Thousands of years had passed, yet time had offered no mercy.
Eternity is not merely long—it is suffocating. For most divine beings, it smooths edges, dulls memories, turns pain into distant echoes. But for the Cat, eternity sharpened everything. Each passing age pressed salt into an ancient wound that had never been allowed to close.
Once, it had been a creature of dazzling purity—a small, radiant soul whose light shimmered like frost under starlight. Hope had lived inside it, fragile but fierce. It had believed in fairness. It had believed in God.
That belief shattered at the finish line.
Every turning of the Zodiac wheel became a renewed torment. Every celebration of the Twelve—etched into temples, whispered in prayers, immortalized in constellations—was a reminder of what had been stolen. The Cat watched from the margins of existence, unseen and unacknowledged, as the divine order it had nearly joined flourished without it.
Denied a place in heaven, its essence drifted instead into the spaces between realms.
There, resentment took shape.
Its once-gentle light fractured, splintering into sharp, prismatic shards—blue with grief, red with fury, white with a cold, unyielding resolve. It was no longer simply an animal spirit. It became a question carved into the universe itself: What gives the heavens the right to choose who is worthy?
And if the gods would not answer—
Then the world would.
The Cat found its answer in mortality.
The divine realm was bound by law, balance, and tradition. The mortal realm, however, was chaos—fluid, corruptible, ripe with weakness and desire. Humans were vessels of choice, fear, ambition. Through them, fate could be bent.
And so, with meticulous cruelty, the Cat set God's Race in motion once more.
Not in the heavens.
On the streets.
The descent of the Divine Spirits was neither gentle nor merciful.
A blinding surge of light tore through the mundane fabric of the world. Reality bent, folding animal instinct into human flesh. Bones remembered older shapes. Blood hummed with ancient power. The transition burned.
In one narrow alleyway, washed in neon glare and rain-slick grime, a young woman staggered as something vast and primordial awakened inside her.
For a split second, her reflection in a shattered bottle flickered—soft, human features overlaid by something else. Something sharp. Something ancient.
Her eye changed first.
The round, ordinary pupil narrowed, stretching vertically into a fierce, golden slit. A predator's gaze stared back from a human face.
Behind her, the city breathed—sirens in the distance, electricity buzzing through broken lights, the metallic scent of fear hanging thick in the air.
"WAIT…!"
The shout cracked through the alley.
A man in a wrinkled business suit stumbled backward, his polished shoes slipping against damp concrete. Sweat streamed down his face, soaking his collar, his glasses skewed as his hands flew up in frantic surrender. Panic stripped him bare.
"WAIT…!" he screamed again, voice raw. "PLEASE—"
A younger figure stood frozen nearby, half-hidden beneath a baseball cap, eyes wide and unblinking as they witnessed something they could not comprehend.
"I CAN EXPLAIN EVERYTHING…!" the man shrieked, words tumbling over each other in desperate excess. His breath came in ragged gasps as he scrambled farther away, as if distance alone could save him.
The woman slowed.
Her sneakers brushed softly against scattered debris—glass, paper, remnants of lives passing through unnoticed. The sound was quiet, deliberate.
She stopped.
The man's heart sank.
Slowly, she turned.
"I know what's happening…" she said.
Her voice was low—not loud, not rushed—but it carried a terrifying certainty. Each word settled into the alley like a verdict. Her feet planted firmly against the ground, as though the earth itself recognized her authority.
Inside her, something vast stirred.
The spirit that shared her body—a Divine Spirit, one of the sacred Twelve—had already seen the truth. It recognized the threads of manipulation clinging to the man like rot. He was not the architect, merely a tool.
A pawn moved by the Cat.
The girl flinched as the spirit fully asserted itself, power surging through muscle and bone, an ancient presence unfolding within her consciousness. A command—silent, absolute—reverberated through her being, carrying the weight of a title older than the world.
"…TO YOUR BODY RIGHT NOW!"
The Divine Race was no longer a celestial myth; it was a desperate battle unfolding in the shadows of a modern city, and the Cat's move had just forced one of the sacred Twelve to awaken in the flesh.
Thousands of years had passed, yet the wound remained as raw as the moment it was carved into the cosmos.
A cat's spirit—small once, hopeful once—had been denied its place among the celestial pantheon. It did not fade. It did not dissolve into quiet obscurity as forgotten spirits were meant to do. Instead, it endured. Its essence burned on as a brilliant fracture in existence, its once-pure light shattered into countless colors by the violence of rejection itself.
