The battle proceeded as you can imagine, with Kalon trying to hit a guard dog with a soft puppy and ending up full of scratches and puncture wounds, lying on the floor, serving as a rug for the young female Rottweiler to sleep on.
“Guh, she’s too powerful,” the boy muttered, feeling the weight of his oppressor over his back. And also her tongue, because she was pretty adept at licking her beds. Jagger snored loudly against Kalon’s newest sworn enemy. After all, a puppy ought to do what a puppy ought to do.
“Hells and heavens, Brunhilda, what have you done?” Exclaimed a man wearing a shirt with a gridded pattern as he came out of the nearest home and witnessed his pet sleeping over a bloodied eleven-year-old.
Jagger raised his head, shook the grogginess out of his system, cleared his throat and spoke. “Good sir, I am Jagger, and this thing with no need for normal amounts of blood is Kalon. He follows the Road of the Rottweiler, and we are seeking other dogs of my breed so he can cultivate. Could you lend your help?”
The middle aged, rotund man scratched his stubble. “I am always willing to aid a youngster in need of a training ground. Drag him inside, we are going to do something about his wounds.”
Jagger raised an eyebrow as hairy as the rest of him. “Aren’t you going to comment on the fact I am a talking puppy?”
“I have seen stranger things in this valley.” He turned his head to look at the frozen lightning bolt illuminating the street. “That’s a magnificent example,” he sentenced, nodding and giving passionate a kiss to his pipe before exhaling a cloud of black and orange smoke shaped like a Rottweiler. “So, he wants to cultivate Rottweilers?”
“Yes. Pardon him, he is an inhabitant of this gods forsaken place.”
“Oh, little one, this place isn’t forsaken by gods. It’s just their playground.”
Jagger realized that this was even a worse prospect, but didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, I cannot drag Kalon inside, he weights way more than me.”
“Are you sure? You are the fattest Rottweiler puppy I have ever seen.”
Jagger rolled his eyes. “I am fed by this moron’s family. Hypercalorical doesn’t even begin to describe my diet.”
The man exhaled a cloud of smoke that grew tendrils, and those grabbed Kalon, grasping firmly at his mauled arms and legs. Brunhilda stepped off of Kalon’s back to aid in his hauling. It always came after the mauling, the hauling, and before the howling, the hauling.
Jagger stepped to a side to let the magic construct and his peer (that, by all he knew, could have been a sister or cousin or aunt of his) introduce Kalon to the building. The cultivator threw a fit while going through the door, hitting his shins with the frame and letting out a cry that made the gods check their mail for failed pipe bombs.
The inside of the man’s house was full of smoking pipes, bongs, vapes, boxes of dried herbs that sometimes resembled tobacco, and an aquarium that contained a single snorkeled capybara stuffed inside.
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“What’s that?” Jagger asked, pointing at the rodent.
“Cabbage, he eats it,” answered the smoke cultivator.
“I… Okay.” Jagger desisted. That was just a giant rat squeezed in a too small squared, topless bottle and that was it.
They placed the moaning cultivator upon a towel on the floor, and gathered around him.
“Do you want to euthanize him or heal him?” The kind man asked.
“Why is that even a question?”
The man nodded and began gathering smoke around his fist, making it coil like matter falling into a black hole because gravity is not racist.
Jagger raised a paw “Wait, is that healing or euthanizing smoke?”
The man smirked and nodded. “I will put him out of his suffering.”
“I will bring the bandages, then,” said Jagger, and raised his head to look around.
The host shook his hand, dispersing the smoke, and sighed. “Not today, Brunhilda,” he muttered, and then moved to a nearby cupboard to grab the elements necessary to provide Kalon some first aid.
----------------------------------------
When Kalon woke up, he looked like the toilet paper roll of a serial killer. His whole body ached, scrambling to his feet felt like an achievement, and the image of Brunhilda panting in front of him was both terrifying and confusing. “What… you bit me.”
Brunhilda poked her tongue out, as if mocking him. Then, her owner came from behind the drapes that served as a door to the guest room. “How are you feeling, Kalon?”
“Wrong, the bed is… soft. Waterlike.”
“Yeah, that’s foreign technology. It’s called a mattress.”
Jagger resisted the urge to poop on the nearest untarnished surface. For the house of a serial smoker, the tiles on the floor were pretty clean. Kalon reached for Jagger with a hand, and for Brunhilda’s tail with the other. Brunhilda began snarling.
“Shhh,” said Kalon, and closed his eyes. He tried to visualize the churri —the vital energy— coursing through him, and through the dogs. Thousands of little Rottweilers making their way through the spiritual veins of his body.
Sadly, that couldn’t be: Kalon suffered from aphantasia. The images tried to come to fruition, but they had no canvas of a mind to be painted over. So, for Kalon, meditation was not very different from the minutes before sleeping.
Fearing the reproach of her owner, Brunhilda had accepted the invading hand upon her butt. It was common for humans to touch canine butts, nothing weird about it. But trying to be used as a cultivation implement felt wrong. She glanced at Jagger with whale eyes, as if screaming for help.
Jagger let out a huff and closed his eyes. Maybe, if he wished it really hard, he would still his own heart and be spared from Kalon. Then, he opened his eyes, realizing there was still a question that needed an answer. “Oi, benefactor, how are you called?”
“Jagger,” said the man.
“Yes, that’s my name, but what’s yours?”
“One out of five men in this vale are called Jagger as sure as eight out of ten dentists recommend Whiskas after every bath. It also being the name of a dog is a sort of collateral damage,” he shrugged a took a long and deep puff of his pipe, exhaling golden smoke out of his wide nostrils afterwards. “Call me Big Jay if you feel better that way, thought”
“Well, Big Jay, do you think there is a way for Kalon to experience a breakthrough soon?”
The man shook his head with a graveness seldom seen in the vale. “He lost a fight against Brunhilda. I bet she didn’t even bite him.”
“Yes, Kalon decided that the teeth, being white, should be the weak spots, and when slapping them didn’t work, he tried with other body parts. Brunhilda only bit him near the end to make him stop trying to throw me onto her carnassials.”
Kalon began snoring. Minds devoid of even the simplest thoughts are a good cure for insomnia.
“It takes a village to train some cultivators, but even for a continent this lad would be a challenge. Besides, hasn’t the elder appointed some dedicated trainer to him?”
“I don’t think they trust Kalon to remember things such as breathing for long. “
Big Jay closed his eyes and slumped on a nearby chair. Wise are the people of this place, sometimes.