Reading The Label - Part 2 (Commission for Axel1)

TAGS: Growth/Expansion, Muscle Growth, Giantess TF, SHORK

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Thinking about how exactly fish of all things gave her so much proverbial fuel wasn’t something Mako was keen on doing, even during her lucid periods; it shouldn’t, not without it being a flagrant breach of the laws of thermodynamics, but she wasn’t one to disagree with observable reality when it came knocking on her door. She ate fish, she grew bigger and hungrier, that much was just plainly obvious; maybe at some point in the future, she’d come up with an explanation for it, but right now?

Right now she was just hungry. And hungrier the more she became ready to consume her body weight in the stuff, courtesy of her hyperactive metabolism; whether it was entirely psychological, or her body giving her the signals she needed so as to not burn up from the inside out was best left as a discussion for the people in charge of reversing the gene splicing. For Mako herself, it was a simple directive: find fish, eat fish, just like the creatures whose DNA she’d injected into herself.

While this was going on inside her head, the rest of the supermarket’s clientele was faced with a decision that shouldn’t have been as tough as it was. Basic fight-or-flight response dictated that, when faced with a threat, they had three options: get the hell out of dodge before their bloodline ended with them, grab the nearest weapon and confront the threat, or freeze and hope for the best. No one, absolutely no one, was ready for a fourth option to insinuate its way into the back of their heads, stealthily as could be: move forward, yes, but embrace the threat.

Maybe it was the overall aesthetic, combined with the fact that the giantess growing in front of them was clearly disinterested in actually harming anyone. She was wrecking the fish aisle, yes, doing number on the shelving and packaging, but more than once she brushed up against a smaller someone and, rather than adding them to the feast, simply pushed them aside as gently as possible… mostly to get at whatever was behind them.

It could be a ruse, as far as anyone knew; perhaps that hulking amazon was deliberately avoiding targeting anyone else around her in an effort to draw them all into a false sense of security, ready to strike when they least expected it. Perhaps, once the supermarket’s non-living stock was exhausted, she would direct her attention to the people around her… or, perhaps, she had no intention of doing such a thing, and those watching should lower their guard and approach her, knowing as they did that they were in good hands.

There was no denying that the looks played a significant part in it as well. While most of those watching were in no way attracted to the sort of hyper-muscular, excessively hulked out physique on display, Mako just… made it work. There was something about the way her body was constructed, built on itself as if in layers, bulging with raw muscle mass and obvious power, that made it almost magnetic in a way: the same instinct one would have on seeing a bicep far larger than normal, where one’s brain would issue a command to touch it and confirm it was real… only, as applied to an entire body.

And one growing larger by the moment. That alone was the sole worrying part about the entire process, especially once the giantess’ back smashed against the ceiling and began dragging along it, bringing down lighting, panelling, and enough dust that whatever she didn’t consume would end up unusable anyway. Simply moving was enough for the giant sharkess to cause destruction to her environs, and it didn’t seem like she was intent on stopping any time soon; indeed, as soon as the fish aisle was entirely taken care of, and as soon as she confirmed this by swivelling around and sniffing the air, her head instantly turned to the front door.

It was difficult to explain what was going on inside of her head; even Mako, who was supposedly in there, couldn’t put to words the primal urges trying to take over. She hadn’t expected the gene splicing to have such a pronounced effect on her cognitive processes, but, as she quickly learned, cognition itself was more than just the few pounds of meat she had inside of her head. She, just like everyone else, was a slave to her own body and its peculiarities, its idiosyncratic urges, and in the form she was in, this translated into a ravenous hunger for… fish.

Hard to tell if it was embarrassing, that someone of her size and bulk would want for fish, as if she was nothing more than a shark on legs, or if she should be relieved that at least her need for sustenance wasn’t directed at people. It was bad enough that she was a shark on legs; at no point did Mako expect that the genemodding would transform her into a hulking human-shark hybrid, but there she had it: just running her fingers over her “skin” was enough to let her feel how rough it was, and the less said about her skeletal structure, the better.

She was lucky there were no mirrors around. The first time this happened, Mako got a good look of herself on a reflective surface and saw just how radically her skull had been altered: elongated, her mouth and nose warped into a shark’s… muzzle? Whatever biologists called it, filled to the brim with enough teeth to keep a dentist in business for life, all of them sharp enough to cut through steel given enough patience. The kind of face one could use to make anyone’s heart stop, ready to rip and tear its way through anything that it saw, and yet, all she wanted was fish.

