by Yuli Ban
As we saw ourselves, we both made noises of disgust. What was on myself that was on her? And vice versa! Oh yuck, it was all brown and greasy.
Batzor also laughed. Its broken face then said, "I am pleasantly surprised, El Sexorcisto! You are the first who has ever accomplished my task with no loss to yourself. Go forth and claim victory!"
And all pieces disintegrated into smoke except for one cap in the center that bounced and swiveled several times before coming to a stop. As I focused on it, words lifted from upon it.
The first step I took exuded real energy, and I consciously stopped myself just to make sure I wasn’t falling over. Yet when I took a moment to gauge how I felt, I realized that my body no longer ached. Indeed, I was fully healed! Leveling up restored my health, stamina, and mana in full.
With that, I grinned and jogged on over to Batzor’s broken corpse. When I picked it up, the material felt like porcelain in my fingers, and the grooves of its face— the wrinkles, the dimples, the cheeks— felt soft like gel. For several minutes, I had fun checking the front and back.
Ana said, "Oh wow. Oh wow. You actually killed that thing."
"Yes, and I still don't know what exactly just happened."
She still sounded so weak when she said, "I'll explain on the way back."
So I said to her, “We’ve got to get you help first, darling.” And this came from a place of honest concern— now that I was in the light, I could see that her entire body had been nigh-eviscerated by the tornado. Who knows how much damage we took from being sucked through the drain.
How did that even happen in the first place?
No, no. No more questions. That was behind me. No more thought. Only action. Only action.
Ghosts of Gunpowder
The sky was the color of a dead movie screen showing a Nazi propaganda reel. Everything about the evening was grey and lifeless, with the only motion coming from the gusts brushing the trees and sweeping away leaves. The few pedestrians running along the street wore the same color— black. Well, not exactly. Some wore grey. A few were daring enough to wear navy blue. But the gist was the same: Amville was not a city of color, no matter how much the neon tried to tell me otherwise.
What's more, I didn't appreciate some of the subtler means of drawing back to the 1950s. I didn't mention it before, but on the hotel that had been destroyed, there was a plaque. As I left the sewers, that plaque was sitting on the ground far away from the rubble and emergency services tending to the devastation. I stepped over to it and saw my reflection within the words: "Humans Only."
If there was any consolation, there was a bullet hole next to 'Only', and I wanted to believe that some soul must have thought it to be a mockery of serious old beliefs. Either way, I wasn't entirely sad to see the hotel gone.
Ana, though— she was still shaken from the experience. She said as much to me: "I've never been in a tornado before. That was awful."
I walked over and wrapped my arm around her, bringing her closer to me. In my free hand, I had Batzor's Core. Just round the corner, there was a liquor and Mary Jane store, and I knew Ana would appreciate such a stop. However, I had no money on myself and thus had to break her poor heart by passing it by with the promise that we would eventually give the place a run.
The wind picked up. There was a sustained gale that pushed me hard enough to make me brace myself. However, I remembered Hurricane Sinatra Jr.’s midnight approach and knew that whatever happened next would certainly have quite the ambient atmosphere.
Lo and behold, the rest of my harem called out to us from down the street, though I couldn’t initially hear them over the whistle of the trees. Maria came over and took the Core, lifting it up to a street lamp to better inspect its details.
"It was so bizarre to see from a distance," Tatiana said. "The tornado never touched down."
My head cocked towards her. "What are you saying?"
"It stopped near the top floor," Olga said.
Tatiana added, "Yeah. That was the strangest thing— it looked like a tornado because of how big it was, but the funnel only touched the building. Then it died out instantly."
I looked to Ana, but she was licking her paw and rubbing her hair, undoubtedly a feline motion to clean herself— though I didn’t want to imagine what she was tasting. Since I didn't have her attention, I looked to the mass of debris.
"Yes, big man. That's my thought as well." I locked eyes with Maria.
Those hypnotic empty eyes.
Then I remembered how she knew and grinned. "It seems someone doesn't want me alive anymore."
