The Northern Grand Duke and the Cat Are Not So Different

Chapter 22

‘Really… the cat is the Duke?’

Although Ruan kept asking himself in disbelief… he actually knew.

He had witnessed the cat transform into the Duke. He heard the Duke himself say that he was that cat, and then saw him turn back into a cat and disappear. There was no way to deny it anymore.

The cat that Ruan had cuddled, licked, and slept with tightly embraced… had been his workplace superior, the Northern Duke, the whole time.

Of course, Ruan had been treating the Duke like a cat ever since he realized the Duke was cat-like. As the days went by, the cat’s transparency when reflected in the Duke lowered, and as he took care of him, he even started to think of him as half his own cat.

But there was a huge difference between privately thinking of him as cat-like and slightly finding him cute, versus actually treating him as an adorable furry creature to cuddle and lick.

At this moment, everything Ruan had done to the cat, whose core had been the Duke, was playing back automatically in his mind.

How he had flirted and made all sorts of advances just to pet him once more, how he had endlessly spouted nonsense without thinking and acted ridiculously clingy. How he had teased him by waving a quill pen, and how they had slept cuddled up every night. And even how he couldn’t resist nibbling on his soft forehead with his lips…

‘I even grabbed him by the scruff of his neck when he didn’t want it and gave him a cat bath…’

Thinking it needed to be washed quickly and thoroughly, he had boldly cleaned every nook and cranny, almost licking…

And that had all been the Northern Duke?

The memories with the cat were like an onion, revealing new layers with each peeling. And now realizing that the cat in those memories had been the Northern Duke every single moment, Ruan felt like he was about to cry.

‘Wait. But hold on.’

The fact that the ‘spiritual cat’ was the Duke meant…

‘The Duke was a cat even before I started talking nonsense to the spiritual cat.’

Then it wasn’t Ruan’s fault that the Duke had become a cat in the first place.

Although not as shocking as discovering that his cat was actually the Northern Duke, this was still quite a revelation for Ruan.

‘I felt so guilty thinking I had turned the perfectly normal Northern Duke into a cat…’

How much effort and care had Ruan put in out of a sense of responsibility for ‘the Duke who became a cat because of him’? But the Duke had been a cat from the beginning. Then wasn’t it just serving a cat for no reason…?

‘Oh?’

Ruan, who was about to feel unjustly treated for a moment thinking he had done pointless things due to a misunderstanding, quickly corrected his thoughts.

Hmm. That can’t be helped. No matter what the outer shell is, it’s natural for humans to serve cats.

‘But then why did the Duke become a cat in the first place?’

As Ruan was pondering this.

Bang.

Ruan’s door flew open.

At this late hour, there was only one creature who would enter Ruan’s room without knocking.

The cat.

‘…but now in the form of the Northern Duke.’

The one who opened the door and entered was the Duke, wearing clothes stained with blood that was black unlike human blood.

‘He must have come here right after finishing off the monsters.’

It didn’t seem like much time had passed since the Duke left this room, but he had already resolved the situation.

The Duke was certainly impressive.

After all, he was described as the Empire’s best swordsman in “Tales of the Sirah Empire”. The Duke’s role in the novel was to be forcibly dragged into participating in the struggle for the throne between Volker and Louise, who both sought his irreplaceable military power with unwanted love calls.

‘But it turns out that the Empire’s best swordsman was actually a soft and fluffy black cat.’

While Ruan was getting angry at the ruthless protagonist who forcibly dragged the unwilling cat to the battlefield.

The Duke, seemingly displeased with his dirty clothes, looked down at his outfit…

And disappeared.

A moment later.

From under the pile of the Duke’s collapsed clothes, a cat with fluffy fur emerged. The cat began to wriggle out from between the oversized clothes. As it was escaping from the fabric, it seemed to get caught and shook its hind legs vigorously before leaping onto Ruan’s bed.

