“Nyahahaha~! So~ yummy~!” A totally naked, one-meter tall cat-girl was happily rocking back and forth on a hammock, with a tub of eel flavored iced cream resting on her belly. Her black-furred tail was wiggling around between her legs and her surprisingly large breasts were jiggling incessantly every time she moved.

A silver spoon made entirely out of nanites was hovering in the air and moved with incredible precision, as it delivered a giant mouthful of the chilly ‘delicacy’ into Jasmine’s mouth. “Om-nom-nom-nom~! Hehehehe~!” She couldn’t help but incessantly make a wide variety of noises, while happily enjoying herself.

There was a loud creaking noise and her bright-yellow feline eyes abruptly focused on the screen-door to her left, which was slowly opening. Her hammock was hanging from the support beams for the balcony that was above the deck she was currently ‘inhabiting’.

Hiro was still wearing the same clothes and it hadn’t even been three hours since the ‘two’ of them had arrived at his house. However, almost immediately after entering the living room, Michael transformed into a tiny cat-girl. Before making all of her clothing and items vanish, she ran out to the backyard and started screaming “Nyah~?! Woah?! You have a pool! Sweet~!” and sprinted over to the diving board.

After jumping into warm, chlorine-filled water, she promptly began drowning. She cried “No~?! My eyes~! Kyah~! Save me~ Hiro-chan~! My coochie feels like it’s on fire~! Wah~! My pee-hole burns so hard~!” As it turned out, her ‘slimy’ nature made her incredibly weak against certain chemicals, though it certainly wasn’t as dangerous as she thought it was.

Before the confused and deeply disturbed cyborg could fish her out of the pool, the nanites suddenly began ‘removing’ the chlorine from the water. Thus, the little girl still sunk to the bottom of the deep end, but she was no longer in any pain. Then she fell asleep and unconsciously floated up to the surface. Her shenanigans eventually settled down once Hiro started giving her candy and essentially treating her like a ‘normal’ child.

***

When Jasmine saw him, she yelled “Nyah~, Hiro-chan~, hehehe~! Did you find it?!” He had a wry smile on his face, as he walked over and handed her a large styrofoam container. Without bothering to even lift herself off of the hammock, she pushed the tub of iced cream onto her groin and immediately opened the ‘take-out’ box.

She gasped, as her eyes went wide and a look of astonishment appeared on her adorable face. Then she started weeping from happiness, while shouting “It’s so~ amazing~! Wah~, Hiro-chan~! I can’t believe you actually remembered my birthday~!”.

The cyborg frowned, asking “Umm, ‘JJ’, when is Minari going to be back?” He had just driven home from the nearest sushi restaurant, fifteen miles away, in order to appease the sobbing little girl who demanded her ‘Birthday Rainbow Roll’ and started making terrifying death threats. Although, by the time he handed her some iced cream, she had totally forgotten about all of that nonsense.

Jasmine used her right hand to casually pluck out a slice of rice, avocado, salmon, and octopus. As she was chewing it up, she wondered “Nyah~, who are you again? Oh, Mikey just told me to tell you that uh, um, oh, hmmm… Meow~, my brainbox is acting all weird. Un~, so~ tasty~! Om-nom-nom~!”

After sighing dramatically, Hiro turned around and went inside the house. He paced back and forth in the spacious, tiled room, which had large windows on the eastern, southern and northern walls. Eventually, he walked up a few stairs and entered the left wing of the house.

Passing the kitchen on his right, he entered the living room to the left. There was a couch next to a fireplace and a small black piano in the corner. As he gazed out the huge window at the giggling cat-girl that was talking to herself, he suddenly heard a quiet ringing in the back of his mind.

He blinked twice with his crimson, robotic eye and started hearing a familiar feminine voice inside of his head. She asked “Oi, Otouto, why the fuck didn’t you call me?! I figured that bastard might have already killed you!”

Without opening his mouth or speaking, he directly replied “I’m fine… It’s just that our plan seems to have a huge flaw in it and I was worried that my transmission might have been intercepted. Well, it’s too late now though, so hopefully this crazy little monster can’t read my mind right now. Yeah, she just finished eating a tub of that nasty eel iced cream shit you like and, now she’s wearing the container as a hat. Sis, not only can Michael still use magic, he also seems to have gained the ability to control nanites… I’m not really sure if it was good or bad, but he’s currently in the form of some weird nekomimi.”

The voice immediately shouted “That’s bad, really motherfucking bad! Leave now! Abort the mission! Get as far away from that demonic whore as possible!”

Hiro murmured “She doesn’t seem that bad… Just a bit weird.” However, the moment he finished that sentence, an AK-47 appeared in her tiny hands. She jumped down off of the hammock and ran over the huge glass table on the deck. The little girl hopped up onto one of the metal chairs, which was painted white, and began rapidly taking the gun apart.

“Meow~, so weird~… No enhancements, no runes, doesn’t even have a mana-gem array~. Nyah~, Mikey~, how does this shooter work without any magic?” Jasmine started talking to herself, as various pieces of equipment began appearing before her. There was a soldering wand, plasma torch, a whole box of colored pencils, a screeching demonic poisonous frog, a bouquet of pink roses, a stuffed brown teddy bear that was sentient, a pen knife and a laser pointer that could cut through steel.

The voice in Hiro’s mind told him “Otouto, listen to me carefully… That ‘thing’ may seem like a cute little nekomimi, but it isn’t. If Arcana is a Goddess, then that brat is literally the Devil! Never trust her! Besides that, if Minari can take Jasmine’s shape, then the others could appear at any moment… While the kitten is one of the most unpredictable, she isn’t that dangerous overall. Anyway, you just need to get the fuck out of there as soon as possible. I’ll let the others know that the plan is a failure. Tell that crazy cunt that you’re going to pick up some uh, I don’t know, tacos or something. Then head to the extraction point…”

Hiro frowned, turning around and walking into the kitchen, while complaining “What are you talking about Onee-san? I can’t just leave New Tokyo… I have a life here, a girlfriend who I love and what about our house?!”

She sighed emphatically and yelled “No matter how fast the tech over there advances, there’s no way that it can compete with Arcana… It’s only a matter of time before she shows up and totally destroys everything! Either that, or the Atheists will finally decide to exterminate the Arcanists in a goddamn Holy War! There’s no happy ending there Otouto! Michael might be able to protect you, but he won’t!”

After he took a can of orange soda out of the refrigerator and began drinking it, he asked “How long? The Shadow Council has had that prophesy for millennia, right? Does it even specify an exact date? I can’t say that I don’t empathise with you all, but even if the world does end eventually, so what? I probably only have two or three years left with the love of my life, and then I’ll… Well, by then humanity will probably be obsolete either way. Who knows, maybe Project Exodus will be finished by then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something happened before that. My point is that even if you managed to ‘save the world’, so what?! This isn’t a game, where you don’t need to worry about the consequences after you somehow manage to win in the end! Even if you destroyed Michael, or appeased Arcana, it doesn’t change anything! Eventually, we’ll all die, it’s inevitable… but what we do with our lives and how much we enjoy them, that’s all that really matters. Who knows? Maybe Arcana was telling the truth… If I was able to be with Rei-Rei in the next life, hahaha~, wouldn’t that be an amazingly happy ending to my pathetic story?!”

A few minutes of silence passed, before the woman said “I’m sorry Otouto… I really am… but life sucks sometimes. You can’t just believe in fairy tales and outrageous myths because things are getting hard. Still, if you really want to stay there so fucking bad, then don’t come crying for me to save your ass again… And if you do decide to go over to that psychotic monster’s side, then even ‘I’ won’t be able to protect you anymore.”