Chapter 843: Upgrade Nitocris? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 843: Upgrade Nitocris? [Bonus Chapter]

Water exploded over the rim of the tub in a foaming wave.

The warm water swallowed her up to the chin and soaked straight through her dense black undercoat.

In half a second, her sleek fluffy silhouette collapsed into something scrawny, drenched and deeply pathetic, like a drowned rat wearing a very offended expression.

Her paws churned frantically against the surface.

"YOU TREACHEROUS DEMON!" she shrieked, paddling desperately toward the edge, her golden eyes blazing with pure outrage. "I PRAISED YOUR CHARACTER THREE SECONDS AGO! YOU WOULD DROWN A MONARCH OF THE ANCIENT WORLD, NYAA~?"

"Stop splashing, you dramatic little gremlin," Silas laughed, rolling his sleeves up past his elbows.

He reached into the water and caught her gently by the scruff with one hand, then grabbed a bottle of honey-scented shampoo from the ledge with the other.

"I am not a gremlin! I am the living daughter of Hathor!" she wailed, her back legs treading water in frantic little circles. "Unhand my nape! The water is soaking into my sacred core, Nyaa~!"

Silas squeezed a pearly dollop of shampoo into his palm and got to work.

He massaged the soap into her sodden fur, working it down along her spine, scrubbing the street dirt from her shoulders and lathering the soft fur of her belly.

The suds bloomed into thick fragrant foam, and the water around her slowly turned a murky gray as weeks of alley puddles and restaurant bins washed out of her coat.

"Unhand me, you brute!" she complained, her ears plastered flat against her soaked skull. "You’re pressing far too hard on my royal spine! If my generals were here, they’d mount your skull on a spear and parade it through the southern gates, Nyaa~!"

"Your generals aren’t here," Silas said, working his thumbs into the tight little muscles between her shoulder blades. "And you’re shedding like crazy... Hold still so I can get your paws."

"Don’t you dare touch my sacred paws, Nyaa~!" she hissed, trying to yank her front leg away. "They were consecrated by the high priests of the temple, Nyaa... ah... ahhh..."

Her hiss dissolved into a soft wheezing sigh.

Silas had found a knot of aching muscle right in the center of her little paw pad and pressed down on it with slow firm pressure, and three weeks of running across hot pavement and cold concrete melted out of it all at once.

Her golden eyes drifted half-shut as her chin tipped up on its own.

’No...’ she screamed inside her own head. ’Hold the line, Nitocris! Don’t surrender to the peasant’s crude sorcery!’

"This is deeply offensive," she mumbled weakly, her front paws going completely limp in his hands. "You’re treating a divine empress like a common household pet, Nyaa~..."

"You’re the one making little sighing noises, Nito..."

"I am breathing. Royalty is permitted to breathe, Nyaa~."

"Breathe a little quieter, then..."

"I’ll breathe however loudly I please, Nyaa~!"

Silas grinned and moved on to her back paws, which earned him a fresh round of threats involving jackals, molten bronze and the floor of a scorpion pit.

By the time he’d worked his way to the tip of her tail, she’d run out of threats entirely and had simply started glaring at him with as much dignity as a soaking wet cat could muster, which wasn’t much.

"How long were you living on the street, anyway?" he asked, gently lifting one of her back legs to scrub between the toes.

"That is a royal secret, Nyaa~."

"...There’s a fish bone stuck in your fur."

Nitocris went very still.

"Remove it at once and never speak of it again, Nyaa~."

Silas plucked the tiny bone out of the fur behind her shoulder and flicked it into the sink without a word.

She stared straight ahead at the tiles with the frozen dignity of a queen pretending an assassination attempt hadn’t just happened at her own banquet.

"Three weeks," she muttered eventually. "Perhaps four... I don’t know... I slept beneath an awning behind a noodle restaurant... The cook threw me scraps on the nights he wasn’t drunk, on the nights he was, he threw his shoes, Nyaa~"

Silas’s hands slowed for a moment.

