This month's themes:

Fox pred
Collection of magic artifacts advantages the pred
Swapping sizes and reversing roles
Jungle fortress

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Patron characters featured in this story:

Andy ©  Drewbermeister

Wane © Lord Draugo

Snow ©  Snowcheetah

Gantradies ©  GantradiesDracos

Very briefly: Clove ©  Kobuld

And me!  xsini

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OUTPREDDING PREDATORS OF THE JUNGLE FORTRESS

JAGUAR-GOLD EYES SPINNING, an emerald-blue naga impacted a bronze pillar with a reedy squelch of the silky adhesive that had erupted from what had been a ball-shaped arrowhead. The fox archer lowered his longbow, looked back at the horde of ensnared monsters who had been guarding the temple’s front gates. His snout—projected from beneath the pine-brown hood of his cloak—bared a grin. One step closer to stealing the artifacts preserved for centuries by the Clan of the Elements. Artifacts that could help him transcend the traditional size limits of a fox. If anyone else stood in Andy’s way, they could join his stomach—he had adventured and fought up quite the appetite.

The ears of a slender cheetah, who held a quarterstaff headed with an emerald and wore tribal cloth and bead necklaces, twitched. He turned away from his companion—a strong-legged, barrel-chested white wolf built for both climbing and fighting—toward a mossy bronze bridge. The posts on either side of the bridge bore torches of sacred flames, a pair of which shined on a fox sprinting between them, pulling taut a bowstring. The white wolf felt the fur on the cheetah’s tail bristle against his own, the middle of the wolf’s tail girdled with a bronze bracer that had a snow-blue gem in its center, but he had sensed the danger before Snow: had heard the patter of vulpine soles across the baking earth and then had heard the tightening of the bowstring.

Growling, Wane whirled and slashed the air in front of his pectorals with his tail. In a blink of time, the snow-blue gem pulsed and then fired a fist-thick bullet of frost, the bullet exploding on the arrowhead and freezing it to the bow. The force of the hit itself did little more than ruin Andy’s aim; but when the frost began creeping up the bow, as if to spread like an infection to his hands, it startled the bow out of his grasp; and he watched it, with caught breath, tumble down into the rushing current of a steep aqueduct.

Already the Clan guards were rushing toward him. Another frost-bullet was catapulted, and Andy sidestepped into a hunched, predatory stance with a lick of his thick, black canid lips. I was thinking of being nice, and just leaving you to be cut free from an arrow-splat … but I’m glad you’ve forced my paw. A gleam came from the quarterstaff, and his pupils narrowed. “Is that the Staff of Spoils? Just what I wanted~”

“Are you sure you want it?” Snow the cheetah sped across the bridge—vaulted off of his bare, digitigrade feet. “Then here!” What could have been an unforgiving blow cut down diagonally just a couple inches short of Andy’s breast. He had leaned back, incredulous from the speed. The up-jab that redeemed its wielder spiked into his jaw, unhooding him before the hard, slender gem-head pecked between his ribs, sending him rolling onto one knee and winding him.

“H-heh.” He clutched his chest and cackled a couple of times to reset his breathing, tearing up a little. Despite that he was gobsmacked from the blow to his diaphragm, he lost concern of that as his eyes widened with suppressed vigilance to throbbing, chilling feeling. Moments before, he and the cheetah had been of equal height; but he knew because of the staff that he had become lighter and smaller—hadn’t felt this small since he’d been apprenticing under his former teacher bowmaster. Snow scrunched his face and grunted, muscles bulging bigger, partially tracing the form of an alpha feline. He clenched up with a look of stoic mirth until he finished swelling out to the size of an elite, seven feet tall. Two feet taller than Andy now. Some of the fox’s size had been stolen with each hit.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Andy asked, voice ten years lighter. His confidence generated an idea that glinted in his eye. “No wonder you rely on your shrinking tricks. A blow between the ribs should have ended this. Yet … h-here I stand.” He rose with much more difficulty than his words would suggest, then bared his teeth and licked them, a gesture of predatory challenge for the Clan.

Wane the wolf: His view of Andy was obstructed by the cheetah, but he saw the cheetah’s back hunch and his gait slow down with wider steps. Snow neither feared the fox as a fighter nor as a hunter, not anymore.

“You’ve decided your fate,” he said with a deeper, gruffer voice, a voice of machismo that didn’t quite fit him.

