Rina Night

WELCOME TO RINNERD'S RUNS!

Im Rina Night, an author and artist creating an original fantasy about cats.

I love warrior cats, dark fantasy, bubble tea, and black humor.

ABOUT THE STORY

This is the journey of a cat-hired killer, from a small and weak kitten under the tyranny of his father, to a respected member of the Gang and the founder of his own group of hired killers.

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Annotation:

Anxiety, hunger, blood. Exhausting training, scandals, pressure. This was the childhood of a kitten named Rinnerd.

His father did not accept refusal or disobedience.

City, darkness, gang. Escape from his own family, the trap of a white stranger, and the mystery of the Sinist incident. The kitten had heard that he was involved in a failed assassination attempt on the leader of a local gang, but without any specifics; his mother was certainly aware of this, but it wasn't until he found himself in the midst of the events that he was able to uncover the details. Their city was already filled with secrets, but half of them seemed to belong to an ominous cat gang... And to Sinist.

PROLOGUE

Dawn was only just beginning to break over the spring forest. In the predawn half-light, the outskirts of the city looked utterly deserted—empty, almost lifeless. Now and again a light breeze wandered and skipped across the treetops, scarcely reaching the depths below; and whenever it died away, the forest seemed not to live at all. It simply stood there, as if carved from stone. Only the sleepy murmur of distant brooks, and the calls and cheerful, easy chatter of morning birds, reminded anyone that this forest had a soul of its own: an inward peace it lent to the creatures around it, a particular spirit and ghost of kinship, of nature, freshness, and distance from all the bustle of the city.

Here stood a small stone box of a place: a little abandoned one-story house with a brick stair, wide empty holes where windows should have been, and unfinished walls on its flat roof, all of it a reminder that a second floor had once been intended. Everything around it had long since been swallowed by tall grass, by odd dry stalks—some as high as a human, like reeds—and beside the house lay boards of every sort: some broken and half-rotten, others hanging down from the roof.

Then, in the shade of the grass, a white feline silhouette flashed by. Eyes a piercing blue, the thin, slippery little tom darted between two boards propped one against the other by the entrance and slipped inside the structure, greeting with a smirk the cats gathered there—cats just like him: dirty, lean, and, above all, wild to the marrow.

“Glitch, your lordship! I bring news,” he said with the thinnest edge of irony, turning his gaze toward a cat whose whole body was patched in untidy black and white.

“Mm… News?” the patched tom asked, interest flickering in his eyes. He seemed to have let the irony pass straight by. “And what kind of news?”

“I saw, I think… Oh, yes. I saw him. I definitely saw Sin!” the blue-eyed cat announced with sarcastic delight, smiling slyly.

Glitch tensed at once, his eyes narrowing. He always tried not to show the full force of his feelings—or to hide them altogether—but here his unease was plain. His tail tucked in slightly, his whiskers twitched, and the newcomer read every detail as if he were a scanner.

“Then why didn’t you bring him to us? Was I unclear? You see Sin, you stun him and run back here before he wakes up!”

“Yes, yes, of course I remember! How long have we been looking for him now… But please understand, he was far away from me. And he’s such a nimble one—you know that! I wouldn’t have reached him unnoticed, let alone stunned him. There would have been a fight, your lordship. I might have been hurt—possibly badly—and none of us needs that. If your best scout gets injured, then who, forgive me, is going to keep watch?”

“Ah-a… All right, all right.” Glitch scratched thoughtfully behind one ear with a paw, looking away. His deepened gaze held both frustration and a faint irritation. “Fine. This time, the chances of catching him really were slim… if everything happened the way you say it did.”

“Of course it did, of course!” the white tom hurried to justify himself. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Glitch!”

“Mm-hm…”

Judging by his tone, the black-and-white tom seemed ready to add something else, but one of the cats sitting on the house’s concrete floor cut him off. Until then they had simply been scattered across the space of this so-called camp, murmuring quietly with their friends, until they heard the white sneak’s words.

“He wouldn’t lie, sure!” came the mocking remark. “And you’d never slander anyone else and beg Glitch to throw them out of the gang either, of course…”

“Enough!” Glitch suddenly roared, baring his teeth. “I told you clearly: do not bring up that incident! I have never approved—and never will approve—of our gang picking at old wounds!”

“Forgive me, but isn’t that exactly what we’re doing right now?” the speaker snorted. “Hunting the same cat for months just to settle a score—isn’t that ‘picking at old wounds’?”

Glitch faltered, fell silent, and breathed out heavily as he gathered his thoughts, staring at the floor. Then he lifted his head again with the same majestic displeasure as before.

“We can take revenge on someone who wronged us—that is normal. Or we can despise one of our own for his past. Those are different things, Tao!” The black-and-white tom straightened, leaving a threatening pause that no one dared break. “Our goal is to find that scoundrel… not to tear ourselves apart!”

“Hmph. And here I thought despising Blitz was normal!” laughed the one they had called Tao.

“Honestly, Glitch, think about it!” put in the cat sitting beside Tao, who looked exactly like him except broader and more muscular. “That little vermin talked you into expelling one of our own—isn’t that tearing ourselves apart?”

“Litost doesn’t count,” the white tom snorted sarcastically, his muzzle twisting into a dark smile.

Despite the sheer insolence of the comment, Tao let out a deep, booming laugh, while his larger twin frowned and bared his teeth. A growl could be heard catching in his throat when he met Glitch’s gaze. Glitch, too, gave a barely audible snort at the joke, but his eyes remained grim. And that kind of grimness promised nothing good.

“Bli-i-itz…” he began, low and slow and threatening. “How many times have I told you that while I rule here, everyone in this gang is equal?”

“What did I say wrong?” Blitz blinked innocently. He kept fooling around, kept playing the clown only to hide the hurt. And he was masterful at hiding emotion—even the hurts that had not stopped aching since the moment he joined the gang.