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Warning: This story contains growth, transformation, muscle growth, hyper muscle growth, monsterification.

Stormy belongs to her player.

Suitable Evolution, by DragonMasterX.

Prologue

Diplomacy had failed and neither side wished to budge. The northern border between Libya and Egypt had become a compromised theater of war for weeks now. Raging gunfire was in charge of a monotonous melody of senseless carnage. The conflict promised to span the ages.

One night, however, the battlefield was deafened by even louder noise than those of firearm discharge. Clouds parted to reveal black skies and for the briefest of instants everything lit up so bright those present became convinced the Sun had arrived to work early by six hours. The sheer incandescence of that light blinded every last soldier in the northern African border.

In an instant, the fighting was over. From the meekest cadet to the most grizzled of veterans, from the small motorcycles to the huge war machines, everything was consumed following the sharpest whistle any kind of ear could perceive. And after the blinding flash ended, nothing remained. Nothing save the odd stubborn piece of debris hanging in the dust of a deep crater approximately a quarter of a mile in diameter.

Ten hours after the sudden ceasefire, a secure and rescue party was dispatched to the crater, hoping to find any survivors to treat for injuries. More than a hundred had been lost that night.

"What are we doing here? Nobody could've survived this." One of the party members had become convinced their mission was futile. As grateful as they all were for the temporary ceasefire, they had to come to terms with the fact the explosion had left no survivors. The young alpaca crouched to give his friend a hand.

"Heave...!" the second party member groaned as he attempted to hold rubble up with his ally; needing the help even for a well-built ox. "Do they even know who fired that bomb or whatever?" the ox grunted, gesturing with his head for the alpaca to drop the heavy piece of thick metal. Nothing had been underneath, so they both let go. "They never tell anything to us grunts..."

"You two, cut the chatter." Their lieutenant raised her voice. She was a pretty tall peacock. Her middle-eastern accent was thicker than the rest when she spoke to their English-speaking allies, commanding other teams of the party to move out before returning her attention to the ox and alpaca pair. "I want to remind you headquarters wants the area swept before sundown. I guess you just volunteered to check further in."

"To the center?" the alpaca complained, "That's really deep! What do you think we'll find down there? Uh, ma'am."

"Isn't it dangerous to get that close?" the ox added.

"The Geiger counter didn't report abnormal radioactive emissions. If the place was compromised we'd already know," the lieutenant shrugged, "Whatever kind of weapon it was that caused this, it's different from what the boys back in the labs are used to."

"We're not really looking for vic- survivors here, are we?" the alpaca looked defeated yet somehow cynical, instead of surprised.

"Get going," their boss simply said, "Look for any clues. Anything out of the ordinary." And resigned to obey their orders, they took their assignment and headed downwards into the crater. Minutes into walking, the ox was first to note how dark the ground they were stepping on when compared to the outer circles.

"It's almost like it's night over here." The tall ox remarked, with the alpaca walking ahead.

"Spooky. Let's hurry down and get out. But damn I didn't expect it to be so deep," the young medic sighed, wanting nothing more than to be under the scorching sun with the rest of the party again. "Place got scorched. It's like we're walking on charcoal."

"Hey, do you see that thing over there?" the ox was pointing dead center at their goal, some twenty feet away from them. The alpaca couldn't agree at first, needing to adjust his eyes to an outline sticking out from that unending darkness at the blast zone's epicenter. It was gradually taking shape.

"Is that... a box?" the alpaca gasped as he caught up to his party member, peeking up at the taller ox as if to fish for confirmation. He immediately turned back to the strange object. In contrast to everything they had so far seen, the cubic item was undamaged. Maybe the height of a traditional coffee table, with similar dimensions. It was too hard to tell at that distance, especially with how the object seemed to share the same charred-black color as the area they were standing on.

"That's like no box I've ever seen. And why_is_ it here? How did it survive the blast?" the ox asked out loud, full of suspicion.

As if pulled in by an invisible magnetic force, the alpaca started towards it. "Hang on, let me just..." but he stopped in his tracks, his companion grabbing him by the arm.

"You crazy? You don't know what that thing is. We should let the lieutenant know what we found. We're grunts."

"Fine. You go tell her. I'm not climbing back up and down again." The ox's nostrils flared, but the request was reasonable enough. He let go of his comrade's arm and nodded, turning his back to start his trip back up.

But before that, the ox turned his head and warned: "Don't do anything stupid, Diallo."

Diallo wasn't interested in doing anything stupid. He didn't chuck a rock at that strange object, or poke it with a stick. He was a grunt, but he wasn't a kid. All he wanted to do was get a good look at it, since he still couldn't tell it apart from the dirt. That's why as soon as the ox was far away enough, he began to pad his way towards the center, taking cautionary steps in the direction of that peculiar-looking piece of geometry.

No farther than two yards away from the center, Diallo started to realize he could hear a strange humming in the air which got ever stronger the closer he got to the item in question. And the louder and more constant the humming grew, the more of a pull Diallo felt towards it. His morbid curiosity was getting the better of him. "Not doing anything stupid," he mumbled to himself, kneeling down and inspecting in greater detail.

It was no box, just as his companion had observed. The cubic shape resembled something like a mineral, its metallic-like sheen setting it apart from the ground. And even with what little sunlight reached into the crater's depths, the glossy surface hungrily devoured it. Angles, corners, features- it was like nothing was there at all, but Diallo and his partner had been able to sense it, to somehow make it out. It had called them there, and Diallo's partner had rejected it, but Diallo had not.

The young alpaca found himself beholding that leftover relic of war. "Why were they keeping this thing here? Why is it making this noise? How come it survived that bombing...? Is it...?" he interrupted his own line of questioning as a gasp escaped his lips. As soon as his fingers hovered above the cube made of shadow, its surface began to ripple. The humming got worse; the loudest it had been, and Diallo found himself on his behind, scooting back and kicking blackened sand as he tried to desperately get away. The solid block of matter had begun to melt before his very eyes, its texture morphing to a substance reminiscent of an ooze.

The black ooze spread over the ground invisibly. There was no way his eyes could tell it was happening, but every fiber in his being was telling Diallo the cube had collapsed into goo and it was spreading. It was moving. It was coming for him. His head was suddenly aflame; the humming had turned into a buzzing that was giving him pain equivalent to a hard migraine. He began to hold his head, stuttering all the while. "Utupu..." he mouthed, fear gripping his soul. "Utupu! UTUPU!"

Diallo's screams resonated throughout the crater, bringing his whole team in only to find the alpaca curled up in a ball and shaken to his very core. At the center of the crater, they could all hardly make out a cubic shape.

The lieutenant ordered Diallo to be extracted, since he was too shaken to be interrogated in place. She had another team radio HQ and bring in specialists to retrieve the strange piece of blackness they had found. Something told her the boys back at the lab would have a field day with it.

Utupu

More than a decade after the North African incident, the peculiar item had finally passed hands through enough research laboratories before finally reaching the American continent. Through an impressive sequence of negotiations and financial athletics, Jubilee Co. now owned the rights to the highly classified substance.

Dr. Malik Arkey had been part of project 'Utupu' for the last five years, having taken over as lead researcher for three of those. One of the stipulations in the transaction of the compound had been the contractual acquisition and reassigning of Dr. Arkey from his station in Saudi Arabia to a Jubilee owned and financed institute located in a mountain city deep within the heartland of the United States.

Dr. Arkey was a particularly tall hare, 6'3" tall not counting his ears. Bespectacled amber eyes of piercing intellect were accompanied by a near-permanent scowl, no doubt a result of his reluctant relocation. He had always seen business and science as inextricably linked; a necessary evil; but the former had never interested him and lately it had only come to obstruct his progress. Although lanky in respect with his build, his height and immutably serious expression more than compensated.

Intimidating wasn't usually a word associated with a typically submissive species, but intimidated was the only word floating in Stormy's head when she first met her employer in a small office of the otherwise big laboratories.

In contrast with Dr. Arkey, Stormy was a notably short wolfess four inches over five foot tall. The difference between them was made even greater with the young wolf girl sitting down. The hare had stopped looking at her after the first, and she suspected last, handshake they had exchanged.

"Is everything in order?" Dr. Arkey's voice rang out a few octaves too deep for comfort, Stormy thought uneasily. Those yellow-on-orange eyes were directly staring at Jubilee's notary; one Mr. Klein. "I would like to begin sometime this month, Mr. Klein."

"We're just about finished, doctor." The fat and short ye well-dressed mouse man gave his thick moustache a wiggle after pursing his lips in deep thought, giving the documents spread on the table a good once over. "We're missing a signature here, here and... there." He enumerated with his pointer. "Do you need me to clarify any of the points in these clauses, Ms. Stormy?"

"Oh uhm, sorry..." the wolfess quietly murmured, scrambling for her pen before directing her eyes down to the Non-Disclosure Agreement part of her employment contract. "This just means I'm forb- that I can't talk about anything we do in this experiment with anybody outside of the company, right?"

"Well put," the notary seemed satisfied, and also completely ignoring the piercing gaze of the scientist looming over both of them. "NDAs are standard fare for all remunerated and voluntary participants for any and all activities involving proprietary compounds or otherwise sensitive information that may jeopardize company interests, Ms. Stormy. After you sign this document, you renounce any right to divulge, copy or otherwise publicize anything you see or hear within these walls."

The legal word diarrhea felt like an onslaught of rapid-fire flurries delivered by a light-weight champion, prompting Stormy to solemnly nod and bring her signature to paper. As long as she remained quiet and cooperative, she could simply forget about the rent due in a few days, and maybe if her landlord didn't push for her to pay an advance of the next month, even afford that new set of beginner dumbbells she had been eyeing back in town.

Nodding with a polite smile, Klein organized his papers and put them away in his portfolio, hastily closing an arm around it before hopping off his chair. "Welcome to the company, Ms. Stormy. And now I'll leave you two to it before the good doctor cuts me down where I stand." He looked even smaller when standing next to Dr. Arkey for some reason. Stormy held a giggle back; she couldn't talk about size difference. Besides, her amusement was quite suddenly cut when she felt the hare's gaze fall upon her.

Almost on pure instinct, a fraction of that being politeness, Stormy sprang up from her chair. She couldn't help but make a basket with her fingers, holding it front of her chest. All of a sudden she felt stark naked before the hare, in an ironic twist, as if she was prey being savored by a hungry predator. "He's probably not a psycho..." the wolfess thought to herself as she forced a smile.

"I hate lawyers," he finally said after what seemed like an eternity. Stormy's cheeks puffed out and she let out a snort. Dr. Arkey's gaze softened for a brief second, followed by his commissures raising and falling; the world's first flash-smirk, the wolf girl thought. "If only they worked as fast as they flapped their mouths." With a shrug, the tall hare headed for the office's exit, holding the door open for Stormy. "Come along, now. We have a lot to cover today."

Perhaps it had been her imagination, but Stormy could have sworn she had heard more than impatience in the hare's voice. He was eager. Perhaps he wasn't going to be such a bad boss after all!

The facility tour was shorter than Stormy had been expecting. Dr. Arkey was as brief with explanations as he was with every single person he greeted and dispatched on their way down the steely halls. In a short span of ten minutes, she had been shown five laboratories (all of them samey-looking and unimpressive for a place this big), the cafeteria, four emergency exits, an expansive yard full of both familiar and unfamiliar machinery for some reason, and a vending machine.

"I skipped breakfast today," Dr. Arkey dryly said with an apple-cinnamon candy bar he had gotten from the machine at the end of the tour. He had offered Stormy to buy her one but she politely declined.

"Everyone looks so busy." Stormy observed, nervously rubbing her arm. She felt out of place in these labs full of important-looking people.

The wrapper was thrown in the bin and Dr. Arkey hooked a finger to gesture Stormy to follow him. "We're behind schedule. All hands are running my experiments on the other participants. That's why I'm giving you, our latest subject, the extended facility tour myself."

"Extended...?" Stormy repeated in her head. She was still trying to catch her breath from practically power walking all over the place. They walked for another minute, turning a corner before Stormy felt herself skid to a halt. An impressive, dull grey metal vault door stood in their way. "Whoa..." she gasped, unable to hide her surprise at the sheer size of that corridor-spanning seal.

"Over here, Stormy. You don't mind familiarity, do you?" Dr. Arkey didn't wait for confirmation, already gesturing for Stormy to get closer; she didn't mind familiarity. In front of him was a panel with a tactile screen. The panel revealed to be a display as the doctor punched in some codes faster her eyes could keep up. "Direct feed to the containment unit for our precious material. Gorgeous, isn't it?"

What Stormy saw scarcely made sense to her. Spinning on what seemed to be a platter surrounded by a cage of light beams was a cube. It was black, blacker than anything she had ever seen before. After staring at it for long enough, her eyes were stuck attempting to find any markings or flaws in the presented object; as if persisting in finding something more than a piece of obsidian geometry. "That is a..." she paused, shyly tearing her eyes from the cubic shape up to the scientist. Stormy realized the futility of attempting to sound learned with a guy like this, "What is that, doc?"

"Call me Mal," the doctor proceeded, "This is Utupu, named by its discoverer. I assure you, not named after its official properties. But I can certainly agree about its 'pull'."

"Utupu?" Stormy's left ear folded. She had never heard the word. Mal's accent seemed to have changed when uttering it, and Stormy had failed to emulate it.

"It's the word for 'Void' in Swahili," Mal informed, tilting his glasses and continuing his explanation. "What we have here, Stormy, is a new element. Incredibly dense, highly conductive, resistant to all sources of physical trauma and yet... amazingly malleable."

"Malleable? Like molding clay?" Stormy asked incredulously.

All of a sudden, Mal started sounding proud. "It took us exhausting years of continuous testing, much of it on the shoulders of my predecessors, to find that its solid shape is merely transitory. At first, it was maddening to think of the Utupu as anything but a strange mineral chunk. When exposed to sufficient shock, the façade is revealed and it is possible to extract tiny samples. You see... we have managed to weave and integrate Utupu into special apparel capable of imparting its qualities into it. An invention of mine."

"You turned that thing into... clothes?" Stormy's eyes blinked fast in disbelief. "After hitting it enough times to turn it into goo? That's a bit hard to understand, Mal."

"That 'goo', however, is a very precious substance. Just a pint of Utupu was all we needed to complete the prototype 'U-Suit'."

"What is a U-Suit?" Stormy inquired, folding her arms and cocking her head to the side. "Sounds like something Apple would sell."

Mal scoffed, waving dismissively. "This is truly revolutionary, Stormy. I have told you about the Utupu's many properties, but it also has one very specific interaction not found in nature as we know it. Are you familiar with Einstein's theory of special relativity?"

"Relativity... Einstein..." Stormy thought hard, channeling the younger her sitting half-interested at physics class. Einstein. E=m... E=m2c? E2m... "Uh," she began to speak, "Energy..."

"Kinetic energy," the doctor corrected, "Equals a body's mass times the speed of light squared."

"That's what the C stood for? Damn..." Stormy cursed her repressed high-school memories in her mind.

"I want to draw your attention to the energy and mass parts, Stormy," Mal sounded more serious than ever. "We're taught one is simply a different side of the other. Like a coin endlessly flipping in the air. Now, what do you suppose would happen if you could freely control when and how the coin spins?"

Stormy's gaze fell to the ground. She was trying to think about the question in her head. She tried picturing a coin flipping endlessly in the air, and then imagined a pair of fingers making it stop before gently flipping it around to admire each side. "You would uh... know what it- what the side is whenever you want?"

