As soon as he could, the knight hit the dragon with the half-and-a-dozen wheel. Irene groaned of pain when the twisted empanadas buried between her flowers, taking away a bunch of her health.
“How the fuck is a turnover sharp?” Fernando asked the question I wasn’t brave enough to formulate.
“With the right recipe from grandma, everything is possible,” said our savior.
Irene squirmed and struggled to get away from the knight’s weapon.
I had taken to seaming through the dirt, searching for vegetable remains I could use.
Irene grabbed both sides of the helmet with her root-paws, and then rammed her head into it. Petals and sauce flew around the combatants, with the hit damaging both of them.
“I shall crumple you like a paper flower,” trash-talked Irene.
In a probably unrelated incident that included chicken, an extremity shaped like a bull head, an uncharacteristic lack of paper flowers and, just by mere coincidence, Irene’s soft cranium, she got stabbed below the ribs and her head smashed against the ground.
The knight took his wheel and used it to sever the dragon’s head off. That represented a mildly concerning blow for Irene and her HP pool.
The Dullahan cosplay fitted her like a charm as her sorry shape scurried away from the empaknight-a, who held her withering head between the bull’s horns.
A new head blossomed where the latter was, a twirl of buds that soon became full-fledged flowers.
“Just a parenchymal wound,” she vaunted. “Oh crap.”
You know what wheel shaped objects made of empanadas are good for? Playing Frisbee.
And you know at what Irene’s neck was very good at? Catching Frisbees.
“I saw that coming,” said the second severed head.
Irene regenerated another head, and started laughing between her teeth. “A head for a weapon? Such a bad trade you mad…”
Then, she sighed.
Fernando got out of Irene’s chest just in time to see the wheel of half-and-a-dozen returning, decapitating her a third time.
Irene’s head started singing the headless waltz.
“She totally lost it,” Fernando cried, staring at Irene’s head “Are you happy, Walter? My summon lost it!”
“Barely satisfied,” I answered with a smug smile.
“Psst, I just need your order to do the thing. If you do, we will kill the empanada man,” said Irene’s head before withering.
Given the enemy doing the thing was never good, I accelerated my search for useful materials. Twigs? Yes, please. Straw? Good for online arguments. Blades of grass? Come to daddy.
Florencia woke up and rubbed her eyes. I signaled one of the belts to knock her down again. She groaned after the orange impacted her. If you ask me, the girl got the message after the third fruit splatted against her face.
“Whose side are you on, you psycho?” Fernando admonished me.
“My side,” I chuckled
The Empaknight-a began his advance towards Irene, ready to give her a deserved quietus.
“You will do it, Fer. You are going to give me the order,” said the dragon, sap foaming at her mouth.
He snapped his fingers and jumped again into her abdomen.
“Sporopollenin,” he commanded.
The forget-me-nots gradually turned a sick yellow as Irene laughed like a maniac.
“Never to be forgotten! Not by men, not by history, not by the very strata below our feet!” she blared out.
Her features became sharper as her appearance turned into that of an amber lizard made of edges. Her skin seemed made of transparent rubber now, the flowers barely visibly under the varnish of sporopollenin.
“Holy fuck. Paleontologist!” I called the motherfucker out.
“Drop out, but yes.”
Meanwhile, Irene’s stare and breathing resembled that of an infant that confused milk and liquid cocaine. I didn’t want to imagine how claustrophobic I would have felt if I had to take Fernando’s place.
The knight raised his bull-headed hand. Sauce flowed in spirals through the air, concentrating on the bull’s snout, shining like the grease was a light source by itself.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“Be punished by the wrath of a thousand deep-fried on a street-stand ones, enemy of cholesterol!”
He went after Irene’s chest with his grease-enhanced horns, but before the empaknight could make contact the horns found the harsh grasp of Irene’s paws.
She laughed, laughed as her root-claws dug into the castle bricks, laughed while the crust cracked and the countenance of the knight contorted into that of a man that is seeing death to the face, laughed as I made a terrible joke about stamens, laughed as Florencia recovered and threw the spade as if it were a knife, laughed as the spade buried in her shoulder and took a sliver of her HP, laughed as I thought about making a terrible paragraph with a badly-constructed lone sentence and some parallel structure.
“Impossible, nobody can resist my street fried empanada punch.” The knight’s body shuddered, and his voice wavered.
“This may come as a surprise to you, but I am vegan,” sneered Irene, who proceeded to bite a chunk off the knight’s helmet.
The knight hit her with the wheel and his mighty weapon shattered from the impact.
“Sacrilege. Sacrilege!” he sputtered, and then jumped back to get away from the dragon.
“My priest, allow me to…” he pleaded to the Empanada Priest, that was snoring like the fight was not his business. “I’ll interpret this as permission being granted.”
I swore to myself that if he went through a transformation sequence, I’d jump from the parapets, into the pit full of pit-pits.
Arms outstretched wide, the empaknight-a started soaring. His ingredients shone with the strength of the sun, and the horns of the bull grew back, thicker, with a new golden hue worthy of the guitar riffs that were emanating from the dough itself.
“No, no, no—” I pleaded to the very fabric of reality.
