Brand New Set - Part 2 (Patreon Commission for MephistonOwl)

TAGS: Growth/Muscle Growth, Nanite Storm/Nanite Absorption, Macro/City Macro, Ascension/God

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On the outside, everything seemed perfectly fine; maybe a few dust clouds emerging from nowhere, but certainly nothing to write home about. It was only after the front door of the apartment building flew wide open and a flood of panicked tenants began pouring out into the streets that onlookers realized something might be happening, a realization that was was made surprisingly easier by the fact that, in between the first signs of danger and the colossal owl emerging from within the cocoon of their ascension were a measly couple of minutes.

The process had momentarily accelerated once the structure began to collapse inwards, with the nanites floating through Mephiston’s bloodstream and machinery making good use of all that falling rubble to kickstart and explosive growth spurt that made short work of the rest of the building in just a handful of seconds, leaving behind nothing but a couple of bits of drywall and whatever was left of its foundations after the half-mechanical titan stumbled around in confusion, slightly dazed by his own sudden emergence into the outside world. The perspective he had on it was wonky, enough to cause slight nausea before he readjusted; it was one thing to have a bird’s eye view when he was actually flying, quite another to have it while he still felt his feet firmly on the ground, leading to some confusion in his brain for the first few minutes of his brand new existence.

A confusion that, once resolved, gave rise to a most curious sense of hunger, one that Mephiston himself couldn’t quite explain. He hadn’t felt it before, not even when the nanomachines he injected into himself were outright gorging themselves on building materials; it had been a sense of power, yes, but never this… ravenous, gnawing need to eat and consume that he could feel biting at his insides, like a pit had opened in his stomach and his whole body was ordering him to fill it. Not with meat or vegetable, or even food for that matter, but raw material that could be used to further fuel his ascent into a godlike status, raw mass that could be converted into bulk, so that all the world might lay eyes on him and recognize him as their new deity.

He liked that idea. He didn’t know where it had come from, nor why he suddenly felt like he should be ruling over the planet, but what he did know was that feeling the last bits of rubble be reprocessed into additional muscle mass for his organic half felt better than anything else he’d experienced in his life, and if he had the chance to feel that again, to keep feeling it for as long as there were things to devour and transform into more of himself, then he was going to take it and milk it for all that it was worth. After all, who was there to stop him? A cursory glance at his mechanical half revealed that it was stronger than ever before, probably sturdy enough to withstand direct fire from large-caliber weapons without even so much as a scratch… and if that much was true already, then one wondered what it might be like if only it were given more, if it was allowed to improve itself until nothing, no weapons, no strategies, no anything could hope to stop it, to stop him.

Mephiston licked his beak upon having this thought, eager to see what the world had in store for him now that he had unilaterally decided to treat it as one big meal ready for him to eat at his own leisure. He didn’t even pay attention to the tiny ones running around him, some frantically sprinting towards their cars in order to get away from the disaster area, while others were rooted in place, admiring this glorious body that had been given to them as if a gift from the heavens themselves. They’d unfortunately not receive that much of a divine bounty though, for the giant owl wasn’t all that interested in giving his would-be worshippers whatever their lewd little minds wanted; in fact, he was far more concerned with the fact that there were buildings all around them that hadn’t yet been dismantled and turned into additional mass for him to play around with, something he decided should be fixed.

By that point, his control over the nanites within his body had grown to become more subconscious than anything else. He could still directly recode them if he so desired via his many machine interfaces, but as he walked around and allowed his hands to fall upon whatever hard surfaces he could reach, Mephiston felt something different within him: a will, so to speak, a collective one that he was only vaguely aware, and yet fully in control of, the total sum of the nanite mass that resided within his physical form and could be commanded to do his bidding. He needn’t spend time changing the way those machines functioned at the actual software level; rather, all he had to do was think about something he wanted them to do and they’d… do it. Much like moving an arm or taking a step, it was more unconscious than anything else, and it took a significant amount of time before the owl was comfortable enough doing it not to recoil at the sight of a nanite swarm leaving his hands; by the end though, he was actively looking forward to it.

The first structure to vanish underneath his direct orders was the building across the street from the one where he used to live. There wasn’t anything special about it, as it was effectively a carbon copy of his old apartment block; but it was there, and that was all that mattered, so it had to go. Besides, he never did quite like some of the decorations those people had on their windows (really, Santa in July?), so what better way to take out his frustrations than by slamming both hands on the roof, which by that point was about level with his pecs, and give his nanites instructions to swarm?

In an instant, two black smudges emerged from beneath his palms, extending in every direction to quickly encompass the entirety of the apartment building, coating its outside surface in a thick, almost shiny layer of nanite fluid containing trillions upon trillions of the small machines, all of which had only one instruction to follow: consume. The “shell” immediately began to shrink, the faint sounds of cement, glass and plaster being crumbled only vaguely audible as they were muffled by the nanomachine swarm itself; Mephiston kept his hands where they were, producing two thick columns of nanites connecting his hands to the ever-shrinking mass consuming his very first (well, technically second) snack. It was all over within a manner of minutes, with the two connecting lines sucking up the soup of raw mass as they receded back into Mephiston’s body, the giant owl taking a couple of steps back after the sheer weight of everything smacked into him.

