William Blackmore’s work quarters were more throne room than office. A massive wall of windows overlooked the vast, abyssal Atlantic Ocean. A top-of-the-line PC tower was connected to three inter-connected monitors on his priceless antique wooden desk, itself larger than the combined counter space in an average middle-class kitchen. Several priceless statues from Egypt and Greece, smuggled, lined the otherwise barren and minimalist marble cavern beyond the desk, meant to remind all who entered that they were now in the presence of a king. And, seated in a ridiculous, Victorian-style custom velvet throne twice the size it should be, sat the man himself: William Blackmore.
His throne faced the windows as the oligarch stared across the ocean, stroking his devilish salt-and-pepper goatee with a large, powerful hand. “And what precisely have you heard?” he implored the priceless Legendary gacha on his right. His voice was like molten dark chocolate bubbling up from his throat. Rich, deep, imposing, and strained.
“My Lord,” Existentia replied, her emotionless voice sounding the way the static on the front of a tube-TV tastes, “I’ve been monitoring for the phrase ‘the Master’ in case you were being referred to as such. Your enemies are on to my processes, and will frequently alter their verbiage, so I added this one among several others this morning. Already, it has paid off.”
Existentia had the appearance of a slender young woman hovering in place wearing an elegant toga. Her eyes were a single brightly glowing shade of lime green, the only color on her at all: she looked like an ancient Greco-Roman statue whose paint had already given way to the bare marble. The unnatural waving of her stone-gray hair around her, as if she were underwater, was the only motion she seemed capable of, aside from the subtle movements of her mouth when speaking. She was among the most arcane of gacha: a Six Star Rainbow Legendary, the stuff of legends and rumors, with a pull chance of under 1/100,000. Rainbow Six Stars were so rare that nobody knew if they were actually real, or how many of them existed--they weren’t even pictured on the fold-out checklist of gacha included with the Glove.
“And?”
“The Matt your son gave to your daughter--” Existentia quickly corrected herself as fury boiled beneath William’s dilated pupils-- “ahem, step daughter… was telling an Ultimatt of a plot your son has conceived to usurp you.”
At this William said nothing, pausing to turn to his desk, pour a priceless vintage French chardonnay into a gilded wine glass, and chug the entire glass in a single prolonged sip. “He’s an ungrateful cretin. I had feared as much when he began collecting them by the dozen. It is unlike his personality to amass such a repetitive collection with such vigor. Go on.”
“That is essentially all, my lord. He has amassed an army of gacha to usurp us. I do not know when he will strike. They number in the hundreds. According to the Matt, he is discontent with your violent treatment of Cecilia, and intends to protect her by executing you.”
William Blackmore paused. He looked calm, but his gacha could tell his fury was reaching its tipping point. “I gave the boy a life many would, and have, killed for. I can scarcely believe he would throw it all away to ease the suffering of a little bastard girl. To think, the boy I leave my empire to is such a complete goddamned idiot!” With a mighty yell William grabbed the mostly full wine bottle next his Gacha-Gloved right hand, shattered it against the edge of his desk, and unflinchingly slashed the palm of his naked left hand open with the razor-sharp remains of the bottle’s stem. took a deep breath, then calmly opened another drawer in his desk. “If it is to be war, Existentia, then we shall have to treat it as such. We have him outclassed, but his numbers concern me. Miss Fortune?”
On his left, a Legendary old crone gacha convulsed about in a trance. She was visually an old-witch-crone stereotype above the waist: beneath it, a massive, billowing cloak barely veiled her massive-centipede lower-body. “Master,” she exhaled with a voice of primordial dust, “your son is planning to attack today. Soon. Very, very soon. It will be a battle where much blood is shed. I cannot tell you who will win, as timelines diverge where possibilities waver, but one of you will perish here tonight—that much is inevitable.”
