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Vore is Vengeance

Crystal clear waters of a splendent teal sparkled. Below them, dense networks of kelp flowed alongside patches of coral. Aye, the sea was beautiful just off the shore of the Xaolaian Island. On the shore, big lush ferns and palm trees obscured a minka home: the kind of home that has tatami floor matting, sliding doors and engawa verandas. Inside this home there was a Protogen named Maxwell, a cheetah named Kendal and a dragon android named Zeta.

Maxwell sat criss-cross at a low table, using chopsticks to stuff his face. He had this big bento box that had a great big ball of rice, an assortment of raw fish, dumplings, and less common food, like chirimen jako (sardines) and torigai (heart clams). It also contained a sort of roe from a giant breed of Xaolaian swallowfish; each shiny, mucous black egg was as large as a dumpling.

“Ish shur guwd!” Maxwell said. As he talked, some of his face nanites dispersed and fizzed through the air, making half of his masticating maw a buzzing black cloud. He gulped hard, then said, “Kendal, you sure you don’t want any?”

“Save me some, please!” Kendal called. Standing at the higher kitchen table, the cheetah was fiddling with a cloaking device. He had not stopped obsessing over it since the guys at the marketplace had awarded the three of them the stolen device and the stolen food for eating the Commonwealth thieves. “I just can’t believe how simple yet effective this design is. You could make something as large as a zeppelin disappear, and the passengers, too. No wonder they wanted this tech.”

Arms crossed, Zeta shook his head. He was by one of the sliding doors. “It was trouble for us to mess with them. And it’s dangerous to be eating food that was prepared for the Commonwealth. It could be poisoned … Those types of fish, none of us know the names of them …”

“But I like it,” Maxwell bleated. A hiccup burst his face into a writhing black amalgam, and before it could reform, a metallic burp reproduced the effect. “I would like to try more of these chewy, squishy orbs sometime.”

Kendal snickered, and stuffed the mechanical guts back into the device after stripping it down to look inside for the third time. “You hear that, Zeta? That’s a polite way of saying, ‘Loosen up.’ You know what I think? I should test this puppy out on you.”

Zeta stayed sternly quiet.

“Aww, why not?! Well, then I think that I should test it on something big—like this house!”

“If we needed to hide the house, it would mean that we are in a lot of trouble,” Zeta said.

Kendal laughed. He leaped on the kitchen counter, then swung his wrench about as a swashbuckler swings at a scallywag. “Then may trouble come! We’ll avast their entry and send them back to the sorry ship whence they came, won’t we, boys?”

As the cheetah concluded his speech, the low rumble like that of a large kettle tripped him off his heels. The cat landed on all fours and rose. Apprehension boiled in everyone. Maxwell couldn’t help but slide open one of the doors, hop off the front platform and peer into the sky.

“A zepp—!”

Zeta lunged and pulled him inside, slamming the door shut.

He said, “As I was saying—”

Kendal said, “As I was saying, you should be the guinea pig of the device. If the Commonwealth have come to settle a debt, they’ll have brought mages with meager armor. All you’d have to do would be to wipe them out with your strength before they could utter a single spell.”

Zeta hummed. “One issue. I don’t know if you hear the hot winds blasting against the door, but that means that the Commonwealth have landed. I am a 12’ tall robot that makes a lot of clatter when he moves; I would be as good with a device as without. You, on the other paw, are a tiny 4’ tall cheetah. I would advise that you do the ambush.”

“Me?! Well, I s’pose there’s sense in it—what say you, Maxwell?”

“I’m curious what the ambush is for. Aren’t ambushes surprise attacks? They already know we live here. I don’t think any attack from us could come as much of a surprise.”

“And they must know we have the cloaking device,” Zeta agreed. “Don’t you think?”

Kendal stuck out his tongue then made a propeller sound. “And you must know everything about what they know, Mister Smart Bot? Alright, take arms, boys; we have a fight a-comin’.”

He tucked the cloaking device into one of the leg braces above his jeans, then tapped it on. Invisible (but appearing as a ghostly outline of cheetah to himself), he made an armoire of weaponry flap open like haunted furniture, then snagged a couple of blasters. He zoomed out from the back of the minka, made a bush of ferns seem to be rustled by hidden critters, then dashed behind a group of Commonwealth scum just as their zeppelin captain stepped afoot the welcome mat.

