The aftermath of the prom night approached us and I felt the soft hairs of Mariana’s tail entangle in my fingers. The belts were talking about the current state of the comic industry.

“They are selling less because Superman hasn’t killed anyone with super farts.”

“No, it’s actually because Spiderman lacks chelicerae. Today fans are more educated and they cannot stand arachnids being represented by unchelicerated individuals.”

The mound of unpregnancies approached. He was mumbling something that at first seemed to be a prayer, but then I recognized as Nino Bravo’s biggest hits, a known cognitohazard capable of eliciting collaboration and feelings of nostalgia in any descendant of Spaniards whom had met their grandma.

Before I knew it, my lips were whistling “Mi Tierra”. I had been successfully infected.

“For a man covered in abortions and miscarriages, you have a beautiful voice.”

“Mom used to say the same thing, before I murdered her.”

“So Kinslayer is not just an edgy name?” said my still-offended sword.

“What did she do? Did she abuse you?”

“She disconnected my pc during my promotion to gold.”

That’s when I knew we weren’t dealing with a human being, but a League of Legends player. I had never killed a LoL player. Was it moral? Was it even illegal?

“So, you have come to 1v1 me?”

He nodded. The fetuses nodded too.

“Are you a necromancer too?”

“Proud Yorick main, indeed,” he said, as if it was the perfectly normal answer to my question. No earthling on Planet seemed to be a good, well balanced person. The ones who had been were probably all dead because of people like the ones I did come across.

He swung his umbilical whip to a side and a stall just blew up. It made no sense, but it blew up. I hit a nearby counter with the tip of Mariana’s nose, and it evaporated in a cloud of brown dust.

“Your Damage Against Furniture stat is smaller than ours,” I boasted.

“Get out of here with your male antics!” said the Aye-aye of a woman as she hit my head with a flowerpot that soon became an ex-flowerpot.

“But…” I blurted as I swooped a jasmine from my shoulder.

“No buts, plenty of empty streets and undesirable people neighborhoods to destroy in the city, shoo.”

“Yes, Mom,” I and Kinslayer said in unison.

I went up to the dude and we walked side by side. He didn’t smell as bad as I would have expected. And, for the most part, the man didn’t talk, just mumbled the lyrics of “Esa será mi casa.”

Exiting the market without a teleport spell was no easy task: it sprawled in all directions, and any direction you walked to presented the risk of leading you back to your starting point due to the city’s layout being designed by what I will reluctantly call creative people. They had hired the kind of architects and engineers that could build a totally stable reverse pyramid, but only if tasked with designing a semi-functional toaster.

“So, uhm, did you ever reach gold?”

“Yes, a few hours later, just before dad came back from work, discovered mom’s body in my room and punched me to death,” he answered, in a tone only appropriate for small talk.

“Wish real life had wards, huh?”

“Preach it, brother. I think we must turn to the right here.”

We kept on wandering through the vile lattice of streets and stalls during, at least, half an hour. My arm was getting tired of carrying Mariana unsheathed, but I could not stash her away. They are backstabbing things, League players. Lowering my guard would mean certain death.

Finally, at the far end of a street, we saw the gates of the city. Kinslayer got on all fours and raced for it like he was the fucking Warwick rework. As he went, he sang “Libre” with the voice of a mating hyena that had smoked his life away for three decades on end.

Past the pristine white walls, past the gates composed of black iron bars, a plain with tall grasses and abundant shrubs awaited at each side of the winding road. Compared to that pure and divine nature, to the fresh smell of cut grass and the song of the grasshoppers, Kinslayer was a sore sight.

“Good luck, have fun!” he shouted from several dozens of meters away.

“Callao Argentino qlo conchetumare,” I honored the ancient traditions of Latin America South server.

“Ah, you make me feel right at home!” he said, and whipped the earth. The fetuses and embryos began crawling down from his body, and my belts mirrored them.

“Why belts? You could use undead rats, ferrets, or, you know, something with teeth!”

“Why human fetuses? They have no teeth.”

“Doesn’t the name clue you in? My eponym unique skill.”

I gestured for a time out, and he and his army stopped advancing towards us.

“People have unique skills?”

“Ehm… yes? They are easy to discover after you pick a class.” he sat down on a rock to the side of the road and started gesturing with his hands to aid the explanation, “They are, like, the God-given cheat for isekai protagonists. They have to do with who we were and how we behaved in life. Mine is Kinslayer, and basically makes me a battle necromancer as long as the zombies are related to me by blood. I discovered it when I killed my pregnant sex slave and, out of pure curiosity, reanimated the baby.”

“I thought you were just edgy.”

He stood and shred off the rest of his grotesque suit, revealing a frail and slim man in boxers. He had to be in his 20’s, but the male balding pattern had already taken away most of his hair, and, judging by the movement of his thorax, one would think the mere act of remaining alive presented a challenge to him.

