“Kalon, buddy, listen, I have an idea to kill the yellow thingy,” Jagger said, putting on big, trusty eyes as a façade.

Kalon stared briefly at the magnanimous, colossal organelle soaring above them and Yggsdrashell, descending slowly to add drama to the situation. “But… it’s green.”

“I am daltonic you stupidly retarded fuck!” Jagger was taken aback by his own insult. “Sorry, I am sensitive about that issue. I need you to trust me on this one.”

“I trust you, friend.” Kalon patted his dog in the head, and Jagger felt loved by the idiot. He forced himself to discard the feeling: it was not a moment for love: it was moment for wartime tactics.

“Well, I will go into the cave, see? And, while you distract him, I will search for some one-in-a-million, peerless ancient artifact that will allow us to kill that green thingy.” He gestured at the chloroplast with his nose.

“Yeah, like in the Elder’s stories! Let’s do this!” Kalon hit his right fist against his left palm and winced in pain. Punching an open wound of oneself got archived inside his tiny brain as a bad idea.

Jagger’s eyes glazed over, rendering him temporarily blind. The wiper washers of his body (AKA eyelids) entered in action frantically, working tirelessly to remove the crystallized tears from his cornea. “Anyhow… good luck, buddy. Make sure to dodge its attacks until I come back with the item. Alright?”

“Alright, go, I’ll keep him, uh, entertained!” Kalon said.

Jagger ran back into the cave, where he lay on the floor and yawned with disinterest. “I can believe it worked. It’s Kalon after all. Hope he keeps being Kalon until I figure out a solution for our little issue. Am I talking alone? Yes I am. Who’s a loony boy? Who’s a loony boy? I am. Yes, I am.” He tried madness to see if it fit him, and then wrote it off as silly.

Kalon licked the wound on his hand as he looked at the enemy looming over him, at its bubbling membranes of madness, a sight that would have made even hardened war veterans lose their minds. But for the chloroplast’s misfortune, it was facing a boy that had no mind to lose.

The boy raised his hand and channeled his vital energy on it, giving form to a Rottweiler puppy. Burio the masochist had come back to the world of the living, and it showed its little white teeth to the challenger.

The thylakoids came down in a meandering path and with diaper-tearing speed, not unlike home ownership rates among younger generations. Kalon danced through he forest of attacks, dodging with difficulty, feeling his efforts being a tad more than he could sustain with each one. In addition to this, his new short sword had opened the floodgates, and was wetting the sand all around them with patterns that dry sand farmers, if they existed, would akin to crop circles.

Eventually Kalon tried to ascend a dune and the sand under his feet gave in, and his face became the topography of terror. “No… no…” he muttered the instant before losing his footing.

The reality of Kalon falling towards it stunned the descending chloroplast in place. Even lacking a brain, it couldn’t process the event it was witnessing. The chloroplast’s stupidity was dwarfed in the face of Kalon’s.

Once Kalon realized they were in a supposedly unavoidable collision course, he extended Burio over his head, and channeled both vital energy and killer intent into the puppy. Then his trajectory changed suddenly as gravity struggled to recover control over the heretic, throwing him against the flat of a thylakoidal tentacle-blade. This in turn, bent the elastic structure and changed Kalon’s direction once more, causing him to pinball around the flat, save farts of his enemy exclusively. The God of Popcorn steadily grew in power as the boy pinballed his way to greatness. Finally, Kalon impacted against a dune, spraying smooth sand the color of a welcome dawn in the treacherous northern seas whose waters surge violet and violent from the scarred entrails of earth and purple prose all around.

Meanwhile Kalon astonishingly succeeded at dodging grievous wounds, Jagger got more and more bored inside the cave. He was a puppy, he couldn’t stand being alone with himself without breaking something for long, and the nekorrhizae weren’t helping. Now and then, Yggdrashell would curse the boy under its stomatal breath.

His ears perked up when, during another disinterested inspection of his surroundings, he spotted the old, half buried metallic bottle with a sprayed on it. That was something he could chew it to its heart content.

And when he unearthed if from the debris, he noticed it was heavier than an empty bottle should. Rolling it with his paws, he determined it was filled by liquid, and the inscription was still as clear as the day it had been printed on it, something that required professional disdain for biodegradability on the manufacturer’s part.

“Glyphosate… figures, I can probably poison myself by chewing on it. Not the kind of death I’d like to have.”

A root from Yggdrashell descended, carrying a turned-off luminescent nut on its end, and placed said nut above Jagger’s head. When the dog stood suddenly, the nut turned on, illuminating the top of Jagger’s head as if it were a lightbulb.

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“The shikimic acid pathway is not present in animal cells, so maybe I can chew on it safely. Wait… I am an idiot!” Jagger stated a truth, and the nut shone even brighter. “The shikimic acid pathway takes place inside chloroplasts! You motherfucking heavens, you betruthed my lie!”

The gods exploded in laughter and high-fived each other. Fifty years of careful planning just to annoy a talking dog had been so worth it, so much that the god of pranks tripped over the table and, due to the erection caused by the sheer success of his master plan, ended up accidentally fucking, and impregnating, the cloud that served as a floor for their apartment. The cloud moaned, then huffed and cried as it gave birth to the God of Rains of Frogs and Fishes, which grew from a baby to an adult in about a minute and joined the others in the sofa, greeting them with a fist bump. “Sup, my celestiggas.”