"And that's what Utupu does. It absorbs kinetic energy and then repurposes that energy... into additional mass," Mal opened his hands, "And what we've so far learned is that this additional mass is reabsorbed into the Utupu itself, densely packed and folded unto itself. If caught with the precise timing before the folding process begins however, it can be extracted and it, separated from its source, retains its malleability."

"Sounds like crazy putty to me, doc." Stormy wanted to reply, already so far gone from all these sciencey explanations she thought her brain was going to explode. However, all she did was nod whenever Mal looked at her confirmation. He tried explaining to her how he had incorporated the substance into neoprene fabric, but even using more analogies and layman terms, Stormy was hardly intellectually equipped to properly understand. All she got from it was that they were hitting that cube hard and turned the resulting ooze into part of a weird outfit called a U-Suit. She wondered if she would have to put it on.

Her doubts were answered when Mal finally shut the display off and sighed. "You'll have to forgive my undue exuberance, Stormy. Passions are hard to ignore. And yet I did say we were pressed for time, did I not? I would have you watch a demonstration before your work can begin. Follow me to the yard."

"The yard...?" Stormy had been thinking about that out-of-place location. She saw Mal nodding and grabbing his phone, quickly texting on it before he gestured at her to follow him. She had been expecting to work at a laboratory as an assistant, but it looked like she was already going for a field-trip!

Another three minute walk full of twists and turns later, Mal and Stormy came out into the big yard. Without the tall ceiling above them, the expansive area stretching before Stormy reminded her of a schoolyard. Except instead of playground for the little ones, the place was littered with heavy-duty machinery all over.

To her right, Stormy could see a junkyard lineup including a car compactor, a hydraulic press and other equipment she wasn't familiarized with. There were even two old cars neatly parked next to each other. She wondered if the institute doubled as a recycling center for a moment; especially when she glanced to the left and noticed in the far off corner there was a pit where the air above it was distorted by heat. She could smell something burning in the air. "Are they also smelting stuff in here...?" she asked herself, curiously peering at the various scientists scattered about the yard taking care of the machinery or otherwise running maintenance tasks on them. One of the scientists seemed to be fixing a steamroller while another looked down upon them from a high tower with a large mechanical arm and winch combo. For a moment, it seemed like they had hit upon some sort of playground for adults.

"I don't understand," Stormy mumbled, turning to look at her new boss. "I thought we were going to do suit stuff...?" she was in the middle of her question when the backlights at the far end of the yard lit up, revealing a row of several contiguous rooms with different colorings. She took note of a bright yellow railing coming and going through the top of those rooms, circling the yard and ascending into the ceiling where they seemed to disappear into tall vents.

Mal was then approached by one of his aides, a stout elephant even taller than the hare himself. "We have U-Suit-04 ready for demonstration, Dr. Arkey," he said while holding his tablet computer up. After a quick tap, the yellow metal rail above brought it down on a hook.

Stormy had to squint her eyes to see it properly at first, but as the railing descended and Mal urged her to walk closer to the row of rooms, she could make out all of its details. The U-Suit was a blue and black, snug-looking wetsuit similar to the ones she had seen surfers in. A blue 'U04' tag was emblazoned on its right shoulder. Its design was bland, with black being the main color and navy-blue streaks tracing along the chest all the way down to the hips, looking like it would accentuate any wearer's figure. It was pretty inconspicuous for such a peculiar sounding piece of sciencey apparel. Before she could ask about it though, the elephant was already tapping away on his tablet.

The hook attached to the railing began to extend, gently lowering the suit which was hung between Stormy and Mal. "Sleek, isn't it? It's quite alright to touch it. You'd best get used to it."

Nodding quickly, Stormy reached out for the suit, her finger hesitating for a fraction of a second before her digits landed on the fabric. She felt nothing out of the ordinary with the fabric. The texture was indifferent to anything she had felt before in her life. Was this really made with that crazy substance she had seen? "It feels cool to the touch..."

"That's normal," Mal replied before unhooking the suit and carrying it with him towards one of the machines on the right side. "Have you seen a hydraulic press at work before?"

"Only in videos..." Stormy admitted, about to ask why that was relevant before she saw Mal folding the suit and placing it between bed and press. Her eyes widened and she began to approach to have a closer look. Mal had activated the hydraulic press, which hummed to life. The compressor was soon descending onto the bundled up clothes. "Thu-that's just gonna turn it into paste, isn't it?"

Mal smiled to Stormy's question, not even looking at her. "Observe."

For some reason or another, people really liked things getting smooshed 'til they were goo. The thrill of answering: Will the mechanical unstoppable force be met with its proverbial immovable object? There were videos out there showing when an object was far too strong or dense to be crushed, and the frame itself ends up being damaged or outright destroyed instead. However, neither side seemed to budge in this case. The noise of pumping cylinders and clicking actuators grew louder as greater and greater pressure was utilized to no avail. Stormy wondered if the fabric was far too thin to actually get properly crushed. Before any result could be achieved however, Mal terminated the process and the press started receding.

The U-suit was still lying on the bed of the hydraulic press, bundled up in the exact same position as Mal had set it. Not even its sleeves were out of place. "That's impressive," Stormy politely remarked, even though she hadn't seen anything particularly impressive. Her deception was transparent.

"We're just getting started. Submit the U-suit to stress tests two through four," Mal ordered as he unfolded the suit and hooked it back up to the rail extender. Silent obedience came from his aide.

The statuesque elephant made the suit's hook travel the railing into the left-most of those rooms from earlier; the first one, dull gray. Each of those separated stages counted with a large glass pane allowing one to look into them from outside. When she was standing close enough, Stormy took note of multiple small windows covered in the same kind of glass, offering only small holes at the bottom of each.

The suit was lowered in the center of that empty stage, but nobody came to get it. Instead, three more scientists approached the smaller windows. They were dressed in lab coats just as Mal and his aide, except they were also wearing black vests which Stormy eventually recognized as Kevlar. Instinct made the wolfess take a couple of steps backwards as each plated scientist holstered an M-16 semi-automatic rifle through the hole under each window.

"Multi-layer polycarbonate glass, Stormy. Highly resistant, almost impervious to this caliber." Mal spoke matter-of-factly, but didn't insist on her standing any closer than she already was.

"Are they really going to shoot a surfer suit?" Stormy couldn't believe what she was witnessing. The hydraulic press was novel but definitely something she had been expecting to see at a laboratory running secret experiments. Guns were certainly not something she had been expecting to come across. She didn't know if those were even real rifles, but they sure looked real and dangerous. Her tail was twitching erratically between her legs.

"Shooters in position, sir," Mal's aide spoke with that surprisingly soothing tone of his. Stormy's mind had decided to fixate on that contrasting detail in order to distract herself from the aberrant demonstration she was witnessing.

"Begin."

Flashes of white coming from the weapon muzzles made Stormy recoil. The sound was nowhere as loud as she had been expecting it to be, probably a result of how the shooting gallery had been set, but still her ears flattened against her skull and she put her hands to her head.

Plink. Clink. Bullets were pooling at the U-suit's shadow as if somebody had dropped their ball of marbles on the floor. The shootout concluded thirty seconds later and not a single hole had been left in that piece of apparel. Stormy's disbelieving eyes could hardly remain in their sockets. Save for one detail, the suit looked absolutely indifferent about the thousands of lead dollars it had just been pelted with. The only thing that had changed in the suit was its blue color having turned a little lighter in her eyes, but Stormy could easily attribute that to how her body was trembling from the end of her toes to the very tip of her ears.

"Moving on to test number 3, doctor..." the aide had just finished recording analytic data in his palm device. A single finger tap sent the suit into the contiguous, yellow room.

Stormy was still shaking. It was only a stupid suit; why was she so bothered? "What if it had been me getting shot at?" she thought, immediately being assaulted by the mental image. "Suits are meant to be worn. Will they give me a helmet? That doesn't even come with gloves, it doesn't look like. I'm getting paid to get shot wearing not Kevlar, but neoprene? This is nuts... Is it too late to back out?" she began to consider turning around, dashing out and taking the 11.5 an hour plus tip part-time down at the gas station. "Heck, don't tip me. Anything to dodge a bullet. Pun intended."

"Stormy."

"Ah!" the wolfess' ears shot up and her eyes regained focus. In the time she had been fantasizing with leaving this stupid idea of hers behind along with every other stupid idea she'd ever had, Mal had stepped back and was now looming over her again. His eyes like that of a hawk instead of the hare he was. "Yuh-yes, Muh-Mal?"

"You're missing the demonstration. And you look paler than when you first entered. Glass of water?" the doctor offered, turning around to gesture for one of his assistants.

"Water would be nice," Stormy said aloud, then added a sarcastic and very quiet thought to herself: "Please don't make me do the underwater Houdini for this. Oh God it IS a bulletproof wetsuit, after all."

Holding a paper cup with much needed cold water, Stormy was escorted back to the stage front to watch the next demonstration in line. She had been underestimating just how dehydrated she was, because a gulp of thirst-sweetened cool water seemed to be exactly what she had been needing to perk up. Her breathing became regular and she made the decision to stick it out some more. Where else was she going to get these unreasonable thrills, after all? It's not like they could hold her in against her will if she decided to quit after the demonstration. "There wasn't any fine print. Not that I noticed. Would I have noticed any suspicious fine print, though? Aw crud..."

The center of the yellow room was just as empty as the shooting gallery, but she soon saw one of the panels at the upper right corners sliding away. A mechanical arm carrying what looked like a tesla coil from one of those old Frankenstein movies popped out followed by three more, one per ceiling corner. The arms extended each coil and angled their tips to surround the U-suit in a diagonal-cross pattern.

"Begin." Mal authorized. The yellow room suddenly lit up as a sustained electrical beep went on a crescendo before the crackling started. Each coil jolted electrical currents capable of frying a person in seconds, running it through the U-suit which might as well have been uninterested at the suggestion of electrocution.

"It's like it's not there," Stormy mouthed off, catching Mal's attention. "But it is being shocked, isn't it?"

"Neoprene is traditionally an insulator," her boss explained, "However, our goal isn't to damage it per se, Stormy. Do not get the wrong idea. Pressure, kinetic force from speeding projectiles, voltaic currents..." the hare opened his arms demonstratively as the experiment concluded with, again, a much unbothered U-suit. "We are not seeking to destroy the fruit of my labor. We are charging the Utupu the material is bonded with."

"The Utupu..." Stormy repeated, her eyes looking past Mal and at the bluer suit. No, her optics weren't lying to her. The blue of the U-suit was brighter now, approaching light-blue from its starting navy-blue color.

"Hmph," Mal gave a light twist of his wrist and his aide promptly followed.

With the tesla coils receding into their panels, the yellow room went dark again and the rail brought the U-suit into the third and final room of the wacky experimental room series. A red room that seemed to be padded and almost claustrophobic in relation to the previous two.

This time, Stormy couldn't take her eyes off the action. As the suit descended into the center of the stage, as usual, the back wall slid off like a pair of automatic doors at any 7-11. However, instead of cheap junk food and overpriced sponges haphazardly stacked in unrelated shelves, the wolfess saw a dark maw very much lighting up like the open jaws of Hell.

Stormy couldn't help flinching. "A giant oven?!"

"Repurposed from an industrial incinerator. I can't stress the importance of you ridding yourself of any impulse to want to see how quick you can roast marshmallows in there," Mal slid in, getting a nervous smile and forced chuckle from Stormy. "How hot do you think it is in there, Stormy?"

"Uhh..." Stormy looked at the raging inferno before her. She was still trying to figure out how it was that she could only slightly feel the heat coming from the red room. "Higher than... a thousand, maybe?"

"Ah, you Americans use Fahrenheit, don't you?" Mal smiled and closed his eyes as if he was running the conversion in his head. "You're not wrong. But it's double that."

Fwoosh. Plumes of flames ejected from the incinerator like the devil's breath. Stormy couldn't believe not one of these people watching the demonstration were so much as twitching their eyes. "Just how many times have they seen this already?" she puffed her cheeks a bit, starting to feel disappointed with herself for her reactions. "I don't think I could get bored of looking at this. It's like being at an extreme science fair..." she rubbed her arm and started to smile, strangely feeling comfortable with the spectacle. She turned away from the action to look up at the immutable hare. "That Utupu thing sure is something, Mal."

"And it's charged now, I would say," the doctor responded, using another hand gesture to stop the experiment. The roars of the incinerator calmed down and its twin gates finally closed the entrance to Hades, leaving, once more, an undisturbed and certainly uncharred U-suit to be transported back out.

Stormy was surprised when Mal asked her to touch the suit when it had just come out of the oven. She had been expecting the entire thing to be up in dying flames, but no high temperatures other than the residues coming from the direction of the red room could be perceived. To her shock, the neoprene felt cool to the touch. Was her mind playing tricks on her? Was there something in the water? Had that suit even been through all those ludicrous tests just now? The light blue streaks made the U-suit look pretty and unsettling at the same time. She could hear an almost imperceptible hum emanating from it.

"It's time, Stormy." Mal's deep voice, once again, brought her back from all distractions. She wondered if he had ever been a radio host before in his life. "Please take your U-suit into the chamber room over there," he pointed to the far end corner of the yard. Two small concrete rooms with simple curtains in front of their insides invited a contrast like clothes store changing rooms inside of a state prison. "I trust it'll be a perfect fit."

"They already crushed, shot, electrocuted and burnt it..." Stormy held the 'charged' wetsuit in front of her as if she was inspecting a wedding gown. "If there's any soul here with any reason to object to the joining of these two..." She frowned, finding it hard to forgive her brain for that one.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Stormy was sick of living paycheck to paycheck. She took the rightmost changing room, closed the curtain behind her and stripped out of her clothes.

"Don't forget," the elephant's soft voice rung from outside of the changing room. "Remove all of your clothes and don't bring anything on your person. The safety box in that room can be used to put all your effects away."

"Right..." Stormy sighed a little before unclasping and sliding her bra directly into that box. The full-body mirror inside the changing room was returning the image of a slightly padded, but otherwise plain-looking, short wolfess. "Of course it had to be a wetsuit. It's gonna be snug, clinging to everything. Just suck in your gut..." she told herself critically, even though her middle wasn't that out of shape. 110lbs. for her height wasn't bad. Optimizing diets on a tight budget was a non-starter, but that would change soon, she told herself.

After stashing clothes, underwear, wallet, keys and smartphone away, Stormy took a deep breath and started slipping into the U-suit. She was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to wear, sliding her limbs through its sleeves without meeting resistance. As she had been expecting, the wetsuit conformed to her build without sacrificing mobility or breathability. Opening and closing her fists, the wolf girl took note of how indifferent her exposed hands and feet felt when compared to her dressed limbs.

She spun around and checked herself out. Even wiggling her fluffy tail out of the hole in the back of the suit had been remarkably easy. It was almost like the suit had been tailor-made just for her! "Don't see a roll, or exposed flanks. It makes my butt look cute too, I guess..." Stormy smiled and turned around, resting her hands at her hips with a heightened level of confidence. "It'll be fine," she told herself, trying to psych herself. "Just do whatever they tell you, cash in that big fat check and then you can just..." her train of thought took an unexpected stop. "Just..." the word echoed and ebbed like a receding tide. In its place, a distracting, loudening humming seemed to push her thoughts just outside of her reach. "Go buhhhh..."

