The Cat Tribe (3)
The Cat Tribe.
A girl with cat ears.
And now, a tail swaying lazily behind her back as well.
She looks like she walked straight out of some subculture anime.
Except that existence had just dropped into reality.
Anyone with a certain… particular hobby, had they been present, would have been unable to hold back tears of pure rapture.
The people actually standing here, however, did not weep. They reached for the hilts at their waists.
Shing-shing-shing-shing!!
"Who the hell are you?!"
"Identify yourself!"
A Cat Tribe girl who had slipped through the barbed wire that had stopped the charge of dozens of snowfield saber-tooth tigers. The northern soldiers had not even noticed her until she was already perched on top of a cauldron lid. Their wariness boiled over to maximum alert.
The party in question, though—
"Me? Yumi-nyang."
—looked entirely unimpressed, which was its own kind of problem.
"Young Master! Fall back!! That thing is a Cat Tribe beastman!!"
"Ah. Yes. It does rather look that way."
With cat ears and a tail that obvious, failing to recognize her would have been the strange part.
So Cat Tribe people really do exist.
I simply watched the girl who had introduced herself as Yumi, fascinated by the sheer fact of her. Meanwhile the northerners reacted as though they had laid eyes on something loathsome.
"Answer properly!!"
"How did you get in here!!"
Their faces twisted with something close to revulsion.
Wait. Revulsion?
Fear, I could understand—she had appeared through the wire without anyone noticing. Their reaction, though, was odd in every respect.
Then—
"You filthy Cat Tribe bastard! How dare you trample the Young Master's grace with your dirty paws!!!"
One of the soldiers snapped and charged.
Whoosh—
In the blink of an eye he closed more than ten meters. A burst of speed that would have killed me before I could even react.
Yumi answered it.
Ting!
A casual flick of her fingers rapped the incoming blade. That was all. The soldier's iron sword snapped clean in two; the broken half went spinning through the air and buried itself in the ground behind him with a dull thunk.
While the soldier's eyes were still tracking the empty trajectory—
"You. Wanna die, nyang?"
—Yumi extended a forepaw and set it against his throat. Sharp claws, grown at some point no one had seen, pricked bare skin and drew a bead of blood.
"…!"
The languid eyes were gone. Vertical-slit pupils locked on the soldier, and a vicious chill settled over the clearing.
"Aeren! Fall back!"
The knights behind him moved. One seized the frozen soldier by the nape and hurled him aside, then they crashed forward to take his place.
In that same instant Yumi's form vanished from where she stood.
"Wh—where?!"
"Behind!!"
She appeared at the back of the knight who had been leading the charge and swatted him with a forepaw. It looked, at a glance, like a playful cat punch. The result left a clear paw-print stamped into the knight's iron plate. Naturally, the man went flying several meters and smashed into a snowbank.
"Bambu!!"
"I-I'm fine! More importantly, that thing…!"
A monster among monsters—northern knights took a blow that dented solid plate and still got back up. The thought Why even wear armor at that point? had barely formed when the real fight began.
Kak-kak-kak-kak-kang!
Every time a knight's blade met Yumi's forepaws, a sickening metallic shriek rang out—like nails dragged across a chalkboard. I was not the only one whose face twisted; every knight close enough did the same.
"Nyang!"
Yumi, as if she had been waiting for exactly that reaction, slipped into the nearest knight's guard. Before anyone could even say huh?, her tail whipped around and slammed him across the torso. He went sprawling as though struck by a flail. Instantly the Cat Tribe girl switched targets and shot toward the next knight.
This… is not a fight we can win.
Honestly, all my eyes could process was a Cat Tribe girl vanishing with a whoosh, followed by the next knight going down with a grunt. If we left her alone, total wipeout would not take long.
What do I do?
She still had not thrown a finishing blow, so she did not seem intent on killing our knights outright—but we could not simply stand there and take it either. No good way to intervene presented itself. Then, mid-worry—
Wait a second. I think I had something for this.
Something flashed through my mind. I dug rapidly through my kit and, before long, found what I wanted.
No idea if this will even work.
But our people were getting dismantled in real time. I could not keep spectating.
I raised the object high and shouted.
"Yumi!! Look at this!!"
"Nyang?"
In the short time since I last looked she had flattened five more knights. Hearing her name, the Cat Tribe girl turned her head on reflex—and saw what I was holding.
At first she only tilted her head, puzzled. Then—
Flaring—!
Her nostrils flared wide.
"Nyang?—!"
Her eyes changed completely, and she came streaking toward me.
"Damn it!! Young Master, get clear!!"
Old Max lunged in alarm, but Yumi was far faster. In a blink she was between the two of us.
The next moment—
"Nyaaaaang~."
—a melting little croon, and she flopped onto her back on the ground.
"Okay!"
I did not miss the opening. I snatched her by the scruff of the neck.
"Got you, you little—!"
"Hieeeek!"
The Cat Tribe girl who had been turning the unit upside down was promptly arrested. Her wrists were bound with sturdy rope and she was dumped into a pit off to one side.
