Lineage

“So essentially, I can pick the trinkets, weapons, and armour off the bodies Annerose leaves scattered around the place, sell them off to the other tradesman around the city, and get a shitload of gold in my pocket to clean and spruce the place up with,” George finished.

“That’s fucking incredible,” I said with an impressed nod. “So Lassie Loudmouth’s brutal butchering of the city’s bastards keeps everyone happy?”

“Well, except for the lads she cuts up, but no one’s really arsed about those twats, anyway,” George shrugged. “So corpse picking is an amazing way to get a good retirement fund going.”

“Richter!” I heard Luna call over to me, turning around just in time to see her place her ponytail on the table and hack it off with a sword, throwing the bundle of hair over to George.

“What am I meant to do with this?” he asked.

“Sell it,” she shrugged. “I’ve got nicer hair than most people have lives in this city.”

Luna flicked her now-back length ponytail over her shoulder and gave it a shake, smiling contentedly with her newest style before pointing at me.

“Alright, fucker,” she said. “Let’s get a move on. Time waits for no man.”

“Right, have fun with the latest haul, George,” I said, patting the bartender on the shoulder.

“Have fun with life, Richter,” the old man nodded, waving goodbye as we left. I threw my hood up over my head, if for nothing more than to keep my ears warm, before Luna’s eyes lit up a bright blue.

“What’re you doing?” Annerose asked.

“Visualising the magic trail,” she said, looking around our surroundings before pointing to a building. “There, it goes up there.”

“Yay,” Annerose growled. “More fucking climbing.”

“It’s either that or killing people,” Luna shrugged.

“Is it ever nice, political discussions of peace?” I asked. “Settle things with a handshake and a smile?”

“Are you going soft on me?” Luna asked. “What happened to the blood-thirsty sociopath I trained to murder with indifference?”

“He’s still here,” I said as the three of us made our way to the starting point of our little obstacle course, using window frames, loose bricks, and wooden strats to make our way up the large, stone building. “He’s just a little sick and tired of having to cut and climb his way through every situation.”

“You solved your situation with the vampires without a fight, didn’t you?” Luna asked, making the leap between the two buildings as she pointed to where we needed to go next.

“Yeah, but that was after what I’m positive was sororicide and a brutal ending to a rebellion,” I answered, rolling to break the impact force as we jumped down a large gap between buildings. “And the only reason I ended up fucking Verella was because she probably would’ve killed me if I didn’t.”

“You guys have really weird lives,” Annerose commented.

“It’s not as extravagant at is seems,” Luna called back to her, pointing to a large block of flats before coming to a stop. “There’s always a few hundred years of quiet between the big throw-downs.”

“Are they in there?” I asked.

“Not entirely sure,” Luna shrugged. “The magic signature is all over that entire block. I can see it weaving in and out of every room hundreds of times.”

“So we search the complex until we find who we’re looking for, right?” Annerose asked.

“That’s the idea,” Luna nodded. “There are three floors to the block, each seems to have ten rooms. We all split up, take our respective number, and meet back here when we’re done. Sound like a plan?”

“What do we do if someone’s in the room?” Annerose asked.

“Knock them out or interrogate them,” Luna shrugged. “Find out if anyone knows anything, and if they do, make them talk. Ready?”

“Ready,” Annerose and I said in unison.

“Then let’s get to work,” Luna nodded, leaping to the bottom floor and claiming that as hers.

“I’ve got second,” Annerose said, moving for her floor.

“Then I’ve got third,” I said, leaping off the rooftop we were on and clambering up the side of the flat block, cracking open a window to one, and climbing inside. The room was empty, and I mean empty. Not a single item adorned any square foot of the room, not even candles on the walls. The floor was covered in dust, lighter patches where furniture might’ve been weren’t even there, showing that this flat in particular had probably never been inhabited.