"Stormy?" the voice pierced through the sudden fog. Stormy stumbled a little, catching herself just in time and covered half of her face with a hand. "Please step out if you're ready. We must monitor your progress."

"Puhroguress...?" Stormy slurred, pushing herself away from the mirror to regain steady footing. Her heels found purchase followed by the tip of her toes. "What progress?" she felt at a loss. Had she really been out of it? Her brain was suddenly catching up to everything she had been doing until that point of time.

Right, the experiment. She had to show something to her boss, Mr. Mal. Dr. Arkey. MD Malarkey. Oh, she had to keep that one to herself, for sure. More importantly, she was going to go to bed early. She was feeling light-headed. "Coming..." Thus, in the interest of getting over with all of this, she opened the curtains with a strong pull.

However, she must have been too excited to get it all over with, because when she next realized what was going on, she was the one keeping the curtain above the ground instead of its hole-shaped hangers. Of course, the first instinct of her sobering mind was to blame cheap plastic hangers, but it was hard to go with that deflection of responsibility when a simple glance up showed the hanger tube for the curtain had snapped in two.

Stormy had very little time to say anything or ask any questions when she was suddenly surrounded by no less than five scientists, one of them Mal's aide. Personal space became less than a suggestion as those looming men, not one of them shorter than six feet tall, looked and 'looked'. She saw measuring tapes being stretched, her cooperation unnecessary as they held her arms and legs (one at a time) out in order to take as much detailed information about her as they could.

Some of them asked her questions. "Does it feel hot? Does it feel cold? Do you feel lighter? Do you feel heavier?" No. No. No. No. She was feeling perfectly fine now. Whatever that episode earlier had been, Stormy was way more concerned with how everybody seemed nonplussed with the curtain she had ripped off its tube. It had been summarily taken off her hands and disposed of outside of her view during the invasive measuring.

Zero to sixty. What was going on all of a sudden? "Is this the power of this suit? Going from tourist to guinea pig in seconds after putting it on?" she huffed impatiently, wanting to at least a briefing! At least they weren't touching anywhere inappropriate, not that she had much to grab onto where it mattered, in her opinion. That didn't mean it wasn't making her feel uncomfortable. "No, I don't need any more water, thank you." She reiterated to the elephant who was constantly punching data into his tablet. Stormy wasn't thirsty. In fact, she was feeling full even though moments earlier she could've asked Mal if he still had some candy left. "And I don't feel hungry either," she added even though no one had asked her. "And I guess I do feel a little heavy," she finally admitted, blushing a little, "I feel a little tingly too..."

When she was asked to curl her right arm again, Stormy sighed. "You just measured that arm. It's not like you're gonna find anything..." Her sentence derailed into silence with Stormy pursing her lips and closing her slacking jaw. The light blue and black around her biceps were creating an outline that had not been there until now; that should not have been there.

The tingling grew in intensity. Surprise gave way to shock and Stormy was in need of confirmation all of a sudden. She turned to look at the opposite side, ignoring the scientist and the tape circling her other biceps and triceps. There was no question there was bulging muscle underneath both the tape and the neoprene.

"Space, please, gentlemen." Mal's voice finally cleared that quintet away from the confused Stormy. "Allow the lady some room to... stretch."

The wolfess wanted to swear to herself she hadn't heard any condescending tone from the usage of the word 'lady' by Mal, but she had something else to focus on that demanded her attention. She flexed her arms up and down, pumping them in alternating motions and then together. Her head ping-ponged from left to right, caught in a loop of inspecting those tiny mountains in her arms.

And then the tingling spread. Stormy tried to hold back a moan of pleasure when she felt the unfamiliar sensation disseminate from her core, callously washing over her loins on its way to her legs and feet. "I can feel it... I'm warm! What's going on? This feels..." she was panicked at first, but her popping biceps, the energy exploding inside of her and massaging ever muscle in her body, and the inexorability of it all... it was thrilling. "Good!" was the adjective she verbally utilized, however.

Indeed, bodily bulging seemed to have started at her arms, but it was quickly spreading to the rest of her. Her posture became a little straighter following a minute expansion of her shoulders, distancing them by half an inch on each side from her neck. Until then, she had been able to feel her swelling deltoids pushing out against her furry skin. Dorsal muscles gained similar definition, building a strong back. Her buttocks lifted with the ratio of muscle and fat readjusting in favor of a round, perky shape. Hamstrings and shins that until then were hidden were making their debut on Stormy's strengthening legs while inflating quads poured more mass for juicy thighs.

"My body's bulking up!" Stormy could certainly not stop herself from vociferating, excitement dripping from every word. No, it wasn't mere excitement. It was a newly developing hunger. She, her body, her mind; all of her being was becoming attached to this sensation. Every nerve was crying out, flaring out as she watched her chest rise and push out with newly acquired pectoral bulk. Her biceps grew a little more and she noticed them getting caught at the elbow pit when she inadvertently flexed her arm trying to feel her stomach.

That little flab had gone. It was completely gone. No, it was being replaced. Stormy could feel it. It felt like the fat in her body had been deleted in favor of increasing muscular mass. And she loved it. She loved every part of her body bulging out, and she certainly loved it when the fingers at her now flat tummy started meeting resistance with swelling abdominal mass completing six-packs she hadn't even crunched for.

"Ahh... ahhh..." Stormy found herself panting, her cheeks flushed with color. The heat of the moment had passed, but she was still carrying all that pent up bliss in her system. She felt so different now! She had biceps, she had abs, and her legs! Oh God, her legs. She felt like she could kick a football out of a stadium without a running start. "Mirror... mirror!" she lifted her head and looked over the excited scientists surrounding her. "I need a mirror!" The chamber she had changed out of her clothes had that full-body mirror.

"Waugh...!" the jaguar directly in front of Stormy was shoved out of the way. Her steps felt simultaneously heftier and lighter than before, as if she was stomping with purpose yet with none of the burden.

Finally, standing eye to eye with herself, Stormy started fanning herself while wearing the biggest grin she naturally could produce. She estimated she had put on about 40lbs. of pure muscle in the span of a scant few minutes. "I didn't just hallucinate that, did I?" she curled an arm, flexing her biceps again. And again. And again. They weren't gigantic, but they were there. Every time she flexed, the fabric of her suit perfectly stretched, never remaining too tense. "Why was I ever worried about this suit showing everything? I love how I look!" she cried out happily, turning around and cocking her hips from one side to another. Her back was so muscular; she had steely gluts! Her legs looked powerful yet without having lost their femininity.

Stormy had become so lost admiring the new her she had completely forgotten the tingling sensation she had come to love seemed to have left her. When she was done riding the narcissistic high, it came to a head that she wasn't feeling any warmer. Part of her was disappointed, but one glance back at that muscular, athletic wolfess in the changing room with her made her forget about exploring what she did not understand. She understood she looked like a total badass. "I could be the star of any action movie now! Eat your heart out, Black Widow."

"Ahem..." that deep clearing-of-the-throat made Stormy turn towards Mal, her confident smirk diminished slightly by the fact he was still, very much in fact, towering over her. "You appear pleased, Stormy. The U-Suit seems to have interfaced with you properly from what I can see."

"Thu-the U-Suit..." she repeated, suddenly at a loss for words, "Right!" she jumped in place, "Right, I put on the suit and then I felt this energy burst inside of me... and then I got big and strong! Look at this!" she stood there flexing her arms in a double-biceps pose, "And all of this. It's all me!"

"It's all thanks to the Utupu," the hare adjusted his glasses by tilting them, "It has changed all the kinetic energy it absorbed and, through my technology, has added to your mass."

"This is awesome!" Stormy jumped up again, "I'm still the same 5'4" runt I've always been but now I don't feel like a weakling at all. I bet I could wrestle a..."

"Jaguar? You certainly threw the one that's my assistant quite far," Mal smiled, side-stepping with his arms at his back. With a tilt of his head, he easily got Stormy to look at the feline scientist still dizzily getting back up to his feet with the help of another of his partners. "Perhaps you think you're a bit heavier than before. But trust me," he leaned in with a small grin, "You've more than doubled your weight, so going forwards, I advise caution unless I demand otherwise."

"More than twice my...?!" Stormy took a good look at herself. Her butt did look a little bigger, but she couldn't believe she was over 220lbs., not at her petite proportions! The admonishment didn't slip her mind, though. "Ahh... uhm..." Stormy bit her lip, killing the loudness of her exuberance with the recent flashback of her brutish display of force. The muscled wolfess then shyly raised an arm, waving with a sheepish grin at the other scientists. "Sorry about that, guys."

"No need to apologize," Mal shook his head, "Increased physical strength is to be expected when bonding with the U-suit. In fact, had you failed to give us any reaction, you would be on your way home by now. We are all very much pleased with this result, Stormy."

"Um... so am I!" the wolfess almost cried out, finding it hard to keep the rampant energy swirling within her in check. "I'm loving every second of this, Mal. Muh-maybe the extra weight is making me feel uneasy. I can't say I feel it... butWhat do we do now? Ahh... need to get more measurements? I can hold still!" she made a T pose, sticking her chest out while holding her breath in. In her mind, Stormy was pulling off the perfect anatomic pose.

While the scientists approached their subject, some begrudgingly, some extremely excited to get those measurements, Mal gave off an almost playful scoff followed by a little laugh. "Good. When you're done, follow me to where the cars are, will you?"

"Are we going for a drive?" Stormy asked with a puzzled look. "Dressed like this...?"

Mal let out a sincere laugh. "Nonsense, dear. You are here to experiment. And now that you've been conditioned for it... it's time for us... to experiment."

Gyms could be unpleasant for those with shaky body images. Stormy had learned to cope with the anxiety of having unwanted attention towards herself, which was why she had little issue getting over the scientist swarm getting so close and personal with her rocking new body. However, that didn't mean she had mentally prepared for Mal's exigence during her first trial.

He had eloquently described to her that they were to test her new strength in an attempt to measure compatibility and stability. To that end, he had brought Stormy to the area next to the two cars where a makeshift work-out station had been set up. She counted two weight racks fully stocked with increasingly more intimidating, heavier plate discs, a bench for sitting down and one for pressing. She was asked to sit down on the latter.

"Are you familiar with all this equipment, Stormy?" Mal asked, standing next to the weight rack closest to her.

Stormy's tail idly wagged behind her, Mal's question flying past her wiggling ears. Walking felt better than ever, but something as simple as depositing her toned rump on a metal bench seemed to excite her too. Giddiness had gripped her with as much intensity as she was gripping the edge of the bench. Her eyes were glued to the weight racks with an eagerness she hadn't felt in years, and they only tore themselves from the heaviest of discs to look down at her biceps, swollen from tension, and down at her fingers. Stormy's digits were curled over the edge, applying increasing pressure as she entertained the fantasy of how strong she really was now. "These muscles aren't just for show, are they?" she finally asked, her voice cracking at the very end, as if she was suddenly fighting a materializing unease.

"That's what we're here to prove or disprove." Mal replied with a vague gesture of his right hand, his left stuck in his lab pocket. "You don't seem confused by all of this, so I assume you've been to a gym before. Just in case you aren't familiar with this exercise, though..."

"You want me to bench-press?" Stormy intercepted, eagerly lying down on the bench, her position exposing that enviable set of abs at her midriff as well as her plump, muscular thighs. Her chest swelled a little and later fell as she let out a deep breath, cautiously bringing her hands up to grasp the unloaded barbell above her. "I've done it before!"

"In that case, I want you to warm up with three sets of twelve using that barbell," Mal instructed. Stormy acceded with a quiet nod and suddenly her eyes were focused on her task. She hadn't even started lifting and her heart was already racing. She could almost taste the adrenaline surging through her. It was almost like the wolfess' excitement had gone out of bounds. For the first time in her life she looked absolutely stunning, Olympian even! She couldn't make a fool out of herself and fail this test.

With a steely grip, Stormy pushed the barbell off its holder and was immediately caught off-guard by how impressively light its metallic weight was. "Alright, Hercules, this isn't even loaded. Don't get cocky now..." she culled her swelling ego, even though the simple idea that the barbell could barely apply pressure to her hands was making her heart go aflutter. Stormy thought she could hold that pose with the barbell suspended above her perpendicularly raised arms for minutes, hours if need be! But that wasn't the point of the exercise, so she started lowering it.

Just as she had been expecting, the muscles in her arms didn't quiver. That tug of the skin at the joints between her arms and shoulders which happened after the barbell's descent just wasn't there. No, it was more than that: She couldn't feel the barbell; she couldn't feel it when she pushed it back up. It was almost as if it wasn't there. "It's so light... less than featherweight!" she couldn't believe she was making that mental comparison. It was unloaded but the thick metal rod was still supposed to be hefty!

"Go on," Mal cut her self-admiration short, urging her to continue. And she did, without breaking form, completing all three sets, quite literally, without even breaking a sweat. "Good. Let's kick this up a notch now, shall we?"

"Whoa..." Stormy did not expect Mal's aide and the jaguar to bring the plates. Her eyes tracked the number 100 engraved on each plate, noting that only the jaguar seemed to be winded as he equipped the barbell with the extra weight. "From no weight to 200lbs?" the wolfess protested. Part of her called her silly to worry, but the more rational side of her mind reminded her she had been eyeing a set of 20 pound dumbbells earlier that week. She was a complete amateur, barely learning the ins and out of body-building.

"These are stress tests, Stormy," Mal reminded her with a kind although patronizing smile. "If we don't push your limits from the get go, if we introduce doubt instead of evidence... we will get nowhere. Now, in the interest of evidence, I want you to complete one full press with this level of weight."

"Just one...?" Stormy was hesitant at first. A tall order, even for someone with toned musculature like hers. The empty barbell had been a joke, but this? From zero to sixty. Again. But that part of her, the one which laughed at the idea of this 'challenge', was telling her to show them. She wasn't an amateur right now. She was an Olympian. She was an amazon. Unstoppable. Her confidence was surging. "I can do it," she finally said.

"Begin."

Even with her newfound confidence, Stormy approached the barbell with respect this time. Her fingers hooked around the shaft, pressing down and listening to the grinding against the holder. Ears perked to the minute shaking of the 100lbs. plates clicking against the butterfly fasteners. She could taste the excitement at the tip of her tongue. She was so tense her bulk was bulging preemptively, making those toned muscles stand out further with no provocation.

Taking down notes, the group of scientists observed Stormy as she pushed the barbell off its holder again. One of them noticed her nostrils flaring as she drew in some air. She was exercising caution even though 200 pounds were suspended in the air by the strength of her arms alone.

"This is..." the muscular wolfess stopped to think as she held the position again for a few seconds. Unlike the unloaded version, she didn't think she would be able to hold it there forever; however, she was impressed with her augmented strength. "This is amazing!" she cried out loud all of a sudden, startling the jaguar who flinched away from the group. She heard a few snickers and an exacerbated muttering before the feline reincorporated himself. Stormy made a mental note to directly apologize to that guy she had shoved earlier sometime later.

"Complete the exercise, Stormy." Deep-voiced Mal insisted. Stormy gulped and returned her focus to the task quite literally at hand.

"This is it..." she told herself, carefully lowering the heavy barbell to her chest. This time, Stormy could feel her muscles working as she sought a stable descent. Her pectorals were starting to burn in order to pump out the necessary strength. She could feel the mass of her swelling biceps caressing her elbow pits as her arms flexed. Her mouth opened in order to breathe out. Stormy had done it. The barbell was mere inches from touching her bust and she was still holding the barbell up without losing her grip. But that was only half the battle; the true fight against gravity was about to start.

