Sometimes, our friends ask questions that swamp us with doubt about the decisions we make in our daily life. Maybe a cunt (E.g. Walter Ignacio Gallardo) points out that you are slightly over your ideal weight. Other times, a well-meaning acquaintance can take notice of a mostly harmless detail that you have developed a complex about, and unknowingly points it out. A freckle, a mole, a little bald spot. Other times, they hold an accusatory tone as they ask, and you get defensive. That day, sitting against a dead tree, I was faced with the later as my hand slid through the soft scalp of my newest acquisition.
“Walter, I will ask again: why did you, that, in your own words, want to be a hero now, had a Cordobese succubus inside a thermos.” Fernando insisted, his finegrs tapping against his bicep.
“And you almost kill us all!” Cornelio added, useful as always. “Everyone not holding a Mariana got reduced to one meager health point!”
“I survived with twelve,” pointed out Florencia, always eager to help. Oh, how I loved her usefulness.
“Shut up flor, I like my life! I like thinking without a headache! I like your mouth,” and here he made a tiny pause, “shut, your mouth shut!”
“I wasn’t holding a Mariana,” pointed out Mariana.
Cornelio made a face, his lips curling upwards in disdain. “I consider you hold yourself hostage.”
“Yay, I hold myself hostage!”
“Walter, answer me,” insisted Fernando, who stood in front of me, casting a shadow over both my person and the burnt wooden column I was sitting against.
“I am a resourceful-trickster type of folklore creature. An elemental mage, except that instead of fire, air, water or earth, I wield surprise as my weapon.” I expounded, freely gesturing with my deft, delicate hands.
Fernando snorted and drowned a chuckle. “Now for real. “
“I found out they generate heat when exposed to holy water and since then I keep one on my person to warm the water for mate.”
Fernando joined his hands in concern. And his eyes darted tot eh girls, that were resting among the debris from the demolished café. Their countenances only reflected acceptance and weariness regarding my antics. “Good Lord, you are for real.”
“Nyau,” said the orange-haired Catgirl, mixing up the Spanish and Japanese onomatopoeia. I slapped her face so she would get on her back, legs and arms up and wiggling like a cat playing with a ball of yarn, and then I began scratching her belly. Mariana immediately jumped in the way, to which I slapped her, and… well, read the previous sequence of actions again. The end result was both of my dumb bitches getting their dose of belly rubbies from their merciful master.
“Walter, you cannot go around getting women like Pokémon. Do you intend to fuck them at least? I’d even respect you more if you say yes.”
“I am no dirty harem isekai protagonist, Fernando. At the first signal of romantic interest from my tools that I notice, they get exiled. Yeeted.”
“You consider us tools?” Florencia asked, not indignant enough for such a question.
“Yes, but not in the sense of something useful to be used. Rather, I consider you and a hammer would score the same in a written exam.”
“I am not that stupid!” the stupid, non-religious sister complained.
“Sabrina, with all undue respect: you are an engineer. If the exam is a written form of spelling bee, the hammer wins.”
Sabrina’s face became a monument to the utterance “He dares!”. Mariana’s face , instead, remained a reflection of the abiotic nature of the space within her skull.
“Rodrigo, ‘tas ahí?” Said Vera, still confused by the explosion, wandering around the rubble, burnt patches all over her skin, her Argentinian selection shirt unreduced to tatters —in fact, suspiciously intact— and the football ball under armpit shoulder untarnished. It was clear that the demiurge believed that the ball shouldn’t be stained.
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“Who’s Rodrigo?” Asked Florencia.
“He was a man who lived fast and joined the club of the twenty-seven after taking a wrong turn in life.” I said with a somber tone.
Fernando’s eyes became a thin line. “He died in a car accident.”
I nodded mindlessly. “Yes, that was the wrong turn.”
The one surviving catgirl purred, and I stopped scratching her belly, fearing my faithful companions would think wrong of me. “Any ideas on what to do with the catgirl?”
“Release her?” Cornelio proposed.
“Let us gut and eat her.” The totally not jealous half-elf and tank of the party added.
Mariana licked her nose, incorporated, sneezed, reverse sneezed, and then licked her nose again. “Sounds delicious.”
I mentally opened my inventory window and dragged the catgirl icon into an empty slot, making her puff seemingly out of existence.
Everyone’s mouths were agape. Mariana’s because she was panting, though.
“How did you do that?”
