To Jagger’s disgust, The Childender beat every child he faced on the tournament, even managing a home run with a petite girl that followed the Road of Beekeeping and fought with a total of three bees on her side.
But we don’t care about that.
Crusadina walked through the busy market with her pupils turned to fractals of siege hooks and Greek fire. Nothing could contain her power, her spirit. For the little girl, the stalls weren’t full of turgid apples and oranges, they were full of projectiles. The crowded street needed to turn into deserted plains. She wore a hooded cape and kept her head covered, not to draw attention to herself. Katie stood on her shoulder, full size, wearing a hood too. One could say many things about Crusadina’s idea of going unnoticed, but not that it was internally incongruent.
Her stomach grumbled, and she raised an eyebrow at the feeling. “Why does it do that?”
“You are hungry, dear.” Katie explained with her soft siege voice.
“I thought that at this level of cultivation I wouldn’t have to eat anymore!” she caviled.
“You are rushing through levels at an unprecedented pace. Some perks take longer to develop. You may be at Global Greek Fire Corporatocracy cultivation level, but your quick advance made you pay a hefty price. In time, you will develop all the skills you left behind, but, until then, Crusadina, you are at a disadvantage against others that have walked an equivalent depth on their roads.”
She stomped on the ground once, making the whole market meet a three on the Richter scale, and pouted. “Fine, let’s search for something to—”
Then a blue-bedecked rump, ostensibly attached to the woman in front of it, hit Crusadina on the side of her head as it passed by. This ass, dear reader, toppled the cultivator, made her crumble onto the floor like she wanted to make so many empires crumble (using siege engines, not her ass).
Katie extended a helping wheel. “Crusadina, are you fine?”
“Thoroughly traumatized by the dimensions of that caboose, but fine otherwise.”
With the help of the manifestation of her road, Crusadina got her footing, and looked around to reorient herself. The pile of crushed bodies wearing colorful clothes by her side was probably a result of Katie falling from her shoulder and rolling over them, so it wasn’t particularly worrisome.
She spotted a stand of an old man who stood solemnly, an old and tall figure surrounded by hanging chicken carcasses. Then, Crusadina “inherited” a couple of wallets from the mound of victims and headed towards a short grocery shopping trip.
“Hello, I want two,” she said to the man, and the old but healthy geezer looked at her with eyes so blue and a heart so strong and pure that it was a miracle no house with a wooden floor had come claim him.
“Are you sure you can handle two of them at once, little girl?” The kind man said.
“I am a veteran in the fine art of eating chicken, sir,” she flexed and patted her right bicep. “These siege cannons don’t feed on veggies.”
“Did you pick up a dumbbell once five years ago and keep showing off the results to this day, you scrawny tart?” The man slapped himself and blinked twice. “Sorry dear, I have my sensibilities and sometimes they win over my passionate heart. You want two roosters?”
Crusadina’s lips were a thin line. She needed chicken farmers alive. She needed chicken farmers alive… “I don’t care about the sex of the chicken.”
“Well, I only slaughter and sell roosters. Hens remain at home to produce more chicken and eggs, as you may imagine.”
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“Gimme those two up there, if you would be so kind, good sir.”
“Richard.”
Crusadina remained silent and moment, and then expressed her confusion with a “huh?”
“The roosters here, they are called Richard.”
Katie approached, used a glue stick to add a couple of googly eyes on her frame, blinked with them, took them off before the glue got dry, and said: “Huh?”
“All my roosters are called Richard.”
“Why?” girl and catapult asked in unison.
The man inflated his chest with pride
“I am the only poultry farmer in the city that can claim that all his cocks are Dicks.”
Crusadina grimaced loudly. “I need an adult.”
Their cute conversation got interrupted by a frutal beam breaking through the market. It was as wide as Kalon’s mom, smelled like strawberries, looked like conspiracy pink that isn’t pink and it’s instead a lie of the elites to spy on us by making us think it’s just pink, and it obliterated through the civilians as if we cared about them. For the record: we do not, and neither did the poultry seller, that handed the girl the chicken and Took the wallets form her hands while she was awestruck by the situation.
