by Nisioisin
Even during Golden Week, it was always around noon when a small bit of Hanekawa as Hanekawa managed to resurface─this aberration’s power and control was overwhelmingly stronger at night. Hmm, that was another thing it had in common with Kanbaru’s monkey.
“Myaa-hahaha!” Black Hanekawa laughed in delight.
It probably didn’t mean anything.
She was laughing for no reason.
She had the intelligence of a cat, too─Oshino had said something about her being missy class president underneath, but it didn’t seem that way to me… In her current state, Tsubasa Hanekawa didn’t seem to have any reverse side.
Actually, no.
This already was Hanekawa in reverse.
If she had any, it’d be her obverse side.
“But what about Oshino standing guard?”
“I’m a cat. Mewving around without making a sound is kitty’s play to me.”
“Now that you mention it…I guess you’re right.”
Oshino was proving to be incredibly useless this time around.
It wasn’t like him.
His odd demeanor when we first arrived at the abandoned cram school and the evasiveness he’d showed thereafter could be attributed to Shinobu’s disappearance (he must have been outside looking for her), but letting Black Hanekawa escape so easily? It seemed unthinkable.
It was right after Shinobu had run away.
He wasn’t the kind of man to make the same stupid gaffe twice in a row.
Wait, don’t tell me he’d done it on purpose… Had he freed Black Hanekawa? Did he tie her up in knots that were only strong enough to keep her there during the day (the Hindering Cat’s words, “clawed myself out of them like it was nothing,” supported the idea) and pretend not to notice as she got away?
She must have pinned down my location simply through her smell and her hearing.
That was how cats hunted.
The question, though, was why she’d come to me after being freed─the reason, not the method. If Oshino had intentionally allowed her to escape, that of course made this yet another instance of things going exactly as he and his know-it-all attitude dictated…
But if so, why?
Another reason I didn’t understand.
One thing I did know was that he’d used a “heterodox” method, or whatever he wanted to call it, to summon the Hindering Cat by force because he “didn’t have time”─because he wanted to talk to it directly. He claimed that she made just as little sense to him as she did to me, but he was a master of self-effacement. Could he have found a hint in her incoherent babble, or at least a trace of one?
“Hey, cat…”
“Myes?”
“……”
I got off my bike, held its handlebars with one hand, and turned to face Black Hanekawa who sat on my back seat, only to involuntarily swallow the words I was about rain down on her.
I was left speechless.
Wow… I could see every curve in her body now that she’d taken off that sweater. I’m talking up the fact that she was in pajamas, but come to think of it, they were just pajamas. Even so, she was impossibly hot. Forget what I said earlier about potentially being twice as happy. I mean, the slightest movement and her breasts were bouncing everywhere. Boingy. Boingy. That onomatopoeia isn’t a sound a human body should ever make. Forget about moving the story forward, forget about narrative coherence, I wanted to throw it all out and spend all night jumping rope with her.
Kanbaru might talk dirty, but Hanekawa’s body…
Plus she had cat ears.
It scared me just to imagine her with black hair.
I understood that physical sex appeal was an absolute necessity for continuing the species, but was there any need to go this far?
“What’s the myatter?”
“A, er─um.”
Then again, she went on her Golden Week rampage in her underwear… This was way easier in comparison. No matter how much of Hanekawa’s memory returned, that one needed to stay erased from her brain for eternity.
“…Um, okay, cat. Repeat after me. ‘Now, the manic maniac mused, mentally mangling mammalian mammaries naturally atrophied.’”
“Meow, the myanic myaniyac mewsed, meowntally myangling myameowlian meowmyaries myaturally meowtrophied.”
“So! Damn! Cute!!”
I’d managed to use my love of cat talk to find a replacement for jumping rope.
A brilliant call, if I do say so myself.
Wait, no.
“I was going to ask you what you’re here for.”
“That must be your way of meowing hello,” she said mockingly. “To purrsent ya with my help, human. Why else would I have come?”
“To─help me?”
“Don’t be mistaken, human─I’m nyot interested in fighting ya any longer. Didn’t I tell ya that a mewnute ago?”
“A minute ago…”
Oh…she meant this morning.
Who calls half a day earlier “a minute ago”? That’s an aberration for you, their grasp on time is just… No, maybe it was best to think of it here as a cat’s intellect being unable to grasp the concept of time.
Plus.
“Did you ever…tell me that?”
“Oh, myabe not. It doesn’t myatter anyway, because I just did. I don’t intend to go on any rampage this time─I’m not in that kind of mewd today.”