Unlike the clothes that were sticky with monster blood, the cat’s fur looked clean, just a bit disheveled from crawling out of the pile of clothes. But even that seemed to displease the cat, as it began to groom itself vigorously. It seemed unable to tolerate the disturbance to its fur that it had so neatly arranged.

Ruan watched the cat grooming almost combatively before approaching and speaking.

“Your Grace. Are you very busy?”

At Ruan’s call, the Duke stopped grooming and looked at Ruan. Ruan politely addressed the cat, which was staring at him with its pink tongue slightly sticking out as if it had forgotten to retract it.

“I have some questions about Your Grace being a cat… if it’s not inconvenient for you to answer now?”

It felt a bit awkward to use honorifics with the cat that he had been cuddling and licking just hours ago, saying “oh, how cute, our kitty”, but… now that he knew this cat was his workplace superior, he had no choice.

He had to be polite and use honorifics consistently.

Fortunately, the cat superior seemed willing to answer Ruan’s question, as it quietly lowered its hind leg that it had been holding up and licking vigorously. Then it looked at Ruan as if to say ‘go ahead and ask’.

‘Is he going to converse in cat form?’

Based on his experience so far, the Duke in cat form could understand human speech and show simple reactions, but couldn’t speak human language. And the current topic was… far beyond the common sense of an ordinary person like Ruan to discuss by relying on the cat’s simple and limited reactions, like playing twenty questions.

‘I need to know something to even ask questions…’

In a situation where he didn’t know exactly what the range of questions should be or what to ask, that kind of communication was impossible.

Ruan once again politely requested the cat.

“If it’s alright with Your Grace… could we talk in human form? I think we could have a more detailed conversation that way.”

The Duke, who had turned his ears back and seemed to be thinking for a moment at Ruan’s words, eventually changed his body to human form. However, there was one point that Ruan hadn’t considered…

The Duke’s clothes stained with monster blood were discarded right in front of the door. Therefore, the current Duke was…

Naked.

‘So this is why he was naked when he came to visit me in the infirmary, and earlier too.’

Ruan was unsure whether to be distressed about seeing his Northern Duke superior naked, or about the fact that it was because he had requested the human form…

When he felt something odd.

Among the Duke’s abundant black hair… pitch-black cat ears were poking out.

As Ruan was slightly taken aback by the appearance reminiscent of a beautiful girl from otaku media.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Hearing a dull sound of something tapping, he turned his head. He saw a fluffy cat tail tapping on the bed.

‘It wasn’t just the ears. There was a tail too… This is undeniably that…’

“Your Grace. Those ears and tail…”

Ruan, taken aback, trailed off unable to find the right words. Fortunately, the Duke seemed to understand what he was trying to say and answered in a confident tone.

“Isn’t it more comfortable to have the ears and tail?”

Comfortable…?

Ruan couldn’t understand at all how or in what way it was comfortable, but he just gave up trying to understand. In a situation where the Northern Duke had cat ears and a cat tail, attempting to understand anything seemed futile in the first place.

Right. What am I trying to understand in a fantasy world? Ruan set aside all other issues and asked the one thing he was most curious about.

“Why are you… a cat, Your Grace?”

It was a question reminiscent of a story he had seen somewhere on the internet, about someone who momentarily asked “Since when?” when an acquaintance said they were actually a foreigner, but Ruan forced himself to finish his sentence. And unlike Ruan, who was agonizing over what he had just said, the Duke answered as casually as if he had been asked an everyday question like “How’s the weather today?”

“Because the direct line of the Reinke ducal family has been cat therianthropes for generations.”

Therianthrope…

Therianthrope…?

Ruan’s head started to ache at the endlessly expanding fantasy world-building. The existence of spiritual cats that didn’t appear in the novel could be overlooked, thinking that it wasn’t necessary to write about everything that exists in the world-building in the novel.

But…

The Northern Duke, who was a supporting character of sorts, suddenly being a therianthrope? And he never showed any signs of it?

What kind of person is this author?