"Who exactly was that cat?"
"How would I know?"
"From your reaction, you definitely recognized who it was."
"An illusion. It was all your illusion."
Inside the Sakura Tavern on Gu Diao Street, Beta Town North District.
Colmar stood behind the bar, clutching a red wine bottle in hand. Her burning gaze fixed on the Gypsy witch before her as she pressed on relentlessly. "It definitely wasn't an illusion... My instincts have always been very accurate!"
Judging by the way she looked, she seemed ready to shove the bottle into Ilena's mouth and pry it open.
Ilena had removed her mask by then. Rather than meeting Colmar's eyes, she turned her face toward the large pane of stained glass set into the tavern door, watching the direction in which the black cat had departed, a faint smile at the corner of her lips.
The black cat had been gone for some time, yet she remained in that position without moving.
Instead of holding a deck of Tarot Cards as she usually did, she was toying with an exquisitely crafted enchanted bullet. A touch of blood stained its tip, lending it an inexplicable air of lethal menace.
After hearing Colmar's persistent questioning, the Gypsy witch finally turned to look at her companion and let out a soft sigh.
"You said it yourself. It's only a feeling." There was a hint of helplessness in her voice. "If feelings were reliable, the Gypsy Witch Coven wouldn't have fallen to its current state... It was precisely because we relied too heavily on intuition rather than theory that Gypsy magic kept falling behind in the development of modern magic."
That was not entirely wrong.
Unlike ancient magic, which placed greater emphasis on experience and intuition, modern magic incorporated a great deal of theory and calculation.