62 Perils of Miscommunication (4)

The next instant, Iris bit into the woman's hand as hard as she could. Startled, the woman shouted out and let go. Iris dropped like ball onto the ground while coughing for dear life from the ton of powder now in her mouth.

Her landing was as horrible as ever, and she lay dazed for a heartbeat or two. There were hands reaching for her, but she regained her senses before they could take hold of her and ran away. Kyro shouted in her wake, but she didn't listen.

Why should she when he was planning to give her away. If she turned back, he would just put her into the carrier and present to the woman like that. And she wasn't going to have that.

If that was her future, then she was better off looking for someone else to take care of her. Maybe next time she ran into someone, they would actually like her a bit and not abandon her at the first chance. There was a lot of hope and little certainty in such plans, but that was all she had at the moment.

And she was going to make it work. She always had. When things go bad, you just have to persevere. That's all there's to it.

Her small feet were no match for a human's long strides, but she wasn't a simpleminded fool. When she noticed that Kyro was chasing after her, she rushed into the flower bushes on the side. They were leafy and not easy to get through, but at least she could do so. Kyro had to go all the way around, and by the time he found a place to squeeze through, she had a good lead.

And this wasn't his apartment. In this chase, a lead was close to a game over.

She soon returned to the main path, and when she saw a fifteen or so people group standing by a sign, arguing about something, she dived into it. Her small form made it dangerous, since they could kick her by accident at any point, but she didn't care. She was no longer the first day in her body.

There was a single close encounter with a foot that rose up at random, but she managed to dodge it on time, losing only a few tail hairs, and she was through. Now that Kyro's sight was blocked, she squeezed through the bushes on the side, but instead of running in the same direction, she went back to where they had come from. Well, the general direction of there.

In passing, she saw Kyro running over, shouting at the crowd to catch a little fox. But he was a step too slow. She was already gone.

It wasn't easy to ignore the worry in his voice and the panicked look on his face, but she purposefully turned around and left. He no longer had anything to do with her. Their friendship was over, as of this moment.

Some distance away, she turned off the path and went through more bushes. This was another pathway, and she rushed through it while there was no one around for a moment. After that, she went by the flower bushes on the other side, wondering where they would lead her.

In time, she reached a small fountain. At the sight of it, she felt a little thirsty, but there were a lot of people there, so she didn't dare come out. It was too soon to start anything new. She wanted a moment to rest and think about what she was going to do now, how best to approach her current situation.

Everything had been going so well, she didn't think of an emergency plan, didn't consider any ifs. It was a fault of hers, of course, so easily believing the good thing. Maybe the universe wasn't as kind as she'd hoped. It seemed to be too good to be true. Her family was cursed, after all.

When younger, she'd always laugh at other people's superstitions, but now, her mind was starting to open up to them. You can call one bad thing a coincidence, two bad things some bad luck, but this? It was beyond what you could call simple misfortune.

She was a fox half a world away from her home, literally. Stuff like this didn't happen to normal people. They didn't just wake up one day in a body of an animal in another continent. There might really be something to that curse thing.

In the flower bushes, submerged in their thick scent, she lay down. She made sure that no one could see her from the outside and closed her eyes. Sleep was the last thing on her mind now, but she didn't want to walk around and maybe run into Kyro or the woman. It was safer to just stay here and wait for the evening when there'd be less people around.

At that time, she could come out and take a sip from the fountain. As for what would happen after that, she didn't want to think about it at the moment. She knew she had to, the reality of her current situation was staring straight into her face, but she wasn't eager to accept it. Maybe if she gave it a bit of time, it'd solve itself and without her assistance?

That was stupid, and so she stopped that train of thought. Until evening, she had to come up with a plan of action, and then she'd find herself a new roommate which was going to be ten thousand times better than her old one. For certain.