Scyelen wakes up, naked, glued to a fleshy floor, exposed and vulnerable, in a dank, eldritch fleshscape lit by an eerie green radiance.

Her first thought is that there's no way this is what it looks like.

Her second thought is that, no really, this is way too elaborate and eldritch to be about raping her.

Her third thought is that, she's going to die. Not of anything they do to her. Of embarrassment when they come to do whatever they're going to do and find her laying in a puddle of her own arousal from imagining what she hopes they'll do to her.

When she gets her first look at the vreth-a-likes, her brain chokes on an ejaculation of exclamation points and crashes. When it really really looks like they are there to rape her, she squeezes her eyes shut and holds really still, sure that the instant she relaxes it'll suddenly not be what it looks like, and the entire universe will laugh at her and call her a bimbo.

ohmiholyfuckingodcocksandtentacles

She is sure this is literally the hottest thing that could ever happen. She is sure the illusion will shatter the moment she gives in.

Then the brainsucking starts, and she understands. Then it continues, and she realizes its not as bad as she feared. Her mind, her self, is being violated along with her body, but its not damaging her, and meanwhile she has never in her life felt so deliciously objectified and helpless.

The sensory deprivation and total bondage, her mind full of nothing but need to cum for something like an eternity at a time. It's torture at first, but it's also nirvana. Every birth makes her cum so hard, and the mere idea of being used as a living monster factory just makes it hotter.

A small part of her is terrified. What will her team think. She isn't even trying to help them or find out if they're okay. The rest of her resents them, for never noticing how miserable she was as a person. But then, even she didn't know. The rest of her wants to stay here forever, because it's the only thing that has ever made her feel this right. This... fulfilled.

She wants to tell the horrors, she likes it here, she'll cooperate. But she doesn't, because what if they believe her? They might give her a choice about what happens to her, how much, and when. And the one thing Scyelen is sure of, now, is that she doesn't want that. She can't explain why, even to herself, but she flinches at even imagining it.

She is content.

It's right at the start of a new birthing cycle. She still has a wonderfully fresh sense-memory of being pumped full of fluid, which is her favourite part of this whole process. She's alone here, with nothing but the gestating eldritch tadpoles in her womb for company.

And she feels a new sensation.

At first she can barely contextualize it; she's more startled than anything. There's a gritty texture against her skin, different from the feeling of resin or slime; there's a rippling pressure crawling over her body, starting at the top of her round swollen belly and slipping up under the fleshspire's seals to cover her face, flowing down over all her exposed skin. It pours itself into her mouth, tasting oily and metallic; it floods every orifice, and she silently sobs in frustration at the not-quite-enoughness of the way it glides along her vagina and up into her womb. It fills her nose and her ears and rushes down her throat and pools inside her, everywhere it can reach, but especially one place in particular; she feels the strain in her womb ratchet up and up and up, from stretched to overstretched to drum-tight and beyond, and wonders blurrily if she's going to outright burst. That would definitely be novel. Maybe she'd die. She's not sure how she feels about that.

She doesn't die, though.

She hurts—hurts a surprising amount, hurts enough that it overpowers the constant all-consuming lust—and her belly swells and swells until she's sure it's going to pop, and it doesn't, and if she had any air in her lungs she'd be screaming, and—

All at once, like flipping a switch, the pain cuts out. Something even newer blazes in its place.

Without any input from her sealed and covered eyes, she sees a vista of coloured lights spreading out in every direction. Every living thing within several hundred feet of her - every tadpole, every horrorspawn, every trapped suffering magical girl - glows in this inner vision, radiant with intricate mystifying patterns in every colour of the rainbow and some she wouldn't swear a human eye could ever see. Her own overstuffed womb roils with life.

The gritty slime all over her body is—fading into her, being physically absorbed into her flesh and also merging its fluid red-black patterns with the complicated snarl of light contained inside her skin.

Everything that's happening right now is confusing on levels she doesn't even have the conceptual vocabulary to articulate inside her own head. But in the tangle of new experiences, she finds something that feels like a new power, and flexes that mental limb for the sheer novelty of being able to take any kind of action—

And an egg starts growing inside her, round and warm, swimming in the horrorfluid. It swells and swells and finally nestles against her cervix, and she can feel its readiness to emerge, a potential energy like a handle she could pull or a rock she could kick down a slope.

