The final stretch of our mountain was less of a climb and more of a ligament-stretching ramp crawl. If you’re a fellow city person, know that it’s tougher than it sounds. Not drips, not drops, but definite rain was pattering across the mud and grass. Most sensible animals had taken cover. Reed and I were out.

We were power-walking again. Going too fast on this terrain could have easily led to a slip-and-fall. Reed had put away her broadsword for the moment, seeing as the way forward looked clear.

“Can you launch energy really far or meow really loud?” she asked me.

“Mrah.”

“I guess that’s a ‘no,’ huh.”

“Meow.”

“I’m asking because I might need to send a signal up or down, for murdering Donovan.”

“Maow?!”

“What?”

“Maow!”

“Oh!” Reed covered her mouth in embarrassed surprise, then got over it and laughed. “Murdering Donovan. Those are the names of the other two people. Murder is the condor, and Donovan is the ranger. Uh…both…masculine.”

“M-meow…”

Reed frowned. “Oh, I should’ve asked you what kinds of abilities you had before we got this close…”

I wasn’t thinking about it that way, but she had a point.

“I-I guess I’m not that used to talking animals, let alone transforming ones! Don’t get me wrong—I know it happens—but…yeah…so…if I say something wrong, I didn’t mean to…uh…yeah…”

Her words got lost in the shuffle of our marching feet. Wow was she making this more complicated than she needed to. I guessed that was humans in a nutshell. How was it that she’d seemed so straightforward, almost businessy at the camp, but now was breaking down over so much logistical nothing?

Eventually she asked, “Do you have much combat experience?”

“Mah!”

She flushed and blubbered instantly. “I’m sorry! That was rude!”

What? I wasn’t offended! I meant “mah” as in confusion, not “mah” as in distress! What’d she mean by “combat experience”? Did she have the same numbers I had, or just, like, life experience?! “Meow meow!” I cried, and I shook my head super hard again, hoping she would turn to see it. Geez…

I didn’t even know what counted as “much” life experience. When it came to the wilderness, I only had a little. But I had to have been more handy than, say, the average city human. And in my former life, I’d been alive for nearly two decades.

What Level was Reed? Presumably she was higher than last night’s wolf—so…what Level was the wolf, then? Or were my basic assumptions all wrong? Was the power actually all in her sword? Or in her muscles, like with boring old Earth people?

“I just don’t want you to get hurt!” Reed cried. “In case we find something weird up there.”

“Meow.”

“You don’t know this place well, do you?”

I silently shook my head.

“There’s a kind of…up there,” she told me, using another unfamiliar word. “It lures monsters in. Late at night, it can lure…like you and me in too. Like a lighthouse, if you know what those are.” She paused. “You’re not a monster, right?”

Wasn’t it a little late to ask that one too?

I meowed and shook my head.

But then I remembered…maybe I was. A nekomata certainly wasn’t an animal. But was it that other fifth-grade vocabulary word Reed had mentioned? More, morp, portal?

Was it “mortal”?

Hm. I didn’t even know if I was.

An opportune-yet-inopportune text box appeared before my eyes.

Message from Sierra, the Goddess of Nekomata
I can’t tell you the rules of this world, but I can say this: you’re definitely mortal.

You have a finite lifespan in Vencia, though it may be longer than the typical human’s.

You’re not fully monster, but not fully animal either. You’ve got a little of both the same way you have a taste for muesli and a taste for raw meat.

For right now, you can tell Reed “no” to make your life easier. Not all monsters are kind.

But not all animals are kind either.

At least there’s kinship. Humans are animals too. A fact that you all tend to forget.

I stubbed my front paw against a stone I couldn’t see. Ugh! Text boxes overstaying their welcome!

Reed heard my squeal of pain and interrupted her speech to ask if I was okay… Oh no, I hadn’t even paid attention to the rest of her speech about the place we were going! And I knew it’d been full of important stuff too!

This didn’t seem like the time to experiment with gestural communication. I had an idea for how to say “repeat,” but it would take at least one free paw—so, later.

I told Reed I was okay with a nod.

In response, she smiled and wrapped up her mostly missed lecture. “…which should mean that we’ll have enough protection. We might even be able to stay on the defensive without looking like total losers, heh…”

I sighed and moved on, powering through my aching paw. It wasn’t draining HP like other recent paw wounds, but it sure was distracting. At least Reed’s last bit had given me some useful information for what I assumed—and kinda hoped!—was a big battle to come.