When the scream-ridden silence settled after the massacre, Crusadina and Katie ignored for a second the steaming pair of butt cheeks that had landed next to them, and eavesdropped on the indoor-voice-disabled individual with long, red hair and cargo shorts across the street. “So this is my problem, see? I am the best writer you know, like, the best of the best, and I could write a very good fantasy epic, with office workers and bureaucracy and everything else the fandom fancies, but every character I write ends up turning gay. Males? Gay. Lesbians? Gay. Asexed rocks? Shapeshift into gays. And, you see, I am not gay, but the characters have, like, a life of their own, you see, and they yearn for their own sex. I once wrote a children’s story about a dog, and had to drop the quill when the dog began seeing sticks and comparing them to phalluses. Then I…” He kept on ranting, so engrossed in his tale he failed to notice that his interlocutor had skipped state. From solid to gas, I mean.
Then the girl and the manifestation of her road focused on the smoking pair of gargantuan butt cheeks lying by them. Crusadina approached, manifested a miniature battering ram that , for all intent and purposes, was just an ornamented cane with a metal ram head on top, and used it to prick the cheeks. There was no answer form the dead ass.
The survivors began gathering around the deceased booty. One had lost an arm, but he didn’t mind: that was the less dire of situations at no hand.
“Fanny, are you okay?” asked a blonde, short woman whose voice was that of an angel—a cherub that was a fan of Alvin and the Chipmunks, specifically.
“Fanny, are you okay?” asked the amputated-and-instantly-cauterized man.
“Are you okay, fanny?” asked Katie.
Crusadina turned, beholding the lanky, black leather clad man holding a giant strawed cup as a mace, resting it across his shoulders. “You have been shit by…”
“You have been blown up by…” added Katie.
“A smoothie criminal!” claimed a random bystander that had just got over the shock of getting all of his friends turned to red mist by the foreigner.
With a wide and smug smile, the fashionable villain spoke, revealing teeth so white that one could assume he, unlike the localss, brusshed his teeth sseveral timess a day. “This place looks like the empire I rule… and I have never been an emperor.”
Crusadina crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second, arriving in front of the man with her arms preemptively crossed, still holding the two chickens. “You are late: this place is scheduled for total destruction. I will burn these despicable walls to the ground.”
The fruit juice cultivator produced a banana smoothie his thigh sleeves, squeezing the cup out in a cartoonish way, and began drinking it. “ I am at the Vanilla Chocolate Cinnamon Apple Banana Smoothie Realm, girl, there’s no way a brat can beat m—“ he got interrupted by the sweet kiss of a chicken carcass against his cheek.
Crusadina’s eyes shone as bright as the library of Alexandria. She vaulted backwards, landing upon a stone bench that escaped the fruity massacre. She hung the chickens from her belt, somehow. Tied them by the tendons or I don’t know, she just holstered the poultry there, people. “I have no fucking idea how powerful that is, but what can smoothies do against an army?” In blinks, around her, the siege engines of her soul began manifesting into the real world. Wood and metal at the service of destruction formed into trebuchets, rams, catapults, forks, and towers. A veritable army devoid of infantry or cavalry formed behind their severely illegal commander, clogging the street.
Crusadina cracked her knuckles and the shockwave staggered her opponent.
“Kono powa!” he unknowingly Jojoreferenced. Then, without losing time… what the unholy tarnished fuck am I writing… whatever… action scene incoming, got to verb fast… he readied his giant strawberry smoothie: a plastic mace in one end, a deadly straw-cannon on the other. He extended the mace end towards Crusadina, holding the massive weapon with one hand and describing a line with his body, as if he were a fencer. “I am not losing to a brat.” He replaced his smile with an ugly frown. “Come, wall hater, and pray that you are lactose tolerant!”