Blood traveled vessels in record time, fueling the muscles in Stormy's arms. Her limbs and chest, for the first time, were starting to feel a burn; a pleasant warmth she remembered from the first time she had successfully completed a bench press. Only this time she had gone not for a hundred, but two freaking hundred pounds. If this was the old her, the bones in her arms would have snapped following with a crushed neck. Even though she was much stronger than before though, the sheer weight of the barbell was starting to make her breathe thinly.

The barbell never shook, however. Stormy found she had the strength, and that she only needed to learn to control it. She was still that little wolfess, her figure optimized, but the suit was also giving her strength far beyond what her petite but toned frame suggested. "Nnnnh...!" she began to grunt for the first time, but she didn't give up. Her grip didn't relent. She pushed back against gravity, against the steel, visualizing the same suspended barbell feet away from her head. And it started to move away.

The elephant's tablet was clicking fast. Murmuring increased, but didn't distract Stormy. She pushed that barbell with all she had, eventually making it reach as much height as she possibly could. And then she gradually, safely returned the barbell to its holder with a gasp.

Mal nodded with a finger covering his lips from the side. He noted how Stormy was panting and gave a second nod, snapping his fingers. The jaguar stumbled a little and followed the doctor's aide in retrieving another couple of plates, these ones half the previous one's weight.

"Muh-more?" Stormy couldn't get rid of her smile. She could still feel the exertion the one bench pressing had demanded from her, yet her excitement didn't diminish. Her mind was trying to convince her that this was hubris. 200lbs. had been hubris, 300lbs. would kill her. Stop. Tell them it's enough. Tell them you'll do more reps with the previous weight. You're not Superwolf.

But Stormy didn't object. In fact, her hands never left the barbell shaft. She was curious. What had this suit done to her? She had never once felt this energized before. She didn't feel tired, her body felt invigorated even though her mind was still convinced she was this frail little pup. It was almost like her brain hadn't caught up to the transformation she had gone through. She wanted to know what her limits were.

"Increased intensity level." The hare's glasses glinted under the fluorescent lights from high above. "Begin," he spoke like an automaton, and Stormy obeyed.

Caution to the wind, her muscles tensed again and she began pushing. This time, she went at it harder, with the intention to have those 300lbs. cowering in fear. Her form sagged on the right side, but she quickly compensated, holding all that weight up while calming down with another deep breath. She wondered if perhaps the scientists hadn't seen that brief lapse in...

"Maintain form." Mal criticized, although way less harsh than Stormy had expected. She swallowed saliva and concentrated in completing the exercise. Her muscles were cooperating, but her brain continued to doubt.

"Get over it, Stormy." She criticized herself. "Squishy wolf is gone."

The barbell reached that inch before her chest again, and then began to raise.

"Superwolf is here." Another pant left her mouth as she completed the rep.

"More weight." Mal demanded, but this time Stormy didn't even flinch. The assistants got to work.

400lbs. 500lbs. 600. She completed every rep with gusto, panting harder each time, yet enjoying herself more and more. Fangs clenched, her toned musculature on permanent display, marked against the neoprene. Her eyes were ablaze with purpose.

Before she knew it, Stormy was working 650 pounds with a strained barbell. Maintaining form had become more taxing, but that only seemed to excite her that much more. By the end of that rep, she excused herself on not making a good press and went ahead with another one. Then another one. Then another, and another...

Mal humored her until the fifteenth, when he finally ordered her to set the barbell down and to let go of it.

"Ahh... huuuh..." the wolfess was panting, her arms falling limp besides her. She let out an amused laugh. "Oh my God!" she snorted, "Did you see that? I'm super mega strong now!" she said while sitting up on the bench, avoiding to hit her head on the barbell. "I don't know how this is even possible! I mean, I look like I work out, but I'm nowhere near as buff as those strong men in TV!"

Mal took the floor to explain to the excited, tail-wagging canine. He even crouched next to her and started running a finger over the contour of her right biceps. Stopping, he tightened his grip and smiled at Stormy's surprised reaction to the rock-hard resistance her own arm was putting out. "Your muscle mass has increased more than visually. It's tightly packed, dense. You are heavier than you look right now. I wouldn't be surprised if you could go for two hundred more."

"I'm game to try!" Stormy excitedly said, ready to lie down again, but Mal stopped her and asked her to stand up as he walked away.

"Why don't you try lifting this one over here?" the hare said, gently patting the trunk of one of those cars. She guessed neither vehicle actually belonged to them. Stormy approached the car meekly, still unsure of how she should approach the task. "Grab it by the bumper. Don't pull back, try pushing until you find your grip."

Stormy understood where the doctor was going with this. "Watching me bench pressing must have gotten boring. Too bad, I was having so much fun with that," she thought, "But a car...?" she began to grin, crouching and sliding her arms under the car until the was able to drag her hands back until they were holding the bumper.

"Begin."

Stormy felt quite differently from the bench pressing exercise now. It wasn't her chest and arms doing the work this time, but her legs. Her calves and quads were starting to burn. But just like with the barbell getting lifted off its catchers, so too did the rear tires start leaving the ground. "I'm doing it!" she told herself out loud, getting more murmurs of approval from her observers. "Wait, this isn't even as bad as the other one. I don't even need both hands!" she giggled, slipping a hand out before shoving with her right hand. The car bumped forwards a little, old metal parts and springs squeaking before it the rear end fell down on Stormy's open palm.

With one hand at her hip and the other gripping the car bumper, Stormy fired a big grin towards the team. Her biceps were in full display. She could even see a faint little blush on the horse that matched the elephant aide in height. Stormy had to take this opportunity and make the most of it; she had never made someone blush before! "Piece of cake!" she winked, and in her excitement, pushed the car so far up she failed to catch it when it whipped back down with a loud crash. "Whoops!" she said after the noise died down. "Nuh-no one was driving this one back home, right...?"

Mal seemed pleased. He didn't waste time in submitting Stormy to further exams. He made her return to the weights, this time giving her incredibly heavy dumbbells to curl while standing and sitting. A steel girder appropriated from the area with the construction and metal works equipment ended bent into an L-shape between her hands, making Stormy let out pleased squeals of delight. Mal then made her run circles in the yard, timing her sprints. "Responsiveness is good. But this isn't any different from the other three..." the Arabian scientist discussed with his aide while watching the wolfess complete her fifteenth lap. About an hour after the tests began, she had begun properly sweating. "Over here." He invited his test subject, motioning for Stormy to stand in front of a training sandbag pending from a reinforced chain.

"I'm not that much of a boxer..." Stormy confessed with a chuckle, looking winded after being pushed for so long.

"And I'm not looking for any fancy moves, so this is your lucky day." The hare assured, standing clear and asking his subordinates to keep their distance. "I want to test for impact now, Stormy. Simply channel all that muscular strength to your fists and don't forget to twist your hips. Begin."

Stormy looked winded, but the challenge was right in front of her. Her hands were already balled into fists. She had just lifted the rear end of a car with one hand and bent a steel girder without much effort, what was a stupid sandbag going to change?

Smack! A right hook sent the sandbag flying in a semicircle before the chains clinked and returned it to Stormy, who caught it with a punch from her left hand this time. Each consecutive punch was louder, stronger, meaner. "Why am I punching this bag anyway?" Stormy asked herself, feeling herself get into rhythm but also settle into the similar monotony of all previous exercises. "I should be trying to lift that bulldozer. Or throwing cars across the yard, yeah!" she grinned to herself, growing increasingly excited, and faster, with every swing.

Whap! Bam! Crack! The blows kept coming with Stormy getting better at intercepting the training bag. Straining chains were starting to crack under rising pressure and one of the doctor's assistants was about to stop Stormy but Mal quietly raised a hand to call them back. The wolfess assault was growing in intensity.

"This stupid sandbag. This isn't a match for me. This isn't even training at this point!" Stormy growled, but keep each thought inside her head, becoming increasingly bothered by the lack of any real effort. "Ugh..." she groaned, feeling that humming from earlier return. "Getting a bit light-headed. Damnit. This is boring me. It's boring me so much!" she kept the blows coming, but inevitably the distraction in her head made her miss one of her counter-attacks, resulting in her getting smacked by the returning sandbag.

The sandbag hit her with dry impact. An unnerving quiet took over the yard, with only Mal and the elephant appearing unbothered by the invisible rising tension in the air. All of a suddenly, Stormy yelled. "AAARGH!" and shoved the sandbag back, feeling humiliated. She shoved with such force the sandbag should have completed a circle, but the abused chains snapped at the most weakened link and instead it hurtled through the air in the direction of the wall. "No!" she screamed after the careening training implement, leaping after it with fury, wanting to deny her quarry's escape.

There was a loud crunch followed by an explosion of sand as Stormy's homing punch was so devastating the punching bag simply ceased to be. Grainy sand spilled everywhere, briefly blinding all witnesses with a dust cloud that took a few seconds to disperse. When they were able to see properly in Stormy's direction again, they saw the wolfess standing in front of the wall, arm outstretched in its direction. Her fist was holding the piece of torn leather she had punched in place.

"Rrrgh... nnngh..." Stormy panted, not saying anything. Her anger subsiding with the destruction of that punching bag, she slowly began to realize how she had just exploded. Her ears flattened against her skull and she hid her tail between her legs, gradually turning around to face her audience. "Suh-sorry about that... I don't know what came over me." She had no other thing to say, feeling deflated all of a sudden. In fact, she didn't merely feel it. One glance at her body showed her missing muscle definition where just moments ago she had been admiring the swells of her biceps. And that wasn't all: her toned bulk appeared to be missing; gone. Even the softness she had been looking forwards to get rid of taunted her from the dull navy-blue and black neoprene hugging her regular, non-superwolf figure.

"What the?" Stormy gasped in surprise, pulling her hand off the wall and bringing it around to check herself out, confirming the lack of muscle mass she had been enjoying until now. "What's going on? What happened to all of my muscles?"

"It seems like your U-suit has run out of energy," Mal explained, his shoes kicking sand and pieces of leather around without much interest. "Naturally, your mass has readjusted. Seamlessly, I must add. You are quite a wonder, Stormy."

"Never mind that! Are you saying the buff up isn't permanent? I was... I was enjoying it so much!" Stormy's folded ears and dilated pupils were making her look like a begging puppy. "And, and I was so strong! Can we recharge it? I can go get changed, we can put it through the wringer and then..."

"That's quite enough, Stormy." Mal intercepted, "You are going to go get changed. But you'll be leaving the suit in our care, and you'll be headed home for now. It's getting late, after all. And we don't pay for overtime."

Panting was slowing down. Stormy joined her hands in front of her, tracing the blue line from her waist up to her armpit and then jumped to her shoulders. She was peering down at her invisible biceps. "That was..." she mumbled, looking up at the doctor with a curling smile. "That was amazing. You're a genius, Mal! I can't wait for more! When do I get to come back?"

"Two days from now," Mal explained while walking Stormy to the changing room. For obvious reasons, he insisted she take the one on the left. "Be sure to rest well. Your body will feel fatigue tomorrow, but you should be fine the following day." He continued speaking while facing away from the closed curtain, "If you're not feeling up for more by then..."

"I will be." Stormy didn't let the doctor finish. "No way am I going more than what's absolute necessary without this thing! That was amazing!" she added in her head, fully dressed in her own clothes, holding the U-suit lovingly in front of her.

"Of course. I will see you then." Mal replied, and didn't say much else, ordering one of his assistants to escort his test subject out. He was soon approached by his personal aide.

"Results met projections on all tests save for the last one, doctor." The elephant tapped on his tablet to send data to Mal's phone. The hare seemed uninterested in every chart, instead taking a walk towards the wall overlooking the sandy floor. "Bonding rate spiked almost explosively," he said, following his boss who seemed to be intently staring at the wall. "Sir?"

There was a hole in the wall where Stormy had punched the sandbag in a fit of rage. Concrete had been pushed five inches in.

"Quite a wonder, indeed."

In spite of having been daydreaming with her bed earlier that day, Stormy couldn't stop turning around under the covers. Shower had felt heavenly and she had treated herself to two full plates of alfredo, but she continued feeling restless.

Her thoughts continued bringing her back to the mountainside laboratory. The gunfire, the fire, the muscles. All of it streamed in her mind's eye like rapid-fire still-pictures as if somebody kept pausing and fast-forwarding a movie in chunks. Stormy's grip on her pillow tightened every time the giddiness returned whenever she went back to the changing room, in front of that wonderful reflection of her idealized self.

"I can't believe that all happened." Stormy told herself, "Even if it did I can't believe I'm back to being a 110-pound weakling." She grinned to herself and sank her face into her pillow, tail spinning like a helicopter as she recalled the look on one of the scientists when she posed for them. But she also remembered the annoyance in that jaguar's face. It hadn't been annoyance directed at her: He had been upset at himself for being unable to stop her during the moment she had lost all control and simply had to find the mirror.

Instead of remorse, Stormy felt guilt-ridden ecstasy. It was so easy to forget about the little people like herself. Constantly shoved around, ignored, cursed to look up at bigger, stronger people. Not one of those eggheads had to look up at her, but they certainly had started looking at her differently when the transformation took place. For about a whole hour, the shoe had been on the other foot. And she had fallen in love with that feeling of superiority. She had tasted a pleasure Mother Nature had deprived her for all of her life.

The picture of that superwolf staring back at her in that sexy, muscle-hugging neoprene suit continued to fluster her. Stormy thought she rocked the look, but what she was slowly starting to understand was that she had enjoyed the injection of power to her little frame the most. All that mass, energy and density talk had flown right over her head; but she knew exactly what she had felt while benching over six times her current body weight. She had felt unstoppable.

"Can't wait to get back to work..." the young wolfess said for the very first time in her life.

Mal had not been exaggerating earlier. Everything had hurt like a bitch for the entirety of Stormy's rest day. Paracetamol had helped numb her pain from early that morning, but she regretted not having a full night's sleep. Even getting out of bed had knocked the wind out of her. Extremities pulsed with the beat of her own heart, reminding her of the first time she had ignored the trainer at the gym and attempted to exercise all six traditional muscle groups in the same two hours.

In a way, Stormy had gone beyond even that in just one hour. And yet she couldn't stop smiling the entire time she rode out the clock to the following day. She had to order out twice that day, and come up with excuses for taking so long to get to the door on both occasions

Anxiety kept creeping in. "What if I'm still numb tomorrow? Mal's gonna replace me. Isn't he? He totally looked the no-BS type..." she munched on her pizza without much excitement. "U-Suit-04..." she mumbled to herself, understanding there were others she hadn't met wearing that same goop-infused suit. She wondered if they were also scrawny like herself, or if they had felt even a fraction of the pleasure she had experienced during and after her transformation. "I can't let that suit go to anyone else." She resolved. Even if she had to raid a pharmacy for ibuprofen, she was going to work tomorrow.

Dynamic Experiments

Fortunately for Stormy, and the pharmacies, no drastic raiding measures had been necessary. Although slightly fatigued, her body was responding normally and an espresso fixed her tired expression quite nicely. The trip back to Jubilee Labs, however, felt eternal to her.

When she finally arrived, she rushed to scan the employee card she had been provided with at the end of her first work day and walked into the bustling hallways. Stormy was still 20 minutes earlier than expected, so her escort wasn't there. While wandering around the halls in search of the yard, where she thought she'd find some of the team working, Stormy stopped and saw a bunch of scientists following a familiarly dressed fellow.

