Chapter 356 - 1: First Things First, Slap a Label on Her

Chapter 356: Chapter 1: First Things First, Slap a Label on Her

The moment Yimi arrived, she caught an abnormal scent in the air. She did not even need to return to her kitten form; the dust drifting through the air was enough to tell her something was wrong.

She was in a remote village deep in the mountains, but no villagers were present. They seemed to have fled to safety.

Yimi looked down at her hands and tried to examine how Adaptive Power had changed, only to sense something extremely vague.

Something resembling Haki or magic spread outward from her body, but it was much harder to control than either of those. It felt as though she had suddenly gained countless extra hands to control and had to divide her attention among them.

That was the best comparison the little cat’s limited experience could produce. Even now, she found using chopsticks troublesome. After trying for two seconds, Yimi decisively gave up on investigating further.

Simple, brutally direct abilities were still better.

Main Quest: Defeat the strongest person in this world.

The mission was simple and brutally direct too.

"Hoho! To think a delicious little child would appear here." An evil voice sounded from nearby.

Looking in that direction, Yimi saw an incredibly ugly monster with a human face and only half his body protruding from the ground.

He even introduced himself.

"I wanted to pretend my friends had buried me in the sand as a prank so I could peek under beautiful girls’ skirts, but nobody on the beach was wearing one! I flew into a rage and accidentally became a monster! Behold the great Disaster Level: Wolf—Half-Body Beach Man!"

"Meow?" Yimi’s ears twitched, and her tail cooperatively curled into the shape of a question mark.

The monster grinned lecherously. "Little girl, you’re wearing a skirt, aren’t you...?"

Boom—

A tremendous wave of psychokinesis flipped him over. Flesh several times tougher than an ordinary human’s burst open, exposing the bones beneath.

The first thing Yimi had learned after taking human form was that girls needed to protect their privacy. Anyone who wanted to look under the kitty’s skirt was a bad person.

Only after actually using it did Yimi realize how difficult this world’s new ability was to handle. She had not meant to release nearly that much force.

Yimi walked toward the monster’s corpse and grew increasingly astonished.

The monster truly matched the name he had introduced himself with: only his upper body was sticking out of the ground.

Was this what humans in this world looked like? Human beings might not recognize Yimi’s sense of beauty, but even she could tell that this thing was far too ugly. Where had the man’s legs gone?

Before Yimi could investigate carefully, the ground beneath her feet began shaking violently.

"Meow?"

The earth cracked across a radius of three kilometers. The village houses failed to last even a second before collapsing. A colossal creature comparable to a Sea King emerged from below with a piercing shriek.

"Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow!"

Even now, seeing something so enormous inevitably frightened Yimi into jumping around. One of the monster’s eyeballs alone was larger than her entire body.

But the colossal creature did not get to rampage for even three seconds. Before it could finish its cry, an invisible pressure rudely twisted it like a soaked rag, spraying thick, dark-purple blood everywhere.

"Hmph."

The little green-haired girl floating in the air folded her arms and snorted. Then, from the black dress that looked utterly incapable of holding anything, she pulled out a phone.

"Hello? What do you want?"

"I received a complaint? Hah? Are you kidding me? If I hadn’t come, the damage here would’ve been even worse!"

"The hot spring? What do I care if blood dirtied the hot spring? Who dared complain about me?!"

"No, um..."

"Are you new?"

The little boy helping the Hero Association test its newest communication device glanced at the new staffer beside him, then helplessly spread his hands while holding a lollipop.

"I heard no one ever dared pass the complaints on to her before. Apologize quickly, or she’ll kill you."

"I heard that, you rotten brat!" Tatsumaki wanted to stamp her foot in anger, only to remember that she was floating in the air with nothing beneath her feet.

The boy looked down at the device settings and discovered that audio capture had been turned to maximum.

"I’m sorry!" He surrendered without hesitation, but still added a retort afterward. "Aren’t you a child too, Little Tatsumaki?"

"A child? Who are you calling a child?! You runt! You drooling little brat! You grade-school slacker!"

She was already twenty-eight!

Below, Yimi’s ears twitched twice. She stared up at Tatsumaki for quite a while.

Madoka had gone crazy again.

Yimi suddenly wondered whether Madoka had been unhappy the last time Yimi went home because Yimi had killed her counterpart in another world. Madoka should not have been that mean.

Ignoring Tatsumaki in the sky, her appearance at least proved that normal humans existed in this world.

Yimi looked around but could not find the half-bodied monster she had just killed. The aftershock from Tatsumaki disposing of the giant monster had flung his corpse somewhere unknown.

Had that thing’s legs been buried underground?

Yimi crouched and pawed twice at the rubble.

"What’s with this brat?" Tatsumaki finally noticed her and slowly descended, narrowing her eyes at Yimi’s cat ears.

"A monster?"

No, she did not look like one.

Tatsumaki had already confirmed that no one remained nearby. Still, she had not kept watching the area afterward. Had this child arrived later?

Remaining afloat, Tatsumaki looked down at Yimi.

This place seemed to have once been a village. Because the Hero Association had learned in advance that a dangerous monster was nearby, it had attempted to evacuate the residents.

Watching Yimi paw through the rubble, Tatsumaki thought she looked like a child trying to dig out relatives buried beneath it.

Tatsumaki sensed no living people. Even if someone had been there, they would be dead by now. Was a child this young capable of understanding separation and death?

"Move, brat." Tatsumaki used psychokinesis to lift Yimi aside, then raised all the rubble in the area.

The mangled half-corpse floated up with the debris.

"Looks like your family is completely dead." Tatsumaki showed no intention of protecting a child’s feelings.

Yimi stared blankly at the half-corpse. She had learned only a few curses from the System and had never been spoken to like this before, yet she vaguely sensed that she was being insulted.

The little cat pointed at her furiously. "You’re this world’s... strongest, right? Madoka!"

To everyone except Yimi, however, those words sounded like a child who had witnessed her family being killed and was filled with rage, yet did not cry or make a fuss despite her young age—someone prepared to fall to her knees and beg the powerful hero who had saved her to accept her as a disciple.

"What a pain. Don’t talk to me."

Tatsumaki did not admire Yimi for refusing to cry. Instead, she disliked the child so much that she wanted to shake her off as quickly as possible and dump her at some orphanage.

Cleanup was not her job, but with the terrain ruined like this, ordinary people probably could not reach the area either.

Tatsumaki grabbed Yimi with psychokinesis, intending to toss her somewhere conspicuous and wait for someone to find her. For Tatsumaki, doing even that already counted as a rare display of kindness.

Yimi broke free of Tatsumaki’s psychic grip.