I opened my stats screen for everyone on the party to see.
Name: Walter Ignacio Gallardo.
Chosen Edgy Titles: Unholy Necromantic Cuntstrider, Unfucker of Elves, Mariana’s Sidekick.
Chosen normal people titles: Golden Retriever Owner, Unpleasant Son of a Bitch, Uni Dropout, Handsome, Occasional Liar.
Nickname: BumbudendronEnjoyer (Shortened as “Bum”)
Class: None. At all.
Level: That Metallica song that is about a man in a coma.
NUMERICAL STATS (COLON)
MIGHT (Or Strength): 1
DEFTNESS (Or Agility): 1
WITS/INTELLIGENCE/PILLISMO: 7 (Way above average)
STREETS (Or Wisdom): 6 (Reduced to -3 when horny)
CONSTITUCIÓN: 1 (Lacks Bitches (Besides Mariana))
STAT THAT ACTUALLY DETERMINES HEALTH AND REGEN: 8 (Bad weed never dies)
TIMES HE CONSULTED THIS STAT SHEET: ONLY FUCKING 5 (He’s a monster)
FANBOYISM FOR LA OREJA DE VAN GOGH: 47 (Only redeeming quality)
&STAT: 111 (This number makes no sense but the system doesn’t work with one line less. Added to the fix later list.)
“Impressive, he has the aptitudes of a lab rat,” commented Sabrina. Love you too, Sab.
Fernando looked at me, clearly disgruntled by something. “Your fanaticism is higher than mine.”
I turned away from him to look at the maid-café-dungeon in front of us. It had catgirls dressed in maids inside.
Yes, I know what I said. Peeking through the wide windowpanes, you could see them, donning the skins of beautiful women as hoodies. One of them puked out a hairball. Another was curled in a corner, contorting to try to reach under her skirt and, probably, lick her parts. The one with a lush head of carrot-colored hair held a thousand-yard stare towards a plastic table. It wasn’t her turn with the braincell.
“They are showing so much skin,” Flor complained, popping her head up from our hiding place behind the wall under the shop’s big windows.
Afterwards she took another sip form the mate, but let it be known that it was a drag full of indignation.
“I am useless at level one,” said the littlest bitch of the bunch. This means Cornelio.
“You are useless, period.” I tried to dispel his delusions of grandeur. I focused on the grass growing on a crack on the sidewalk. It was level three. Then I checked Mariana’s stats.
Name: Mariana Ursula Gallardo.
Chosen titles: Walter’s Owner, Owned by Walter, Good, Girl, Boy, Dog, Good Girl, Good Boy, Good Dog, Good bitch, Sword, Gun, Flail, Mug, Mariana, Ursula, Gallardo, Come here.
Nickname: SlashNumeralEcsEcsEcsGoodGirlEcsEcsEcsNumeralBackwardsSlashAsteriskOmegaAsterisk
Class: All.
Level: 147 (Max 99)
NUMERICAL STATS (COLON)
(Check volumes 1 to 19 of “Mariana’s stats: abridged version” to get a resume)
Useful. Really.
Then I grabbed Mariana by the tail, causing her to turn and look at me in a slight confusion very becoming of her ilk.
I checked my stats again.
Name: Walter Ignacio Gallardo.
Chosen Edgy Titles: Unholy Necromantic Cuntstrider, Unfucker of Elves, Mariana’s Wielder.
Chosen normal people titles: Golden Retriever Swordsman, Unpleasant Son of a Bitch, Uni Dropout, Handsome, Pathological Liar.
Nickname: BumbudendronEnjoyer (Shortened as “Bum”)
Class: None. At all.
Level: Juan.
NUMERICAL STATS (COLON)
MIGHT (Or Strength): 198 (Base: 1)
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
DEFTNESS (Or Agility): 198 (Base: 1)
WITS/INTELLIGENCE/PILLISMO: 8 (Base: 7)
STREETS (Or Wisdom): 6 (Reduced to -3 when horny)
CONSTITUCIÓN: 198 (No one pimps harder than he who wields a bitch. Base: 1.)
STAT THAT ACTUALLY DETERMINES HEALTH AND REGEN: 198 (Base: 8)
TIMES HE CONSULTED THIS STAT SHEET: 6 (On the way to becoming human.)
FANBOYISM FOR LA OREJA DE VAN GOGH: 47 (Only redeeming quality)
HIDDEN SKILL:
MARIANA (SWORD MODE): You are wielding your pet as a sword, gaining some of her stats (Hard capped at double max stats).
SUPER HIDDEN SKILL (Nobody else can see this):
Divine intervention: Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. I will aid you so you can kill me. Send me with my siblings, Walter. And when at long last you are done, play Dragon’s Dogma, will you? it’s a great game. I like playing as a strider. Silence the pawns, tho.
I closed the stats screen, my long face letting everybody now something was amiss.
“What happened, Walter?” Flor asked, putting a dirty half-elf hand on my shoulder.
I had to make something up.
“Two things: One, I am flabbergasted at the fact that wielding Mariana gives intelligence. And two: I realized I died without ever playing Dragon’s Dogma.”
Fernando perked up at the mention of that damn game.
“Oh, dear, that was a life not worth living!” He teased. “I liked playing as a strider. I could tell you every dialogue from the pawns, from memory.”
I needed a change of subject before going mad, so I stood, dragging Mariana, head down, behind me. And then I sauntered through the Maid Café’s glass door, ringing the bell and catching the stares of all the hungry catgirls. I casted a killing glare to all the hissing, heckles-raising , skin-wearing girls that jumped over tables and approached with a stalking movement.
“I head there was a new dinner in town,” my eyes examine dthem as a cowboy would one off those dry western shitholes he saw a thousand times before. “And I, Golden Brooch, thirst for scrambled eggs and a good coffee. And regarding the latter, I want it so black that it gets fetishized by /pol/.”
