Kylo lay draped across the straw mattress in his sister's room, his tail ticking against the fabric in lazy, rhythmic annoyance. The shared dormitory was silent except for the faint hum of some active enchantments, woven into the walls, doing whatever.

His sister had gone to another of her classes, to listen to that scary woman, probably. He had chosen to stay behind this time, but now he felt bored.

He stretched once, claws curling against the upholstery, then collapsed again in the same boneless heap out of the sunlight that had shifted traitorously to the far corner of the bed, as if following him.

Maybe he could go on a hunt himself. His ears flicked once, remembering the terror of the fake-bunnies he caught the other day. That should be entertaining.

His sister had left a small window near the ceiling open, allowing him to squeeze through, go, and explore whenever he felt like it. Maybe he should tell her that it wasn't necessary. He knew how to open that window himself with some basic mana manipulation. It wasn't warded like the doors and other windows. Maybe he should tell her. Or maybe not, it could make for a funny surprise someday.

Without thinking, he jumped up onto the windowsill and then into the dry grass outside.

He didn't use his invisibility runes yet. He had noticed that some people could feel the burst of mana when he activated them, and got awfully interested in what happened. Instead, he just started strolling around like another stray cat, toward the entrance of the sewers.

He slunk between legs and the towering buildings, his paws silent on the loose dirt, ears swiveling at the echoes of laughter and hurried footsteps going wherever in a hurry.

The ground smelled of too many strangers, sweat, anxiousness, and arousal. The noise of a hundred human teenager voices all speaking at once cluttered the air.

Then he got through, out of the frenzy, and arrived in a calm bamboo forest.

A bird chirped somewhere, but he ignored it, strolling closer to the tunnel leading into the sewers.

Before entering, he stopped and looked over his shoulder. Nobody was close. Nobody was looking his way.

He activated his invisibility runes and stepped inside. A bit further ahead, there was a rusted iron crate. Not a problem for a professional sneak like him, of course. He just slipped past with the silent grace of a thief or an assassin. He found the thought amusing. Yeah. He would be an assassin that day, an assassin of fake bunnies, the butcher of the stinky cave. His paws landed on slick stone, the recomforting cold biting through his pads. The darkness pressed close, welcoming, alive with the drip of hidden water, and the faint scuttle of worms and insects. Each breath carried a cocktail of iron, mildew, and something sour that made his whiskers wrinkle, but also stirred him with a strange, shivering thrill. Down here, the rules were different. His pupils dilated, adapting his vision to the penumbra. There were no scary humans anywhere; he was the apex predator.

Pleased with himself, he tried to catch the trail of some fake-bunny, but he couldn't find anything. There were no hurried steps, trying to flee; no recent smells of damp fur. That was strange. He tilted his head. He couldn't have killed them all yet. Could he?

Could he have a rival, an intruder in his hunting territory? Preposterous! It needed further investigation.

So, Kylo, the sneaky detective, the assassin-detective, carried on deeper into the sewers.

He got to a crossroad. A sloshy and stinky river of slowly flowing water covered the bottom of the new tunnel. He tilted his head. His sister wouldn't like it if he got dirty again, but that wasn't a problem. He activated his air-step runes and started walking over it without touching water. He peeked down from time to time in case he saw some fish, but everything was dead and long rotten.

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Tap-tap, tap-tap.

He nearly lost his footing, startled. Were those steps? Kylo held still, trying to listen to where the noise came from.

Tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.

There it was again, up ahead. Kylo slowly stalked toward it until he heard voices. But something was wrong. He couldn't make sense of the guttural and clicking sounds. It was as if he were listening to an alien language. Kylo felt like the first time he came across humans, trying to understand their yaps and yells.

Intrigued, he walked on and peeked around the corner into a large cavern. What he found surprised him. Humans were walking up and down, busy with whatever nonsense humans do instead of hunting.