Mako would’ve laughed, if she wasn’t so busy sniffing the air and trying to find the smallest particulate that would let her know where to go. She was roughly aware, in that state, that she lived by the ocean; in declarative terms, the information was there, but once her body encroached on multiple walls and just taking a step cost her enough willpower to nearly break her entirely, such things had a tendency to vanish into the aether. She was still growing, was the problem; she would keep growing until, at some point, she hopefully reached a maximum size beyond which her physiology couldn’t go further, signalling the point where the transformation would wear off.

Unfortunately for her, this mythical climax only occurred when she had her fill last time, and there was nothing to guarantee to her that it would happen again; it could be that her first change was special, a form of priming, and now that she was undergoing it again, the process simply wouldn’t stop. Or, maybe, it would; she just didn’t know, and it was this unknown that, perhaps paradoxically, made it so easy for her to just let go.

If Mako knew what was going to happen, it would’ve been significantly easier for her to start fretting over it: what if it didn’t happen? What if it happened, but out of its proper schedule? What if it happened in a slightly different way, one that made her think that it was going to not happen at all? A myriad of different ways of stressing over it, when, in sharp contrast, just having no idea meant she was left with two options: generalised, directionless anxiety, or a complete surrender to fate. And frankly? She was tired of being anxious all the time.

In this new, improved form, she could finally cut loose. Not inside buildings, but that was easily solvable: just keep walking, and eventually she would crash through the double-wide doors and glass windows, emerging into a much wider, much freer outdoors, where her full self could be expressed. Did she drag half the store’s internal structure along with her? Did she leave behind a trail of destruction, courtesy of a body that kept bulking up and the surprise addition of a long, muscular tail that seemed to have a mind of its own? Maybe, but that hardly seemed important compared to finding some breathing room.

Even the screaming seemed not to register. Why should it? She was fine; it was everyone else who didn’t know how to deal with her, everyone else who had to figure themselves out now that they were shown true perfection. Too much? Perhaps, but the new Mako was quick to take that one smidgeon of doubt, lock it in a box and threw it in the back of her mind along with whatever was left of her old self; there was no room in there for any amount of introspection, only certainty: she was the pinnacle of genetic perfection, wrought into being by her own hands. Yes, she did need to splice some shark into herself, but that didn’t really matter; omellettes, eggs, that sort of thing.

What did matter was that she was still being reshaped into an ever-greater form. While easy to miss amidst the mad dash to get out of the supermarket before she blew her way up to the second floor, now that she had the time to admire herself, it was clear to Mako that she was not yet done growing. Much like before, any amount of strain, no matter how minor, seemed to add further mass onto her already-bulky frame, her body defending itself by defaulting to increasing her musculature. Of course, at her size, any amount of physical exercise counted as “strain”; just flexing was more than sufficient to make her swell several inches in every direction, not helped at all by how she was flexing with most of her upper body.

It fed on itself. Mako made her top half bigger, placing her lower one under greater stress, which forced it to grow, thus giving her more of a reason to expand her gargantuan self further. It wasn’t much; it wasn’t as if she was literally outgrowing entire buildings just by flexing (at least, not whole buildings), but it was sufficient: she could see herself grow, she could open her eyes as she strained herself and she could see her veins popping, her bulging self bulge further, her body multiplying her mass in a frenzied rush to make sure she didn’t collapse in on herself. She could keep her eyes open and fixed in one direction, marveling at how more and more of her body came into view, until it took up a significant chunk of wherever she looked at.

The sole exception was straight up… but that could be easily solved. Tilting her head in that direction also conveniently gave her a whiff of what she wanted the most, and seeing as there was some distance still between her current position and the wealth of fish she detected… well, plenty of time to exercise along the way, until her shoulders and back were so immensely overdeveloped that even looking straight up at the sky wouldn’t stop Mako from being able to see some part of herself.

Very easy to lose her sense of self as well, especially when there was so much body in which to throw it into and forget it was there. Easy for her to fully embrace her embodied cognition and abandon this notion that she was what her brain decided she was; that instead, her true self, the one fully realised Mako, was the sum total of her entire physicality, from the lust-and-hunger-addled brain to the colossal pile of muscles that she called her body. Easy enough for her to tune out the entire world around her, until all she could hear was the creaking and groaning of her leather-like skin; easy enough for her to phase out everything that wasn’t herself, leaving only the growing of her form and the thundering, earth-shaking steps she was taking closer and closer to the docks.

