The Cat Tribe (6): Soft Landing, Hard Avalanche
"I'm off, nyang!"
With that spirited shout, Yumi bounded away—to carry word of my big deal back to the Cat Tribe community.
Watching her go, I sent some of our people ahead to the Grand Duchy to make a few preparations of our own: the goods I had promised the Cat Tribe, and the medicine meant to treat their chronic affliction.
Max, who had been quietly observing it all, finally spoke up.
"Young Master… do you truly believe this will work?"
I turned to find his face lined with worry.
"Relocating a people is never a simple matter. Just as the Northerners' view of the Catfolk is far from favorable, I doubt the Catfolk hold any great fondness for the North either."
"That's fair enough."
From what I had been told, the North of old had been a truly savage place. It was hardly a paradise now—but back then, blood had run like rivers.
I could understand it. When food is scarce and life is hard, and someone next door keeps getting under your skin, a fist tends to fly of its own accord. Stack enough of that over the years and the grudge gets carved into the DNA itself.
"I don't expect the relocation plan to sail along as if the wind were at our backs," I said. "Even among those who actually listen to Miss Yumi and come outside, the number will probably be a handful at best."
"And yet you're pushing ahead regardless?"
"Pilot projects are always like that."
Any new venture hits rough water at the start. Relocation projects tend to hit it harder than most.
They make the news every year back home.
You offer money, a place to live, even priority bidding on new housing—and still there are people who dig in their heels and swear they will die before they leave that land. Whether it's genuine attachment to home or a desire to squeeze out a little more compensation, I couldn't say. What I did know was that moving a person's heart is one of the hardest things in the world.
Even Madara couldn't manage it, and he spent centuries grinding himself into the dirt over it.
So I, who possessed neither the greatest gold jutsu of all time—Wind Style: Rasp of the Mouth—nor the ultimate dōjutsu, the Rinnegan, would simply have to keep trying.
And how, exactly?
How? You just do it and see.
People with as little as we had couldn't afford to sit around table-talking methodology forever. Endless both-sides fretting over this risk and that only slowed the work. In the North, the proper mindset was to put your head down and charge.
"Even a few is fine," I said. "We build a Catfolk village first. Once some of them settle in and start living well, the rest will trickle after them, little by little. When someone who was already doing fine does even better, people just shrug. But when someone who was just as badly off as you suddenly starts thriving—that's when envy and inferiority boil up for no reason, and you find yourself wanting to follow along. That's human nature."
"Young Master… sometimes you seem overflowing with humanity, and sometimes you seem to have none at all…"
"Ha ha. If you want to love people, don't you have to understand them first?"
Love is not longing. Longing is the emotion farthest from understanding. So of course love requires understanding to go with it.
"…In any case, setting that aside—have you already secured a site? No matter how vast the North may be, we can't simply drop them anywhere. Even Catfolk can't thrive in just any place."
He was right. I was hardly blind to the harm of carving up residential zones by race. Even so, when you bring together peoples who have lived in entirely different cultures, a soft-landing phase of separation is necessary at the start—even if you mean to mix them later.
And fortunately—or not—the question of where to put them didn't require much fretting.
"Sites? The North is littered with them."
"Which is to say—ah."
Max let out a short breath. He had already reached the answer himself.
"Every year, villages in the North disappear. Whether people leave of their own will or are forced out, it's a constant event. Not a pleasant one—but from an administrator's point of view, you use whatever you can, sentiment aside. A village left empty for a while will take some work to bring back online, but it still takes far less effort than starting from bare dirt, doesn't it?"
He was right. However tough the beastfolk were as a people, you couldn't just toss them into the middle of nowhere and tell them to figure it out. This wasn't an idle-management RPG. It was the surest way to shatter the trust of people who had followed us on faith.
And once the beastfolk realized that their great migration for a new life had dumped them onto worthless wasteland, there was no telling how far they might darken. Whether those soft little paw pads would turn into mountain-soul iron claws, whether a full moon would turn them into Son Goku, or whether they would dark-evolve into something like SkullGreymon—every pull of that gacha was a guaranteed brick. Best to move carefully.
At minimum, we need to find them somewhere livable. And even without that reason, keeping them in one place is simply easier to manage.
Yes, each of them was a walking high-explosive hazard—but it was equally true that each of them was elite-grade manpower packed into a single body. Better to gather them neatly in one place than scatter them around and watch them go off like quicklime hitting water.
"At any rate, let's do everything we can to give them a soft landing. Even if Miss Yumi brings only a handful at first, if they become the seed water that draws more Catfolk after them, that can only be good for the whole North, can't it?"
My conclusion, in short, was a hearty "let's all pull together." Max's lips twitched as if he still had something to say; then he let out a long sigh, shook his head, and changed the subject.
"From experience, any further argument here would be empty talk. Still—there is one thing I'm curious about."
"What is it?"
"The medicine you're offering the Cat Tribe. Is it truly reliable?"
The medicine. Fair enough—that was the most important piece of all.
And yet—
"Honestly? Not entirely."
"…Pardon?"
"In terms of probability, it's over ninety percent. But I don't expect that introducing the treatment will mean a full recovery for everyone. And restoring the sight of Catfolk who have already gone completely blind is going to be next to impossible."
From my experience taming the old barracks cats, I had a fair idea of what was wrong with them. That didn't mean this method could give sight back to those who had already lost it.
