7) Kogarashi (Kamen no Maid Guy).
“Mother of god…
it’s an Alucard who overdosed on steroids and got stuffed into a maid outfit…
how do I unsee this?” I said, eyes bulging and refusing to return to their normal size.
No, seriously.
The dude on this card’s cover looks like a seriously bulked-up Alucard!
There might be some difference in the face, but that’s hidden under a white half-mask styled like a maid’s bonnet!
Yeah, except the predatory “beak” of the mask and the glowing eyes in its slits ruin everything.
As does the fanged grin, and the extended, muscular arm tipped with claws that would make our local Wolverine bro howl in envy.
And this dangerous image isn’t even undercut by the maid uniform on this guy.
Even like that he looks brutal…
and cringe.
And the info from the Gacha…
he cooks (Yes!
Yes!
Oh my god, yes!
He’s hired!), does cleaning, and on top of that has X-ray vision and can connect to a computer via USB.
Has 27 senses (which is, like, way the hell above the human five…
isn’t that going to fry my brain with sensory overload?
Also connecting to a PC via USB…
that’s actually kind of cool, gotta say…
how many possibilities does that open up), Kogarashi has a poor grasp of ethics, and so many treat him like a wild animal.
Despite his appearance, he’s fairly good-natured.
Possesses high strength, endurance, resilience, barely feels pain, and heals instantly.
Due to his perception, he can’t stand infrasound, so much so that if the frequency’s right, it’ll seize him up on the spot and could even kill him.
Otherwise he’s basically some minimized Alucard crossed with Walter from the same show, with a kind worldview.
“Screw it, gorgeous character.
And loyal to his master too…
looks a bit cringe…
and if you re-dress him, kind of scary too.
But here it’s either assimilate, since it’ll give a lot of pluses while bringing a pretty minor weakness that’s hard to even pin down.
Or summon him outright, since despite everything, he inspires trust — maybe because of what I know from the Gacha, and what I can sense from the character card itself?
But he does inspire it!” Damn, this is a real dilemma.
Both assimilating right now and summoning are equally viable options.
Fine, shelve it for now…
what’s next?
8) Kogarashi (Kamen no Maid Guy).
“Okay…
dilemma just solved itself.
One for summoning, one for assimilation.
Actually the other way around, assimilate first, I’ll feel calmer that way.
And right after — summon.
I’ll get to compare how ‘on the same wavelength’ we end up being afterward, too.” Genuinely awesome.
I could even test whether identical cards can be merged.
What would that give, or could you summon two identical characters at once?
Damn, so many ideas, and only two cards.
9) Kogarashi (Kamen no Maid Guy).
“Oh dear lord up above, eavesdropping on my thoughts, thank you for the second helping in a row, amen!” I said, pressing my hands together in prayer.
Maybe there’s some kind of hint buried in this?
Well, yeah, now for sure one goes to assimilation, and the other two I’ll first try merging — and if it works, great, I’ll have learned a new mechanic, plus I’ll summon and gauge just how much stronger this guy would be than me.
If it doesn’t work, I’ll test the double-summon option instead.
A glimpse into the distant future.
On the roof of a skyscraper stood three male figures in, forgive me Lord, maid dresses, the wind toying with both the hems of the dresses and the long black hair of all three.
The one standing in front, in whose features one could faintly recognize the former Lucian, surveyed the city below.
“Brothers.
This city has drowned itself too deep in filth.
The time has come to cleanse it of the garbage, to give it a thorough scrubbing.
No more will a single child in New York be afraid to walk late at night, no girl will need to cut through back alleys, no boy will run into a gang of thugs!” Lucian intoned, filled with purpose, his glowing yellow eyes flashing through the slits of his half-mask.
His speech was met with two nods of agreement.
Three(!) Alucards-in-Skirts set out on the hunt for villains.
Back to the present.
“Hm, strange, for a second there it felt like a bad idea to summon a couple of Kogarashis, wonder why that would be,” I said, feeling a chill run down my spine.
Alright, what’s left?
10) Minion Number 23 (Despicable Me).
“Well, okay…” I shrugged.
