Chapter 16
The forest had gone quiet again after the monster fell.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet that came with sunrise over a garden or the hush of a library late at night. This was the tense, watchful sort of silence that settled over the trees after something unnatural had dragged itself back into the dark. The branches still swayed overhead, leaves whispering against one another in the wind, but the path ahead felt empty in the way a room felt empty after someone had just left it.
Mai stood with Puss cradled in her arms, her fingers trembling as she stroked the cat’s black fur. The creature’s breathing had finally steadied, though she still looked battered from the fight. One ear was bent at an odd angle. Her whiskers twitched faintly. A smear of dirt and dried sap clung to the side of her face.
Okama sheathed his sword and scanned the trees again out of habit. His body was still keyed tight with battle tension, every muscle ready for another attack that, for the moment, did not seem to be coming.
Yuki stood a step behind them, one hand resting near her pouch of spellcards, her bored expression gone for once. What remained was sharp attention, the kind that made her seem less detached and more dangerous.
“I don’t like this,” Mai whispered.
“Neither do I,” Okama said.
Puss huffed in her arms as if offended by the implication that she was the one responsible for the situation.
Mai shot her a glance. “You can complain later. Just stay still.”
Puss’s ears flicked.
Then, without warning, the black cat’s body went rigid.
Mai froze. “Puss?”
The cat’s eyes snapped open wider than before. For one brief second, they seemed to catch the light in an unnatural way, reflecting something silver and red deep inside the pupils. A thin pulse of shadow rippled outward from her body.
Okama took a half step forward. “Mai, move back.”
But it was already happening.
Puss twisted once in Mai’s arms, not to escape but as if her own body had suddenly become too small to hold whatever force was awakening inside it. The cat let out a sharp, strangled sound, and then a ring of dark light burst from her in all directions.
Mai staggered backward with a cry, nearly dropping her. Okama caught her by the shoulder and steadied her just in time. Puss fell from Mai’s grasp and landed on all fours in the dirt.
Except she didn’t stay a cat.
Her shape began to stretch.
Bones shifted beneath black fur with a soft, sickening crack that made Mai flinch. The small body elongated, the spine straightening, the shoulders widening. Fur spread along arms that were no longer legs, and a tail lashed once behind her before lengthening into something more elegant and balanced. Her hind legs changed, joints restructuring, feet reshaping into a humanoid stance while still ending in padded, clawed catlike toes.
It was not a transformation that looked painful, though it should have been. It looked instinctive, as if something long hidden had finally remembered the shape it was meant to take.
A tail flicked once in the air.
Ears rose from a crown of dark hair that spilled over her shoulders in a messy fall. Her face sharpened into a feline beauty, the line of her jaw becoming more defined, her nose small and delicate, her eyes still the same amber gold but now far more expressive in a human face. Black fur remained along her forearms, calves, and the sides of her neck, blending into smooth skin marked by faint, pale stripes that caught the light when she moved.
In a few heartbeat-stuttering seconds, the cat was gone.
In her place stood a cat chimera.
Mai stared.
Okama stared.
Even Yuki, who usually treated nearly everything with calm indifference, blinked once in undisguised surprise.
The girl who had once been Puss looked down at herself with obvious alarm. Her hands lifted uncertainly, fingers flexing. She stared at the dark claws at the ends of them, then at her tail, which twitched behind her as if it had a mind of its own.
“Wha—” she began.
Her voice was no longer a cat’s small noises or purrs. It was a girl’s voice now, soft and breathless, with a slight roughness at the edges like she wasn’t used to speaking at full volume.
Mai took an involuntary step back. “Puss?”
The beastfolk girl flinched at the name.
Then she pressed both hands to her head and shut her eyes tightly.
“No,” she said, very quietly.
Okama’s brows drew together. “What do you mean, no?”
Puss — no, the girl, if she was a girl — opened her eyes again. Her pupils were narrow now, catlike slits in bright amber irises that seemed to shimmer with panic. She looked from Mai to Okama, then back to her own hands.
“I… I know that name,” she said slowly. “I know it’s mine, but I don’t know why.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Mai’s chest tightened. “You remember your name?”
The girl hesitated.
Then she gave a tiny, helpless shake of her head.
“No. Not really.”
The words fell like stones.
The forest remained silent around them, but the silence had changed. It no longer felt merely watchful. It felt confused, as if even the trees were trying to make sense of what they were seeing.
Okama folded his arms. “So you’re transformed, but you don’t remember who you are.”
The girl looked offended by the bluntness, though there was fear underneath it too. “That’s not exactly how I’d put it.”
Okama studied her with narrowed eyes, not unkindly, but as if trying to solve a problem that refused to line up neatly. “You can talk. You can think. That means you’re not just a monster transformation.”
“No,” she said, then hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
Mai looked down at the black cat ears twitching above her head. The sight should have been ridiculous. Instead it made her throat hurt.
“Can you remember anything?” Mai asked gently.
The girl looked away toward the shadows between the trees. Her tail curled around one leg in a nervous loop.
“There are pieces,” she said. “Flashes. A classroom maybe. Desks. Chalk. Someone laughing. Someone shouting.” She frowned, pressing her fingers against her temple. “It slips away when I try to hold onto it.”
Okama went still.
“A classroom?” he repeated.
The girl nodded, though uncertainty clouded her face. “I think so.”
Mai and Okama exchanged a quick look. That was not just a vague memory. Not in this world.
Mai took a careful step closer. “What else do you remember?”
The girl’s shoulders tensed. For a moment she seemed ready to bolt, but she stayed where she was. Her tail lashed once, then stilled.
