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After we spent the first night in a house of a very hospitable family that Mariana buried in some forest halfway across the world, she transported us both to a low level zone. I never was one to find enjoyment in grinding, but considering the damn things dropped money, I saw it as a side hustle. I mean, based on the experience of the previous day, my main job was tailing —or, rather, witnessing— Mariana on her accidentally-omnicidal journeys. She did not kill people because she wanted to, but rather because they were too weak for the energy and head-butts of a super-powered Golden Retriever.
In this occasion, however, in the middle of an endless clover field, she watched over me as I speared bunnies to death. We had gotten my equipment the previous day, some hours after the stabbing, some hours before the murder.
The mobs were cute, small and peaceful, and I derived no pleasure from the vile act of ending their lives. Mariana ate a body or two, disregarding the fact we were unaware about the interaction of healing spells and potions with prion diseases.
It was hard to impale the big ones, and it caused me real anguish when I had to do it with the small ones. Mariana even commented on it after the first level one bunny died.
“An elegy for it, the doubly stabbed, in that it got stabbed so smol,” she recited.
“I wonder how the fuck do you keep parodying Poe’s poems if dogs can’t read.”
“Trust the spears in the buns —silver buns! Such a world of leveling their agony foretells.”
I gave up trying to reason with her. I mean, not at that precise moment, but about three days after her arrival at home—back in NY—so finding myself ready for another attempt surprised me.
But, oh Lord, there were so many rabbits hungry for the soft clover. A hundred walking XP bags tainted with guilt and entrails. White dots sprinkled over a field of green, and my cursed duty to turn them crimson. There was no urgency to level up, but neither was there any guarantee that we would return to Earth, and I could not depend on Mariana forever. An overpowered and gifted Golden retriever was still a canine. I had probably a decade or so left with Mariana by my side —unless I learnt necromancy— so I had to get used to fending for myself in this wild, newfound land.
My humanity sublimated another little bit each time the spear penetrated in the tender flesh of the beautiful lagomorphs. I will never forget their cries and squeaks as they felt life drip from their innards. Mariana was entertained by them, using one of the bodies as a ragdoll, shaking it violently. She was happy playing like that. She was even cute.
After I killed the umpteenth rabbit, the ground started to shake, as if we were deserving of the wrath of the god of Chileans. Seeing nothing could crush me from above, I simply lowered myself to the ground with utmost care.
“Ow, the ground is scared,” said Mariana, not letting the corpse go.
“No, you polished-brain, this is an earthquake,”
“What does it imply?”
“The ground shakes because of internal movements of the earth.”
“Because it is scared?”
I decided the conversation, like my sex life, was not going anywhere, so I closed my mouth and waited.
Then a giant, rickety hand came out of the dirt, a few meters away from us. That kind of explained the tremors.
“Oh, it implies a boss fight! I hope it is a squirrel. A big squirrel.”
“I hope it comes with fireworks.”
Mariana threw a glare full of fear towards my general direction. That word was vile, the very concept was unholy.
We patiently waited for the zombie/boss/whatever to keep emerging. It was taking its time, and, to be honest, I was ready for another trauma. Hunting anything with murderous intent that attacked me had to be better than massacring bunnies.
Eventually another hand came out, and it held a letter, scribbled with gibberish. A daunted office worker —just, you know, giant— followed, disembarrassing himself from the dirt.
The fastest thing in a ten kilometer radius was not my heart, but Mariana’s tail.
“It looks friendly. Do you think we can play catch with the dead bunnies?” she asked, with genuine interest on the subject. No matter how high her intelligence stat, she was a Golden Retriever to the core.
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The man coughed a bit, and raised a hand, introducing two fingers inside his mouth. Then something white, something fluffy, came out: he had orally birthed a rabbit like it was nobody’s business. He stared at the small rabbit on his hand, and caressed the soft head of the animal with his index finger.
“Andara, I am sorry for it is here, Andara, and I can’t kill it!” he howled with soul-piercing anguish.
I groaned. It was definitely Fantasy LATAM.
“Aggro it, aggro it, aggro it!” chanted Mariana.
“You even know what this guy represents? I must wait till the last second. If I interfere before he spits the eleventh bunny, the fight will be longer.”
“How can you possibly know that, Walter?”
“Call it a hunch. I will just dodge until then.”
“You irredeemable virgin gam… oh, right, you are the gamer. Silly me. I almost forgot I had to beg you to feed me. Silly, silly me.”
“Andara, your books, your pictures, an asteroidea, Andara!” cried the giant. Then he flung the bunny towards me.
Focus, Walter. This world was just like a videogame, so it meant only one fucking thing.
I closed my eyes and rolled towards the bunny a fraction of a second before the impact.