She was a blood red wyvern. Her pupils were slitted, as though permanently exposed to too much light, and an acrid gold instead of white. Below bronze ram horns, a pair of barbed membranes flanked her nape. A crimson kerchief of gilded edges covered her breasts, and a matching skirt her thighs: Both pieces of clothing were both diamond-shaped at the bottom. A plasma blunderbuss encumbered her slender arms of scale.

Behind her, trailed from a parked bronze zeppelin two dozen mages in prestigious-yet-tattered magician attires of thorned leather spaulders. Some were wyverns, some raptors, some birds of prey.

“Oi!” she spat at the door, covering it in a corrosive mulch of slather. “You got somethin’ of ours, cat and friends!” She fired without fanfare. Her gun muzzle belched a chemical reaction, which peeled through the door in a blink as a smoking magenta glob; it pounced corpulently on the tatami floor. Two guys vaulted behind kitchen tables—it boiled, exploded, chewed giant chunks out of the wood.

The sheer kickback punched the wyvern into a backwards somersault, and she recovered with her legs widely spread and hips rocking in a motivated war dance. “OI! WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE’RAT?”

Her mages rushed forward, morale raised; she fingered her trigger again; the two guys inside were shaking, on their knees, battered and crawling toward the armoire.

Suddenly, a magenta orb shield flashed around her, pelted by blaster fire. It tripped her sideways, overheated her shield generator and stung her. She cursed like a sky-sailor, and her crew of mage slaves whirled, casting arcane bolts in the general area from which blaster fire came. Ethereal blue flames engulfed palm trees and flowers, then self-extinguished.

Some mages moved to secure the premises of the minka, but the wyvern zeppelin captain roared, “FOOLS! The device is our objective, and the carrier’s outside—find him!”

The mages hadn’t a clue where to look until blaster fire sent a scatter of three windmilling to the ground.

Retaliation came quick. Paralyzation spells, revealing spells and frost bolts either fizzled or frosted over the tropical grass and detritus, missing their mark. Then, a tawny hawk mage dropped his stave with a squawk, and the mages knew exactly where the cheetah was.

The hawk’s blathering beak vanished with a throaty squolp. His gilded sapphiren robe flailed through the air, disappearing with taloned hands and kicking boots as the invisible devourer staggered back behind a group of palm trees. Multicolored magic projectiles pursued him, each of them immolating one of the tree trunks before self-extinguishing.

Veins on the captain’s peachy-white neck bulged. She rabidly hissed with a seizure of her head, then leapfrogged her bare taloned clodhoppers off some of the heads of mages, beating her great cloak of wings toward the palms. She alighted, switching her blunderbuss to bullet mode. She sprayed multi-fire each way. She shrieked, “Damn spotted pussy, SHOW YOURSELF!”

Each BOOM made large lizards dart up and down the trees. Meanwhile, the invisible cheetah lounged in a bush-shrouded hammock. One last gulp sent the final bird claw tip down his gullet; slushy sounds and warbly noises droned from behind the hammock-obscuring greenery as the seemingly empty hammock bulged and swayed and bounced to the flappy struggles of the hawk.

The mage started to cast: “Enfernus ag—”

“BwwWWeeeaaaAaaaaAggghhHHhh!”

The defeathering belch made tawny plumage swirl and teeter down round the invisible cat. The bulging hammock quietened and moved complacently. First, the oxygen had been purged from the feline’s belly: Once the belly was a vacuum, air had been ripped right out of the mage’s lungs, along with his spell words.

“That’s better,” said Kendal. “It’s about time you let me gurgle you in peace.”

His speech and a following chuckle roused the shouts of a few searching mages. A wyvern and a raptor pried bushes apart with gnarled claws, and subsequently ate blastfuls of blaster juice. They fell smoking, both of them a burnt-toast black.

Clambering out of the hammock, “Alright,” the big-bellied cheetah said, “back into the fray for me.” Clumsily he staggered forward, still adjusting to the burbling weight at his middle. With a gross BluWUP of his belly, he hopped off a dying guy’s gut, prompting their last word: Bluh!