“Nothing useful,” she said bitterly. “Just… the feeling that I’m supposed to know all of you.”
The statement rang strangely in the still forest.
Okama’s voice turned quiet. “All of us?”
She looked at him then, really looked. Her eyes widened slightly, and there was a brief flicker of emotion across her face so quick Mai almost missed it.
“Wait,” she whispered.
Everyone leaned in without meaning to.
The girl took one step backward, then another, as if distance would help her think. “No, that’s not right. It’s not just all of you. It’s…” She swallowed. “You feel familiar.”
Mai felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
“Familiar how?” she asked.
The girl opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her expression twisted into frustration so sharp it looked almost painful.
“I don’t know!” she burst out. “That’s the problem. I don’t know why! I don’t know if I knew you, or if I saw you, or if I was you, or—”
She stopped suddenly, horrified by her own words.
The three students stared.
Even the birds had gone silent now.
Okama’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a strange thing to say.”
The girl’s face flushed darkly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, but it’s still strange.”
“Okama,” Mai said warningly.
The girl rubbed her arms as if suddenly cold. Her ears flattened slightly against her hair. “I’m sorry. I just… I know I’m not a cat. I know that much. And I know I used to be someone else. But every time I try to reach for it, it’s like grabbing smoke.”
Okama’s gaze flicked to the place where the monster had fallen. “Maybe whatever attacked us damaged your memory.”
She shook her head. “No. It feels older than that.”
Mai frowned. “Older?”
The girl nodded once, slowly. “Like I’ve been lost for a long time.”
That was somehow worse.
Mai looked at the unfamiliar body in front of her, trying to square it with the cat she had carried for so long. Puss had always been sharp, strangely intelligent, sometimes irritatingly expressive in ways that a normal animal never should have been. There had always been moments — brief, impossible moments — where she had seemed almost like a person.
Now, looking at her standing there in human form with dirt on her knees and panic in her eyes, Mai felt a chill run through her.
“Puss,” she said carefully, “do you know you were with us?”
The girl blinked.
Then, very slowly, she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I know that. I know I was with you. I know I belonged with you.”
She looked down at her own hands again, flexing them as if testing whether they were real. Her claws caught the light.
“I just don’t know who I was before that.”
The admission hung in the air.
Okama exhaled through his nose. “So we’ve got a beastfolk catgirl who remembers being one of us, but not which one.”
Okama tilted his head. “That’s one way to put it.”
The girl grimaced. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Call you what?”
“Catgirl.”
Mai almost laughed, but the sound caught in her throat. The tension in the moment was too strange, too fragile, too full of relief and unease all at once.
She crouched slowly so she would not seem so tall or threatening. The girl watched her warily, but did not retreat.
“What do you want us to call you, then?” Mai asked.
The girl opened her mouth.
And stopped.
Her face blanked with sudden embarrassment. “I don’t know that either.”
That got a tired, disbelieving sound out of Okama. “You really do have amnesia.”
The girl folded her arms and looked mutinous for a moment, though the expression was undercut by the nervous twitch of her ears. “I’m aware.”
Mai looked at her for a long moment, then softened. The fear was still there, but so was something else. Not just pity. Recognition, maybe. Or the instinct that told her this was not a stranger. Not really.
“You can stay with us,” she said quietly.
The girl looked up.
Mai swallowed and continued. “At least until we figure things out.”
The beastfolk girl’s expression wavered between hope and suspicion.
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
Mai didn’t answer at once. Her eyes shifted to Okama, he gave the tiniest of shrugs.
Because we’ve all been thrown into the same mess, her expression said. Because no one else is here. Because we’ve already lost too much.
Finally Mai said, “Because you were with us before this, weren’t you?”
The girl’s shoulders loosened by a fraction.
“I think so,” she whispered.
Okama sheathed his sword fully and looked toward the path ahead. “Then we keep moving. If she’s one of the class, we’ll find out which one eventually.”
Okama nodded. “Assuming she survives long enough to remember.”
The girl shot her a glare. “I’m standing right here.”
Okama’s mouth twitched. “Good. Then you’re already more useful than half the people I’ve met today.”
Mai let out a small, surprised laugh, and to her own shock, the catgirl’s ears flicked at the sound as if she were relieved to hear it.
The tension eased, just enough to breathe.
But the mystery remained.
Who was she?
A missing classmate? A transformed otherworlder? Someone they had known all along under a different shape?
The girl seemed to feel the question hanging over them. She hugged herself awkwardly, tail curling around her ankle, and looked from one face to the next.
“If I’m really one of you,” she said, voice smaller now, “then… I’m sorry I can’t remember.”
Mai rose again and smiled, though it was shaky around the edges.
“That’s all right,” she said. “We’ll do the remembering for you.”
The catgirl stared at her for a second, and something in her expression changed. It was small, but real — a flicker of trust, or hope, or maybe the beginning of both.
Then the wind moved through the trees again, carrying with it the scent of wet earth and distant rain.
Okama looked up sharply. “We need to go.”
“Can you walk?” Mai asked.
The girl glanced down at her new body as if the question itself was absurd, then took one experimental step. Her balance wobbled for a moment, but she recovered quickly, ears twitching with concentration.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
“Good,” Okama said. “Then keep up.”
The girl lifted her chin, a spark of defiance entering her face for the first time. “I was already planning to.”
Mai adjusted her grip on her staff and fell into step beside them. The beastfolk girl moved between them now, still uncertain, still half-lost, but very much alive.
They had been searching for the class.
Now they had found one more piece of it.
And even if she could not remember which classmate she was, the forest had given them something far more important than an answer.
It had given them a lead.