Olga said, "I'm sure that could describe plenty of people, to be honest. Considering what you did last week, you probably killed hundreds of millions. It's only because your name isn't in the newspapers that no one's tried to snuff you yet."
"This just in!" cracked a car’s radio. "Batzor has been defeated. Repeat, Batzor has been defeated! This momentous happening is the result of a Player named Alexei Sistar, who is currently located in the affected city of Amville. More information to come as it develops! Dance in the streets, all ye of Amville who have lost loved ones and destroyed your harems to this monster!"
I threw my head to Olga and shouted, "You want to keep talking, then?"
She shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Don't look at me; I'm an elf."
"Oh, and what's that got to do with it?"
"Everything, sweetheart. Elves are a noble and pure race."
I scowled. "Elves are—" But I stopped myself. That was all behind me. I didn't need to rage against elves anymore. Olga was one of the good ones. “Anyway, Tats, honey— does your tit milk heal catgirls?”
She smiled and said, “Nope!”
I frowned. “So it only works in certain situations?”
“No, I mean it only works on Player characters. We’re all NPCs, so it wouldn’t work to begin with.”
“That would have been fine information to have a hundred pages prior so that this didn’t feel like a cheap cop-out.” I tickled my chin and said, “Ana’s in dire need of some health restoring, but I’m fresh out of cash.”
Maria flashed a fat wad of bills and said, “Oh, well it’s lucky that I got into a fistfight with a pimp.”
“That was a pimp?”
“Of course, big man. We couldn’t find too many otherwise high-quality candidates in the city, so we had to recruit anyone we could find. This included scum like him. So let’s just say that he had a rapid unexpected retirement.” She handed me the money.
All at once, I was reminded of the roachmen from the motel and how they told Maria and the harem to recruit more pimps. Clearly they spent the past week doing just that, but I couldn’t understand where they found the time. They were with me all week! Or did they do this business when I was asleep?
“Where do you need to be?” she asked. “A drugstore?”
I squeezed Ana’s breast and said, “Drugstore is correct, madam. Around the corner, there’s a drugstore filled with good items Ana can use.”
Ana snuggled up closer to me and began to purr. My favorite sensation on this Earth by far. It was clear from day one who Best Girl was, but I wanted there to be healthy competition regardless. And what’s more, I didn’t want to risk alienating the rest when they had all been helpful in some way.
We moved from Vermillion Boulevard onto Amethyst Avenue, away from the cacophony of emergency vehicles and towards the cacophony of a drive-in theatre across the road. We passed a pink and yellow neon-lit drive-in diner named ‘Mary Jane’s Sunday Eats’— perhaps that’s what put the term on my brain earlier— and arrived at the trussed door of the cheap drugstore. Ana reacted as if she were in candy land and eagerly picked out the most expensive chemicals and plants she could find, even though she was just here to regain her health.
In fact, I decided to step up and tell her, “No,” when she wanted to buy all these things because of course we had to conserve our money. Another situation could have arisen that required funds. Sure,
it was easy to get money in this world if you had no sense of morals, but I still prided myself on the idea that there were ways to get what I wanted without wanton destruction. It was one of those beliefs that had to die before it killed me.
Ana made it hard to say no because she tried to pull off puppy dog eyes— though in her case, perhaps it would be called ‘kitty cat eyes.’ And while I did feel the urge to give in, my manly übermensch will held firm.
“Here’s a Magnifico! Blunt,” I said to her. “It costs $399 and will restore all 100 hit points, with the only negative effect being that you have affected vision for 30 minutes. This is what you’re getting.”
Though she tried to pout, she ended it with a meek, “Okay…” And those flattened ears made me diamonds. I started the day diamonds and I was damn near close ending it diamonds.
Tatiana and Olga laughed at Ana while Maria called her many variations of ‘Doofus’. We sat on a grass knoll next to the sign for the drive-in diner and waited for Ana to fully heal up. In the meantime, I told the harem about what had happened in the hotel— of the ASIMO in the elevator, of meeting Johnic in his bizarre windowless room, of the dreadful concoction he prepared for me, and all the rest. Maria’s brow wrinkled when I mentioned Johnic’s room being windowless as if I triggered a specific memory for her. Tatiana, too, seemed flustered, though she made it less obvious than Maria.