Quaking with an excitement so intense it's almost terror, she finds the gestate-an-egg power again and activates it over and over, not even bothering to read the pages of the mental library where the potential eggs are stored, just frantically filling herself with things whose emergence she controls; and when two-thirds of them are still growing and she feels weak and dizzy and barely conscious and her womb seems even closer to rupturing than it did at the start of all this, she finds the mental button figuratively labeled 'emit egg' and holds it down as hard as she can and her world whites out with pleasure.

Eggs pile up at the base of the fleshspire as the source of them cums her brains out (both more and significantly less literally than usual).

And then something... bigger... starts moving.

Its been inside her so long it almost feels like losing a part of herself, if she could feel anything other than ALL THE ORGASMS. It bursts out of her, snapping her pelvis like a twig, on the figurative heels of the eggs, a squirming mass of glowing green flesh like nothing biology has seen before. It lands on the eggs, crushing some of them under its bulk, while still more rushes out through her absurdly distended but improbably-intact vagina in a foot-wide river.

There's more of it than could possibly fit in her body. There's more of it than her body. Squirming rippling, folding endlessly in on itself. It is hundreds of pounds of malignant cancer, each cell an eldritch organ, all mashed together, growing and eating itself and growing fast enough to watch.

Once the last of it leaves her, it's like, it was already cancer but now its cancer has cancer. It bubbles out and collapses in, until finally, it falls still and the green glow begins to fade.

Her soul literally feels an empty-ish sense of relief.

Another dozen eggs pour out after it, ranging in size from tennis ball to award-winning watermelon.

Then, finally, the flood stops.

She slowly relaxes. For the first time in... she doesn't know how long, her head feels clear.

What... the fuck... just happened?????

While she's still coming to grips with her new reality, her shattered pelvis knits itself back together with a series of moderately disgusting sounds.

And... she can feel those eggs. Not just in the glow of her life-sight. She can feel them like parts of her body.

Slowly, hesitantly, she commands them to hatch.

The creatures that emerge are many and varied. When she finds one with the twisting patterns of four-dimensional biology, she tells it to die instead, but that still leaves... a bunch of other things. A weird little triceratops-ish critter, a scaly thing with hooves, a skeletal demonic winged monkey sort of deal, a pile of small gross worms with faces like teeny tiny mining drills and another pile of larger, less gross worms that look sort of like wee little sea dragons, blobs of dark red goo innumerable because they merge into each other whenever they touch...

...three entire human infants?????

She does not want three entire human infants!!!

One of the three dies before she gets her instinctive flinch reaction under control. She shudders. What the hell is she going to do with all this?

The creatures all move at her will like they're parts of her own body. She sees through their eyes, hears with their ears, feels with their skin and smells with their noses and tastes with their tongues. It's... intensely weird, still being immobilized while she's suddenly got a pile of babies grafted onto her—not her soul, this doesn't feel like a soul thing, her—for lack of a better word, lifeforce?? Whatever the hell one of those is? She is so very out of her depth.

The blobby red stuff is simplest, because it doesn't really have a body plan. She experiments with that first. It can move around and sort of blobbily pile up on itself and harden to a rocklike consistency that no longer feels alive and eat its dead rocky brethren to regain the lost blobmass—and it can also digest the eggshells and the crushed eggs and the dead baby and the giant pile of terrifying eldritch cancer—there's kind of a lot of red stuff now, and it tastes sweet where it's splashed into the mouths of her little minions, so she has them all eat it.

They grow real fast, on that diet.

She stops feeding the triceratops when it starts weighing more than she does. The two remaining babies, when she feeds them enough, grow into... clones of herself??? That... that almost makes some variety of sense? The cloned Scintillae eye each other warily.

—oh, oh she's an idiot—

She has the red goo eat the fleshspire she's attached to. Not the whole thing, just enough to free herself from it.

Eating the fleshspire takes... rather longer than it should, and the red goo swells by several times the the thing's entire volume before she comes loose in a deluge of viridescent blood. It doesn't actually react much to being maimed, though.

Her soul feels weird. Good weird? It might be a good weird.