While he was vacationing on the sidelines, the battle had progressed. Captain Wyvern foraged murderously for Kendal from place to place, barking corrosive spit. A few distressed mages dogging her proximity fired magic at random in an effort to weed him out. Meanwhile, mages cycled inside and outside of the minka like enraged hornets. Flashes of magic were responded to by bullet fire, mostly, though a throwing knife whizzed out of a shattered window to lay a raptor on the lawn like a plank, the blade in his eye.

That answered where Maxwell was.

But where was Zeta?

The cheetah winced. From behind the minka to his right, two great metal whips hurtled and splashed through the sky, and two crushed forms crashed into the sea and ejaculated two white jets of water. With a kittenish inside-joke smile, Kendal dashed with powerful, arcing steps with full use of his leg braces, heading to Zeta. Skidding round the corner, he saw Zeta slowly stampeding toward him (on his way to help Maxwell, likely). It wasn’t so pressing a matter to Kendal that he was about to be squashed; behind the giant android dragon, the captain wyvern had just popped out of a patch of tropical flowers, and Kendal saw the first two individuals of her following of magical cronies blink out behind her.

Maxwell was injured and unguarded.

If he was hit again—

Time slowed—

Kendal thrust his hand over his head. He smote his cloaking device. At the same time he reappeared, he unleashed from his predator maw a fearsome cheetah “CHIRP!!!”

From the sheer power of this chirp, a breeze wafted over his cheetah ears, gusted his luscious brunette hair and swished his ponytail—and also lifted his flapping overcoat at his sides. Zeta’s eyes flashed with astonishment. With a metallic, queasy-sounding “BARK,” he teetered back on his paws until he fell. His arse became a shiny gold meteor. Its shadow quickly swelled over Captain and Company, and foretold doom for them.

With a choir of shrieks, Captain and Co. flung themselves back into the underbrush.

A metallic quake spanked Maxwell against the armoire. Not only did it disarm him: It knocked up the blast visor he had put on so that it covered his wild pink mane instead of his face. He stayed slumped against the weaponry as the three live mages inside the minka rose, trudging toward him. They steadied clawed hands, then aimed the palms at his face.

He screeched. The cry burst his muzzle into a swarm of black nanites.

A bolt of magic gunned his head, sprawled him over the floor.

But he still breathed.

Rings of cyan electricity cracked and sparked and sped over his silhouette. He was twitching. The mages seemed confused. The battery inside him whirred and recharged. His sky blue face markings and thigh arrows blared bright. Lucid clarity imbibed his senses of sight, smell, hearing, feeling and tasting.

He gasped into second life, leaning up.

A second magic bolt smashed his skull against the furniture—a third/fourth/fifth.

The mages instantly regretted this. The protogen harpooned the air with arcane spears from his mouth, unleashing the tinny laugh of a tiny lunatic. He rolled to his feet in the manner of a zombie armadillo having a sugar hive, and a ball of surplus energy spun around him, crackling, hissing and spitting voltage.

“That tasted good!”

His body bulleted into the open armoire. Weapons flew out of it gunfire fast till he found a battery blaster.

He locked the blaster on his hand. A smile of menacing treacliness made his lips zag across his face. The foreboding sight made the mages wail and scatter for various doors. His blaster aimed, boomed/aimed, boomed/aimed, boomed.

When the last of three plasmic quakes faded, three fresh piles of ash simmered by the exits. The incense of roasted bird and dinosaur gave the minka the smell of prehistoric barbecue. Maxwell flung his head back and unleashed a maniacal cackle. Then the boom of a blunderbuss battered the place from outside, and he leaped with surprise, his feet scrabbling in the air. He landed, grabbed his blaster with a militance then dashed through the blunderbuss-made hole of the main door in a magical caffeine rush.

