Shae knows she doesn't have long.

The Empyreal Knights are on their way to claim the artifact for the Archonate. She can see their airship in the distance, its bloated shape chugging ponderously beneath the clouds. If they discover her, they will kill her. No one outside the Archonate has ever seen an Origin Core and lived, and Shae intends to do a lot more than look.

She reaches the center of the ruins and kneels, thrusting empulse into the earth beneath her feet, feeling the shape of her imbuement in her mind.

With each beat of her heart, her empulse spreads downwards. There is a hollow space beneath the lush meadow, too regular to be natural. The hollow is capped by a solid slab that could be straightforwardly lifted with the proper application of pulsebinding.

Shae calms herself. She could probably lift the slab with an exemplar technique, but that would leave signs. She has just enough time to do this right.

She severs the empulse in the slab, recovering the rest. Her new exemplate is hers. She can feel its presence. Also hers are the leather bracers on her wrists, becoming exemplates with a single heartbeat each.

Shae darts backwards. One she has what she hopes is enough distance, she stops by a handy rock and two heartbeats make an exemplate of it as well.

Holding her arms up in front of her, she joins each bracer to the the rock with an orthogonal pulsebind, forcing the horizontal motion of her bracers to match the vertical motion of the rock, with the intersect pointed towards the hollow. Then she joins the the rock to the slab with a linear pulsebind and biases the intersect heavily towards the slab.

Shae leans into her bracers and starts walking forward.

The weight of the rock presses against her arms. It rises into the air at precisely the speed she moves forward, but its weight isn't the only thing she's lifting. With every step she takes forward, the slab creeps upwards by a tiny fraction of that distance.

By the time she's walked back to the hollow and the rock is clearing the treetops, a section of meadow has torn itself out of the ground, levitating upwards just enough to reveal a gap big enough for Shae to squeeze through.

Shae wriggles through, dropping into the dark.

Once she's down, she breaks the joinings on her bracers, and lets the slab and the rock fall.

The slab falls slower than gravity, the small rock much faster. Both hit with comparable thumps.

The floor is smooth, glossy, like glass cut into tiles.

With the light from outside cut off, it's too dark to see anything at all.

Shae calmly reaches out to feel the wall behind her. She follows it.

The wall is smooth. She finds a corner, another corner, another corner, and another corner.

The room is perfectly square, with no exits, and feels like smooth dry glass.

It's true.

A dormant Origin Core.

This is the power to forge a new world.

Shae turns and walks confidently into the center of the room, hand out in front of her.

Her hand meets a cool, curved surface with the same texture as the walls.

At the instant of contact, light ripples out from under her fingers, revealing the shape of a perfect sphere hanging in midair in the exact center of the chamber. It is big enough that two of her could not quite wrap their arms around it and link hands, if there were two of her and she was inclined to try.

She feels a pressure against her skin, against her mind. A pressure she might recognize if she's ever interacted with a shok'ush. It is very weak, and the glimmer of light released by her touch is already fading.

Shae recognizes the sensation.

Shae also came prepared. She's wearing black leather travel leggings edged with white fur, which split at her inner thighs and wrap around her hips without covering anything important, and a matching half jacket with nothing underneath.

She leaps up and vaults onto the top of the Origin Core, settling herself against it with her legs spread wide. The smooth featureless surface feels hard and warm as it makes direct contact with her bare vulva, and she focuses on that feeling, letting it cut through her adrenaline.

Her jacket provides no barrier as she knocks its flaps aside and seizes her own breasts. Her nipples harden under her fingers as her hands slide up over her pliant swells, and her hips begin to rock, grinding her flesh against the unyielding crystal sphere.

The Origin Core doesn't have enough power left to participate in Shae's efforts. There is nothing but smooth dead glass to help her stimulate herself.

The surface under her is slippery with her arousal.

Shae fondles herself and humps the slick hard surface. She doesn't need anything more. Shivers of hot liquid pleasure ripple through her with each undulation of her hips, and her nethers throb with the torment of her nipples.

It's more than enough to bring her to orgasm after a while, but she's in a hurry.

Shae lifts her breasts up, stretching her nipples to take both into her mouth. A muffled moan escapes her as she clamps down with her lips. That leaves her hands free to go to her sex, one in front, one behind, knuckles knocking against the Origin Core as she humps.

Her body ignites, spasm after spasm clenching on her fingers, each kindling a glint of empulse that drains out of her core into the Core.

Light. Abstract patterns and whorls of glowing sparkles spread through the Origin Core and play over its surface.

The lights do not form symbols or words, but are perfectly comprehensible to Shae anyway.

Awakening

This core has successfully imprinted.

You may decide this core's next action, awakener.

It can create many things. It can gather power in many ways.

It will only respond to you while resonating with your power.

It will remember you while it lives. It will forget you if it dies.

The sparkling lights shift, taking on a new meaning. The light spreads, somehow jumping from the sphere to the walls, filling them with the same sparkling light.

Status

This core's awakener is currently linked.

This core has ONE command link and ZERO feeder links.

This core has ONE block of linked territory and ZERO subordinate units.

19 of 10,000 storage circuits are charged, and power draw is currently 0.26 glints per measure. This core's power reserve is critically low.

It takes her a moment to focus after her orgasm, but only a moment. It takes far more than an unremarkable orgasm to interfere with Shae's awareness of her surroundings. She looks down into the glowing sphere and takes in the information it presents to her. It's fractal, nested within itself. She can look at any one term and see its explanation inside it without having to ask.

There is a lot of information, though. It's all right there in front of her, and parsing it is much faster than reading text, she can still only take in so much in the time she has. But resonant links are two-way.

"I need a way to fight two Empyreal Knights and win."

A shift in the currents of light draws her eye.

Subordinate Units

This core has enough power to create a subset of possible eromorphic empulse-based organisms.

In addition to a unit's basic form, there are several complimentary and several mutually exclusive properties that may be given to a unit upon creation for additional cost.

And again.

Subset of Possible Units

There is enough power to create two of the first two of the simplest mobile units.

There is enough power to create several of the simplest passive defense units.

There is enough power to create one of the first three symbiotic enhancer units.

Passive defense is going to be useless against Empyreans.

Shae looks into the other two.

The Two Least Expensive Mobile Units

The PHALLIC TENTACLE is a serpentine length of flesh with a penile head capable of nimble movement. It lacks dedicated sense organs, but will seek a lubricated orifice by touch if given no commands. Creation expends 8 glints and occupies this Core for 0.2 measures.

The YONIC TENTACLE is a serpentine length of flesh with a lubricated throat running through its body, that is capable of nimble movement. It lacks dedicated sense organs, but will seek a warm member by touch if given no commands. Creation expends 8 glints and occupies this Core fore 0.2 measures.

Glimmering lights.

The Three Least Expensive Symbiotic Units

Symbiotic units must be worn by a human. If no human is present, the unit will deactivate and request matrix storage in this Core.

The BREATH HOOD is worn on the neck and covers the face to provide breathable air in any environment. Breathing the air provided by this unit may cause intense sexual arousal when this unit is low on power. Creation expends 10 glints and occupies this Core for 0.2 measures.

The DILDO STRAP is worn on the vagina and clings to the hips to provide a temporary penis to the wearer. This unit will perform direct genital stimulation when low on power or when stimulation is applied to the shaft. Creation expends 10 glints and occupies this Core for 0.1 measures.

The GLIDE LEGS are worn on the legs and provide high overland mobility through friction manipulation. This unit will perform direct genital stimulation when low on power. Creation expends 14 glints and occupies this Core for 0.2 measures.

Whirling patterns.

Erovores. This thing can create designer erovores to order. But none of the things the Core has enough power to make are going to be any use. The Empyreal Knights must be literally on top of her by now.

"None of these are enough. I need something powerful. Something that can do damage, keep me alive, and let me escape when I'm surrounded."

The currents of light shift.

PORTAL GAUNTLETS

This symbiotic unit is worn on the arms and provides a pair of linked portal emitters which may deploy a portal's two ends to any location within line of sight.

Portals remain tethered and may be moved while open. Control of open portals diminishes with distance.

This unit will perform tactile stimulation of the chest area, or if possible compel the wearer's hands to provide direct genital stimulation, when low on power.

Creation expends 1,565 glints and occupies this Core for 6.8 measures.

Oh blit that's a lot.

At an average kindling rate of of two and a half glints per beat, that comes out to more than a quarter-measure of continuous orgasm. Shae is as hot between her legs as they come, but even she can't manage that, here, in the time she has left.

She starts grinding her sex against the Core again, just in case.

"Show me the properties that can be added to symbiotic units."

Luminous currents shift. There is a lot of information. Books worth.

It seems to fall into four natural categories.

Properties of the substrate, like native empulse storage capacity and how much empulse is sent back to the Core, are first and most obvious.

But there are also deep wells of possible morphologies, behaviors, and special powers. Some of which she might even recognize as characteristic of common naturally occurring erovores.

So they really are to order and the units on offer are just presets.

And if wild erovores follow these rules... did she just discover the origin of erovores? And if she did, do the Archonate already know? Speaking of the Archonate, they have two Origin Cores already. What are they doing with them that Shae has never heard of Knights with portal powers?

Absorbed in the whirling lights, Shae's orgasm catches her off guard.

Her spasms of pleasure throb through her body, and her kindling empulse drains out of her into the Core.

The Origin Core pulses brighter for a moment.

37 of 10,000 storage circuits are charged, and power draw is currently 0.26 glints per measure. This core's power reserve is critically low.

"Show me a blank symbiotic unit and all properties I can assign it that will result in a creation cost of less than forty-six glints."

That's still a long list, but a much more manageable one.

A blank symbiotic unit is described as a skin-thick layer of flesh in the shape of a human, glossy black on the outside and a lubricated fleshy pink on the inside.

Shae resumes humping the Origin Core while she pours over the possibilities.

Special abilities that affect the body of the wearer directly, because mass costs. Thin out the shape until it resembles a web of fleshy ropes more than a body covering.

Special abilities that provide a passive effect, because she doesn't have time to learn how to control an active power, and control interfaces also cost. Two passive effects catch her eye, for producing an interesting interaction.

