Silence installed into the garden for a few instants, while we watched the clouds and shook our heads in disapproval.
Irene was three-fourths not-dead still, so when she stared at me, I braced myself for trouble. My belts were anxious for action.
“I need my Xanax!” screamed the one who was anxious due to terrible calfhood trauma. Damn, I almost miss my belts while writing this.
Back to the battle in the garden, Irene laughed between her horrid teeth. They were yellow enough for the one-out-of-ten dentist that doesn’t recommend Sensodyne to convert his peers to his religion.
“One of us is going to die here today. And I am immortal,” she said. Then, showing a total lack of manners, she charged with the sole intent of biting my head off.
I spent what would have been my last moments checking my stats and equipment page.
“Equipped weapon: Mariana Ursula Gallardo (Counts as a flail, I guess, I think. I am just a Demiurge and they don’t pay me enough to figure out what the fuck your aberrant dog-based contraptions are, people. Actually, since everyone else got killed by murderhobos like you, they don’t pay me. And it’s not like I can quit the job, somebody has to manage this clusterfuck. When the US demiurge was still alive, I was able to neglect these small things. But I digress. FLAIL.),” it said this time.
“Take it easy, Demiurge,” I mumbled.
Irene made contact and the lights went dim and yellowish.
You don’t expect floral aromas when your head enters the mouth of a dragon. The saliva was sweet, so it was probably made out of nectar. She had a couple of ligneous molars that reminded me of a mammalian carnassial. Her lethal teeth were tickling and scratching my neck. One even found the way to draw a drop of blood when she thrashed me around. After a few seconds, she threw me against the parapets and observed me as if I were an alien.
My belts, twigs, leaves, et al received the order to curl around my arm, hauling Mariana up. She was heavier than usual.
“There goes another. Bye! Have a good death!” said Mariana as she got pulled back to me by the tail. An instant later, with the painful howl and the wet sound, I realized she was talking to a pit.
I had to hold on to a parapet to finish hauling my catch on board. Mariana resulted to be a perfect pit pit bait: Several white and black dogs were latched at her like remoras to a shark. Very angry remoras that believed themselves lampreys.
“Am I getting stats from the pitties too?”
“Only from those whose mangle moments cancel out,” chiefly explained Mariana.
“So, let me get this straight,” began Fernando, “pit bulls work like electronegative atoms in a molecule?”
“When trying to savage a Golden Retriever yes, somewhat,” confirmed Mariana.
“Fernando, can I, like, opt out of life?” kindly asked Irene.
“No. Fight.”
Irene charged at me like a scared gecko charges towards self-amputation. Unlike the gecko, though, she got promptly smashed with a heavy mass composed wholly of dog. One fifth of her total HP got erased with that simple attack.
Mariana thoroughly enjoyed being swung above my head.
“Taca taca taca taca taca taca chuk chuk taca,” she made her best impression of a helicopter.
The pit add-ons snarled and kept on thrashing, trying to counteract the centrifugal force. Irene took the garden spade on her shoulder and threw it at me. Spinning the drooling mess of dogs at a 45-degree angle in front of me, I successfully got a disgusting bath of saliva and disarmed the projectile. Or, rather, it found itself at home buried into the shoulder of a pit, but that was a happy ending because, let’s get real, this particular garden spade had a thing for shoulders.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
My instant of distraction was enough for Irene to take flight and start raining forget-me-not petals over us.
“I am the only memory priest in existence, Walter. My mercy only goes so far with those I deem agents of oblivion, and so does my patience.”
I started cringing, hard. My most embarrassing memories where welling from the bottom of my soul, affecting me all at the same time. I felt myself drowning into my own mind, like it was a sea of expired milk.
With a quick yet intense jerk of the chain Mariana impacted Irene and the rain of petals stopped. The rain of an entire dragon over me had just started and finished, though.
I lifted Irene with one hand, making no effort thanks to the strength the dogs granted me. Fernando jumped ship and began rushing towards the opposite end of the garden. Florencia followed, swinging the rake wildly, trying to catch the little shit and turn him into a colander.
