Mariana impacted against Irene’s side and it barely took away four percent of her hp. Half of Fernando’s face appeared from the dark flowers.
“I am sorry, Walter. I am —or I like to think so, at least— a man of honor, of my word. This situation, the greater good forcing my hand, I despise it as much as you must do.”
Florencia was trying to sneak behind him while holding a machete. For a second, I wondered why the tools were laying around at seemingly random spots, and then I remembered: gardening was one of Sabrina’s hobbies.
“Why are you with the escapists, though?” I decided to entertain him.
“I escaped from my duty as a son, as a coward. Saving this world from people like Mateo is my way to atone.”
“And wouldn’t you prefer to return with your mother? Let us destroy this place, go back to the last split second decision that could have made you not jump from the bridge, hang yourself, or pull the trigger,” I suggested, Flailriana still swinging by my side.
“She would hate that. The woman my mother was before she got eroded by the illness, she would never forgive me if I did that. My life in this place is but an elegy for her memory.”
Florencia jumped on Irene’s back and tried slitting her neck with the machete. She succeeded. Nothing bled from the wound, because Irene was made of the memory of flowers. She just lost like one percent of her HP, which didn’t take long to regen.
“Rude,” protested Irene, and then, by bucking, removed Florencia off her back with ease. The half-elf ended up in front of me, kissing the floor in a way her suitors would not approve of. I didn’t take my cellphone out of my pocket, I didn’t shoot a quick photo of her sorry state nor uploaded her beaten ass into social media. But, had I had a cellphone, Wi-Fi, electricity, the necessary software, an account in the aforementioned web sites, a competent and independent pet capable of defending me in the meantime, and reasons to not save the photos for future blackmail, I would totes have.
“Do you need landing classes? Mariana is adept at dropping from tall heights and surviving unharmed.”
My flail licked her nose. “The rest of the subjects involved in the falls, however, not so much,” she added.
The distraction earned me a punch in all the face, courtesy of Irene. The impact sent me sliding back against the parapets. The garden’s floor a harsh, exfoliating mistress. In a split second of lucidity I pulled Mariana to me and grabbed her from the tail. The demiurge was sending a string of insults into my brain, begging for me to stop changing the way I used Mariana. Then, I knew he settled for “Equipped weapon: Mariana Ursula Gallardo (MUG)”.
Enticed by the prospect of avoiding a gutting that would cost me another tenth or so of my HP, I blocked Irene’s next strike with… with the mug.
“Boss, now that you are holding Mariana, can we rearrange into an armor or something? If you die, that’s bad for us, y’know?” said one of my belts.
“Oh, that belt talks,” observed Mariana.
“Turn the hows, they’ve tabled,” replied the belt.
Irene launched a savage hail of swipes. I blocked the first two with Mariana, losing one of the pit bull add-ons, and then rolled to the side. A familiar voice boomed from the garden entrance.
“What in the seven holy angels that bless the very grass where Messi steps on is going on here?” roared a, in international terms, fuming Mateo. In Argentinian terms, a mildly annoyed Mateo. He was accompanied by his elite pits, that walked besides him with the head down, looking suspiciously at everything. You could see it in the eyes of these dogs: they had met trust once, and decided it was too dangerous to be left alive. “Well, I am waiting for an explanation, and it better be the best one you have come up with in your life.”
I scurried away from Irene while she and her summoner were distracted.
“A difference of opinion,” I scratched my chin while saying that.
“Go on, complete the inevitable joke, I will slap you afterwards,” he said, arms crossed, his left index tapping on his right biceps.
“He considers I am better off dead and I choose to skip some of the bureaucratic steps to challenge his hypotheses. A scientist’s quarrel, nothing more.”
Mateo let out an exasperated sight. Florencia ran past him, into the building, panicked.
“I want to hear the explanation from the black thing.”
Irene vomited Fernando into the bricks and, holding his hands in the air to show he was unarmed, he walked towards Mateo.
“This is just a personal quarrel with Walter, he made my girlfriend break up with me back in uni just because I got better grades in one of our shared classes. So now I want to kill him. I am sorry, my Lord, if it seemed like I wanted to thwart your plans.”
“He’s lying,” I protested, just to get Olympically ignored.
“That sounds so Walter. Do you want anything as retribution, in exchange for letting my associate in peace at least until he is of no use to me no more,” Wow, what a friend Mateo was.
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“No, my lord, I am going away now. I just ask for a little favor. They say, it… grants luck,” he said.
Irene had a shit eating grin and was looking at me.
“Fernando, I know Mateo won’t listen to me because he is an ass, but you don’t have to do this! Don’t you want to see your mom anymore? To remind her she has a loving son, ever for a moment? She is somewhere there still, hostage of a jail of her own insanity!”
He flinched a bit, and gave me a killing glare, before keeping on walking towards Mateo.
“Worry not, Walter, if he attempts to harm me, he is a dead man.” He relaxed his arms and addressed Fernando. “Go ahead, touch my scalp, everybody asks to do it.”
I tried to get up and charge against Fernando before he touched Mateo’s scalp. A second Irene? it was more than enough with one. One that promptly reacted, pinning me to the ground.
“How oppressive are one’s own memories, right, Walter?”
I wielded the mug against her leg with all my might, severing the extremity. Irene Didn’t react, it was too late.
Fernando’s hand made contact with Mateo’s head and a black lightning shoot out of the shining skin, towards the sky. The clouds seemed now battered, sporting patches of red and blue.
