The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#303 Cat Pago (16) - New House Outing The smooth grain of carefully selected hard maple wood emitted a subtle yet luxurious golden luster under the living room lighting. Real wooden pillars with rough textures preserved as-is, with artificial processing minimized. That thing reaching from the living room floor all the way to the ceiling's end made one feel the illusion that this place was part of a modern art museum. A massive cat wheel equipped with silent precision bearings and an acrylic hammock lined with the finest wool padding. A handcrafted set finished stitch by stitch by an artisan, incomparable to ordinary supplies. And the impression of the party who received this tremendous living space slash playground equipment as a gift was as follows. "Hmm, well, it's not too bad, I suppose." "Is that really something to say in front of someone who emptied their bank account to offer this to you!?" Gyaoooo! Popuri roared fiercely, but regardless, Pago just licked the back of his hand and answered shamelessly. "I simply gave my honest impression. I can't make up something that doesn't exist, can I?" "Humanly speaking, if you've received something worth 350,000 yen, shouldn't you at least put on some pretense?" "That's far too difficult a request. I'm such an honest, straightforward cat who's terribly bad at lying." It was an answer that would make one seriously consider for a moment whether there was anywhere to buy cat fur and meat. "Argh, seriously!! Is that price or whatever really fair!? Did you really have to erase the memories!! Even if you burned the ritual diary from the stalker operation because leaving it would cause mental contamination, why did you erase even the summary I wrote in the exorcism diary!!" "Well, if you look through the summary and memories come back, troublesome things might happen. And you just can't remember the detailed content - the general feeling itself should remain, right?" "Ugh." Popuri was left speechless. It was just as Pago said. Though the specifics of what she did and how had disappeared from her head, at least the awareness that she had reached quite a dangerous territory and was able to safely return to being human thanks to Pago remained. In fact, if that weren't the case, she would never have bought something like that premium cat tower in the first place. It was just that while her head understood, her heart couldn't accept it when she actually saw the empty bank account, so she grumbled. "In the first place, you're earning overwhelmingly more compared to others your age, aren't you? Even if it's convenience store part-time work, three times the salary is more affluent than most mid-level office workers." "That's why I was at least able to empty my account to buy it. Otherwise, even with an advance it would have been too much, wouldn't it?" Popuri let out a deep sigh. Well, one way or another, she wasn't seriously angry either. Anyway, thanks to it, they had exorcised the supernatural being, Hinosaka could come to school healthy again, and they were able to prevent students from dying en masse from strange sorcery. Compared to that, something like a premium cat tower wasn't a very cheap price... but it wasn't an unbearable price either. The problem was. "...But this takes up way too much space, doesn't it?" Popuri's home is a studio apartment. Installing something like a large cat tower reaching from floor to ceiling in such a place made the space quite tight, even if saying it felt cramped to death would be an exaggeration. The men who came to install it hadn't made those strange expressions for no reason. (In the first place, Popuri had never seen cat towers come with delivery & installation service like beds.) "Isn't this perfect timing? Why don't you move while you're at it? You were always grumbling about hot water not coming out properly and mold growing on the walls anyway." "Do you think moving is something you can just do that easily?" Even as she answered so curtly, Popuri fell into thought for a moment. Though she had complained about her empty account and such, Popuri wasn't one to be particularly extravagant in her private life to begin with. She already received the minimum rent and living expenses from home, and could handle meals with school lunch and convenience store lunch boxes. In other words, unless the convenience store manager rises up saying, "I can't accept this unfair contract anymore!!", the money will eventually pile up again. It wasn't like she was planning to move to some massive estate; moving from an old, creaky studio to a new one with better facilities and slightly more space... would be a sufficiently realistic plan. It's not like she was desperately set on moving, so just casually looking around would be fine, wouldn't it? With that thought, Popuri plunged into house hunting. "...What is this, a building that seems to threaten 'I'll end your life the moment you enter'?" Some time later, she muttered such words in front of a certain building. "Oho, this isn't just a level where one or two have attached. Most supernatural beings would have to pay their respects to the seniors the moment they enter, wouldn't they?" Pago beside her spoke admiringly. He was a cat who spoke quite comfortably since it was someone else's business. Popuri let out a sigh. "Haah, I should have caught on when it was the store manager of all people who introduced this building." The trigger wasn't anything special. She had just casually mentioned to the store manager, who had lived around here for quite a while and had his own network, that she was looking for a new place, and he said there was a cheap and good building, so she came to check it out. It was originally a building he had almost moved into himself, but the building he ended up living