A Displaced Samurai

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

The Antithesis, plant-based monsters that will devour everyone in their way, have been plaguing the galaxy for thousands of years. Twenty-five years ago they reached Earth. The Protectors are an interstellar alliance that opposes the Antithesis.

When the Antithesis attack her graduation party, Caitlin MacCallan is chosen by the Protectors to fight them. She will find more than just Antithesis to fight...

This is a crossover fanfic of Ravens Dagger's Stray Cat Strut and Aest Belequa's Halcyon Nightmares (old version).

Update October 2025: I just noticed Aest has renamed Halcyon Nightmares toMagical Girl Luciole.

Aest Belequa has started rewriting Halcyon Nightmares some time ago. The new version is titledThe Halcyon Systemand different enough that rewriting this story to match the new world building does not make sense.

I'd rather complete it based on the old lore (not anytime soon!) and then try my hand at an original.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Rabiator

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.4/ 5.0
Followers: 658
Views: 361,273

Reviews

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Community Reviews(6)

EleeyahRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Updated as of chapter 63.
I'm not familiar with Halcyon Nightmares, so I can't say what's from there, how accurate it is, etc. I am quite familiar with Stray Cat Strut however, and this piece has no inconsistencies, so far.
Style: I had no issues reading Displaced Samurai. Doesn't feel too dense, or too lose. The paragraphs are thematic. There's no confusion. The pacing is fine, but we haven't seen enough chapters to really say. There are times where dialogue feels a little stilted, but they're rare.
Grammar: Few issues - mostly just the occasional choice of words hinting at a foreign native languages. It shouldn't bother anyone, really.
Story: Caitlin becomes a samurai, and promptly loses direct access to samurai gear when she ends up in an alternate dimension. Instead of buying powerful items, she'll have to figure out how to make use of their blueprints, with the help of her support AI's tips and educational catalogs. I found it all pretty interesting and well written.
Character score: The main character is fairly...dry. She's certainly not the emotional kind, and at times, it seems like she's too untouched by what's happening to her. But that is very consistent. In a way, she gets out of her own way and allows the plot to progress freely. Things happen fairly quickly and quite a lot of time gets covered. That probably wouldn't be so easily accomplished if Caitlin had to stop to work through her emotions regularly. But on the other hand, it does make it a bit difficult to connect. She's supposed to be quite curious and possibly nerdy about science stuff and engineering - and mostly that doesn't come through.
But that's just the main character. There are several others we get to meet, and they're different enough that it reinforces my sense of Caitlin just being herself.
KahunabobRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
So, I blame the author RavensDagger (Stray Cat Strut) for feeding my LitRPG addiction. They did a shout-out on their pages for this story and I got hooked. Think I spent about a day getting up to speed.
What do you get when you take a Cyberpunk LitRPG and toss the protagonist into another dimension that doesn't have Cyber Samurai, but Magical Girls for protectors? Well, this one, apparently.
The main character, Cait is fun. She isn't as Gung Ho / Cavalier as some other LitRPG characters out there, but she's no passive slouch either.
The twist or hook for this story is that Cait is a relatively new Samurai that got yeeted into a different dimension. Instead of fighting the plant based Antithesis of her home reality, she's fighting robots. And she's fighting them smartly. The way someone like Tony Stark, or Cyborg or any other fandom's super engineer would: analyze, adapt, overcome. And does so in a believable way in the setting.
If I could criticize anything, it'd probably be that I'd like more Cait character development. The story fast forwards here and there when there's really nothing to do but wait. But it'd be fun to show Cait doing some everyday stuff. Going to the mall. Maybe on a date, if she's interested in anyone. Hang out with friends etc. Round her and other characters out a bit.
MasterReeveRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I've been reading this ever since I was pointed at it by the author of another Stray Cat Strut spin-off. I've greatly enjoyed the ways this story differs from typical SCS spin-offs and from SCS itself.
I'm saddened to see it's gone on hiatus and truly hope that it comes off that status. If it never does, I just want the author to know that it's great so far, and I'm glad to have read what was written.
Thank you, Rabiator, for writing this!
EDIT: A new chapter! Yay!
HikinBearRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
I had read Halcyon Nightmares as a stand alone story without realizing it was a Fan Fiction of Stray Cat Strut. I honestly didn’t enjoy it that much; the writing was too Young Adult. I then devoured the actual Stray Cat Strut story and found it much more enjoyable. Looking for SCS Fan Fiction, I found this story and am glad I did.
While this story takes place in the Halcyon Nightmares universe, it doesn’t get involved much with the Magical Girl trope. Instead, the MG’s are just people who have some strange Tech and can do things the MC, Caitlin cannot.
The Main Character, Caitlin is a young women who becomes a Vanguard in the SCS universe just in time to be whisked away to the Halcyon universe. So she is cut off from support from the Protectors and has only her wits and her AI to rely on. Fortunately, her AI has thousands of Catalogs and Blueprints to create low and medium level technology that is still advanced for the world she’s now in.
This story is how Caitlin, starting with almost nothing, builds things to build things and becomes a power in her own right. I enjoyed the plucky MC as she learns to be something more.
The story isn’t perfect, but the writing is very good and I can forgive some issues.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed this and am patiently waiting for the next chapter.
MiertamRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
I found this by searching for Stray Cat Strut fan fic since I caught up with the main story. I just wanted to see what other people were doing in Raven's Universe.
This story balances right between being a copy of the original and an original stand alone story. It probably helps that I haven't read the magical girl story where most of this book takes place.
The writing is clean the action scenes are exciting without drifting into Mary Sue categories. My only quibble and it's a minor one, is that most of the time the MC wants to build anything she buys a new Catalog then buys the one blueprint out of it then never goes back to that well.
All in all a fun read I highly recommend this for anyone who likes Stray Cat Strut.
Ethenia VermillionRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
As most other reviewers I’m sadly not familiar with Halcyon.
Style: The writing is done in an easy to read manner, and information is broken down into manageable pieces. I think the only thing that bugs me, which is a personal pet piece of mine, is the usage of onomatopoeia. Personally I dislike them, but you mostly use them in an immersive manner. In a couple of chapters I did notice you filled up a lot of page spaces with repeated onomatopoeia, which did somewhat break immersion.
Grammar: Nothing to really point out, it’s grammatically sound with a minuscule amount of typos (fairly certain I read an ‘either’ but should have been ‘neither’), and to even stop them you usually have to pay attention.
Story: It’s an interesting mix of concepts that work together. The only thing of notice is that I don’t know where you’re going with the story, is she working on a way back to SCS? Is she working on taking over the business world through weapon manufacturing? Is she simply wanting to stay and R&D? It is early in the story, but I would hope for some clear direction before the chapter 50 mark.
Character: I think this is my only critique. I’m not going to mention side characters, as I feel there are issues with the main character that has to be fixed first. I don’t know anything about Caitlyn. I know her name, and that she has a bachelor’s degree in physics. Apart from that I feel she’s a bit two dimensional. She’s consistent within her current development, but I don’t know anything about her. Does she miss anyone from her world? Is she hot tempered? Is she relaxed? Does she have any hobbies? There are few defining features.
Overall it was a pleasant read, and I will absolutely be following the story as you develop it, it has potential, and lots of it, and I will be updating my review.