Shae cums, adding another 14 glints to the Core, and then keeps working.

Morphology. Add rudimentary stimulators to the inner surface, keep the part that covers her vagina directly to minimize moving parts.

Behavior. Light, constant stimulation. No stimulation while absorbing her empulse, because its easier to fight through a ruined orgasm than a satisfying one.

Special abilities. Automatic flash boosting. Automatic reactive flash shielding. Combined, her whole body will be put in a continuous flash state.

EXEMPLAR HARNESS

This symbiotic unit is worn on the whole body. It places the wearer in a continuous flash state, allowing feats of exemplar strength and durability only limited by available empulse.

This unit will perform undirected tactile stimulation at all times while worn, ceasing only while absorbing empulse from its wearer.

Creation expends 42 glints and occupies this Core for 0.1 measures.

"Create Exemplar Harness."

A shadow forms in the center of the Origin Core.

Creating an EXEMPLAR HARNESS

The creation of this unit will be complete in 0.09 measures.

A rumble disturbs the slab overhead.

The slab ceases to be Shae's exemplate, fading from her senses as it is claimed by someone else.

The shadow in the center of the Origin Sphere illuminates, revealing the form of the Exemplar Harness.

It descends, breaching the bottom of the Core like it is made of water. It falls.

Shae strips out of her leggings, hiking boots, and jacket. She jumps off the Origin Core and is there to catch the Exemplar Harness.

She pulls it on, stepping into the feet and drawing the web of fleshy cords up onto her body.

As it settles into place, she feels it come alive, wiggling little psudonubs against her skin. It feels good, especially the row rippling up and down through her intimate folds, but thank fuck she isn't ticklish.

Power surges through her. Moving becomes effortless.

With a creak and a shower of crumbling soil, the slab begins to move upwards.

Status

This core's awakener is currently linked.

This core has ONE command link and ZERO feeder links.

This core has ONE block of linked territory and ONE subordinate unit.

9 of 10,000 storage circuits are charged, and power draw is currently 0.26 glints per measure. This core's power reserve is critically low.

Nine glints. If they kill her, it won't matter if she loses her awakener status, and either way the fight isn't going to last long. She needs to be ready if she wins.

"Create Yonic Tentacle."

Meanwhile, in the meadow above...

The airship settles against the ground with a jolting thump. Several of the all-male crew leap out, trailing ropes and stakes to anchor the airship in place.

Inside the airship's bridge and cabin, Aiser'lis and Cera'mae of the Cardinal Cultivar study the patch of meadow ahead. Aiser'lis is a woman of presence and ruthless precision, standing tall with long white-on-silver hair. Cera'mae is a woman of cunning ruby eyes and bloodlust, standing with deceptive stillness at her mentor's side. Neither woman wears any clothing, but both of their limbs are entwined with thorny green vines, crawling over them like part of their skin. Both have a lush red flower blossom growing from and covering their abdomens, with feathered rows of petals growing from the vines at hips and breasts to provide a rudimentary semblance of modesty.

A team of four men jump out of the airship's cabin and set up in the center of the ruins, deploying equipment for their pulsebinder, who gets to work on excavating the artifact.

"The soil has been disturbed," Aiser'lis says.

Cera'mae darts forward one step, coming even with her mentor. "How can you tell?"

Aiser'lis turns and points at a fresh crater in the meadow, off to the side. "That is recent. So I looked closer. If you're not expecting the meadow to be pristine, there is an unnatural break in the grass. See it?"

"Yeah. Someone else is here," Cera'mae says, grinning and licking her lips.

"Get yourself seeded," Aiser'lis orders, "and join me when you're done."

Aiser'lis hops down and strides out in front of the airship, circling the area where their pulsebinder is working.

Cera'mae puts her back to the wheel, and the view out the bow window. She licks her lips.

Towards the back of the cabin, six shirtless young men in loincloths and cargo leggings towel the sweat off each other from turning the large crank that powers the ship's airscrew. Cera'mae looks them over and picks one on little more than a whim.

"You," she calls, pointing.

The men all stiffen, snapping into attentive postures. The one she points at steps forward. "Yes, m'lady?"

"Come here. Bottoms off," she orders hungrily.

The young man, dark-skinned with green-on-grey hair, blushes faintly as he bows his head and unfastens his loincloth. His cock flops into view, and Cera'mae reaches out, grasping his dangling meat in her vine-encrusted hand. She pulls him closer, squeezing and stroking with her fingers, and his erection swells in her grasp.

"Ah!" the young man breathes softly. "You're making it hard!"

"Good." Cera'mae turns back to the bow window and leans over the control console. "Fuck me and give my womb your cum, now."

"Yes'm."

Her perfunctory petal skirt rides up completely, baring everything to the young man. Wetness glistens on the lips of her vuvla, which is ringed by thin vine tendrils. As she lifts her hips and wiggles her ass at him, the small tendrils of vine animate and contract, pulling her intimate folds open to present a dripping hole waiting to be filled.

The blushing young man steps forward, a little nervous about the creeping thorns framing so arousing a sight, but not enough to disobey. He sets his hands gingerly on Cera'mae's hips and slides his cock into her hungry hole, gasping as he finds himself sliding into molten slickness. Inside her, writhing and wriggling slick walls actively massage his length. He lets out a strangled moan and starts rocking his hips against Cera'mae's butt, thrusting into her.

Cera'mae makes an approving noise, but doesn't look back, instead watching Aiser'lis out in the meadow.

The break in the grass is fresh, describing a precise square. Very fresh. Aiser'lis suspects whoever beat them here is still here.

While the pulsebinder works, Aiser'lis stops and plants her feet in a wide stance. The vines embedded in her feet animate and spread, branching down into the ground, thickening as they root her in place. She can feel the grass, the soil. She can draw nutrients and biomass up into her body to feed the fetal seed that waits in her womb.

The petals of her Empyreal Blossom ripple, responding to her will. The life in her womb splits, a new mass growing rapidly. It mutates. It flourishes.

When it is ready, a creeping wave of sexual need stirs from her core. It starts as shiver along the vines embedded all through her hot flesh, spreading out from her middle. It swells and intensifies, bearing down on her senses with the implacability of a falling mountain. Her limbs tremble, and her throbbing birth canal floods, dripping on the grass.

With a flicker of intent, the internal vines help her womb open and discharge her new floralisk. It hurts, a sharp counterpoint to the enflaming ache of the vines, but Aiser'lis is so aroused that the pain doesn't even register. The intrusion into her vagina, stretching her wide, instantly triggers an orgasm so intense that only her experience and willpower allow her to stifle a scream of pleasure down to a mere exhaled moan.

Despite the dizzying orgasmic pleasure of birthing the floralisk, Aiser'lis catches the lump of curled up plant flesh as it squeezes its way out of her. It uncurls in her hand, shaking off the glistening nectar of her sex, and Aiser'lis opens a second pair of eyes. It's like being in two places at once. Aiser'lis has her own body and senses, while also feeling, seeing, and controlling this other body at the same time.

Her body doesn't cool. Her flesh doesn't calm. A second floralisk is already on the way.

She makes the scouter floralisk unfurl four leafy wings and blink clear four sharp eyes. She has it take off and power into the air, spiraling upwards to give her an overhead view.

Aiser'lis slams through another blinding orgasm, forcing an even larger mass of plant flesh to breach her labial gates and ooze out of her drooling orifice. This one she doesn't catch. It hits the ground between her legs and unfurls, unpacking its limber form into a startling large six-legged beast that stands as high as her hip and has woody blades at the ends of its forelimbs.

Her mind stretches, incorporating the new hunter floralisk's body, even as her own body is taken again by orgasmic ecstasy from another hunter floralisk beginning to leave her womb. The vines in her brain thicken every so slightly, digging in just a little more, but are nowhere close to reaching her limits.

The grass in a circle around Aiser'lis begins to wilt. The soil begins to dry out.

From above, there is still no sign of whoever it is who got here first, other than the rock and the disturbed grass. No sign of whoever it is leaving either. Whoever it is traveled light and is probably still present.

The young man that Cera'mae ordered to fuck her is getting into it now that he's gotten over his shyness. She's already wound up, because it's impossible to be anything but wound up with an Enplanted Empyreal Blossom, and she cums on the young man's cock promptly.

When he buries himself in her and ejaculates, moaning as he grips her butt, he stays hard, and she lets him keep going. It is slightly unprofessional of her, but it beats standing around waiting to get pregnant from the first load.

Cera'mae is a lot newer at this than Aiser'lis. There are rumors that Aiser'lis has been an Empyreal Knight of the Cardinal Cultivar for centuries. Cera'mae only has a few years of experience with her Empyreal Blossom, and her assignment to the Cardinal Cultivar under Aiser'lis only happened fifteen days ago. Cera'mae doesn't go around Enplanted full-time like some of the Knights, but Aiser'lis must if she's hundreds of years old and still has ovum to spare.

An Enplanted Empyreal Blossom can reverse the effects of age and sickness, heal wounds, and provide enhanced strength and endurance. It allows control over many of the body's autonomic functions. One thing it can't do is reverse the end of a woman's fertility, or be fertile by itself. To gestate floralisks, a Knight has to provide the seed herself.

A mental intent sends the vines in her guts to trigger an accelerated ovulation. It meets the young man's sperm in her womb and germinates. It grows, dividing and expanding, but before it can start to specialize, at the point just before it becomes both more and less than mere possibility, the vines in her womb stab into it and lock it down.

The fetal seed will last for as long as she remains Enplanted, allowing her to produce an unlimited number of floralisks while it remains, but she knows it will die if she is separated from her Empyreal Blossom, requiring her to impregnate herself anew the next time she is Enplanted. She doesn't consider that a hardship, but the ovum she has are all she'll ever have, and she knows what happens to Knights who run out. They're 'retired' so their Empyreal Blossoms can be passed on to another.

The young man cums in her again, and she savors the rush before shooing him back to his duties.

The pulsebinder pulls a lever on a spring-loaded flywheel, releasing it to spin. Slowly, a thick stone slab covering a dark artificial hollow begins to rise into the air at an impressive pace. The pulsebinder's teammate throws the lever the other way, locking the flywheel as it spends its momentum, and locking the slab in place at chest height.

