Reincarnated Without a Cheat, I Adopted the Former Hero as My Mom

"No."

One syllable. Perfectly flat.

"There are other materials to collect. You're quite the comedian, Uriel."

Uriel made a sound somewhere between a sigh and resignation. This woman delivered sarcasm with the same emotional energy as reading a weather forecast.

Seraphina had already pushed through the next curtain of hanging vines and kept walking. She moved through the forest without ever putting a foot wrong. Uriel stayed in her footprints and saved himself the effort, though it left him no room to look around.

They waded through ankle-deep mud and clambered over several massive fallen trunks.

---

Half an hour later, Seraphina stopped at the base of a moss-covered rock face. She pulled out her tools again, crouched down, and began working with practiced efficiency.

Uriel took up a position about fifteen steps away, back against a broad-trunked tree, and activated Observer.

The first five minutes, he actually scanned the perimeter. No unusual movement in the canopy. No ripples on the water. Nothing shifting in the undergrowth.

Five minutes after that, his focus began to drift. A beetle the size of his thumb crawled past his shoulder along the bark. He watched it travel twenty centimeters and disappear into a crack in the tree.

Five minutes after that, he started counting fruit in the canopy across from him. He got to six, then forgot whether he'd been counting left to right or right to left.

Just as his attention was about to wander off completely, something rustled in the undergrowth.

Uriel's spine straightened instantly.

A small orange shape squeezed out from between the leaves.

Round head. Both ears flopped flat against its head. Four stubby legs. A tail dragging behind it. By any reasonable metric, this was a completely ordinary orange tabby cat — just one that appeared to have misplaced its ears.

Uriel and the cat stared at each other for two seconds.

Neither moved. He beckoned it over with one finger.

The cat walked toward him. Unhurried, like it owned the place. It stopped right at the toe of his boot and looked up at him.

He studied it carefully.

...It's just an orange cat.

They have orange cats in another world.

The cat tilted its round head, then leaned into his boot and rubbed the side of its face against his ankle. Its tail wound around his foot, swept across to the other ankle, then back again. The softness of it came through the fabric of his trousers.

Uriel's resolve collapsed. Immediately. He crouched down and ran a hand along its back. The cat didn't flinch. It had astonishing manners — no hissing, no claws, nothing. He scratched behind the base of its ears, and the cat lifted its chin and pressed it into his palm, a low rumble starting up in its throat.

"Respect," Uriel murmured, fingers working under its chin. "You're way too well-behaved for a forest cat."

The cat narrowed its eyes. Its tail draped over his wrist, the fur-tips barely tickling.

Seraphina's voice reached him from behind, accompanied by the scrape of her tool against rock.

"Uriel. Stay alert. This area falls within the hunting range of Roundhead Tigers."

Uriel's hand froze.

"Adult Roundheads are rated Gold-rank. Taking down an adult normally requires a full adventuring party."

His fingers were still resting on the cat's chin. The cat poked his hand impatiently.

His gaze drifted back down to the orange cat in front of him.

Round head.

Orange fur.

Roundhead Tiger.

He cleared his throat and asked, keeping his voice as steady as he could, "What about... juveniles? Comparable to a normal small cat?"

Seraphina kept digging.

"No. Adults reach three to four meters at the shoulder. Juveniles are around one meter."

Uriel looked the cat over from head to tail. It wasn't even forty centimeters from head to tail. Even standing up, it couldn't possibly be a meter tall.

He exhaled slowly, slid both hands under its front legs, and lifted it off the ground. The cat let him, dangling patiently from his grip, and produced a small, polite mew.

I need to make Seraphina pet this thing later. Nobody has the willpower to resist this level of fluff.

Seraphina stopped working.

She raised her head and swept a look around.

"Did you hear something just now?"

Uriel pulled the cat a little closer to his chest. The cat settled in cooperatively, front paws draped over his forearm, tail swinging.

"Didn't hear anything. What kind of something?"

Seraphina's brow drew together slightly. She listened for another two seconds. Nothing.

