Puella Monstrum Madoka Moecha – Chapter 6 – Kyuubey

Madoka – Oh God What Is Even

I… I need to get out of here.

Hitomi and Sayaka have already left, and I’m just huddled on top of the toilet’s cover, my face burning about half as intensely as the heat I’m feeling between my legs, and I can’t stop thinking about short blue hair moving between them as Sayaka licks my labia entirely clean off my dripping juices, and I don’t want to touch myself in here again, I don’t want to shove my fingers inside me until I feel them stretch me almost painfully, but I keep remembering the smell of that white puddle seeping beneath the partition keeping me away from my two friends, the partition they kept pushing hard enough I thought it would come down, letting me see Hitomi’s rolled back eyes as Sayaka held her upright and pounded her hard enough to turn her moans of pleasure into desperate gasps, and then Sayaka would look right into my eyes, never stopping moving her hips, letting me know I would be next—

“I think you need some fresh air, Madoka Kaname.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! I’m not masturbating, I swear!”

There’s a moment of dreadful silence, and I slowly turn my head to look up at the small window letting light into the toilet.

Kyuubey, crouched on the windowsill, arches an eyebrow over that red bunny-like eye of his and looks at me reproachfully.

“I don’t need any reassurances as to your current lack of onanistic activities,” he says, swiftly jumping down to land on the floor in front of me and sitting back on his haunches.

…

“You’re terrible, Kyuubey,” I tell him, my cheeks still as heated as a moment ago, even if the shock has, for at least a moment, driven away the constant temptation to ask Sayaka to explain to me what exactly it’s like to have a… a…

You know what I want to ask her!

“I’ve often been assured about said fact. It continues to baffle me,” Kyuubey says before getting on two legs and sniffing at my—

“What the Hell are you doing?!”

“Assessing your level of distress,” he says, reproachfully staring at my hands as I pull my skirt down to cover… everything. “It looks like you are in need of my hands-on assistance.”

…

“No,” I tell him, trying not to cry.

“Are you sure? Your scent indicates levels of arousal that would be thoroughly uncomfortable to endure—”

“Yes. I am sure,” I cut him off, trying not to scream.

“Ah. Then I guess I’ll just dispel Sayaka Miki’s magic,” he says, as calm as I don’t feel.

“Wait, you can do what?”

Rather than answering… Kyuubey glows.

It’s… it’s like staring at a full moon, if the moon could be blinding, and his fur comes off him in pulsing waves that soon become a sphere, each strand of fur turned into glimmering light that spins fast enough I can convince myself I hear the air buzz, and…

And then it contracts, comes back to him, and…

…

I think I should’ve asked Kyuubey what gender they would prefer.

Because, kneeling in front of me, there’s a very cutegirl wearing a miko outfit, Kyuubey’s tail protruding from the back of her red hakama, the weird double ears on top of a head with silky, short white hair, the red eyes staring up at me in a way that is making me reconsider whether or not I want her ‘hands-on assistance,’ and couldn’t she have done this before asking—

“Destructive interference,” she whispers.

And… And the air blurs, and suddenly…

I am not horny anymore.

I still am lethally embarrassed, though.

So, still huddled on top of the toilet seat, I hug my knees, bury my face in my thighs, and try not to sob.

“It is apparent you require a change of underwear, Madoka Kaname.”

You aren’t helping!

***

Kyuubey—Messing Things Up

It takes me a moment to coax Madoka Kaname out of the bathroom stall she claims she cannot leave without risking spontaneous combustion.

For some reason, my clarification regarding the rarity of such a phenomenon and how it often can be explained away by perfectly sensible circumstances doesn’t reassure her entirely.

It takes quite a bit of (practiced) effort not to smirk at the flustered girl.

“So… Sex is… a requirement?” she asks, repeating herself in different words.

“It is, up to a point. One could go by just using the energy released by Phantom Shards, but that would hinder my efforts to gather such energy—not to mention it would require me to be available at all times. Most magical girls end up… indulging. It helps that most phantoms are born out of some kind of sexual desire, and so defeating them and having sex are often confluent objectives.”