Captain Wyvern squalled, “TRIED TO MAKE AN ASS OF THE CAPTAIN, EH? SHE’LL MAKE KIBBLE OF YEH, S’WHAT SHE’LL DO YEH GLORIFIED HOUSEPET!” Globs of green doom cannoned from her blunderbuss—pitched her into backward somersaults. The globs alighted and boiled fervidly on the ground behind a panicked Zeta. He fled the captain, carrying Kendal in his massive arms like a kitten. Green detonations mortared the earth behind him, creating craters. The shockwaves upgraded some of his metal steps into graceful skips—graceful for an android who weighed tons, anyway. Into the protective vine curtains of the jungle, he and his creator disappeared.

Maxwell peeked around the corner, then smacked himself flat against the minka to hide when Captain Wyvern and the last six mages roaringly stampeded after his friends. “Those guys are really gullible, aren’t they?”

The captain and her mages waltzed right into the dark maze of spiky leaves, brambles and vines. They spun and surveyed they surrounds, but were especially lost. There they were foolish mice: perfect for a cat and his fellows.

Metal whips missiled out of the gloom. They curled round two mages—yanked them into green abyss like the tendrils of some carnivorous plant. Bloody howls of horror preceded instinctual blasts of arcane bolts and bullet fire being scattered into the black unknown.

Captain Wyvern screamed, as livid as a blinded bird-of-prey. She leaped into the overstory with beats of her over-large wings, and the narrowly spaced jungle colonnade knocked her back and forth as she blasted bullets at any monkey or cockatrice that moved or looked at her the wrong way. (And all of them did.)

Animal bodies showered the earth.

Below her, all the last four mages kept pitching magic blindly. One of them got a tap on the shoulder.

“Boo.”

The face of an upside-down cheetah greeted him. The wyvern mage got only the briefest scan of the cat, whose tail was curled around a tree branch, and then yelped: That’s when the feline’s jaws enlarged and snarfed up his face. The wyvern demurred with kicks and muffled cries, his leather boots plucked off the ground. The bulge of his horned head—oddly enough—climbed the length of the squelching, spotted throat. The other mages whirled to see what was going on, then blurted the beginning of spells to counterattack.

That came before they heard a metallic crackling of energy. The sound grew louder and distracted the free mages. Then a sphere tackled the three of them like a possessed coconut: But the sphere had no hair, nor was it brown, but blue. The sphere stopped whirling to reveal Maxwell. He giddily shivered as he crouched over his three prey, who were stacked below his paws like pancakes.

He wrapped his arms around the first of the three avian mages then did a backwards dive to the jungle floor, hurling an eagle’s beak his maw. While black fireflies buzzed around his swollen jaws, he slurped down the protesting eagle and kept the other two pinned down by whapping his hyperactive tail over their backs whenever they tried to rise.

Kendal gave labored gulps as he escorted his unlucky wyvern up his esophagus, his eyes twitching. He appeared to regret devouring his prey with gravity working against him, but the act exercised his gullet.

This is more challenging than I thought—bring it on! he thought.

Contours of crumpled wings wriggled their way up his stuffed craw as the struggles of his draconian prey massaged his throat with weak elbowings and pawings and pleads. Kendal shuddered and convulsed a bit from the strain and his inability to draw much breath, save through his nostrils. He dropped his blasters to the ground then clutched the wyvern’s hips and shoved them into his tight esophagus to a choir of punchy squelches and the intense croaks of the constrictions of muscular walls. As he prized his prey through the sphincter of his belly, he gagged and he upchucked a couple of inches of his meal.

I suppose I could breathe better if my tail weren’t hanging me like a noose, he thought.

He unlooped his tail. He thudded on his back on the hard ground, and damn near retched up his wyvern. His lubricated esophagus slipped up and spilled some of the wyvern’s belly out, and that kindled hope in the wyvern. The wyvern mustered the confidence to open his mouth and mutter a spell-syllable, but not before Kendal inhaled a huge gulp of air—or at least tried. A flex of coral pink gullet flesh piledrived the wyvern’s snout into a belly wall, smothering his face, which in turn fizzled his magery. Another gulp from above dunked his upper body into purring acids. The waterboarded prey gurgled in protest and splashed in fear, and his pleads animated the big, doughy bulges of Kendal’s tawny belly. The gut now housed not one mage but two, the first being the avian from earlier.

