Stray Cat Strut

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Stray Cat Strut (A cyberpunk system apocalypse!) - Ongoing

Fluff (A superheroic LitRPG about cute girls doing cute things!) - Ongoing

Love Crafted (Interactive story about an eldritch abomination tentacle-ing things!) - Completed!

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café (An insane Crossover about cute people and tentacles) - Hiatus

Cinnamon Bun (A wholesome LitRPG!) - Ongoing

The Agartha Loop (A Magical-Girl drama!) - Volume Two Complete!

Lever Action (A fantasy western with mecha!) - Volume One Complete!

Heart of Dorkness (A wholesome progression fantasy) - Completed!

Dead Tired (A comedy about a Lich in a Wuxia world doing Science!) - Ongoing

Sporemageddon (A fantasy story about a mushroom lover exploding the industrial revolution!) - Ongoing

Past the Redline (A girl goes too fast, then she does it again) - Completed!

Magical Girl Crystal Genocide (Magical Girls accidentally the planet, and then try to fix it) - Completed!

Magical Girl Rending Nightmare (A sequel to Crystal Genocide! Cute girls in a soviet dystopia having a picnic on the roadside) - Volume Two Completed!

Noblebright (A shipcore AI works to avenge humanity) - Completed!

The Complicated Love Life of Ivil Antagonist (The Empress of Mars finds love) - Completed!

Pokebun (Broccoli Bunch in the world of Pokemon) - Hiatus

Queen Violence (An Assassin Reborn as a Kitten) - Completed!

No Strings Attached (An Elden Ring/Bloodborne inspired progression fantasy) - Ongoing

Save Scumming (A time-looping system apocalypse) - Ongoing

Interlude - Crisis Mode Three

Crisis Mode believed that murder was bad.

That may have been a controversial opinion to some, but it was something she truly believed in.

Right now, she was seriously reconsidering her beliefs.

Stray Cat had pulled back and was standing on the edge of Libre's office, making a call of some sort. Crisis Mode could just about hear her through her helmet, but her voice was too muffled to make out exact words.

Libre, in the meantime, was simply... standing there. His arms were loose at his sides and his shoulders were slumped. He looked defeated. But his eyes...

His eyes were twitching. There was a glimmer in them, the sign of active aug-use. "What are you doing now?" she asked.

Libre blinked twice in rapid succession, then sighed. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know enough about how you intend to fight them. They will adapt to it. Not now, but if you don't kill them all, then in a week, a month, a year, they'll know how to fight you. That's how she died."

"Your girlfriend? Mace?" Crisis asked.

He nodded. "We knew that there were growing hives to the north of the city. We didn't have their exact locations, but we did find some sub-hives. We took them out, focusing mostly on those close to the city. It would give us more room to work in, a cleared area to defend beyond the city's walls. Logical."

"That's where your white whale came in?" Crisis asked.

He nodded. "That's where it came in. We were predictable. We used the same tactics, the same approach. They figured out a counter. An antithesis model that had a higher base intelligence, regeneration, a proper digestive system and natural weapons able to counter or bypass the armour she used."

"And you think those will be more common now?"

"No," he said with a little shake of his head. "That white whale was designed for Mace. The next will be designed to fight Stray Cat, or Gomorrah, or you. It will be able to fight her mechs, or resistant to fire, or... whatever else. Because it worked, and it eliminated a threat."

Crisis shook her head. "That's not an excuse to get others killed."

"Ten now to save a hundred later," he said before cringing back as she took a step closer to him.

Maybe the lesson hadn't gone through with just one punch?

"None now, to save them all later," she replied. "That's how we're going to do it. Or at least, we'll try."

He nodded.

She backed off, spinning on a heel to slam her way out of the room. She noticed Stray Cat looking at her before the samurai turned towards Libre and pointed at him. "You're benched. Don't do anything stupid until we're done with Quebec," Stray Cat said.

She waited in the middle of the control centre for Stray Cat to come out, then she walked next to her, both of them slowly heading for the elevator at the front of the room. "Thank you," she said.

"For what?" Stray Cat asked.

"For coming here. For not taking any of his shit."

"Oh... yeah, no problem. Ah, fuck, that reminds me. We're going to have to countermand his orders with the ammo. That's going to be a pain in the ass."

"Yeah, I imagine," she replied.

