Some men would give anything to watch their enemies die around them. Cutbastra was not one of those men, those weren’t his enemies, and the rain of bullets pelted the streets, reducing the crime and murder rate of the Seventh-world country he found himself in. If he looked to his right, a shower of lead was putting a stop to a robbery, and spawning another two as people gathered to scoop up the bullets, which they intended to sell at the local scrapper. Cutbastra knew it was useless: the bullets were made of spiritual energy; they were not long for this world. Had they been made of actual lead, though, and with the added iron hemoglobin provided, they would have fetched their collectors a small fortune that they could spend in luxury goods—loaves of bread, for example.

He extended his neck to look at the angry gun-eagle hanging like a sort of aluminum-plated moon in the sort of sky. A giraffe reaching for the tender sprouts of freedom.

“Psst,” he Coca-Cola-opened at his enemy. “Psssssst,” He rattlesnaked, trying to gather the attention of the continuously-firing flying armada.

Mic paid no heed.

Oracle peeked out of the pocket of his friend just in time for a bullet to hit him in the head, bouncing off of it, making him see stars.

Cutbastra’s indignation spoke for him, his fists buried on his sides like he was a fine piece of pottery. “Hey, you, in the sky, your projectiles gave my friend’s brain a shaking and a stirring.”

“This is not the sky, this is the void left after the locals robbed the sky and sold it for byproducts of the fabrication of cocaine.”

Cutbastra dropped his hands. He could let his enemy destroy the place, turn it to a smoking wasteland. Improve its living standards, so to speak. But no, he had suffered a lot to be there. He had fucked things no man had fucked, subjected himself to fetishes long dead. He had to face the woman he had cucked.

“I am here, let these innocent…” He made a little pause, reconsidering his words, “mostly innocent…” a second pause. He was still off, “mostly barely guilty… I give up. Let this wretched nest of rejects exiled by sentient turds from the foulest of sewers in peace.”

Believe it or not, Cutbastra still felt he had missed the target with that description.

“Let me kill you with a little struggle and I may consider shooting them faster, so as to end sooner,” The metallic voice of the eagle boomed through the land, getting stolen at every nook and cranny, under every misbuilt shanty, over every mangy-but-fat dog that would get slaughtered and his remains boiled in capybara oil (it exists, really. It’s made from the fats of the rodent. Capybaras are rodents. Argentinians call them Carpinchos. And they make oil out of them. And they mix that with honey in an accursed concoction they consume to attain unnatural sexual, football playing, and healing powers. Barbaric, if you ask me.) come some unpurloinable New Year.

Cutbastra’s fingers met his manly but delicate chin. That was an actually decent offer.

“Can you add something else to the deal? I am considering it, but it’s still not quite good enough.

Mic regarded him with his laser-pointer eyes, whose beams converged on Cutbastra’s unblemished forehead. “Bullets.”

Cutbastra shook his head, his golden ponytail swaying graciously from side to side.

“Rockets.”

The face of the defender of Cabaret said one, and only one thing: Never utter that ominous word again so long as I draw breath.

Mic held a moment of silence as his violence-simmered brain processed the situation. “Squirrels?”

“That’s not related to military-level weaponry!” Oracle protested, coming back to Cabaret. “Outrageous!”

“Ouirageous when it’s positive, friend. Squirrels are very lethal. Seven hundred years ago, the soldier with most registered kills baited people into thinking they were safe from his sword and fists by keeping their distance. That’s when he pulled out the squirrels, the perfect long range weapon for a cultivator. Imbibing the little ones in his vital energy, he blew the heads of his enemies with a single rodent throw. Bam!” He slammed the back of his hand into his palm. “A specialized weapon, but one of historical importance. Squirrels and war are no strangers to each other,” he concluded his discourse by inflating his chest, proud of his knowledge of esoteric warfare.

Oracle’s head snapped to the side, putting as much force as he could on the movement. “No, it seems I cannot break my own neck. Do I even have a neck?” He lamented shortly after.

“well, no, I don’t accept the deal. Do you surrender or do we dance?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The apparition of several red dots upon Cutbastra’s body clued him in about Mic’s answer. He or she or whatever was not looking for the white flag, so to speak.

Wetting his thumb with saliva, Cutbastra began rubbing onto the laser dots, erasing them. “I am the man who buttfucks logic and gets it pregnant and forces it to get a reverse abortion in the back alley of a cave full of mineral dogs. Do you really think it is a good idea to defy me?”

The massive bird tilted its head. “Pretty much.”

Cutbastra closed his eyes and revealed his palms. “Pretty is among the adjectives I hear the most when people speak about my person.”

Mic’s every compartment opened, uncovering long cannons, missiles so varied they would get an Englishman to revolutionize the field of biology, and an obscene number of lenses and scopes to aid with aiming, because if you are gonna rain death upon the heathens, you better have them well identified.

Cutbastra licked his hand and groomed himself a bit, pulled a mirror form his pocket dimension to check his teeth. He couldn’t face death without looking presentable.