The lab coats were surrounding a towering specimen of armadillo. He was bulky, way bulkier than she had been two days ago. But what truly grabbed Stormy was the blue and black, snug suit so perfectly conforming to his perfectly cut musculature. Her eyes glowered at the 'U03' tag on the armadillo's shoulder as he passed her by.

Wolf and armadillo crossed eyes for a fraction of a second, which was when Stormy felt that unwelcome humming resonating in her noggin, which made her lose their short-lived staring contest. "That tall jacked-up jerk looked at me like I was a tourist..." Stormy grumbled to herself, continuing down the hallway in search of her boss and his team.

She regretted not having paid attention to the building's layout two days ago, getting increasingly exasperated as every scientist she met told her with matching impatience that Dr. Arkey had yet to arrive. For some reason, she had convinced herself that it was a lie. She had only one day working with him and Stormy knew a guy like that had to be _living_at his workplace.

Sighing in resignation, she fell with her back against the wall next to a vending machine and gently tapped it, trying to figure out where she had taken a wrong turn on her way to the yard. "This vending machine..." she murmured, and quickly continued down that path. It had been two days but that last stretch was still fresh in her mind. But all she managed to do was end up at the giant metal vault door. Where the cube was.

Stormy took cautionary steps forwards. She had no idea what for. She was on her own, and certainly didn't have the credentials to access what was on the other side of the vault. The panel was also out of the question. The humming was back. She started holding her head, actively trying to shake that bothersome sensation off. Stormy couldn't see that strange material which had been used in the construction of that wonderful suit. And yet she could feel observed, not by the wall-mounted security cameras... but...

A hand fell upon her shoulder, making her jump with a scream. Stormy turned around, pressing her back and hands on the vault door. "Mal!" she yelped, eyes almost popping out of their sockets. "Gah! I think my lungs just tried jumping out of my throat."

"Sorry, Stormy." The hare didn't really deliver on the heart-felt part of his apology. Imposing as always, he loomed his full foot of height over her, leaning in with a particularly intimidating glare. "What are you doing here? This isn't my office, or the yard."

"Ahh..." the wolfess scrambled to explain. "I was bored waiting at the entrance. I guess I... Excuse me, do you hear that noise?"

"Noise?" Mal repeated, confused about the direction their conversation was taking. And yet moments later his eyes started growing behind his glasses. "What kind of noise?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's just my nerves, but I keep hearing this humming noise. Do you have issues in your electric grid or something?"

After a pause, Mal tilted his glasses and turned around. "Perhaps I should have a word with our electrical engineer. But for now, since you're here early, I would like you to follow me to the yard. I can see you're well, and I don't wish to delay today's experiments. So, if you would...?"

"Right! Of course, doc!" Stormy grinned, forgetting all about her discomfort at the promise of more experiments at the yard. This was her kind of science. Everything else could burn for all she cared. However, she did stop for a moment when she began following Mal out of the vault corridor. Her eyes remained glued to the vault door for three whole seconds. It was almost like she could see the black cube through the vault door.

After she resumed her walk, the constant humming dropped to static-like, soft scratching until it vanished for good. "Shouldn't have overdone it with the paracetamol..." Stormy chastised herself.

Like a wish granted, Stormy was feeling the snug embrace of neoprene covering her from ankle to neck and all the way down to her wrists. Even the shoulder tag felt like it belonged there. Nobody else should be wearing that suit after all. However, something was off when she stepped back out from the changing room.

Stormy stared at her open hands and repeatedly opened and closed them, tensing and distending. "Why aren't I going back to She-Hulk mode?" she asked aloud without thinking. Mal had just left his team of assistants and his personal aide when he heard the question.

"It's uncharged, just as you left it last time." The hare explained, and Stormy finally took notice of the navy-blue streaks of her suit; they had been glowing light-blue last time. "You will recall the suit will not transfer and maintain mass without energy."

"Sorry, doc. Must've forgotten my power bank back home!" Stormy sarcastically replied, catching herself too late to stop her response from coming off strong.

"No matter." Mal turned his back on Stormy, who was considering quickly apologizing for her outburst, but he hardly appeared bothered at all. He was stepping towards the compactors, standing in front of the hydraulic press. "We have everything we need to re-energize the U-suit and get you recharged."

"Thank God. So when do we start?" the wolfess smiled. Although her expression started looking a little sullen when all of a sudden she found herself lying on the bed of the hydraulic press, face to face with the compressor above her. "This is a joke right?"

Mal started chuckling. "Fear not, my dear. Your results were so impressive last time that I've decided to move our experiments to their next stage."

"But don't I need to be um... 'recharged' if I want to experiment, doc? I'm not sure I'll be able to do much in this press!" Stormy nervously giggled. However, no matter how nervous she was, she could not get off the hydraulic press bed. The entire team was making sure she remained perfectly still and lined up in the contraption meant to turn anything into goop. She wasn't looking forwards to being turned into wolf goop.

"The next stage of our experiment will determine how efficient the transfer rate between kinetic energy and mass of the Utupu is," Mal began to explain. "To that end, we require the user to be wearing their U-suit while it's processing. Don't worry. I'll make sure nothing bad happens to you."

"You realize you're saying that to someone strapped to a hydraulic press, right?" Stormy gulped. Was that juicy paycheck worth this? The adrenaline junkie in her mind celebrated her new starring role as James Bond, but the rational part of her brain reminded her unlike the charming brit, she wasn't equipped with any laser gadgets.

"Stand clear and prepare for stress test number one," Mal ordered, and every last lab coat stood away, ready to observe that scrawny wolfess getting crushed.

"Muh-Mal? I think I changed my mind..." Stormy gasped as the machinery whirred to life, eyes frozen at the sight of the wobbling metal press above her. The realization hit her like a wall of bricks: Right now she wasn't strong. She wasn't superwolf. She wasn't She-Hulk or James Bond. She was going to get crushed to a paste. The words were bunching up at her throat, she wanted to yell out for them to stop but she was so scared she couldn't get the plea out.

"Begin." The doctor didn't even flinch as his aide tapped on his tablet interface.

Whiiiiirrrrrrrr... the press was falling. Nothing would stop it. Stormy was squirming in place, fighting against her bonds. But there was nothing she could do. Even through her suit she felt the cool metal board land on her chest and stomach, covering almost her entire body except for her neck and the second half of her lower extremities. Stormy shut her eyes tight and a fear-gripped heart convinced her to prepare for the worst.

But the worst didn't come to pass.

Stormy's head rung with a deep, sharp noise resembling the ever persistent humming coming back in the form of an overpowering buzzing. Even though the press was already pushing her ribcage down, it was her mind that was on fire. She began to growl and convulse, eyes twitching under their sockets.

With the streaks of navy-blue on the U-suit starting to lighten up ever so gradually, Stormy's body began to push out. In similar fashion to the previous day, her biceps and triceps became notable in her arms. Her shoulders widened and her abdomen straightened out with burgeoning muscle mass. Excess fat trimmed and legs thickened with hard muscle. Superwolf's return signified the end of that insufferable noise in her head.

By the time the migraine had subsided, Stormy gently reopened her eyes. They had a certain lucidity to them that startled some of her observers, most notably the horse she had embarrassed and the jaguar she had shoved two days ago. Struggling had been replaced with almost unsettlingly calm breathing.

A grin on her once frightened face told all. "This feels nice."

"Remarkable..." Mal said behind his hand, though nobody heard him. He raised his voice: "How are you feeling, Stormy?"

"Like I'm getting a big 'ol hug, doc." Stormy smiled. If the headache had lasted longer than a few seconds, Stormy didn't know, but its disappearance had also brought all of her fear with it. She could feel her bigger muscles flexing against the hydraulic press attempting to crush her. Its tremendous force would have hopelessly shattered every bone even in a person as muscular as she was. However, the slowly lighting up suit was absorbing all that impact just as it was meant to do. "Mmm... is this all this thing can do?" she asked while gently tapping the cylinders atop the crusher.

At Mal's orders, the elephant cranked up the pressure. Stormy purred to the escalating weight being dropped on her. She could feel her chest swelling with additional pectoral mass, spreading it wider as her abdominal mounds grew thicker and more bunched-together. Her torso was pushing back against the rising pressure.

"Mmm...!" the wolfess closed her eyes, biting her lips to stifle a moan. One could say she was getting off to the hydraulic press 'hugging' her, but in truth she was relishing ever second of growth she could process. She was enjoying the expansion of her muscles, but also starting to develop an affinity for the feeling of imperviousness the U-suit was giving her.

Stormy didn't have to be a genius to understand it wasn't her muscles stopping the machine from obliterating her existence. That suit was protecting her, turning what should have been bone-snapping pain into a soft embrace. That soft embrace, in turn, was feeding her the power she had been hankering for.

When the test concluded, the pressure gauge had started dialing down from a full ton. With the crusher receding, Stormy let out a pleased sigh once she was able to freely move again. Her anxiety had all but vanished, she was riding on that high again. "I'm ready for those tests!" she announced with a power flex towards Mal. But he didn't seem amused, as usual.

"I'm afraid not," the hare snapped his fingers, his assistants scattering save for his trusty aide, as always. "Your suit isn't fully charged yet." He paused, allowing the curious test subject to get a good look at the barely lit up blue streaks. "Just as I theorized, having an immediate recipient for the newly generated mass has given us a more efficient way to manage the Utupu's capacity. As long as you're wearing it, your suit will absorb any and all kinetic forces and immediately recharge after enhancing you. It serves both as protection and a booster to your natural abilities."

"Pretty handy!" Stormy admitted, checking herself out again with pride in her grin. "But there's something I don't understand. If it isn't fully charged, why did you stop the hydraulic press?"

"For starters, it only goes up to twice the pressure it was utilizing, at which point we would be on the verge of needlessly risking our equipment..." Mal explained matter-of-factly while Stormy secretly rode the bliss of knowing she was a threat to an industrial heavy-duty machine. "Additionally, the Utupu has been observed to react with diminishing returns to the same kind of external factors. Prolonged exposure to the hydraulic press would not give us the same results. It's partially why your mass has barely improved from last time..."

"Wait... I am a little buffer, that's true! I feel it, my abs and pecs feel much harder... You mean I can get even bigger than these She-hulk proportions?!" Stormy started to think back about the wearer of the 'U03', mentally transposing herself into the armadillo's proportions. Her hands started shaking with excitement.

"...simply put, in all likelihood." Mal finally agreed. "In any case, multiple sources of kinetic force are necessary before we can repeat them. Think of it as the Utupu 'building resistance'. I have proposed it is a mechanism to prevent overloading, to remain with a certain level of consistence..." his ears started flopping as he noticed his fascinating talk was entering in one of Stormy's ears and coming out the other. She seemed lost in her own little world. With a deep sigh, Mal told Stormy to follow him.

Again, Stormy was in front of the three contiguous rooms. She remembered them all. White, yellow and red, from left to right. "This is how we'll charge me up?"

"Unless you've 'changed your mind', yes." Mal said, getting a defiant smirk from the wolfess. He returned a smile and gestured for her to venture forth. But Stormy stopped at the ramp leading into the first stage.

"I can tuck my arms behind my back, but shouldn't I have face protection for this?"

"Our shooters will only be firing at the suit. However, we are still going to lower a Kevlar panel via the railing to shield your face. We will also be preparing additional protection for the other two stress tests. Go stand in the center. Take it from here, Eugene."

The elephant stood forwards. Eugene was finishing the supervision of all gunmen getting in position. "Please remain in the center of the stage. Shooters will only aim at the suit the center of the suit and nowhere else. Ensure not to move unless told otherwise. Do you understand, participant?"

"I do." Stormy nodded back at the aide, thinking it ironic how two days she had been fatalistically dreading this exact same situation. The gunmen at those three windows were the same scientists who had taken her measurements, who had watched her bench hundreds of pounds and pulverize a sandbag with her fists. Their eyes were those of marksmen right now and didn't at all look like the eager eggheads they usually were without their tablets and clipboards and pens in their hands. The jaguar in particular seemed intensely focused. She gave him a small wave, but got nothing in return but what she construed was professional silence. Perhaps he hadn't seen her.

"Guns in position." Eugene first said as the Kevlar panel started to descend from the railing going across the three stages, stopping in front of Stormy's face, covering all the way down to the neck. "Take aim." He made doubly sure the trajectory projections were being followed. Once he was sure, he turned back to his boss and nodded, missing the wave. "Fire team in position, sir."

"Begin!" Mal commanded. Muzzles lit up white-hot again and the hail of lead began. When Eugene turned back to join observation however, he saw Stormy's right hand was raised. "Stop! STOP!" he yelled, watching the wolfess flinch in shock when one of the projectiles struck her descending mitt.

Three seconds of sustained fire had been sufficient to leave a sizable chunk of collapsed bullet casings at Stormy's feet. "Her hand has been shot..." Eugene frowned, not expecting bumbling at this stage. He rushing to the glass pane to get a better look. Oddly enough, he wasn't hearing Stormy so much as hiss in pain, but even more strange was the absence of blood.

It had all happened so fast. The muscular wolfess didn't see who had delivered the shot to her hand, but at that point she didn't care. Impact had been clear as in the rest of her body. Because of her surprise she hadn't had the chance to properly feel the exposure to all those bullets getting crushed against her torso. With the sudden interruption the suit had remained barely charged from its latest threshold, but something new had happened which had stolen the breath from everyone in the yard, Stormy included.

All their eyes were focused on her shot hand. It was balled into a fist, but more strikingly, it was black. Utupu black. When she reopened her grip to inspect the glove that had formed around her fingers, the single casing that had impacted her palm fell off and joined the clinking bundle on the floor. Before she could ask about the glove, her attention was brought to her other hand. Black ooze started secreting from the end of the sleeve, coating her exposed hand and every last digit in the same blackness from before. In similar fashion, her feet and even her tail was bundled up into a sleeker appendage completely encased in the solidifying black goop. Finally, Stormy brought her fingers up to her face when everything in front of her eyes went dark. The substance had crept out from the suit's neckline, masking her snout and the rest of her head in a protective, solidifying film.

It wasn't until a few seconds when she began to struggle breathing that nostril holes and fresh ventilation appeared on the snout mask. While at first she was unable to see, the black casing in front of her eyes started to thin and allowed her limited vision.

"Astounding. With these bonding levels..." Mal remarked, mumbling to himself with his right arm under his chest and his left hand covering his mouth. He was frowning in deep thought yet pleased with the development. "What a happy accident," he lowered his hand to address his aide. "Wouldn't you say, Eugene?"

"She's... covered in some sort of armor." Eugene turned around to look at Mal with barely bated breath. "Is it actually trying to protect her? The Utupu, I mean?"

"Only one way to find out." Mal raised his voice towards Stormy while she continued checking herself out, "Can you hear us, Stormy?"

"Yeah!" she said, although with a muffled voice. "I had no idea the suit could also do this. It's full of surprises!"

"Indeed," the hare replied, "We're going to resume the stress test now. Be sure to remain still this time."

"You never told me Get. Set. Go." Stormy was annoyed, but the sweet new ability she had discovered for her suit more than returned her hunger for seeing how far she could push her body. "I'll hold still."

