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Chapter 8: More Than a Gut Feeling.

The Library was hidden in the sands of the treacherous and stupidly named Notmibia desert. I don’t have to describe a desert to you: sand, wind, wind with sand. Dunes. Plants wise on the ways of C4 and CAM photosynthesis. And a lack of water that distressed Mariana.

“I am a water dog, there is no stick, no lake nor lagoon nor oasis. I’ll evaporate,” she repeated as we traversed the great expanse, suffering the scorching sun.

“You re also a gun dog, and I don’t see you shooting.”

“I have webbed feet! The water in me wants to reunite with the water not in me!”

“You never swam in your life, you lived in an apartment.”

I weighed the canteen that I carried on one of my leather belts —I had decided that being trapped in a world with rules as absurd as a videogame deserved equally absurd clothing— and it felt light enough to worry me.

“We will need to drink, eventually. Do you have a spell to make rain or something?”

“No. I thought water was a thing that spawned in bowls.”

Then I had a terrible idea.

“Do you have any summon spells?”

“Summon hobo.”

“… Mass teleport us to somewhere where we can gather water and back here, then.”

“We would appear at the same spot we are walking away from, then.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. I kicked a small mound of sand, that was the color of Mariana. Thought she had good camouflage for the situation. But it was no time for such observations, as we were on the verge of dehydration.

“Does the hobo leave a body after being killed?”

“Yes…Oh, it’s like that Powerwolf song!”

“I don’t exactly know to which one you are referring, but yes: murder is involved. And no, dynamite isn’t.”

I readied the ritualistic dagger I had stolen from the castle. It looked thematic for a necromancer, being old and rusty.

“Walter, you know how non-necromantic summons work, right?”

“Yes…” I lied, because when you are this way past the moral event horizon avoiding explanations by your dog is no crime.

Turns out, some summons scale with the summoner’s level, like in any respectable game. So, when the hobo emerged from a flash of orange light, dressed in his rags and slouching a bit, he was massive. The man had more muscles than a collection of elephant trunks. He stretched and, afterwards, posed like a bodybuilder.

“Can you spare a coin, young man?” he said with his husky, sensual hoboice.

“If I were threatening the life of a coin, I guess I could.”

I shuffled my feet and looked at the sand. I had lived in New York; I was willing to stab your average hobo for far less than a sip of blood. As stated, this man —this somehow non-homosexual-pile-of-men of a man— was as far from average as one can expect.

“I don’t think you understood me, lad. Will you give a tip to this old man?”

He stood with his form fully erected in front of me, providing much needed shadow. He extended his hand, unaware that the only beings that got tips from me were the most exploited, overstressed workers: Female Vtubers.

“Mariana can you make him say Onii-chan?” I said, pointing at the prospect of a high-end ass-whipping that stood before me.

He stared at me like a Rottweiler stares at a robber covered in steaks. I, in turn, stared at him with the confidence of a Chihuahua facing a Tibetan mastiff.

“Why aren’t you scared shitless, eh?”

“We are in the middle of a desert. I am dehydrated. Do you think my body can afford to be rendered shitless?”

“What?” said Mariana and the hobo in unison.

The man cracked his knuckles. I whispered an undead resurrection spell and smirked.

“Go on, hoboss, make me give you a tip.”

My sudden source of confidence didn’t come completely from the deterioration of my mind state due to the heat, but rather out of the fact that I was a necromancer covered in leather belts.

“I can control my summons, Walter,” Mariana stated the obvious.

My distraction made me get swatted like a man falsely accused of wanting to commit a terrorist attack against politicians, instead of, you know, a high-school as it is protocol.

I lost half my HP bar and the feeling on the less horrid half of my face. I gained the incredible ability to soar over the sands at a vertiginous speed without doing the minimum effort. Then I impacted a dune. The sand under the surface was cooler. Overall, getting the snot beat out of me qualified as a slight improvement.

Mariana ran to where I was comfortably buried, picked me up from the pants and hauled me back to the fight.

“Are you fetching me for the hobo?”

“Yes, why?”

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“Goddamit Mariana.”

My belts decided that it was enough of a nap and uncurled. Like snakes they crawled over and beneath me, until they were slithering by my side.

“Anorexic dachshunds!”

“No, just my belts,” I said as we arrived to the shadow of the hobo.

The man squatted, resting his elbows over his knees

“Spare a coin, young man?”

I managed to stand with certain difficulty. There were several Marianas behaving like Borges’ blue tigers. Also, the hobo forked in several homeless people, whose collective known is, I guess, a “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s cast”. But there I was, standing on my own two feet, surrounded by my loyal belts.

“No.”

The battle that took place after that could be better described as the hobo’s training montage. Each hit took half my current HP, but I knew he could not kill me: The racial skill of third-worlders was to be unkillable by homeless motherfuckers unless they had a motorbike with a modified exhaust.

Eventually I started singing “You are the best” by Joe Esposito while he beat me to a pulp against a local rock that wasn’t very happy with being stained with my blood. Things stop adding pain when you are at a constant single health point.

When I got tired of the charade, I condensed my classist hatred in the dagger and drove it against his hairy abs. (In all honesty, I just stabbed him following my instincts. Being Argentinian gives access to increased facazo proficiency.)

It barely made a dent on the Hobo’s HP pool.

“It tickles.”

“Listen, can I pay you to kill someone?”

“Yes. Anyone except my summoner.”

I retrieved my dagger and transferred several dozen gold pieces to the homeless man. He laughed like an earthquake.

“Kill yourself now, please.”

“Well, uh, pacta sunt servanda I guess. Ehm, summoner?” he looked at Mariana pleading for help. She was rolling on the sand, apparently dodging some sunrays with each invulnerability trigger and thus cooling herself. But I was more impressed by the fact that a homeless person knew Latin.