The knight started spinning slowly as his shape became undone, with his muscles detaching from his arms and flowing to form a mane around the bull head.
I peeped out the parapets. It was a long fall into a pit full of bloodthirsty dogs and Mariana.
Glancing back at the rearranging mass of shining turnovers that had its own soundtrack with Japanese lyrics, I convinced myself that jumping into a sure death had become a not-so-negative prospect.
Irene lunged at the Empaknight, her claws aiming for the bell pepper. A sudden burst of light and freshly oven-cooked dough scent surged from the core of the aberration and destabilized Irene’s flight, making her crash on the tulips. Matu’s tulips.
I turned towards the half-elf, who was searching around for some other tool to throw.
“Florencia, how dear does your dad hold his flowers?”
“Well, I am called Florencia,” she stated plainly.
“Good point.”
I turned my gaze at the knight, that was now a full-fledged chimaera: a bull with a mane of knife cut meat; a snake body made of dough rolls and covered dorsally by an armor of empanada-shaped golden scales; and a tail crowned by an olive rattle.
Sloshing sounds came from the rattle as the bull shook it.
“Well, I promised to myself that I would jump, but, uh,” I scratched the back of my head, “Yeah, the horoscope says jumping today would be a totally Pisces thing to do and I don’t want to be associated with one.”
“Do you want me to call my father to deal with—” began Florencia, and a belt quickly jumped to her face to muzzle her. “Mhhmh”
“No, he will consider me useless. Besides, the Empanada Priest, here present, “I pointed at the sleeping puppy with my open hand, “Is a surprisingly reliable battle asset. More so than Mariana.”
“I heard that!” telepathed my loyal companion.
“Is it a lie?” I shouted, down into the pit.
“No,” she conceded, and went back to licking the blood off her fur while a group of pit bulls latched onto her legs, trying to maul her. It was a cute sight.
Irene and the empaknight-x continued their fierce showoff. The horns clashed with the pollen-colored claws, thorny teeth found themselves at home among turnover scales, Fernando yawned now and then.
I got the last piece to complete my master plan, and rearranged all of my zombies into a rope. Then I gave them their fetching orders: it was time to play the waiting game.
Irene’s assault on our discount-store-Digimon-rip-off was relentless. She tore off pieces of the mane, she avoided the horns and plucked out chicken filling from the eyes. The Empaknight was losing while barely making a dent on her.
Florencia got her hands on a rake and gave it a few swings in the air, as if it were a halberd.
“Flor, dear, I have two eyes that took several months to grow into a barely functional state, and years to get them to an optimal one. I’d be very pleased if, after the battle, this delicate balance stays the fucking same.”
“Walter, when this battle ends, can I pay you for Earth’s biology classes?” she said out of the blue.
“No. I love lording my knowledge over women. I’ll do it for free.” It took me a few seconds to realize what I had acceded to. “What do you know about evolution?”
“It’s a hoax to make us lose faith in the word of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” she recited like she knew it from memory.
“Irene!” I called.
“What?” asked the dragon, that was a little busy buffaloing the bull, punching it in an inexistent groin.
“Hurry up, I need to fucking die.”
“Could you wait? we are having a… moment,” Irene said after the snake body curled around her and started constricting.
“Oww, they are hugging,” said Mariana, inclining her panting head. She was back by my side. Somehow.
There’s a first time for everything, including yeeting one’s pet from the parapets of a castle. I had come up with a master plan. She was not going to use funny teleport to foil my brilliance and get away with it.
“Wiiiiiiii,” Mariana pontificated as she fell into the void. This time, the pit pits arranged in a circle around the landing spot, so nobody would die from the impact.
“Why are you handicapping yourself?” asked Fernando, dumbfounded, from inside Irene’s chest. Only his mask could be seen, and only when the bull wasn’t trying to make a snack out of Irene’s neck.
“Spite. I am powered by sheer spite.”
“Alternatively, he is an idiot,” offered Florencia.
Irene’s claw penetrated the thorax of the empaknight-x and came out of its back, holding a juicing bell pepper. The HP bar of our ally abandoned the race faster than a politician after they say they have sensible information that could lead to the incarceration of certain woman.
The mass of empanadas and their ingredients went limp, and Irene let it fall to the ground, crushing the tomato plants. They were innocent, they gave good tomatoes. Why is life so cruel?
Ah, right, the Empaknight. He got promoted to his last evolution: The Ex-panada. A cloud of a substance similar to finely grounded cumin rose from the corpse, and took on the form the knight had in life.
He turned to look at us. His gaze wandered: from the dreaming Empanada Priest, to Florencia, to me. He then nodded.
“Nos vemos, mis gauchitos queridos, que se me escapa el bondi que pasa por el Cielo de las Empanadas,” which would roughly translate to “Farewell, my esteemed allies, the Paradise of Empanada Warriors eagerly awaits the arrival of another one of his sons.”
He then soared into the sky, merging with the clouds, becoming a giant image that watched over us as the wind slowly erased his shape.
I looked into Irene, and Fernando looked at me. We nodded. We mhmed. We forged the bond that is only possible between deathly enemies when a greater force causes both of them to be outraged.
“God damned Jojo references,” we said in perfect synchrony.