“Nah, impregnating sex slaves and causing them to abort is a livin’ for me, mate. I don’t like it, but you know how it goes. The highway requires efforts I am not willing to make.”

Some of you may be thinking: “why isn’t Walter disgusted by this narcissistic murderer, shocked by his deeds?” and, to be fair, I wasn’t beyond a slight distress and a bit of repulsion. By that point, however, I had stopped caring about the moral implications of basically everything.

The slimy unborn undead —from here onwards, unstillborns— marched in lines. My belts, unorganized, awaited like a den of lazy snakes.

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“One Mississippi, two Mississippis…” counted a white one.

The unstillborns rushed over us like a swarm of low-middle class citizens during Black Friday. They overcame the few belts willing to fight, and trampled the ones who were still not awake enough to react.

A slash, and Mariana’s face became a stem cell bank. She promptly licked the remains of fetus off her snout.

“Delicious.”

“Mariana, please, behave like a sword should.”

“Swoosh,” she said.

“That’s better. I guess.”

Kinslayer snickered while my belts struggled to stand a fight against literal sub-babies. The fetuses were strong, unnaturally so, and I could feel the strain their holds and hits placed on my zombies.

“You are not a battle necromancer, are you?”

“Why would I double-dip when I can double-class? I am a swarmer!”

Great, the strength of his undead increased with numbers. And, boy, he had left several kindergartens out of business.

I started mowing more unstillborns down with Mariana, swinging her in wide arcs to take out multiple individuals with each slash.

“Fiuumm, fooosh, swoong,” she said with each movement.

“Could you shut your doggo-sword up? I am trying to decide what I will make my next victim cosplay as while we fuck. Your wholesome sfx have no place here,” he protested.

“Why are you like this?”

“Evil?” he asked, rejoicing in the sound of his own voice.

“No, I can stand evil, even cartoonesque evil like yours. No, I mean, a redditor.”

His smirk crumbled down. A small victory for this necromancer.

“You are no fun. Children, make dad happy.”

The half-formed heads of the unborn all turned towards me. The less developed ones wriggled about in my direction. Step by step, I carefully retreated, never showing my back to them, never stopping giving my belts the emotional support they needed to keep fighting.

“Do you think they will stop if I start singing?” asked a belt.

“Suicide-homicide is not the answer here, my brother in tannery.”

Mariana kept making sound effects.

“Wiush wiush wiush wiush,” she gave her stillness some style.

The realization that I was whispering “Noelia” almost takes me out of the moment. It seemed half the battle was resisting Nino Bravo’s Valencian allure.

Wind blew against me, and took the stench of rotting miscarriages into my nostrils. Mariana drooled like the water cycle depended on her saliva output. That made me wonder how much water did Mariana consume when I wasn’t looking, as she seemed to have endless reserves of pee and drool.

And these were not things to wonder in the middle of a life or death situation. The babies were piling on top of each other, giving shape to a blob of pulsing, ill looking flesh. It wasn’t tinted with the blood red of muscle, as many of the tissues were still transparent.

Savage swipes of Mariana kept the thing at bay, making small arms and heads fly in every direction when the blade made contact with the mass.

Then, I stopped, letting the aberration advance over us. I had been so stupid.

I let Mariana go, and the army of undead babies was solved as she jumped over them and feasted on human flesh.

We both recalled our surviving zombies. My belts were covered in smelly fluids, but, as you are aware, reader, I was never picky about my fashion.

He raised his whip in the air meanwhile Mariana licked his thigh, still consuming part of his army.

With exaggerated brutality the man flogged Mariana with the umbilical cords, taking away one percent of her health after three terrible spankings.

She didn’t care.

“I… I should have foreseen this; you know? Fighting against a god-like dog while covered in meat, things… could go wrong.”

“You know what they say: Replays have no fog of war.”

I could not imagine the pain of being defeated by a Golden Retriever and her tender tongue. Killed, yes, of course. But defeated? It presented an absolutely dishonorable fate.

“Shiup, shiup, schlop,” said Mariana.

“Let’s do this: you join the escapists or at least leave Mateo’s side and I leave you alone, yeah?” he said, trying to push the beast away from his body.

“I understand your need for escapism, I really do. You thoroughly fucked up your life back on Earth. But our land calls for their sons. The fields of Buenos Aires, the waterfalls of Iguazú, the rocky landscapes of the Patagonia and the glaciers that shaped them. Tango, chacarera and cuarteto—”

“The corrupt politicians, the violent crime, the shitty internet. The Chileans,” he interrupted me, the little bitch.

“You need a bit of hell in each and every heaven.”

“Stop idolizing our homeland. It’s a shithole,” he spouted the most Argentinian of sentiments.

“It is. However, doesn’t every man love his own ass?”

He remained silent as he scratched his scalp and wondered, probably, how in the seven hells had the conversation come to this. What decisions he had taken that had led to this exact, nightmarish exchange.