A girl with a web of thick black cords adorning her body streaks out of the darkness and slams into the nearest man. Her fist splinters his jaw and snaps his head back hard enough to break his neck.

Shae drives her feet into the dead man's chest, using him as a springboard to fling herself at the rooted Empyreal Knight like an arrow.

Aiser'lis has a split second to put together, no signs of leaving, and, alone with the Origin Core, before Shae's fist whiffs through the space her head occupied before she used her rooted stance to yank herself downwards faster than it was possible to fall.

As her back hits the loam, she snaps off the vines at her feet and rolls. She has one of her hunter floralisks go for an evisceration on the off-balance attacker while the other hangs back to avoid any surprises.

The woody blade stabs into Shae's gut, but the sharp point skitters off her flesh. She pivots, digging in her feet to change direction and slam into the hunter floralisk. She snaps her arm forward, slicing down to break off the limb that stabbed her.

She's using up the reserves of her Exemplar Harness alarmingly quickly, but there's nothing she can do about that. She's on the edge of an orgasm but she can't pause long enough to let it happen until she has the upper hand.

She braces herself against the recoil and flicks the damaged floralisk at its master hard enough for the impact to shatter them both.

Aiser'lis has her second hunter leap between her and Shae. The two floralisks collide with a violent crunch, spraying broken twigs and sap as they tumble across the grass in a tangle of ruined limbs.

Aiser'lis lunges through the explosion. The vines around her right wrist have thickened and grown, extending over her hand and melding into a blade much like the forelimbs of the hunters. It's much less sturdy. Even she can't force her vines to grow fast enough to have a durable weapon in the time since the start of the fight.

She drives the blade into Shae's neck anyway.

The blade splinters, shattering into pieces without hurting her, but the force of the blow knocks Shae off her feet.

She plants her hands and throws herself at Aiser'lis in a kick with both legs.

Aiser'lis dodges, and strikes out. Shae is amazingly good, for a civilian, but Aiser'lis is unquestionably better. She blocks Shae's blows, their limbs colliding with the distinctive almost musical shing of colliding exemplar flash states. Her own blows land, knocking Shae back, overcoming Shae's physical power to keep her on the defensive with sheer skill.

Glass shatters and Cera'mae comes hurtling onto the field. She races to join the fight, but her steps are unsteady, her breath broken by a moan as she staggers and catches the small ball of plant matter that she squeezes out of her vagina. She hurls it overhand at Shae's back.

Shae doesn't know what the projectile does, but she doesn't care. She catches it. And slams it into her opponent's face.

It explodes into a cloud of glowing reddish spores, which flash over the instant they touch anything. A fiery explosion engulfs the Knight's upper half. The force and heat of the explosion drains the last glints from her Exemplar Harness as she dives in and seizes the Knight's arm, and with the last of her artificial flash state, Shae rips the Knight's arm off at the shoulder.

She was inadvertently holding back an orgasm this whole time, and she feels her Exemplar Harness stop stimulating her as the power leaves her limbs. It's now or never. She ignores the blood and slams her hand against her crotch, grinding the inert nubs into her vulva. And she cums.

The Exemplar Harness reactivates with not even an instant to spare. A second sporebomb bursts against Shae's back, covering her in exploding flamespores. Cera'mae staggers to a stop with a moan as she births a third.

Aiser'lis recovers fast, vines already growing from the stump of her shoulder to replace her arm. Her eyes take on a manic gleam from the pain. She's lost limbs before, but not often. She has to take a moment to gather herself before she can resume the fight.

Shae doesn't give her a moment.

Aiser'lis hits the ground. Shae follows her, slamming down with all her weight on the point of two fingers. It's enough to cave in the Knight's ribs, and Shae pushes through, using her momentum to bury her hand in the Knight's body.

Shae grabs the Knight's beating heart, pins the woman to the ground with her foot, and rips it out. Let's see her Empyreal Blossom heal that.

It tries. It fails.

The luminous white glow of the Scintillant begins to gather around Aiser'lis.

Cera'mae is backing up, holding her third sporebomb ready to throw. The airship crew is watching in horror. The pulsebinder's surviving team is cowering behind their equipment.

Shae lifts her gaze to Cera'mae, and smirks.

Status

This core's awakener is currently linked.

This core has TWO command links and TEN feeder links.

This core has TWO blocks of linked territory and FOURTEEN subordinate units.

704 of 9,998 storage circuits are charged, and power draw is currently 0.48 glints per measure.

Heatless daylight spills into the glass-tiled prison through a crystalline ceiling, slanting with the Ebb. The covering stone slab is gone, and the square room housing the Origin Core is now a rectangle divided into two perfect cubes separated by a transparent wall with only a row of small circular openings at waist height.

The original room still houses the Origin Core itself, along with one Phallic Tentacle and a nude Meron'shae. Two dormant Empyreal Blossoms sit innocently in the corner.

The new room contains eleven bruised, naked young men, shackled by wrist and ankle to the walls with glassy restraints provided by the Origin Core's furnishing abilities, and a Yonic Tentacle for each of them, hard at work. Each young man groans and whimpers in strained pleasure as a slick fleshy throat milks his cock, pumping itself up and down each shaft with variously delicate strokes. Several of them are spent, barely staying hard as the Yonic Tentacles assigned to them struggle to arouse them, while a few others are still responding enough to be good for another orgasm.

Four men on the back wall, three on each of the side walls, and one more shackled to the dividing wall. Unlike the others, he is shackled facing the wall, his swollen erection sticking through one of the holes into the Core room. Unlike the others, he is very thoroughly gagged and blindfolded by a face-covering mask, glossy black on the outside, fleshy pink on the inside, with pink tendrils escaping the edges of the mask to loop around his neck. Because unlike the others, he is able to give commands to the Origin Core.

Because whoever has the most empulse in the Core is given Command status, regardless of her wishes. She won the fight, only to almost lose everything when the man she threw to the first Yonic Tentacle had an orgasm and the Origin Core suddenly started obeying him.

It was close, but she avoided disaster. Both of the Knights are dead. Now she has to make sure she feeds the Core more than any of her prisoners do, or she risks losing control of it.

Shae cums again, moaning as the Phallic Tentacle wrapped around her legs fucks her deep and hard. A soft glassy pad supports her body as she lays beneath the Origin Core with her legs raised, feet resting against the smooth surface on the bottom of the glassy sphere.

Her kindling empulse flows out of her, transmitted through the Phallic Tentacle into the Origin Core.

Shae already surpassed her unfortunate first prisoner in empulse contribution. She can't demote him directly, but if all the empulse he contributed gets used, he loses his link with the Origin Core and his command status with it. Only the awakener is remembered between links.

Unfortunately, the Origin Core does its best to draw power evenly from all of its linked storage, so Shae can't just spend her first prisoner's empulse before everyone else's.

Shae has other ideas about what to do with him.

Shae orders all of the tentacles to slither away to rest and give her prisoners a break. The Phallic Tentacle withdraws its firm girth from her cunt and releases her legs, slithering off to coil up and wait. She gets up and goes to the dividing wall, placing her hands on either side of the shackled young man.

"Change this wall to have a vertical gap at the width of my touch."

The other prisoners go slack, too exhausted and spent to do more than watch blearily.

With a mild spike in power draw, colors deepen around the channels of light running through the transparent wall. The glassy material ripples, before eroding away to leave the shackled young man hanging in a new archway. The wall settles down into its new configuration.

The shackled and masked young man twists uncertainly at this new development. His swollen erection begins to wilt.

Can't have that.

Shae presses her nude body against him, catching his cock at the apex of her thighs. He jolts, shivering at her touch while his long neglected erection glides along Shae's wet, silky cleft. He throbs, hardening even as he tries to pull away. Shae hitches one leg around his hip and feeds his rigid shaft into her cunt. She rolls her hips, slowly stroking him with her slick inner walls until he whimpers with his need to cum. She stops moving.

"You should know none of this is your fault," she says to the young man. "I am sorry I didn't have the means to be more selective about what comes next."

Shae backs off, letting his cock slide out of her as she puts her leg down.

"Detach the shackles binding this man."

The glassy mounts luminesce and shimmer as they pinch off and retreat into the ceiling and floor.

The young man's wrists remain bound together, his ankles likewise. He teeters, unable to keep his balance so bound with his senses so impeded.

Shae catches him from behind and drags him over to the pad beneath the Origin Core. He tries to struggle against her, but he's disoriented, exhausted, and painfully aroused. He doesn't try all that hard.

"Attach the shackles on this man to the floor."

She stretches him across the pad, wrestling his arms down over his head off one side while his ankle shackles fuse to the floor off the other side. Once she has him secured, she sits up on him with a sigh. His hard cock throbs against her butt.

Shae reaches up and touches the Origin Core, peering into it. Matrix Storage.

Whirling luminous whorls.

Matrix Storage

Empty storage circuits may be temporarily repurposed to contain a viable pulse matrix in transubstantial pattern suspension at the standard conversion ratio of mass-empulse saturation.

Matrix Storage does not allow nested circuit charge and any excess empulse will be diverted into adjacent storage circuits.

A suspended pulse matrix may be reinstantiated at no cost, or at a cost equivalent to any volitional empulse dissemination within its capacity.

2 storage circuits are currently assigned to a suspended pulse matrix.

Deep sparkling glimmers.

It all comes down to this. Shae's entire plan hinges on what happens next. All of her effort and many of her crimes will be for nothing if she fails to complete this last critical piece of her masterwork.

Shae reaches for her jacket, leaning across her bound victim's naked body, and pulls a scroll out of one pocket. She unrolls it, checking what's she's written there one last time.

From a second pocket, she retrieves another hard-won prize: three vivid green spheres that fit in the palm of her hand. Enough vital aetherlight to infuse her for thirty beats.

"Just so you know," she says to her victim as she lifts herself to bring her vulva to the tip of his swollen cock before she sinks down, impaling herself slowly, "what I'm going to do next is very delicate. If I mess up, if you distract me, the results may be excessively gruesome. For you. That is not a threat. If I make a mistake, I do not know what could happen, but I promise you it'll be worse than anything I'm going to do to you on purpose."