With smoky explosive coughs and purple wheezing, Ana finished the Magnifico! and thanked me in ten made-up languages.
I replied in one, “Gracias!”
And of course, my dumbass messed it up because Maria came to my rescue with, “No, that means ‘thank you.’ You’re supposed to say ‘de nada,’ which means ‘you’re welcome.’ It’s literally 101, b-baka.”
“Stop saying that word, goddammit. Just stop! It’s not funny! It’s not cute!” And it really wasn’t. When she said it the second time, my face crackled into a thunderous scowl from the cringe alone, let alone the pain of knowing she was trying to double down like Neil Breen on being a Tsundere.
‘Wait, is it Tsundere or yandere? I forgot the difference between the two.’
Maria responded, ‘I’m neither, idiot.’
This surprised me, but she already warned me that it was possible, so I smiled and said out loud, “That’s right. It’s just ‘FINK’.”
“Now that’s cringeworthy,” Tatiana said, arms folded.
“Where did that come from?” Ana said, grabbing her cheeks. “Why is she a fink?”
“No, I mean— she was communicating telepathi…” I rubbed my head with the side of my sleeve. “Never mind! Never mind.”
I wanted to put my foot down and not take any more of this abuse, but Ana grabbed me around my neck with her tail and spent the next minute purring in my ear, whispering just under my hearing of how she wanted to wear my clothes.
By that point, the sun had gone down. There were no long shadows in the previous hours, but the streetlamps made up for that in spades. The winds were sustained at gale-force and blowing our hair about. I was lucky I lost my hat in the collapse— it would have been annoying to attempt to keep up with it.
Olga then walked up to me in Ana’s usual coy way and said, “So, Alli—”
“No.”
She pursed her lip and said, “Okay, fine then. Alexei! You were so frenetic about running from the assassin before, so why aren’t you scared of the fact that the news totally blew your cover this time around?”
I smacked my head. “Oh phooey, I totally forgot about tha—"
BANG.
We all ducked. I rolled out of the way right as the grass settled down again. My back against a sign, I looked into my inventory. No ray gun. That made enough sense. But what concerned me was that there wasn’t anything else to go along with it. Not even a tranquilizer gun.
"Where's my weapons? My guns?"
Ana coughed and shouted, "They're back at the motel. Remember? They were in your other pants that you forgot to wear this morning!" The damn polka dots came back to mind.
I threw my fists down. If I had my ray gun, I'd have been able to solve the problem quickly. But it had been lost in the tornado.
"If you need a spare ray gun," Olga said, "I can make one out of some of the materials here!"
I nodded at her, my jaw dropped and brow furrowed. "Alright, you know what? I don't even care anymore. Elves? Forget it. Not saying another word about 'em." She squee'd, which would have been cute if we weren't being oppressed by a sadistic sniper.
“It’s not even magic, though! I’m the Crue’s resident technical expert, so I build this sorta stuff. That’s why I have a contract with Coyote Ugly to make those snazzy helmets we wore on our hogs!”
“Neat.” Another shot blasted through the sign, throwing out sparks. “Jesus!” Then I shouted to the girls, "So I bet you're feeling a little silly about not chasing the assassin now!"
Tatiana quickly replied, "We can fight Doof off anytime we want. He just has a sniper rifle."
"Doof?"
That brought her to cover her mouth. "I probably shouldn't have told you so soon."
From the tree came a voice that sounded like static exploding, “MY NAME IS NOT DOOF!”
"Hold on, you know this guy?" Another shot exploded, kicking up more earth. I shouted again, "Jesus!"
Tatiana rolled her head and said, "I'll tell you when we get out of here. But yeah, I do."
