The rounded-edges, metallic buildings had mechanical, insect like legs and crawled around the main plaza. Residues of magic permeated the air, and I know about it because my belts were complaining about such invisible reality.

“This place is so polluted it looks like my family gene pool after my sister ran into that pack of feral bulls,” said one.

“Thick…suffocating…like the world-corgi-mutaburrasaurs butt…” continued another.

Seeing through their no-eyes, I could feel it too. An invisible miasma of leftover magic gathered around the low levels of the city. That led me to the conclusion that magic waste was denser than air.

Mariana ran in circles after her own tail. Cornelio complained about the direct sunlight giving him a head-splitting ache. Florencia discussed religious matters with a destitute man holding a sign with “the end is near!” painted with charcoal next to a caricature of a Golden Retriever with a stare of determination. That was probably the most down to earth doomsayer I would ever behold.

“It’s her! She will bring the end! I can sense her vile energy!” The main shouted when he noticed Mariana. Mariana reacted by summoning a pile of batteries over the man.

“Keep the change. Don’t bite them,” she said to the man buried in counterfeit Duracell.

“Mariana, that’s not… I mean…” I tried to come up with an argument of why that was not a correct action, but no one had ever told me I would cause the end of the world. Not with that tone, anyway. “The bunny sends his regards.” I proceeded to step over the man’s trembling hand to make sure insult and injury were not estranged.

“We did not come to Mechdrid to beat hobos,” Sabrina complained.

“My pet is paying for the trip and she bought the hobo-beating package,” I retorted while I unzipped and proceeded to urinate over the pile of batteries.

“Walter, that’s gross!” complained Florencia. Her angle didn’t allow her to see my parts, but I had always wanted to hear a woman say that after I whipped it out. A dream come true.

The words welled from within me like a geyser eagerly waiting to erupt. “Hello Gross, I am Walter.”

The man under the pile of batteries didn’t answer. His life bar still wasn’t depleted so we weren’t worrying a lot.

“This little advantage of knowing how much you can beat someone up without committing murder is the one thing Planet has over Earth.”

“Walter, can we go buy what we need and beat homeless people afterwards?”Sabrina proposed with a the sweet voice of a girl asking his father for money.

“What do I get out of it?”

“A valuable party member.” Spoke Cornelio. Most of his eyes were closed, and he was massaging the eyeless area of his temples with a single finger from each hand.

“Hey, I just had an idea,” I said, and the three siblings took a couple steps back. Mariana remained by my side. “What if we get a physician to extirpate most of Cornelios eyes so he can live a normal life?”

My stomach met Florencia’s knee and became its little sub bitch. Sabrina took out the frying pan and, seizing the moment, went for my buttocks with a full swing. My coccyx got caught in the crossfire. Cornelio stood there, massaging his head, not bothered by my suggestion to mutilate him. Good boy, Cor, good boy.

“Can we not beat my owner? I need him to eat,” intervened Mariana.

“The girls stopped pummeling me. And I fell to the floor, back and front aching. “Harder mommies,” I pronounced words most accursed.

“We will never beat this guy again,” Sabrina declared, disgusted by my reaction.

“Yes. Next time, it’s stabbing,” conceded Florencia.

I spring back to my feet using the belts to aid me. Stabs were of no concern to me., unless delivered by motorized robbers. And I had not seen or heard a motorbike in this world yet.

I surveyed our environment further. People came and go in hurries, their robes not so different from those in the first city Mariana and I had visited. Some of them had gauntlets, necklaces or footwear with bright, round, polished gems incrusted on them. They were followed with little automatons: golems fashioned after dogs, arthropods and birds, to name a few. A girl even had a rooster following her. I decided to approach her with a nonchalant step.

“Hey, lady.”

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“Yes?” she asked with eyes a bit too open for my liking.

I gave her a thumbs up. “Nice cock.”

My mission completed, I walked away satisfied, back into my face-palming party. Even Mariana was putting her paw on her nose bridge.

“Follow me to the market, Walter.” Sabrina ordered as if she were the party leader. Fearing that, if we lingered, she would get familiar with the place and therefore fuck it, I obliged.

The way to the Market was brief, just a couple blocks away. Getting there was only slightly tardy due to the fact a pack of buildings had decided to migrate and we had to wait to cross the avenue, not to end up demoted to mats under their metallic or stony arthropod-like legs.

The crystal cores in the underside of the buildings shone bridge as they marched. I thought that should make it easy to steal if you are strong enough to not mind a whole building collapsing all over you.

I decided to postpone the indulgence in my newfound kleptomaniac tendencies. Shopping after committing a crime was made harder by all the local law enforcement coming and trying to detain you, as if curbing crime were their job or something. No! it isn’t! Your job is to make sure law abiding citizens get fined for minor infractions that may even not exist. Shoo. Let me commit honest-to-God thievery in peace.