The dust was caked more than two centimetres off the floor, with cobwebs of all shapes and sizes hanging like drapes from every wall in the place, bugs and critters caught in the webs and crawling all over the floors. This seemed really strange to me: a flat in a city with barely any living space left that was completely barren with no signs of ever being inhabited? That didn’t add up.

I tested the door handle: unlocked. The door cracked open and I walked down the hall to the next one, listening intently for any signs of life. After testing the door and finding it unlocked, I found the room to be the exact same as the other one. This process was repeated for the next five rooms: empty and never having seen human life in them. I continued to the next room, listening and smelling, and I found something. The smell was that of rotting corpses and the sound was of buzzing flies.

Opening the door greeted me with the sight of piles of bodies, stacking well over ten in each, rotting away with their clothing completely stripped off and leaving their ravaged bodies totally bare. I recoiled in disgust as the even worse smell hit me, the door having provided protection from the abhorrent stench of decomposing flesh. I shut the door rather quickly, stepping away from the room and coughing loudly.

I froze in place when I heard a familiar sound: the sound made when someone lowers themselves into a bath, and it was coming from the next room over. I slowly crept over to the next room, listening with my mutation to hear any kind of voice or sounds, only divining two things from my listening: There was someone in there, and it was a female. Deciding whether or not to boot the door in and start asking questions was a hard choice.

On one hand, the person could be completely uninvolved with anything going on here, be it the empty rooms or the multiple corpses, but at the same time it seemed nearly impossible to live in this flat, nevermind next door to that amount of corpses and not notice something. So they had to be connected to it somehow, right? Despite their near-definite guilt, I sided against booting the door down, and instead checked to see if it was unlocked, and, unlike the others, it wasn’t.

It made sense that it wasn’t, seeing as how the woman inside was bathing and most likely stark naked, and I’d be in the same boat as her. So with a little help from the hidden blade and a lockpick, the door was unlocked and openable. I pushed the door open, having heard the person inside get out of the bath and move around rather close to the door whilst picking the lock, but on entry saw no one in the flat at all.

I moved further inside, keeping my eyes, ears, and nose peeled for any trace of the woman I knew was in here, my nose picking up an overwhelmingly strong amount of perfume that made it nearly impossible for me to smell anything without my eyes watering up a river. I had no choice but to kill of my super scent mutation, and instead rely on the others in my possession. Though it was the lack of my bloodhound scent that made my next encounter a more difficult one.

I heard scratching from the ceiling above me, turning around to see a sight I’d not encountered before. No, the naked woman leaping at me was not something I’d never dealt with, it was what creature the naked woman was that was an anomaly. She was a Nekomata, like Karra, Larra, and the twins, but she looked so much different. The most notable thing was the paws she had. Large, soft-looking, padded cat paws with long claws that she slashed at me with as she leaped down.

She collided into me, pinning me down on the ground with her strong paws and stared at me in the eyes. She had a catty grin on her beautiful face, being the most differently coloured of the Nekos I’d met, with thick, puffy, ass-length white hair and gorgeous, emerald-green eyes. She licked her lips hungrily as she stared at me, swishing her much-bushier-than-normal tail at me as she sized me up and down. Since she held off killing me for some reason, I took this time to look her over:

She was incredible busty, her tits rivalling the size of my mother’s in her Succubus form, with a thick, juicy ass, and big thighs to go along with it. Her body was also muscular, the same level of exercise on her that Luna had, and was dotted with several scars, showing either clumsiness or an experienced combatant. She elaned ever-closer and inhaled deeply, her nose centimeters away from my face, before an angry growl came from her maw.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “And why are you breaking into my house?”

I was silent for a moment, my eyes locking onto the choker she wore, and the stone set into the choker. It was what looked like a diamond, carved into the same shape as the piece of jet we found at the crime scene and the overwhelming stench of perfume being the same one I smelled on it earlier. I’d found our cat burglar… and she was literally a cat burglar.

“You’re the one that’s been robbing folk, right?” I asked. “Leaving behind your little calling card? The piece of jet?”