in was closer to the convenience store and the building itself was bigger and better, so he gave up on this one, according to his story. Just in case one forgot, let us mention once again that the store manager's current residence is such a vicious place that his nephew Mr. Sato stayed for just a few days and immediately got possessed by an evil spirit. Though the store manager himself receives no damage at all, perhaps because he's bald. Most likely, the store manager himself definitely thought this building he introduced to Popuri was a very 'good' building. "Well, if it's just the appearance, it's fine. At a price that's 1/10 or less of other places, it's definitely a good building. Though anyone with even a bit of spiritual sense would instinctively avoid it." "You call an appearance where smoke-like stuff is spewing from the building's exterior walls and blood stains are splattered on it 'fine'?" "That's because you're the one seeing it, Blackie. Relax your eyes a bit and look again." "Hmm." Popuri did as Pago said and relaxed her eyes. In the past, doing this would make everything blurry and indistinct, but perhaps as an aftereffect of wearing glasses during the previous transfer student incident, she could now properly see objects while only turning off her power to see supernatural beings. And the building viewed anew this way was. "Oh... it's definitely nice. It's so clean it almost looks brand new." "They need new residents to keep coming in, so those supernatural beings must have put some care into it. The maintenance fees should be cheap at least. So, are you going to look?" "Well, whether I'll actually move in or not is secondary - it should be fine to just take a look, right?" In the past, she would have run away without looking back at any building involved with supernatural beings, but now she had become quite bold, perhaps because she had accumulated considerable experience. Normally he should have given her a stern warning not to let her guard down, but Pago didn't bother to do so. Confidence and recklessness are very similar but clearly different, and Popuri's was on the confidence side. Popuri stepped into the mansion's interior with supernatural detection activated in only one eye. Normally when checking such buildings, a realtor or building owner would accompany you, but apparently they didn't want to set foot in this place and had just handed Popuri the keys. It was rare for this era when electronic door locks were mainstream, but Popuri quite liked this analog sensibility, so she had no particular complaints. The target was the top floor, the 5th floor. When she boarded the elevator, mirrors installed symmetrically left and right creating an infinite structure greeted her. "Blackie." "I know." Popuri clicked her tongue. There's something called the elevator mirror ghost story. Mirror images that repeat infinitely while facing each other. A type of ghost story where among the passenger's reflections, a monster with a completely different expression from the original is hidden, trying to threaten the passenger. In fact, some of the reflected Popuris made completely different expressions from the real Popuri and showed signs of stealthily trying to cross over to this side. "You know what, Pago. I've actually thought about this." Just as the fourth reflection was moving to the third, and then trying to move to the second reflection. "If 'only specific reflections in the mirror are monsters,' that means 'all the rest are exactly like me.' Then in terms of numbers, wouldn't this side have an overwhelming victory?" With a "Hyah!" battle cry, the third reflection's Popuri smashed the back of the monster's head with a baseball bat. With a thwack! the 4th monster that got hit in the back of the head collapsed in the same position it was trying to cross over, and likewise the 13th and 44th monsters trying to cross reflections flinched and trembled. But that was only for a moment. Soon they attacked the spaces they had crossed over to. That is, they attempted preemptive strikes on the 12th and 43rd Popuris respectively, and succeeded in taking them out. The 13th and 44th giggled as they looked at the mirror Popuris with burst heads and broken necks. The 444th in the distance. Even the 4444th, so far away it was barely visible as a dot, went through a similar process and burst into laughter. And immediately after that. Thwack! A baseball bat that flew transcending the reflections from beyond the mirror slammed into the center of their faces. Every time the original Popuri swung her bat this way and that as if doing batting practice, Popuri's duplicate images beyond the mirror violently beat and crushed the supernatural beings. The supernatural beings showed off their considerable power and crushed the mirror Popuris, but no matter how much they beat and destroyed, there was no end to Popuri's numbers. Right after a monster Popuri crushed a mirror Popuri's head, another mirror Popuri crushed the monster Popuri's legs. A mirror Popuri stepped on another mirror Popuri's shoulder to leap and bring down her bat, while a mirror Popuri deflected an attack with her bat as yet another mirror Popuri hit a home run to the enemy's temple. It was already an outrageous act that completely ignored both physical laws and the logic of mirror reflection, but if you were going to nitpick about that, the fundamental structure of this supernatural being where only 'specific images in mirrors' act individually was already something that ignored reality's laws and logic, so it wasn't surprising. Now, leaving behind the mirror Popuris who had started beating up the supernatural beings on their own without Popuri needing to swing her bat, Popuri got off at her destination, the 5th floor. "Well, the elevator is cleared. I hope the inside of the house is clean."