Malicious Compliance: The Necromancer Who Hated His Script [LitRPG / Progression Fantasy / Satire / Comedy / Villain / Revenge]

The sign above the door read [TRATTORIA IL BAFFO]. Beneath it, someone had painted a smiling chef whose mustache was large enough to have its own zip code.

Mordecai held the door for Egel, who entered while still clinging to his arm, and the smell reached them before they had taken three steps. Garlic, basil, tomatoes simmering in an enormous pot, while Red-and-white checkered tablecloths covered every table, candles burned inside empty wine bottles, and an accordion was playing a song about the sea from somewhere Mordecai couldn't identify.

'Viciiin o' mareeee, facimmo ammore...' Song name: O' Marenariello.

Behind the counter stood the owner, a short, round man with the cheerful confidence of someone who considered every stranger a friend he hadn't met yet. He wore a very thick black mustache, a blue apron suspiciously reminiscent of overalls, and a red cap with no letter on it. Oh no.

Mordecai stared, while Egel tightened her grip on his arm.

'Hmm..." he rubbed his chin. "He looks exactly like...'

A notification appeared before his face, large and red enough to conceal its owner.

[CRITICAL WARNING. DO NOT SAY IT. DO NOT EVEN THINK IT LOUDLY.]

[WE CANNOT AFFORD A COPYRIGHT LAWSUIT AGAINST THEM. THEY HAVE MORE LAWYERS THAN WE HAVE SKELETONS.]

A bead of sweat trickled down Mordecai's forehead.

He then looked at Egel and said, 'Excuse me for a minute, Egel,' before mentally activating one of his recently acquired skills: [FREE ACTION TALKING]

Then, around him, the entire universe froze and turned grey while bossa nova elevator music started playing in the background.

'You're afraid of a copyright strike, are you serious?' he thought, with the patience of a man explaining fire safety to a toddler holding a lit match. 'You? After recycling every cliché and trope you could get your hands on? The tsundere, the dragon slayer with a murdered family, the catgirl who says "nya," the harem, and even blonde mages with ED. We're a landfill of other people's ideas with a corporate logo stapled on top. If anyone's getting sued, it's all of us. In bulk. What's the next clichè? That guy named like a car who constantly dies? Wait, he's already in this world if I remember well.'

[THEY ARE A DIFFERENT KIND OF LAWYER. NOT EVEN CASSANDRA OR ALDMAX HIMSELF CAN SAVE US.]

'Fine.' He sighed. 'I said nothing. Look at me, saying nothing.'

After his last words, the system notification disappeared, and the universe started moving again.

"Kaitoyama?" Egel looked at him, confused, as nothing had happened.

"Sorry, Egel... I just remembered something important..." Another drop of sweat fell from his forehead.

Then, the owner spread his arms.

"Benvenuti, miei cari clienti!"

[Subtitles: Welcome, my dear customers!]

Egel blinked. As far as she could tell, the man had just sung a very short song with tremendous enthusiasm.

Mordecai, meanwhile, understood him perfectly. A line of clean white text hovered beneath the owner's chin, translating every word.

'Wait. Subtitles? Since when do I have automatic subtitles?' He studied the floating letters. 'Half the tourists who visit Japan would trade a kidney for this. Why isn't it sold separately?'

[This skill was unlocked off-screen during your last dungeon crawl as Kaitoyama one month ago, the one where Vampire Slayer spent four hours hunting little bats screaming "VAMPIRES! THEY MUST DIE! THEY KILLED MY FAMILY!". You ended up eating toxic mushrooms that usually give hallucinations to people and unlocked that skill thanks to your [Iron Stomach]. You skip every notification that doesn't contain the word "reward."]

'Fair.'

He then leaned toward Egel and spoke very, very, very quietly. "Don't say anything. Just smile and nod. Italians talk with their hands and the tone of their voice. If you nod at the right moments, they'll assume you're fluent and understand their language."

Egel nodded with such conviction that he briefly wondered whether she'd interpreted the instruction as a lifelong commitment.

Straightening his coat, Mordecai turned to the owner.

"Buonasera. Un tavolo per due, grazie."

[Subtitles: Good evening. A table for two, thank you.]

His Italian was flawless, perfect, splendid, amazing, italianissimo. Not the sort learned from a phrasebook five minutes before boarding a plane, either. His voice came out deep and warm, with the unhurried elegance of a man who might read poetry to a candle for recreational purposes. Every syllable sounded as though it had spent several centuries aging in an oak barrel. That voice was deeper than my future.

