'Man, the United States is pretty boring,' I thought, kicking a stray pebble down the endless stretch of concrete.
My name is Hiro Saijō. I'm twelve years old, and right now, I was making my usual, agonizingly dull trek back home from school. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I hate my life, but looking around at the perfectly mowed lawns and the giant, boxy houses that all looked exactly the same… it just felt so lifeless. There was no mystery here. No tight, winding alleyways to explore, no cool city neon to get lost under. Just wide roads and stop signs.
"I want to go traveling." I muttered, adjusting the straps of my backpack.
'Anywhere but here. Maybe back to Japan,or Europe, or just… somewhere where things actually happen.'
I reached the intersection a few blocks from my house. The crosswalk signal flashed its bright white walking man, granting me permission to cross the wide avenue. I stepped off the curb, my eyes naturally dropping to the asphalt, when I saw it.
Sitting right smack in the middle of the crosswalk was a cat. A completely pitch-black cat.
It was just chilling there, tail curled around its paws, staring blankly at the opposite side of the street. It didn't even twitch when the walk signal started beeping that rapid, annoying countdown.
'What is this idiot cat doing?'
Suddenly, the screech of tires tore through the quiet afternoon air. I snapped my head up. Around the corner, a massive delivery truck was swerving wildly. The driver had taken the turn way too fast, and the back end of the truck was drifting, the rubber smoking as it skidded right toward the crosswalk. Right toward the cat.
I looked down. The cat was just staring at the blinding headlights, completely frozen. It wasn't budging an inch.
My body moved before my brain could tell me how stupid this was. I dropped my backpack, bolted forward, and scooped the heavy feline into my arms. I threw my weight backward, pulling us both out of the street and tumbling hard onto the concrete walkway.
My elbows scraped against the pavement, stinging like crazy, but I held onto the cat.
'Holy crap, I actually did it. We're safe.' My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I breathed out a massive sigh of relief and looked down at my arms. The black cat was completely unharmed, just staring up at me with these glowing, unblinking yellow eyes. It was a weird look. Not grateful, just… expectant.
Then, a deafening screech of metal echoed above me.
I looked up. The truck hadn't just skidded. It had hit the curb, violently overcorrected, and flipped. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl. The massive metal box was in the air, blotting out the sun, gravity pulling it directly down toward the spot where I was sitting.
'Oh.'
CRASH.
Everything went pitch black. There was no pain, no flashing lights. Just an abrupt, heavy silence.
—
I gasped, sucking in a massive breath of air as if I had been drowning.
I shot up into a sitting position, my chest heaving. 'I'm alive? How am I alive?!' I frantically patted my chest, expecting crushed ribs or a missing arm. But I was fine. Actually, I was more than fine.
I blinked, my vision adjusting to the dim lighting of a living room. It wasn't my living room. There was a low glass coffee table in front of me, a sleek flat-screen TV, and the couch I was sitting on felt like expensive leather.
I looked down at my hands.
'Wait. These aren't my hands.'
They were bigger. The fingers were longer. And the skin… it was deeply tanned. Like, deeply, artificially baked tanned. I stared at my left hand, noticing a thick, gaudy silver ring wrapped around my middle finger.
Panic started bubbling in my stomach. I touched my chest. I was wearing a black tank top, and layered over it were heavy silver chains and a chunky necklace that clinked loudly when I moved. I grabbed at my head, pulling off a tight black beanie. I looked at it in my hands—it had a silver skull stitched onto the right side.
I looked down at the rest of my outfit. I was wearing a loud, obnoxious leopard-print jacket.
'No way. No, no, no...'
Memories from a few years ago suddenly hit me. I remembered my American stepdad, sitting in the garage with me, showing me these wild Japanese fashion magazines he'd found online. He had laughed, pointing at the guys with the dark tans, crazy hair, and flashy clothes.
"They call 'em Gyaru," he had whispered, grinning like it was some big secret. "Well, the girls are Gyaru. The guys are Gyaruo. It's a whole subculture, kid!"
I remembered my mom bursting into the garage, furious, snatching the magazines away and yelling at him for teaching a ten-year-old about "delinquent fashion."
I stood up, my legs feeling strangely long and heavy. My center of gravity was entirely off. I stumbled toward the hallway where a large, full-length mirror hung on the wall.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Staring back at me was a teenager. He had deeply tanned skin, light brown hair styled in messy, spiky waves that the beanie had just flattened out, heavy silver jewelry, and that ridiculous leopard jacket.
'I'm… I'm a Gyaruo.'
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, a violent headache pierced my skull. I grabbed the sides of my head, groaning as information just… dumped into my brain. It wasn't like watching a movie; it was like remembering things I had just temporarily forgotten.