Stray Cat shook her head. "You know, the idea of Libre is great. I'm pretty sure there are a few tactics and strategy focused samurai that are part of the Family. Jolly Monarch comes to mind. You know, guys that know their shit. Half of the Antithesis kills out there are soldiers and artillery and whatnot, and they operate off of good logistics."

"It's important, I suppose?"

Stray Cat made an ambivalent sort of gesture ahead of her. "Yeah. I went to school for this, you know? For like a week, but that still counts. Anyway, an army runs on its stomach. Guns need bullets, otherwise they're just big paperweights. If you can find a samurai that knows their shit and can get the right things in the right hands while cutting through all of the bullshit paperwork and pencil pushing, then you can win a war. I was kind of hoping that past all of his bullshit with trying to predict the aliens, that Libre was that sort. We could use that."

"But he's not," Crisis said.

"He's not in the wrong direction," Stray Cat replied.

She moved into the elevator, and the woman jammed her thumb onto one of the buttons.

She settled in next to her. It was nice, being with someone who actually knew what they were doing. The gulf of difference between someone new like herself and an experienced, confident samurai like Stray Cat felt impossibly wide.

"I'm gonna need a few minutes later. Going to call the Family, ask them for help. Hate doing it."

"You do?" she asked. "Do you not get along with them?"

"I don't get along with anyone that tells me what to do," Stray Cat said. "Look, they're not bad, and they genuinely seem to walk the best, but they're paper-pushers. Corpo. There's a profit incentive, you know?"

"I do," she replied. "I really do. I... I used to work for an insurance company."

"Ah."

The less said about that, the better, probably. Her job had been to deny, upcharge, deny, and deflect. The worse part was how quickly she had gotten used to ruining other people's lives with the press of a few buttons.

Maybe one day she'd be brave enough to find her former bosses and do to them what Stray Cat did to those that put humanity at risk? That would be cathartic, at least. And it would be an objectively good thing to do.

That would be nice, but it would be something for another day.

"What are we doing now?" she asked instead.

"We're heading back to Gom. She's better with logistics and the like than I am. I'm just smart enough to know that it's important, not smart enough to figure it out. Once that's done, I think we're going to plan a little picnic outside of the walls."

"A picnic?"

"Right atop the nearest hive," Stray Cat agreed. "We have you and Shy and Hedgehog, as well as Princess and her sister. That's a fair number of samurai. Give you all a wide range of enemies to blow up, and you should collect a good number of points. Might get myself a new mech too, before we head out."

They were soon stepping outside, and Crisis Mode looked up into the sky. It was lightly overcast, but not raining. The sun wasn't quite overhead anymore. They had another three, maybe four hours until the sun set.

She was good for that long, at least. Afterwards... well, there was always caffeine and stimulants to keep the edge off. She mostly just didn't like the idea of fighting aliens in the dark.

They both moved towards Stray Cat's massive mech-carrier, the ramp on the side lowering itself down as they approached.

"Is that it, for Libre, I mean?" she asked. "I slapped him around, and now it's done?"

"Yeah," Stray Cat said. She sighed, her helmet making the sound echo strangely. "Look... fuck, if he wasn't a samurai, I'd fling him out of his office, put an end to the whole thing in a more permanent fashion. But he is. I've... got to believe that other samurai aren't bad people. But we can't have him in charge of jack shit for a while. Maybe get him some therapy or something, let him grieve. Maybe show him the corpse of his white whale."

She nodded. There was no way for her to find any love for that man in her heart, but sympathy? That she could manage, at least a little. "Can't hurt that that model whatever is probably worth a lot of points," she said.

Stray Cat snorted. "Yeah. Bet it's a couple of hundred, at least. We're talking... what, mid-thirties? We're going to have to be careful. It's killed one samurai already. We're kind of a rare breed. Don't want to lose more of us just because we decided to take the fight to them, you know?"

"We can be careful."

Stray Cat made a so-so gesture. "Careful-ish. We're not going to hide behind some walls and take potshots at it. We're going out there and fucking them up. Then we can come back and take care of our, ah, internal issues."

Right, the city was still caught up in riots, even with their warnings and efforts otherwise.

Once things were a little more stable, perhaps those would stop. She could hope, at least.

In the meantime, she had aliens to kill.

***

A note from RavensDagger

I'm doing an AMA on Reddit today!

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/1wh00q0/im_ravensdagger_author_of_stray_cat_strut/

And tomorrow, I'll be the guest on Reck's podcast! We're specifically talking about SCS!

Link: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondQuestsWithReck