When they brought out the first two children, Cutbastra frowned. Two was one more than the necessary. When they brought out the fourth and fifth, he licked his lips out of nervousness. By the time they brought out the tenth, he was looking at the younglings the way a dog looks at a vacuum cleaner. When the fifteenth child called Jagger came out, he looked around, trying to spot hidden magical mirrors. When the eighteenth, that was a girl, joined the veritable daycare in front of him, the immortal was shaking, his elixir of true beauty quivering in his hand as his eyelids and lips twitched. Cutbastra began hollering in horror when the twenty-second inbred abomination joined the ranks of sacrifices. By the twenty-eighth, he had been toughened by experience, numbed down by it. He had drunk all his guilt and found out it wasn’t alcohol free. He was casually sipping from the elixir as he spoke to the damned.

“…So, if you go to heaven, and I don’t say you will, but if it exists, and if it has cocaine, try it: It’s amazing and once you are dead, it has no negative side effects…”

“Cutbastra! They are children!” Oracle chided.

“Yeah, but they won’t be for long,” Cutbastra said, and then broke into an ugly cry.

Kalon, who was witnessing the scene, hidden— in his mind, at least— behind the immortal’s back, readied Jagger (the puppy) to slap the immortal in the head. Again.

Whomp! Jagger slammed against Cutbastra and he didn’t even flinch. He turned with a soft smile and grabbed Kalon’s forearm before he pulled back.

“Kalon, Kalon, dear, you need to put your wrist into it, you need more killing intent. You are using a weapon without sharpness, your personality needs to add all the edge.”

“Did you just call a dog a weapon, friend?” Oracle asked.

Cutbastra’s spirits suddenly crumpled down like a dog rehomed to a farm downstate. In the Mariana’s trench, to be more specific.

“This place has broken me, Oracle. I begin to believe what can kill me is not a weapon, a deft hand or a secret technique, but their sheer, heaven defying stupidity,” he said with a gravity often unheard of in flat-earther circles.

Whomp! Jagger’s fat hit straight into Cutbastra’s perfect cheek. “Hey, hey, Kalon, could you hit my back? I need to release some stress and, you know, a massage could help me.”

“Much obliged, villain.” Kalon politely said, and then obeyed him who had just become his arch nemesis.

“A bit lower… there,” he moaned after something cracked.

Jagger (The one we almost care about, not the other forty that had gathered there so far) was whining. The crack hadn’t come precisely from the immortal’s back. “Ah, so that’s what the channels in equisetum are,” the Rottweiler suffered yet another botanical epiphany. At this rate, he would be getting a master’s degree before Kalon took even his second step towards immortality.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The next hit embedded Dragon Ball Gt’s “Sola nunca estarás” ending in Jagger’s brain, revealing him the existence of Spanish, which caused him a migraine unrelated to being used as a beating stick. “Loving heavens, what have these monsters done to the N letter? It has a cousin with a toupee!”

“Great, the puppy has lost it. The last trace of sanity in this village is gone," Oracle lamented.

The servile wives brought the last batch of brats in front of the Cutbastra. The denuded tree felt particularly indecent and illegal, and tried to grow her leaves back faster. So many young eyes upon her delicate bark would earn her the axe if she didn’t do anything to amend the situation.

“So, forty-seven children called Jagger, not one more?” Cutbastra asked.

“Not one less, either,” confirmed Oracle.

“Children!” Cutbastra addressed the crowd, and from toddlers to preteens everyone stopped weeping and turned to him in sepulchral silence. Simultaneously. The immortal was taken aback by the image of a horde of unblinking underage zombies. “ Could you, like, kill yourselves?”

One of the Jaggers shrugged and broke his own neck without questioning. Not one turned his attention away from Cutbastra as that happened.

Jagger the puppy barfed all over the immortal, and the barf turned back into little living chickens and sugar canes when touching his wondrous aura.

“What the fuck. That’s a new one.” The immortal commented, picking up one of the little birds. “People should barf on me more often.” Then, Cutbastra focused again on the silent, staring children. He took a pebble form the ground, and flicking it with a single finger, obliterated the heads of three preteens that were randomly, but fortuitously, aligned. Among a rain of gore and a suspiciously intact eyeball chaos ensued and the children tried to escape, only to be caught by horny housewives in want of a little favor from Cutbastra. “That’s it, mommies, give up your own children for some of this.” He gestured at his own body. “Damn I am good. And sad. I just killed three children.”

“Consider that, as you are immortal, the amount of children you have killed per day lived will infinitely approach zero,” Oracle dispensed his skink wisdom.

“That’s somehow even worse, their lives reduced to numbers.” he gestured with his open hand towards the gathered, struggling, scared children in front of him, rounded like sheep by sex-starved matures in their area. “Look at them, they… What?”

One of the beheaded children still stood, his hands looking for a head that wasn’t there. He would have been coughing blood if he had retained, you know, the anatomical means to do so. Instead, it poured out his severed neck, staining his white robes.

“Oh, that’s Culmino’s brother. His family can live up to a bit more than a week without a head, which gives them the opportunity to mate, whatever that means.” Kalon began explaining, and the fear of death overtook Cutbastra’s face. “They sort of… run out of water and die afterwards.”

“Did you just thought?” Jagger the Rottweiler said, scared too, hanging from Kalon’s iron grip.

“I learned that back in the day at school.”

“Back in the day when you went to school, you mean?” Cutbastra suggested, a flame of hope igniting in his heart. Perhaps the people of Valelike vale were just eccentric, after all.

“I… I think he means he attended school a single day. Ever,” Jagger the puppy said.

Kalon nodded effusively.

The flame in Cutbastra’s heart looked for the nearest water gun and committed suicide, leaving the whole place ashen and wet, even knowing they had hired no heart-janitor.

The immortal grabbed a few more pebbles that lay at his feet. “Fine, let’s do this fast.”