Over ten minutes since the Spirit had manifested—right on schedule, it was time for AST to clock in, line up, and give the new Spirit a proper demonstration of what they were capable of.
"A little later than I expected." Natsumi stretched out languidly and stepped in front of the girl and the small child, blocking their path.
This time, Squad Leader Kusakabe didn't bother with an opening greeting. As far as AST was concerned, Shiori—that girl who showed up to complicate things at every single scene—was already an old acquaintance, so they cut straight to the point and fired off their missiles like they couldn't wait to punch out.
Natsumi spun her broomstick in a wide arc. The tip fanned open like a mirror and drove it into the ground: "Haniel."
A rainbow of light swept across the sky in a graceful arc. Wherever it passed, the visual world transformed—the missiles screaming toward her morphed into cartoon-style radishes, wobbling through the air in bizarre, meandering paths before drifting lazily to the ground. They detonated in small puffs of smoke, and the word BOOM actually appeared as a special-effect text bubble floating in midair.
"Now then..."
The woman swept her broomstick toward the squad.
"What is this?!"
Fuzzy mascot costumes—the kind used in stage plays—materialized out of thin air to replace their CR-Units, sending the AST members tumbling from the sky in a chorus of startled shrieks.
Not that it needed saying, but this was objectively the most gentle defeat they had ever suffered.
With that handled, Natsumi tossed her hair and turned her gaze to Shiori. "What's your name, newcomer?"
"Um—Itsuka Shiori."
"Oh~? Shiori, is it. They call big sis here a 'Witch,' but you can just call me Natsumi." She sauntered toward the girl and lightly hooked a finger under her chin.
She dropped into a voice of deliberate provocation: "Hey, little Shiori—let me ask you something. Do you think I'm... pretty?"
"Huh? You're very pretty, big sis." That answer required no help from Ratatoskr whatsoever.
"I knew it!" Natsumi's expression brightened. "Then tell me specifically—which parts of me do you find pretty?"
"Well, um—"
Before Shiori could answer, a cartoon radish Natsumi herself had forgotten—arcing lazily through the air—came tumbling down and exploded in a plume of white smoke.
"Achoo!"
Her own power had turned them into this, but the sneeze caught Natsumi completely off guard. Her nose itched and she couldn't stop herself.
In that instant, her body seemed to shatter like a broken mirror—her entire silhouette flickered, and for just a fraction of a second, her frame shrank dramatically.
The moment passed in an instant. The other two girls, eyes squeezed shut against the billowing smoke, noticed nothing.
Nobody noticed—or so it might have seemed. But Natsumi herself could never believe that nobody had seen. When it came to what a person was most sensitive about, the mind always leapt straight to the worst-case scenario.
"Shiori, emergency—Natsumi's readings are dropping across the board. We're practically neck-and-neck with the time Yimi found out you and Miku were involved!"
"Huh?" Shiori blinked.
But compared to Yimi back then, she hadn't said or done anything this time.
"You saw it, didn't you?" Natsumi bit down on her thumbnail, her expression clouding over.
"Saw... what?"
Why was she only asking her? Yimi was right here too.
"Unforgivable. Itsuka Shiori—I'm going to make you pay."
Shiori: ?
What did I do? I've been here less than two minutes!
Having issued her declaration of war, Natsumi scooped Yimi up by the armpits, mounted her broomstick, and flew away.
??
Shiori watched her disappear into the distance for a long moment before her hand finally shot out: "YIMI!!"
You're getting back at me by carrying off Yimi—why?!
Oh. Right. Natsumi had introduced herself as "big sis" just now. That was going to be a problem.
The way Natsumi had inexplicably started talking to Yimi earlier—she wasn't going to do something to her, was she? Yimi could normally handle just about any danger, but who could guarantee this new Spirit with the unknown personality wasn't the type to trick small children into doing something strange?
"Another problem child... no, problem teenager," Kotori muttered under her breath, crunching her lollipop.
An abandoned, deserted building could serve as a wandering Spirit's makeshift base—Kurumi Tokisaki was one example, and Kageno Natsumi was another.
The difference was that Natsumi's ever-shifting power could render a drafty ruin into something resembling a fairy-tale castle—at least from the inside, it looked the part.