As soon as the alpha-bodied cheetah kicked off his feet into a charge, Andy feigned fear. He turned and bolted back the way he came, seeming to confirm his previous show as the sum of a lackwit’s bravado. Snow shredded the gap with both his size advantage and species advantage, then yanked him off the ground by one of his cloaked arms, the cheetah yawning his slathering jaws. Before he could swallow Andy’s head, the fox yelled, “Aha,” and lunged clumsily for the staff, then wrenched it as hard as he could. Snow held the staff steady in place, his brutish bicep not even budging. He lowered his eyelids with a neutral wryness.

“Did you really think—”

Brunette mane whipping back, Snow teetered back, blinking puzzledly a couple of times from a whiplash before he flopped onto the ground, staff clattering out of his grasp. Andy planted his feet, then turned to look at Snow. He rubbed the back of his dome and smiled, proud of his headbutting skills.

“That I have a skull of steel? Yes I did. Still do.”

Blinking and leering at the light blaring from the canopy, Snow shivered into movement—reached for the staff. Andy kicked it aside, stepped over to it, then scooped it up. It magically shrank about two feet in length and an amount in girth not noteworthy, adjusting its size for its new wielder.

“And now I have a staff of magic. Much more multi-purpose.”

Urban legend asserted: The Staff of Spoils had two magical effects. One, it could steal size from whomever it struck, based on the amount of damage dealt; and two, it could steal size from whomever tried to strike the wielder, should the wielder dodge or deflect the attack. Only one way to find out the truth of it all, Andy thought, ears twitching.

He ducked a frost-bullet … then rose chuckling, his muscles bulging bigger, back broadening and voice deepening every so slightly, with a low, pleasant sound of shifting flesh, and pulses of warmth; though, he still wasn’t as athletic-looking as usual, nor was his voice back to normal. The wolf had naturally stood as tall as the alpha-bodied cheetah, seven feet tall, but he had dropped to six-foot-eight, while the fox had grown back to five-foot-four.

His stomach growled under his cloak, so oversized that it may as well have been a nightgown. He planned on not only growing back into it, but ripping out of it.

“We’ll see how big and bad the both of you are once I’ve bonked you down to size,” he said, and grinned disarmingly. “I’d start running if I were you, food~”

While Snow tried to catch his breath and clamber up, Wane lobbed another frost-bullet with a grunt, and careened across the bridge to their side. Smugly, Andy dove under the shot and passed the cheetah, thwacking the small of his back and dropping him back to his knees. The fox was still growing from the miss-and-hit combo when one of the wolf’s ursine-thick, iron-clawed paws rose to maul him, the wolf’s arm as broad as most warriors’ thighs.

Andy swooped beneath it—launched a flurry of strikes from behind. Each hit grew him a couple of inches in height, and the frenzying rush of adrenaline hastened his onslaughts. Next thing he knew, the wolf—disparately bruised, woozy and sluggish—had been deprived of so much size that, when he tried to seize the staff, Andy pushed down and folded him to his knees with a widening grin, the vulpine’s biceps surging to outgrow even the thigh-thick arms Wane had once bragged. The muscles of his limbs and chest jumped and knotted significantly, building to lycanthropic proportions, shredding his taut cloak as effectively as would claws, his broadening pecs snapping his quiver harness. Arrows spilled halfway out of the fallen container as Andy, with brusque groans of his evolving frame, snatched the wolf’s former height. Though, compared with the wolf when the wolf had stood seven feet tall, he boasted a discernible surplus in bulk.

The last scraps of his cloak piled around his king-sized paws. Laughter boomed. The wolf blanched, his arms shaking like gelatin. The grapple wasn’t even fair anymore. Andy would have to let the wolf have the staff … but why would he go and do that? Finishing at seven-foot-eight, the fox—now a hulking werefox—kicked down the lithe, borderline-dwarven, four-foot-eight canid. He stepped over him with legs that had become digitigrade, like those of a feral beast.

“What have we here, a wee puppy?” He picked up the canine who stood nigh half his height by the scruff of the neck. He breathed a hot, rumbling undertone over Wane’s head, the wolf’s former anger succumbing to fear. Too stubborn to admit defeat, Wane lunged out to Snow, gasping. “A member of the most revered Clan of predators … and yet, I could fit you in my stomach … Either the standards for the food chain are getting really low, or I’m getting really big~ Where do you place your bet?”