This is a lie, but Shae shoves down her guilt when the bound young man nods nervously.

To the Origin Core, "Parse as Literal Instruction: Let one hundred and twenty-eight conjoined empty storage circuits be the scope of the following matrix substantiation."

And then Shae reads her program from the scroll, carefully, going line by line and phrasing each with utter precision. It takes a while. There is a lot of writing crammed onto that scroll.

The bound young man doesn't understand any of what she's saying to the Origin Core. If he did, he might try to stop her, gruesome fate or no gruesome fate. But lacking the knowledge to follow the scary girl's logic, he lets her finish without interruption.

The whorls of light all stop, locking in place.

Awaiting Input

For

New Matrix Template

Shae puts the scroll down and smiles.

The bound young man trembles under her, his hard cock twitching in the grip of her vaginal walls.

Shae... undulates. Slowly. Her hips rise and fall in a teasing churn. The young man whimpers. His hips jerk up to meet her.

"Relax," she says as she fucks him. "This is almost over."

The bound young man can't see her or reply to her, with the fleshy mask attached to his face, but that sounds more than a little ominous. He hopes he's imagining things. He hopes that the scary girl has what she wants already, and is only raping him on a whim. His whole body boils with the need, and her cunt feels so good gliding up and down his cock. At this point he'd be willing to call it more of a mercy-rape than a trespass. He wants to cum. He needs to cum. He really really hopes this isn't still part of some nefarious machination!

If Shae does this right, he'll never know either way. She can see that he's nervous, but he's also riding on the desperate edge of orgasm. Without warning, she rises and slams her hips down, bouncing hard and fast on the young man's cock, dragging him harshly over the point of no return.

Shae brings the green aetherlight spheres up in front of her face, and crushes them in her hand. The brilliant vapor flows out between her fingers, shining brightly. Shae breathes in, drawing the vital aetherlight into her body. It's slippery, leaking out of her skin at a rapid pace, but it'll last long enough to do what needs to be done.

With a muffled cry, the young man ejaculates.

And at the first spurt, Shae yanks herself off, standing, even as she hits him with the strongest vitalbloom she can muster.

Contrary to popular myth, the vitalbloom is not an overriding aphrodisiac that can force anyone into the throes of lust at any time. It is a blunt instrument that cannot be aimed like that. A vitalbloom is energy, wakefulness, arousal, but it multiplies what is already there. Using it on a terrified foe will result in far more in the way of manic adrenalized violence than sexual responsiveness.

But for a victim in the throes of an artfully cultivated ruined orgasm, it burns out all desire beyond a desperately urgent need for sexual attention of any kind. It empties his mind of everything but lust.

Flash state. Bladehand through the throat to sever the spine at the base of the skull.

The young man dies without even feeling the blow that kills him. His thrashing body goes limp, one last rope of semen splashing down on his chest as he falls still. One of the other captive men cries out in protest.

Shae squeezes her eyes shut, steels herself, but doesn't otherwise outwardly react as she goes to wipe the blood off her hand.

Soon, the Scintillant gathers. A luminous white vortex that tightens around the dead young man's head until it is blinding.

At last, it collapses to a searing point, then blasts upwards in a radiant beam of white light, seeking the Celestial Sea beyond the sky.

The beam strikes the Origin Core. This shouldn't matter. Nothing known to science or legend can prevent the Scintillant from reaching the Celestial Sea.

Until now.

The beam splits, spilling around the Origin Core like water before curling inwards to dive into the deepest depths of the crystal sphere. The frozen whorls of glimmering light within stutter and fragment.

Flicker.

Dim.

The last of the Scintillant sucks into the Origin Core, and the Origin Core goes dark.

The other shackled young men stare in open horror at what Shae has wrought. The holy Scintillant, brought low.

The crystal clarity of the dead Origin Core darkens even further, fading to solid oily black.

The daylight filtering in through the ceiling... shifts. A grayness spreads through the glassy walls. Color seeps out of the world, dulling everything to mere shades without hue.

Then, the oily black Origin Core melts. It falls out of the air, exploding into a sea of black goo as it strikes the floor.

Seven oblong crystal spheroids emerge from the black goo as it oozes outwards.

All of the now-free Tentacles stir briefly, before contorting and falling down dead, poisoned by the corruption of their master.

"It worked."

Shae stumbles, slipping and sliding in the umbra as she collects her jacket and uses it to wrap up the seven crystal spheroids. She is going to need those later.

The very air feels... thick. Muffling. Slippery. There is no color at all, here inside the new magic she has created, and Shae can feel the gleam pressing gently against her mind, whispering of unattainable satisfaction. It's subtle, only really noticeable here in the midst of such a strong concentration of the new magical substrate, but that's fine. That's the point.

This is meant to be a solace, for the silent.

"What... is this?" one of the shackled young men rasps out.

Shae gestures towards the dead young man's body.

"What was his name?"

"...his name was Bere'isht."

"Then this? This will be the Isht," Shae decides.

Before continuing, she hesitates, but blit it, she can indulge herself with a villain monologue just this once.

"It will come to the lovesick, the lonesome, the longing, as the Scintillant comes for the dead. It will gleam for the deprived, as empulse kindles for the climax. Call upon it, and it will manifest its umbra flesh, taking a form directly driven by your desire. It is the end of social gatekeeping for sexual sensory experience. No man or woman will ever need wonder what it feels like to touch or be touched even by their wildest dream, or ever need be told they are not entitled to know because they cannot or will not navigate our society's obscenely stifling formalities."

Shae spreads her hands grandly.

"This is the end of the silence."

To punctuate her statement, Shae mentally pushes back against the muffling weight of the gleam, focusing on the unattended sensitivity of her hard nipples.

The gleam resists, at first, but the umbra responds.

Twin pseudopods sprout upwards from the black goo around Shae's feet, sucking mass in to grow as they rise, sinuous and bubbling. Each splits at the tip, flowering open into three thick flaps, and at the center, umbra forms into a pair of perfectly human-shaped lips.

Each three-sided pseudohand glomps onto one of Shae's breasts. Each pair of lips latches onto a nipple, and suckles her so sweetly.

Shae thrusts her chest out and moans in pleasure.

"S-see? I will take the Isht, and I will cover the known world in it."

Stretching her left hand out for effect, Shae begins tapping fingertip to thumb in sequence: the muscle trigger to purge her wombrider. At the same time, she closes her eyes and dwells on her womb, on how hot it would be to have a mass of psychoreactive sex goo hiding inside her, as though she were its mother and it, her amorphous spawn, lurking, waiting, using her as camouflage.

A feeling of liquid looseness accompanies the tiny ball of flesh that drops out of her womb, and she shoves her mind against the gleam while the fleshcraft magic remains, making her womb permeable.

While umbral mouths continue to suckle Shae's breasts, a thick tendril of umbra contracts and oozes upwards from between Shae's legs. It reaches her vagina and plunges in, flowing like a living liquid as it pumps up her canal and floods into her womb.

Umbra can manipulate its own density and mass to an extent, substantiating from and sublimating into gleam, but even so only about a tenth of the umbral mass coating the floor can fit into her, and even that leaves her belly swollen and heavy, almost doubling her own bodyweight.

It's like getting fucked by a gelatinous river. It feels weird and different and so good. Shae cums, hard.

She staggers, but the breast-sucking pseudopods thicken and extend, wrapping around her torso to hold her up.

Then the glassy floor, the glassy wall separating the two cubical rooms, crack under her feet and hands. Shae moans, confused. It feels like she's flickering into a flash state as she kindles, and she can't stop it, can't control it. It's happening on its own.

Well, that is unexpected and suboptimal, but it's not like she can fix the problem without another murder and another Origin Core to sacrifice. The fragments don't have the physical capacity to intercept Scintillant anymore, and she can't think of a mistake that could've caused this anyway.

Shae straightens up, trembling with the fading echoes of orgasm as the umbra continues to stimulate her sensitive body. She looks very pregnant, but not unnaturally so.

Time to go home.

Shae wants the remaining umbra to wrap around her body and carry her to the airship. This is much more difficult to frame sexually, but maybe if she just presses the intention into the gleam as hard as she can...

It ignores her.

That's inconvenient, but not really unexpected.

Maybe if she fantasizes explicitly about each separate step in the process of the umbra taking a form that can carry her?

She starts by imagining as vividly as she can how good it would feel to rest her body by floating in a mass of umbra instead of standing on her own two feet, especially now that she's got the weight of a whole other girl hanging off her gut.

Umbra sluggishly extends upwards, climbing her legs and crawling up over her butt. The thick tendril resting in her vagina sprouts outwards, supporting her pregnant belly from the outside, and the pseudopods suckling her breasts drape themselves against her and melt into the larger mass.

It takes her weight, slowly thickening as the umbra oozes inwards, but it can't seem to just engulf her in a blob. To move it seems to require at least basic anatomical structures. It can't just arbitrarily control the shape of a liquid mass of itself.

Eerie strands of white gleam from the umbra where it has solidified the most to manage the effort of holding her up.

This really isn't the intended use. It's probably good that using the Isht like this is so round-a-bout even for the one who designed it and therefore knows exactly how to manipulate it. Shae adjusts her fantasizing to include more specific anatomy. Just imagining it isn't enough, she has to actually feel sexual desire for her fantasy to get the umbra to move, but that in particular has always been unusually easy for her to do on command.

Jacket. Shoes. Empyreal Blossoms. It would be so sexy if she didn't have to go pick those up herself, right?

And then... it would be nice to be pleasured while held high up in the air to enjoy the view and whatnot, cradled in soft flesh but carried by strong limbs. To the airship.

It takes a few tries, but eventually the umbra manages to pick itself up on three distinct, trunk-like legs and climb out onto the meadow. It never stops stimulating Shae's body, rubbing, sucking, fucking, all with the liquid caress of slick umbral flesh that shifts between amorphous pseudopods and almost recognizable arms, hands, cocks, and other hints of the human form.

It delivers Shae to the airship and settles itself inside the cabin to continue pleasuring her.

By then, Shae has had dozens of orgasms and is kind of wrung out. The umbra seems to know exactly how to touch her to make her want more, almost teasing in the way it doesn't quite give her the best possible orgasm.