We reached the Market, a street lined with stores with single-pane windows taking up their fronts. Behind the glass one could see all sort of items, from clothes to meats,from automaton parts resembling legs and tails and heads to a religious-items store inhabited by a possibly sentient cloud of incense smoke so thick you could throw a pair of spiked bots on it and introduce it to your parents as your just-abducted goth girlfriend.

I stopped the group in front of a butchery. The butcher was a stoud, bald man with a friendly face.

“Hands up, everyone, I am buying everything in this store!” I announced to the 0 clients currently in the place.

“No dogs allowed, lad, sorry.”

“Mariana, give the man an early retirement.”

Mariana transferred some indeterminate amount of money to the man. “Holy… yeah, this one dog can enter the store. It’s practically hers now.”

I advanced through the store, touching every piece of meat available. Obey me, flesh. Do my bidding, I told it. The sausages screamed in pain constantly, aberrations of nature.

The butcher watched with a genuine smile as I reanimated the stock that was hitherto his and led it out of the magical fridges as a disgusting reimagination of the Hamelin flautist.

Mariana described circles around her own axis as the meat flowed around her like a macabre and delicious river. She was broken, broken by the equidistant foodstuffs, that made it impossible to choose a way to lunge and get some.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.” She constantly telepathed to everyone in the room.

“Is she okay?” The store owner asked, shyly.

With arms crossed, eyes closed and head shaking, I answered, “She’s a Golden Retriever.”

“My condolences,” he said, hugging me with his hairy bare arms. It felt like being swallowed by a wire sponge.

“One gets used to it,” I said, my arms still crossed, because there was no way I would reciprocate his gesture. I had an image to keep. A status as a villain.

His hands began descending though my back and, soon, I felt one of themgrab my buttock.

“Excuse my impertinence, sir, but… are you sexually assaulting me?” I asked out of mere curiosity.

“Errr… I’d like to think it’s just how good friends help each other in times of need.”

Sabrina and Florencia were snickering. It was fine. They probably expected me to fend for myself for their amusement.

I pushed him away using the belts.

“They are cuter than me, you know?” I pointed at the half elves, and they stopped laughing. By their scrunched faces, I guess they even got offended at my suggestion. Hypocrites. “except the one with the head full of eyes. I mean, depending on your fetishes.

“I like your type better.” He approached again, and I stood my ground. No sexual predator would make me show weakness in front of the ladies.

Mariana stopped suddenly, collapsed on the floor and caught fire as the meat kept dancing around.

“Do you really want to force yourself upon a necromancer while in a butchery? Because I can get behind your deviations, your degeneracy is commendable even. I’d bet you fucked some of the meat cuts. The chicken breasts? Enjoyed every second of the improvised titless-titjobs you forced onto them, because hens are known whores and heathens.” Mariana kept burning steadily, releasing black smoke as she panted on the floor and seemed to undergo a seizure. “But, my man, you don’t want to assault me. I can give you one of the semielves, she’s even a virgin.”

“I won’t let you sell Sabrina to this terrible man!”

“He means you, Flor,” said Cornelio. Thanks, Cornelio.

Sabrina approached me with her frying pan drawn. “Walter, why are you not killing the man?”

“It’s a chance to get rid of Florencia, I don’t know when I will have another.”

“Hey!” Flor said, scowling.

“No offense meant, girl. I am just not comfortable having your kind in my party.”

“That was specist or racist.” Sir Rapesalot accused me.

“No, get it right: it was sexist. When you adventure with women, people say things. I don’t want to be of manslut fame.”

“Yet you carry the caboose for it, necrotwink.”

That was the most sincere compliment I had ever received.,. I’d have blushed, had not been, you know, about to get my ass broke in and entered. “Thanks, I appreciate your honesty.”

The magical fire alarms went off and the least beautiful of rains began falling over us. This shit was getting to romantic for my liking. I laced my fingers with his and looked the butcher in the eyes. Despite the balding, despite the greasy skin, despite his excess of body fat, there was something in the man that made me feel a funny sensation.

We closed our eyes, and I ordered the meat to converge, the bones to break and fashion pikes out of themselves. In less than a second, with my face mere instants away from meeting his, he opened his eyes and beheld my shit-eating grin as his flesh got penetrated at every angle by broken femurs, humeri and ribs. “I am sorry, big boy, this twink is saving himself for General Rosas.”

The man gargled on his own blood and gasped for air in vain as the bone-to-flesh-ratio of his body increased. His health bar went down in chunks. Mariana began to extinguish thanks to the sprinklers, and was wagging her still flaming tail.

The butcher died, but the meat didn’t let him fall. He died standing, a grotesque statue of his own profession. I ordered the meat to hang him on one to the hooks used for the cow halves, and, after that, still stained with the man’s blood and followed by my new army of fresh meat, left the store.