Most of the townsfolk —except for Culmino, who dragged himself on the floor licking any pebble that caught his only ounce of attention— cleared a wide circle around the plaza, dispersing according to the idiosyncratic rules that Kalon followed when walking through a road. Jagger, held under Cutbastra’s arm as if he was a particularly fluffy bag of potatoes, had opinions about the local populace, and none was good.
“Somebody get a banana for Cousin Culmino!” Colinus the Lipstick Behemoth ordered. Nobody obeyed, for none of them were called “Somebody”.
The elder stepped out from the crowd, downed a bottle of kerosene, picked Culmino from the skin of his neck and cast him down the road, making him describe a curved trajectory that perfectly followed the path.
“Thanks, dad.”
The elder Gave his son a thumbs up and solemnly walked back into the crowd.
Cutbastra was grooming his hair with the aid of a handheld mirror that floated in front of his face. “Oracle, can you give me the hairline forecast?”
“Your hairline will be unreceding this week, friend.”
“Sweet.”
Colinus attacked first, charging forward, manifesting the fashion curses of a whole century in lieu brass knuckles. His hands turned to whorish lipstick-porcupines. A single punch connecting would put an end to that smug grin. Cutbastra bob and weaved through the punches, admiring the engorged veins on the arms of his rival as they passed a cell’s span away from his unblemished cutis. It made no sense to dodge further, to move more than it was necessary.
Coming upon Cutbastra like a collapsing drunk gorilla, Colinus decided to go for the chance of squishing the head of the immortal between his forearms, closing them suddenly, o0ne at each side of the immortal’s head. Cutbastra ducked, mainly to avoid his hairstyle getting ruined, but also because he valued a life where he didn’t suffer from explosive brain incontinence.
Cutbastra infused Jagger with his namat (the energy of vitality) and jumped backwards, flipping midair. Without letting go of Jagger, he placed the dog under his foot, to then switch into a sick Benihana grab of the puppy. He landed with the style of an angel and the whine of a Rottweiler. “Ah, sorry.” He picked Jagger back up.
Jagger didn’t know what skateboards were, so he just considered it a weird technique that resulted in him being used as a practice doll for chiropractors. Another day in his life.
Colinus breathed in deeply and let his lipstick knuckles disperse. “Punching your head off seemed simple, but you are fast for a prince charming.”
“Well, the faster I do the deed, the more men and lesbians I can cuck. The more men and lesbians I cuck, the bigger my power grows.”
“You are despicable.” Colinus cracked his knuckles. “I will enjoy infusing the road with your grey matter.”
“Please, this puppy could beat you after a few years of cultivation.”
“Please don’t involve me further into this madness.” Jagger pleaded.
Cutbastra played deaf as he slapped Jagger’s butt, making his puppyfat wave and wobble. “Absolute unit of a puppy.”
Kalon decided not to chide at the cultivator for slapping Jagger. Maybe he could use the residual power of the slap to advance somehow.
Colinus advanced again, hands like claws ready to grab his opponent and smooch him to death. He did manage to grab Cutbastra. But then the shape of the cucktivator dissolved, slipping through his fingers as if he were made of smoke. “How?”
“Lover’s scuttle,” He said with a casual tone, pacing around the big fella. “I didn’t reach immortality by being easy to pin down. Not after I faced that redheaded woman who followed the Road of Pegging. I feared, Colinus. I feared for real back then.”
“None of the horrors you faced compares to my wrath, cute bastard.”
Cutbastra smiled solemnly. Yes, that last bit was the origin of his name, for when he was born, his mother misheard his father when he uttered those same words after seeing the face of his flawless firstborn.
“You know nothing of the horrors I faced,” he threw his golden ponytail back with a dramatic gesture. “I once ran out of hair conditioner.”
“Condolences, brother in disgrace.”
“But… you are bald,” Cutbastra astutely observed.
“Not down there.”
He let out a breath he definitively knew he was holding, as it was a perfectly warmed and shaped up breath. No one else could exhale so handsomely. The women in the public subtly widened their nostrils to try and take even a single molecule of that precious carbon dioxide in. “I hate to have to do this to such a cultured brother. Carry on, come at me a last time, then it will be my turn to attack.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Calinus flipped on his back thrice, to put some distance between the two of them. This bore Cutbastra to the point that he used his Ata —the vital energy— to create a handkerchief and try to play tug of war with Jagger.
“Stop rubbing that cloth on my snout.”
“Bite it and pull, please.”
“I’ll call the special victims unit!”
Cilinus ignored them, closed his eyes, and steadied his breath. He felt the thick Zanko —Guess what this is… exactly— running through the energy channels of his body, bathing every cell, like a slurry passion-red paste destined to become a lipstick that would engulf the world. Then he projected it to the sky, invisible power coursing through the air to converge high above.
The Kunot —That which powers living beings. No, not ATP. — in the atmosphere condensed in clouds of pink and purple. Tubes of lipstick swiftly condensed inside the clouds. Sharp ones. The tubes, not the clouds. The clouds weren’t sharp. Clouds are not easy to whet, like, you try to grab them and they escape between the fingers. And if you hit them with a whetstone it just doesn’t happen, you know?