Mic exploded forth. A wave of unbearable heat expanded fort as hundreds of pieces of artillery ignited and shot, missiles and bullets all heading towards Cutbastra, who was checking his nose for pimples.

And all of the bullets intended to strike true, yet none reached the cucktivator’s tender flesh. A swarm of locals jumped out of the shanties and alleys and horse carts and between them, fingers faster than the speed of sound, dismantling the projectiles midflight for their valuable metals. Cutbastra may have been powerful, but the locals had millions of collective years of experience in the field of scrapping.

The flying metallic eagle was befuddled. “What the impoverished heavens did just happen?”

Cutbastra stepped forward and looked down: his shoes had also been redistributed. “Do you want to go fight at a place with population we would actually mind killing? Or a deserted place, whichever you prefer.”

“Yes, let us go and free some sandniggers. From themselves.”

Oracle held a stare to his friend. “Won’t you comment about the casual racism?”

“I am four centuries old. It reminds me of home.”

Mic let out a shrill bout of laughter. “Then let’s go to your hometown: allow me to kill those you care about.”

The cultivator sat upon the ground, and began scribbling nonsense in the dirt of the streets with a single finger. “You cannot do that. My avatar did it first.”

“I am glad for your loss.”

Cutbastra sprouted from the ground in a single movement, hand pointing at the sky. “Let’s take our fight above the clouds, where the locals cannot steal from us.”

A sneaky hobo emerged out of an open sewer —in the dirt streets, yes. Don’t question the narrator, people. “You have no idea what we can or cannot steal. One time there was this thing where the moon gets in front of the sun. The total eclipse area was in Gerrison, millions of broken crack pipes away from here. And with some elbow grease — and grease from other body parts too, as being well lubricated is an essential part of the job — we managed to bring it here.”

“You stole a solar eclipse?” Mic asked, with a rather curious expression on its beak.

“I am afraid that’s not my field. I steal tooth cavities,” he put up the most rotten smile Cutbastra had ever seen. The teeth had holes that went through them, and the holes had smaller holes in them, and the smaller holes stared at you, straight into your soul, and infused in it the terror of one in ten dentists. “I will steal any and all you have for a little fee.”

“You… could steal my money too,” Cutbastra offered, pulling a little bag of coins from his orb, shaking it twice, and blinking. Fatal mistake, that last one, as the bag instantly poofed away from his hand.

The hobo extended two fingers in a friendly gesture, his oily hands shining under the sun. “Not my field of expertise, but Lucas, as you didn’t see, is the fastest one we have. He steals money fast enough to fend off inflation in several neighboring countries.”

“Such power,” Mic uttered, trembling, gunpowder dripping out of its metallic cloaca.

Cutbastra scratched the back of his head and let out a little laugh. “Ehm, yes, interesting. We need to, kind of, kill each other, so we would be thankful if you could point us to an area where our attacks wouldn’t get abstracted. Somewhere far away that—” Cutbastra wanted to continue his sentence, but he noticed the ending of it had gotten pickpocketed out of his brain. “Son or daughter of a female dog!”

“How is this hellish place called, so I have a name for the wasteland I shall create after I get rid of Cutbastra?”

“The real name was stolen, so we call her the four-o-four,” The hobo stated, and then checked his luxurious watch in the few seconds it was tangible, before seemingly poofing out of existence.

Cutbastra extended his hand to the Hobo, thankful for the information provided, and only then he noticed the breeze and his bare shoulder. “How in the yiffing hell did they yoink the shirt I was wearing? And where’s Oracle?”

“In the black market, most likely. Let me check.” The hobo turned his head towards the flap of his jacket, fiddled a bit with his hand inside it, and pulled a confused Oracle out.

“I have seen things you entities wouldn’t believe. Defense enmities burning on the head of Orion, bright as Dark Lords,” he stated puzzlingly.

“Fella is so traumatized he pulled a Blade runner, a fandom terminology, a Head and Shoulders and a Mu Online reference in merely two sentences. This city does that to the stolen ones.”

Mic blinked. Cutbastra blinked. Oracle tried until he crashed head on against reality, and then licked his eyes.

“We can check out other universes to make socks go missing. Enough robberies in a single place curve spacey timey stuff inwards, like gravity,” The hobo explained, his dirty finger describing circles in the air. “Our city used to be bigger, then a fella stole a baby sock made out of antimatter. Three blocks around him blew up before we could steal enough energy from the explosion to save our home, you hear? Since then we have rules about which universes we can steal from.”

“I’d shoot you if I had unstealable projectiles.”

“I’d cuck you if stealing your wife wouldn’t be seen as a local custom.”

“I’d blink, had they not thieved off my eyelids.”

Then Cutbastra explained to his traumatized friend that he never had eyelids to begin with, and turned to run away from that place, gesturing for Mic to follow. And as a denuded Cutbastra ran away, Mic thought only one thing: that toned ass would be prefect for nuclear target practice.