She's in more than one body, but not more than one place. She's in all the places, but there's only one her. Except... if she tries, she can think creature thoughts with a creature, self thoughts with her other selves, and run her mind in all those directions at once. Her overarching meta-self has to maintain concentration to do it, but it's like she can will herself multitasking ability just by trying to do two things at once.

Her soul settles down. And suddenly it clicks. She is all of these bodies. The original isn't her 'real' body, just the oldest. Her soul is connected equally to all her human bodies, she can feel that, and she could easily loose track of which of the bodies she showed up in. And all the bodies are still connected to each other through something that isn't her soul. Inter-body coordination is effortless and complete.

Around her, the lake sloshes quietly, rippling against the bony shore.

She hasn't been seen, yet. There is no cry of alarm.

But there are enemy magical girls and horrorspawn on patrol. She will be seen, and she probably doesn't have long.

Right then. Time to do the obvious thing.

Which of her current bodies can make more eggs? Just the three human ones. Fine. The three human ones gestate five human eggs each. She has to have two of her hold down the third and cover her mouth so she can't scream, when it comes time for the laying, because human eggs are some of the biggest ones and it's not a pretty process getting them out of there. But she does it, and while that one is healing the five new clones are shoveling goo into their tiny faces and growing up, and then she's got more of her to make the next generation, and a tide of goo deconstructs the spire while the overflow pours into the lake to go hunting for tadpoles and rolls along the shore to free more girls from their captivity - and she sends some up to the alcoves too, while she's thinking about it - and every fifth Scintilla dedicates herself to producing more creatures from all her non-human non-eldritch templates - and the first batch of creatures scarf down goo as fast as they can eat it, and so do the rest as they come out -

In two minutes she's gone from three clones to thirty. They writhe in a puddle of dark red slime, continually producing more eggs. She finds she still has plenty of spare attention to run the rest of her army. Orgasmic birth is hardly a new concept, and the pain of producing these enormous eggs isn't that wild a variation. At least the egg powers let her come properly every time.

Should she worry about how many selves her soul can sustain? Well, she's not gonna. If she dies, fine. At least she'll have tried.

The red goo expands exponentially, gaining several orders of magnitude more mass than is evident in what it eats. If it eats everything eldritch indiscriminately, it could easily drown the entire lake with a fraction of the resulting mass, it could drown the whole cavern and everyone in it before it even finished eating the Elder Brain.

There are dozens of magical girls, split between the alcoves and the lake, and hundreds of unconscious mortal men hanging head-first into the water from the hive above.

Her soul will keep up with no strain at all until she has exactly 96 human bodies, but the moment she tries to hatch a 97th clone, a sudden debilitating headache strikes down all of her at once, and exactly 24 of her 96 human clones drop dead instantly, as if their entire nervous systems simply cease to exist.

It never got old, like Scyelen feared it might. Just being, this fuck-focused, this wet and ready, constantly, without end. She doesn't have room in her head for anything but FUCKABLE HOLE READY TO CUM, and she doesn't want there to be. She doesn't want any other priorities competing with HORNY. Being this horny is a glorious feeling. She'd fuck anyone, eagerly, and feeling that way is transcendent.

And then something hot and slimy is washing over her body and it feels nice but it's doing things and then she's assailed by light and sound and falling and there's red everwhere which is wrong and different and what is going on?!?!?

"Wh-wha-?????"

There's a... bizarre sensation, when a whole chunk of her network drops dead at once. But it clears up in less than a second, and then she's back in business. She brings the count back up to ninety-six and then doesn't try to fight the limit. Her bodies switch to pure army production.

Her goo targets the minimum amount of eldritch nonsense for its purposes. Just enough of the fleshspires to free the attached girls, just enough of the tadpoles to kill them, eat a little more when it needs more mass nearby. When it's covered the whole surface of the lake, it hardens itself into a shell to keep the tadpoles trapped inside and underneath it so they can't make trouble while they're being absorbed, then starts piling up on itself to grow toward the men and free them - but she reconsiders that when she realizes they're probably not going to be very helpful and might get in the way, so she cocoons them in defensive layers of goo instead.

She can't answer the question of the first girl she frees; she doesn't have any bodies close enough. But actually, she should probably do something about how concentrated in a single spot she is. It's not strategic.

Half her bodies climb aboard creatures, mostly the hoofed scaly ones but some of the armored elephants too. One turns toward the confused girl and heads in her direction while the rest scatter.