I knew this house. I lived here. I knew my age. I was seventeen. I knew the route to my high school, I knew the names of people I had never met, I knew how to apply self-tanner, and I knew how to ride a moped.
I am a twelve-year-old kid who hates boring American suburbs. But I am also a seventeen-year-old Gyaruo living in Japan.
I backed away from the mirror, my breath hitching in my throat. I practically ran back to the leather couch, threw myself onto it, grabbed one of the throw pillows, buried my face completely into the fabric, and just screamed.
"MMMPPHHH-GAAAAAAHHHHHH!"
I kept my face buried in the leather pillow, letting out all the panic, confusion, and raw terror of dying and waking up as a Japanese teenager who looked like he belonged in a 2000s music video. My lungs burned, and I finally stopped to gasp for air.
Just as I started to lift my head, a sudden, solid weight dropped right onto my lap.
Thump.
I froze. Slowly, I lowered the pillow. Sitting perfectly still on my leopard-print covered thighs was a black cat. The black cat. The exact same one from the crosswalk, with those weird, unblinking yellow eyes staring directly into my soul.
'How did it even get in here?' I thought, my brain struggling to process yet another impossible thing. 'Did it follow me? Wait, I literally got crushed by a truck. Did we both die and get sent here?'
My twelve-year-old brain defaulted to the only normal reaction a kid has when presented with an animal. Without really thinking about it, I reached a trembling hand forward and tried to scratch it behind the ears.
The cat deftly leaned back, dodging my fingers completely. Then, it opened its mouth.
"Why did you grab me?"
A woman's voice. Smooth, slightly husky, and sounding completely exasperated. It came right out of the feline's mouth.
"Holy shit, a talking cat!" I yelled.
I scrambled backward so fast I practically launched myself off the couch. My silver chains smacked against my chin as I stood up, pointing a shaky, ring-covered finger at the animal. The cat simply let out a quiet sigh and hopped down from the cushions, sitting on the glass coffee table to maintain eye contact.
"Calm down," the cat said, her tone flat. "And answer the question. Why did you pull me out of the street? I was sitting there for a reason."
I stared at it. I was a twelve-year-old kid trapped in a seventeen-year-old Gyaruo's body, arguing with a suicidal talking cat. My grip on reality was officially gone.
"I... I just kind of did it," I said half-mindedly, my hand slowly dropping to my side. I swallowed hard, the adrenaline fading into a dull ache in my chest. "You just... you reminded me of my first cat. He got out of the house one day and was killed by a driver who wasn't paying attention. I guess I never really got over mourning him. When I saw you frozen in the headlights, my body just moved. I didn't want it to happen again."
The cat stared at me in silence. The annoyed twitch of her tail completely stopped. She closed her eyes, and for a second, she looked incredibly tired.
"I see," she murmured. When she opened her eyes again, the harshness was gone. "I suppose I owe you an explanation. I wasn't always a cat. Originally, I was a human woman. I died, got 'isekaid' to another world, and spent years fighting to save it. And I did. I saved them all."
She let out a bitter, dry laugh that sounded bizarre coming from a tiny animal throat. "But my reward for saving that world? I was sent back to my original, real world... as a cat. I was at an all-time low. I had lost my human life, my magic, my friends... everything. I was just sitting in that intersection, waiting for a truck to end it."
'Whoa,' I thought, my eyes wide. 'That is way heavier than anything I've ever dealt with.'
"But," the cat continued, her ears perking up slightly, "it seems fate has a strange sense of humor. Because you intervened, a new set of rules kicked in. This is my third reincarnation. Because of that, and because you altered my fate, I can attach myself to a person. I can essentially become a random power source for them. A system, of sorts."
She tilted her head. "Do you accept?"
My heart did a backflip. My twelve-year-old inner nerd completely overrode my current shock. A talking cat with a tragic backstory offering me anime protagonist powers?
"Yes!" I practically shouted. "Absolutely, yes!"
"Good," she said, a smirk clearly visible on her feline face. "Then let's get out of this form."
A sudden burst of white smoke erupted from the coffee table, thick and completely obscuring my vision. I coughed, waving my hands to clear the air. As the smoke dissipated, my jaw hit the floor.
Sitting on the edge of the coffee table wasn't a cat anymore. It was a tall, gorgeous woman with dark brown skin, brilliant golden eyes, and long, wild purple hair tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing a sleek, sleeveless orange overshirt and black tight-fitting clothes underneath.
My brain short-circuited. 'Wait. That's... that's Yoruichi. Literally Yoruichi Shihouin, what is happening?!'
She stood up, stretching her arms above her head with a satisfied groan, popping her back. She looked down at me, placing her hands on her hips.
"Much better," she said, her voice the exact same husky tone as the cat's. She glanced toward the hallway window. "Alright, kid. Stay here. I need to head out and see if this is a fictional world or not. Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."