Irene had never been lobbed into the air by a plant-erotica author before. Neither had she been swatted from behind and above with a Golden Retriever attached to several pit bulls. Getting both first times a second apart from each other and with someone that never loved her had to be slightly jarring.
Let us, for a second, imagine how she saw the castle seemingly grow taller, the clouds escaping from her grasp. The anguish felt when, at sub 10% HP, she plumbed into a hole filled with angry, mean dogs. How terrible it must have been for the last thing she saw to be my smug shit-eating grin as I watched her get torn apart by the pit inhabitants.
“Fernando, I am sorry. Fernando, I am so sorry. Oblivion take me,” she sobbed in her last moments. I limited myself to silently judging her gaming preferences. Morrowind was where it was at.
When I turned, Florencia was beating our rival like she would her future husband: with the rake’s handle, without mercy.
“This is for ruining the tomatoes!” she rebuked before rebonking.
“Lady, I don’t want to —ay mamá” he got hit on the back so hard the rake broke in two “I don’t intend to hurt you. Please, let me talk with Walter,” he said, trying to contain his tears.
“It’s fine, Flor, his summon is easily beatable now, let him come to me.”
“But—” she began protesting. I whipped the ground with Mariana to make her understand this was serious business.
“Boing,” said my weapon.
“Fine, you are the psychopath.”
Fernando scurried to me, who could actually murder him, just to escape form Florencia’s torturing methods.
“Walter, please, reconsider. I cannot beat you, you have proven your battle prowess. Look.”
He carefully took his mask away with a single hand, revealing his face. He threw it to a side, and looked at me with teary eyes. Blue irises, brown hair, small nose, only slightly fucked up teeth. He would have made a good twink for master Ros... Walter control yourself!
“I don’t like people remembering my face, but you have wrestled the privilege form these hands.”
“You are not that ugly, I have seen worse.”
“Well, it just takes a mirror,” he sassed back. I quickly gestured Florencia to not fuse his skull with the rake’s head.
“So, man, who did you lose to the German?” I asked the question I was tired of holding.
“Excuse me?”
“Alzheimer’s. Who, in your life, made you hate it so much. Forget-me-nots, purple ribbon-shaped scarf, powers based on memory. It doesn’t take a genius to see through it.”
He sat on the border of one of the flowerbeds.
“My mom. I killed myself because I couldn’t stand seeing her body walk soulless around the house. A husk of the woman that loved me more than her life, that gave everything for us —me and my siblings—. Sons are meant to bury their parents, but what do you do when they go away before you can even think about a grave?” He buried his nails into the dirt behind him. “When your mother slowly degenerates into your defenseless child, what’s there to do? When she calls you ‘dad’, or ‘brother’, when your name is not among her vocabulary anymore?”
It would have been in character for me to mock the man. Look at him, a victim, hahaha. How miserable. But I pitied him. A thing I thought long dead, that begins with emp and is not an electromagnetic pulse, erupted within my soul. Empathy 2: the vengeance.
I refrained myself from hugging him, and then patted his head like he was Mariana.
“Is this how you show affect?” he stammered, taken aback by my weird reaction.
“Yes, I like head-patting my whiny bitches.”
“Can I do the same just to spite you?”
I gestured my scalp and inclined my head. But he simply placed two fingers upon my forehead. A light tap, and he was now holding a ball of blackness betwixt the fingertips of his thumb, index and middle fingers.
I grabbed him from the robe with my left hand, and tensed the muscles of the right, ready to smash her with my dog-flail.
“What did you take from my brain, memory mage?”
He dropped the ball between us and it expanded suddenly, pushing me away from the memory mage, who was engulfed by the shadows. The oily exterior of the ball seemed to spin, and it began to clear, from the top to the bottom. And when the contents of the ball were finally revealed, Fernando was already inside them.
“Thanks for forgetting me not,” said the slick Shadow of Irene.