Red flared with rage.
Blue shimmered with grief.
White gleamed with a cold, merciless clarity.
That eternal sting of failure did not soften with time. It sharpened. Each cycle of the Zodiac turned the blade again. Each year named after the Twelve was another reminder of absence, of exclusion, of thirteen becoming nothing.
Now—fueled by a desire so focused it bordered on divinity—that same animal had set God's Race in motion once more.
Not through prayer.
Not through appeal.
But through force.
The Cat, now no longer merely an animal spirit but a complex, volatile presence, hurled its bottled resentment into the mortal plane. Its aura blazed violently—red, blue, and white intertwining like a broken crown—as it tore open the ancient seals that kept heaven and earth apart. The Divine Spirits were dragged from myth into flesh, awakened not by choice but by compulsion.
The alley was narrow, hemmed in by concrete walls slick with moisture and grime, neon reflections trembling in shallow puddles. The air smelled of rust, wet leaves, and fear.
A man in a business suit stood frozen at its center.
His glasses sat crooked on his nose. Sweat soaked through his collar. His breath came in short, panicked gasps as if the night itself were pressing down on his chest. He was not powerful. He was not important.
He was a pawn.
"WAIT…!" he shouted, the word tearing from his throat as though it might anchor reality back into place.
The blonde-haired girl by the chain-link fence slowly turned.
At first glance, she looked ordinary—just another student caught out too late at night. But something in her posture was wrong. Too still. Too grounded. Her expression was composed, almost distant, as though fear had already been judged and dismissed.
"I KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING…" she said.
Her voice was calm. Not loud. Not frantic. And that calmness terrified him more than any scream could have.
The man recoiled, hands raised higher, fingers trembling. "I—I CAN EXPLAIN EVERYTHING…!" he stammered, the words tumbling uselessly from his mouth, stripped of meaning the moment they left him.
The girl did not answer.
Her sneaker brushed against the ground, a soft RUSTLE through scattered leaves and debris. The sound echoed unnaturally loud in the silence that followed. Slowly, deliberately, she looked up.
Her eye changed.
What had once been warm brown narrowed into something ancient and inhuman—a magnificent gold, split vertically like a predator's gaze. Power settled into her bones, into her breath, into the very space she occupied.
The Spirit had taken control.
She shifted her focus—not to the screaming man, but to the other figure nearby. The person in the baseball cap stiffened as her gaze locked onto them. For a heartbeat, the alley seemed to hold its breath.
The figure in the cap gave a tense, almost imperceptible NOD.
An acknowledgment.
An understanding.
An acceptance of chaos.
The blonde-haired girl FLINCHED as the Divine Spirit within her surged, forcing itself deeper, louder, more absolute. The command erupted from her—not merely spoken, but imposed, vibrating through flesh and soul alike.
"…TO YOUR BODY RIGHT NOW!"
Her fingers clenched instinctively into the fabric of her coat, knuckles whitening. For the briefest instant, a fragile human thought surfaced—small, terrified, and achingly alone.
"…WILL I EVER BE MYSELF AGAIN…?"
The question never found an answer.
Her hand struck the fence with a sharp CLINK, metal rattling as the divine presence fully flooded her form, drowning the girl beneath the god.
The man swallowed hard, an audible GULP, and stumbled backward, shoes scraping uselessly against the pavement. His eyes darted wildly, searching for something—anything—that still made sense.
Then everything broke at once.
The spirit moved—not with human hesitation, but with impossible precision.
And suddenly, a third presence exploded into motion.
The person who had stood so calmly in the baseball cap launched into the air, their body shedding its human constraints mid-movement. Fabric stretched. Shadows warped. In the blink of an eye, cat ears pierced through hair, a tail whipping behind them as their form tightened into something sleek and powerful.
They wore short shorts, their muscles coiled and responsive, moving with predatory grace that no ordinary human could achieve. This was not the Divine Cat itself—but another vessel, twisted into motion by its influence. A pawn, or perhaps something worse.
The businessman gasped, a strangled cry tearing from him—"!!!"—as the figure vaulted cleanly over his head.
He barely had time to look up.
Another silhouette cut across the sky.
A body arced upward, higher than physics allowed, framed perfectly against the full moon. Long ears unfurled mid-flight, unmistakably rabbit-like, trailing behind a billowing, ornate cloak that caught the moonlight like silver fire.
The Rabbit Zodiac.
Active.
Awakened.