I was too stunned to argue, my face flushing slightly under my fake tan. "Yes, ma'am."
She gave me a two-finger salute, vanished in a literal blur of speed, and the front door clicked shut behind her.
I stood alone in the living room. The silence crept back in, but this time, I wasn't panicked. A grin slowly spread across my face. I had a magical anime mentor. I was in a new body. I had powers.
I stepped into the middle of the room, widening my stance. I took a deep breath, raised my left arm, and curled my fingers, mimicking a Kamen Rider about to transform.
"System..." I yelled at the top of my lungs, striking a dramatic pose. "Start!"
I waited for the glowing lights. I waited for the holographic screens. I waited for the armor to materialize over my leopard-print jacket.
Chirp... chirp... chirp...
Outside the window, a lone cricket chirped in the quiet afternoon air. Nothing happened.
——
[??? POV]
I leapt gracefully onto the top of a concrete wall, my small, black feline paws making absolutely no sound.
The afternoon sun was beginning to dip, casting long shadows across the neighborhood. I sat on the edge of the wall, my tail flicking back and forth as I surveyed the town below. A gentle breeze ruffled my fur, and my yellow eyes locked onto a massive, pristine campus in the distance.
There was a large sign near the front gates. Even from here, my enhanced feline vision could easily make out the bold kanji: Kuoh Academy.
I let out a long, very human sigh.
'Out of all the anime universes,' I thought, scratching behind my ear with a hind leg. 'It just had to be the world of Highschool DxD. Great. Devils, angels, perverts, and constant world-ending threats.'
The realization stung even more because I knew exactly how vulnerable I was right now. After dying, reincarnating, saving a world, and then being forcefully dumped back into a cat's body, my magic and physical stats were at rock bottom. If I ran into a low-ranking Stray Devil right now, I could probably take it down with some quick maneuvers and dirty tricks. But an experienced one? Or a named character? They would turn me into roadkill in a direct fight. That kid back at the house had no idea what kind of neighborhood he was living in.
I shook my head and focused on the real issue at hand: creating his System. Since I had bound my soul to his, I was essentially his operating system. The "Creator" rules dictated that I had to design his abilities, but for some completely idiotic reason, I wasn't allowed to just ask him what kind of system he wanted.
'Makes absolutely no sense,' I grumbled internally. 'But whatever. Let's see what we can do.'
A translucent blue screen popped up in my mind's eye. Since I was currently borrowing the form of a fictional character myself, an idea struck me. Why not lean into that?
I started inputting the parameters. The System would revolve around summoning characters from fiction. By completing certain tasks, surviving, or hitting milestones, he could summon individuals from other universes. Furthermore, upon a successful summon, he would be granted a random power or item from that specific character's world.
I hit the "Finalize" button in my mind.
ERROR: System Request Flagged. Host parameters exceed allowable power scaling. Drawback required.
A big red error message blinked in my vision. I rolled my yellow eyes. 'Of course it got flagged. Too overpowered. What exactly is the issue? The powers? The items? Or...'
I tapped my paw on the concrete. 'Ah. It's the summons. A growing army of perfectly loyal, insanely strong fictional characters completely breaks the balance of this world.'
I reopened the prompt and typed in a modification.
The summoned characters will not be immediately, mindlessly loyal followers. They retain full free will and personality.
However, they will spawn with a significantly higher tolerance and affection rate toward the Host than they normally would, ensuring they don't instantly kill him or just walk away.
I hit submit.
DING. System Accepted. Booting sequence initiated.
I let out a satisfied purr. I hopped down from the wall and padded into a secluded, heavily wooded park near the edge of Kuoh.
"At least the boy will like it," I muttered to myself, my voice tiny in the vast trees. "I wonder if he even knows what DxD is? He recognized me, so he's clearly an anime fan."
I stopped walking, a sudden realization hitting me. 'Wait. He said he was reincarnated too, just like I was. I was so caught up in my own drama, I forgot to ask his actual age. He looked like a young kid a bit childish, but he's in a seventeen-year-old's body.'
I found a quiet clearing behind a large oak tree. With a quick pulse of the tiny bit of energy I had, I shifted out of the cat form, standing up fully as the tall, purple-haired woman. I stretched my arms, enjoying the feeling of having actual thumbs again.
'If I'm going to be walking around this town helping him, I need a proper identity,' I thought. 'I borrowed this body, so I might as well borrow the first name. Yoruichi.'
I crossed my arms, tapping my chin. 'Yoruichi Shihouin? Honestly... maybe I'll just adopt the kid's family name. If he's okay with it, of course."
Satisfied with the plan, I closed my eyes, letting my body compress and shift back down until I was on four paws again. With a flick of my tail, I darted out of the woods, navigating the winding streets of Kuoh to head back to the house.