“Hurry hurry, I don’t have all day. I don’t even know how I keep bleeding when I am thirstier than your average litRPG reader.”

Without further ado, the man grabbed his head and tore it off with a twisting movement. He fell forward, splashing me with refreshing ruby goodness.

Mariana hurried and started drinking the blood from the source. I had to imagine Bear Grylls telling me that it was necessary, and that it could be worse. That a camel smelled like one and a half hobos at the very least. That prions were a lie from Big Pharma to prevent us from tasting the entrails of our enemies.

I cupped some of the blood draining from the severed neck into my hand and took a sip. It was better than any of the energetic drinks I had ever tasted: sweet, but no so much, with a hint of iron and, I think… b negative? Yeah, let’s assume it was b negative. It lacked the plumbic touch of third-world blood. This homeless man summoned by a dog had had a better life than middle class people have in many countries.

I gutted the man and started drinking the blood from the abdominal wound. The guts fell on the sand and started sizzling due to the heat. Somehow, the hobo had several sets of intestines and livers. I made sure to not rend most of those gastrointestinal tracts: Mariana was an avid consumer of chitterlings.

It was so fresh. I slipped his entrails on the ground and started making a gut angel. Mariana had gone from Golden to Crimson Retriever as she dug on the chest for the man’s heart. She was wagging her tail, and I laughing because she wasn’t quoting Poe.

“Mariana?”

She removed her head from the hole in the chest. “What?”

“You can disguise the blood and its smell with magic if we come close to a town, right?”

“I have a better idea. But first, food.”

She chewed the heart as if it was a squeaky toy. It didn’t squeak. I would have killed for the heart of my enemy to squeak.

I wondered if I had crossed a line.

Then I took another sip of blood, and decided that, if there wasn’t a united nations council there, there wouldn’t be human rights, either. And if there were, summons would not have them. Maybe it was the sun, or maybe it was my superior intellect finally snapping and telling my conscious that I, indeed, was above the common rabble. They made angels of snow, I made angels of entrails. They drank Bloody Marys, I economized seven characters. It was easier to tweet about my drinking habits.

When I surprised myself thinking about using Twitter, I knew the heat had taken its toll on my cognitive skills.

“Mariana let’s go, we need to get shelter and a bath. Besides, I don’t think we both will fit inside the hobo at night, to use him as a refuge from the cold temperatures.”

“I have fire spells.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust your capacity to set things on fire. My doubts lie completely on your capacity to set on fire only the things you need to.”

“We are in a desert. Not many things around here are flammable.”

“I am.”

Telepathic silence followed.

“Have you drank enough blood of the innocent?” she finally asked.

I nodded. The last thing I needed was a fulminating diarrhea.

Then Mariana started to run in circles around an imaginary axis.

“Call forth water elemental!” she thought out loud, and from the sands rose a giant newfoundland made of water.

“Call forth shotgun!” I shouted, expecting the universe to be at least merciful enough to grant me the means for swift suicide.

“Why would you need one? Don’t like baths, you terminal otaku?” sneered Mariana.

“You said you only had Summon hobo as far as summoning went!”

“This is a call, not a summon. It’s different.”

“How?” I said, getting my hands closer to her neck with each instant.

“They are boosted by different stats and gear.”

“Dogs don’t use gear,” I said before commanding my belts to whip her. She remained impervious to the leather onslaught. I could feel the belts growing nervous.

“Boss, it ain’t working!” they silently screamed into my mind. I liked it, it gave the action the ominous aura that can only come from desperation.

“It tickles. Also, my collar levels up with me, look!”

Mariana uploaded the snapshot of her chain collar into my mind. It listed a few hundred different bonuses that I did not bother to pay attention to. The one I remember is 3.6e450% damage against furniture. Like she needed it.

“Why and how does a choke collar level up?” I asked, more to myself than to Mariana, that was already swimming inside the giant newfie.

I decided to further pollute the body of the summon... err... called one by jumping into it to get rid of the blood and shit that covered me. The water was warm and the big dog didn’t mind.

“Is the newfie male or female?” I asked my partner

“It’s made of water.”

“What’s in its ‘sex’ field on stats?”

“Current pH.”

It was slightly above seven. Given we had dissolved blood into it and that the industrial revolution still had to happen in that world, it made sense for the negative logarithm of the concentration of hydroniums in the dog to be slightly above the point of neutrality.

“Hey Walter, can I ask you something?”

“It’s unbecoming of you to not indiscriminately fire the question in my general direction, Mariana. Are you ill? Do you need a vet?” I said as I played with her ears.

“If you take me to the vet I will dig the deepest hole on the planet and push you into it.”

“And then jump behind me.”

“Well, yes, I’d be compelled to do that,” she granted with a sweet voice.

“Go ahead, ask.”

“Why haven’t you picked an advanced class?”

“I always wanted to have an army of servants without the rights you owe to the living.”

“Yes but you could become a battle mage and wield a…” She made a pause and stared into the distance, just to then look back at me while panting and wagging her tail, “stick. A big one, with enough strength.”

“Mariana, you may have the energy of a blue star and I respect that, but I am lazy. I am min-maxing my efforts here. The less I have to attack, dodge and, overall, move, the better. Necromancer is good for that.”

The newfoundland barked once, and the water reverberated. In the distance, like a mirage distorted by the rising air, a small town was slowly being revealed.

“Mariana, our quest could depend on you not accidentally snuffing the local populace. This is a desert, there are no squirrels around. Do you think that, under these conditions, you can achieve this?”

“No,” she said, panting happily.