Project Necro is an official initiative by Re:Library.

Lonalia Linalia Baba-nyan is an engineer and a rear-support member. She can fight, but she can’t take the leading role. On the coming day of the decisive battle, she would stay behind with the Wang family and take on the role of fooling Haoran’s parents, who would doubt his going out. After all, going out for long hours on a day off without studying at home is suspicious enough.

In order to settle the feud with the World Shadow that threatens the cat realm of Qitiaohe City and the homeless man possessed by the Shadow, Haoran- took the drug that arrived early that holiday morning and immediately began tracking down the man who had fled more than a month ago. Everyone’s basic abilities had reached their growth limit, and preparations for battle were roughly complete.
A young prodigy who had, in just two months, acquired and trained psychic powers, survived ordeals, grown accustomed to the hard-to-describe senses peculiar to psychic users, and harbored a quiet sense of superiority, learned the vastness of the world through a new sense that had opened up.
By touching an object, he could obtain in a single sweep the information from the past two months that the object had “seen,” and naturally understand it… The temporary power gained through the drug was tremendous.

Haoran had learned firsthand through social games how powerful information is. Information alone can’t defeat enemies or become money, but it multiplies the efficiency of every action many times over. A power that lets you obtain two months of information just by touching objects is a threat on the level that would make an informant die of rage.

If the psychic user who wields this power belongs to them, then it stands to reason that Tsukuyomi truly does rule Japan’s underworld. A secret organization of unfathomable depth in the shadows of the world—a group of psychic users whose machinations were beyond him. Thinking that they could have ended up as his enemy made him shudder.
Haoran was sincerely relieved that he had become one of Tsukuyomi’s own.

The park that had been the center of curiosity, after some days passed, had lost both the stationed police officers and the onlookers, leaving only the “No Entry” tape. It was easy to touch the remaining bench that had narrowly escaped destruction, and trace its information.
From the bench’s memories, he traced the homeless man. Touching road signs, mailboxes, manhole lids, store walls, he linked together the homeless man’s destinations seen from their memories and continued the pursuit.
In preparation for an unexpected encounter, Haoran rode his modified bike, placed Tai-yi in the chest pocket of his rider jacket, put Huang-hu between his legs, had the crows of the Miao Miao San He Hui follow from above, and arranged for nearby cats to gather at Tai-yi’s command. He was in full readiness.

Incidentally, the modified bike Haoran rode did not require a license.
Bike categories are defined by exhaust displacement. A bike with exhaust 0cc is basically just a bicycle, so naturally no license is required. A license only becomes necessary when operating a bicycle equipped with a motor that produces exhaust above a certain threshold.

The Baba-nyan-crafted bike, powered by psychic blood and its refined fuel, had its engine replaced with a general-purpose PSI drive, giving it 0cc exhaust output and thus legally license-free. Therefore, even if he brazenly rode it on public roads, there was no grounds for him to be charged.
Of course, since it looked like an ordinary bike painted silver, there was a chance he might be stopped for his age and asked to present a license, but for Haoran, having the legal loophole for driving without a license (?) was a major source of reassurance.

Since he frequently needed to stop the bike and touch objects along the roadside, it took him two full hours just to confirm that the homeless man had left Qitiaohe City. Haoran-kun had assumed the man was hiding somewhere in the city, so he braced himself again, thinking it might take days to find him.
When Baba-nyan had said she could fool his parents for up to three days, he thought she was exaggerating, but the wisdom and caution of the loli-granny were not to be underestimated.

Before leaving the city, Haoran consulted with the two senior cats, and dismissed the rank-and-file underlings except for Tai-yi and the seven cats and seven crows under her direct order.

The cats and crows belonging to the Miao Miao San He Hui had their daily lives, and leaving their familiar home turf was something they resisted. Helping for a few hours near their territory was one thing, but it was impossible to drag them along for a multi-day campaign.
If only he could guarantee their lodging and food, he could push them harder, but the Triad lacked the funds and organizational infrastructure for that, and their bonds of trust were thin.
Haoran judged that the seven cats and seven crows, who were either particularly loyal or good-natured, were the realistic limit for his entourage.

While sometimes snapping back to sanity and wondering why he was conducting such a strange and painstaking pursuit for an old man whose name he didn’t even know, Haoran continued the search.