After his words, Egel's knees nearly gave out. She hadn't understood a word, but apparently her body didn't consider that an obstacle. It heard Mordecai speaking Italian and promptly began making marriage arrangements without consulting her.

Her grip tightened around his arm, her cheeks turned crimson, and a tiny noise escaped her throat, which she disguised as a cough.

'His voice... Oh, gods, his voice...' She swallowed. 'Say something else. Anything. Tell me about Larry's spoons, read me a tax form or talk me about the dental plan...'

The owner pressed both hands to his chest.

"Ah, parla italiano! Mamma mia, che voce! Sembra un attore!"

[Subtitles: Ah, you speak Italian! Mamma mia, what a voice! You sound like an actor!]

"Troppo gentile," Mordecai replied with a modest nod.

[Subtitles: Too kind.]

Egel nodded too, very vigorously.

The owner nodded back, delighted.

Naturally, she nodded again.

For several seconds, they continued exchanging nods, neither willing to be the first to stop. Mordecai suspected they'd still be doing it by dessert if he didn't intervene.

"Prego, prego, da questa parte!" the owner sang, grabbing two menus.

[Subtitles: Please, please, this way!]

He ushered them between the tables, apparently satisfied that he'd met two exceptionally polite customers.

---

Their table stood at the back of the restaurant, sheltered by a column wrapped in plastic grapevines. A candle burned between two place settings, and the corner was secluded enough that Mordecai couldn't see the other customers without leaning sideways.

The AI-generated/stolen owner had clearly spent a lifetime recognizing couples who insisted they weren't couples.

They sat down, and Egel immediately picked up her menu. Upside down, but with great dignity.

Mordecai decided to leave her to it.

While she examined the mysterious collection of letters, he breathed in the smell of garlic and warm olive oil. Fresh bread had just come out of the oven, and somewhere nearby, someone was stirring a pot of tomato sauce.

For a moment, he was back on Earth, specifically to a small apartment, a folding table, and a bottle of wine that had cost considerably more than it deserved.

He'd spent three days practicing a pasta recipe he'd found online, making enough mistakes to feed a family of six. On the evening of their first anniversary, he'd finally managed something edible. He set the table, lit the candles, and even ironed a shirt, an activity that he couldn't do often because of time.

Then he waited for Lucy to come home.

She'd loved the dinner so much that she even cried a little.

The following evening, Mordecai returned from work to find their apartment full of candles and flowers. Lucy had cooked for him too.

She'd been planning the same surprise for weeks.

Unfortunately, she'd gotten the anniversary date wrong.

Her pasta was terrible. The sauce had somehow managed to be both watery and burnt, and she looked so nervous when he tried it that he couldn't bring himself to say anything except that it was delicious.

They ate both dinners. Twice the pasta.

In the end, they were sick for a week.

Sick but happy. They spent the next week in bed, holding onto each other and watching stupid anime.

Mordecai smiled to himself. 'Ah damn. Those memories always return in the wrong moments—'

"Kaitoyama?"

He looked up. Egel was watching him over the upside-down menu.

"You're smiling." She said, with a small blush on her cheek.

"Oh, don't worry." He reached across and turned her menu the right way up. "It's nothing important. What looks good?"

Egel stared at the page, now presented in an entirely new and equally incomprehensible arrangement.

"I..." A pause. "I can't read any of this." She sighed with pain in her voice.

"That's fine. Neither can anyone else, without help." He said, his voice soft.

He then activated the translation overlay and glanced through the dishes himself.

A movement beyond the serving window caught his attention. In the kitchen, a young apprentice had begun chopping carrots for the soup of the day.

And because the System had apparently received an unexpected injection of investor money, the production budget suddenly went through the roof.

The lighting changed.

A golden glow descended upon the cutting board, bathing a perfectly [SSS Ordinary Kitchen Knife] in the radiance usually reserved for legendary weapons. The nonexistent camera swept toward the blade as a single carrot rolled into frame in slow motion, illuminated from within like a sacred relic.

The knife descended, and each slice spun through the air at a glorious sixty frames per second, catching the light before landing on the cutting board with a crisp, beautiful, overbudgeted, and mixed tak.

Then an angelic choir began singing, and for eleven magnificent seconds, the preparation of vegetable soup received more artistic attention than the rest of the city had seen in a century.

Mordecai watched, chin resting in one hand.

"Beautiful," he murmured. "Truly. Look at those millions flowing into the carrots. All that money, all that animation, all that care, just to fill the enormous hole where a plot should be."

[The animation team worked very hard on that. You should be grateful and appreciate art.] The System replied, sounding genuinely hurt.