Beneath the shade of a cherry tree, pink eyes stare at me between crimson cheeks.

She’s such a good girl; I can’t help but want to tease her.

“I am sure your friends and companions will appreciate your eagerness to help them,” I tell her, nodding my head in deference.

Apparently, that’s all it takes for her brain to short-circuit.

“Wha—wha—wha—I am not going to, to… to do thingsto Sayaka and Mami just because they are magically pent up! Much less at once!”

I raise an eyebrow I grew quite fond of centuries ago, when chastising an easily flustered blonde.

“I never mentioned group sex, Madoka Kaname. Though I’d imagine that would be an efficient way to go about the process. I admire your pragmatical mindset.”

Ah, now the crimson cheeks look on the verge of bruising.

How nostalgic.

“Pragma—no! I… I’m not pragmatic! Not at all!”

“Oh? Do you mean that was just an expression of your personal preferences? I never imagined you to be so… adventurous.”

She starts making a strangled noise I can barely pick up with my animal ears, and then buries her face in her hands.

How nostalgic, indeed.

***

It doesn’t take long for Madoka Kaname to leave after she remembers she still needs to go to school and would rather do so wearing functional underwear. Despite the circumstances, the way she rushes away from me doesn’t even hint at a retreat.

She’s… braver than she thinks.

Again, how nostalgic.

I take a deep breath and look at the branches of the cherry tree above me. The swirling pink petals don’t look at all like yellowed chestnut leaves falling around me while traveling through southern France.

The sounds of the park with a soothing water channel aren’t at all like those that surrounded me deep through a dark forest, with Riz constantly on the lookout for roaming packs of wolves fattened through a century-long war.

The… the people of Japan, that loathsome country, aren’t like the villagers who often housed… them.

Ah. It looks like Homura Akemi got to me far more than I intended.

There was a reason I showed her. A reason I told her about Tart and Riz, as nonsensical as she thought the whole scene was.

The reason is… I know she comes from another world. Another timeline.

One in which she has reason to hate me.

One in which, presumably, I didn’t make my mistake.

One that should have been entirely different. That should’ve gone down another path.

And yet…

And yet, Homura Akemi knew who Jeanne d’Arc was. Recognized the name.

And everything in her eyes told me she knew her tale still ended in tragedy.

So…

So I stupidly pulled at an open wound, just in case there was a chance, no matter how small, that another Kyuubey and another Tart would have managed things differently, would have…

I shouldn’t be like this.

But… I made a mistake.

***

The Earth wasn’t young. Not really. It was billions of years old, had seen entire ecosystems rise and fall, had seen continents drift.

I was, though. This would be my first world to mold, the first place I would turn into a battery to stall the end of creation.

Such a noble calling.

So, as soon as I arrived, as soon as I identified the potential in the sapient species barely rising above the animals around them… I got to work.

I analyzed the nascent noosphere, the collected thoughts turning the planet into a world, and I identified every key point I would need to manipulate to bring about the cycle of energy creation, the laws of Fate starting to gel around the bipeds. It was straightforward enough: desire and tragedy, wish and retribution.

Karma.

And yet… I delayed.

It all seemed simple enough. I’d just have to devote millennia to carefully groom the downfall of everyone I’d associate with, to have innocence turn to regret and despair.

Simple.

Maybe not easy, but… simple.

And then, just as I decided to finally get to work, to stop stalling and set in place the rules of what would come after, I came across them.

A couple, their hair unusually blond, the male shorter than the vigorous, youthful woman.

The woman riding him with an energy the man couldn’t keep up with, as his eyes rolled to the back of his head and his lips slackened in a silly grin.

It was… interesting.