Reed’s Mountain clearly didn’t have a tall, pointy, wizard-hat peak. Even near the top, it was wide and broad and fairly lumpy. Like a sunhat, if you wanna extend the simile. Once we crested the steep, leg-workout portion, we could see the summit in the near distance. There was something strange on top, a human-made structure. That must have been what Reed was talking about: the “lighthouse.”

I pulled out my mental Map.

The Treasure was in exactly the same spot as the lighthouse. Perfect. So perfect that I began to seriously wonder—and kinda dread!—whether, after al of this, we’d also have to dig a mile underground to get it.

We began to jog. The weather was no longer messing around. It was officially out to make puddles and runny noses, and it made sure we knew it. It splashed across my fur, chilling me to the skin. Bu the one thing it could no longer provide on these rocky slopes was mud. So speed up we did. We panted together, aiming for nothing but that lighthouse, beacon, lure.

We were coming closer and closer. It did sort of look like a lighthouse, at first…but then it looked more like a chapel. It was some sort of tower attached to a building, both made of stone. The closer we got, the more dingy and time-worn the walls became. There were scraps of honey-brown and pink paint, hanging on for dear life and surrounded by deserts of gray.

Reed talked again, this time between heavy breaths: “This used to be—a holy place—but it was…one day long—long ago.”

I didn’t know one of the words, right after “was,” yet I knew what she meant. I could sense that things were out of joint, up here. The closer we ran, the more haunted the air.

But it wasn’t quite like the time-dilating stones. I checked my Stats to make sure, and…no. No debuffs, no new SP drain, nothing yet unexplainably lost.

It was a raw feeling of dread curling up inside of me, coiled tight and heavy in my stomach. It seemed like a magical dread, though I couldn’t explain why I knew that except by process of elimination.

Would my Skills or Traits even work here?

Well, Reed hadn’t implied that they wouldn’t, but since I was incapable of asking questions to confirm, I figured it was better to be safe than sorry. We were coming up fast on the entrance to Reed’s Lighthouse, which I refused to call Reed’s Church because cats should bow to no one. I yearned to Leap to the door for the theatricality, but as we got closer, I discovered it was made of, like, granite. That would’ve been bad.

As we reached the door, Reed mainly had her eyes on the windows of the chapel. Understandably, because they were made of thick, shining, gold-flecked amber. Maybe she was checking for magical signs or whatever, but I was just intrigued by their beauty.

Could those have been the Treasure? Nah, I’d tracked enough Treasure to know it was going to be inside.

I backed away. Up close, nothing about this place besides the windows was outstanding. The stone-and-mortar walls with their crumbling paint reminded me of a castle keep.

In fact, the door looked like it was locked in place by the same mortar. It gave way at Reed’s touch, swaying open on a nonexistent hinge.

She paused after that, and I peeked inside, bending my head around her leg.

At first glance, the place was nothing but ruin and desolation. Off-color smudges on the ground showed clearly where furniture had recently sat and fended off dust. A small percentage of that furniture lay in shreds and tatters against walls, in random spots, and in cracks where the rock floor and walls had been split by time…or something else. And rectangular smudges stood out on the walls, too, likely from art that’d been destroyed or stolen. The door in the back was mortared into the wall, presumably leading to the tower—I wondered if that was in the same state of disorder.

It dawned on me, though, that the place couldn’t have been abandoned. Things weren’t just tossed about. They were set up in their own inhuman patterns. I recognized a splintery, moth-eaten oval as a transformed wooden table with living, sac-like lumps growing on its underside… As my eyes lingered on it, I thought of how city cats used thrown-out sofas as shelters by clawing out the stuffing and coils.

With each passing second, I discovered a new pattern in some alcove of the room. It began to look less like a free-for-all and more like a series of camps, as if different animals—different monsters—lived in their own sections. As if we needed to tread lightly, for fear of inciting a turf war.

But I haven’t described the most intriguing part of the room: a rough chunk of brassy amber hanging from a bronze chain the way a chandelier might on Earth. Swaying slightly, and glowing. Pulsing.

Reed’s face had only a twinge less wonder and fright than mine. She turned to me and whispered, “You don’t know any places like this.”

I shook my head.

“You can’t shoot arrows or…other things.”

I…uh…again shook my head.

“Stay here, please,” she said. “Until there’s a fight. I’m going to try for the…” Another missed word or several.

Well, at least wrangling my head around the end of that sentence would keep me occupied while Reed made her next move. But first, she revealed her blade and set it gently next to me. Then she removed a baggie that I hadn’t even seen before—more stuff from her mysterious Inventory? Even though I made my best confused face at this, she didn’t stop to explain why she couldn’t just keep it behind her back. She just went on ahead into the room, her canteen bobbing at her hip, her shoulders tense.