The tests resumed without delay. The Kevlar screen in front of Stormy's face had not been removed, as additional precaution. She held her arms tucked behind her back as the hail of bullets restarted and this time, Stormy was able to feel each impact hitting her body. "It's like I have ants crawling on my abs... this is fun!" she began to laugh.

"Stand still, participant!" Eugene raised his voice, exasperated by looking at that glossy, encased tail begin to wag behind their subject.

"Killjoy." Stormy mumbled. It wasn't long before reflex made her turn her head slightly, able to peer past the see-through membrane in front of her eyes down at the brightening blue of her suit. As rapid-fire continued to strike her, she could feel her body warming up, becoming tingly all over. Remaining perfectly still became an issue for the wolfess. She was starting to grow again.

At first it was her shoulders widening again, further putting distance between her arms and neck. Her chest swelled further, breasts starting to become defined against the tight neoprene thanks to her inflating pectorals. Her already impressive set of abs became so bulky the fabric in front of it started looking painted on. In a similar fashion, the sleeves on her arms and legs finally started struggling to contain her thickening limbs. Biceps and triceps swelled significantly with deltoids joining in adding bulbous shapes from her shoulders all the way down to her elbows. Stormy couldn't help tensing up and flexing, feeling the fabric cling to her before stubbornly readjusting to fit her increasing girth. Quads and hamstrings exploded with size, almost doubling the size of the wolfess' legs with calves and shins growing outwards, plumper than ever.

Again, Stormy felt herself standing a little straighter. Her mind became consumed with the pleasure of expanding, but just as she was reaching an apex the intensity of that tingling sensation appeared to die down. The blue streaks were still glowing brighter than before. "Mmm... can't you fire harder? Don't have shotguns... sniper rifles?" she began to ask, turning her masked face away from the Kevlar screen at Eugene and Mal. They couldn't see it thanks to the mask, but they could somehow tell her eyes were narrowed, full of arrogance.

It was almost like she was fighting a particularly bad itch. An itch that required being shot at by a sniper rifle. At receiving only silence in response, Stormy turned back to the Kevlar screen only to see it vibrate. A bullet had struck it instead of the suit. "Where are you aiming?" she suddenly hollered. "Don't you see every shot counts?" the musclebound wolfess said, her arms starting to come around. Biceps and forearms caught bullet spray like bugs on a windshield. She was flexing her arms impatiently, grinning behind her mask. Perhaps if she taunted them they'd bring out the big guns themselves.

"Remain..." Eugene began, but his voice trailed off when Mal brought a hand up. The bullet hail continued past 30 seconds, but Stormy wasn't riding the same high as before. She was impatient. She had seen herself grown beyond superwolf levels, she wasn't ready to stop now!

"I'm dying of boredom over here!" her hands clapped on each side of the Kevlar screen, biceps suddenly bulging against their sleeves as Stormy pressed, and pressed, and pressed, trying with all of her might to conduct her hasty impatience into her grip. "Nghhaaaa!" she finally roared, tearing the reinforced screen in two. "Told you to stop missing your shots!"

The elephant was glad he didn't have to tell his co-workers to hold their fire this time, but he had seen bullets bouncing off Stormy's neck and cheeks like her face was made out of titanium. There was no question about it: The Utupu was absorbing impacts via that protective film as well. "Sir..." Eugene wasn't able to play it cool anymore. "Sir, her adrenaline levels are through the roof. They've been steadily rising since the hydraulic press, but now she's..."

"Ready for the next test." Mal shouted without addressing his aide. He walked up to the bulletproof glass and added to the exasperated Stormy: "It looks like you won't need additional protection for the following stress tests. Step in."

"Sir? I saw it with my own eyes, the shielding holds and even stores charge, but we can't be sure..." Eugene was silenced before he could finish voicing his concerns.

"Science, my dear man." Dr. Arkey was being unreasonable in his aide's eyes, but the latter knew it had been whole semesters since he had seen that glint behind the hare's spectacles. "We don't want to hold her back at this junction. Not with these excellent developments. Inside the yellow room, Stormy!"

The suited, well-built wolf didn't have to be told twice. She could almost taste the residual electrical charge coming from the tesla stage. Stormy recalled Mal's words from earlier. "Getting bored of gunfire, huh?" she murmured lowly, straightening up and crossing over to the next room.

Surrounded by the tesla arms, Stormy was already giddy. Mal shouted "Begin!" and soon the coils lit up like dystopian Christmas trees. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of volts were running through Stormy, coming from four different sources at once. Certainly she would've been cooked from the inside out had she not been wearing the suit. Instead, electrocution to her felt like small bursts of ticklishness where that wondrous black goop failed to be 100% absorbent. Energy was soaked up, transferred to Stormy, and fueled another growth spurt as well as the charging of her suit.

"This tickles." She finally said, not even bothering to ask for the voltage to be raised. Just like she had expected, the new source of energy was finally getting processed the way she wanted. Closing her eyes to drink in the swelling sensation, Stormy began to hug herself wanting to roam her body as it grew.

Limits were getting pushed. There was so much muscle her 5'4" frame could pack. Curvature started getting sacrificed in favor of additional bulk. On her sides, her oblique muscles started to stand out, becoming just as marked on the suit as her abs and breasts were. Her arms grew thicker than the equine member of Mal's team, her biceps swelling to round, taut shape even when she wasn't flexing them at this point. When she did, they grew to the size of her head. Her legs exploded with size, turning from powerful yet feminine lower limbs into mighty tree trunks.

"Mmnnghh... this is the best! I can feel all this power coursing through me!" Stormy vociferated in a way that made her voice echo over the electrical noise. "I can't be hurt! I'm invincible!" the masked lupine laughed, curling both of her swollen arms in to display those head-sized mounds rising to meet her eyebrows. "But I can feel it's not enough..." she glanced down at the suit's light-blue streaks with impatience. Even with all this voltage, they weren't glowing the brightest yet. "Let's move on!" she shouted at Eugene and Mal.

The elephant frowned, his once soothing voice adding weight with his offended expression. "Stand down. You're not the one in charge of the pacing..."

"While I hate to contradict my personal assistant..." Mal interjected, standing next to Eugene peering past the protective glass, "...I'm afraid Stormy's reaction is, although out of line, appropriate. Electrocution isn't doing it anymore. Please terminate number three," he turned to the fuming elephant, who lowered his head at his boss' tone of request, "...and initiate stress test number four."

"Yes, sir." Eugene didn't bother looking back into the yellow chamber. The elephant couldn't see Stormy's face, but he could tell she was smirking at him the way a spoiled child taunts the mean parent with the cool one's permission.

With the tesla coils pulling back, Stormy didn't have to be told to move to the next chamber. Stretching her buff arms and bringing them around at different angles to admire her burly physique, the wolfess sauntered with a confident strut. The red stage was certainly a confining space, but she fit at the center just fine. Stormy was looking at the thick metal doors as if facing a gargantuan predator with every intention of smacking it in the face. "Bring it!" she shouted, although it was hard to tell whether she was goading Eugene or the industrial incinerator.

A hydraulic press had felt like a soft hug to her. Bullets had bounced off her like infantile rubber band projectiles. Getting violently shocked had only made her giggle at the most. Stormy couldn't wait to see how she'd make fun out of raging hellfire.

It was hard to tell when the test was going to properly start. Stormy had been expecting to at least feel a little heat rising and making her sweat at the very least. However, she was cool like a cucumber right until the doors started sliding and a sea of bright orange took over her field of view. It was the stuff of religious nightmares. Two days ago standing where she was would've made Stormy faint from terror. Now she was simply stretching back, thrusting her chest out and slowly bringing her arms above her head as if she were greeting the rising sun.

"Mmm..." the wolfess began to moan as temperature steadily raised. Her suit was feeding once again, this time converting thermal potential into power that was, at this point, making the blue streaks of her apparel glow brightly. Her body once again started bulking up, re-forged by the dancing flames attempting to carbonize her. Mask, gloves, foot and tail wear; the entire suit and its accessories burned for Stormy's muscles. Thousand degrees were making the very air sizzle, and yet a very comfortable wolfess only had one huskily-spoken word for that inferno: "Toasty."

Once again, her muscles burst larger. Calves became hard like diamonds, her hamstrings leading into thick, powerful gluts that would be able to snap street lights between them. Enlarging quadriceps got Stormy overly thick thighs which now competed for space under her pelvic region; she could definitely crush a person between them. The mounds at her abdomen added a new, unbelievable fourth row that completed an awesomely bunched eight-pack. Her back further widened alongside expanding oblique muscles, eliminating the once waist-clinched figure her previous transformation level had created. Were it not for her massive pectorals making her proportionately enlarged breasts stand out against the neoprene, it would be difficult to tell Stormy apart from a male. Her arms became so enormous not even Eugene's natural elephantine thickness could compete with her any longer. Her biceps were just bigger than her own head when she flexed them now. She was becoming more fearsome than a bodybuilder!

"Yeeeesssss...!" she sighed in absolute bliss feeling her own minty fresh breath get trapped inside of her mask, contrasting that now pesky warmth surrounding her swollen form. "This is much better. This is what a wolf should look like!" Stormy deeply laughed, her voice holding much higher gravitas than before. She smirked behind her mask as she watched the doors slowly close. Good. She could feel the suit properly charged now.

The scientist team was hesitant to approach their test subject. Even Eugene was taking cautionary steps towards the exit of the red room. Stormy relished every second her heavy feet stomped the ground. She could almost taste her observer's intimidated reactions. Two days ago they had been eager to get touchy-feely, but now even maintaining her 5'4" height, they were stunned by the powerhouse she had turned into.

Stunned was perhaps too small of a reaction. Stormy was nothing short of imposing even when doing something as trite as walking. The new, bigger muscle she was packing had made her so heavy she expected to have tripled her original weight. But of course, Stormy had been wrong. She was significantly heftier on account of the sheer density of her mass and would have left the first phase of her transformation two days ago in the dust. The floor struggled every time Stormy stepped down, tiles cracking or outright fissuring under the muscle-bound wolfess.

"What's the matter, boys?" the mask, gloves, tail and foot wear suddenly receded; black goop merging back with her suit. Her grin was almost predatory, tongue licking her chops as if she was eyeing fresh steaks before her. Stormy held her arms out, bouncing her pectorals in an invitingly gratuitous manner. "Aren't you going to take my new measurements...?" she tried singing out seductively, her deeper tone making the horse scientist practically vibrate. He was the first one to step forth, flustered and unable to maintain eye-contact. He was followed by Eugene and the rest of the team, with a satisfied Mal observed from a distance.

"As you can see, the Utupu's resistance and its ability to impart nigh-invulnerability to its wielder is nothing short of a miracle." Mal said. "You're the first one we could submit to all these tests in a row, without external protectors."

"It's an amazing feeling, Mal, that's for sure." The smirking Stormy curled her arms in her favorite double-bicep pose, lifting the coyote and jaguar holding measuring tapes around her swelling biceps off the floor without paying their weight any mind whatsoever. "I feel like I could walk into a speeding bullet train right now and it would need my license plate afterwards, haha!"

The coyote emitted no sound, his ears and tail tucked back as he held onto Stormy quietly to avoid upsetting her. The jaguar however was a different story. "Hey, my hand got snagged in the tape- hey! Let us down!" he demanded, annoyed by the way he and his partner had gotten manhandled this easily.

Stormy remembered the jaguar. He had been sent flying last time, and right now he was suspended with his feet dangling inches away from the floor. Her arm was so huge he was trapped between her bicep and forearm. For a moment, his irritating whining made a dark corner in her mind present her with the question: "What if I flex even harder with him there?" The sweet smile on her face belied that secretive mental image. "Of course." Stormy spoke, lowering her arms until both scientists were touching the floor with their feet again. Hastily, the jaguar tugged his hand out of the mess of measuring tape and grumpily stepped off, followed by the silent coyote.

"If you're done toying with my team..." Mal boldly approached the potently enhanced wolfess. She respected the fact he was unflinchingly standing before her, "I wish to test for resilience one more time. You don't mind doing that before we move to the upgraded strength experiments, right?"

"Resilience? Mal, you're the doc," Stormy chuckled, sassily holding one of her large hands at her hips, "You should know by now I'm indestructible. Pressure, guns, electricity, fire..."

"I was thinking we could cycle back into pressure. A fearless, indestructible being like you has no objections to demonstrate your invulnerability, yes?" Mal smiled. Stormy's expression mellowed. She didn't have a good smartass quip to respond to that one. He knew how to play her like a fiddle.

Fiddles are stored in boxes shaped like the instrument. Stormy was asked to jump into a rectangular pit by the cars, and to lie down in it. A giant press of the same shape loomed overhead with thick metal plates surrounding her in all four directions. She was in a large vehicle compactor: A car-cuber. As soon as the top bed was craned down, Stormy was sealed in. The entire experience was similar to the hydraulic press from earlier, except significantly more claustrophobic.

Even through the sound of machinery trying to crush her like a car, Stormy could still pick out the individual smashers coming at her from the side. She felt them touch her elbows and it prompted her to shoot her hands out, catching them in place. Pressure attempting to collapse her and turn her into a meat cube was simply not enough. A car would've already gotten compacted, but the machine was having trouble keeping up with her new, monstrous strength. The bed pressing at her from above wasn't able to continue and she knew that if she kept pushing the machine would break. "Meet immovable object." She softly murmured, finally letting go and curling up into the fetal position.

"It's... working?" Eugene cocked his head to the side. There was no camera to see inside the pit, so it was hard to see what was going on in there. However, the panels had stopped groaning in protest, they were doing their job and pressing. Reading Dr. Arkey's expression was impossible, he had been looking directly at the top bed for minutes without batting an eye. "The process is almost complete. You don't suppose we killed her, did we? This is way much more pressure than the hydraulic..." before the aide could finish his sentence though, the car-cuber stopped making noise. Immediately afterwards, it whirred again, followed by the chute hooked up to it spitting out the bundled up Stormy.

Casually standing up and dusting herself off, the bulky wolfess looked bored with herself. Many jaws dropped. Neither Stormy nor the suit looked like they had been through a trash compactor in the slightest. "Are we done playing? I want to get my pecs a workout!"

"Right this way." Mal was already headed over to the gym, with his assistants lagging behind him and Stormy. "I'm convinced now, my dear."

"That I'm indestructible?" Stormy turned to look up at the hare, cocking her head sideways.

"That you were the right one to devote myself to," he paused, gestured towards all the equipment laid out for her and said: "You don't mind assembling your preferred weight stack, do you? I'm afraid even Eugene won't be able to help with the amount of weight necessary now."

The elephant cleared his throat, emerging from Mal's side. Even though he was the tallest person in that yard, he was feeling small all of a sudden. Stormy sensed it and decided that she liked that.

Throughout the strength tests, she excelled in every category. She had gone from bench-pressing hundreds of pounds to tons without breaking a sweet. Barbells and dumbbells began to sag and bend at their end from the ludicrously heavy plates she had built them with. Her fan club was growing ever more jittery with every additional ton she burdened herself with. Stormy couldn't help but want to toy with them.

First, the obviously infatuated horse usually tasked with writing down her maximums got a wink as she balanced a barbell heavier than a car like a baseball in one hand and collected even more weight to add to it with another. She set her sights on the quiet coyote next, maintaining eye-contact as he timed her every rep while she was doing deadlifts. Each time he caught himself staring the poor, meek coyote could only avert his gaze and look elsewhere.