"I'm sure they did. Three weeks or more on a carrot. Meanwhile, the main character still doesn't know why he's here."

The golden lighting vanished, the choir fell silent, and the apprentice scraped the carrots into a pot, completely unaware that he'd just starred in the most expensive eleven seconds of his life.

Egel, who had missed the entire spectacle, was still struggling with the menu.

"Uhmm... Kaitoyama..." She kept staring at the menu. "What's a 'bruschetta'?"

"A slice of bread with tomato, oregano, and extra-virgin olive oil on it."

"That's it?" She put her index finger on her mouth. "Extra... virgin... olive oil... Sounds like a legendary ingredient."

"That's it. They have an entire culture built around the idea that putting good things on bread constitutes a meal." Mordecai leaned back. "It's one of the few things this world gets right."

---

After ten minutes, the surely 100% legal copyright™ pending owner returned with a notepad and the expectant expression of a man about to witness an important culinary decision.

"Allora, cosa prendete?"

[Subtitles: So, what will you have?]

Egel froze. Nobody had prepared her for this part.

She scanned the menu desperately until her finger landed on a word near the top. It looked pronounceable. More or less.

"Piz... za. Mar... ghe... ri... ta."

The owner's eyes lit up.

"PIZZA MARGHERITA! Ottima scelta, signorina! La regina delle pizze!"

[Subtitles: PIZZA MARGHERITA! Excellent choice, miss! The queen of pizzas!]

Egel beamed. She had absolutely no idea what she'd ordered. She didn't know what a pizza was, who Margherita might be, or why this mysterious woman had apparently been crowned queen of something. Still, everyone seemed pleased with her decision, so she considered it a success and nodded to the owner.

"And for you, signore?"

Mordecai handed over his menu without bothering to open it.

"Per me, gli spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino."

[Subtitles: For me, the spaghetti with garlic, oil, and chili.]

The owner took a step backward and placed a hand over his heart.

"Aglio, olio e peperoncino. Semplice. Perfetto. Il piatto dei veri intenditori!"

[Subtitles: Garlic, oil, and chili. Simple. Perfect. The dish of true connoisseurs!]

He scribbled down the order, spun around, and thrust a fist triumphantly into the air.

"LET'S-A GO! MAMMA MIA MARCELLO! PREPARE THE FOOD FOR OUR CUSTOMERS!"

Then he charged toward the kitchen at a speed that should have been physically impossible for a man of his proportions.

A notification appeared.

[I TOLD YOU.]

'I said nothing.'

[YOU THOUGHT IT.]

'I thought it quietly.'

[WE'RE BEING WATCHED. THEY'RE WAITING FOR ANY WRONG MOVE.]

From the kitchen came a thunderous voice.

"SECRET TECHNIQUE! THE THOUSAND-LAYER SAUCE!"

Orange light poured through the serving window. A violin swelled over the hiss of frying pans, followed by someone shouting the name of a dish as if challenging it to mortal combat.

Something exploded. Rather softly, actually. The sort of explosion that suggested nobody had been injured, but the sound designer desperately wanted credit for it.

Mordecai closed his eyes.

"There is always a cooking anime," he muttered. "Always. The prodigy with the tragic past, the arrogant rival who can't stand losing, the grandmother with the secret recipe." He gestured toward the kitchen. "And why is the recipe always secret? It's tomatoes. Water, tomatoes, some herbs. What are they hiding? The location of a nuclear submarine?"

"What's a grandmother got to do with it?" Egel asked.

"Nothing. That's the point. She's always there. She smiles, gives the hero her secret recipe, then dies right before the final episode so he can cry into a pot."

Egel looked toward the kitchen, where another suspicious flash of orange light illuminated the serving window. "That sounds... very dramatic... hehe..." She scratched the back of her head.

"Oh, it gets worse. Then comes the tasting. Someone takes one bite and their clothes explode. Their clothes, Egel. Nobody explains why. There's a dragon behind them, a field of flowers, a choir, sometimes a naked angel descending from heaven. All because the soup was good." Mordecai yapped.

"Well... it must have been very good soup."

"It's soup, Egel."

"MAMMA MIA!" someone shouted from the kitchen.

Mordecai rubbed his forehead.

"For the record, nobody's clothes are exploding in this establishment. I have a reputation to maintain, and apparently a lawyer is already looking at me, probably rubbing his hands and smiling like a demon..." He sighed.

Eventually, the kitchen settled down. The owner disappeared to attend to another table, the food was cooking, and even the accordion player seemed to have exhausted his supply of tragedy songs.