“Find me a tree, I want to hang myself so I don’t have to listen to you anymore. “

“Roger!” Mariana shoot off, leaving me to my fate while she fetched the enemy a tree. A monkey paw would have let me down less often than her.

“What just happened?”

“My sword deserted,” I commented, accepting my destiny.

He lashed the ground with the umbilical cords as his armor homogenized. “How the tables have, like your bitch, turned.”

Mariana had left me with a severe stat disadvantage. There was no way I could attack him directly, or afford to take a hit from his whip.

His weapon was undead too, so It would not be an easy task to avoid it. I consulted my belts for battle plans.

“You dispel us and we rest in peace while you get lovingly murdered,” one of them contributed.

“I refuse to be productive until payment is provided,” complained another.

If Kinslayer’s babies where half as annoying, he had half my condolences.

He came with slow and sure step, and I retreated in a similar way, trying to keep a constant distance between us, never letting my guard down. I battled the urge to sing “Un beso y una flor.”

“Run, come on, I love the hunt.”

“You are faster. A beast, I’d say. And… No, but, not and. But there this problem about you,” I began casting my victory spell.

He stopped and crossed his arms. “Problem?”

“Yes, you see…” I started pacing from side to side “You still behave like the League of Legends addict you were. You are not using your full potential. Your unique skill would be greatly enhanced by raising an army of rapist sons, and why haven’t you done it? Because you don’t have control over your life.”

“Bullshit! I am in control!” he whipped the dirt.

My inner Red-pill guru smirked.

“No, a confident man, a man in control, would just chuckle to my suggestion and kill me without further ado.”

He raised the whip.

“But, if you do, you will not listen what I have to say, how to solve this issue you foster. You will keep being a prey of anguish, will keep crying at night.”

“I… I sometimes do cry,” he conceded, lowering both his weapon and his gaze.

“See? That is because you failed to take control of your life. Look at you, working for the Escapists, that probably despise you for your less than moral behavior. You are stuck in this life you don’t like, and the more you indulge in it, the more you sink. Like making a Riot account all over again. Like when you kept playing after a Support Lux tilted you to extremes you had forgot existed.”

“You are right. But some problems have no solution,” Kinslayer lamented.

He raised his whip, to which I reprimanded him. It mysteriously worked.

“Better this way. Listen, man, you cannot go on like this. It hurts, but you could be so much more. I am sure there are women out there that would love to be the concubines of a filicidal warlord. Imagine the power you could have if you didn’t have to go around buying disposable sex slaves…” I was saying this with a straight face, and, to this day, I don’t know how I managed.

“There is no way to attain that. I burned too many bridges. It’s time to die, Walter.”

His whip bolted to my ankle and grabbed it. As I described a gorgeous arc over Kinslayer’s head, I noticed, in the corner of my eye, a marvelous sequoia canopy against the horizon.

I hit the floor laughing, even if that didn’t make the impact less painful. My dear back would be sore for days, and the silhouette left in the dirt would remain there until the next plentiful rains.

That sole beating took about one third of my health away, and Kinslayer seemed to be not even trying.

“See, that anger, you have to redirect it. First, clean up your room, then, your life…” I began once more.

He slammed me against the floor once again. This time, I kissed the dirt.

“Shut up! No one can fix me!” he then lowered his tone, and talked to me with the respect he fucking owed to me. “This is what I deserve.”

“Yes, to be Gaslit by the Gallardo. It’s time to die, Kinslayer.”

He tensed the muscles of his arm, ready to slam me again, but then saw the growing shadow on the ground, looked up and let the whip go.

“Know I despise you,” were his last, tired words before the dozens of tons of wood buried him.

I scurried away while he tried, in vain, to lift the sequoia from over his bloody form. Mariana was resting over the trunk, panting like the excellent girl she was.

“I fetched the thing, why isn’t he happy?” she asked, looking at the bloody, crushed man, tilting her head. Even if unaware of it, Mariana was a cruel mistress. “Be happy!” She commanded.

His last surge of strength was used to speak, even with most of his body under the tree’s fat ass, “I am dying, bitch, please remain silent.”

Kinslayer coughed a repulsive blob of blood and phlegm. Among the things that covered him, that was the least gross of them all.

“Walter, he is not happy!”

“He is dying, Mariana. Going from man to corpse.”

She licked her nose, “Yummy.”

“Walter?” he said, his eyes red from the broken blood vessels.

“Yes?”

He pronounced his last words: “GG EZ.”

“A casa petón,” I responded automatically.

The wind blew. The tail wagged. The blood and amniotic fluid drained among the grasses.

The wind blew, and it carried the market’s scents and hustle. The tail wagged, happily. The blood and amniotic fluid escaped from the monster that was my golden retriever, seeking shelter underground. The locals would drink the life of Kinslayer unknowingly. It would give their crops sustain, too. Gamer fuel, in the purest sense of the expression.