I peeked around the corner. Bad move. BANG. A chunk of the sign blew off from the power of the round. The entire light fixture turned black, and the bits of debris blew off in a little whirlwind. For good reason, seeing the whirlwind made me jump and grab my chest. However, my involuntary act of wussiness did help me to see the red dot upon the ground. It wiggled about, and I saw it zig zag back and forth between myself and the others.
My heart pounded, but I noted to myself that it was not as frantic of a beat as it had once been. Something had changed in me and I wondered in that moment if my epiphany in the sewers was real.
"Alright, shoot." Another round burst out the back window of a car. "Not you, motherfucker!" Then I shook my head and looked to Olga. "Whaddya need to make the ray gun, Ms. Engineer?"
"Vehicle parts. Preferably some big ones like in a trailer. Luckily," she pointed past me towards an RV parked in the back of the lot of the drive-in movie theater, "there's one right there." She looked to Maria. "Do you still have the Golden Hair?" The Golden Hair! That spiky wig gave magic users inconceivable power for a short time. Funny, it was something I picked off a dead Nazi biker a week prior and I thought I had no use for it.
Maria popped up onto her knees and materialized the power up from hammerspace. "Yes, of course. Olga, take this!" She tossed it over the top of the sign towards the elf girl.
Then the hair exploded. Another sniper bullet had eviscerated the thing.
"Dammit!" Tatiana shouted. What disturbed me was not that we lost such a useful power-up but that Doof was apparently such a good shot that he could get a bead on the thing and blow it away in the half second it was visible at all. That was not human. I wanted to ask the girls if Doof was a cyborg, but my adrenaline returned and I couldn’t find a free moment to care once the thought occurred to me.
"Welp. There goes that!" When I looked to the ground to find the red dot, I couldn't find it and feared that I had lost track of it permanently.
Maria motioned for me to run to her. "Come here, quick!"
I sputtered and said, "He's going to shoot me! You saw what he just did!"
"He has to reload. He's fired precisely six shots— don't waste time, just run!"
I stood and sprinted as fast as I could, expecting my head to explode at any second.
But I made it. And I felt like a badass. The ground exploded just behind me, throwing up a jet of dirt like a mortar round. Maria pulled me in too quickly, however, and I landed right on her galaxy-sized breasts. Nose deep in those things, I was at risk of drowning in pure tit.
We both b
lushed, and she pushed me off. However, before I could go flying out of cover, she grabbed my ankles and kept me down.
"Watch where you're going, idiot!" she shouted.
But I didn't want any of that shit. "Me? You're the one who pulled me into your damn cleavage, woman! It wasn't my fault!"
Boom went another shot, most likely to get our attention.
I managed to duck-roll out of the way and land nose-first in Maria's cooch. By that point, I didn't even mind. It was natural for harem stories to have their leads wind up face planting in some piece of woman, and I was curious as to when I'd start following in that holy tradition. Now that I was doing so when I was struggling to stay alive and not get shot, I knew once and for all that my fate as the Crue's butt monkey would forever be established.
Though I will admit that I had no qualms about face planting in Maria's cooch. That was one fine succubus cooch, perfectly safe with that glittery black glamour dress of hers. Though when I noticed that she was wearing such a dress, I had to call her out on it.
"Why are you still wearing that? It's giving us away!"
But it sounded stupid to my ears the moment I said it because obviously the answer was, "What, do you want me to run around naked?"
And I had to be an ass and say, "I'm not against it."
She didn't punch me into orbit, which was already an improvement over harem ecchi anime. But she did grumble and moan about how pigheaded I was being.
Was I sorry? Not really, because she was the one who thought it was a good idea to get in a fist fight with a random stranger while we were being shot at earlier. If the girls had banded together and followed my damn orders, we wouldn't be hiding from the assassin.
But I didn't say anything. It's better to let them have their moment of victory than to force more conflict when it wasn't needed.
Until she said, "And yeah, I know I should've paid more attention to stop the shooter earlier. But that's behind us. We're done with that."
I coughed and gasped at the same time and said, "Oh, finally we're starting to realize that I may not be a complete tool, then!"