"Hi," she says when she arrives, a naked girl with waist-length hair plastered to her body with the same red slime that coats everything else in sight, riding a thing that looks like a bizarre hybrid of a moose, a hyena, and a crocodile and moves like an extension of her will. "I'm rescuing you." A thoughtful pause. "Sorry about the mess."

Hair?! Blink blink.

Wait, there was a word there. An important (terrifying, devastating) word.

Scyelen cradles her diminished but still-glowing belly like her life depends on it

(well, one hand is bent down to reach between her legs at the same time, mindlessly rubbing her swollen vulva)

as the word 'rescue' echoes in her mind over and over and over and over

between small, orgasmic shudders (not masturbating right now is literally inconceivable, the urge is so strong)

Rescue. "Rescue."

There are probably things she should do, but she's kind of forgotten how to make decisions. "Rescue."

(she shrinks back, clinging to one of the fleshspire's tentacles, watching devastated as red ascends over green, bathing the Lair in a bloody dimness, her womb crying out in protest at the numb absence of the radiance)

Maybe she can stay and help the horrorspawn rebuild after everyone else escapes. Is refusing to be rescued a thing she can do? But... she doesn't understand what the hell this other girl is or is doing (she has beasts?! Beast Mage? no raiment?!?!), but it looks rather thoroughly destructive. "Rescue..."

When the last of the green radiance cuts off, Scyelen flinches. Tears fill her eyes as she falls over and starts crawling towards the former lake, guarding her belly, finger-fucking herself even as she crawls on one elbow. She can still feel it. She can still feel the light. She just has to get closer.

And that is about when Vreth and his minions open fire on the horde of monsters and clones. Brilliant emerald beams of horrorlight lance down at the horde, from the hive above, from the rim of the Lair, by the hundreds. The beams feel like agonyecstasyhotcoldpressuretearing like anywhere they touch, all the nerves dial instantly up to their maximum settings and send incoherent noise.

For a moment, the horde falters as her collective consciousness scrambles to deal with the sensory assault—

—but half a second later she finds a way to rebalance it, rerouting incoming pain signals to whoever happens to be giving birth at the moment, and the pain flashes from crippling to exhilarating and she laughs, all of her at once, and turns in perfect coordination to begin her counterattack.

Flocks of slimy red imps with bulging bellies launch from the surface and fly toward the hive, unflinching in the storm of beams. As soon as they get close enough, they vomit red goo at the nearest solid object. Below them, continuous streams of eggs spew from writhing Scintillae, and hatch into more bony winged creatures, and gulp down more goo until they reach adult size and fill their stomachs to maximum capacity, and then they join their brethren in the air.

Any individual Scintilla flinches slightly on a direct hit from a horrorbeam. But if the beam is sustained they can rebalance immediately to compensate, and if not they bounce back just as fast. And none of what she's doing depends on any individual Scintilla.

As for Scyelen...

Goo surges up over her, hardening to a rocklike consistency around her legs. The Scintilla standing over her says distractedly, "Sorry but no," and rides away, leaving Scyelen covered in goo and stuck to the ground but still able to touch herself if that's her jam.

Scyelen lets out a piteous wail... and cums hard, because force was just used to control her and in her current state her experiential discrimination isn't any more granular or forward-thinking than that.

When she can think again, she stares longingly at the covered-over lake, and cries. "Nooo~ooo~o. P-Please! N-No. I don't want to go back."

(She doesn't have a spell. One of the advantages of her experimental soul is that, because she only has one isolated power that doesn't vary at all in what it does, she doesn't need her raiment to use it. She can copy one spell from any magical girl she's touching, and keep it as long as she wants. She can do the same if she touches the spell. If its the sort of effect that can be touched or affect her body. The red goo should qualify, but her soul can't feel it.)

The vreth-a-likes fall, flailing, when they're struck by the goo. Some of them dodge, though. And the ones that do, fight with speed and grace, stunning creatures with their horrorlight and breaking them with martial strikes.

Vreth himself is slippery like a shadow. He moves like a being that has centuries at least of martial arts experience, his face-beams are an order of magnitude more powerful, used with precision, and anywhere his cellophane tail-bell swipes, goo dies.