He had forgotten to account for the simple fact that, broken down or now, he was still absorbing an entire building, and as a result, let loose a loud yowl-turned-moan as his body struggled to reprocess everything it had just been injected with. Not that it was a particularly hard task; after all, those same nanomachines had already turned him into an Adonis-like giant of a man… but did it really need to feel so good? Honestly, considering the type of person he was, it probably wasn’t meant to, but he just accidentally fiddled with his nanites in such a way that it made his brain produce the happy juice whenever he used them; even if that was the case though, he wasn’t about to complain, what with there being so many buildings around him that he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of that high any time soon.

But it wouldn’t do to just absorb them one by one. Not only would this take so long as to become downright monotonous, but it also wasn’t enough of a flex of his new power; sure, eating buildings in seconds wasn’t something that most people could really do, but given the sort of tools he had at his disposal, it felt downright wasteful not to use them to their fullest extent, especially given what happened to him after all that mass he absorbed was reprocessed into something his body could actually use.

It was just like back at home, just… bigger. Much, much bigger in fact, so much that he actually saw the ground run away from him in real time as his body’s two halves were equally engorged by the infusion of raw materials, rather than it being a lopsided competition as it had been beforehand; this was good, it meant that his body was becoming more efficient at handling things, which obviously could only mean that he should go for larger and larger meals, playing in perfectly with what he’d already been thinking. It all fell into place, really: he ate one building and became big and bulky enough that, rather than nearby roofs being on par with his pecs, they were now closer to his waist, so obviously he wanted more… no, needed more. He was their new god after all, the new deity to which they would pay tribute, and it wouldn’t do for him not to be as glorious as he could be. Plus, buildings allowed people to hide in them, and he wasn’t about to have that; all would see his glorious radiance.

Thankfully, it was easy enough by that point to give direct orders to the nanite swarm, enough that he didn’t even need to think about what he wanted to do before he felt large clouds of them erupt from his cybernetic side, a thick curtain of nanoscopic machines containing so many of them that it blotted out the light of the sun for the lucky few structures that had been earmarked for consumption. Just like before, the swarm enveloped them, coating their surface in a thick layer of destructive nanite fluid, and just like before, the buildings were broken down into their base components and then siphoned back into Mephiston’s body. The only real difference was that it was being done to multiple targets at a time, and unlike his first full meal, the owl no longer needed to pay any close attention to what he was doing; in fact, just as the first cloud was getting finished sucking up the last bits of concrete, he was already creating a second one, this time from his organic fingertips, to cover an entire residential city block on the opposite side of the one he had just unceremoniously claimed. It was just so… easy.

It shouldn’t be… should it? It should be difficult to take a whole city and break it down into its base components, not something that should be doable just by snapping his fingers (hell, not even that) and letting the nanites take care of the rest. And yet, rather than posing any kind of challenge, what he was seeing the simplest, most mundane task on the planet, and that… that made it special. It made it better, somehow, that he could so easily wreak havoc on such a large a scale, that something that usually took a natural disaster came to him as naturally as breathing; he would raise an arm, and whole blocks of buildings would vanish beneath his nanoscopic attendants, he would stomp down on an apartment highrise and not only would every ounce of its construction materials be added to his growing form, but those of neighboring structures as well.

All while leaving the organics inside intact, of course. Those who hadn’t run away already had to be spared from his rampage, though not necessarily for any humanitarian reason; it was just harder to have worshippers if he accidentally smushed them underfoot, and what was the point of going so absurdly overboard with his destruction and absorption if he wasn’t doing it for the adoration of his new subjects? Oddly enough, the little ones didn’t seem to be all that enthused with their god; surely, seeing Mephiston’s well-toned, muscular form looming over their city and growing larger with each building he claimed should’ve let them know who was in charge, but very few of them actually gave themselves up voluntarily. Most still insisted on evacuating, with others even going so far as to try and harm him, apparently unaware that such a thing would inevitably be a pointless endeavour; bullets and shells would either bounce harmlessly off of him or be reabsorbed into his body, and even when the occasional fighter jet decided to perform a strafing run, it barely did anything other than give the owl even more fuel for his raging furnace.

Did they not understand that he was inevitable? That no matter what they did, he would always be, and would not be denied? From the way they acted, one might be forgiven for thinking they were actually afraid of him, a ridiculous notion that Mephiston refused to indulge; clearly, if all those littles ones were yet refusing to throw themselves at his feet, then that was because he wasn’t being clear enough with the message: he was their new god, he was there to stay, and there was nothing they could do about that. And what better way to show this off than to keep eating the city, one block at a time, until finally he reached the downtown area?

It was funny to him. Once, he might’ve looked up at the skyscrapers and felt something resembling pride for being able to live somewhere with such imposing architecture, maybe even a modicum of joy for knowing he could just get in his car and go visit them, to look upon the landscape from so high up without having to resort to flying. Now though, they looked so… small. He actually had to look down just to be able to see them, down there, looking like mildly thick toothpicks that he could oh-so-easily topple down with just a single claw. They were barely worth consuming, now that he thought about it; looking back at where he had come from, there was an enormous, widening trail of destruction where he had gone through, the result of which was his body being as colossal as it was at that moment. Surely, if there still remained anyone who denied his divinity, then that was their fault, not his. So, he raised a single foot, then brought it down on what used to be one of the country’s most beautiful skylines, and just like that, it ceased existing; the gains he received from them were barely worth the effort.

Still, that was just one city. One metropolis. There was a whole world out there for him to claim as his own.

So better get started on it.