The engorged middle of the cheetah looked like a great boulder that had fallen on him, that now threatened to crush the breath from his lungs. In reality, his middle was less likely to asphyxiate him than the scaly haunches and tail upon which his stuffed jowls now banqueted. He slurped as hard as he could to chauffeur them through his lips, turning blue in his cheeks. Then his lips smacked together. A challenged GULP laid the coup de grâce to the twin swells of his gullet, the bulges of the wyvern’s legs. The legs sunk into the throaty depths below his chest. With a string of loud gulps, they relocated lower and ballooned larger the glutton’s mound that was Kendal’s gut, accentuating jiggles of fur and the borborygmi of his digesting foes.

“BuuhhhhuUuhhuUrrRwrwrwrRRrrrrghghpppghgHP!”

Kendal let out a rumbling belch. Its rattle was reminiscent of the last slurp of soda from the straw of a plastic cup.

Meanwhile, Maxwell moaned between swallows of the chocolatey, feathery midsection of his eagle meal. Feathers cycloned around his jaws from the tips of restlessly beating wings. This mage did manage to speak spells inside of Maxwell (unlike Kendal’s prey), but as soon as the magic left his golden beak, it splashed harmlessly into Maxwell’s belly walls, and infused his form with sprinters of sparkling blue energy.

Whatever battery powered his belly acids gained a supercharge: The pit of chyme churned away the robe and the feathers of the eagle swifter than before. Turquoise silk gilded with gold dissolved around him, while the eagle shrieked and lunged at patches of dissolving fabric, as though they could buoy him up as rafts and sail him away from his fate of becoming part of a metabolic bisque. All he managed to do was cyclically massage Maxwell’s bloated belly, making the sherbet pink fluff of its bulge swirl around like whipped cream being dispensed.

Max chuffed. He sweated from his hyperactivity on top of his metabolic process, while the bulge of his prey lurched and rocked him every which way. Maxwell had been aboard a large vessel, once, which moved to make him as queasy. Except, THIS vessel lay atop him rather than below his feet. When he realized this reversed dynamic, he was awarded a second helping of queasiness. He oofed with fatigue and seasickness. He shrugged his maned head back in the lethargic way of a sofa-loafer, then barked a belch large enough to propel a canoe.

While he burped, he coiled the two other bird mages in his tail then craned them toward his maw. He first gulped the head of one of them (an owl), then gradually relaxed his coils to transfer the owl into his dripping esophagus. Too impatient to wait for the owl to go down, he forced the other mage (a pigeon) into his maw before the owl had boarded fully himself. Maxwell’s pliable throat gulped quicker and dragged the owl’s waistline along his tongue and palate, which teased his taste buds with flavors of pine and twigs and forest game. All the while, Max’s tail jabbed the beak of the pigeon at the robed buttocks of the owl to speed the two-bird assembly along.

Creaking noises came from the purplish maroon chestplate of Maxwell as his bloated throat pushed the nocturnal hooter through his sphincter. Acrid steams of the belly greeted the owl, as well as a sashaying of belly walls and a rowdy bubbling of the gastrointestinal jacuzzi. Hoots of horror fluttered the flesh of the cramped belly as paroxysms of the sphincter reintroduced the eagle to the owl, and squashed their forms together more and more. The space of the belly waned, and each gulp of the pred forced the owl to headbutt the eagle deeper into the bile.

Soon, both eagle and owl bathed in the digestive medley of the gut. Even in his hyper state of energy, Maxwell could hardly move. The massive weight of his nocturnal meals anchored him down. He trembled in pure bliss as talons slipped into the cyan luminance of his maw. That cleared space up in his maw, which let him dunk the pigeon’s head below the zags of his maw into his squishy cerulean depths. With mirth he dined on this delicacy of a bird: Unlike feral pigeons, the owl tasted fresh and delightful and somewhat like a feathery pizza.

His throat appeared as thick as a pillar and featured the form of a pigeon packed so tight within, you could see faintly see the panicked face of the bird even below the thick tufts of pink fluff. Mighty cerulean muscles of slimy flesh masticated and pushed the defeated mage through his tract until the trio of birds reunited in full, the last of them curling up into that congested gut of impregnable walls.