Natsumi set Yimi down in a chair. "You belong to me now, little one."
Yimi made her best unimpressed-cat face.
Seeing that expression, Natsumi's grip tightened on her broomstick. "So you did see it—my pathetic true self. Even a child like you can tell..."
She relaxed her grip. "Forget it. I'll chalk your share up to your sister Itsuka Shiori's tab as well. It's too late to beg for mercy now, hahaha!"
"..."
The little cat produced a thick stack of cards and held them up. "Do you want the cards?"
"My, my. Not crying, not throwing a fit. You're not an ordinary child, are you." Natsumi made no move to accept them.
Yimi looked up at her. This woman smelled even better than big sis Yoshino—more precisely, her spiritual power was far more abundant than the Spirits Shiori had already sealed.
She thought for a moment, then pointed at Natsumi and assigned her a new title: "The Green One."
"?"
"What do you want?" Yimi asked.
Natsumi tilted her head. "What do I want? Are we playing Aladdin's lamp?"
The little cat raised a paw and said something that would probably earn her a lecture from Origami: "I'll give you my underwear."
"Who in the world would want that?! Does Itsuka Shiori normally teach her little brother things like this?"
"I'm a girl," the little cat corrected her, clearly displeased.
Once her hair grew longer, people would stop getting it wrong.
"...A girl, is it. No wonder my charm had no effect." Natsumi looked faintly, inexplicably disappointed.
Actually—wait. Was Itsuka Shiori really in the habit of teaching her little sister to hand her underwear to strangers? What a dangerous woman.
She patted her own cheeks, snapped her fingers, and pulled herself back together. She reached for the baseball cap on Yimi's head. "If you're a girl, you should be wearing something cute. Let big sis conjure you a lovely princess gown~"
Yimi swatted her hand away.
Natsumi rubbed the back of her hand, looking a little hurt.
But she magnanimously lifted Yimi onto her lap anyway and glanced at the clock on the wall. "It's already nine at night. Good girls should be in bed—shall I tell you a bedtime story? Sleeping Beauty or Snow White?"
It had still been morning when Yimi left the house.
The little cat paid this no mind whatsoever and raised a paw to place her order. "Sleeping Beauty."
Natsumi nodded. "Then it's Snow White—because she's pretty."
Big cats were always like this, never willing to defer to the little cat's preferences.
Yimi drooped her face and pondered how to obtain the other woman's spiritual power. If she gave away all the cards it would probably trigger the Stand ability—but each of those cards had been won one by one through hard-fought battles.
"Once upon a time, there was a princess just as beautiful as big sis~"
"Zzz..." Already asleep. Origami hadn't adjusted her sleep schedule on purpose, so the little cat's circadian rhythm was completely unreliable.
"Wha— she fell asleep already? What kind of child drops off the second they lie down? Or—does that mean you find big sis's arms comfortable~? I see, you're pretending, aren't you—waiting for me to let my guard down so you can escape? I'll have you know that's not going to work. When someone's truly asleep, if you lift their arm, it'll drop right back."
Natsumi reached over and lifted Yimi's arm.
It flopped straight back down.
She had actually, genuinely, already fallen asleep—and they were barely past the opening line of the story...
Natsumi tapped the side of her own head. What she was doing and what had just happened didn't seem to trigger any déjà vu from her forgotten past—yet somehow she felt compelled to do it anyway.
She could only dimly sense that those weren't memories worth reaching for.
She was much cuter asleep.
Natsumi gently moved Yimi to the princess bed and reached down to lift the baseball cap off the small girl's head. The cat ears that had been pinned down all this time were suddenly exposed right before her eyes.
"Is this a costume accessory?"
Surprised, Natsumi reached out and gave them a curious squeeze.
"Mrow!" The sleeping little cat reflexively left a perfect shoe-print on her stomach.
"..."
She doesn't want anyone to see them, does she...
Hmm. The cat ears were undeniably adorable—but a part of a person's body that didn't belong on a human would inevitably draw strange looks. That was just how the world worked.
How similar to herself.
Natsumi's eyes dimmed. She pointed her broomstick at Yimi, and under the power of Haniel, the ears on top of the little cat's head were concealed from sight.
Now then. She supposed she should get back to thinking about how to properly make life difficult for that girl who had seen her at her worst.