“Then it shall be the brat, and I will take great pleasure in euthanizing his ungrateful cur-ass.” The mad patriarch pulled a capsule from his desk and clutched it in his bleeding hand. The capsule immediately illuminated with a brilliant crimson, but William maintained his grip unfazed as the temperature increased. As the heat started to become unbearable to even him, the capsule finally erupted into a puff of brilliant flames against his calloused palm, and in a poof of celebratory smoke, Several Hats appeared. “Support gacha are normally not my style,” William mused, placing a ten-gallon cowboy hat with teeth around its rim and two cartoon angry-eyes on its brim atop his head like a crown, “but Omni provided these for such an occasion. Normal Several Hats boost attack ability, physical stamina, mental ability, and magic by up to 200%. These variants, among the rarest there are, will boost ours by 500%. Painfully unfashionable as it may be, we shall have to persevere. Though I am a human, even I can benefit from such an atrociously unfair advantage.”
As the demon hat bit into his skull and penetrated his brain with its needle-tongue, William Blackmore felt godlike power surge throughout. He leapt backwards over the desk, rising ten feet into the air and landing on both feet after a double backflip in the air. His muscles bulged at the seams now, nearly tearing through the feeble prison of his skin, and his thoughts went so fast he had already processed his next movements before he had thought of them.
William tossed a party hat with cartoon sad eyes and identical teeth to the cowboy hat’s over to Fickle Fortune, who reluctantly removed her pointy hat and replaced it with this significantly less spooky pointed hat. He tossed Existentia a bowler hat with cartoon happy eyes and even sharper teeth, who placed it silently atop her head. In an instant, the godlike buffs set in for each of them.
Floating above them, Temparment gnashed his mighty fangs and babbled incoherently in an arcane language, seemingly disappointed to not get a hat of its own. An impossible creature consisting entirely of two disembodied floating demon eyes and a lipless mouth of sharp, bloodied fangs floating directly beneath, the poorly spelled being may have looked like a child’s poor drawing of an “evil face,” but it was one of the most powerful gacha in existence as a Legendary 5-star. Temparment was capable of consuming anything it bit off into the darkness of its throat, a veritable black hole that destroyed anything that entered and erased them from reality entirely. The pull rate: 1/50,000.
“Don’t get your necronomipanties in a bunch,” William sighed. “I did not give you the last hat because, in case you forgot, you don’t have a head .” Temparment shrieked with discontent, so William tossed the baseball cap to him to prove his point. Surprisingly, the cap’s cartoon confused eyes looked practically giddy with delight as its teeth clamped down on absolutely nothing above the demon’s head, its tongue disappearing into absolutely nothing to connect with the disembodied face… somehow. “For the love of god” William groaned, “you’d think eventually I’d get used to this kind of asinine arcane BS, and yet--”
Fickle Fortune interrupted by raising a gnarled fingernail and shouting, “he has come!!” William motioned something to Temparment, who floated over to the doorway and readied itself directly above.
The twenty-foot mahogany double doors to the chamber slammed open. The trenchcoat-clad silhouette of Gerald Blackmore loomed in the doorway flanked by Throckmortons. Gacha crowded behind him packed wall-to-wall, stretching back as far into the distance as William could make out.
“Welcome, son,” William said, his tone entirely flat. “It’s so kind of you to visit your dear old dad once in a while. Here to beg for another advance in your allowance for more gacha?”
“I am actually here to discuss the matter of my inheritance of the company upon your death,” the boy replied, doing his best to sound menacing. “Because I truly hate to tell you, but I fear that tragic day has already arrived.” This terrible, formal, movie villain talk wasn’t new for the occasion: it was simply the banter of two narcissists who both fancied themselves the protagonist of a story far too sufferable to star either of them.
“The deepest tragedy,” William said, adjusting the sentient cowboy hat latched to his skull, “is when a parent outlives their child. It breaks every law of nature. Unfortunately for you, the laws of nature no longer seem to apply—so neither will my mercy.” With a snap of his fingers, Temparment flew down from its ambush position over the doorway, unhinging its impossible jaws and diving at Gerald. The boy threw his hands up to push it away out of instinct, but as it consumed a huge chunk of the Throckmorton guards that leapt in front to protect him, it also bit off the teen’s hands, Gacha Glove and all, rendering them up as sacrifices to the abyss. Temparment gobbled down the rest of the shrieking Throckmortons as William grinned sardonically. He expected the Gacha to turn on his wretched son and end him instantly now he was Gloveless. Instead, as Gerald shrieked in shock and pain, tears streaming down his contorted face, he pointed the rest of his army on towards battle with his bloody stumps and slumped to the side of the doorway as the invasion continued. William quickly grabbed his magic-infused pistol from his desk drawer and leapt into battle himself.