When it came to make a show of strength, Stormy took one of the steel girders from the construction and metal works sector just like the one she had bent into an L shape the other time. This time however, Stormy continued bending the beam, claws digging into metal to grip like one grips a thick rope they're trying to tie around. Steel girders weren't meant to be tied like ropes, but Stormy's frightening brute force did not care. She twisted metal like a shoelace and brought each end around, reshaping an I into a knot that she immediately got bored of. With a growl, she began to press her hands at each end of the twisted metal.

The noise of metal giving against her strength made more than one scientist whimper. As Stormy forced the steel knot to collapse by pressing her hands together around it, Eugene approached the ever observant Dr. Arkey with unease. "Sir... this exceeds all projections. She's far stronger than what we anticipated..." he whispered, doing his best not to face Stormy or give her any indication of what he was talking about. "I was already uneasy about you moving her to dynamic stress tests, but this..."

"We're on a tight schedule. Did you know I had a meeting with the board of directors yesterday?" Mal's expression grew sour, even though it was quite amusing to watch Stormy play with the steel ball her hands had created out of the girder. "They've been particularly hassling me about U02's mental condition, even though they are the ones who insist we move things along." He sighed, removed his glasses to rub between his eyes, slipped them back on and finally turned back to his aide. "Out with it, Eugene. I've never known you as a roundabout man. What's eating you?"

Eugene gulped, pausing when he saw Stormy move back to the cars and casually lift one of them over her head, tossing it up and down like a ball. It almost looked like the yard had become her playground. "Sir, you're seeing it. Compatibility is beyond 100% according to our pre-established parameters, the numbers have started losing meaning. The psych evaluation shows erratic brainwave patterns, which explains the sudden increase in aggression, but it still is a far cry from her personality on her first day."

Mal had been patiently nodding, acknowledging each and every piece of information he already had been fed live throughout the experiments. "Your point, Eugene."

"She's juggling cars, sir_._" The elephant said dryly, trying not to look at the tomfoolery of physics that burly wolf girl was subjecting them with. "None of our subjects, not even U03 with his compatibility rating of 80% has been able to do that, and she's well out of bounds by now."

"Excellent progress, I would say. Enough for those imbeciles to leave me alone for once." The hare nodded to himself, "I will likely have the next two nights to myself." He finished curtly, turning back to the amusement before them. Eugene had a knot in his throat. He wanted to scream at his boss, to tell him to stop this and to dial the experiment back more than a couple steps back. This was way too much progress in a short time.

If their subject had such great results in the first day and such outlandish ones on her second, what was going to happen on the third, or fourth...?

What if they lost control?

_ _

The thought was almost too much to bear. Eugene let out a yelp, flinching when he heard a loud crash. He turned in the direction of the eastern wall which had been blown back. A huge car-shaped hole above a wolfess-shaped hole had redecorated the yard. Eugene rushed over to help one of his co-workers who seemed to have fainted. "What just happened here? Hey you!" he raised his voice at the quiet coyote who couldn't quit staring at the holes in the wall. Before his peer could say anything though, Stormy carefully stepped back in through the lower hole, dragging a hopelessly crushed car behind with her.

"Sorry about that," Stormy smirked, "I was never much of a juggler. Must've slipped." She let go of the junk heap that used to be a car next to the other one she had haphazardly set on its back; possibly as a prank if Eugene had to be the judge.

There was no doubt about it. Watching her work out with everything she could get her hands on was a spectacle. Dr. Arkey was so pleased with himself, finally reaching, no, exceeding his goals. His U-suit had been proved to be the technology necessary to harness the Utupu's potential, but his star subject, Stormy, had been able to utilize the latter in ways he had been unable to foresee. Curiosity was tugging at his heart like a puppet master's strings. "How far can you go?" he thought as he watched Stormy step on and crush the flipped car, her neoprene-clad muscles beautifully reflecting fluorescent light. The mesmerized Mal was now only concerned about seeing how far they could push the Utupu. He wanted to see what it truly was capable of.

And Stormy wasn't disappointed with this process. She wanted to push herself, but the equipment available was too light, too pathetic for someone of her Herculean might. She had moved from cars to the steamroller, and even that ended spinning on her palms. She looked at the observation tower and grinned, not even sparing a second to think if she should attempt to tear it off its foundations; she was going to.

However, before Stormy could take a step away from the changing rooms by the bent and damaged gym equipment, all movement ceased. The soles of her feet dragged over the fissured tiles under her and for a moment she lost her breath. She was suddenly sluggish, lethargic, and the humming was back. "Ahnngh... ahhh..." she moaned in displeasure, starting to understand what was happening as she felt a deflating sensation come over her. "Nuh-no..." she began to whimper in her softer voice. Her fists clenched, feeling the neoprene loosen around her as her mass started to decline. "No! No I'm not ready! Charge me up! Shoot me! Hit me!" she demanded with a roar at the frightened scientists. But nobody shot her. Nobody stood forwards.

"I guess that is all the time we have for today." Mal sighed with disappointment, also noting the dulling blue streaks on Stormy's shrinking self. He realized at that moment he had let his excitement get the better of him. They couldn't force the suit immediately recharge between experiments.

"No! No!" Stormy sounded desperate as she was approached by the suddenly more courageous scientists. She scrambled away towards the changing rooms, bursting in to get a look at herself, as if wanting to convince herself she wasn't losing that beautiful, gorgeous, swollen build she had come to love.

"Stormy," Mal's voice approached in the distance, the only one bold enough to get close to their dwindling brick house. He couldn't see her after the curtain stopped flapping behind her, and he decided to keep his distance for the time being. "There will be another chance soon, in two days," he assured her. "The U-suit needs a cool down period lest our technology takes too much abuse and breaks down."

The humming turned into loud, painful buzzing with her rising anxiety. Words were hardly reaching her at all. Stormy's blood was like brimstone. She could feel black substance running down the end of her sleeves, but instead of layering like silk, the goop squirmed irregularly. Miniature, tar-like tendrils whipped at the air. And then her eyes flashed red and a beastly snarl split her maw open. Her own visage scared her so much she backed herself up against the wall and gasped. Stormy was looking at her 110lbs. self again on the mirror, but for a moment she had not seen herself on the reflection. That hadn't been her face.

"...are you alright, dear?" Mal attempted his softest voice, almost sounding genuinely concerned to the wolfess whose ears were rapidly twitching. There were no more tendrils at her wrist; there never had been. Had there?

In the end, Stormy agreed to conclude the day's experiments. Nobody asked her about what she saw in that mirror because nobody was able to see it. She barely said yes to Mal's orders to come back in two days and to take a full day's rest, and had to be escorted out because she looked dazed.

Stormy knew she would be back; she was clearly excited for more. No, she was hungry for it. Desperately addicted. She had tasted power no one else ever had and would do anything to experience it again. But for now, she needed to get back home. The headache subsided once she exited Jubilee labs, but she had to contend with a nagging feeling all the way back home. She kept flexing her right hand open and closed absentmindedly. She could feel something strange was going on with her.

The Humming

When she finally got back home, Stormy dashed straight into the bathroom of her little downtown apartment. By some fortune she had scored the side of the building with mountain-view, but only one view concerned her at that moment: Her reflection. She rubbed her fingers under her eyes with care, detecting the start of eye-bags from two previous sleepless nights. She stopped looking at her eyes when she caught something odd on her right arm. Peering past the crevices of her fingers she opened her palm and raised an eyebrow. The fur on her palm was dimpling, exposing a little of the skin underneath. "Isn't that where I got shot earlier...? Odd, I don't remember feeling pain but this looks bruised... like a scar. I guess I was so high on adrenaline from surviving the hydraulic press I didn't feeling the shot... Looks totally healed up though?" she brought her hand up under the bathroom light. "Ugh, hope nothing got in through the wound. I guess the glove was there for most of the time... I'm too tired to think about this."

Gently pressing down on the blue chevron marks above her cheeks, Stormy began to massage her temples, closing her eyes and focusing on what she had seen. It was all one big blur in her head, soon audibly backed by the ever stubborn yet distant hum as some sort of pesky and annoying mosquito only she could hear, apparently. But this time it wasn't making her head hurt at least; it was actually barely noticeable, though still there. "Maybe I'm getting used to it... Darn, I must be on edge."

Stormy thought she had to take her mind off work. Just because she loved it, especially after today, that didn't mean she had to carry it with her back home. Don't think about muscles. Don't think about all the cool stuff you did. It wasn't working. Words evocated clear, picture-perfect moments: The bullet hail, the mask forming, the electrical arms, the incinerator... It was like watching four different action-packed movies where she was the star. The brightest star. The unstoppable star. A force of nature, commanding respect and inspiring fear.

Her eyes opened and she grinned, letting out a chortle. "What are you thinking about girl?" There was no monster in the mirror. It was just Stormy looking back at her with a bright, although tired smile. Another takeout day.

She felt way less reserved about money after seeing her banking app registering the day's pay; she had arranged for advances due to her situation. Although she appreciated the moonlit mountains through her little window, she was reminded she had downgraded apartments with gradually decreasing size three times now, and now barely had a closet where she could store the junk she had yet to pack away.

While waiting for food delivery, Stormy decided to finally get some organizing done. She didn't want to stress herself out about work, even though the thought to beg Mal to let her back in the next day was a lingering idea that just wouldn't quite quit. She crouched next to the simple two-person table she used for her laptop and got a good look at the four boxes she had neglected to either unpack or put away. A frustrated sigh left her lips.

First, she carefully slid the table away to expose the stacks. The box at the bottom was the most loaded one, full of heavy paraphernalia she simply refused to dispose of. Hoarding always came back for a bite. "Let's just get over this..." she pepped herself up, crouching and getting her spindly arms around the base of the bottom box. Stormy's legs pushed her up straight and she soon was turning around and heading towards the closet when she suddenly stopped moving.

"What...?" the wolf girl stopped to realize what she had just done. It had taken two of the moving company men to haul up the bottom box up her apartment without dropping it. And she was now holding the entire thing up plus four smaller boxes stacked on top of it. Stormy's heart began to race, her mouth taking turns being agape and softly closing, as if struggling to get a word out. "How?" was the single word materializing in her mind. She looked down at her thin constitution and then back at the boxes which she was practically embracing. Boxes that she had no doubt weighed more than her lithe frame.

Experimentally, she began to slide her left arm to the side, needing to add pressure with her other limb to compensate for the lack of anchorage on one side. Ridiculous as it might've looked to anyone witnessing a little wolf girl being hidden behind a huge stack of hefty boxes, Stormy was holding them all up with the strength of a single arm. "I'm not big, I'm not wearing the suit..." she chuckled, "What the heck is going on...?"

Stormy entertained the thought to text Mal, but the delivery boy ringing her apartment buzzer caught her off guard, almost making her drop the boxes. She brought her other arm in and quickly headed for the closet, where she neatly stashed the undisturbed stack inside before she went to get her food.

On her return upstairs, Stormy felt that she had so many questions that needed answers now. Her grumbling stomach made her promise her rumination some dedication later. However, all of the day's excitement seemed dogpile on her when the last Chow Mein noodle disappeared into her mouth. Thoughts escaped her, worries melting away as she hardly left her chair before she collapsed down onto her couch, drifting into heavy slumber...

A black void stretched as far as Stormy's eyes could see. Even though she could not see the ground beneath her feet, she was standing at forlorn coordinates in a surreal space. It didn't feel cold nor warmth the one thing she could almost palpate was her own loneliness.

"Where is all my stuff? Where's everyone...?" her voice came out sluggish, tired, stretched like drunken slurring. All it took was one desperate step forwards for her to fall into the abyss.

The urge to scream was there, but she couldn't push the vowels out. Eyes ever widened as gravity took her for an interminable freefall. Deeper and deeper into the unknown she plunged, despair settling in as she looked up, realizing all she had known had simply vanished. Then the question of utmost importance became: Should I vanish as well?

(NeED)

"Huh?" Stormy's gasp was inwards. She heard a voice other than her own in the infinite darkness.

(inCOMPlete)

(SeEK)

Similar to the distracting humming, the words echoed in her brain like the remembrance of a song, except Stormy could not recognize tone nor inflexion. Her interlocutor's identity remained a mystery.

(WEAK)

Stormy's eyes snapped to attention at the word. "Weak. I'm weak...!" she repeated, before she felt that falling sensation suddenly come to an abrupt end. "Oof!" Her face had hit the ground along the rest of her body. She felt around for a strangely familiar surface, and when she lifted her head off the floor, the realization that she was in Jubilee Labs' hallways sank in.

"What the...?" Stormy gradually sat up on her knees, face to face with the tall metal vault again. Her ears perked to attention as a sound that for once didn't seem to be manifesting inside her head called out to hear. It wasn't a voice and it wasn't those weird words. A noise that resembled a beating heart led percussive rhythm behind the vault door. The more she focused on the door, the louder the beating got.

(AlOnE)

(inSUFFicient)

(SeEK)

Stormy held her head. "I'm going off the deep end. Why am I here? This is the room with that thing..." she shut her eyes, hissing and shivering. "Insufficient?" she repeated, trying to think on these cryptic messages. Lack of context was driving her up the wall, wanting to know what significance there was in all of this. Her anxiety began to spike when she suddenly thought back to how pathetic and utterly defeated she had felt when the suit's energy had run out. "It's not enough..." she began to gasp, looking out into the vault door with widely opened eyes.

(WhAT iF)

Stormy began to moisten her lips from left to right.

(ENOUGH?)

A flash of light engulfed everything, forcing Stormy to close her eyes. When she next opened them, she was standing at main and seventh. A sudden influx of pride swelled in her chest as everywhere she looked to she saw people surrounding her, on their knees, either prostrating or stunned by her presence. Lifting her musclebound arms, Stormy curled her fingers, balling her hands into fists as if she was clutching power itself.

Ooohs and aaahs fed the massive wolf's ravenous ego as she punched into a nearby two-level bus, gripping the bent chassis before pulling the entire vehicle off the ground. She held it above her with booming laughter. It was like she was a little girl all over again, playing with her toys and having people admire her for it. Except there was nothing little about her anymore, and admiration might as well have been worship.

Stormy recalled her last two work days and then looked at the countless admirers that filled the streets. This is the essence of what had hooked her into the experiment. This was exactly what she had wanted all of her life. Power and worship. But for that fantasy to become real...

(WEAK)

The bus vanished. The crowds vanished. The city itself poofed into the air. All Stormy could see was the ceiling of her one-room apartment. She was crumpled at an awkward position on her couch where she had fallen asleep in earlier. Groaning, she repositioned herself and sat up on the couch, popping articulations and rolling her shoulders. Her right hand shielded her eyes from bright sunlight peering in from over the mountains and in through her window. It was the afternoon.

She was still tired even after all that sleep. Stormy couldn't being able to properly sleep in the last three days, but now that she could remember that vivid dream, tiredness didn't matter as much. She knew the experience of having masses bend over for her in awe had only been in her head. But Stormy knew she wasn't very far from crossing the line between fantasy and reality.

With one glance at her open right hand, she noticed no sign of the scar she had seen the previous night. Spreading her legs and resting her forearms at her knees, Stormy allowed herself a silent smirk.

She was so close to crossing the line. Stepping through the point of no return. All she needed was...

(MoOOoORE)

It was Stormy's third day of work. Staff was busy with parallel and unrelated projects, too busy to pay any mind to the short wolf girl. Even with her incredible progress as a test subject, she was still no more than a newbie after all. Stormy told herself she wouldn't have to continue feeling like just another number soon.

