For as long as he could remember, evil spirits would always hunt him down and try to take his life. They were what had taken his parents one night when they had sacrificed themselves to protect him after their family’s sacred barrier had been breached, broken by the claws of a horrid evil entity. After their deaths, an S-Rank hunter had come to slay the spirit and cleanse the lands, but they always regathered wherever Joyce was regardless. Eventually, they were forced to move him from the secluded forest of his ancestral home and into the big city where his parents had owned a restaurant, and with the protection of the crowd, he stopped being attacked as frequently. He was told they were after his excess spirituality, and that even if he couldn’t use it, it would smell delectable to their corrupted senses. They were after his smell, his blood, and his life… as if consuming a defect like him would do any good for them. Weak as he was, he was for some reason still viewed as a demon’s greatest delicacy, and the home that had once belonged to his forefathers was thus overtaken, unable to be purged.

And now, because of him and the beacon on his back created by his overflowing spiritual essence, they were being attacked once more, and he was powerless to defend himself just as always. Though before their lives could be stolen away, a trusted, slender, and elegant blue blade thrust itself in front of the two before the attack could meet them, June’s immaculate reflexes that were always quick to kick in saving their lives yet again as the opaline pendant around his neck began to glow a deep ocean blue. Because while June did not have a spirit bond of his own, the thing about his family was that the same spirit was always passed down through their bloodline and whose power could be siphoned by them all, June included, even when the full power of the spirit currently belonged to his mother. Even still, the holy ocean water sliced through the evil spirit’s dark claw with ease, pushing it back as the water along the blade hissed and burned against tough skin, this evil spirit holding the true face of a demon in pain being touched by what was pure.

“Isabelle, weren’t you supposed to be the one on your guard?! Watch out next time, damn it!!” June screamed as the demon’s second claw came flying at his face, Luce lending Isabelle their power so that she could possess the momentum of the demon’s attack and have it miss June with a wide swing. “Ahah, Izzy, aren’t you cutting it too close?!”

“You should just be thankful I saved you! Though you did save me first, so I’ll call it even!” she glared at the beast while her venomous words struck June instead, the skilled and capable B-Rank spirit hunter fixing up his stance as he prepared himself to be the vanguard.

He was quick and agile and with swift reflexes that were unmatched. June on his own already had great intuition, and the intuition given to him by the Aging Water spirit only amplified his instincts and ability to take the correct actions at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t the type to brute force things, and he didn’t have the ability to win battles through sheer force like others might, but he was the type of fighter you would really struggle to beat if you couldn’t keep up with his speed and the fact that his ability to read his opponent’s and allies’ movements was off the charts.

Isabelle, likewise, could do almost anything and was a perfect all-rounder. She wasn’t automatically made A-Rank the moment she was old enough to apply for the spirit hunter occupation for nothing after all. Lucinda had made her rich, meaning it was easy for her to accumulate the artifacts and weapons she may need for any situation. Lucy had caused her to be surrounded by good people and he could always sniff out when they were dealing with a bad egg, causing Isabelle to always know who were her best allies. Luce gave her the ability to control her opponent's momentum by manipulating where their force and impact were going to land, which successfully allowed her to manipulate the luck of battle. And when you combined that with her own skill with the sword and immaculate technique, she was a person you would never want to face if your luck was even slightly below average.

Joyce envied them. He wanted their power, their ability to fight and defend themselves. Even now, all he could do was pull out some talismans he’d made to keep other evil spirits at bay so that the two of them didn’t become overwhelmed. But without a spirit sword to fight, making it impossible for him to harness spiritual energy, and without even a spirit bond to rely on… and when you topped it all off by putting such a huge target on his back because of the overwhelming amount of spirituality inside him that he had no way to harness, he… he really…

“Oh. I get it now,” came a sudden voice from the trees, right above him in a spot where a talisman should have already prevented all spirits from being.

He was certain Isabelle and June would be greatly alarmed by this and would move to help him immediately, but as he turned to raise another talisman up to shield himself from the creature, they did not seem to notice anything at all… and he met eyes with that same winged feline that had always escaped him before he could catch a look. However, now that he was finally able to, Joyce could not move a single muscle to save himself, the spirit’s uncanny lavender eyes staring at him as though they had just figured everything out.

“I get why you made all those swords now, even though you knew they were always going to be faulty. At first I thought you must be about to die soon because of how much of your spirituality and life force you gave up to make them, but you did that as a calculated safety measure, didn’t you? Because you knew that your spirituality was so overflowing that if you didn’t want to be a constant target, you would have to get rid of it somehow. That’s pretty smart of you, human,” the winged feline purred as their kittenish face began to somehow appear as if it were smiling. “I quite like you. I like crafty humans.”