Qitiaohe City has seven tributaries flowing into it, the origin of its name. Following one of them upstream to the north, he eventually entered a mountain trail.
As the autumn leaves began to fall and patches of clear autumn sky peeked through the canopy, the frequency of people giving strange looks and pointing their phone cameras at the tourist covered in cats—one shoved into the rider jacket pocket, one at his feet, one in his chest, one wrapped around his neck, one placed on the rear rack, one poking its head from his backpack—noticeably decreased.

The homeless man’s escape route was pretty clear even back in the city, but once he entered the mountain road, the tracks he left behind became incredibly obvious. He was ignoring most obstacles and heading steadily in one direction. After leaving the city, Haoran roughly estimated the direction and distance the man was fleeing and began tracking that path, improving the efficiency of the pursuit.

Eventually, the pursuit that began early in the morning passed noon, and they approached the border between China and Russia. The memory-visions of the homeless man shown by the ability disappeared into the forest beyond the border.
Even Haoran, who tolerated smuggling and unlicensed driving, hesitated. With neither passport nor visa, he could not cross the border checkpoint through official means. His parents would never allow him to go abroad for reasons impossible to explain, and if he took his time to process the required procedures, the trace he needed for the pursuit would fade away.

He hesitated briefly, but the cats, who understood the concept of borders only to the extent of “entering another cat’s territory,” meowed at him, and with an air of “what can you do,” he decided to commit illegal entry.
Being able to break laws and rules easily when necessary, though with caution, was a good reflection of Haoran’s outlaw temperament—according to Baba-nyan.

Barbed-wire fences lined the Sino-Russian border. Not as solid as those around major road checkpoints, but still regularly inspected and equipped with surveillance cameras. Electrified wires ran through them, and passing through unnoticed was no easy feat.
After consulting Baba-nyan by phone, considering the homeless man’s escape direction and the difficulty of illegal entry, they concluded he would have to brace himself to proceed deep into the mountains using paths untouched by humans. Maintained or paved routes had too much security.

This made sense to Haoran, who then insistently confirmed that he wouldn’t be executed if captured by border security, and carefully checked that Tsukuyomi could serve as his last-resort refuge abroad, before committing to the illegal entry.
He unloaded the cats from the bike, set the gravity dial to 0 to erase the weight, lifted the bike onto his shoulder, and left the public road for the forest. Relying on the cats’ sense of smell and alertness, he advanced north through paths unused by humans and reached the border fence.
Although human traffic was very low at that spot, the surveillance cameras were solid. They covered each other’s blind spots thoroughly, and he couldn’t hope for malfunctions.

Haoran-kun devised a simple plan.
The crows would block the surveillance cameras by pretending to have an aerial territory fight, and in that moment he would manipulate gravity, jump over the fence, and quickly vanish into the forest on the Russian side.
Wild animals being caught on camera was common. There was no reason for suspicion, and the group succeeded in illegal entry with surprising ease.

Once in the mountains, night fell soon after, and the temperature dropped sharply. As the altitude increased, it grew even colder.
For every 100 meters of elevation, the temperature drops by 1 degree Celsius. The mountain range spanning the Sino-Russian border reaches around 1000 meters, so he had to be ready for lows around minus 10. It was late autumn, November. Haoran had forgotten about cold-proofing and endured by relying on Tai-yi’s warmth in his jacket.
Fortunately, it was a full-moon night, and moonlight filtering through the trees barely let him see his footing. He followed traces using his ability, and had the crows and cats confirm directions, advancing onward.
Though not heavy, the large bike often snagged on branches and was clearly a hindrance. But if he left it in the forest, he would never find it again. There was no choice but to carry it.

As he grew tired of climbing and the night deepened, the group reached an abandoned village.
Haoran had no way of knowing this, but it was a village whose redevelopment effort, led by a Russian company, had failed, and whose residents had left several years ago.
The old abandoned buildings were covered in vines, the half-torn blue sheets over the halted-construction pension fluttered in the cold wind, the roofs of decaying homes and the fields buried in weeds were lightly coated with snow.
When Haoran touched the rusty water tower of the abandoned village, he saw a vision of the homeless man wandering the village like a feral man who had lost his sanity. It seemed he was hunting wild animals and using the village as a base.
At present, the man had stuffed scrap into an outdoor oil drum and made a fire, staring blankly into empty space with unfocused eyes. His beard was overgrown, and his already ragged clothes were stained with dirt and plant juices.