The act of procreation had never seemed relevant, other than to ensure the continuity of the species that I would turn to cattle, but… But seeing them, seeing the man weakly reach up to the bouncing breasts above him, the woman smiling encouragingly right before dropping her hips down on top of him so suddenly that his strength fled as he weakly spurted inside of her as his arms fell back down on top of the grey furs they were using as bedding…

Seeing the look of sheer enjoyment as she lifted her dripping pussy off his cock before slowly climbing down his body, taking his length in hand and slowly licking it up as her blue eyes never strayed from his face, waiting until he had the strength to look down at her just to swallow him whole, right down to the root as her nostrils flared and a sound of delighted enjoyment hummed from both their throats…

I found that… interesting.

Not in the erotic sense. I didn’t have the capacity for that, back then.

But… But seeing something that had been honed for a single purpose through their entire evolutionary tree evoke such intense feelings when turned to mere enjoyment, such a stirring in the noosphere gathered around them…

I started thinking.

The Witch System was an awe-inspiring feat of magical engineering. It would feed on the ever-shifting energies of a body and soul about to reach maturity and take the conceptual change as the catalyst to turn the magic wielder into something else, to have the egg laid at the moment of the contract burst open when the currents of Fate turned in their inevitable tide.

It would assure me a steady flow of energy at the cost of personally tending to every girl I contracted until they reached the point of no return, the metamorphosis that would have them hunted down by their replacements.

It was, as far as I could tell, flawless.

Still… what if, rather than a burst of energy, I could gather a small stream? What if I could make the system more… sustainable?

I didn’t even have to tweak that much. Still inspired by the female, now engulfing her mate’s shaft within perky, round breasts even as she never let his tip out of her lips, I could see how to twist things around. The witch form could be made less powerful, just a way for the magic wielders to tap into the surrounding noosphere, to have the resonant aspects of their psyche and soul gather power from cultural inertia. From dreams, and myths, and legends.

Turning back? Releasing all that energy in a way I could harvest as easily as I could have the Grief Seeds? That would have been more difficult, hadn’t it been for me carefully examining the male’s release, how… how pleasantly drained he became as the female swallowed his seed…

That… seemed like a good idea.

Centuries later, I would be present to listen to the first human to ever utter the line, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ and I would remember this moment and spend the entirety of the month drinking myself into a stupor.

Because I just had to try, didn’t I? I just had to rework a globe-spanning feat of magical engineering at the last moment and set it into motion without properly checking things, didn’t I? I just had to stake the fate of an entire world on my last-minute burst of inspiration.

It’s a miracle it didn’t go worse.

At first, it seemed to work well enough. I could feel the noosphere’s winds swirl and shift, the mental energies of the nascent race of sapients attune to the changes surrounding their psyche. I could feel everything connect, the proper channels for energy to endlessly flow be formed, crystallized around the concepts I had introduced.

Channels that led back to me.

And so I was hit by it. I was hit by the surge of raw magic attuned to the concept of sex, and desire, and release. To the concepts of change, of growth, of attunement.

And so my body glowed with a silver light I never managed to hate as my paws lifted off the bare soil beneath me, and my limbs lengthened into something more... comfortable. My eyes grew, my vision of the world filling with vivid colors I used to only be peripherally aware of. My skin became flawlessly smooth, devoid of fur even as my tail swayed behind me and my ears twitched above me.

And I… became a girl.

A Kyuubey-girl, Tart would call me millennia down the line.

So I was a Kyuubey-girl kneeling on dark earth, staring at the very attractive blonde doing her best to coax another erection from her lover, licking his entire body before shifting above him so the slowly hardening member would be caught between soft thighs as she hungrily kissed him, sucking his tongue into her mouth.

And I, for the first time in my life…

Touched myself.

It took me half a day to stop doing it. And then I started hitting my head against the nearest rock I could find.

The legend of the drumming rock lasted for three generations of the Ioka Tribe.

***

The park is… soothing. I always enjoyed the sound of rushing water, once I developed a sense of aesthetics.

Almost mischievously, taking advantage of the fact none of the people who can see me in this town are currently nearby, I dip a tabi-clad foot into the channel, feeling the fresh current wash around the fabric made from my magically woven fur.