Useless trash is still trash.
Should I spin another twenty or so?
Actually…
no, things are already going worse and worse for me as it is, with this damn Axel blocking me from applying so many cards.
Don’t want to make that feeling any worse — what if I snap?
Better to get to work instead.
And then treat myself to something nice and necessary…
no, not 2B, though I wish!
But a trip out for a new monitor and a multicooker.
Well, at least some of my plans went off without a hitch.
Sure, I had to weather a full-on war with 2B, who didn’t want to let me go out alone, unprotected, unsupervised…
and they wouldn’t even let me take the motorcycle!
But there I couldn’t argue.
“You still have work today that you wanted to get to, and if, like last time, you lose track of time again and…” “Got it, agreed, no motorcycle,” I cut her off.
As it turned out, even the “time perception” ability could fail me if I just wasn’t paying attention to anything and fell into some kind of trance like that.
That is, the ability keeps tracking time just fine, it just doesn’t register in my conscious mind.
And yeah, I didn’t want to get swept up like that — I was planning to sit down with the metrics later that evening, so to speak, keep an eye on how the ads were doing while I was out of easy reach.
“You could still bring me along, or stay home while I go get everything myself,” Yorha tried once more to talk me out of it.
“Agents of SHIELD literally promised to come by, and if neither of us is home, there’s a good chance they’ll get the not-so-bright idea to bug my house…
from what I know, they love doing that,” I offered up a serious argument, one I was ashamed to admit I’d only just now remembered.
“Then the second part of my proposal stands,” Yorha stared at me with that same emotionless look.
“I won’t let anyone but me pick out something as important as a monitor and a multicooker!
Besides, it’s more dangerous for me to stay here alone than to go out somewhere.
Tell me, how many things have happened outside my window in the last two weeks?
So no.
Nothing’s going to happen to me.
I’m not planning on getting into anything!
I’ll stay in touch, I’m bringing my phone.
And I’ll call you the second I need to,” I gave my word, calming Yorha down a little, though clearly not all the way.
Wonder how exactly that shows.
Given her face didn’t change one bit.
But she couldn’t come up with any more rational arguments, and irrational ones from an android…
does that even happen?
And though she looked like she wanted to suggest something else, she never voiced anything more.
It’s almost nice, having a beauty like that worry about you.
Not quite the way I’d like, true, but I’ll take it.
And so began my trek toward the nearest home-appliance and electronics store to me, which wasn’t the closest one to my house (the closest one has a garbage selection!).
Pleasant chill in the air, light snow, the city’s bright lights, and people wandering unhurriedly around, since a lot of them are still on holiday and don’t need to rush off to work or lunch during business hours.
That kind of idyll lasted about forty minutes, until, two blocks from the store I needed, on a street running parallel to the one I was on, noise started up.
Damn familiar noise!
Though that particular cacophony had a bit of everything in it.
And to make it worse, I needed to cut through an alley right onto that very street to continue on my way.
Sure, I could take the long way around.
But…
the damn curiosity of a sixteen-year-old.
Sure, I don’t look my age anymore these days (what with this height and build), but mentally I haven’t aged even a single year, by my own reckoning.
I carefully crept along the alley to the other side and peeked out, noticing…
“Oh, now that’s a woman!” escaped me involuntarily.
Big!
Tall, taller than me, muscular, but it didn’t ruin her beauty at all!
Green!
In gorgeous knee-high boots and something resembling a closed sport-swimsuit (isn’t she cold?) in a white-and-purple color scheme, which very favorably emphasized absolutely everything!
But especially that chest…
a D-cup, or maybe even bigger?
Damn it!
Lucian, pull yourself together, quit drooling over a half-naked hottie like some horny teenager!
Wait, hold on…
I am a teenager, and what with a certain gorgeous individual living in my house and our occasional involuntary physical contact, not to mention raging hormones, “horny” is a fair label for me too…
okay then — carry on staring, Lucian, you fall squarely within the demographic that does this.
Argh!
The second I get back, cold shower, straight away!
Ugh, no, I’m afraid that won’t cut it anymore…
gonna have to lend a hand, so to speak.