Shae is not accustomed to thinking unsexy thoughts, but she tries anyway because she doesn't have time to recover from getting fucked until she passes out. Flying an airship is too complicated and delicate to do by proxy. She tries to mentally press her satiation into the gleam.

It's like trying to move a mountain. The gleam doesn't budge at all.

It's hard to even think the thought, like a thick fog full of sticky webs bogs down her mind as soon as she tries to contemplate not wanting more. She will always want more. She's not done. Stopping now would be agony.

Yeah, Shae doesn't care. She's always going to want more sex, but that doesn't mean it has to be now. Shae is very fortunate to have a lot of trusted lovers in her social circle. Shae. Is. Very. Satisfied. With. Her. Personal. Sex. Life.

The gleam buckles under the force of the thought, and color begins seeping back into her skin as the gleam dissipates. The umbra goes still, then melts off of her, oozing out into an inert puddle.

Shae sucks in a breath and wobbles over to the airship's controls.

That took way more effort than it should've. That feedback was an order of magnitude stronger than Shae predicted. Ultimately, the gleam behaves as expected, but that still took a disturbing amount of mental effort.

That... might actually be a problem. But realistically this is her one and only chance, and it did technically work as designed. Shae isn't going to call the whole thing off over a minor deviation. She can't.

But maybe she should come up with a contingency for purging the gleam from a human body, just in case.

Launching the airship is awkward for one person alone, but doable. It gets pointed in the right direction, and soon the overgrown ruins are left behind.

Traveling by air is faster than walking, but it'll still be a several day journey back to civilization. The airship is designed to move silently, powered by human muscles and exemplar strength, but it does have an outboard airscrew and an emergency supply tank of liquid nitrogen large enough to power the pneumatic engine at the stern of the airship's envelope through the night and into the next day.

Shae finds that one of the crystal eggs from the destroyed Origin Core still contains her Exemplar Harness in intact form. Masturbating with the crystal egg doesn't seem to have any effect. It doesn't suck up her empulse or form a link. But she finds that if she tries to imbue empulse with her heartbeats, it doesn't go like it would into a normal object but it does give her low-level feedback and let her manipulate the internal mechanisms enough to reinstantiate the Exemplar Harness.

It emerges from the crystal egg in a stream of rippling brightness, colors bursting vividly through the liquid glassy mass before it solidifies into black and pink flesh.

She can't wear the Exemplar Harness over her swollen abdomen, but the crystal eggs themselves show promise if some of the Origin Core's base functionality is still there.

The fragments are lacking any of the active systems that allowed the Origin Core to be so easily used, but the substrate is still viable. It will be many days of work to rebuild anything useful, requiring new systems to be built from first principles via slow external inputs.

But once the capacity to form a resonant link is restored, the crystal eggs might indeed provide a way to create an anti-gleam contingency. Just not any time soon.

The city of Sanguine Primus stretches across a vast steppe, bordered by low mountains to the north, a dropoff to the south, and tall glass-like walls to the east and west. Farmland stretches south from the cliff face for half a demispan, worked by machines and Archon Golems.

An Archon Golem is a large, ponderous beast, with six splayed legs, an eye at each end of its body, and several manipulator tentacles slung under its belly. Its flesh is a bland, milky white, and while not visible from a distance, it contains a human criminal within its main body, one who was sentenced to civil service; a euphemism for being medically crippled and relegated to life as an involuntary empulse generator.

The city itself shines under the light of the solfire. Spires of blocky construction tower high enough to break up the line of the mountains beyond. Much of it is actual glass, used to complement the aesthetics of the more-than-glass spread through the city's heart. A suspended High Road bisects the farmland, jutting out from the center of the cliff and continuing through the air above the fields.

An airship patrols the sky above the fields, but this airship is not intended for speed or stealth. Its envelope is a thin shell of exemplate glass, forged in extreme heat to contain a set of rotary light sails in near-vacuum that power its propulsion.

Her own (stolen) airship ran out of compressed nitrogen a while ago. Shae stashes it in a craggy copse overlooking the fields and makes for the High Road on foot, leaving the bulk of the Isht behind. She puts on her shoes and her jacket and, after some effort, her leggings, finds pockets for all of the crystal eggs, collects two full canteens from the airship cabin, and cradles her swollen belly in her arms as she treks across the crop fields towards the small town that hangs from the underside of the High Road like a boxy stalactite.

Ebb shades into Shadow as the solfire passes beyond the mountains and the Celestial Sea emerges from above the Echelon of Light.

The starlight is brilliant, here. Sanginue Primus is an old city, and even this far out from the city itself, generations upon generations of stars fill the sky and shine down with enough light for the colors of the landscape to remain vibrant even in the deepest part of the night.

The town under the High Road is a sleepy little place, home to only a few dozen overseers and their families or associates, plus a handful of merchants.

Shae is out of water and after walking all night at twice her usual weight her feet and her back are begging for mercy. She's very glad to finally reach the town.

A few people are milling around the upper areas, but no one is looking at her. The crops give way to packed earth in the shadow of the High Road. Two ladders, three sets of stairs, and a lift platform provide ways up from the ground.

On the second level, just below the ramp that drops from the middle of the High Road, is the town's plaza, which contains several shops and a small inn.

Up on the High Road itself, a caravan of rail-cars sits half loaded, with a pair of Archon Golems lifting heavy crates of produce onto the cars.

Shae goes straight for the lift platform and throws the control bar, which releases the pulsebound counterweight to fall. The platform rises smoothly and silently, taking Shae all the way up to the plaza. To be polite, she ought to winch the counterweight back up for the next person who needs the lift platform.

A woman in cut-off shorts, leather vest, and work gloves sees Shae and rushes over.

"Here, let me."

She takes the crank from Shae's hands and turns it herself while she gives Shae a once-over.

"You look like you've had an exiting day. You just get into town? I haven't seen you before."

Shae is grateful.

"Exciting is one word for it. Thanks. Do you know if the inn is open?"

"Sure. Just over there."

The woman points at one of the buildings. Then she gives Shae's belly a look.

"Are you gonna be okay? You look pretty far along there."

"Any day now," Shae agrees. "I was hoping to get a bath, a meal, and a ride into the city. I'm traveling there to give birth."

"Shouldn't be a problem. There's always space on the driver. Get yourself a room. Ask Madam O'lua to introduce you to the boy, Kiv'ese. The caravan ships out day after tomorrow."

Shae gets herself a room. Shae gets a bath, and a meal. Shae gets a nice soft bed.

After the subtle and not-so-subtle looks she gets for her choice of clothing, she also buys herself a skirt to attach to her leggings. Walking around with her pelvis bare is improper enough to be conspicuous, even if it isn't quite indecent and looking pregnant earns her extra leeway.

Kiv'ese is young, cute, and overly serious. He solemnly agrees to give her a ride on the caravan driver when she asks him. Shae lets him pet her swollen abdomen.

When it's time, Kiv'ese brings Shae onboard the driver, which is a large, sleek, aerodynamic rail-car at the front of the caravan. Kiv'ese steps down into his own seat, which is inset in the floor of the car with an unobstructed view of the rails ahead.

The boy inserts a key into a metal box under the seat, and comes out with a fist-sized aetherlight sphere, glowing blue. He crushes it, and breathes in the vapor. A visible blue aura rises from his skin as he forcepulls the driver to the rails.

The caravan accelerates rapidly, gliding smoothly along the High Road at higher and higher speed until Kiv'ese's infusion of force aetherlight fades away, and they coast the rest of the way.

When they stop in the city, Shae slips away from the caravan and hires a pedicab to take her into the theater district.

The trip through the city takes another half a measure.

Sanguine Primus is a prosperous, if indolent place. Most labor is done by the various Archon Golems (which, to those in the know, were obviously Origin Core units all along), and every citizen has the right to minimum living space and enough of a stipend to feed themselves. There are no homeless and no poverty, but only a moderate minority have access to luxuries like aetherlight healing or birth control or participation in the city's thriving economy of the arts. Thanks to the transformative Gyneca Halo and Andeca Eye at the peak of the mountain range, sickness and death are quite uncommon, but using either of the relics is indescribably painful and reaching either is a bit of a hike if one isn't affluent.

Crime is rare, when no one is desperate, but that fact is also the Archonate's public justification for every crime having the same sentence: civil service a.k.a. rape by 'domestic' erovore. (The conditions are actually quite humane for lesser offenders, such that they would certainly get volunteers if the practice wasn't aggressively stigmatized, but it is aggressively stigmatized, to the point that no one would dare admit anything but abhorrence at the idea in polite company.)

Empulse is holy, after all. It is deeply uncomfortable to think about the way it is used to power their civilization.

Signs in the windows of many venues read, Lovers Only.

Signs on the walls of many businesses read, Singles Need Not Apply.

Hanging banners advertise the services of prostitutes with various themes, but of course only the affluent minority can afford them. While there is nothing wrong with solo pleasure per se, it is theologically revolting that empulse can be kindled that way, so only those with active sex lives may use empulse powers in public without being unforgivably vulgar.

Eventually the pedicab reaches its destination. Vena'ese's Massage and Show is a modest brickwork building decorated with pornographic tapestries and posters, and it notably lacks either of the ubiquitous warning signs.

Shae slips around to the back entrance and goes inside.

The dormitory is quiet. The faint sounds of soft music and the low murmur of conversation come from the main floor, but the sound of the back door opening brings Ese out of her office.

"Shae? You're home!"

Ese gets a look at Shae and freezes.

"Stars above! What did you do to yourself?! Are you pregnant? You can't be pregnant. You've only been gone for a ternion!"

Ese pulls Shae into a hug, careful of her swollen belly.

Shae giggles and returns the hug with wandering hands.

"I'm not pregnant," Shae confirms. "It's a long story, but I did what I set out to do. How've things been here? What have I missed?"

"A few of our regulars have been asking after you."

Ese takes Shae's hands and tugs her into Ese's office.

"Tyn's started on a new song. Recco's been out recruiting more extras for the next Ambient Orgy. Ziie and Lece have been arguing because Lece wants to mess with the nuru formula again."

Ese stops and gives Shae a smile.

"It's good you're back. What have you been doing out there?"