It took me centuries to start appearing in a clothed state. I think the shift in the legends about beasts wearing the skin of women helped with that.

Of course, that’s jumping quite a bit ahead. Because as much as my transformation into a human-hybrid affected me personally, as much as the neverending horror at what I would’ve been forced to endure had I chosen the course of history where I would spend eons personally tailoring tragedies to everyone I met, and as much as the shift in my perceptions horrified me until I finally learned to accept them fully when traveling through war-ravaged France…

I still made another mistake.

Never implement a last-minute change without double-checking—and then triple-checking. And then distrust any result that doesn’t show any errors because surely there must be some hiding somewhere.

I feel like my younger self could have benefitted from meeting a programmer.

In this case…

I hesitated to stray away from the tribe near where I first took my new shape. I had no excuse: the system was in place, and it was time for me to look for girls with the right potential to contract me. It was time to fulfill my purpose.

And yet, I… I didn’t know what to do.

As alien as the concept felt to me, I truly hesitated. The far too intense emotions and the empathy that came with them had muddled my sense of purpose, and I felt I needed time to learn about what the new me was before I truly set to work, lest I managed to compound on my mistake. At times, I wondered whether there was even a chance to go back, to undo the changes I set in place, to have this be a predictable cycle.

Of course, that was when my hand was forced.

The female had gone out to hunt, and the male had remained behind with the tribe, working on something I believed would turn out to be a weapon of some kind once somebody figured out how to use it without injuring themselves, but his eyes often strayed toward the direction his mate had gone to, and…

And I saw the winds of the world swirl around him as his member hardened beneath his furs.

And, suddenly, the very same blonde was embracing him from behind.

Except he didn’t feel it. He didn’t react to the amorous caresses, to the daring touches, to the kisses raining down his body.

He just kept sitting there, staring at where his mate had gone to, his member tenting the front of his furs.

That was the day the legend of the second drumming rock was born.

***

Phantoms.

I had to deal with phantoms.

Because of course I let the new system interact with everyone and not just those with magical potential. Of course I thought that would be a great way to gather even more power from the subconscious motions of volition and belief. Of course I thought I was being clever.

And now, the embodiments of everyone’s unfulfilled desires were threatening to consume the entirety of the species I had chosen to raise.

The next few millennia were exhausting.

I had to contract a magical girl in every single human settlement just to ensure not a single phantom was allowed to grow powerful enough to become a threat. I had to monitor each and everyone of them, the network of bodies I could jump to stretching thin as humanity spread like a damn virus—something I would have celebrated under any other circumstances, but that I was now being increasingly frustrated by.

I almost cried when the first of the masochistic creatures decided to settle in the Arctic.

Screw that: I sobbed like a little girl.

Seriously? Of all the unclaimed parts of the world, and the damn humans had to see a hellish, barren landscape of frozen death and think that was good enough? That the property value could only rise? What do these hairless monkeys even want to—

Ah. I thought I had repressed that trauma well enough.

It’s humbling to know that, after so many millennia, I still have so much to learn about repression.

Anyway, another unforeseen circumstance turned out to be enough to save my increasingly depleted sanity.

That is: unplanned pregnancies.

Not mine, of course. I don’t even want to test how viable that is.

But, as it turns out, when a girl in her monster form wants to get pregnant… she will.

And the child… won’t be normal.

The results are unpredictable, but, more often than not, they will carry some traits from their mother’s monstrous form. Their strength, some of the magical affinity…

The ability to see and kill phantoms.

That was… such a relief.

I almost wanted to come up with a eugenics program to replace base humanity with monstrous lines. In the end, I refrained because the bloodlines of monster hunters were enough to contain the threat. Phantoms usually weren’t that powerful, and, despite their capacity for unlimited growth, they did so at such a slow rate that regular culling was more than enough to make the problem a non-issue.

Still, the lines did not always breed true, and, unless mixing with other lineages of monstrous origins, they would revert to base humanity in as few as three generations.