Jagger calmed his ire down and thought with a cold head. He needed to test if the sprayer worked, somehow, while lacking opposable thumbs. He grabbed the tube with his mouth, placed it on a flat stretch of the cave’s ground, placed himself on the non-business end of the sprayer, and tried to trigger the sprayer using one of his paws as a stopper and the other to push it, but he lacked the fine control necessary to do such task when the mechanism was so clogged with dirt and rust.

Then, being a Rottweiler, he held it in place, carefully placed his mouth around the trigger, stilting his head so the cannon faced sideways, he increased the pressure gradually.

And, reached the breaking point, fiush!

He dropped the bottle and began pumping his feet against the stone. “It worked! yes! yes! I am so excited! I… need another tramadol.”

After a second of elation, the dog picked the can back up and climbed out of the cave. Emerging from between Yggdrashell roots, he spat the can over a hollow between the nutty wood and searched for Kalon with his gaze.

Kalon, for his part, was engaged on a leisurely fight for his life. The stakes were, as implied by the previous statement, quite low: Worst case scenario, our protagonist would die. And then I would have to look for another. I mean, there’s always Crusad… ah, no, there isn’t.

Anyway, supposing we are invested in Kalon’s survival, let’s say that he was clumsily perrying the onslaught of blades that the looming enemy launched at him. Burio enjoyed this, biting the edge of the thylakoids, taking the hits instead of Kalon. He even spoke for the first time since being created. “Yes! Yes! Grant me my glorious dusk in battle, oh Lord of Sempiternal Night! Bring oblivion forth and let it rain upon us, empyrean daddy!”

We… we may ignore him going forward.

Jagger, finally spotting him among dunes and a forest of unfurled thylakoids, called out for his owner “Kalon! I found the item! You need to swish swish our enemy with it!”

The dog picked the bottle back up and rushed to his owner, distracting the chloroplast, that was bad at multitasking, and letting Kalon catch his breath. He zigzagged as the blades struck the sand around him with dry, short sounds, each impact showering him in rough fragments of quartz and feldspar

And when one of the blades was about to reach him, Kalon extended his open hand pulled with his mind, Making Jagger take uncontrolled flight until he recovered his original sword, sword that now held a veritable artifact of ancient power: agrochemicals.

Kalon despawned Burio, and he howled in lack of pain as he became undone.

Bold declarations boomed from above, a rain of the voice of their enemy as Jagger passed the bottle to Kalon.

“Die at once, mitochondria oppressors. Never more an organelle must descend from enslaved bacteria,” quoth the plastid, “Nevermore!”

And so the chloroplast accelerated his fall, thej thylakoids forming a veritable lattice of shifting scissors on its underside.

“Kalon, if this fails, we are transitioning to minced meat. I’d like you more like that, but that’s beside the point. Forget swish-swishing, we need to throw the whole bottle at the chloroplast, a sort of suicide mission if we want for someone to action it, were it to not break on the thylakoid lattice. Summon Burio back.”

“But Jagger, we will lose the ancient artifact!”

“Is that or dying, my esteemed oligophrenic. Do whatever, I don’t care either way.”

Kalon let Jagger go, closed his eyes and concentrated, he brought forth the image of Burio on his mind, and then of a leg, with a heavy boot. The leg kicked the puppy out of Kalon’s mind, manifesting it into reality with a gathering of luminous energy. “Burio, I have a suicide mission for you.”

The puppy began panting with excitement. “It will be an honor to serve and die for the cause, to become one in legend with the glory of past and future fallen warriors…” The pup began his monologue, and Kalon cut it short by giving him the bottle to hold tightly against his chest, and grabbing him from the tail.

Kalon spun the freshly-baked puppy on his side, as if Burio was a slingshot, gathering momentum to give his career as an ecoterrorist an explosive start.

“Wait for it to be closer…closer… You waited too much, now!” Jagger ordered, and Kalon let the puppy go.

“Wiiiiiii!” Burio said as he flew towards a sure death.

After a few seconds puppy and bottle impacted with the barrier of Thylakoids, and Burio got reduced to a sort of dog sashimi in an instant: bloody, finely cut, and maybe delicious. The same happened to the bottle, spilling the agrochemical all over the membranes of the chloroplast, making it enter its body swiftly. When Kalon and Jagger were already debating on whether to crouch or play limbo to buy another second of lifetime, the descent of the chloroplast stoppedsuddenly, its blades almost frozen, saving for an uncontrolled shivering on them.

“Ha! seems like someone got tryptophan withdrawal!” Jagger mocked their dying enemy.

Then, the chloroplast exploded, bathing them in loads of disgusting and sticky green goo, shutting Jagger up.

“Guh!” Kalon said, feeling the chlorophyll-rich paste defile his uncaramelized, but alive, body. “We lost the ancient artifact!” he then lamented.

Jagger was already returning to the hole in Yggdrashell: he would need Brunhilda to give him a thorough tongue bath.

“Guh, I don’t feel more powerful.” Kalon complained, and then turned towards the nutree overlord. “Also, why didn’t you help?”

“You had it under control. Besides, that’s just one. There are a few thousand more that you need to deal with.”

“That will take years at this rate!” Jagger exclaimed. “And we will need to get money for a shipment of herbicides. I can probably sell what Brunhilda forages…” he began considering his options.

“The path to immortality ain’t short, pal.” The begooed Kalon caught up with his weapon and pet. “We will kill them all, no matter how many dozens a thousand is."

“More than half a dozen of dozens of dozens,” Yggdrashell said.

Kalon guh’ed in all caps. His head hurt, and his skin tickled. Maybe a bath of nuttar would solve the latter, though.