V2 Chapter 10: Samari's Training,

Kalon slammed on the metaphorical brakes of the real spirit constructs, sending the whole team flying out of the newly built, liquid-puppy-based carriage with a state-of-the-fart cooling system, which consisted on six-dozen hypothermiaed puppy tongues placed inside a winding tube for air entry. The wet, cold tongues licked the air cold, and their lapping drove it inside the carriage, where Samari and Jagger and Kalon had been chilling just moments afore.

“When I tell you to stop, Kalon, I mean for you to do it gradually so inertia doesn’t kick our asses,” Samari complained, coming to her feet and grieving her white shirt, that was now covered in black and smelly Rottweiler tar.

Kalon, covered in streaks of ex-carriage too (as he had lost control over the summon during the fall, that included one of his gravity defying feats), considered that pretending to not hear her complaints was the wisest of decisions.

Jagger wondered if being covered in his liquefied peers was something that he needed to consider traumatic. Also, he had fallen on his back and his belly was greeting the sky, so that was something to fix, maybe. Perhaps. He wasn’t sure he still had the force of will to stand. Ah well, if he died, he died.

“Well, we are all safe and sound, judging by the looks… except Brunhilda, which is somewhere…”

“Burr.” Brunhilda’s echoing voice came out of nowhere.

“Fine, the status quo wins again. You may be wondering why we stopped.” Samari raised a finger, ready to drop an explanation over her suspecting companions.

“We are not,” truthed Jagger, “every time we listen to your ideas, Sam, we get in some sort of absurd trouble.”

“You also get in deranged antics when I remain silent,” Samari argued.

Jagger, knowing he had lost the argument, started snarling.

“Ah, shut your trap, doggie. Samari said, going up to him and kicking her companion in the ribs, making him yelp.

“What was that for?” Jagger turned, getting back on his feet, and then, understood. “Ah crap, I stood.”

Samari smile and patted Jagger on the head, hoping he had enough common sense to not try and maul her. A risky gambit, indeed.

But it paid off, as Jagger was a certified pat slut.

“Why did you tell us to stop, Samari?” Kalon finally asked, while he commanded the liquid puppies to flow back into his dress.

Samari sat on the dirt of the road and leaned back, supporting herself with her hands. It was good to be out the carriage.

“She likely learned something from the book.” Jagger contributed as he sat in front of the giggling Arcagnostic.

Samari nodded with enthusiasm. “Correct. It’s a covenant.”

“A coven hat? Like, one of those pointy ones used by evil witches?” Kalon earnestly asked, cracking his knuckles. He pseudothought a witch hat would fit Samari like a glove.

“No. Covenant, a contract with the heavens. An Arcagnostic spell, if you will. A technique we learn after we master the control of our spirit. Basically, the book, that’s…” Samari peered around, quickly taking in the road, the tropical orchards not their left and the tropical cows to the right. “Over there, by the mango tree, describes how an arcagnostic can strike a deal with the heavens to become blind.” Samari’s face didn’t match what she was saying. So Jagger twirled his paw as a gesture for her to continue. “And also invisible. The world cannot see you and you cannot see the world.”

“Gods in heaven full of prostitutes, that is just a toddler’s biggest dream come true.”

Samari patted the slut again. “Indeed! And a useful ability to have. I could learn it. I mean, I have not mastered my spirit yet, but not all covenants require a complete mastery. This one is rather easy.”

“And rather stupid,” Kalon surprised girl and dog with his remark. “eyesight is essential in a battle, or for infiltration, if you would like to use it for that.”

Samari blinked twice. “Kalon, why aren’t you being an idiot?”

“I rest from stupidity once in a while. Is that wrong to you?”

Samari stood, approached Kalon with Cautious step, and poked his cheek, scared. “Sacrosanct intercourse, this is for real. You could deactivate your stupid all this time?”

A smile grew on Kalon’s face, and then he began laughing. “Haha, no, I was being told what to say by the Avatar.”