And he has help. Black Swan is suddenly there, red wings ablaze, belts whipping around them fast enough to produce cracks of thunder as she fights back to back with the horrorspawn.

This would be inconvenient if she was using the imps as anything other than a goo delivery mechanism. They're weak enough that even the horrorspawns' underpowered face lasers can slow them down, and Vreth's can snipe them right out of the air.

As it is, it doesn't actually matter. Dead imps are just handy biomass. The goo splashes against the structures of the hive and crawls up it, splashes against horrorspawn and experiments with which parts of them to eat in order to disable them as fast as possible, splashes against Black Swan's belts and hardens into encumbering rocks or attempts to nibble at them even though Scintilla is fairly sure that the goo's slow absorption is not going to do much damage to a magical girl's raiment. And the horrorspawn, once dead or disabled, are a fantastically convenient source of even more biomass. The hive gradually fills; the goo on the ground piles up, an inch deep, two inches, three, four, even deeper by the lakeshore—she keeps freeing the other magical girls, spares a thought to separate the goo-rock encumbering Scyelen's legs from the ground and pull the girl away from the lake on a rippling wave of goo flowing uphill in defiance of gravity—

This is probably a really stupid strategy. Probably if she'd had ten minutes to think about it she could've come up with something better.

But there's no denying it's effective.

She lets Vreth and Black Swan clear goo and imps from their immediate vicinity. She could push back, but she doesn't want to. If they get an overly optimistic impression of their ability to handle the stuff, she might be able to lure them deeper into the hive, close them off, and drown them. If not... well.

The imps, now that she's got her process streamlined, stop even bothering to fly back down to reload. They just smash themselves bodily into the hive, die, and feed the goo there, glued to the surface by goo-rock until their bodies are fully reclaimed.

Goo is not that great at absorbing hard materials, and the imps are individually pretty pathetic. Neither thing by itself could present a significant threat to the structural integrity of the hive.

But amid the indiscriminate imp assault, as they stream upward to fling themselves against any part of the hive they can reach, the ones that hit near the very top carry tunnel-worm eggs. The little wriggling worms, under cover of the goo-rock that sticks their hosts to the hive, aim their rock-chewing jaws inward and start boring through the connection between hive and ceiling, swallowing goo along the way as it rushes inward to fill the tunnels as fast as they're dug. Each tunnel starts out approximately the diameter of a particularly chubby pencil, but as the tunneler worms grow, the tunnels get bigger; when they reach adult size, after a few minutes each, the holes they dig are wide enough for a crouched human to walk along.

Vreth learns to dissolve the goo-rock as quickly as he learned to snuff the living goo, wiping it out wherever it might start to encumber him. Black Swan, likewise, is pouring all of her mana into her Tentacle mod. Any time a belt gets stuck she simply dispels it and deploys a new one. They can keep a fairly large area clear, and when they move together, they can cut a swathe through the monster army with ease.

But the fact of the matter is, the Elder Brain and its spawn are not prepared for anything like this level of resistance. It is obvious that whatever bio-weapon is being deployed so unexpectedly and effectively has the upper hand.

So when Black Swan slings Vreth onto her back and flies them like a scythe of death through the army of beasts, they ignore the other fighting and go straight to the center. Together, they dive and drill through the shell over the lake, exploding a hole in the goo-rock to reach the Elder Brain.

Still falling at high speed, they never hit the water. The space around them shards apart like a kaleidoscope for a bare second, before snapping back to smoothness as they vanish between the cracks. The Elder Brain folds in on itself, shrinking away in their wake. Not all of it, but enough. And what remains beneath the goo-rock quickly goes inert, plunging the Lair into darkness.

Many of the magical girls are too gravid to fight, even now that they're free. Many of those with manageable bellies are stuck in a frenzy of masturbation and can't contribute either. Of the girls from the alcoves, a decent number just curl up and cry. But even without raiments, even without spells, there are a few who come out swinging.

Sylvia launches herself out of her alcove with the speed and grace of a magical girl with the top-tier physical stats to go with her absurd mana capacity. She can cross fifty meters in a single leap and hit hard enough to liquefy even horrorflesh. She assesses the battlefield in an instant, and slices into the horror-forces wherever the beast army isn't curb-stomping them on its own.