"It's still probably safer if you don't know."

Shae shakes her head. Safer for Ese, and safer for Shae herself. It's better if her friends don't know she's a murderer until they can have the right... context.

Shae pats her swollen abdomen.

"I've created something, though. Something new. I shouldn't say more than that for now."

"I won't argue."

But Ese does give Shae's pregnant profile a pointed look.

"How long is this condition going to last?"

"I should be back to fucking fit as soon as I get a chance to visit the tentacle monster in the basement."

Ese quirks an eyebrow, but laughs.

"Yes, ve's missed you too. You're totally still veir favorite. Come on."

Ese meanders back out of her office and leads the way to the large trapdoor at the end off the hallway.

"I am a tentacle-loving deviant and proud of it."

Shae makes a detour to collect a box of jars, then follows Ese down the hidden stairs.

Descending into the basement is like walking into a womb. The light is soft and golden, shed by bioluminescent orbs in the corners. The walls are lined with pink flesh, decorated with vertical rugae, and the floor is soft, padded skin over bone plates. It is furnished in a mix of fleshcraft and plush fabric cushions.

Velitanar rests on a fleshcraft chair thing, reading a novel.

A shok'ush like vem shares the basic body plan of a human, in that ve is bilaterally symmetrical, with sense organs at one end and motive limbs at the other, but that is the end of the resemblance. Veir short blue body is rigid, with parallel spinal columns splitting into 'digits', thin finger-width prehensile tentacles, at the top of veir body. Ve sees with three nimble eyestalks, but doesn't otherwise have a face or a head. Veir motive limbs, called rachi, are serpentine and longer than a human's entire body, with articulated fins at the ends. Most notable are the pair of articulated lobes protruding from the front of veir body, each containing a lubricious yonic orifice and three retractable phallic tentacles.

An eyestalk swivels up from veir book and veir eye goes wide.

"Hey Velit. Look who's returned from her mysterious quest."

Velitanar's eyestalks bobble excitedly. After ve puts veir book down, ve levitates and 'swims' through the air, looping around Shae in a circle. Ve puts out a feeling of pressure as ve says something, drifting to a stop in front of Shae as ve extends four of veir phallic tentacles, a pair splurting out of each lobe, to slither around Shae's body and pull her into an embrace.

One phallus curls down along her hip and ducks under her skirt to probe at Shae's vulva.

"Ve wants to know if you're okay and if you're home for good now. And ve wants to know who you've been letting 'weave on you, this is sloppy as fuck," Ese translates.

"I'm home for good."

Shae snuggles into Velit's tentacles, sighing softly at the touch between her legs.

"No one 'weaved on me, though. This is the result of my victory."

Shae spreads her thighs a little, savoring it when Velit's phallus slips inside her. But then she remembers what happened with the Origin Core's Tentacles, and stiffens.

"Actually wait, you can't feed yet. You shouldn't link with me until after. I'm reasonably certain that I'd poison you if drank me right now."

Velitanar can understand Shae just fine. By sharing a resonant link with Ese, Velitanar can understand anything Ese hears and understands.

Velitanar's tentacles go still as ve looks at Shae with all three eyes. One eye swivels toward Ese as Velitanar says something.

"No, I don't know either. Shae here is being mysterious."

Ese meanders over and flops down on a cushion.

"Shae. Exactly how worried should we be?"

"Let's find out, shall we?"

Shae turns and backs towards a lounge chair, pulling Velit with her.

"I need you to try to morphweave a birth trigger onto what's already inside me. It got in via fleshcraft magic, and I have reason to believe it'll be responsive to the reverse."

Velitanar eases Shae down onto the chair and bobbles veir eyestalks in a nod.

Veir phallus slides deeper into her vagina, inch by inch, until it makes contact with her cervix. Velitanar settles in, says something with a bobble of surprise, then dips veir eyestalks in concentration.

"Looks like you were right," Ese translates. "Give vem a few minutes to frustrated morphweaving jargon."

"Just out of curiosity, what was your backup plan if you were wrong?"

"Hike up to the Gyneca Halo with a really sharp knife, cut myself open, then fall through and let the Halo put me back together. I'm glad I didn't have to do that, though. This is much less conspicuous."

"Conspicuous."

"You worry me sometimes, Shae."

A short while later, Velitanar perks up and withdraws veir phallus from Shae's sex, announcing success.

"Get the jars."

Shae can feel the umbra in her womb squirm as the fleshcraft magic infuses her, making penetration of her cervix both safe and painless. She has Velit and Ese hold the jars under her rapidly engorging vagina as she clamps down on her body's reactions.

The shiny black ooze gushes out of her in a viscous torrent.

Getting fucked in reverse by a gelatinous river is just as good as it was going in. Shae tries to hold back, to not cum and possibly poison Velitanar, but before the third jar is full, she has to kick vem off of her, breaking skin contact before an orgasm rips through her flesh.

She doesn't flicker into a flash state, this time. That seems to be an effect of the gleam only.

Eventually the last of the umbra gloops out of Shae's quivering pussy and fills an eighteenth jar.

"Well, that was a new experience."

Ese tightens the lid on the last jar and puts it with the others.

"Are you going to explain what this stuff is? Or what you're going to do with it now that you've gone to such lengths to smuggle it into the city? I have to tell you, I have no idea where this is going. Actually I have way too many ideas about where this might be going."

"It's umbra."

Shae catches her breath and sits up bare-chested, leaving her jacket behind. Sure enough, thanks to the fleshcraft magic, she looks as good as ever, with no visual hint that her womb was so recently and heavily occupied.

"I can finish my plan tonight. After that, there'll be nothing to link the Massage and Show to what's going to happen. Just keep my face off the ad banners and you'll have all the plausible deniability you'll need. They don't know my name and I made sure to leave a false trail. If anyone's even looking yet, I doubt they could've figured out even that I'm a citizen."

Velitanar floats closer and says something.

"Ve wants to know if the umbra is erovore poison on purpose."

"No. That was an unintended side effect. And I'm not sure it's poison in that state. It might only be toxic as gleam."

Shae unbuckles her leggings and pulls them off, leaving her nude except for her shoes.

"I should be safe to link with now, though."

Velitanar only hesitates for a moment before wafting down and coiling veir right-lobe phalluses around Shae's legs. One slithers up and pushes into Shae's vaginal canal, wriggling as it fills her, while the other two spiral up onto her hips and lift her up for better access.

Veir other lobe contracts, splurting wet tentacle cocks out to wrap around Shae's torso. One slithers figure-eight around her breasts. One snakes under her butt and curls up to prod at her second hole. One drapes itself around her neck and settles its phallic tip at her mouth.

Velitanar shifts veir rachi under vem, taking up a position as though Shae is laying cradled in veir lap. Veir digit tentacles play over Shae's limbs, a few of them threading between Shae's fingers.

"I want to know how sure you are that this isn't going to fall on us."

Shae relaxes happily into Velitanar's many limbs, rolling her hips to fuck veir phallus as it thrusts into her cunt. She spreads her legs and grinds her ass onto the other tentacle, shivering as her second hole yields to the hot slippery intrusion.

"Mmm... I'm... sure it won't fall on us soon."

Shae kisses the phallus at her lips, rubbing against it then closing her mouth over the rounded tip to suckle.

"If it... looks like it'll... fall on you... I'll give.... mmm... myself up. Make sure it... only falls on me."

Ese shakes her head and gets up to go up the stairs.

She pauses on the first rung.

"I know you're not afraid of civil service, Shae. But, we'd miss you."

Aww.

Shae shoots Ese a warm smile.

And then Shae cums, closing her lips around Velitanar's tentacle dick to muffle her cry of orgasmic bliss.

"She's right, you know."

Velitanar's tentacles flex, repositioning themselves to fuck Shae with even more force and speed.

"None of us want to lose you."

Shae can only moan, but she smiles at vem around veir tentacle and squeezes veir digits before another orgasm takes her and her eyes roll up into her head.

Late that night, Shae hitches the jars of umbra onto a backpack and sneaks out under a dark cloak that hides both her body and her face.

She is patient, moving slowly through shadowed alleyways and across low rooftops. Her destination is an artificial mesa adjacent to the dropoff at the south edge of the city.

The mesa is a gated octagon, with glasswork fencing surrounding a paved yard.

Within, rows of metal pipes sit on racks, while an awning covers crates of canisters wrapped in brightly colored paper. A single guard sits in a watchpost facing into the city, along the only line of approach over flat ground.

In three days, there will be a display of sparkworks to mark the new year. It is a relatively new tradition, begun during Shae's own lifetime with the discovery of some secret method of rendering red aetherlight crystal into a volatile form that can be easily set off or dampened with ordinary sparksliding.

The guard appears to be reading a magazine.

Shae doesn't risk crossing the guard's line of sight. She goes around and scales the cliff. It isn't easy, with the extra weight she's carrying on her back. She misses her Exemplar Harness, but she's a skilled enough exemplar to avoid falling to her death.

The rock is sheer and mossy, with little in the way of natural handholds, but it breaks nicely, holding together without fracturing. If anyone looks closely the handprints will be very obvious, though.

Shae will have to risk it. She flashes her hands and carves handholds into the stone as she climbs.

She reaches the glass fence and climbs over, dropping to the pavement inside. The crates provide cover once she reaches them.

The guard doesn't turn around. She seems to be actually reading that magazine of hers.

The sparkworks come in various shapes and sizes, but they all share the basic design of nose-cone, ballast, payload, nozzle. The ballast is just ordinary clay, and can easily be replaced.

One by one, Shae opens each sparkwork, replaces the clay with umbra, then closes it up and puts it back in its place.

She doesn't rush. She moves in methodical silence.

It takes all night, but she finishes without incident. Shae leaves the way she came, climbing along the cliff face.

She makes it back to Vena'ese's just before the first light of the swell.

The three days until the end of the year pass without incident.

Shae settles in, catching up with the others in passing while she spends most of those three days experimenting with the fragments of the sacrificed Origin Core.

After three days of intense study, Shae discovers how to use the seven crystal eggs in conjunction to access the erovore genesis functions in limited form. It requires linking with all seven individually and then sending slow literal instructions of all of them in parallel, but she can do it.

