He Who Fights with Monsters 4 (He Who Fights with Monsters, #4)

by Shirtaloon

“It is good to see you alive again, Mr Asano.” “Good to be seen,” Jason said. “It comes as bit of a surprise.” “Not entirely,” Shade said. “The World-Phoenix token in your possession was always a comfort to me, in regard to your safety.” “Wait,” Jason said. “You knew?” “Of course,” Shade said in his usual dignified tone. “I’m not a scrub.”

“Mr Asano, you just died attempting to have a knife fight with an entity so powerful that it was forced to use a proxy so as to not annihilate the universe by simple virtue of arriving in it.” “Oh, come on, Shade. It was one time.” “Mr Asano, as I do not possess eyebrows, I shall require you to imagine me with a pair in order that I might give you a flat look from beneath them.”

“Damn. You missed the last season of Game of Thrones.” “Was it any good?” “It was real good. Extending it to thirteen episodes so they could properly develop the climax was a smart move, after how much they’d been rushing things.” “Last I heard, they were cutting it down to six episodes.” “Someone leaked the scripts and the internet went crazy. Something about everyone turning dumb, evil or both. They rewrote the whole thing and everyone really liked how it turned out.”

If only!

“It’s a good time to be a vampire,” Vermillion said. “Bram Stoker was a debacle and the less said about Bela Lugosi the better, but Anne Rice and Twilight really turned things around.” “Really? Twilight?” “Twilight was fantastic for us.”

She looked down at his t-shirt, emblazoned with the text I WENT TO A MAGICAL ALTERNATE UNIVERSE AND ALL I GOT WAS VAST COSMIC POWER.

“The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”

“It’s a DVD box set, Uncle Jason. It might as well be chiselled on stone tablets.”

“Tell the truth as much as you can, and if you have to lie, make it obvious. That makes it easier to slip the important lies past people.”

“That it’s an arbitrary assignment of negative value to words with no inherent negative value based on outmoded moral strictures,”

“I’m a man’s man,” Jason said. “The only thing I fear is a frank discussion about my feelings.”

“I try to be a good guy, but it turns out I'm really bad at it and kill a lot of people. I've been back less than three weeks and I don't know how many people I've put in the ground. Asya, do you have numbers on that?” “Uh... somewhere between thirty and fifty is the estimate,” she said.

“Bigger on the inside,” he muttered. “I suppose I am too, for that matter.”

His familiars had been comfortingly following him around like apocalyptic ducklings.

“Very small isn’t nothing,” Jason said. “We’re totally going to save the universe, which will totally get me some action. I’ll be all ‘hey, ladies, I’m the guy who saved the universe,’ and they’ll be all ‘that sounds like hot nonsense, but you’re way better looking than Kaito, so let’s make out.’ Then I’ll be all ‘I can’t do that; I respect women,’ and they’ll be all ‘it’s totally our choice.’ Since I’m all about female agency, I have to go along with it at that point because it’s the feminist thing to do, so we’ll go the supermarket and buy all the whipped cream…”

“It'll be fine,” Jason said. “I'm great at fighting evil. I mean, did I hurt the bad guy? No. Did he kill me? Yes, he did. But we won! Will I get credit? Probably not. All the women will be like ‘hey, Humphrey, your shoulders are obviously so large because of a glandular condition, but we’re totally into that.’ Then Humphrey will be all ‘sorry, gaggle of women, but I have to mourn my even more handsome friend,’ and they’ll be all ‘hey, we’re super ready to comfort you,’ and he’ll be all ‘well, I suppose my handsome friend did show me how to whip cream.’ Then they’ll go off to a local purveyor of dairy goods and—”