Gerald had two hundred and twenty-two gacha in all who charged in to his defense. He had mercifully released gacha like Linguine Arf, who he found unsuited to combat, before the battle. Even he wasn’t sure what would happen when the glove was off, but Gerald had treated his gacha well, if not a bit soldier-like, unlike the people he took out his anger on in day-to-day life. When he’d called the Matts to fuse, he had been sending them to success, not slaughter, and they’d done so of their own free will and loyalty. So it was with all of his gacha now. The Glove was a symbol to them, not a controller.
The bottleneck effect of the entrance doors worked to the patriarch’s advantage. The plan was as follows: Fickle Fortune predicted attack after attack in real time, switching psychic focus from one attacker to the other with vicious speed and relaying each prediction telepathically to William, Temparment, and Existentia rapid-fire. In this way, William masterfully leapt out of the way of each strike just before they’d hit, and any attackers that would be too strong or too wide in range would be stopped in their tracks by Existentia’s relative stopped time ability and subsequently eaten out of existence by Temparment.
And, sure enough, that’s how things began. The Nyancies rushed in first, desperately trying to use their vacuums to absorb the magic of the Legendary gacha, but they were immediately consumed in violent, haphazard bites by the demonic face. Legs, hands, halves of heads, tails and cat ears fell to the ground in a frenzy as residue from the buffet, blood splattering as each dropped. One of the poor girls watched the bottom half of her body suddenly vanish from reality before falling to the ground a torso and trying to crawl away with her arms, soon after having her entire skull torn off her neck in one fell bite. Another fell to her knees and begged William for mercy, who took great pleasure in shooting her point blank through the skull with a magic-infused bullet. The last remaining Nyancies fused to form a Meowquis DeSade, a powerful dark magician dominatrix catgirl with a magic whip, but before she could utter one spell, she was frozen in time by Existentia. Like all the others to suffer this fate, she witnessed her own demise in slow motion, feeling each tooth sink into her stomach and back like slowly closing pinchers. They pierced her skin first, stretching it to its limits as she felt it tear open all the way around her at once like taffy, then slowly tore through her inner organs and tissue. When their jaws closed, her entire bottom half was erased from existence. The pain of losing half her body made her blissfully numb as the rest of her was bitten off in one fell chomp. A stray finger rolled to the ground.
The next line of offense were the Breakfast Dragons. Temparment took great enjoyment in their consumption, for reasons bordering on obvious. Still, their mere appearance on the scene meant the battlefield was bathed in flames, breathing them faster from their waffle-mouths than they were consumed. All wood in the room caught fire, burning the curtains and the desk to ash almost instantly. Fickle Fortune’s cloak was caught aflame by the breath of one she had failed to predict, and soon each of her bug-like legs were crackling as she was slowly roasted alive. Her bottom half crisped up like a fried grub before her eyeballs exploded out of her skull, flames pouring out and melting the skin from her face, revealing her grasshopper-head-like skull. She collapsed, dead, her party hat leaping over to Temparment’s baseball cap and latching atop it to stack their effects.
Temparment’s speed grew twofold from this, and the remaining breakfast dragons were a breeze. Several fused into a Bacon Hydra, the eight headed pig-meat themed evolution. It managed to erupt molten bacon grease onto William before it was consumed. The napalm splattered across the left half of his body and disfigured his flesh, burning on at a temperature high enough to melt any human who hadn’t been equipped with the power of one of Several Hats. Half of William Blackmore finally reflected how he looked on the inside: a twisted, endlessly-burning, rage-fueled maniac who’d stumbled into a vast fortune by luck and circumstance. His willingness to kill his own son shifted to literally burning desire.