"Still—the odds of the young ones suffering the same fate should drop sharply."
"W-wait… Young Master, that sounds rather like a kind of…"
"A scam? Is that what you mean?"
"Th-that isn't what I meant…!"
Oh, it was exactly what he meant. It was closer to a preventive measure than a cure, and I had no intention of denying that.
"Well. Perhaps it is."
"Young Master, what in the world…"
Aren't you afraid of the Catfolk's mountain-soul iron claws, human? The unspoken howl rang loud and clear.
But I had my reasons.
"Even so, I judged that coming outside would still be better for them than staying where they are."
My concern for them was not a lie. Putting the records together, the Cat Tribe's mass blindness had only begun after they entered Jangbaek Mountain. Whether it was some special virus that targeted only the Catfolk living there, I couldn't say—but putting distance between themselves and that place raised the odds of putting distance between themselves and the virus as well. When plague arrives, the traditional answer is still the same: hang the quarantine rope and separate.
"Besides, I told them clearly that a full cure would take time. Which means they'll have time enough to enjoy a better culture in the meanwhile."
A full cure would be nice. If it never came, that wasn't the end of the world either. Ordinary human sympathy for them certainly existed—but as an administrator, I also needed their elite-grade labor. Driven into the depths and cornered somewhere on the mid-slopes of Jangbaek, the Catfolk had still built a life and survived in that hardcore hunting ground.
I suspected their other senses had sharpened to compensate for the lost sight. Fold people like that into the North, and from my seat it was as good as adding an entire knight order's worth of force.
"If they keep receiving overwhelming welfare, warm hearths, and a steady supply of catnip, the Catfolk will integrate into the North even if they never free themselves from the disease we originally promised to cure. And that alone is a gain, isn't it?"
"Th-that may be so, but… whether we can actually handle them…"
"Well—somehow, won't we? They're a minority, after all."
If the Catfolk had numbered in the hundreds, I wouldn't have spoken so boldly about taking them in. The North was broad on a map and mostly bad land, and its population was nothing to boast about. Even so, it still held a clear numerical edge over a mere handful of Catfolk.
No matter how salty the water in a cup, pour it into a river and who would even notice?
And more than that—
"Even you, Butler, find this relocation plan sudden and alarming. How do you think it looks from the Catfolk's side? Miss Yumi is called a great warrior, so I expect she'll have a voice—but even so, how many will actually accept my offer?"
The difficulties of a relocation plan were something I had already talked to death. The fact that few would join us at this stage was, for the moment, an advantage.
We take them in slowly, in stages.
As I had said more than once, soft-landing the Catfolk into the North was the plan. Either way, there was no real fear of failure. A true master plan.
I made the boast with full confidence.
And it took less than a day for me to regret it.
Shit. I shouldn't have run my mouth.
Only a few hours had passed since I agreed to take in the Catfolk.
We had already determined that the unusual stir among the monsters near Jangbaek was the Catfolk's doing, and that it was a one-off event rather than a long-term factor. The Grand Duke's soldiers were packing up and preparing for the return march. A few of the commander-rank knights, having felt the power of the barbed wire firsthand, were debating whether to leave it in place as part of a longer-term plan for a Jangbaek forward base. With nothing better to do, I was stretched out in my tent.
Then, without warning, the outside grew noisy, and from far off came the cries of beasts.
A moment later, a deep, rhythmic thudding reached even the tent where I lay, and the ground itself began to shake.
I bolted upright and burst outside—and there I saw it.
Hundreds of Catfolk, flying over Jangbaek's brutal slopes as if every last one of them had mastered the art of shrinking the earth.
"Don't tell me…"
"It would appear… that all of them have come out."
Max's voice was shaken, no doubt recalling the conversation we had just finished.
No. This was not in the script…
For all that, I could sense no hostility. Which meant Yumi's persuasion had actually worked—and yet—
They've lived with this disease for decades.
And they were supposed to swallow the word of some second son from an enemy house they'd never heard of, waving a cure around, and then pour out en masse? That made sense?
I watched the snowball I had thrown come rolling back as an avalanche, my face gone blank—then forced my expression under control just in time.
The Catfolk who had been racing along the ridgelines closed the distance in a heartbeat and came to a halt before the barbed wire.
"Grrrr…"
"Grr…"
"Grrrrr…"
I understood at once.
Yumi had been nothing more than a near-mutant housecat. Standing before me now were purebred beast-men, tiger-human in every line of them, as if they had been slamming protein powder by the barrel.
And one especially striking specimen among them stepped forward.
"Grrrr… Is the Second Young Master of the Grand Duke's house present?"
…Me?
I nearly turned my head toward Darius somewhere behind me, and only just stopped myself. I was the one who had made this happen. It was right that I step forward.
So, dragging feet that did not particularly want to move, I forced myself ahead and raised my voice.
"I am Logwell Wintershield, Second Young Master of the Northern Grand Duke's house. And you are?"
"Grrrr… I am Arun, Third Claw of the tribe."
The man who named himself Arun had thick leather bound tightly over both eyes. Even so, he looked straight at me as if the lack of sight meant nothing at all, and asked:
"I heard it from the First Claw. That you swore on your life to free our people from Heaven's Curse."
"…I did?"
Fuck. When the hell did I ever say that.