Joyce took a step back, the talisman in his outstretched hand the only thing standing in between him and this intelligent spirit who he could not tell was powerful or not. But when he stared at the talisman between his fingers, he saw it begin to change its shape, the rectangular piece of paper filled to the brim with his spirituality turning almost to liquid, gently sliding out of his grip before it completely slipped away from him, splitting into shining golden orbs of glitter before completely absorbing into the winged feline before him. And his mouth was agape, unable to comprehend what in the world he had just seen. Because in reality, the only way for a spirit to absorb a talisman like that was… was if they were…

He must have missed the fight, because right at that moment, the dark cloud among them shifted. The evil spirits that had once plagued his old home were now sliding into the necklace that hung around Isabelle’s neck, a known spirit capture weapon. When an evil spirit could not be killed or exorcised, it could be sealed away into a charcoal necklace of a similar caliber until it would either be destroyed or released for a stronger spirit hunter to properly take care of. But there was no reason for that to have been done here. The few spirits that had strayed from their nest to try attacking them could have been easily handled by Isabelle and June’s teamwork, but all of a sudden, even though she had never commanded it to do so, the charcoal pendant that had a hole carved in its center lifted itself from off her chest and began to absorb every single evil spirit this plagued forest had to offer, something that necklace should have never been able to do… but it kept consuming, until in the blink of an eye, everything was clear and the entire estate had been purified once and for all.

“What the…” Isabelle stared at the item hung around her neck, dumbfounded. This one didn’t have the capacity to hold so much, it would have had to have been greatly modified to do so, and yet it had just done so despite that… “Joyce!” she immediately turned to him upon realizing something was greatly amiss, when she finally saw what had been hiding its presence so expertly from her and June all this time… the winged feline, whose wings fluttered and landed right down at their feet, the creature purring happily while it brushed itself against Joyce’s legs as her cousin stumbled away.

“Hi there! I’m Neomyra, and I guess you three must have followed me here. Is this your house, mister?” they kept purring at Joyce, the man being clueless on what to do as he kept lifting his feet away from the spirit so that it couldn’t touch him so familiarly. But in the end, it didn’t really matter, because all of a sudden the spirit was stretching and yawning as if they were tired, before they picked themselves up and pranced right along inside the Spiritking family’s barrier as if it were as easy to them as it was to breathe. “Now come on inside, I’m tired! I want fish! I promise I’ll give you all super duper good luck in return, and I’ll give you your sword back, too. Oh, and I did modify that pendant for you so it could fit more evil spirits in there, but since there are so many, we should probably destroy it before they build up enough strength to escape. Here, allow me,” Neomyra’s eyes flashed in the direction of the pendant, Isabelle making an audible gasp when the thing flew off her neck and into the hands of a… wait, hands?!

Right before their very eyes, Neomyra shifted into a form that looked almost human, with a human body covered in blond fur and cat-like lavender pupils that took up their entire eye along with large fluffy ears and a tail. Their wings were closed on their now human-shaped back as they took hold of the pendant and put it in their mouth, their sharp white fangs crushing the instrument in a way that should not have been possible without strong exorcising tools and a ritual to weaken the binding to make it destroyable while preventing the spirit’s escape simultaneously. But no, Neomyra just bit it in half with their molars like it was no big deal, the modified spirit-catching tool crumbling to dust right in front of their very eyes before the now human-looking kitten started hacking.

“Ew, ew, that tastes gross!! Wahh, why did it have to taste gross, I don’t like that taste, I hate it!! I need fish, I want to eat fish now, bleghhh… I’m gonna rip out my tongue,” Neomyra blared as they scratched incessantly at their face like they really were fixing to rip it out because of the poor taste that would have had to have been the mix between charcoal and the ashes of demons, which they could all agree was most definitely not delectable by any standard. But while two of them were struck with nothing but shock and silence, June got the hint and raised his hand to his temple like an army soldier saluting their captain.

“Don’t worry Neomyra, your humble guy June here will go fix you up a bowl of milk to wash out that taste before I get started on your fish! Have faith in my superb cooking abilities and make yourself at home!” he exclaimed loudly before dashing off inside the facilities to race to the kitchen, Joyce and Isabelle staring after him like he was crazy.

“Hey, this is not your house, you can’t make calls like that! This is Joyce’s decision!” his cousin yelled after him, though Joyce himself was too busy staring at that wailing spirit that was rolling around on the ground like they’d just ate poison, which honestly they technically just did, the poor thing screaming about the horrible taste as Joyce watched them, unable to feel anything but confused. Just who was this spirit…? Why could they slip through all his family’s barriers, why were they so powerful, why did they seem to have so many forms, why had they helped them, and why were they here? And why, if they really were so strong… were they rolling around on the floor crying like a brat after stealing and trespassing on his family’s sacred grounds?!