While rebuilding the link capability, she also discovers a quirk in the logical architecture that she might be able to exploit to create a feedback loop that might possibly be able to trigger a sort of forced pseudo-synchronization, unsettling settled empulse and cycling it to purge gleam from someone's body. Only the possibility is there, but it is at least proof of concept.

Even with a normal resonant link reestablished, the fragments only react to direct literal instructions. Most of the original interface seems to be truly lost.

During those same three days, Ese and Recco organize and advertise a special event: to enjoy the sparkworks display from the roof of the theater while Ese's staff provides warm bodies and skilled flesh for physical entertainment and comfort.

Ese is suspicious of Shae's reaction when she informs Shae of the event, but elects not to confront Shae about why she might find such an event so amusing or ironic.

On the night of the display, the roof of the theater is packed. Several dozen men and women lay nude on reclined fabric chairs to watch the sky, attended in various ways by Ese's tantric practitioners.

Theirs is not the only occupied roof either. The sparkworks fly high, and the display will be visible from anywhere in the city's bounds.

A single sparkling trail suddenly shoots up and explodes into a flowery ring of embers over the city, warning everyone that the display proper will begin in one demimeasure.

Shae is among the practitioners, attending eagerly to a soft-bodied man under the starlight. Covered from head to toe in the slippery nuru gel, Shae sensuously slides her whole body up and down her client's front, rubbing him down with every possible inch of herself. Her slippery skin strokes him. Her breasts slip over his hips. Her shiny butt and drooling pussy glide in circles over his chest. Her mouth fills with his cock, her lips drawing up and down the shaft.

Shae uses the frame of the chair as a toehold, keeping herself in place. It takes practice to stay put when there is so little fiction to work with. Especially when rubbing her slippery skin all over her nude client feels so nice.

"Take me in, watch with me," the client requests, once the warning shot bursts overhead. His hands grope Shae's butt, stilling her undulations.

Shae pivots upright, smiling at him over her shoulder as she slides herself down and curls back, laying down on top him with her back to his chest and her head on his shoulder. Angling her hips just right, she catches his throbbing erection in the cleft of her vulva, and offers up a pleased sigh when the man thrusts up and his cock slides into her waiting sheath. His arms go around her, latching on to play with her and hold her down.

Shae relaxes into it, eager, but pliant and unobtrusive. It's her job to accommodate his intimate preferences, to provide a sexual outlet at his whim without distracting him from the show, and she prides herself on the quality of her work. It is a delicate balance to maintain, after all.

The sparkworks fly, and the bursts of light and paint vivid colors on the star-filled sky.

Invisibly, each detonation scatters a fine mist of umbra over large portions of the city. Tiny amounts that collect like dust on everything in sight, unnoticeable but ubiquitous.

So thin. So spread out. Even where the umbra sublimates into gleam the loss of color is imperceptible, and the umbra does not animate.

Slowly, the gleam will spread, the umbra will grow. It will not happen instantly, but soon, as it feeds on the sexual deprivation of the silent underclass, it will gain enough mass to manifest. At first in small ways, as simple organs sprouting before the most sexually desperate, but eventually it will be strong enough to manifest a longed-for fantasy out of thin air.

Or at least, that's what it was intended to do. Only time will tell if the intention will match the results.

Shae goes back to her life.

And waits.

While their performers play live music, she gives slippery skin massages to clients while they listen. While dancers dance or actors put on thematically-appropriate plays, she bends over the padded benches so her male clients can stand and fuck her from behind while they watch. While tantric shows and sexy games go on up on the stage, she sits on a cushion under a bartop and lavishes oral attention on her client's pussy on demand. Her job involves those and many other variations too. It is often couples or triples pleasured side-by-side by Shae and one or two of her fellow professionals, but not always, and Shae makes a point of getting herself assigned to the clients who come in alone, when she can.

For the most part, the clients are polite and appreciative, and the rude ones make for good stories after closing. Once in a while Shae goes up on stage herself, but only when the performance gives her an excuse to hide her face. Shae enjoys her work, and she's good at it. Maybe the best.

In her off hours, she continues experimenting with the fragments of the Origin Core, sometimes asking Ese or Velitanar or one of the others for help with a specific problem she thinks they might have a comparative advantage at solving. The form of her proposed anti-Isht safeguard begins to reveal itself to her.

After twenty days, it's pretty obvious something is going on. The crime rate has dropped drastically, and there are... rumors.

Twenty-three days into the new year, the first images of the deformed umbral sexcreatures go up on public service announcements all over the city, warning the citizenry to be wary of this new unknown phenomenon, and that the Archonate is investigating.

The rumors get more legible over the following days and pentads.

People who've lost color are loverless, avoid them. People who take advantage and fuck the umbral constructs are vanishing. Fucking the umbral constructs should count as proper sex. Fucking the umbral constructs is something only the loverless would even want to do. People who've lost color are vandalizing things, maliciously breaking pulsebindings and exemplations, only to protest innocence but we all know those loverless freaks are lying. People who've lost color are using the umbral constructs to attack innocent upstanding citizens. People who've lost color are being attacked by the umbral constructs and need help. People who've lost color were all so loverless that now that they've got something to fuck they've stopped doing anything else, and good riddance.

To lose color is to gleam.

Over in this tenement, someone gleamed so hard they spontaneously transformed into a tentacled beast that tried to rape everyone in sight until they were eventually hunted down and killed by an Empyreal Knight.

Wait, what?

Shae is somewhat surprised at how fast the Isht grew. At how quickly the rumors appeared. She's disappointed but not surprised by how many of the rumors seem like attempts to stigmatize the Isht or further put down the loverless, but things mostly seemed to be going to plan until this.

She needs to know if it's true.

Shae only waits to finish her shift at Vena'ese's before she hires a pedicab and goes to talk to the alleged witnesses herself.

On the way there, the pedicab drives towards another tenement. A tower made of Origin Core territory blocks. The glassy material is dull. Colorless. With a massive web of cracks zig-zagging through the whole structure.

A new crack appears as the pedicab approaches. Then another. And another. The sound of it echoes down the street.

The same thing happened to the territory of the Origin Core I sacrificed.

Shae lunges forward over the chauffeur and squeezes the brake lever. Her anti-Isht device isn't ready, but with a hollow dread Shae realizes that she has, in fact, messed up badly enough that it will be necessary, even if the rumor of the rape-crazed transformation isn't true.

"Turn us around. Take me back. Take me back!"

"Get off me!" the chauffeur complains. "I'm going!"

The cracks spread faster. A shard of crystalline material sheers off and falls, stabbing into the street like a knife.

A deafeningly loud bong rings down the street, and the entire tower begins to shift, crumble. And then the entire thing shatters, falling down in a rain of deadly crystal. The noise is incredible. Dust rises. Fragments of rubble go flying out to strike nearby buildings.

The pedicab only barely makes it out of range in time, narrowly avoiding several collisions with other panicked chauffeurs and screaming pedestrians.

Towering umbral creatures climb out of the rubble. Shiny black vaginas and penises writ humongous, amorphous amalgamated limbs, writhing tentacles. At least a dozen of the creatures emerge, each different. Each with hints of grayscale human skin peaking through the umbral growths of its main body.

One, with four limbs like the distorted impression of a man bent backwards to walk on all fours and a tower of tentacles unfurling from its crotch out of the form of a penis taller than an entire person, lunges into the street and snatches up a coughing straggler.

The woman's clothes are torn off in an instant, and tentacles impale her in every hole. She spasms violently, and screams like she's dying.

It is hurting her badly, but it holds back just enough that it doesn't do permanent damage, having been hard-coded not to maim or kill no matter what form it takes.

At least that last part is working as intended.

But this is still a disaster. In retrospect, it even makes a kind of terrible sense. The feedback on the gleam was far stronger than it was supposed to be. It pushed back against the reaching for mental states that were contrary to the mental states that attracted the gleam. If that process compounded, created a run-away cascade...

This was inevitable the moment the umbra reached critical mass.

But... there were only a dozen or so monsters. That's not enough gleam to bring down an entire tower of territory blocks like that. These aberrations might be the exception, with most loverless receiving the sexual solace they were unknowingly promised.

If there aren't that many aberrations, if Shae can deal with them all, this might not get too bad. Even if a few buildings fall down, this... this is still better than the silence. Shae wanted to break the status quo, and even if the transition is rough, this could still lead to a new, better, stable equilibrium.

The pedicab delivers Shae back to the theater.

Screaming is still audible in the distance, along with the ringing cracks of another crumbling tower.

Visible in the distance, down the street a block away, another of the large umbral creatures shambles into view and snatches up a fleeing pedestrian.

"Shae!"

Ese is herding people inside while Recco and Ziie heave an improvise locking bar out to the main doors.

She catches sight of the approaching umbral creature and freezes.

Shae grabs Ese and yanks her inside, then helps Recco and Ziie get the bar onto the doors.

As soon as the doors are secure, she bolts for her room.

Ese chases her.

"Shae!"

Ese catches her at her room.

"Shae, that..." She lowers her voice. "Is this your... thing? Did you do this?"

"This wasn't supposed to happen. The Isht wasn't supposed to do anything like this."

Shae pulls out the seven fragments of the Origin Core, gathers them up, and pushes by Ese to head for the hidden trapdoor to Velitanar's room.

"It was just supposed to be the ideal sex toy. The existential sex toy."

"You may not have noticed, but your 'existential sex toy' is turning people into crazed rape-monsters."

"Yes I know I'm working on it."

Shae throws herself down the stairs into Velitanar's room.

"Velit! I need your help!"

Velitanar comes floating over to meet them.

"What's going on up there? Is that noise people screaming?"

"Yes."

Shae takes a breath, and sets the Origin Core fragments down in a circle. One heartbeat each, and she synchronizes them with each other, then triggers the command she's spent so much time constructing. Then she starts taking off her clothes.

"The Isht has gone out of control, and I need to stop it. I know how, but I need your magic, Velit. I've primed each of these artifacts to let your morphweaving implant one of them in my womb, which you have to do enable it to function. It should absorb your magic to convert itself, then propagate that conversion to the other ones so they all become functional."