“Rip him apart!” ordered Mateo as Fernando laughed, and the dogs promptly obeyed, tearing pieces of what they thought was flesh, just to find out they were biting a mound of Forget-me-nots.
“Fernando can exchange places with any known group of forget-me-not worldwide, isn’t that useful?” said Irene, who seemed to be melting now.
Country music blared out of the sky, and the singers were all bald eagles. I mean it literally, the lyrics were eagles’ cries, this is no metaphor.
“Walter, go inside, and take the little priest with you,” Mateo ordered with a solemn tone.
God should have been eating fried chicken, because thick, black, burnt frying oil started raining upon us. I could almost hear the painful cries of a million plumbers in the distance.
“What did he summon? What is so dangerous to make—”
The music changed to the U.S Anthem, as sung by the most redneck of all voices.
“Go, now!” he kicked the tails of the two pits to his sides, one at a time, which made them hurl into the air and, before they landed, he grabbed them, as if they were dual swords.
The dogs attached to Mariana desisted on their attempt of mauling and ran off, leaping from the castle’s terrace and back into the pit. Mariana, as it was only natural for her, jumped from my grasp and proceeded to lick the oil from the brick floor.
“Don’t tell me this is the American demiurge.”
“I am afraid he is, Walter. If you are not going to run, brace for a fight that may very well put an end to us all. My daughters will find a way to fend for themselves.”
“What about the Empanada Priest?” asked Mariana.
“It’s an Empanada priest. Probably the most imbalanced class to exist, so much only dogs can take it,” Mateo briefly explained.
“Well, I cannot take it, it’s greyed out,” Mariana said, defeated.
The storm clouds birthed a gigantic face made of TV screens. It didn’t look like Hamilton, Jefferson, Washington, Adams or Franklin, or any other founding father, and it looked like them all. With shifts of TV light and the very shape of the screens, it seemed to flow between the faces of important historical figures of the United states, without ever settling on one. A bit more of indecision, and the founding fathers would have been replaced with all the dinosaurs a pretty stupid child quite related to me couldn’t decide among when taken to a toy shop.
The Empanada priest summoned a dome of crusty dough to cover himself from the rain of oil. Then, he snored on, like the hero he was.
The first arm of the demiurge emerged. It was composed of drones, fighter jets, semi-automatic guns, and aircraft carriers, all deformed and mixed up. Each one of them had a handgun. The handguns were female, as one could see smaller pistols nursing on the underside of their cannons.
“Ah, so those are the mind breaking things Lovecraft’s characters so often saw,” I casually commented.
“You meet a literal fake god, and the first thing you do is… quip?”
“Effectively. Otherwise, I may give a fuck, and the fabric of reality would be unable to handle that,” I explained.
“You will make me fall out of faith one day,” said Mateo, dual bullys ready to slash whatever the Demiurge’s shadow launched against us.
Another part of the god emerged from the clouds. Silicon chips, coolers, capacitors, and resistances joined to give shape to an arm featuring more elbows than a convention of Hinduist and Buddhist deities.
Then a third arm: eagles, black and brown bears, salmons, raccoons, alligators, Californian condors, and plethora of insects interlaced, stretched to the point of being barely recognizable. All of them drooling, roaring, snarling. Some of them fond of open carry laws, too.
“Is there any reason to wait until he arrives to, like, attack?” I asked, out of this rare unique skill I possess, which some call… common sense.
“He is invulnerable until he finishes his entrance: it’s the United States demiurge,” Mateo explained, jaded. I feared he would self-decapitate any second.
Mariana gathered so much oil in her fur she could have been declared honorary duck.
Another arm came along with heavy guitar riffs. This one was composed of French fries, burgers, fried chicken, hotdogs and deep fried guitars and drum kits.
“I have a theory on how this universe started.” I declared.
“And what would that be?” asked Mariana.
“In the beginning, there was only weed in the universe. Then, the creator of this place consumed it all before proceeding with the, well, creation. ‘Let there be lit,’ he said at long last. I call it ‘the big bong theory’.”
Mateo slapped me with the blunt side of one of the pits. Then he looked back at our gargantuan enemy. “Lord, I had forgot how long the introduction of this motherfucker lasted for.”
Wings whose skeletal support was made out of crumpled comic pages entered scene. The membrane, the very star-spangled banner, offered a funny complement to the colorful panels.
“So, uh, are we staying under the oil rain? During the whole battle?”
“No, it will end and rainbows made of democrat and republican propaganda will appear among the clouds. Now and then, you will have to dodge an elephant or donkey drop. They make funny cartoon sounds when they fall; you will manage.” His words were as tranquilizing as the news that, in the next forty-eight working hours, gravity may stop working for a minute or two would be.
“No more oil?” complained Mariana.
“There is a lot around already. The ensuing diarrhea is going to kill you if you keep on licking it.”
“But it tastes like chicken; it has to be healthy.”
“Mariana, my dear, I know you are coddled, and that your idea of high cuisine is whatever falls off my plate. That doesn’t mean that everything tasty is healthy.”
“Funny logic, logic man. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t check out,” she said, and continued lustering the bricks with her tongue.
The health bar of the shadow finally became visible.
“I see, it measly has one HP for each dollar of the US national debt,” I said, not feeling particularly threatened. Then I checked Mariana’s numbers: her HP was barely in the billions.
Mateo smirked. “So this one is way weaker than the real thing.”