Cat Ears

The front deck of the survey vehicle.

Thud.

Thud.

...The dull knocking stopped for a few seconds, followed by another basic series of "thud thud thud" impacts, accompanied by the sound of something heavy hitting the ground.

Jiang Han half-squinted, flicking her tail once to shake off the sand and stone dust clinging to it.

Beside her, Lester held a chisel hammer, her face caked in powder. She sneezed twice, hurriedly turned incorporeal to let the sand and gravel roll away, and said resentfully:

"Damn it! You flung the powder everywhere!"

"Hahaha, I told you not to stand next to the kitty." Lilia lay basking in the evening sun, cheerfully mocking the ghost witch.

The other ghost witch, Lisa, was having continuous-treatment bandages wrapped around her with the help of an investigator witch. Jiang Han's Evil-Banishing Slash had nearly scattered her soul to the winds; she had come within a hair's breadth of taking a day trip to the Underworld.

Lisa bared her teeth in pain. "This once again—hiss, ow!—once again, again, has strengthened my resolve not to become a cat slave."

Hailey, the investigator witch, drew out her words and said in an exceedingly leisurely, unhurried tone, "Fine. Then may I go to your house and take away your Cat Lamp?"

"Of course not!" Lisa's eyes widened, with not a trace of a ghost witch's composure left in her.

Jiang Han swayed her tail, feeling a long-missed sense of freedom, and let out a long breath.

Her tail had just happened to poke into a chunk of mithril ore beneath the sand and become wedged tight inside. Fortunately, the ore chunk was not especially large, so with the help of the other witches, they had hauled both her and the ore onto the survey vehicle. Lester then volunteered to