“…………”
Could I…believe her?
There was no way I could if I took last time into consideration… But on the other hand, that was the normal way to look at it. Trying to read too much into what this cat said left you looking like a fool.
If she said it wasn’t her intention─then maybe it wasn’t.
And─
If she said she was here to help, then she really was here to help.
“But─why? You’re like…Hanekawa’s stress, right? A second personality she has that manifested to reduce her stress─”
That─was how the nightmare started.
She attacked her parents, she attacked innocent bystanders in town─she went on an unfettered rampage. She was utterly audacious about it, too. It wasn’t quite as bad as the hell that was my spring break in terms of damage─but the Hindering Cat may have surpassed even the vampire in terms of dread. She indiscriminately attacked people with all the drive of an adolescent boy who hid at school until night in order to smash all its windows, unable to hold it in any longer─it was a preposterous stress relief method.
“So don’t get the wrong idea─I still feel like thanking ya. Nyormally it would’ve taken a year to relieve my meowster’s stress, but it only took nine days thanks to you─”
Oh…
So you could look at it that way, too.
Of course, from the Hindering Cat’s point of view─all she cared about was venting Hanekawa’s stress. So no matter how simple, hasty, or efficient the method─it didn’t matter.
To the very end, aberrations─were logical.
“Ah…so you want to find Shinobu as soon as possible, too. You’re saying─our interests align.”
“Purr-cisely.”
“…Okay,” I nodded.
I still had my doubts, but there was no time to hesitate.
“In that case, your help is exactly what I need.”
“Myaa-haha. So you could say that my offer to ya…is the cat’s pajamas!!”
“………!”
The Hanekawa I knew would never look so triumphant over that obvious and stupid of a joke…
But this was Hanekawa’s flipped personality.
It was kind of depressing.
“Well, I’m more interested in your feline senses of smell and hearing. You’ve fought her before, so you ought to know her scent and her voice. All you need to do is track those.”
“Hmm. All righty.”
“I’m going to drive around at random, so let me know if you notice something, okay?”
I got back on my bike.
With Black Hanekawa
on its back seat.
It might be a lie to say that I didn’t have a single wicked thought in my mind at that moment. Okay, it would be a lie. That plump sensation from when I rode with Hanekawa that morning was still fresh in my mind. But my vulgar motives were met with instant karma of the highest order.
“Gah!”
I reflexively fell from my bike, and the momentum caused it to crash to the ground as well. Only one person, no, cat survived, Black Hanekawa, who dexterously sprang into the air, spun, and made a clean landing.
That’s a cat for you. This was no time to be impressed, though.
“Hm? What’s the myatter, human?”
“…Ah, gaah…ah─”
The Hindering Cat hindered in more ways than one.
To give a modern name to a particularly notable characteristic of this type of cat monster, they were able to drain one’s energy. In this way, she was less like a cat monster and more like a succubus, incubus, or ju-rei. She was a lust-besotted cat. An aberration that consumed humans─those she touched found their strength and vitality sucked dry. There was no case of it being bad enough to kill someone─but at the very least, she did send some people to the hospital over Golden Week.
She sent two people to the hospital.
Hanekawa’s parents.
Of course─they were discharged in three days or so.
This was the aberration that had fully embraced me as she sat on my back seat… It was only for a moment, and while you could write off whatever small bit of resistance there was, Black Hanekawa, unlike Golden Week, was now wearing proper clothes, pajamas though they may have been─so I wasn’t sucked dry in an instant, but I was wearing light clothing myself…which meant I took an incredible amount of damage. Just as I thought I had recovered my stamina, it had disappeared again in a flash.
Energy drain.
Still, allow me to say this.
I may have fallen, but I had no regrets!
“……………”
I started to think that I might really be misunderstood if I kept saying those kinds of things… It wasn’t that I was trying to be considerate of anyone in particular, but Senjogahara did have an awfully good sense for it…
You can never be too careful.
“Oh, I get it, human. My myaster’s breasts felt so wonderful you’re writhing with pleasure!”
“I’ll admit that I’m stupid, but you know, you’re pretty stupid, too…”
Did she not understand her own abilities?
The Hindering Cat’s ability to drain energy was always-on, activating whenever direct contact was made. It had nothing to do with the cat’s intentions…
“Well, human, if you’re that despurrate for it, I’ll let ya myassage these breasts if we can agree to some conditions.”