“We have invulnerability frames!” I said cheerfully, as the bunny had passed through me as if either of us were a ghost.
“We have what?” asked the level four hundred battlemage-clerk-fighter-specialist-[…]-dog.
“You are invincible for a few moments while you roll. Nothing can touch you.”
“That explains why that mud was not sticking like usual,” she said, her eyes thin lines, like she had just heard of her worst enemy.
The man hurled another rabbit at me while the first one nibbled peacefully on the clovers. This one was black. I was hoping we either were subject to a light profanity filter or that Mariana had grown some common sense.
More excited than she should have as she murdered my hopes and dreams, Mariana expressed a concoction of the word “bunny” and a racial slur. It technically was not racism because she was another species and all, but, still, it made me uncomfortable. It also led to the unfortunate discovery that her comments were not able to be dodged.
The man kept throwing small bunnies at me. With the velocity they picked up, I was sure to get beaten to a pulp by a couple of impacts. Each projectile was faster than the previous, harder to dodge by just facing it, and, as there was no need to do that, I started rolling to the sides, just to be safe.
When he threw the tenth, I was close enough to lunge and poke him in the leg with my weapon. If my suspicions were right, the boss was about to be unable to stand it when he amped it up to eleven.
“You got a hit on it! Another, uhhh… what comes about three hundred numbers after one?” said Mariana, who watched me from afar. Even with maxed out intelligence and wisdom, her nature was liable to slip right through the seams. It was befuddling that she managed to consistently finish sentences in a coherent way.
The eleventh bunny was born, and he could not stop staring at it, terrified, as it was a death sentence. He was not throwing it like the others. Neither was he going to.
“Man, the people cleaning Suipacha are going to hate this.”
I ran away as fast as I could towards Mariana. That is, away from the giant.
“What’s a Suipacha?”
“A street in Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, where, according to a man named Julio, stands the apartment of a young lady that went to Paris.”
“Oh, I thought she lived in Pehuajó.”
“I am not talking about Manuelita the tortoise.”
And we kept on talking about things of lost Argentina. Mariana had been born in New York, and routinely heard me complain about the differences between it and my home country. I mean, come on, the Americans need a license to have a clothesline on that god forsaken city! Back in Argentina almost everyone has theirs, and you can see them on the yards or terraces of the humble houses who nest among the brown dirt streets and the haunting, terrifying reverberation of motorbikes in the distance. Ah, how I miss being mugged in my mother tongue, in my land. Down there, crime is more artistic. In New York I felt every thief was the same…
But I digress.
As I told my dog about the theoretical yet unproven differences between the two dominant parties in Argentinian politics, the man kept staring at the bunny, consumed by a fright so total, a terror so final that it was almost comical. He was paralyzed as the small animal curled in his hand.
“Andara, no, they are eleven! They are eleven, and that means twelve, which in turn is thirteen!” he said, as another earthquake came forth and a chasm filled with the light of a new day began to open before him. He called for all the bunnies, who, already grown and ugly, jumped in the arms of their god, their father.
And then he took the plunge, probably expecting that nobody at the deep end of that chasm (Not even one of the cursed creatures that dwell deep within) would notice the fact that there were, besides the notorious and alarming stain of blood and torn flesh, bunny related drops.
Long story short, the single hit I landed on him earned me the kill credit. I got a ton of experience, ten whole levels, propelling me to the 20’s and forcing me to choose a class.
“Choose foodmancer! Or steakmaster! Or Empanada priest!”
I genuinely considered the latter. Healing people by the power of the knife cut meat in the Salteñas. Then I firmly grasped my common sense, that at each second tried to escape from my reach.
“Something more traditional could work. Any suggestions?”
“Tortilla arcanist?”
“Something not food related, Mariana.”
“Squeaky toy necromancer.”
Her bitch brain was clearly unable to think of anything not related as my role as her food-and-entertainment-dispenser (see also: owner).
“Necromancer is a good idea, I could raise an army of bunnies, use them to take over some small elven village, kill all the men, take the women and… well… you know how it goes,” I said. Perhaps I did not mean it. Sure, if the elves were assholes, I would have no problems with faux-videogame genocide. If they were good, I would just use my natural charms to seduce some ladies.
“Bury them in the yard!” she said, like it was the obvious answer.
“Close enough, Mariana. Close enough. Necromancer it is.”
As soon as I picked, I felt myself getting way wiser. Was that the worst mistake of my life so far? Effectively. Big enough of a fuck up to recognize it as such.
I tried to cast my new spell, reanimate, on my serotonin-producing neurons. Sadly, it did not work.
I settled for reanimating the rabbit that was nearest to remaining a whole functional animal and tailed Mariana to the closest place resembling civilization.