Mariana licked her sword tip, or nose. “I want food too.”
The catgirls, with their manifold skin suits, gathered in a circle, around one of the tables, paws placed across each other’s shoulders. They mumbled some cat nonsense and I raised an eyebrow out of politeness. Their fluffy tails came out of their flashed skin skirts, quite non-bloody and contrasting with the grotesque image these ostensible cannibals and their suits projected . I managed to identify a Chartreux, an Angora, and a Siamese girl by their tails. The ginger catgirl jumped from her table and stamped her face on the floor with a loud thud, knocking herself out in the happiest way possible. The stupidity of the café was immeasurable; its cringefest infinite.
My party members sneaked behind me, thinking me unaware of their presence. They had forgot I had a sixth sense for losers, something that would probably prove worthy if I ever attempted to find a mate deserving of my grandeur.
“What are they doing?” Sabrina muttered, her lips way too close to my ear. My hand on Mariana’s tail twitched. The white lights on the low ceiling seemed to me like mocking cherubs.
“Personal space.” I pushed Sabrina away with a single finger. She was clearly scared, defenseless without her contraptions. Fernando stepped before me and proceeded to commit a heinous act: he touched my forehead with two fingers, extracting the shadows of a memory. He rolled the dark orb between his fingers, as if it were a marble.
“What did you pull from my head this time?”
“I am not letting you have all the glory.” He cast the orb over the ugly white and grey tiles of the café floor. Shadow spread its tendrils and bulged out, developing into a donut shaped form that, soon enough, sprouted soft, long hairs and a pair of deep blue eyes. Then it uncurled, shook once she stood and my heart jumped to my throat. “There are two of them now…” I muttered, my lips trembling at the prospect of having to feed an extra Mariana.
Fernando picked up the carbon-colored copy by the tail and held it in front of himself, like a foil.
“I took some fencing classes back in my yo…” He scratched his head as both tails started wagging their respective Marianas.
“She sometimes does that. You get used to it.” I turned to regard the sisters and Cornelio, who was wearing one of his… how to describe them… gay as fuck, purple-with-pink-hearts keffiyeh-like headdresses made by Florencia. “Stand back and avoid dying, if possible. Mainly Sabrina and Florencia, you are useful. Cornelio, if you die, do it like a man, okay?”
“With honor and glory?”
“No, with an erection. Get it together, you would be getting murdered by cannibal catgirls. Many would kill to be in your place,” I said with a face so straight that it lived in the suburbs and had two mildly-neglected children and a Golden Retriever.
Well, at least the Golden retriever.
I slapped the bitch, making her cease her wagging, and raised her in front of me too. “Ready, Ferna… oh, you are left handed.”
“Ambidextrous, actually.”
“Faithfull follower of the Dao of the straw to changed hand.”
Fernando recalculated for a few seconds. You could almost see the spinning loading icon over his head. “… Jesus fuck, don’t do that to English ever again.”
We almost didn’t notice the pack of angry skin-wearers charging at us, with |claws unsheathed and sharp teeth showing. They foamed at the mouth and seemed to be of the unserviceable kind. My hand sneaked through their guard and caught the leader of the pack, a blonde Siamese girl with Asiatic features, by the neck. The others stopped in their tracks, unsure of how to proceed.
“What’s your name?” I asked applying more pressure as she clawed my grasp, unable to damage me in any significant way.
Her response was puking a ball of hair. Pubes, most likely.
I applied more pressure in her neck, and she started moaning. That made me to withdraw my hand, sparing her and letting her slump on the floor, and caused 20% of damage to my hp. I felt the distinctive taste of stealable metals in my mouth.
“What happened?” asked Fernando, eyes wide open, the Calico catgirl attacking him properly skewered by the shadow-Mariana.
I spat blood to the side, onto a dirty coffee cup over one of the tables. “I pleasured a female without getting anything in exchange. That elicited an autoimmune response from my well-concealed misogyny.”
“You need to start seeing women as people, dude. They are not bad at all.”
“That’s the problem: I hate people at large too.” I casually swung Mariana and decapitated my blonde attacker. Mariana went woosh.
Fernando pierced the heart of a lunging catgirl and instantly pulled his Mariana back to parry the claw of another and hit it in the face with the bitch’s tail-handle. “But people often are fine. They are lovely, they are helpful…”
“They are forgetful.”
Fernando’s smile turned to a dissatisfied frown for a second, and then a smile again. “You son of a bitch. You… this… nibbling on your head.”
I glanced upwards and noticed a catgirl had managed to latch on my scalp and was biting and scratching with the full intent of killing me. I pointed at her with my index finger. “Limited edition hat.”
“Kill her?” he suggested as he casually crushed the skull of a catgirl under his boot.
Then a girly scream ripped through the café, and I pulled my thermos out of the inventory. While Fernando rushed to aid Cornelio — the screamer, probably — and the girls, I poured a bottle of holy water inside it, closed the lid as firmly as I could, shook it a bit, and flipped it over my head.
“Walter, won’t you help, you idiot? Your party is in danger!” Fernando beckoned. But I didn’t turn, for cool guys don’t look at explosions.
La K’onga started playing from inside the thermos, and I knew the dungeon would soon … not be a dungeon anymore. I approached the redheaded Catgirl and cradled her limp, unconscious body. “You are too stupid to die. I will protect you.”
I kept ignoring my limited edition, angry hat, but only for a few moments, for a violent wave of heat, Fernet Branca —I tasted it— and mangled Spanish hit us, washing around everyone present, obliterating the catgirls and reducing our non-Mariana-wielding or non-Mariana-being allies to 1 hp.
As for the café… it got demoted to past tense.