Casey's belly is so swollen she can't even stand up, but she can pull flares and the materials to make floating lanterns out of her hammerspace Storage and send light sources up into the air to increase visibility for those combatants who have eyes.

A handful of others, scattered around, go into battle with nothing but their skin and fists, setting up the horrorspawn to die at the hands of the beast army more often than killing them directly, but.

The hive breaks free from the ceiling, and falls. It smashes through the now-dark lake, mere moments too late to do any damage.

The crash is apocalyptic, like dropping a skyscraper point-first into a football stadium. Except... most of the shockwave goes down, because the superstructure doesn't stop when it hits. It punches through. And the debris begins to fall from above.

Even greatly diminished, the shockwave that does blast outwards is enough to break legs and rupture eardrums, especially when it loops through the closed space multiple times as it fades. Thanks to the cushioning effects of the ocean of goo, nobody dies, but it does stop the battle cold.

The broken hive crumples, and its pieces scatter vertically, continuing to fall through the hole above, into the hole below... and back out of the hole above, forming a continuous, persistent rockfall. (Too slow. Its noticeable. Terminal velocity should be faster than that even in this gravity.)

Well. That happened.

She looks around. With countless eyes and numerous other sensors and ninety-six coherently synthesized instances of her new magical life-seeing power.

Scintillae near pregnant magical girls who don't look too busy ask variations on, "Can I try something to deal with the... that?"

Out of the few pregnant girls who aren't
a) crying or in shock
b) masturbating (or in two girl's one case, vigorously making out and humping)
c) screaming while doing some combination of the above
d) too injured to talk
there are a handful who just stare like they don't understand the question...

...and the ginger who made the lights they're all currently relying on, attempting a sickly smile. "What're you going to try?" Casey asks.

...and a loli. A disturbingly gravid loli, who none-the-less seems relatively collected. Samantha gestures down at her beachball-sized, horribly swollen stomach. "Yes you may. If only because I suspect I must take the year of peace, to fix this."

"Having the goo eat it. It'll probably be at least moderately horrible, sorry." / "Okay. It'll probably be kinda horrible but I'm pretty sure it won't kill you."

And the loli can have a goo abortion. Oh boy. Why this.

It hurts. It hurts like something is eating her internal organs and ripping chunks off her soul. Samantha writhes, screams of pain hissing out between clenched teeth, and her womb refills as fast as its contents can be absorbed.

Sylvia knows this sound. She dashes towards it, crossing the distance in seconds to arrive at Samantha's side.

Okay but what's happening? She slows down and squints mentally at the complicated twisting figures that she suspects are her new power's attempt to project four-dimensional biology into the three-dimensional space of its vision.

It doesn't slow down. The moment the multigirl focuses on her new sense, the loli lets out one last shriek of agony as she rapidly swells... and pops like the worlds most disgusting balloon. Her body cavity bursts open in an eruption of gore and buries her corpse under a fountain of dead cancer.

Meanwhile, a few of the other girls who participated in the fight want to know (from elsewhere located bodies) various variations on what the fuck. And Sylvia is conspicuously not glaring at Scintilla as she gently wipes Samantha's entrails off herself.

That... almost made sense?

She frowns at the mess, lost in thought. There's a space here, a reality, a physical object that just happens to extend in more directions than usual...

What happens if she...

The local instance dismounts her chimera and leans down to touch the pile of horrorcancer. It files itself in her library as a new instance of the same ?species? as the one she emitted earlier.

"They're more fragile when they're dead, looks like. I think I can still figure it out, though."

But for her next experiments she's gonna want to use someone more disposable. One of her instances who was doing imp production a minute ago switches to making a horrorcancer egg, this time on purpose. And she looks more closely at the tangles of lifeforce in the pregnant girls.

The egg is born dead. It refuses to hatch, and the cells inside are inert.

There's certainly something going on in some fourth (and fifth?) direction, with the pregnant girls. Their 'lifeforce' is nonsensical, contradictory, like a shadow of actual life that is somehow more real than the real thing while being fundamentally unlike it. But... the dead horrorcancer, it's there, it's, spilling out over the... there aren't direction words for this. But it fills the womb and then overspills into the... beyond, where the living flesh is pervaded by something... else.

"Um... did you change your mind?" Casey confusedly asks the clone with her, having been too far away to hear Samantha's dying screams.