For the first time since they'd arrived, Mordecai could hear the candle burning between them.

Egel sat very straight, with her hands folded in her lap, and every so often, she glanced at him, only to look away the instant their eyes met. Her cheeks had remained pink throughout dinner preparations, and Mordecai was beginning to suspect the Italian accent had done permanent damage.

'Being the protagonist is pretty hard, isn't it...?'

After she moved her gaze away for the 100th time, Egel opened her mouth, closed it, and then tried again.

This was a woman who had faced monsters, survived dungeons, and spent years pushing her body beyond its limits. Yet asking one simple question seemed to require more courage than any battle she'd fought.

"K-Kaitoyama?" Her voice was small despite all her muscles.

"Hm?" He looked up.

"Can I... hold your hand?"

Naturally, the System chose that precise moment to intervene.

[+10,000 EXP IF YOU HOLD HER HAND.]

[Dibbs57 has launched a petition to make Egel the MAIN HEROINE. It has 4,000 signatures and counting.]

Mordecai stared at the notification.

His expression froze into the unmistakable look of a famous streamer who had just done something unforgivable during a live Fortnite broadcast.

He was still trying to formulate a polite refusal when he realized he'd been silent for far too long.

Egel took that as permission. Her hand slipped across the tablecloth and closed around his.

Mordecai had been expecting a grip strong enough to pulverize his fingers, especially given what she had gone through with Wukong. Instead, her palm was warm, almost hesitant. She held his hand carefully, her thumb brushing across his knuckles as though she were trying to memorize their shape.

"For my whole life," Egel said, looking down at their hands, "I dreamed about holding someone's hand like this." She smiled shyly. "Usually, I ended up breaking them."

Mordecai's eyes widened.

"...Breaking them?"

"B-by accident!" she exclaimed. "Mostly. During sparring. I'd get excited, squeeze a little too hard, and then there'd be this awful cracking sound." She laughed nervously. "Afterward, I'd always visit them and apologize with fruit. Well, only when the sparring partner was a nice person." She scratched the back of her head. "And... I also used to kill monsters with these hands, you know?"

'That's pretty sad, to be honest.' He thought.

"But I never got to hold one like this," she continued. "Just because I wanted to." Her thumb moved gently across his fingers again. "I always wondered what it would feel like."

'Okay,' Mordecai thought. 'That's actually really sad.'

Then he remembered the quest.

[A DINNER WITH THE MUSCLE MOMMY: IN PROGRESS.]

Oh, right. He'd accepted this ridiculous mission for the rewards, and somewhere between the Italian restaurant, the eleven-million-dollar carrots, and the memory of Lucy's terrible pasta, he'd completely forgotten about it.

'Right. A gentle exit. I'll withdraw my hand politely. Make it look natural.'

He pulled, but nothing happened.

He tried again, applying a little more force, only to discover that extracting his hand from Egel's grip was roughly as feasible as removing a bank vault door with two fingers.

Her thumb was still tracing little circles over his knuckles. She wasn't even squeezing.

Unfortunately, this was a woman who had somehow accumulated two thousand years of cultivation in fifteen minutes, as we said for the 123742nd time. Her idea of a gentle grip had very little in common with the laws of physics.

Then Mordecai made one final attempt, but the bank vault remained closed.

Egel looked up. She noticed him pulling, and her smile faltered. There was worry in her eyes now, mixed with a fragile hope that made the whole situation considerably worse.

She still hadn't let go.

'I am trapped,' Mordecai thought, staring at their joined hands. 'By a hand. A very polite hand.'

[Dibbs57: This is the best thing I have ever seen]

In the end, Mordecai abandoned his escape attempt.

He could probably free himself if he tried hard enough, but that would mean making Egel think she'd done something wrong. And after hearing her talk about all the hands she'd accidentally broken, he couldn't bring himself to spoil the first one she'd managed to hold without sending its owner to a healer.

So he settled back in his chair and allowed her to keep his hand.

Then, because he was Mordecai, and because dealing with genuine affection was apparently more terrifying than fighting a demon lord, he changed the topic.

"Egel," he said, his voice gentler now. "Tell me about your past."

She blinked, surprised.

"I don't think I've ever really asked." He glanced toward the kitchen. "We've got time before the food comes, so I'd like to know more about you."

Egel looked down at their hands again. For a while, she said nothing. The candle flickered between them, and somewhere behind the serving window, a pot boiled over.

"MAMMA MIA!"

Mordecai sighed through his nose.

Egel gave a small laugh, then drew a slow breath.

And without letting go of his hand, she began...