Nothing remained of her original intent to head to her safehouse. No doubt, by then, the camera system had been activated as news reached her employers of a giant sharkess rampaging through downtown; no doubt they were already drafting the contract termination papers and preparing a press release. No doubt the police had been called and she was well on her way to being sedated and dragged somewhere where her transformative rampage could be run down until it burned out… and no doubt in Mako’s mind that none of this mattered, because she was the one who decided what was going to happen, no one else.

For those watching from afar, having at least realised that they should ignore that voice in their heads telling them to get closer for the sake of their own safety, it was… a spectacle. No other way to put it; most of them had been going about their daily life, doing what they could to ignore the humdrum monotony of it, when suddenly they turned a corner and there she was: a twenty foot tall giantess, some kind of hybridised, land-walking shark, looking like a pile of living muscle mass more than it did anything else. Only a few would even notice the truck-sized pair of breasts jutting out from a set of pecs that somehow turned out larger; the whole was far greater than any of its parts.

And behind her, proof positive of her superiority. If she wasn’t a perfect lifeform, then surely the city would’ve been able to withstand her. If she wasn’t the pinnacle of perfection, then her simply walking wouldn’t have left everything in her wake pulverised and reduced to wreckage. This much Mako knew, and this much she was happy to perpetuate; at no point did she stop to think that she was giving her potential pursuers a big fat neon sign pointing to where she was going, because no pursuers would ever reach her.

Even if they did, what would they do? Shout at her for her to calm down? Shoot her with tranquilisers, only to have the darts bounce off her skin? Just flat-out shoot her, to then find out she was far more bullet-resistant than anything they had in their armoury? Nothing they had could even begin to scratch her, and the sooner they realised this, the better off they would be; there was nothing left for them to do but embrace her and the reality she brought along with her perfect self.

The streets disagreed, of course. As did the several vehicles that just happened to be in the way; for most onlookers, it was the first time they saw something as ubiquitous as a car being flattened into a steel pancake with some glass sprinkles on top, and so suddenly that it bordered on the outright impossible. That the giantess could do in a moment what an industrial press took some time to accomplish was the realm of fantasy, but unless the entire city was experiencing a highly specific collective hallucination, there was no other explanation: it was happening, and those sirens weren’t just in their heads.

Only a mile or so until Mako reached the docks, at which point she’d be able to gorge herself to her heart’s content. She could smell it as well: fish, industrial quantities of it, stacked in such deliciously excessive numbers as to make her mouth water with anticipation. She could taste it as well; part of the gene splicing, she presumed, giving her the ability to literally savour her prey from a great distance away, even through air. Or maybe she was just imagining it, fueled in equal parts by her animalistic hunger and a very human arousal, libido and the need to feed conjoining into an hitherto unknown beast of an instinct that no other living creature on the planet possessed.

Yet more proof of her unique nature, and yet more evidence that she should be the one dictating the rhythm around those parts. Already she saw cars pulling up next to her, their drivers and passengers practically falling off their seats in their maddened attempts at getting close to her: their eyes unfocused, their motions uncoordinated, their minds having been infiltrated and taken over by the singular need to be close to their goddess. To worship her, to give her their all, even if this meant risking proximity; it didn’t seem to register with them that one errant twitch on the sharkess’ part could very well send them flying several feet in a random direction.

Mako would never do so on purpose, but alas, she was long past the point where she had any input on what her body did. All she had was the control panel for her urges; she could definitely tell herself that the principal motivation for the next five minutes was to feed her hunger, as she had been doing since leaving the supermarket, but apart from that, she was just a passenger… a passenger that felt every last ounce of sensory overload her body was bombarded with every half-second, but a passenger regardless. A place of honour, but still not at the wheel; that much belonged to no one, as her body slowly shifted into becoming its very own master, doing whatever it wanted to do to satisfy urges that only it could understand.

Just as it should be. Mako didn’t want to stop herself; just as long as she still reaped the benefits, standing there inside her own mind, feeling everything her body felt, then she couldn’t care less. Let the streets be destroyed, let whole chunks of the city be torn to shreds and the local fish supply be reduced to nil: what she wanted was to indulge, and if this meant relinquishing control of herself to her primal lizard brain, then this was just what had to happen.