Editing City Series:Volume6a Chapter2 (section)

===Part 2===

Berger stared at the girl’s face.

She had long, soft-looking blonde hair, her eyes were closed, and her face was fully relaxed.

She was asleep.

“…”

He had pulled the blanket down far enough to see her white-skinned shoulders which shined bright in the bluish-white light.

He frowned, sighed, and casually placed the blanket over her again.

“I must be hallucinating. When I pull this blanket up again, it’ll just be that cat.”

He counted aloud to three and pulled back the blanket, but he still saw that girl who had rolled over in her sleep to turn her back toward him.

He could see her face in profile, her plentiful hair, and her entirely bare back.

Even the glow panel must have been too bright for her because she held a hand over her forehead as she rolled over, causing her body to emerge from the blanket, revealing more of her bare skin.

He stared at her in the faint light for a bit, but finally breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, with a chest like that, she’s clearly still just a kid. There goes any temptation toward wrongdoing, I guess.”

He quipped to himself and started to place the blanket over her again, but she grabbed his hand.

“!?”

The relief on his face quickly turned to tension.

But her eyes were still closed and she was still asleep. Her grip was weak as well.

His eyes turned toward her sleeping face where he saw something different from before. There was tension in her brow and her lips moved weakly in order to say something.

He lowered his head to read her lips.

“Vati?”

He sighed and, a few seconds later, smiled.

“It’s okay.”

[[Image:City_v06a_061.jpg|thumb]]

He removed her hand from his but then squeezed her hand back.

Her expression softened and she turned her face away from the glow panel.

He used his other hand to pull the blanket back up to her neck, but as he did, he noticed a series of black letters and numbers written on her right shoulder.

“A brand? HGB-000402.”

That was one of the indelible management numbers people were given in a concentration camp for Heidengeists.

He clicked his tongue once and said nothing more. It took a few seconds for her breathing to calm. He slowly brought her hand below the blanket and let go. Then he silently stood from the bed.

He tiptoed through the darkness to reach the bookcase by the wall.

The book he pulled out was titled ’36 Southern Berlin Citizenship Records.

“Oscar Mirildorf. My old upperclassman’s superior officer who retired after the ’35 Armored Hammer of God Incident in Berlin. This says he ran a private school out of his home on the city outskirts afterwards.”

He flipped through the pages.

He flipped through a lot of them and then flipped back. The hard paper made intermittent flipping sounds as he did so.

After a while, he stopped.

“The Mirildorf family. The wife’s name is Diana Mirildorf, a Werecat from London, city of monsters and gods. I guess that means it’s pronounced Dye-ana and not Dee-ana.”

He returned the book to the shelf and smiled bitterly. Then he pulled another book from the shelf.

This one was the Unreif Germane.

“Where’s the passage Marsch quoted?”

He recited it to himself as he flipped through the pages and then stopped.

The top of the page contained an illustration of a woman leading a dragon and a one-armed man with a sword walking through the Black Forest. The bottom of the page was titled 9th Section of the Ruling King.

“This is the section about the Heidengeist Messiah and the youth with a divine name descending to this land when it was still nameless and only included the Black Forest. The Messiah was unsure if she should use her power to save this land, but he convinced her to descend to the earth with him.”

He shut the book and returned it to the shelf. He walked over and sat back down on the bed.

Just once, he glanced at the girl sleeping below the blanket behind him, but he faced forward again, crossed his arms, shut his eyes, and sighed.

“Let’ see,” he said. “There’s so much to think about, but the most pressing problem is her. …Seems safe to assume that girl is Hazel Mirildorf. She escaped as a cat, but once I brought her here and she fell asleep, her tension faded and she came out of her Flektieren transformation.”

He heard the blanket rustling behind him.

“…”

He turned silently around to see her sitting up.

Her long and plentiful blonde hair fell across her body as she sat sleepily in the bed. The bed creaked beneath her and the blanket fell from her shoulders to gather around her hips, but she did not seem to notice any of it. She only stared blankly at her surroundings.

Her left eye was a brown feline one and her right one was a blue human one.

She must have injured the one eye because it was a prosthetic.

“Nh.”

She let out a faint sigh as wakefulness slowly gathered on her face.

She turned her head to view Berger with her differently-colored eyes drooping sleepily.

Their eyes met and he spoke with a sincere smile.

“Don’t worry. I’m not interested in kids.”

That inspired her to looked down at herself.

She was naked.

She immediately threw a slap his way.