Next came the Tiffanies. Realizing their original strategy would end in a similar fate to the others, Gerald commanded them to instead fuse with bodies (or at least chunks) of Nyancies to form twenty Fem-Fatals, all casting powerful dark magic spells on the gacha themselves. They’d learned from the others’ mistake: William was only going to die when his gacha were eliminated first. Several of them cast Reverse Magic at Existentia, who froze herself in place, stopping time for herself only. Without Fickle Fortune’s rapid-fire predictions, she’d had no way to know who to stop, let alone that an onslaught of them would be coming. Three Armatanks, powerful tanks with armadillo body cores and heads, rolled in during this chaos, firing countless missiles and cannonballs at Temparment. He consumed them all into his dark dimension, much to the poor mammalian tanks’ surprise, and went on to feast on the armored atrocities, savoring each crunchy bite of the many required to accomplish such a task.
Now that Existentia was frozen, Gerald’s personal Fem-Fatal bodyguard ran into the fray: the one who had helped him kidnap Matt. She was the most powerful of them and had always managed to conjure up the most vicious spells, so she was a natural pick for the only plan she knew had any chance of working now. Gerald almost reached out for her and cried for her to stay back, unable to bear the thought of losing one of the few companions he saw as equals, but she gave him a tearful smile, the cat ears built into her head limping solemnly as if to say, “It’s okay. We’re on the right side here. We have to finish this.”
While Existentia was still frozen by her own power, the Fem-Fatal used a powerful disguise swap spell, switching her own appearance to the Existentia’s and the Existentia’s to her own. Temparment finished on the Armatanks and eagerly approached to consume the supple exposed flesh of the Fem-Fatal, realizing all too late that he had just engulfed a forcefully disguised Existentia and her Hat in one gulp instead. William immediately shot the being who looked like Existentia in the head, correctly realizing it was Gerald’s right-hand Fem-Fatal, and she died instantly… but the damage to his own team had been done. Team William Blackmore was down to one legendary gacha out of three. Gerald wept he wasn’t sure if it was from this loss, or this victory, or the pain of having no freaking hands, but for the first time in years, he bawled.
There was still no good solution for defeating Temparment. The last lines left of the army were the Fridge Horrors, and Gerald had placed them last because their ability was to summon random things whenever the door opened, and that seemed like a good last resort final gambit. Now he was coming up on this moment in the battle, though, he was filled with terror. What if they summoned nothing miraculous? What if Temparment plowed through them before anything useful came out? It would take him several bites per Fridge, but he was powered by multiple Hats, and there were only thirty of them. This was not looking good.
The fridges rolled in. William tried to stifle his laughter as the lumbering beasts opened and closed their doors at lightning speed, hurling random objects warped in from all over the world at the demonic face. A chicken leg, hairspray, a Nintendo 64, the gravestone of a poor cobbler from Belgium, a shard of broken glass, a wicker basket, a junkie high on acid, a water bottle, a Hawaiian shirt, a Zaxxon arcade cabinet, a hat without cartoon eyes… there seemed to be everything in the onslaught but something useful, though at this point Gerald couldn’t even think of what might save them. Thousands and thousands of objects hurled out, but to no avail.
The fridges tried their best, but one by one they were crunched away, toothy bite by toothy bite, until there were only two left in the gore-stained room. William’s non-melted eye dilated with joy to see the empty hallway now behind his hands-less, weeping wimp of a son. This uprising had failed, gloriously. The surviving fridges kept limply spitting out worthless items as Temparment closed in on them.