I decided to give an honest answer. “Misogyny/Misandry/misanthropy skill tree. My hatred for humanity grants me perks to spend on it.”
“There’s no such thing as that skill tree, liar,” Sabrina of the Wounded Ego accused me, to which, after making a face of disbelief and taking my hand to my chest like the drama queen I was always meant to be, I took a mental screenshot and pasted it into the party chat.
Fernando tapped his lips, got up, and wandered around the rubble a few seconds, kicking the remains of a cup and avoiding stepping into the mangled bodies of catgirls. “Walter, you always told everyone you had unlocked no unique skill. Or special skill, or trait, hell, it has no official name. Yet you have access to this… hate fueled skill tree.”
My eyes wandered over the group. “In my defense, I thought it was a normal part of the system.”
“What kind of game would give you power for hating on women?”
“Shut up pole. You know, in contrast to hole.”
Fernando sighed. “For hating on people…”
I winked. “Now that’s what I like to hear. So you say this skill tree I mostly ignored can provide me widely unknown advantages over our enemies?”
Fernando smiled, approached me, and tried to pat me on the shoulder, but I stepped out of his hand’s way. “Pretty much so, cunt. You even have most of it still locked, you point hoarder.”
I went pale and started fidgeting with my hands. “You mean there’s no guide? I need a guide for something so complex!” I exclaimed, realizing I had been hoarding points of misomancy for nothing (and therefore not giving the feature the slightest attention, like… most unfunny things in the gamified system).
“There’s a respec button right there in the image!” Cornelio argued.
“It costs money! Do you think I am millionaire?”
Cornelio clicked his tongue so Mariana would approach him. Then, she cupped her cheeks with his hands. “Mariana, how much money do you have?”
“I don’t know.” Mariana nearly whined. “Many zeroes.”
“Put it back into scientific notation, harebrain,” I commanded my powerful, flawless pet.
She, as expected, did my bidding.
“Only 3.1e1287 gold. 3.2e1287. 3.3e1287. 4e1286.”
“What did you spend a whole order of magnitude of money on?”
Mariana didn’t answer. I strode to her and held my hand out, as if she had something in her mouth. “Spit it out, Mariana. What did you spend that unimaginable amount of money on?”
Mariana engaged on evasive tactics, lowering her head, averting her gaze and glancing at me from that low position that says “I know I have done wrong and here I have the evidence. Don’t take it, don’t expose me! Mercy! Genji! Random Overwatch character!”
“Mariana, I cannot pry your mouth open to make words come out. So, please, tell me, or you go into the inventory…” Then I raised an eyebrow. There was something wrong with my statement. It was too logical. Too… unstupid. “I cannot?”
I lunged at Mariana and grabbed both her jaws. Slowly and with great difficulty, I started pulling them apart as she thrashed and whined a and pawed my arms so I would let her go.
Then, as a little opening appeared between the teeth, the words surged out like water from a spring. “ISpentThemInAPhotoOfASteakPleaseDon’tGroundMe.”
“What kind of steak?” I demanded, not letting her go.
“Non-fungible.”
I pulled back and rinsed my drool-drenched hands on my pants. Hands that then hid my face as I screamed in frustration. “My dog fell for NFTs!”
I couldn’t believe it. My girl, the only blonde I loved more than Darkness (from Konosuba fame). It felt like my only daughter had gotten pregnant by a drug dealer and dropped out of school. Except there was no drug dealer to force into a shotgun wedding.
Overcome by grief, I unlocked the blinking “It is what it is” perk on the misomancy tree, activated it and immediately stopped caring. “I can self-gaslight at will. This is how godhood must feel.”
I slapped Mariana to make her stop caviling.
“Did he just unlock some sort of psychopathy buff?” Sabrina whispered to Fernando.
“That would be so Walter,” the memorymancer confirmed.
“You can stop feeling things at will now, Walter?” Florencia came forward, concern on her face. “Even love?”
I activated the perk, and didn’t feel the cringe leaving my body. “Some things. I still love Mariana while I have it on. I wonder if I can feel hatred.”
“I want to get a Silver Labrador as a pet,” Cornelio said with a shit-eating smirk.
No, the perk was useless for making me stop caring about that. “No such thing under heaven!”
I tried to calm down and began pacing about the ruins of the café. Soon, we would part to keep on leveling. But, hey, maybe I could find something useful among the remains.