Something was strange, though; they were all disgustingly pale, like worms that had never seen the sunlight. One of them darted past him, coming from an adjacent tunnel, carrying a bundle of dead fake-bunnies. Kylo caught his scent. The man smelled of darkness and mushrooms. A scent not even close to how a normal human was supposed to smell.

Kylo's fur bristled, not from fear, but from the electric sense that he had stepped into a place covered in secrets, where even silence had weight and every step forward was a trespass into someone else's dominion.

"Fake-humans," he muttered to himself. "Bunny-thieves."

They didn't seem strong, but there were a lot of them. They wandered in and out of the tunnels leading into the cavern like busy ants, carrying even more rats, busy exterminating all life to feed their hungry maws like a plague.

Mystery of the lack of fake-bunnies resolved, he was about to retrace his steps when he thought better. Who did those fake-humans believe they were, daring to steal his rightful prey right under his nose? It was a challenge to his authority over the sewers that needed punishment. How could he punish them, though?

His eyes wandered across the cave, over a group of men cooking heaps of rats over some hot stones covered in runes. He could smell the sizzling fat from where he was standing. Maybe he could steal those. Nah, that was too easy. Others were building some strange statue out of discarded bones, somehow fusing them into a larger whole.

That seemed important for some reason. All of the fake-humans working on it seemed focused on what they were doing, almost entranced, adding each new bone with utter care.

Kylo tried to understand what the statue was supposed to depict. It seemed like the skeleton of a man with six ivory arms, sharp claws, and a bone-helmet covering his skull. An armor-insect-man, maybe. Who knew?

Maybe he could topple it. Those fragile bones would probably shatter on impact against the hard ground. That would teach the intruders to behave. That would make them leave, give him his territory back.

Decided, he stalked closer, one step, another.

He saw a flash, a streak of silver darted toward him, rushing over his head before impacting the wall at his back with a loud, metallic clatter. Kylo lost his footing, startled, and plunged into the stinky river. He barely saw the knife rebound off the wall before he was underwater.

How had they detected him? He was invisible; none of them felt strong enough to see through that.

He dove through the slush, holding his breath, before resurfacing way upstream. The fake-humans were agitated, running too and from, poking the river with long sticks as if searching for him.

He observed them from the shadows for a while. They started exploring further. One of them found one of the footprints Kylo had left behind and pointed it out to the others.

Kylo felt annoyed with himself for leaving visible tracks. But for some reason, his footprint seemed to calm those humans down, instead of altering them further. He tilted his head in confusion. What were they afraid of if it wasn't him?

Soon, they returned to whatever they were doing before.

After a while, Kylo left the shadows and started stalking between legs, clad in invisibility. No one seemed aware of his passage.

That was strange. How had those guys discovered him before?

His eyes wandered back to the statue in the middle of the room. There was something ominous about it, but he couldn't tell what.

He stalked closer again until he felt it. There was something, a boundary behind which there was a shift in the ambient mana, a contest of wills. It reminded him of how he felt in the bunny spirit cave he explored back in the mountains where he was born. It felt as if the statue was claiming the ambient mana for itself, changing it, leaving a distinct imprint.

Two of the builders turned their heads and stared in Kylo's general direction with their dark and empty eyes.

One of them flicked his wrist. Kylo saw the knife flying toward him, but he didn't even need to dodge it. Either those guys had bad aim, or they couldn't really see him, only sense his general direction. Were they misjudging his size in his shrunken cat form?

More of them turned, flicking even more blades toward him.

"Amateurs," He scoffed, shaking his head in amusement. He started retracing his steps, walking backwards in silence without losing sight of them. "Bad hunters."

As soon as he felt the shift of crossing the invisible boundary, they lost all interest in him.

"Strange."

He observed them for a while longer, fantasizing about ripping out their throats. His gaze wandered toward the tunnel with the most traffic of rat thieves. Maybe he could ambush some of the hunters. That sounded like fun.

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