The man staggered, turning in a slow, helpless circle, his mind fracturing under the weight of what he had just witnessed. Gods. Beasts. Transformation. Fate unraveling in a forgotten alleyway.
"WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON…?" he screamed into the night.
Above him, the city slept—unaware that the first move in the second Great Race had already been made, and that one of the Divine Twelve—the Rabbit—now ran free upon the Earth.
The chaos of the forced awakening had finally begun to settle.
What remained was not peace, but aftermath.
In the alley, the echoes of divine interference lingered like a bruise in the air—bent metal, scattered leaves, and the stench of fear clinging stubbornly to concrete walls. The businessman had been left behind, knees weak, mind fractured beyond immediate repair. He stared into nothing, unable to reconcile the screaming sky, the impossible transformations, and the truth that reality had slipped beyond his grasp.
High above, cutting through the darkness, the newly awakened Rabbit—the 4th Place Divine Spirit—rocketed across the night sky.
"KYAAAHH!!! I HAVE NO IDEA…!"
Her cry tore through the clouds, raw and unfiltered, a sound born of terror rather than divinity. She fled not with purpose, but with instinct—dragged violently from a quiet human life into an ancient role she did not remember choosing.
The heavens did not answer her.
They never had.
Because the wound—once a single injustice—had widened into something far greater.
Thousands of years had passed, yet the wound had never healed.
What began as a slight had grown into a chasm carved straight through the cosmic order. The rejected creature, once small and hopeful, now burned as an incandescent mass of fractured emotion. Rage, sorrow, envy, resolve—each splintered fragment pulsed with equal intensity, bound together by one singular obsession.
Justice.
Not mercy.
Not forgiveness.
Justice, as the Cat defined it.
Now, fueled by a desire so absolute it eclipsed even fear, that same animal had set God's Race in motion again.
But the true architect of the chaos did not linger in alleys or soar through moonlit skies.
It waited somewhere far more intimate.
A human home.
The air inside the room was close, heavy with the warmth of living bodies and the tension of imminent violence. Shadows clung to the walls as the Cat Spirit revealed itself fully—not as an abstract force, but as a presence with form, weight, and intent.
13TH PLACE (ELIMINATED).
A ROUGHLY 3,000-YEAR-OLD CAT.
Its chosen vessel stood above its prey.
The young woman's dark hair framed a face now unmistakably feline—eyes sharp, pupils narrowed, lips curved not in a smile but in possession. A dark tail extended behind her, moving with a slow, deliberate SWISH, betraying neither haste nor hesitation.
She straddled a boy pinned helplessly beneath her.
He was slight, dark-haired, glasses crooked from the sudden impact. His breath came fast and shallow, chest rising sharply beneath her weight. He had done nothing to deserve this—had known nothing of gods, races, or ancient grudges.
And yet, here he was.
Her knee pressed into the floor beside his ribs as her hand shot forward, fingers curling violently into the front of his shirt. The fabric tightened in her grip as she hauled him closer, collapsing the last fragile space between them.
He FLINCHED.
Her voice dropped, no longer playful, no longer human.
"LISTEN CAREFULLY."
The command was not loud—but it was absolute. It reverberated with the authority of something that had waited millennia to be heard.
Inside her chest, a steady, deliberate THUMP echoed. Whether it was the heart of the girl or the ancient spirit wearing her skin no longer mattered. The vow that followed was forged not from impulse, but from three thousand years of restrained fury.
"THIS TIME, NO MATTER WHAT…"
Her eyes burned.
"…I'M GOING TO WIN."
The boy beneath her swallowed, frozen between terror and disbelief. His world had once been defined by textbooks, homework, and quiet routines. Geometry formulas. Exam dates. Predictable rules.
Those rules had just been annihilated.
Because he was not merely a victim.
He was not merely an audience.
The Cat had chosen him.
Not as a competitor.
But as something far worse.
…the boy had been forced into BEING THE REFEREE FOR THIS RACE.
A living rulebook.
A human anchor.
The one figure who could legitimize the Cat's rebellion against heaven itself.
She would not simply participate in God's Race.
She would control it.
She would drag the DOG (11TH PLACE), the SHEEP (8TH PLACE), and the MONKEY (9TH PLACE) down from their divine perches and force them into the mud of the mortal realm—where power bent differently, where immortality offered no guarantee of victory.
The board was reset.
The stage was no longer the clouds of heaven or the halls of gods.
It was the urban jungle—crowded, chaotic, and unforgiving.
And within it, a 3,000-year-old Cat prepared to rewrite the cruel fate that had defined her existence.