"Well," he said quietly, "nobody’s throwing shoes at you here..."

She didn’t answer that, but her tail stopped lashing, and for the rest of the scrub, she held perfectly still.

He pulled the stopper, let the gray water drain away, and set the tub filling again with clean water while he grabbed the handheld sprayer and he set it to a gentle wide fan of warm water to rinse the suds out of her coat.

SHHHHH!

The water ran dark for a few seconds, then cloudy, then finally clear... Underneath it all, her coat was black as obsidian glass, gleaming under the warm bathroom lights.

Silas shut the water off, lifted her dripping, shivering body out of the tub and wrapped her up in a big fluffy towel straight from the heated rack.

"Come on," he said, carrying the towel bundle over to the marble counter. "Let’s get you dry before you catch a cold."

He set her down and patted the towel around her to soak up the worst of it.

Nitocris sat curled inside the warm folds with only her damp, pointed little face poking out, shivering faintly.

"I demand a hearth fire," she grumbled, her teeth chattering. "The drafts in this miserable realm are an insult to the solar dynasties, Nyaa~."

"Hold on, hold on..."

He pulled a small hair dryer out of the cabinet, clicked it onto its lowest, warmest setting and picked up a wooden brush with fine bristles.

WHIRRRRR!

A gentle stream of warm air washed over her coat.

She flinched for half a second and dug her claws into the towel, braced for an attack but as the warm air began to separate the damp black strands, followed by the slow sweep of the brush gliding through her fur, her whole body went perfectly still.

The brush moved from the back of her head, down the curve of her neck and along the full length of her spine.

SWISH!

It smoothed out the tangles, worked loose the dried knots, and fluffed her undercoat into a soft velvety cloud.

Silas worked slowly and patiently, scratching behind her ears every now and then to guide the brush along her jaw and her eyelids fluttered.

’Mm...’

Her spine began to melt, her legs uncurled beneath the towel like wax set too close to a candle, her chin sank flat against the edge of the towel, and her front paws began kneading the soft cotton in slow pushes she didn’t seem to notice she was doing.

Then, deep inside her little chest, something started to rumble.

PRRRRRRRRR!

It began as a hum against her ribs and swelled steadily into a deep motor-like purr that echoed off the bathroom mirror.

Her golden eyes snapped wide open in horror.

Her head jerked up, and her whiskers bristled with pure fury at her own treacherous body.

"SILENCE, VILE VESSEL!" she hissed, swatting her own chest with a forepaw. "CEASE THIS DISGRACEFUL NOISE AT ONCE, NYAA~!"

Silas burst out laughing and nearly dropped the brush.

He had to put it down on the counter and hold onto the sink.

"Did you just yell at your own chest for purring?" he wheezed. "Nito, you’re hilarious."

"I did not purr, you blind ape!" she shrieked, glaring at his reflection in the mirror, her ears burning beneath her fur. "That was the ancestral war chant of the desert lions! It’s a battle cry meant to terrify the spirits of the underworld, Nyaa~!"

"Right, right... The terrifying war chant of an eight-pound cat," Silas said, giving her ears another slow stroke of the brush.

"I’ll bite your thumbs off while you sleep, Nyaa~!" she snarled, even as her back half stayed completely melted against the towel and her eyes drooped shut again under the warm air.

PRRRRRR!

"Your war chant’s going again..."

"I KNOW, NYAA~!"

Silas kept brushing, still grinning and working through the long fur around her haunches.

"Tell me about Harper," Nitocris said abruptly, staring very hard at the mirror as if the purring had never happened. "Is she well? Does she still talk too much? Does she still sleep with her glasses on and wake up with the frames printed on her cheek, Nyaa~?"

Silas blinked.

"...She does that?"

"Every single night. I told her a thousand times but she never listens, Nyaa~."

"She’s good," Silas said, his voice softening. "She’s stronger than ever... She was wrecking a whole room full of people when I called her earlier I think and yeah, she still talks too much."