"...I must have imagined it." She turned back to the rock face and drove her trowel in. "Stay alert regardless. If you hear a cat cry, treat it as a warning."

Uriel hoisted the cat up by its armpits. Its little stubby legs dangled in the air, swaying back and forth like a pair of fuzzy noodles. It didn't struggle. Its round head tilted to one side, amber eyes regarding him with total serenity.

He gave one of its front paws a gentle squeeze. The cat obliged by folding its toes around his finger.

"Why?" Fully absorbed, he didn't look up. "Does a Roundhead Tiger sound like a cat?"

The clean sound of a blade parting root tissue came from the other end of the clearing.

"Not exactly." Seraphina delivered the information in the same tone she might use to read out a train schedule, hands never stopping. "Records document a rare variant, though. Called a Battle-Worn individual. Prolonged survival causes significant physical regression — body size reverts to roughly that of a house cat. Strength is entirely retained. Speed is ten times that of a standard Roundhead."

Uriel's hand stopped moving.

More precisely, it locked in place.

The cat looked at him. He looked at the cat.

Its tail wound one lazy loop around his forearm. When the scratching didn't resume, it tilted its head with what could only be described as mild confusion and batted his fingers with one paw.

Seraphina's voice continued. "That variant uses its small, harmless appearance to approach prey. It uses its harmless appearance to make prey lower its guard. Once the target is completely relaxed, it closes the distance at overwhelming speed and kills it in a single strike."

A small, definitive click as she sealed the last vial and fastened her pouch.

"Alright, this batch is—"

She turned around.

Uriel had already released the cat into the nearby undergrowth in one fluid, practiced motion. His arm left a brief afterimage.

The cat sailed through the air in a less-than-graceful arc and vanished into the same shrub he'd been staring at for the past five minutes.

The shrub convulsed violently.

Then came a sound: "MRROOOOWL—!"

Same timbre as a cat. That sound had no right coming out of something that size. Leaves shook loose from the branches and rained down.

Seraphina's gaze moved from the trembling shrub to Uriel's face.

Uriel clasped his hands behind his back. His expression was undisturbed.

"That cat cry you mentioned." He tilted his chin toward the shrub. "Like that?"

Seraphina looked at him. Looked at the shrub.

"I've never heard one in person," she said calmly. "But presumably."

Uriel didn't wait. He stepped forward, closed his hand around her wrist, and ran.

Under no circumstances was he getting into a real fight with a Gold-rank creature moving at ten times normal speed. One serious exchange and his carefully maintained average student persona would detonate on the spot.

And if he couldn't win, that would be even more embarrassing.

Seraphina was dragged along for several steps before she caught on.

Thirty meters in, she spoke. Her breathing had picked up slightly from the pace.

"Uriel. We can't outrun it."

"Don't say that." He didn't look back. His grip on her wrist didn't loosen. "Keep moving."

His boot caught the edge of a streambed stone and skidded. He stumbled half a step, recovered, and kept going.

Ahead was a dense stand of trees, the undergrowth packed higher than a person. Uriel set his jaw, dropped his shoulder, and punched through the leaves, pulling Seraphina in behind him.

They came out the other side and the canopy opened up.

They nearly ran face-first into a tree trunk.

Both of them locked up. Their boots carved parallel grooves in the mud.

The trunk was tawny-brown, covered in a dense layer of short fur.

Trees don't have fur.

Uriel slowly looked up.

It wasn't a trunk. It was a leg — thick and densely muscled, connected to a paw the size of a cartwheel, claws sunk deep into the earth.

Above that: a body that stood twice the height of a man. Tawny fur stretched over stacked muscle. A tail swept the ground behind it in a slow, rhythmic arc, dry leaves hissing in its wake.

The head turned at the sound of their approach.

Round. Ears flat against the skull. Amber eyes looking down from a very significant height.

A half-swallowed fox hung from its jaws, its hind legs still twitching.

Its enormous golden pupils locked onto them without blinking.

One Battle-Worn individual behind them. One fully-grown adult in front.

What are the odds. Most people never encounter either in a lifetime, and here he was stuck between both.