So it was a good thing that monstergirls liked fucking.

Like… they liked it a whole lot.

And the enhanced feelings of intimacy instilled by an act that went even beyond what regular sex can do to a human mind ensured that…

Well.

Let’s just say I was never afraid there would be a time when I would lack for monster-born.

Yet again, another reason to throttle my past self.

I spot an empty bench and decide to sit down and just watch the pink petals of the cherry blossoms fall. At this hour, most people are either working or studying, so the park is pleasantly empty, filled only with the sounds of a breeze making flower-laden branches sway and a water channel that could carry away worries and regrets if I had never forgotten how to let it do that.

Tart.

And Riz.

I… loved them.

Not in a romantic way. Never that. They had each other, and it brought me a peace and happiness I had never felt as I watched them find joy and support in the other’s arms.

But… after centuries of wandering the Earth, after having finally found a way to let humanity fight for itself without me having to look over their collective shoulders, after I had finally started to learn how to be… how to be like them, to accept the girl who was born out of the Collector…

They… They helped.

***

“I don’t understand,” Tart said, staring at me with those wide eyes of hers even as Riz rubbed the one shoulder she wasn’t covering with her protective arm.

“You don’t have to. Just… Thank you,” I told her from the other side of the campfire, smiling at her in a way I never had before. A way I had never understood before.

She looked to her side, to Riz’s amber eyes, and the older woman shrugged, also baffled by my gratitude.

But she was Tart, and so…

She looked back at me, a wide, cheerful grin on her face.

“You are always welcome, Kyuubey,” she said.

And my heart hammered inside my chest as I felt the need to laugh and hug the two of them.

Then Riz died, and that laughter died with her.

***

“You could’ve saved her,” Gilles said, above me, his hands around my throat, his cock spreading me open.

He had a touch of monster in him. A lineage of dragons.

I’d always thought dragons were noble, even when their myths weren’t.

Gilles had been noble. And enough of a dragon to see me, to touch me.

“She begged me not to,” I told him through my pained throat, feeling his rough movements shake my entire body, my petite breasts moving beneath his chest until he bent down to bite around my nipple as I buried my hands in his hair and whimpered in guilty pleasure.

He was still a dragon.

But I could feel the nobility burn away.

He came inside of me, that one day. And many that came after.

But then the madness took him, and I…

I should’ve stayed. Should’ve stayed, and stopped him, brought him to reason, him, and all of those who had followed her and that I still could reach.

But…

But that was the country that had watched her die. The country that had sacrificed her.

And so, I left France behind and hoped it would burn.

Like Tart had.

***

For a time, Asia was much better.

“Foul demon! Your sorcery has bewitched the noble emperor long enough!”

It was amusing, at least.

“Can you come back later? The royal consort is quite… hungry,” I told the well-muscled, rapidly blushing bodyguard as his sword dropped from nerveless fingers and he gaped at a very naked, very eager Daji writhe between my legs, her tongue shoved right between my folds, her bare behind pointed right at the young man who had so rudely interrupted us.

To my right, the Emperor of China drooled a happy grin as he stared into empty space, his mind filled with all the creative illusions of unearthly beautiful women I had crammed into the accommodating void between his ears.

Inbreeding had its perks.

“I… What… what have you done to them, demonic fox?” he managed to say despite the pulsing waves of lust-filled incense wafting across the room, making my skin tingle, my nipples almost painfully swell in their need to be touched, licked, kissed.

I stared at him.

There was… a bit of Bai Ze in him, the cowlike monster associated with the Yellow Emperor, though, in this case, he had none of the insight of the creature.

Although he had distrusted me from the beginning, so there was that.

“Nothing they haven’t asked me for,” I answered, biting my lip as Daji licked up to find my clitoris, to surround it with thirsty lips and suck on me.

“I don’t… You tricked them. You fooled them into asking that which they were not ready for,” he said, approaching me.

I smiled.