But I digress, and in the middle of an action scene no less. Woe is me.
Anyhow, the sharp lipsticks began raining with a rollin’, roarin’ fashion thunder. They were to fall upon Colinus’ quarry, obeying their master’s will, accelerating past terminal velocity in less than a second.
Cutbastra dedicated an instant to the noble act of measuring how fucked he could be. Significantly less than your mum (p < 0.0005), he concluded. He waited for the lipsticks to reach mere centimeters away from him, and then, he danced through them, avoiding sharp makeup like he avoided being glassed by angry husbands.
Cutbastra effortlessly flowed through the onslaught of lipsticks, and Colinus reduced the distance between the individual tubes, turning it from a rain to a downpour and from a downpour to a veritable barrage of overpriced beauty-enhancing products. The space between a tube of lipstick and the other was another tube of lipstick. There was no way for Cutbastra to dodge it without getting out of the bounds of the circle the public marked around them.
Jagger closed his eyes, exhaled in relief, and closed his eyes. Finally, he would be returning to nothingness. No more having to put up with Kalon, no more cultivation nonsense.
But Cutbastra didn’t plan for him nor his borrowed puppy to die. He looked dead serious at the lipsticks and filled their inexistent minds with images of the lips they held so dear being painted by other bars, by colors and brands so different. Made the lipsticks feel inadequate, insufficient. What if… what if the men and women whose natural beauty they adorned had other makeup products? They couldn’t see, they couldn’t hear, they were lipsticks. They were trapped in their own bodies, unable to find out if they were, in fact, being cucked.
The lipsticks collectively decided suicide was the only way out of this conundrum, and thus exploded midair, gifting the valley a fine multicolored mist that slowly descended from the skies.
Cutbastra cleared his throat and made an annoying tiny voice: “Mom says it is my turn to use a technique.
The world around Jagger became a blur. Aloof as only he could be, and trapped under Cutbastra’s arm, he decided it was a good time to test some bodily functions.
Yes. It worked. He could vomit. The fact the vomit hit a house and bored a hole the size of a Grand Dane on it was just a little variable introduced by the levels of inertia they were managing.
Not two seconds later, Cutbastra was back into his original position, and Colinus scratching his head, confused. He felt uncomfortable, his whole body —a lot of body, at that— was tickling slightly. Worst of all, he had seen nothing more than Cutbastra disappearing and then reappearing in the same spot.
“Illusion techniques, demon?” He asked.
“No, no, attack me. Call forth your Enshin[1], use whatever technique you would like.” He said, smiling with the confidence of him whose cheating on the exam went unnoticed.
But when Colinus tried to cycle his Oteeze —biospiritual fuel— he found himself unable to do so. His channels were clogged, no cell of his body could pass energy to another. It was like somebody had inserted corks made of a power foreign to the system into the little spiritual gates of each cell.
Cutbastra raised a finger and began pacing from side to side. “Did you know that you have more than double the cells of a normal human in that big boy body? A whooping 62,379,647,211,912, give or take a few due to cellular death and division being an ongoing process. I had to give you a gentle tap for each, as I couldn’t bother to use more than a finger to touch each millimeter of your skin. What I am trying to say is: I am not gay, despite being this handsome.” He then stopped his pacing, took a handkerchief out of the pockets of his jeans, spat on it and cleaned the pinky of his right hand using the other fingers of the aforementioned to move the piece of cloth. “Does anyone have hand sanitizer? No? Barbarians.”
Colinus disregarded his handicap and charged a last time, ready to hammer the head of the immortal with a haymaker. “Die!”
And this time, cutbastra didn’t dodge. He didn’t even move. The fist made contact, and, immediately, Colinus began wishing it hadn’t. First his wrists and hand gave out. Then his elbow articulation, and the force of the impact against the immovable object kept travelling through his unprotected body as it twisted.
With a bloodied, dislocated arm and throbbing pain coursing through his whole being. Colinus fell to the floor, screaming.
He walked up to the defeated giant and sat by his side, putting Jagger on his lap as he casually addressed his opponent “I think I am a fan of my zygomatic, answering the question about my favorite bone. My cheeks are so delicate and beloved by the mistresses, you know… But that doesn’t matter now that I get to keep all other bones intact too. So, do you give up?”
“No as long as I draw breath.” COlinus said, trying to scramble to his feet.
“Sure about that?” Cutbastra also stood, holding Jagger under his arm once more.
“Of course. Yet, I have to admit, I am beginning to feel a crawling warm on my chest as we fight, despite the struggle and the broken arm. It’s as if facing you were to still my heart at any mome…” Then Colinus noticed he, indeed, had a newfound hole in his chest, and Cutbastra was holding his still beating heart aloft.
“Do you need it back?” Cutbastra asked, serviceably.
Colinus’ Goth-girl-thighs-pale head nodded.
Cutbastra inserted the heart back into its place. Upside down, because he was no cardiologist.
What followed, naturally, is that Colinus fucking died.
----------------------------------------
[1] The vital energy.