“Stop trying to sell your master’s chastity, you lustful cat.”
“One pack of bonito flakes a go!”
“What a bargain!”
It was such a cheap price to pay for Tsubasa Hanekawa’s chastity! If that was really the offering price, I’d pay sixty years’ worth up front for an exclusive contract!
“What’s the myatter? Then one catnip…no, one cat food!”
“Change the unit all you want, it won’t matter. You need to say a number bigger than one! Or can you only count that high?!”
Hmm.
What a strange feeling.
I was conversing normally with someone I could have died fighting over Golden Week, not too long ago… Then again─aberrations were all about how you approached them. How you dealt with them…I guessed.
“You’re kind of a nyasty person, treating me like an idiot… Fine then, human! It’s time to decide who’s the bigger idiot!”
“Why would I want to do something that pointless?!”
“The event will be a match of shogi!”
“If two idiots faced off in a serious shogi match, the result would be so lame it’d hurt to watch!”
Shogi chess.
As far as contests of skill that everyone knows how to play but few have mastered, shogi was right up there with baseball in Japan.
“Hmm. Then how about this? A game where whoever pawses a stopwatch at purrsisely one second wins!”
“How dull can you get?!”
And wait.
You couldn’t measure intelligence that way.
I picked my bike up off the ground… Trusty old granny bike that it was, it was oddly sturdy, suffering only a bent basket. Nothing was broken.
“All right,” I said, “I think we should walk around looking for her together after I park my bike somewhere around here… It’ll be slower going, but we’d be more thorough that way. Okay?”
“Meow.”
“Her blond hair won’t make her any easier to find with human eyes now that it’s this dark out…so I’m counting on you, okay?”
“Count on me!”
I began walking, pushing my bike along. Black Hanekawa followed behind me…no, she overtook me and walked in the front, as if to lead. She really was a stupid cat… Maybe some instinct made her want to run past anything that moved.
The cat and the aberration were inseparable─apparently.
In that sense, I could call the cat monster the easiest aberration of all to understand─it was definitely the best-known one I had encountered until that point, aside from vampires. Well, I got cat monsters in general, but I, with my limited information, hadn’t heard of the identifier that was “Hindering Cat” until Golden Week.
Hmm, but I wondered… What would it look like if an objective bystander saw me walking alongside Black Hanekawa? A high school boy walking alongside a young, cat-eared maiden…how would they see me? No one could ever think the cat ears were real, and walking around in her pajamas was way better than walking around in her underwear, but… Maybe it would’ve been a good idea to head back to the abandoned cram school for now to grab her hat and sweater.
Then again, putting clothes on any beast, not just a cat, was a Herculean undertaking… It was a miracle in itself that she hadn’t taken off those pajamas…
Oh, whatever.
It wouldn’t mean anything to worry about it now.
There were already rumors about me walking arm-in-arm with Suruga Kanbaru, our second-year star. Adding a rumor about me walking around with a cat-eared beauty to that didn’t really change anything. I could deal with Kanbaru and Hachikuji, and though it’d be hard to come up with an excuse to tell Sengoku, you know, what happens happens. Our top priority now was to find Shinobu.
It was Hanekawa’s honor I was concerned for if anything. Then again, the pajamas might just barely pass as street clothes, plus she had her glasses off, and she had a different hairstyle, and most importantly her hair had changed from black to white. No one would think I was with Hanekawa unless they knew what was going on. No amount of dye or bleach could do this good of a job on someone’s hair color. Her facial expressions were totally different, too… Even I didn’t know who Black Hanekawa was when I first saw her during Golden Week. If not for the shape of her hips─no, it was only because she’d saved my life that I was somehow able to pin down her identity.
Plus.
This was also─Tsubasa Hanekawa.
Another Hanekawa.
She had two sides, and this was the reverse side.
“Hey, human,” Black Hanekawa said from the front. “Refresh my meowmory. What was it ya wanted me to do again?”
“……………”
The intelligence of a cat…
Should I be relying on her?
We reached a bookstore after walking for a bit─the bookstore that boasted the largest selection in town, the same one where Hanekawa and I had picked out study aids together the other day. The store was still open…so while it pained me to park my bike there when I wasn’t going to be doing any shopping, I had no choice. I decided to put it there.
We departed once again.
Still no traces of Shinobu’s scent.
Speaking of scents, I could imagine a cat’s sense of smell being better than a human’s, but how much better was it, if you were to quantify it? Not as good as a dog’s, I assumed.