“You are clever. I like you.” My eyes roamed up his body, guessing how much bull there would be in him, how thick his cock would be. “Now drop your pants and fuck an heir into your slutty empress.”

He blinked at me in shock.

And then he dropped his pants, and Daji sucked me very enthusiastically as she was railed by a man wide enough to dwarf her, his hips loudly smacking against hers as he stared at me with anger and desire.

Then, after the Empress was lying on her side, her body wracked by the kind of orgasm one can rarely get without some magic involved, I leaned back on the imperial throne, spread my pussy between two fingers, and looked at him in silent challenge.

And he proceeded to fuck my brains out.

***

When I arrived in Korea, my reputation had preceded me.

The nine-tailed fox. The witch. The calamity woman.

“Ah! Yes! Yes, take that! Take everything!” Park Mun-su, a noble man devoted to purging corrupt royal officials, yelled below me as he thrust his cock up into my rigid body.

I didn’t answer him.

Not because I was trying to hold back any reaction as the ropes bound around my arms and breasts bit into my always soft skin. Not because I was too busy fighting off the barrage of pleasure the man with the blood of a kirin was fucking through me with his far too horse-like cock (in proportions, thankfully not in shape) as he spread me open in a way no one had since that charming imperial guard whose name I never learned.

No, it was because I was too busy trying to breathe through the also quite hefty cock of Park Mun-su’s son throbbing down my pulsing throat.

I had to fight off unconsciousness because, as much as I had spent the better part of three decades drowning myself in sex, alcohol, and the magic that fueled both of those, this was too good to miss.

Particularly with his younger son fucking my ass hard enough to make my spit fly off around the older’s cock.

Once upon a time, the fox had had the same consideration in Korea as it had in Japan and China. That of a mischievous spirit who could be malevolent or benevolent. When Park Mun-su saw me walking down the street and dragged me to his home?

The myth of the kumiho says we are unrepentant monsters, man-eaters, seducers of boys.

And that we have a ball that holds our power.

A ball that can be stolen from us when we share it with a malicious kiss intended to take someone’s life.

I spent a whole month being ruthlessly fucked into a mewling pile by the family of the noble hunter of corruption, enjoying every second of it.

I never told him I wasn’t actually a fox.

***

“You are too dangerous to leave unattended, Tamamo-no-Mae,” Miura said.

“I changed your diapers once,” I reminded the whelp of a line of tengu.

Of course he would turn out to be a swordsman. They rarely went against the stereotype.

He nervously adjusted his blue haori’s collar in a way that was a painfully transparent stalling tactic as he looked for the appropriate way to regain whatever dignity he may have still held in my eyes.

Not much, really. He was always a brat.

“As recognition for your past services to the Imperial Bureau of Onmyoudo, you shall be sealed rather than executed,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow.

“You and whose army, little Miura?”

He bristled, his hand nervously inching toward his katana.

And then, from behind a black volcanic rock, stepped out Abe no Yasuchika, garbed in the traditional white kimono of an imperial astrologer.

He looked so much like the founder of his line that my heart clenched.

“I think I shall be enough, won’t I, honored ancestor?” he asked, a wooden rod in his right hand and a spread of paper talismans in the other.

“You… Abe no Seimei wasn’t my son,” I tell him.

No. He was Naomi’s son, beautiful, young Naomi, lost to centuries gone by, who had always claimed me as family just because her transformation had turned her into an amorous kitsune.

She never quite understood how different we were. She just declared me her cousin and forced her hospitality on me until I found myself spending far too much time teaching her son, the child who would become Japan’s most famous astrologer, how to best battle the phantoms almost nobody else could see.

He ended up defeating an infamous oni, a phantom powerful enough I would never had sent Naomi alone to battle it.

And he, a human with just enough fox blood in him to work the magics I taught him as a child, defeated the beast who had been devouring travelers going to Kyoto for years.

I was so damn proud of the little terror I almost forgot how long it had been before I rushed to meet him. And I found a grown man greeting me with a sad smile on his face who then took me to his mother’s tomb.