Ahem, screw it.
Focus.
This is a situation where She-Hulk, apparently either the sister or cousin of Bruce Banner, is beating the hell out of someone right in the middle of the street.
Right on that observation, She-Hulk gets slammed back-first into a car parked at the edge of the road, where the green beauty had just been thrown.
…Okay, correction, someone is beating the hell out of She-Hulk.
Thankfully from this angle I can now see the split lip and the swelling bruise near her left eye — though honestly, those had already been visible to me from the previous angle, I just hadn’t noticed — my gaze hadn’t managed to climb above a certain level, hadn’t made it up to her face.
Wonder why.
The white part of her suit is more gray by now too, and filthy with dust and other debris.
Yeah, I’m not exactly the most observant guy, huh.
And she’s fighting a huge green monstrosity.
Hm, could it be Hulk?
Family squabble, maybe?
Ah, no…
too bad, that would’ve let me walk away with a clean conscience.
But this monster was bald, its face only distantly resembling human, its body seemingly covered in blisters and burns, then pumped full of steroids and green dye, with a faint brownish tint to it.
Out of its hunched spine juts…
a bone spike?
A crest?
A fin?
Hard to identify what that thing is.
And there are soldiers scurrying around too, whom I also failed to notice at first.
Wonder why.
Ah, doesn’t matter right now.
Looks like they’d literally just pulled up in those two APCs (or something similar), and opened fire specifically at the green “gremlin on steroids,” not at She-Hulk, so the enemy here is clear, only thing is…
I’m not getting into this!
Sorry, but this thing just casually smashed She-Hulk into the ground, pulverizing the asphalt with a single hit.
And in general it’s completely dominating this gremlin over its opponent.
And She-Hulk is way, and I mean noticeably, stronger and tougher than ordinary people, a category I still technically belong to.
This is literally a fight way outside my weight class!
Not even close, really — I don’t even register on this scale, and even a glancing hit from this gremlin would smear me across the asphalt in a paper-thin layer.
There, soldiers are already here, civilians are being evacuated, so let the professionals deal with all this, there’s no shortage of them in our city, is there?
I’ll just take the long way around this.
I’ve got, uh…
a holiday sale!
That multicooker isn’t going to buy itself!
Already having turned and taken a couple of steps, and having already found two dozen justifications for my own cowardice, I heard another crash, far from the first of the fight, but this time its tail end blended with people’s screams, screams of pain among them, coming from where the civilians were being led away.
And one more anguished scream…
“Mom!” — and not just any scream, a child’s scream.
“Come on, Lucian, you know you’ll regret it if you turn around,” I told myself.
But I turned around anyway, to see, judging by the wooden splinters, something that used to be a bench had just flown into the crowd.
Moans of the wounded, a lot of blood…
several people who’d either unluckily been in the bench’s path, or had tried to shield civilians, in military uniform, clearly beyond saving now…
and a little girl, maybe eight years old, fallen to her knees over her mother lying on the ground, whose left arm was completely soaked in blood, a wooden shard lodged in her side, in the stomach, and the woman herself either already dead or unconscious.
And a crying child, possibly having lost her mom forever now.
“Congratulations, Lucian, looks like you just found that trigger every hero has,” I said darkly, not recognizing my own voice, unable to tear my eyes away from the scene.
All of it seasoned with the sharp realization that if I hadn’t turned away, if I’d decided to help right away, not even in the fight, just with the evacuation, this wouldn’t have happened!
Had I been among the civilians, even just helping the soldiers get them out, had I been in that cursed bench’s path, one incoming Jo-Lan Chubasu would have scattered the threat to dust!
And out of everyone hurt, it would’ve only been my hands.
But no, I had shopping to do, right?
What’s the point of having power if you never even use it?
Gradually all the sounds seemed to fade away, leaving only the girl’s crying up ahead and a little to the right, and the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears, echoing even into my temples.
There, in my field of vision, that monster comes into view, clearly set off by the girl’s crying.
And it’s decided to permanently silence the source of the unpleasant noise.
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There are chapters ahead.
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