Snow—even though he had gotten up again, and still measured somewhat inspiritingly large at six-foot-eight—was equally despairing. Instead of rushing forward to help Wane, he pivoted and gaped at all of the guards squirming under the arrow-splats. What power was his to fight a hunter—to stop a monster—who could do all this?

Heavy footsteps had approached him while he was distracted. A loud swallow—far too close for his comfort—pricked up his ears. Two fluffy, firm mounds budged the back of his head, and then a forearm as thick as a pole wrapped around him, pressing his back against what he imagined, with a gulp, to be the wriggling bulge of Wane slipping through the beast’s gullet like a rodent slipping through the internals of a muscular, furred snake. Those pecs expanded then deflated, and Wane fell into the roundening stomach. It inflated into a full, grumbling ball. With a blush of indignance, Snow looked up and saw a golden eye mocking him. Slather splattered on his snout. Slurping and squelching resounded. The artifact-adorned tail dove down the monster’s esophagus.

GULP—Andy claimed the last of that once-proud predator. The bulge of the tail vanished beneath the beef of his chest. Snow couldn’t bare to look behind, but he could feel the imprints of the canid struggling, jostling that noisome, crowded ball of fluff.

A humid belch droned disgustingly, bedraggling Snow’s brunette mane and covering his shoulders in slop that smelled of acid, canid musk and a coppery smell. His heart plunged. Andy chuckled. A softer “Ghuuuwrp” disposed of the tail bracer, an artifact known as the Frozen Scorpion.

“Like the souvenir your friend gave me, little kitten? You won’t be much more than that coming up. A furball, maybe. But me? I’m gonna be a huge, swollen werefox with some extra protein pumping me up, thanks to you two.”

Andy then did something that Snow knew was awry: He released him. What else could the cheetah do, but try running away? When he did, Andy lumbered after him and, a couple of times, bonked him with the staff, toying with him. Each time a dose of size was transferred, Andy hummed with a beastlier timbre. Twisting one of his shoulders with each spasm of growth, he swelled to nine-foot-six, the size of an occult gladiator. Snow dropped closer to the ground on a decline to five feet tall, shorter even than all the shortest females of the Clan.

Which left him barely larger than the wolf bulging, digesting and losing shape. Growling with a dark playfulness, Andy chucked the staff. He chased his prey around a courtyard of obelisks, letting Snow continuously escape and grow tired; and now and then, the predator would proffer a verbal taunt. Snow no longer felt like a proud hunter, but like game. At the peak of his fear he felt the thud of the werefox falling onto all fours. Andy loped forward and tackled him down.

*GULP~*

Belly bulging with more distinct contours because of his feline catch, Andy lay on a bench with his staff propped against a mossy wall, scuffling the Frozen Scorpion onto his tail. Once he got it on, he took some time to test it out. Patches of frost had decked every arch and wall by the time his fast metabolism had fully digested his meals and primed the musculature underlying his fluff. Each of his calves had grown larger than both of the average warrior’s thighs put together; and the pecs of his expanded, V-shaped chest shuddered with each breath between biceps corded to excellence.

Having cleared the outside of the Clan grounds, he took his staff and trudged toward a door leading into a descending, torchlit hall. Going down, he had to duck his head and squeeze his shoulders close at a pace for wading. The congestion of space didn’t bother him much; he was too busy thinking about the artifacts and the prey that lay within. He rumbled with a voice that filled and echoed through the space, dusting down debris.

Into a circular underground chamber the size of a small church he emerged. His pupils widened to process two great, quadrupedal figures that would have frightened him before. Now that he was of a monstrous size, they only excited him. Two dragons guarded a hallway big enough for them to walk through beside each other with breathing room for their wings. One of them—a black-and-purple named Sini—stood 13’ tall from head to talons, his shoulders almost up to the werefox’s head: He wore a ruby-gemmed amulet. The other dragon—a slate-blue—actually stood a claw shorter than Andy (nine feet tall) and had amber crystals surging along his spine and his underbelly. Plating his posterior were steel, cybernetic haunches that must have been designed by the Archivallians. On one of his foretalons gleamed an amber-gemmed ring.

Gantradies the slate-blue yelped, “Sir, many apologies, but you’re not actually supposed to be here. Your presence threatens the security of the Sanctum, so it’s best you let me escort you out. Otherwise, we’re just gonna have to destroy you.”

Sini the black-and-purple didn’t bat an eye at his partner’s switch of gears, his gaze coquettishly half-lidded. “Or … we could poison your thoughts and then have an orgy,” he said. “Which I think could be fun with a fox your size. Destroyer and I are due for some on-duty fun.”

