man behind, face down on the ground. The wound on his head was healed, which I found to be quite annoying given how lucky I had to get in order to get a clean kill without anybody suspecting anything, but the noise had clearly attracted attention.

I was first to leave, but I saw Marina wasn't far behind.

She was at least smart enough to run away farther away from the direction of her house, rather than going towards it. probably searching for somewhere secluded to transform back. It gave me enough time to arrive to her house before she did.

As she arrived home, she proceeded to tell me all about how boring her day had been, but she seemed extra touchy and affectionate, and didn't even mention that she had been unusually late to arrive.

I don't think she was aware that the cat she had rescued from the monster was me, in the poorly lit park, she had just seen a black cat, and I am hardly the only black cat in the world.

At least, thanks to the excitement of the day, Marina didn't even last long enough awake to worry about the fact that her parents once again failed to show up for dinner, coming home late and not even checking up on her as she slept in her room.

Still, this bears further investigation.

Marina is a magical girl... and I'm starting to feel, it's no coincidence that she happened to find me in my hour of need.

Either way...

Today was a good day. One less monster walks the earth, and I'm not talking about the raging monstrosity with spiked tentacles. But this has only served to remind me. My break was long, but... there is no rest for the wicked.

And I'm quite wicked indeed.

Time to get back in the swing.

Oh, I never did say what I did before I reincarnated as a magical girl's cat, did I?

You see...

Before I died, I used to search for those that would abuse children, and, well... you saw what happened to the fatso back there didn't you?

As I slept in Marina's room, I wondered if there was any greater meaning to me reincarnating as her pet, of all things. Was I meant to be her mascot, like in those shows? Had whatever authority controls this afterlife seen my work, and thought it good enough to be given a second chance?

Whatever the case may be...

I'm not wasting this opportunity to continue my work.

After all... I'm the cat here, if I don't deal with the vermin, who will?