She turned her head, shooting me a sideways glance as she eyed me up a second time, pulling my hood down and staring deep into my eyes.

“What’s it to you?” she asked. “We all gotta make a living.”

“And I’m not judging you for it,” I said in a calm manner. “All I wanna know is who your boss is.”

“And why should I rat him out?” she asked.

“Well, that confirms that it wasn’t self-sabotage if your boss is a male,” I mumbled under my breath. “So that leaves McGraw or Williams. Can you make my job much easier and tell me who it is?”

“I’d like to…” she said, rolling her eyes briefly. “But I’m afraid I can’t. Mr Williams made it very clear that… oh… oops.”

“You’re not the brightest, are you?” I asked with a smirk.

“Can… can you forget I said that?” she asked, her angry pretense dropping away completely and revealing the demeanour of a ditzy Nekomata, as was a common trope with their species. “I’ll give you a cookie?”

Very ditzy Nekomata

“Sorry, honey, but I can’t do that,” I chuckled, trying to move my hand only to have her pin me down harder.

“I’m not letting you move,” she growled.

“Why?” I asked. “I only wanna pet your ears.”

“Yeah. Nice try, buddy,” she growled. “I already fell for that with another guy. He was mean. Tried to pull them off.”

“What happened?” I asked, deciding to play along with the catgirl.

“Well, Mr Williams sent me to get hold of a ‘very important piece of paper’ from the mean woman who hurts other catgirls,” she explained.

“Any idea what the piece of paper was?” I asked.

“Not… not really,” she said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “I… I can’t read.”

“How old are you?” I asked her, seeing that her physical age and mental age were leagues apart.

“Uh… lemme think…” she said, moving her paw away from me to scratch the back of her head, allowing me to move my arm freely. “Gimme a second… I’ll figure it out...”

She then completely removed both of her paws from my arms, counting up numbers on her fingers and becoming more and more frustrated as she seemingly forgot which number came next in the sequence after eleven, restarting over and over again, eventually saying the numbers aloud to try and remember them better. She suddenly clapped her hands to her head and threw herself onto her back, growling and yelling angrily at her inability to count.

“Hang on!” she said, clawing at her hair frantically, completely ignoring me as I got up and walked around her. “I’m… I am…”

“It doesn’t really matter that much,” I said, crossing my arms.

She turned her head towards me, confusion spreading onto her face as she flipped over onto her front and bared her fangs at me.

“When did you get up?” she demanded.

“A while ago,” I shrugged. “Can you tell me where Alexander is and I’ll leave you to go back in the bath.”

“I… I’m not allowed to,” she said, shaking her head. “Mr Williams said that I was never allowed to bring anyone to his home in the business district. He said ‘Don’t bring anyone to either the grey building with the chimney tower or the mansion with the stable outside of it.’ So… I’d like to tell you, because you seem nice enough, but I really can’t. Sorry.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “I’m going to leave now.”

“Hey!” she exclaimed, rushing around to block the doorway. “Do… do you have any food? I didn’t really steal enough last night to get breakfast this morning. My tummy’s really rumbly.”

“I don’t have any on me, no,” I said, drumming my fingers on my crossed arms as an idea formed in my head. “But you’re welcome to come to my house and eat as much as you want there? As long as you promise to tell me where Mr Williams lives, okay?”

“I… I don’t know,” she said, scratching the back of her head in a pondering manner. “He gets mad when I bring friends over.”

“I have business with Mr Williams, anyway,” I said to her. “He’ll be glad to see me once I explain the situation to him. I promise I won’t let him hurt you.”

“He doesn’t hurt me, he just doesn’t let me eat as much when I screw up,” she said in a downcast manner, her ears pressing flat against her head. “You… you won’t tell him I screwed up, will you?”

“Of course not,” I smiled, stroking her on the head and getting a happy purr in response. “Now, let’s get you dressed, and get you something to eat, okay?”

“Yeah!” she nodded enthusiastically. “Let’s go!”