At Tai-yi’s command, the crows grasped tear-gas grenades in their feet and took to the sky.
If they wanted to bring him back to sanity without killing him, and by stimulating pain or survival instinct, this was the safest, most reliable, and quickest method Haoran could think of. Fighting head-on with a giant larger than a house was madness. Huang-hu wanted to talk before making a move, but was persuaded by Tai-yi and reluctantly backed down.

The dazed man reacted instantly the moment the tear-gas grenade was dropped from overhead, as if he knew everything and had been waiting for it. He swelled into a giant in an instant, black haze seeping from him. The tear gas was easily blown away by the gust from his growth.

“Aaw maan, he’s already not sane anymore. Go, Huang-hu!”

Haoran scratched his head, straddled the bike, shouted, and grabbed Huang-hu from his feet, hurling him. Mid-air, Huang-hu enlarged, landing with a quake.
Huang-hu’s gigantification ability had reached astounding levels.
Growth count: 20 cycles. Gigantification rate: 3325 times. Taller than Japan’s Skytree.

“MRRREEEOOOOWWWWW!!!”

Huang-hu, sitting with his tail sweeping across the mountain ridge, the moon behind him, let out a mighty cry that shook the air. He bent his massive feline body into a forward-leaning stance and attacked the black giant, who was mouse-sized compared to him.
Just taking one step caused a rumble, and dilapidated houses collapsed one after another. Trees shattered under his front paws, the ground kicked by his hind legs opened huge craters. The mountain seemed to move with feline agility.
The cat punch, its speed multiplied by mass, had nuclear-bomb-class power. The target was the head. Since blowing off the head in the park hadn’t harmed the man, and based on Baba’s knowledge, they believed the core of the black giant was in the abdomen.
They learned that the monster’s sensory organs were obviously in the head, so first blow off the head, restrain the limbs, and then deliver repeated belly punches from a mount. The World Shadow surely couldn’t endure that and would flee.

However, the black giant stopped the massive cat’s paw, as big as its own body, with one hand. The impact spread, caving in the ground around its feet and sending cracks running, but the black giant’s body did not budge, almost inhumanly still.

“He stopped it!? No way! This is bad, run—damn!”

Haoran reflexively tried to escape, but seeing the cat squad charging bravely at the giant’s feet with pipe bombs in their mouths, he slammed the bike into full throttle and launched forward.
The black giant transformed its arm into tentacles, coiling around the paw pads so Huang-hu couldn’t pull free. Worse, the tentacles crawled up the front leg, creeping upward.

At its feet, dozens of pipe bombs exploded. Against humans it would be deadly, but to a giant over ten meters tall it was barely firecracker. They had expected only that it might divert the giant’s attention if lucky, and by some stroke of fortune, the giant, which had been in a perfect deadlock with Huang-hu, lost its balance.

In that gap, Haoran, riding the bike at sonic speed, touched the giant’s foot with his fingertips as he blasted past.
Instantly, the giant dropped to one knee. Apparently even one who endured Huang-hu’s cat punch could not withstand suddenly increased gravity by seventeen times.

“No time! Press the attack!”
“Meow!”

Huang-hu’s gigantification time had only a few seconds left. If their main force fell, the triad would have no more options. They had to finish it at once.
Huang-hu’s downward cat punch, supported by Haoran’s weight manipulation, struck the giant and caused an extraordinary shock and roar. The earth shook, and moments later part of the nearby mountain cliff collapsed.
It was literally a catastrophe-class blow.

In the cloud of dust, Huang-hu’s massive body slipped away. His time had run out.
Holding their breath and praying, they watched as the dust slowly cleared.

At the bottom of a crater so deep even a meteor couldn’t produce something like it, a man lay collapsed.
From the man’s body seeped a darkness darker than night.

Could it still not be enough?
Haorann and the cats braced themselves, but the man’s trembling hand grasped the darkness and crushed it.
The darkness writhed in pain and dissolved into the air.

Huang-hu was the first to race down into the crater, crying joyfully.
Seeing that, Haoran let out a breath and relaxed his shoulders.

After all that, the only one they saved was an old man. If it had been a beautiful girl, it might have been more worth it.
Totally not worth it. But seeing Huang-hu purring as the man gently petted him, he felt, well, whatever.

And thus the turmoil surrounding the cat society of Qitiaohe City came to an end.