Samari sighed in relief, like a lung does after being pierced by a bullet. “Tell your inner Jester —and by this I mean the Avatar— that I am going to need help with martial training if I want to fulfill this covenant.”

“What kind of help?”

“I am rusty. My mother taught me the basics, but I haven’t trained since she died. So, considering you are pretty capable in the battlefield…”

Samari hoped Kalon would not need the whole sentence to understand her petition. How naive you are, Samari. I’d kill you — merely for the lulz and in a ridiculous way, as tradition dictates — but if we are killing off stupid characters, Kalon and every other inhabitant of the vale would need to go first. I don’t make the rules[1].

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Samari, I think your last sentence is incomplete.” Kalon noticed. Kudos to you, Kalon.

Jagger wished to go back to his puppy days, when he was being whomped against a wooden training doll, suffering epiphanies left and right. Ah, those were the days, a simpler time surrounded by idiots that at least considered him Kalon’s intelligent sidekick. Now that role had been taken by Samari, and he had been reduced to just the talking dog that died now and then. And it wasn’t a bad life except for, you know, the death and rebirth cycles he underwent so often. At least he could now see the moron’s mind for clues into his thinking processes, when they were so kind as to exist.

“Kalon, I need you to fight with me, without killing nor crippling me nor tearing my face off, nor… ugh, Jagger, explain to him.”

“Samari wants to be beaten like a wife that did cook, but fucked up the recipe, and whose husband is just mildly drunk on a day where his favorite football team hasn’t lost.”

Samari joined her hands in front of her mouth, looking at Jagger with concern. “Why are you like this?”

“Because Kalon understands these terms flawlessly. Right, Kalon?”

Kalon hammered his fist against his palm. “Yes. I must hit Samari but not too hard.” He then gathered his liquid puppy scarf around his right arm, a bubbling ball fo darkness and puppy features forming around his fist, and rotated his arm behind him to unleash the fury of a thousand pup smoothies over Samari.

Seeing this, the girl extended her open arms and shook them. “Not now, you doofus! We need to find somewhere outside the road and I need to prepare.”

Samari headed for the field where the cows grazed with milky happiness. “Follow me, we are going to seek a place without many cows and can practice there. Please, don’t backstab me due to your Avatar’s orders. I am sure he is absolutely thrilled at the chance to beat me.”

Inside Kalon’s mind, the avatar leaned back, Satisfied, trying to figure out how the fuck he was leaning back when he had become a fractal of Rottweiler heads as of late. “She’s right, I do want to give her what she deserves.”

----------------------------------------

Say what you want about Samari’s pale complexion, but nobody can deny that it had a one-in-a-thousand-years talent to get bruised. Her white skin was a prodigious one when it came to the art of turning the right shade of black or purple after every time the multiple lashes of liquid puppy made contact.

The Holsteins had gathered in a wide circle, watching how the white girl slowly turned into one of them, all black spots and milky skin. They mooed and snorted, judging her weakness. Moo, they mocked. Moo, they derided. Moo.

Jagger had jumped atop a cow and was using her as the mooral high ground to act as a referee of the fight. He would interfere if Kalon happened to be about to kill Samari. Probably. If he didn’t get distracted first. Which, in his opinion, was likely to happen.

Kalon wasn’t enjoying this. Samari had been good to him, or at least not overly mean. And here she was, trembling, bruised and with a bleeding nose, getting in position once again, with palms open and facing him, with her body tilted sideways, with her left leg put forward, snorting a new dose of instant coffee after every fall. He didn’t want to attack her once more.

The Avatar, on the other hand, had invoked the power of the god of popcorns and watched the brat beating of his time with unmatched interest.

“Again, Kalon. Lash out again. I can do well this time.” She said between heavy, pained breaths.

“Erm, no?” Kalon begged.

“Kalon, I need to practice. The cows have great expectations of me,” she unknowingly lied.

One of the cows scoffed, turned on her hooves and lumbered away. She would not tolerate such defamation.