Of course, what actually kept her confined was not the rope around her wrists.
It was the thick carpet of something spread across the bottom of the pit.
"Catnip. Catmint."
Also known as cat grass. That was what finally calmed the rampaging Cat Tribe girl.
In more than one sense of the word, yes.
Buried in the catnip, the Cat Tribe girl purred with a thoroughly melted expression—looking as if she had died and gone to heaven.
I suppose I should call myself lucky.
The only reason I had catnip—catmint—on me at all was for cooking.
Last time I had the mess crew research herbs that could neutralize residual monster meat when we finished a batch of gukbap. Catmint was on that list.
For the Jangbaek Mountain reconnaissance operation we had left the castle carrying a large variety of herbs only, intending to source most of our meat on site. The mess crew's recipes were meant to let us turn any monster we killed into edible gukbap after proper neutralization—and among those herbs was catnip, which had just let us subdue her safely.
Even in the modern world, catmint is used as a mild sedative and digestive, and as an herb for tea.
Anyway, once the Cat Tribe girl was secured, I put soldiers on watch. Whenever she started to come around they were to toss her a little more catnip—and nothing beyond that. Stick a blade in her face while she was like this and she might wake up; that would be a catastrophe.
In the meantime I spoke with Old Max.
"Young Master, how in the world did you do that?"
"Ah—you mean bringing the catnip?"
"That was impressive enough… but I meant the end, when you seized her by the scruff and subdued her!"
"Ah. That."
Clipnosis. Ever heard of it?
Pinch a cat by the nape and it freezes, literally. The whole feline family works that way; it is an instinct stamped into them from when mother cats carry their kittens by the scruff.
How did I know?
How could I not? I raised more than a few barracks cats in my time.
When you work at a forward base long enough, cats that somehow slip through the wire always show up behind the mess hall. With nothing better to do, I used to keep them as a hobby. Those same cats would get fat on leftovers, then occasionally fall into a drainage ditch and get stuck. The method for fishing them out was clipnosis.
Grab them anywhere else and you risk getting shredded.
Cats are creatures that know both the sweetness of repaid kindness and the taste of betrayal, so you always handle them carefully.
Of course I could not tell him all of that, so I fudged it.
"In my experience, feline animals freeze when you take them by the scruff of the neck. Since she is the same family, I thought she might react the same way—so I tested it."
"Hah… that was recklessly dangerous. To make physical contact with a Cat Tribe beastman so carelessly—losing that arm would not have been surprising!"
Fair enough. The Cat Tribe girl in question was a monster who could snap an iron sword with a flick and bat blades aside with her claws.
Still, his reaction left me puzzled.
"Come to think of it, the soldiers and the knights both reacted strangely to a Cat Tribe person. Did something happen?"
Thinking back, even when Old Max had lectured on the beastmen earlier, the parts about the Cat Tribe had been laced with unmistakable wariness.
Old Max let out a long sigh.
"It is a matter of the distant past. There was a war of enormous scale in the North. The Grand Duke's house managed to settle it, but countless northerners bled in that campaign."
"And?"
"The Cat Tribe fought as assassins. They used their racial gift for silent movement and turned the nights of the battlefield into pure terror. Ever since, the Cat Tribe have been objects of aversion and hatred among northerners."
"What, the other demi-human races did not fight?"
"They did. However."
"However?"
"They fought from the front. Unlike the Cat Tribe, they did not fight from behind."
Ah.
So the northerners—those stubborn manly men—could accept the descendants of people who put their necks on the line face-to-face, but could never accept the descendants of the ones who farmed kill counts with backstabs?
Show up to a sword fight with a gun and you will never be forgiven.
I roughly understood.
But—
That is other northerners' business.
I was interested in the Cat Tribe's racial traits themselves.
A born assassin race. And their single-hit damage was no joke either.
This is pure Dark Templar material…!
As a lifelong Zeratul fan, I could not possibly let this pass.
"This will not do. I am recruiting her."
"Pardon? A Cat Tribe girl? W-wait a moment, please! Young Master, the Cat Tribe are extremely dangerous!"
Old Max was talking as if I had just said I intended to keep a live bomb as a pet. Granted, the display she had put on in those few seconds had been deeply impressive, but—
"But I am the one who caught her."
A barracks cat is still a barracks cat. This body, master tamer of Cheorwon's finest mess-hall cats, had no reason to flinch.
I scooped up a generous handful of catnip and dropped straight into the pit.
"Yumi, was it?"
"Nyaaang…?"
"I am Logwell Wintershield. You may not know the name, but I carry some weight in the North."
She was a talking cat, which made her different from an ordinary barracks cat—but I did not think the grain of the creature was all that different.
So I held out a fistful of catnip and made my offer.
"If you come with me, I will supply you with large quantities of catnip on a regular basis."
A thoroughly intuitive big deal.
Soldiers, knights, and Old Max all crowded in to see how the negotiation would end.
To which—
"Nyang!"
—the Cat Tribe girl, Yumi, answered.
Whoosh—!
By swinging her forepaw with everything she had.