Miho the Killer
Chapter 69: Idle Days

Chapter 69: Idle Days

Miho has been ’recovering’ well.

Even only after a few days since we made Shin’s place our home, she could already throw the daggers from one end of the room to the bull’s eye on the dart board. If that wasn’t already an impressive feat, she improved her targeting by throwing the daggers from different positions and angles. Once that task seemed like a child’s play to a child-like Miho, she stopped playing with the dartboard and started to work with the Wooden Man that she called Woodie.

Woodie had a tough life.

He was beaten relentlessly day and night by Miho, and to add to his misery Miho at one point started throwing knives at him too. She targeted him from various angles and positions Knives flew and stuck to him from top of her bunker bed, from below the desk, through the gaps of a half-open door.

Whatever we did, Miho had a dozen knives laid out next to her.

We’d be sitting on the floor playing Uno, Go-Stop, Monopoly, or whatever, and she’d at random points pick a knife and fling it at Woodie. It invariably landed on him and its myriads of wooden arms were of no use.

Every time I asked her why she was doing all this ’training’, she told me that there were three reasons. The first reason was so that she could protect me from the ’bad woman in a suit’ - a faceless villainess that Miho was sure would come for us eventually. The second reason was that it was because Shin told her to train.

And the third reason was that it was because Shin told her to train.

As the kitten was slowly transforming into the tigress she once was day by day, I stayed with her. Her movement was so graceful, yet her punches and kicks were vicious. Sometimes she’d get so worked up fighting Woodie that she’d actually get angry at him, and all the grace in her movement would disappear and she’d beat him relentlessly in raw anger. Normally I sat and watched in fascination, but once she started to headbutt and bite Woodie it was usually time for me to stop her and pull her back, let her lay on my lap pillow as I calmed her down by stroking her head, turning her roar into a growl, and growl into purr, and purr into a gentlest snore as she fell asleep.

Shin had a lot of books in his house and I discovered he was an avid reader, especially classic literature. He seemed particularly fond of Dostoyevsky, ironically citing Crime and Punishment as one of his all-time favorite books.

For me personally, I had no particular ’favorite author’ as such, but I did enjoy reading the large collection of poetry books the old man had. Between her training, or sometimes even during her training, Miho often asked me to read them out loud for her, which often made for a bizarre scene of Miho beating up Woodie to the rhythm of Shakespearean sonnets.

Funnily enough, there were also a lot of music scores in the house, which Shin apparently bought with high hopes of hearing Miho play them someday - ’but the brat never even looked at them,’ he grunted.

While most of them were too hard to play, even for me, he had a good sense to buy some that were very useful for beginners, my personal favorite Czerny scores and Hanon exercises proving to be particularly well suited for Miho to practice.

She improved very quickly, especially with Hanon. Her musicality had a lot to be refined, but she had a raw talent for dexterity that would make any aspiring musician jealous. Although I, despite being a little dusty, was still far ahead of her, when it came to something like lower-level Hanon exercises she could burn through them faster than I ever could.

I heard Shin was a good cook but he never cooked. I would have protested and asked him to take up some cooking duties, but Miho always praised me for my cooking and it has become one of my great joys every day to prepare a meal for her and watch her enjoy it.

Shin was mostly away during the day time saying he had ’work to do’, so I never really asked him what he was really up to. It wouldn’t have done me any good to know and certainly wouldn’t have given me the peace of mind that I wanted to have and enjoy while these mundane days lasted.

Thankfully, I was allowed to ’leave’ the house if accompanied by Miho, but the area was limited to the large grass field behind the house. I was quite surprised when I left the house for the first time though. While inside the house felt like a nice, big, and well-decorated mansion with a good blend of modern and antique styles, from the outside it looked like a factory or a warehouse with bland colored steel panels for walls and the roof.

Every time we went out Miho warned me repeatedly to NEVER EVER NEVER NEVER NEVER touch the fences as I’d die from electric shock. I trusted her enough to believe that so I stayed away.

The grass field wasn’t very well kept and there were lots of weeds growing. I offered to mow the lawn and do some gardening to Shin, but he rejected it by saying having a nice and well-kept garden in a ’factory’ lot would look suspicious as hell when seen from above.

Nevertheless, Miho and I had a good time playing there. I was never good at sports but I did play some softball in elementary school, so I was at least a little better than the standard ’you throw like a girl’ level. Miho particularly liked playing catch with a baseball. While she always threw the ball back to me in a way that was easiest for me to catch, she wanted me to throw the balls at least a few meters away from her at all times so she could do all those fancy diving catches. In a way, it felt like this was also some form of ’training’ for her, but getting some exercise was a welcome break away from the mostly indoor life I was forced to live.

The ’big job’ that we had to do eventually was always in the back of my mind and I dreaded the day that Miho would need to be thrust into action again - and she seemed to be getting more and more ready for it each day -, but I must say these idle days I’ve been spending with Miho felt like the short but wonderful time we lived together back in my flat. Despite the (very luxurious) prison-like environment we were forced to live in, I wished that these days would last forever.

But of course,

It was never meant to be.

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