“Come on, attack me, Kalon. Attack me like you are Brunhilda and I am an unsupervised piece of steak over the table.”

Kalon raised his arm, and the whip of liquid puppies gathered in a single strand of blackness so true and deep that it would seduce several children of the Gromera clan. It snaked in the air, waiting for the arm that held it to come down and smite their opponent.

Samari’s heart pumped in her chest, because if it pumped anywhere else she would have been in real trouble. She had a plan, and her spirit had been already extricated preemptively. Her hands were too weak to catch the construct infused with vital energy. But her soul was unbreakable.

The tendril of barkness came down like a thunder, describing an arc thrrogh the air and making a loud snap. She wove the spirit of both her hands together and thrusted them upwards, apart, ready to intercept the attack with this net of spirit, and tie it in like a spider it’s unfortunate prey.

What Samari didn’t calculate, however, was that while the strength of her soul couldn’t be matched by the physical world, that of her arms… left much to be desired. In other words, the whip reached the net, got caught into it, and it brought her hands together in a sort of embrace around it… before slamming into Samari’s face like a SWAT team into a streamer’s house.

Pain. That’s all that Samari felt as the tongues and noses and wrath of a trigintillion (One followed by ninety-three zeroes. One of those numbers that exist only for the sake of idle games. This is more than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.) puppies kissed her cheek softly not.

This ended with Samari being slammed against the floor, and then lifted as Kalon retracted the still-sentangled whip, sending her over his head, and making her land between two haughty cows.

“Pathetic,” A cow mooed in cow speak, which no one else but the cows understood.

Another cow poked the unconscious arcagnostic with her hoof. “She is not a gifted one, that’s for sure, moo. Do we eat her?”

“She is not grass, moo” said the only vegan of the bunch.

“Shut up Daisy, you are a disgrace to cattlekin,” said El Toro Roberto, that was also La Vaca Clotilda during the cold nights at the barn. Had he been born a cow? a bull? No one knew. No one wanted to know.

“We cannot eat her, she is guarded by the others. We have to eat the others first,” she raised her cow head to look at Kalon with cow eyes (made of cow) and recowsidered what she had just say. “But he did beat this one without breaking a sweat.”

“Do we name him honorary cow?”

“Bull. Honorary bull." Corrected Roberto.

“Shut up, you are an honorary cow by day, honorary bull by night. If you are a cow , honorary or real or not, he can be a cow, honorary, by night, and by day,” Daisy dropped the rulebook on him. Or would have, if cows knew what a book was.

“Can we call him a slur and be done with this? “ Asked the black cow with white spots of the bunch. “I have to spread Cryptosporidium to unsuspecting raw milk drinkers like I am a rabid fan of Destroy All Humans and they are Playstation 2 owners,” she made a reference no one in her universe was supposed to get.

Jagger perked up, suddenly remembering he knew how to speak cow. “Hey, that cow is talking about cult games! Hi cow! Hi!”

“Barns of heaven, a talking dog!” exclaimed one of the cows, and all but one —she who had Jagger on top—stampeded away, careful to not step on Samari’s body. They didn’t want to get their hooves dirty.

“Moo, don’t go, moo, get it off me, moo!”

----------------------------------------

Samari came back to her senses shortly after, and the first thing she found was Jagger’s face, staring down at her, drooling on her face. “Fuck, you are alive. I cannot eat you now.”

Kalon had crowched by her side and watched over with a concerned expression. “Sorry, Sam, I didn’t notice you had grabbed onto the whip until it was too late.”

Samari raised a pained thumbs-up. “I am fine… and I think most of my ribs are complete,” She whizzed before falling unconscious once again, more out of exhaustion than anything else.

Kalon then carried his friend into the orchard, placed her under the shadow of a mango tree, and, with the aid of Jagger, watched over her until she recovered enough to continue their travels.

----------------------------------------

[1] As it happens half of the time when powerful individuals claim this: I actually DO make the rules. I know, I know: shocking.