… I left Japan then. Traveled through Europe.

And then I lost Tart and ended up coming back, just to once again meet Seimei’s face looking at me with chagrined regret as the sealing array I had unwittingly stepped into lit up, and the winds of the world howled.

Miura slashed me down, then. His blade parted my body, severing the links to all my other ones, forcing me to become a single person in a single place.

And then I…

I faded into the rock.

The Killing Stone.

And I spent centuries there. Dreaming, barely aware of it, my memories playing over and over, my mind becoming something other than what had been sealed into the rock.

Then the rock split, and I…

I woke up in this modern, alien world. A world full of more people than I ever dreamed there would be before they tried to reach for the stars, full of technology I had grown accustomed to not existing through millennia of seeing them develop.

A world where most of the old bloodlines had disappeared, faded into myth.

Where magic was considered superstition.

A world in which phantoms roamed, unimpeded to grow, to gather in numbers and strength, with barely anyone left to see them, much less hunt them down.

And so I was faced with my current circumstances:

There are no magical girls, and there haven’t been for centuries.

There are almost no hunters left, and their numbers keep dwindling with each generation that doesn’t breed true.

There are far more phantoms than I ever thought could be dealt with, and some of them are more powerful than I thought possible.

I can’t travel the world except in the same way everybody else does. At least my invisible self doesn’t have to pay for plane tickets.

I pondered these circumstances, the point of no return humanity was about to be faced with, and I…

Dropped down to my knees and laughed until I cried.

Because there was no way, absolutely no way, I could fix all of this on my own. The world was about as condemned as it would’ve been if I had established the Witch System, and little old me, naked and stranded in the middle of the mountains of Nasu, was entirely impotent to stop it, no matter how much the current me wanted to, no matter how different I was from the Kyuubey who wouldn’t have batted an eye at a catastrophe of this magnitude.

I had messed up. I had messed up, and then I had allowed myself to be taken out of circulation for long enough that the whole world would pay for my mistakes.

‘I know you are not an angel. I know, but to me… Will you pray with me, one last time? Pray that I meet Riz in the afterlife?’ Tart had asked me the last time we spoke. The day before she burned.

And I, tired of begging, tired of pleading with her to slaughter her way out of that prison—

Knelt down and prayed.

I didn’t know to what. To whom. I just…

I just wanted things to get better.

I think, at that moment, I truly became human for the first time. Impotent before something I wanted desperately to not be true, resorting to everything and anything for a loved one… Yes. I think that was the last time an inhuman Kyuubey walked the Earth.

And then I did the most human thing I could conceive of and went on a senseless, hedonistic bender until somebody slapped me down.

I drop down on a wooden bench hard enough that it creaks, and a raven rummaging through the grass behind me is startled into flight.

Then I open my eyes and stare straight into the sun filtering through the pink blossoms above me.

This has been pointless. Homura Akemi definitely affected me more than I thought.

And I…

I take a deep breath, relishing in the sensation of cold air spreading inside of me as wavering spots of warmth glide over my face, trying to take in the feeling of being alive and out of that damned rock.

Then I do a mental calculus and take out my phone.

I told Homura Akemi that I didn’t need one, that I had telepathy.

Mostly to tease her, truth be told.

Still…

Sometimes, it’s easier to call.

“Auntie? Do you have the slightest idea of what time it is?” Jean’s groggy voice asks as soon as he picks up.

“Around twelve a.m.,” I say, my internal clock as impeccable as ever.

“In France, Auntie. What time it is in France,” he answers, grogginess giving way to irritation.

“Jean, I feel you shouldn’t be asking me that. You should be aware of the time-keeping conventions of your own country.”

There’s a noise coming out of my phone that I once delighted in getting out of a cheerful blonde who wanted to be a hero.

It’s distorted, the masculine voice of Tart’s and Riz’s descendant not quite reaching the same heights Jeanne’s once did.

It still makes me smile.