Something in the cat’s shoulders loosened.

"Good," she said quietly. "That’s good, Nyaa~."

She didn’t say anything else, but he noticed she’d stopped fighting the brush entirely then his dark blue eyes narrowed slightly.

He’d checked the tabs of beasts, eggs and Heroes before, and he was suddenly very curious what the System would make of a reborn desert empress sitting on his bathroom counter.

With a quiet mental command, he pulled it up.

HUMMM!

A glowing blue window snapped into existence in the air in front of him, hovering over the mirror.

[Name: Nitocris-Hathor]

[Title]: First Per-aa of the Khemet Dominion (Reborn)

[Rank]: D-Rank

[Level]: 1

[Vitality]: 60

[Mana]: 40

[Active & Passive Skills]:

[Royal Feline Body]: A small, swift and agile body. (Passive)

[Memory of the First Per-aa]: Retains the knowledge and memories of an ancient empress. (Passive)

[Hidden Potential]: SSS [More]

Silas stared at the lines, and the brush paused halfway down her hip.

’D-Rank...’ he thought while frowning.

Sixty Vitality was laughably fragile... A stray dog could snuff her out.

A car rolling past at the wrong moment could do it, too.

For all her titles and royal posturing, the body she was living in was barely more than an ordinary stray cat that happened to remember how to build pyramids but right below her skills, glowing a bright, unmistakable platinum, sat the line that made him lean closer.

Somewhere inside that tiny brittle body was the full foundation of a First Per-aa, locked behind a cage of fur and small bones.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what she must have looked like back when she ruled, tall and bronze and terrifying with a khopesh in her hand and an empire kneeling at her feet, and it was even easier to imagine how small she must have felt these past few weeks, hiding under awnings from drunk cooks and stray dogs.

Silas looked down at her.

Her fur was dry now, fluffy and gleaming like polished black silk.

She’d sat up properly on the towel with her chest puffed out, and she was carefully licking the back of her paw with the air of a queen who had decided to forgive the world for its many insults, looking extremely pleased with how clean she was while still grumbling under her breath.

She’d done terrible things... She’d also crossed a desert and a strange city alone, half-starved, just to find the girl she’d hurt and say sorry...

’She deserves better than a body that a loose brick could kill,’ he thought, and the gold ring in his eyes began to hum softly.

He wasn’t even sure it would work but the System had shown him her tab without complaint, and it had let him upgrade Rika’s beast eggs.

He had UP to spare.

Even after pouring a fortune of it into Rika’s eggs as well as Aki’s upgrades, there was still plenty left over from the North Khemet slaughter, sitting in his reserves and doing nothing.

Silas tapped the edge of the floating window.

He opened the upgrade option and set it on the small black cat sitting on his counter.

The window shifted, and a ring of bright golden light spread across the mirror, bathing the whole bathroom in a warm glow.

Nitocris stopped licking her paw. Her fur stood up along her spine, crackling faintly, and she squinted up at the light with deep suspicion.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "Why is the air glowing? If this is another bath, I’ll scratch your eyes out, Nyaa~."

Silas only smiled.

"You’ll like this one," he said. "Probably..."

"Probably?" Her ears flattened. "What do you mean, probably? I’ve survived a betrayal, a rift, two thousand years in a blade, a god, a desert and a noodle cook. I refuse to be killed by a glowing mirror in a peasant’s washroom, Nyaa~!"

"...Nobody’s killing you."

"Then explain the light, Nyaa~!"

"It’s called a present, have you ever received one?"

Nitocris’s eyes narrowed into suspicious golden slits.

She looked at the glowing ring, then at Silas’s calm, faintly amused face, then back at the ring again, and her tail began to lash slowly from side to side against the towel.

...In her experience, presents from powerful men usually came with chains attached.

A single prompt appeared in the center of the light.

[Upgrade Nitocris-Hathor to SSS-Rank? Y / N]