The bellies of Maxwell and Kendal churned up a cacophonous storm there in the understory. The two friends purred and relaxed and let their gravid stomachs metabolize their foes slowly and satiably. From the darkness, Zeta emerged and patted a small bulge in his iron abdomen: Apparently, he had swallowed whole his duo of mages already.

Above them, Captain Wyvern flapped through the overstory and scanned the forestry below fruitlessly for a while. Finally, she sighted the cheetah and his friends. But she saw that she was outnumbered.

She squawked, “This ain’t the last you’ll hear of me, you hear? The Commonwealth will have your heads, along with the stolen device!”

And so she hammered her wings and piloted high into the canopy en route the heavens.

Despite his giant belly, Kendal leaped to his feet with the aid of his leg braces. “Not so fast, you!”

“Um,” said Maxwell, and jumped up as well. “I like your enthusiasm—as always—but just how do you plan on chasing her?”

“Team,” Kendal said, “I’ve DREAMED of this moment. Zeta, shoot one of your tendrils at her. Maxwell, CATCH!” He flung himself into Maxwell’s arms, and the Protogen looked surprised that he caught him. Zeta launched a tendril as instructed. “Now, Max—put that mana caffeination to good use, and run up his tendril!”

She’s mine, the cheetah thought, and licked his lips.

This he did as his carrier said, “I hope you know what the heck you’re doing!” and hopped on Zeta’s shoulder. Maxwell assumed a sprinter’s stance then started forward like a bolt of lightning, determinedly racing up the tendril. The tendril harpooned through the overstory toward Captain Wyvern.

“Now, toss me!” Kendal yelled at Maxwell.

“What?!”

“Letting go is an integral part of life,” he shouted.

He recalled these words from a fortune cookie.

The meaning of the words confused Maxwell so much, he had to use extra energy to contemplate them and in turn lost track of where he was going. The tendril ended, and he tripped and fumbled Kendal, but not before Kendal pumped his feet off of Maxwell’s bouncy belly. The cheetah rocketed through the roof of greenery. He flew toward the Captain like a superhero, and the Captain glanced back with sheer shock.

Kendal yawned his maw wide and swallowed her from her feet to her thighs, engorging his esophagus without a single gulp.

“What in the—how have you—noooo!”

Captain Wyvern beat her wings as though the cheetah would simply freeze or fall off of her at a certain altitude. But the closer she ascended to the clouds, the more of her slick body he swallowed. She tasted like curry, and he purred loud and devoured her hips and soon gulped down her bust.

“Fool—swallow my wing arms, and we both fall!”

Nice try, Kendal thought, as though she were trying to trick him.

She began to sway down from the sky as he swallowed over her shoulders, his large belly thrashing like a manic pendulum. Her wings folded and cloaked her head as his lips pursed over the top of her horned skull. One last slurp sealed her screaming jaws inside his craw. Kendal seemed satiated and happy and would have remained so, had he not opened his eyes and seen himself plunging to his death.

His eyes widened. He gurgled from his throat in panic as he tried to flap his arms, which spun his gurgly stomach over his head several times. As the treetops closed in on his sight and ensured death, he resigned to die from his gluttony: He purged the danger from his mind and instead focused on gulping the last of his wyvern meal down. His belly blimped into a legendary sphere, from which the cries of his prey increased in volume, for they had all been informed by Captain Wyvern that they were falling.

For some reason, this seemed to them more perilous than being digested.

He exploded through the canopy. Twigs berated him.

“Ow, ow, ow ow ow!”

“Kendal!” came Maxwell’s voice.

“Hey!” Kendal waved at Max, who was coiled by a tendril.

Then a tendril engulfed him too, and both tendrils buoyed the boys safely down to a beach just off to the side of the dense jungle.

“You guys are much too heavy,” Zeta complained. “You really must upgrade my whips if you plan on doing that more often.”

“More often?!” Kendal blurted. “We should make that an official team combo technique!”

“Burp,” Maxwell agreed, upside-down in Zeta’s other tendril.

Zeta sighed his surrender, and smiled warmly.

He saved his breath, since he’d be needing it to metabolize the Commonwealth goons in his gut. They all would.

And what’s there to complain about, when you’re gonna spend the rest of the afternoon digesting foes with your friends on a tropical island?

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