“Oh?” Andy twirled his staff a bit, then finished with an offensive flourish, his stance arched forward and knees bouncing with rhythm. “Hope you dragons are ready for the challenge you’re instigating! We’ll see who’s talking down to who in a few minutes~”

Sini harrumphed, inhaled, then purged a smoldering beam of mindpoison breath and steered it Andy’s way. The werefox rushed clockwise toward the dragons, keeping a few steps ahead of the dispersing gas, and lobbed a frost-bullet en route. Pelted on the scaly chin stubble, Sini winced and recoiled with his breath projectile tapering off, the stubble freezing into scintillating icicles.

I always hated when Wane hit me with that thing, Sini thought, but at least he didn’t have the staff too. He didn’t dwell on this, because Gantradies winked at him conspicuously. Sini gaped at him … then nodded, and shot him an ear-flick, and then the slate-blue tapped his toe-ring.

Perspectives changed: Andy was running toward Gantra … but no one was in the same place as before. Andy braked in a daze. When he realized that the toe-ring had teleported him to Gantra’s previous position and vice versa, it was too late: Sini was breathing sultry breath down his neck. With an immersive squelch, the dragon swallowed his upper half, then glutted down to his posterior, smothering his face with smooth, wet flesh whose way of handling the werefox wasn’t nearly as smooth.

“Blegh … dragon breath.”

It wasn’t every day that a predator managed to lodge their sticky jowls around Andy. He jabbed his emerald staff-head at the chasm of squishy flesh, and hoped to be gagged up; but the flesh was too cushiony for the staff-head to do more than knead a little into those plush muscles. Instead, the predator let out a low, warm, hectoring rumble. Andy closed his eyes, thought with a marksman’s decisiveness. He arched his tail, like a scorpion readying a strike. Right as the peristaltic rings around him opened up and the ones ahead closed, he flicked it. A frost-bullet impacted the rings that had dilated shut, freezing them in place as a blockage.

Sini couldn’t have blanched and gagged more severely if he had nipped on an expired carcass. Acrid purple breath shattered the frost plug, geysering out; and Andy rolled free. He rose from a knee without inhaling, not wanting to find out the effects of the mindpoison unfurling behind. He saw Gantra rush toward him, then gave a sidelong glance back at Sini, one ear twitching. As Sini was gagging, the staff bashed him on the side of the head. “Ruuaowl!” The few inches of stolen size were enough to send him cackling after the werefox with a fatal glare.

Andy leapfrogged off Gantra’s head, landed running across his back, hopped off his plated haunches. As Gantra began lifting his head, Sini’s throat prized over the place where Andy had been just a second ago … and swallowed the slate-blue down to the crook of the neck.

“Gack …” To fight the contractions of lubed throat muscles with snout alone, Gantradies learned, was as hard as trying to climb the water of a fall. “Sini, we’re on the same team!”

Ring-mouthed, the drooling Sini raised his brows remorsefully. He cupped the slate-blue’s shoulders then pushed with his wings flitting and clenching up, but Gantra’s horns had been lodged deep into a trench of the slimy rings, which refused to release him; so the dragons groaned, flapped and sawed back and forth. Panicking, Gantra bapped his toe-ring, but the resulting flash of magic switched their roles exactly, so he became the one eating Sini.

With a gasp of exasperation, Sini shoved against the accidental predator’s plated chest just to resist the current of esophageal muscles trying to pull him farther down instead of out. He was quick to give up on that tactic. One handpaw squeezed the ruby of his amulet.

Glowing white, the form of a dragon yanked free from Sini, its head phasing through Gantra’s throat. The dragon’s body blinked—turned black-and-purple, and then flopped into a tumble as a doppelganger, a Doppel-Sini, to whom the amulet had been passed. Not much shorter than 13’ tall—the same as Sini after that staff trickery—the copy rushed behind its maker. He wrenched on his tail as hard as he could, feeling a faint budging of the slate-blue’s esophagus.

“Oooh, what a handy piece of treasure.” Ten feet tall, Andy smirked at the glint of the ruby. He thumped toward the doppelganger, chips of stone flooring crumbling off of his draconically large soles. “And now, I have three dragons to play with. Three dragons with oh-so-much shrinking to do …”

Wings shivering, Doppel-Sini dropped Sini’s tail. He rose high on his haunches, then inhaled. No way could Andy let him breathe his poisons: The air was still a little hazy from the last dragonbreath; and while he could resist the aphrodisiac, now that it had spread throughout the room, he didn’t want to test his willpower against a cloudier space. Cracks forked across the floor with a superpowered vault. He landed with the dragon in a headlock.