Shae drops to her knees and taps finger to thumb in sequence with one hand while she masturbates with the other, and a few moments later her replaced wombrider purges itself and slides out of her cunt.

Shae picks up one of the crystal eggs. Spreading her thighs, she presses the oblong spheroid against her wet vulva and pushes on it with her fingers until her sex yields to it and it slides inside.

"Do it now, please."

Thick shiny tentacle cocks splurt out of Velitanar's lobes. Wrapping veir digits around Shae's limbs, ve maneuvers a phallus to her crotch and slowly penetrates her.

Ve makes contact with the crystal egg, and it is almost like touching her cervix. It responds. Velitanar weaves a thread.

Each of the other six fragments suddenly glow like molten glass. The smooth crystal egg shapes elongate and resolidify into plump, lightly rounded dildos.

The seventh, inside Shae, melts. It flows into her womb and bonds with her body, fusing with the organ while setting up to forge a much deeper and very different kind of resonant link, as soon as Shae kindles.

"Make me cum."

As soon as Velitanar's tentacles drive her to orgasm, the new entity in her womb completes the last step in its own construction. Her entire reserve of empulse unmoors itself and cycles through her. And when its over, she has a new intuitive sense connected to her mind.

Eropath Core

Interface: Online.
Wielder Bond: Stable.
Tactile Pulse Synchronization: Slave Mode.
Eropathic Synchronization Cycle: On.

Power
1,400 / 1,400 ( -8 gpm)

Aegis Mantle - 5 / 5
    Dynamic Exemplar Traction Boots (0/1,000) - Available | 100% Integrity
    Multiplex Adjustable Dildo Strap (0/200) - Available | 100% Integrity
    Reciprocal Flash Defense Beltweave (0/500) - Ready to Deploy | 100% Integrity
    Exemplar Portal Gauntlets (0/5,000) - Available | 100% Integrity
    Pulse Matrix Imaging Collar (0/100) - Available | 100% Integrity

Reciprocal Pulse Memory - 74,319
    [34][23][54][21][33][37][41][19][27][...]
    Wielder Composite - Viable

The information is not in words, not in a form she has to interpret. It just appears in her mind.

Since the individual Eropath Cores cannot create units by themselves, Shae decided which pieces of symbiotic bio-armor would combine to the best effect without interfering with each other or anything else, and then created seven sets in advance, storing a set within each of the future Eropath Cores.

Once locked in, Shae's proudest accomplishment is the reciprocal pulse-memory repair, that exploits the kindling memory within empulse to undo damage to both aegis mantle and wielder by channeling the record of past physicality through the enhanced flash state provided by the Beltweave. Instant, comprehensive healing that would protect her without making her vagina dangerous to use. It would even reverse aging.

But by far the most important feature of the Eropath Core is the synchronization cycle. That is what will allow her to purge the gleam from anyone she fucks.

Velitanar pulls away, veir phallus slipping out of Shae's sex.

"What under all the stars was that?" ve says, sounding awed.

"My backup plan."

Shae wraps up the other six Eropath Cores and hands them to Ese, standing up.

"Keep these safe. I can purge the Isht from anyone I fuck, now. And thanks to what I'm calling my aegis mantle, I can do it without getting killed in the attempt. Watch."

Shae sends a mental command.

Something thick and squirming bulges into the back end of her vaginal canal. The knot of flesh wriggles out of her womb, passing magically and painlessly through her cervix before stretching her inner walls, making her moan as it breaches her vulva.

It's shiny black, but vibrant and reflective, making colors seem brighter around it. It's covered in seams, with fleshy pink tendrils that peak through as it extends out of Shae's vagina and curls upwards. It splits apart into a web of belts that reaches out with its inner pink surface and climbs up onto her chest, accentuating her bare breasts as it loops around her ribcage and catches itself, pink tendrils pulling tight as it closes up and settles into place.

Shae trembles, unable to resist rubbing her clit as the next piece of the living armor thrusts out of her cunt and crawls down her leg, wrapping around the limb before closing up into the form of a shiny black thigh-high boot with slimy pink tendrils peaking out of the top and through various seams. She births the other boot immediately after.

In the same manner, Shae squeezes the Portal Gauntlets and the Imaging Collar out of her pussy, panting with pleasure as the pieces of living armor crawl up her body and cinch themselves into place. She leaves the Dildo Strap unborn, for now.

As she recovers from the pleasure, she feels light. Like moving is effortless. It's much more refined than the Exemplar Harness, but gives her nearly as much raw power.

Her legs are covered, as are her arms, with a softly glowing glassy portal emitter in each palm. A web of flesh hugs her torso, and a tall collar clings comfortably to her neck with slimy pink tendrils covering the lower half of her face and a pair of eerie inhuman eyeballs set just under her ears. Eyeballs which see only empulse and gleam, and which she can command to rise onto her face to give her magic-sight.

Ese takes the bundle and stares as Shae gives birth to her living armor.

She opens her mouth to ask all the questions, starting with, "How does it work and can I do it too?"

But thumps and screams filter down from above. Those people need whatever Shae is going to do now.

So all Ese says is, "Go. And come back in one piece."

Shae dashes up the stairs, through the dormitory, and up again to reach a window. She punches out the glass, then points her left hand behind her. She's thought a lot about all the ways she could use portal powers ever since she discovered they're a thing, and she had time to come up with a lot of ideas.

A bolt of light shoots out from her left palm. It splashes against the wall and sticks, connected to Shae's hand by a faint ethereal tether.

Shae aims her right hand out the window, at the bare sky over the middle of the city. Another bolt of light shoots out into the air. It moves fast, and there's nothing for it to hit, so Shae mentally tugs and the second ethereal tether snaps taut as the portal irises open.

Turning, Shae throws herself into the first portal, emerging into the sky over the city.

A mental command brings the Imaging Collar's eyes up over her own, and her vision shifts. Pure light in an empty void, sketching out the form of the city and the glaring presence of gleam. Retracting the eyes, Shae closes the portal, snaps the tethers back in, then fires both off at once.

One end splashes against a wall far below. The other end opens in midair right in front of her.

Shae passes through the portal, the speed of her fall redirected horizontal. She hits the street and slides, because her Boots give her complete control of her own traction. She yanks the portal tethers in and skates down the street at high speed.

One of the large umbral creatures that looks like the vague suggestion of a man bent over backwards to walk on all fours with a gargantuan upthrust penis split apart into a swarm of tentacles stands ahead, vigorously raping a half-dozen people.

Shae flicks her portal tethers out, opening the portals right beside her. That close, she can use the ethereal tethers to drag the open portal ends along with her, wielding them a bit like blades on chains.

Skidding around the umbral creature, the portal ends swing out, and their edges slice right through its tentacles without even a whisper of resistance. Shae skids to a stop as the victims fall free and start scrambling away, bringing her portals in close in a guard pose.

The umbral creature lurches around, severed tentacles regrowing as it stamps towards Shae.

A glimpse of grayscale skin is briefly visible through the severed tentacles. An entirely human penis sticking up in the middle of the forest of umbral appendages.

The creature staggers as it grabs at Shae.

The man inside is driving the thing at some remove. It's carrying him towards other people, trying to fuck them at any cost, but the umbra isn't pleasuring the man inside at all, and Shae knows he can't feel it when the umbra fucks someone else.

It doesn't make any sense. Why is the gleam directing all of the motive outwards like that?

Shae darts in, slashing with her portals, once more revealing the human cock within the forest of tentacles. Then, before they can regrow, she leaps up, locks her boots against the things umbral body, and drops into a squat to impale herself on that cock.

Instantly, as her vulva splits and her tunnel swallows the man's gleaming penis, she feels the state of her own arousal wrench hard, inflamed to match his. She moves her hips, riding him hard and fast, trying to make them both cum as quickly as possible.

Some of the umbra shifts, retracting slightly to bare more of the man's skin to Shae's body.

His face emerges last, and there is no awareness in his gaze.

"Not fair... Not real... Not fair... Not real... Not fair... Not real..."

He babbles, moaning and shaking as tears trickle from his glazed, unseeing eyes.

"Just want... Not enough... Not real... Why can't I... Why not me..."

The umbral tentacles start to wrap around Shae's body, attempting to pull her off the man's cock and fuck her themselves.

Suddenly it clicks. The Isht can provide any sensation, but he needed the one thing the Isht can't ever provide: emotional validation as a lover.

Stars above, she really should've thought of that. She was so sure she caught all the errors in her design, but apparently she was deluding herself if she missed a mistake this catastrophic.

Shae bounces and fucks even harder, faster. She ignores the tentacles. It is nigh-impossible for them to overpower her. She works her hips, stroking her pussy up and down his cock, bringing them to orgasm in lock-step.

The enforced simultaneous orgasm mingles Shae's empulse with the man's and with their empulse free and mingling, the Eropath Core forces it to cycle fully, washing the gleam out of him.

A bubble of restored color bursts out of his body, wiping away the gleam and turning the umbra to inert goo.

He and Shae fall to the ground with a splat, still joined. He slowly regains awareness, wide eyes drinking in the bizarrely attired woman impaled on his cock.

He lurches up, wrapping his arms around Shae, and sobs wordlessly into her breasts.

Shae pets him gently and makes soothing sounds.

But the city is in chaos around them, and she's starting to realize with a sinking feeling of dread that she's never going to be able to keep up. She might as well continue gently holding and fucking this man, since even if she drops him right now, she won't be able to get to all of the other afflicted. There are probably already thousands of people similarly Consumed.

Even if she taught Ese and five other girls how to use the Eropath Cores, they'd never be able to keep up.

The Isht had so much time to spread. It probably couldn't even be contained in Sanguine Primus. She meant to bring solace to the silent, and after a fashion she supposes she has. This is about as loud as it gets. But there will be no stopping what she's unleashed. This world just wasn't ready for it. She sees that now.

If everyone's needs were met, the Isht would remain entirely inert. She knew the silent underclass was suffering, ignored by society and left to fend for themselves, but even she vastly underestimated just how much suffering that was, just how many people had retreated into that lonely agoraphobic silence.

In her carelessness, Shae has destroyed the world.

She buries her face in the unnamed man's hair and lets her own tears fall.