Gerald, in desperation, closed his eyes and screamed in his mind, from his mind, a desperate demand into the universe. He didn’t believe in a God, and he didn’t have any reason to think any being existed any more powerful than his father or their gacha, but turning back to his nearly obsessive belief that he was living in a simulation, Gerald Blackmore demanded a miracle, directly from the universe. He didn’t know what kind he was asking for, and he certainly couldn’t have guessed which kind he was going to get—but it seemed something about his consciousness imposing its indominable will upon reality had skewed the laws of probability in his favor, because the boy’s miracle came…
One of the Fridges spat out the world’s largest diamond, previously unfound by mankind. It was the random object that happened to pop out just in time. The unrefined chunk of the hardest material known to man plopped out just as Temparment bit down towards the fridge. Every one of his blood-stained teeth shattered upon the ferocious impact, leaving him unable to bite. He tried to loosely gum the fridge down his throat, but it was far too large. Temparment suffocated the Fridge Horror, but in the process, he choked to death on it, unable to force it whole down to the black hole in his gullet. Both fell to the ground, dead among the gore, crushing the face’s Hats in the process under the excess weight of the refrigerator.
The only beings left standing were Gerald, hands-less and quickly bleeding out; and William, half-melted but kicking and still wearing the last surviving Several Hat. The deformed maniac pointed his gun at his son and pulled the trigger without hesitation, but he had used all his bullets on the gacha. He tossed the gun down and marched angrily over to Gerald, gripping him by the throat with his half-melted hand and lifting him into the air, slamming his son’s head against the wall again and again with the augmented strength granted to him by the Hat until Gerald’s skull had mostly caved in. Blood filled the white of his eyes as it spread to places it shouldn’t. His father didn’t even have to finish choking him--there was no avoiding death now.
“Your little rebellion failed, you low-down, traitorous little punk,” he growled, squeezing harder. He had no patience left for formal banter. Gerald could feel the life drain out of him already as his air cut off, kicking wildly to no success. His vision blurred. “This is the part where I’m supposed to ask you for your last words, but I can’t be expected to do so when I’m this pissed. Do you see what you did to me, you waste of sperm, you waste of fucking oxygen!? Do you see what happened to my beautiful body? Not even Omni can--”
“You’re holding me with your left hand because you can’t grip me with your right,” Gerald barely managed to vocalize, smiling.
“…what?”
“You cut your fingers down to make them fit in the glove, didn’t you, father? I’d wondered how you’d done it, but this confirmed it for me. You can’t even jack off now, can you? I doubt you could hurt me with that hand anymore if you tried. You’re such a fucking coward, you had to--”
“Silence!” William boomed, lifting his gloved (and, yes, self-mutilated) hand to prove his son wrong and strike him hard enough to bash his nose into his brain and kill him instantly. The moment his hand came within reach, Gerald used his last bit of strength to bury his foot under the lip of the plastic glove and kick it off of his hand with all his might. His father’s chopped-up, gnarled stump reached for it as it fell to the ground and landed among the layer of blood and gacha-chunks, sloshing away, but it was too late. A Several Hat, the last one left, blamed William for the death of his brothers. No longer bound by arcane law, the sentient cowboy hat’s angry eyes grew even more furious as it bit down and devoured William’s brain like cole slaw at a rodeo, chomping his forehead cleanly and entirely in half.
The half-melted megalomaniac slumped over, his eyes rolled back into his head, his mouth frozen in an angry exclamation. The other half of his brain sloshed out onto the floor like Jell-O sloshing from a bowl, splattering next to the torn-off cat ear of a Fem-Fatal and the eyeball from a Tiffany. The Several Hat flew through the open door to the study, eager to exit the carnage as quickly as possible, and not particularly eager to commit any further violence at all now he was no longer being controlled by a maniac.
“I win,” Gerald laughed, falling to the ground. He knew he was already dying, bleeding out internally and externally and with a skull smashed open, but he’d done it--he’d saved Cecilia. He smiled and thought back to his favorite movie, the Matrix.
“Maybe this is like the Matrix. It’s all a simulation, and the gacha are just a virus. I’m the chosen one, but I can’t do it in this life--I’ll have to die and be reborn somehow, like Neo. Hell, I hacked reality already, right—what’s one more miracle? Maybe somebody on the outside in the real world will revive me with the power of love, and I’ll come back able to dodge bullets, and we’ll tangle with men in black, and--”
The irrevocably shitty, needlessly sadistic, and surprisingly heroic thirteen-year-old boy died with a massive smile on his face.