“Cute—but no more fumes for you.”

A tap of the Frost Scorpion to Doppel-Sini’s jaws muzzled him; and then Andy would thump the bottom of the staff against the dragon’s chest again and again, and would verbally taunt the doppelganger as the disparity between their sizes surged. In the beginning, Andy’s head only came to the clone’s throat; but after a dozen jabs, he had more than outgrown both Sinis: He towered over all three dragons, the clone so small that he could probably only stand as high as the fox’s abdomen; but he couldn’t even stand because he was held aloft in that headlock, squirming against a grasp which only thickened and became more unconquerable.

“Haah, you’re no dragon … I’ve hunted deer that looked bigger than you~” rumbled Andy. He had knocked the doppelganger down to the size of a plushie. A pet. A pawn.

Swung by his tail over a yawning maw, the shrunken clone squeaked at the stumbling pair for help. The cries galvanized the pair into pushing against each other’s shoulders as hard as they could—but far too late. They flopped down, free at last, their snouts covered in slather; but they found Andy sighing and patting an engorged stomach. The gurgly belly had girth enough for him to wrap his arms snugly around it. Which he did—which forced up a hunky, territorial belch. The burped-up amulet plopped on the top of his gut.

Shaking goop off their schnozes, Sini and Gantradies got up, while Andy clipped the trinket on behind his neck. A flash blinded the dragons. Presently, they gulped and gazed up at two humongous werefoxes. While the original werefox continued digesting Sini’s double and held all the stolen artifacts, Doppel-Andy had no objects nor prey to encumber him. Both of them slathered hungrily.

Just when Sini thought the circumstances couldn’t worsen, Andy mused, “I wonder what else this amulet can duplicate …” He unclipped it, wrapped it around the staff, adjusted its girth, clipped it on then tapped the ruby. Another flash, and then his duplicate was gripping an exact copy of the Staff of Spoils two-handed.

Doppel-Andy flourished his staff, admiring it. “Why thank you, me. I always wanted my own toy.”

Sini slid right next to Gantra perturbedly, leering back and forth between the foxes and the slate-blue. “Did Snow never think to tell us that was possible?!”

“I think he told me,” Gantra admitted, “but he said it was sacrilege; and so I thought, Would committing sacrilege ever be justified? Well, the thinking rumbled my belly, so I went fishing and caught me a catfish; and man he had some whiskers that were like eels, they were so long—but handsome.”

“Nevermind that,” Sini huffed, “use your switch thingy.”

Nodding furiously, Gantra raised a talon to tap the toe-ring. Sini inhaled for a magical ambush … except, Andy pitched a frost-bullet which polished the gemstone with a thick layer of frost. When Gantra’s talon landed, cracks scattered along the ice instead, but he couldn’t touch the ruby, so he didn’t teleport one of the Andys to where he was. Sini couldn’t abort in time: Belched out was a terrible gale of poisons, which utterly buffeted and intoxicated his partner with lust. Gantra swayed with a fit of giggles … then pounced on Sini to assault him with smooches. Sini wailed and squirmed and tried to rid himself of the drunkard; and while they were doing what lovers do best—which is to fight—the Andys jumped them.

Staves swung overhead, came down in two-handed blows. By the time the beatings had ceased, to say that the werefoxes looked like huge, musclebound bullies compared with their prey would be an understatement. Squealing, the rodent-sized dragons fled. The ground would detonate time and again beneath the werefoxes’ soles, the sheer force of each step springing each dragon forward. Comparatively boulder-sized pebbles thudded around them. A haze of debris thickened as the relative kaijus pursued.

Split-screen view: Both dragons careened into the air, and hoped to make it to the passage through which Andy originally came because it’d be too small for either of the werefoxes to tail them through. A long way short of their mark, they were plucked out of the air by their tails; and each of them became no more than a bite-sized snack for the canine duo.

Which left the hallway they had guarded wide open. What could lay in the chamber beyond, except only the most valuable of the artifacts? Now about 25’ tall each, both Andys thundered into the hall. On the other side, a devilish creature of a juggernaut frame punched a fist to an open palm, rumbling in anticipation.

Let them come, Clove thought. Let them feed me their magic and themselves.

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