Dr. Arkey was nowhere in sight, certainly not within greeting distance. It made her huffy. "I gotta be his best test subject at this point. What is he wasting my time with now?" Stormy thought, feeling insulted. "Can't be that shrimpy armadillo. Maybe the guys or girls with the 1 or 2 suits? Wish they'd disappear."

When a hand landed on the ruminating Stormy's shoulder, she didn't flinch, nor turn around. Instead, her frown was directed to the shoulder-tapper as if all patience had been drained from her person. She had been eager to reprimand Mal for making her wait, but she breathed in instead and gulped her words. It was the elephant.

Eugene had the rest of the team behind him. They all loomed over Stormy, as usual, yet only Eugene was making eye contact. "Good morning, participant. Dr. Arkey is currently tied up with a meeting in his office."

Closing her eyes and suddenly understanding Mal's disdain for bureaucracy with great clarity, Stormy couldn't help but emulate his grumpiness. "How long do I have to wait?" she asked, moody.

After a small pause and a polite smile, Eugene assuaged: "That depends on how fast you can walk. We're here to pick you up. I'll be in charge of monitoring you while Dr. Arkey is busy." His eyes were suddenly locked with Stormy's unblinking ones. It was like Eugene wasn't staring at a person anymore. The unnerving staring contest had to come to an end lest he be devoured by the wolfess' pupils. He did so by turning around, tilting his head and asking: "I trust there will be no inconveniences."

Stormy's silence wasn't natural. She very much wanted to continue with the experiments, caring very little about who thought they held her reins. She hadn't been attempting to subjugate or antagonize the tall elephant. Her mind was wandering because the disembodied voice that had replaced the insufferable humming was coming from five different directions, one of them clearly stronger than the rest.

(CLOSER)

(toO FAr)

(aLOnE)

(LIbeRatE)

(...)

The fifth source of noise was also speaking, but it was getting lost between two others. She could hardly make it out.

"Participant." Eugene's voice shredded through Stormy's concentration like a party popper going off in the middle of a mid-term. "Stormy?" he insisted, fully bringing the wolf back out from her mind.

"I'm coming." Stormy replied to all.

Symbiosis

---

It was the same as two days ago. The suit with the U04 tag fit snugly as usual. Mask and other protectors materialized the second she was exposed to what anybody else would construe as danger. She took the abuse and grew stronger with it. Each stress test put Stormy's suit to full charge until the same immensity as the previous test day had been reached. And then Eugene ordered her to work out while "taking care not to unnecessarily break pricy equipment".

Her observers, as usual, were in awe of her might and resistance. Stormy was lifting and bending dispassionately however. Their admiration and respect, save for Eugene's which were missing, were food for a starving animal. Stormy simply wasn't getting the same high as she had before. Not after dreaming of making an entire city hers. Not when those voices kept calling her weak, clamoring for her attention louder than any humming or buzzing.

But Stormy realized she was at her limit. Even with the appearance of an Olympian bodybuilder and the strength of ten, it wasn't enough. "But what if..." she stopped deadlifting for a moment, eyes slowly starting to widen, "...what if there was enough for more?" she thought back to Dr. Arkey's explanations. About the block and the goop it produced. She thought about how they used the goop to make her suit and then she thought about how it must not have enough of it to allow her to reach even greater heights.

"More."

(MoRE)

"Excuse me...?" the nervous coyote from earlier, writing down Stormy's progress, flaked a little when he saw her mighty fists flattening the reinforced steel barbell in her grip. "Uh... Muh-Ms. Stormy, did you say...? Ah!" he stepped back away from the powerful wolfess when the flattened barbell snapped at the ends, pulled down by the plated discs. It slammed loudly enough for everybody in the yard to hear. "Mr. Eugene!" he called out.

Eugene rushed back to the weighting equipment area, finding the broken barbell in their test subject's hands and the torn bits with all the extra weight at her feet. Looking at Stormy herself, the elephant couldn't help but lose his breathe at the way her facial expression had contorted. There was a vacant stare in Stormy's eyes, yet a big grin exposing pearly white fangs. "What is going on...?" he finally spoke out, getting a response from his jittery college.

"She stopped responding after she crushed the barbell, sir. It's like she's in a trance. The last thing I heard her say was..."

"More." Stormy finished for the coyote, her head snapping in the direction of the construction area of the yard. The scientists on that side all had to dive out of the way as she hurled the remains of the barbell in the air like a javelin, sticking it at the far end on the west side.

Eugene lost his balance and had to be brought low by the fast-acting jaguar pulling him down with him. "Jesus Christ!"

Before they could see what she was doing, Stormy had already cleared the distance between the yard's gym area and was standing in front of the stabbed concrete wall. And before any of them could properly react, her hands grabbed onto the reinforced steel rod and began to pull. Her muscles strained, pushing her suit out and she growled, but instead of pulling the broken barbell out, the concrete around it fissured and inevitably started falling apart like a crumbling sandcastle.

"Nnnnnghhaa!" bellowed the musclebound wolfess, ripping the yard wall out and exposing the hallways on the other side. "More..." she panted, dropping the makeshift hammer she had just created before leaving through the newly created exit. This would take her where she wanted to go faster.

"God... I didn't have time to tranquilize her..." lamented Eugene who could only stare at the destruction, equally mesmerized and terrified.

"Where is she even going?!" the jaguar demanded, "There are no exits down that corridor. Only labs 4, 5 and..."

"...the storage area..." Eugene gasped. "Get Dr. Arkey!" he ordered the horse who was the closest to one of the emergency internal lines. However, his peer only gave him a worried shaking of the head.

"I can't reach him, Eugene! He's not picking up for some reason!"

"Damnit!" the elephant held his head, heart-rate climbing fast. "Call security. We have a test subject on the loose. Tell them... no, don't use lethal force." His eyes widened in realization and Eugene took the phone in hand. "Enlist U03's help! He should still be in laboratory 3 finishing his tests! She's headed for containment! Go go go!"

Eugene's worst fears had come true.

Stormy was making a mess of those winding corridors. If there was no shortcut through the corridors, she punched walls down until her path was clear. Scientists feared the short tank of a wolfess, diving out of the way or outright running away. Concrete rained all around her, dust clouds left in her wake as she made her way down the corridors to where the loudest of those voices was calling her.

A security team conformed of as many units as they could fit in the vault hallway was waiting for Stormy when she arrived at her destination. All of them were equipped in riot armor, helmets, some of them holding shields and others grenade launchers. The unit on point however was someone Stormy remembered and felt appropriate in greeting him with a sneer.

"You're the fourth, ain'tcha?" the buff, tall armadillo made the hallways vibrate with every step he took. He folded his thick arms when was close enough to Stormy to cast his impressive shadow over her. "Knew you were up to no good the moment I saw you. Stormy right? I'm Leo."

Trained professionals couldn't wholly keep their cool before the two massive individuals. It was look watching two monsters snarling at each other. Even though one of them was allied to them, more than one of the four grenadiers was considering gassing them both.

"Get out of my way." Stormy simply said.

"No can do, lady. I'm getting a fat bonus for calming your sweet buns down," the armadillo slammed a fist in his open palm, making his neck sound off with a pop. And I've been raring to test this suit against someone who can actually survive my right hook. So, are you sure you wanna go with a heavy-weight champion at the top of his game?"

Stormy had arrived at the vault with zero patience. She hadn't been intending on hurting anyone as long as she got what she wanted, but this oaf they had sent to stop her was only serving to upset her further. Her twitching hands were ready to strike. "Let me through." The eerie calmness in her voice was like a silk-wrapped grenade.

"You got brain damage or something?" Leo sighed. "Let's see if I can help scramble a neuron or twoooohh...!" He thought he had all the time in the world to react to a newbie barely two days into the experiments, but then he saw that shorty ducking and all of a sudden he was looking at the ceiling, flying back several miles per hour.

Like bowling pins the security team behind Leo was caught in a massive impact strike when his broad back bowled them all over, resulting in group knockout. Only Leo himself seemed to be awake, although floored after crashing into the vault door. Stormy walked past him, ignoring his slurred speech.

"Cuh-c'mere... lemme..." the buff armadillo sputtered, eyes still spinning, "Lemme have at'cha..."

"Hope you don't have brain damage." Said Stormy in response as she passed by him, standing before her goal. The towering metal vault door. Behind it was what she had come to get.

(HeRE)

What stood before the wolfess was a ten-foot tall titanium alloy security door in the shape of a traditional clockwork cog. It would only move for those with the correct pass key at the panel she had seen Mal operate several days ago. Without the passkey, much like all the concrete she had smashed down, the vault door was an obstacle in her way.

Stormy put her right hand on the vault handle, pulling immediately. She grunted, feeling immense resistance, but she was stronger. Her muscles tensed and she pulled even harder; she knew she didn't need more than one hand. But even with her desire to force the vault door open, she failed to take the handle's resistance into consideration.

SNAP.

With silent contempt, Stormy threw the torn handle away and put both hands on each side of the vault's circular shape. First, she applied pressure from each opposite side, feeling the vault groan in protest as it started to fail to hold her monstrous strength at bay. When she had convinced herself her fingers wouldn't slip, Stormy exerted all of her might in one powerful clench before pulling. The vault's outer frame suffered damage as it was bent outwards by the unhinging door. "Rrrrrrgh... grrrr...!" Stormy growled, vascular lines popping over her suit as she pulled and pulled until the door had been unhinged. Tons upon tons of weight were suddenly and violently severed from the frame, falling on wolfess who tore the vault door off and lobbed it overhead behind her.

And then the security alarm started blaring. But to Stormy it was just background noise.

It was sheer fortune. None one the security team had gotten crushed by the falling piece of dense titanium alloy. Stormy hadn't even bothered to look back. Her attention was glued to the prize not twenty paces away from her. And yet she didn't approach it for more than two steps. She couldn't help smiling, letting the sinking feeling of victory wash her over.

Standing at the threshold, Stormy held her hand out like someone beckoning their pet. Although no one in their right mind would call the Utupu block a pet, it still seemed to acknowledge Stormy's presence. At first the black cube stirred, emitting loud buzzing followed by the sound of dripping molasses.

The cube was melting like a fudgecicle left by a stove. It dripped off within its containment unit: a transparent box locked behind metal cylinders in one of the many vault storage holes. First, the black sludge covered every observable nook and cranny of the once see-through surface, stirring and making the box shake. As if possessed of a will of its own, the substance started creeping out gradually through the imperceptible cracks of its vault box, reminding Stormy of the condensation phenomenon in glasses with chilled drinks in them. Except in this case it wasn't the air around the container freezing, but the Utupu oozing out.

"Come here." Stormy whispered, hearing a faint little chitter coming from that squeaking, exposed material before her sight went dark. The black goop lurched forwards, covering the space distancing them before it splattered all over her body. Stormy was covered from head to toe in the stuff, leaving her tar-black, glowing under the fluorescent light tubes overhead. And for a moment, it looked like she was immobilized like a gunk-defiled statue. However, the substance's texture began to change, its fluidity adjusting as it sought to completely engulf Stormy like a protozoa snacking on microscopic prey. Soon it began to conform to Stormy's shape, wrapping her body in a new black suit of which rapidly began to sizzle and melt into her body, slipping in through the mouth, nostrils, ears and every last pore in her body.

"Ahh..." Stormy breathed deeply once the absorption ended. Her entire being felt warm now, electrified even. That tingling sensation was back and it was making her quake all over. "So much... so much power!" she let out a deep rumble, flexing her swelling arms as she began to pack on even more muscle than before. Unlike before, her entire body started stretching to compensate for the incredible amount of mass the ooze was adding to her. Just as she had suspected, more black goop meant more strength faster.

And fast she grew. Inch for inch, Stormy became taller as her arms and legs doubled in size, the rest of her struggling to keep up. Her biceps became larger than basketballs, her tree trunk legs so massive they were less tree-trunk like and more oil-drum-thick. Her U-suit remained stubbornly clinging to the swelling wolfess, marking her insane bunched eight-packs and her inflated breasts covering the titanic slabs of meat that her pectorals had turned into. One more neck and head could have been placed separately on each side of her face thanks to how distanced her shoulders have become. Her muscles had muscles; she was becoming truly massive!

"So good...!" Stormy moaned with ever deepening tone, octaves continuously dropping until she held a baritone impossible to distinguish between male or female. "I'm so big! So huge! So powerful!" the wolfess laughed, feeling herself pulse with every inch she added to her height. When the transformation was over and she turned around to step off the vault door's threshold, she felt both the doorframe and the tile she stepped on bend and crack. She had no idea how much she weighed now, but she had to place her height just above six feet.

"Unngh..." Leo stirred awake at that moment, seeing unbelievably thick ankles flying by his head. He caught one of those tremendous hams around his arms, trying to anchor the amazon down. But all he managed to do was get carried off the floor for three of the steps it took for Stormy to notice him. "What the fuck..." he was still fighting a concussion, Stormy guessed, and allowed him to speak. "What the fuck just happened? I was told... you were at your limit...? How are you so..."

And then she got tired of the paused, laborious breathing. "I broke the limits." She simply stated, having difficulty glancing down at Leo with her impressive chest sticking out so much ahead of her. However, she realized she wasn't really looking at him. Beyond feeling him desperately clinging to her leg, Stormy could sense something else on the armadillo.

(BrING)

She glared down at her invisible perception. Leo began to groan and she heard a disgusting sound, like when one pulls the skin off their chicken before putting it under the knife. The armadillo let out a drowned yelp and started releasing his weakening grip. His mass started to dwindle, but not by much. His suit however started to melt, tearing off Leo's body and sliming its way up Stormy, where it merged with the Utupu that composed her own.

"Mmm..." the wolfess shivered, feeling a micro-tingle that lasted for all of a second before she ascended a couple of inches taller. The unconscious Leo crumpled down in a heap, down from exceedingly jacked bodybuilder to the heavy-weight champion she had heard him claim to be. Stormy had taken the Utupu from his suit and added it to her own. "Don't worry. I will put it to better use." She rumbled down at the weakened armadillo, flexing her right arm and kissing her ultra-beefy bicep.

Examining herself, Stormy didn't even realize the emergency alert seemed to have died down around her. Everything about her being radiated power now. She doubted anything could stop her at this moment. However, three more voices called out to her. Fortunately, they weren't far away. In fact, they were directly above her. One fainter than the others. More goop separated from its source, she guessed. It had to be hers, as well.

"Do you realize the thin sheet of ice you are walking on right now, Arkey?" a gruff voice came from the left display.

"Allow me to recount your failures, doctor." A much more refined, womanly voice spoke from the rightmost display. "First you lose U01, then you push U02 until her psyche breaks. U03 is allegedly a dead end. And now your findings with the recently acquired U04 are 'inconclusive'?"

Mal was still sitting at the center of a conference call with his employers, the board of directors. "Progressive, madam," he corrected. A bright alert light shone under his desk, but he was quick to override it with a simple button combination. He had access to video feeds where he needed them.

"Does it please you to make us bleed money, Arkey? Is that it?" another investor raised their voice. "You might have been part of the package deal when we acquired that damn African rock, but nowhere in the contract does it say we can't have you replaced at our discretion."

"Where are our results, Dr. Arkey? You promised us technology capable of revolutionizing the field of physics," a third voice resonated, polite yet demanding. "Additional salaries, repair and purchase orders... It's high time you were held accountable. None of us here believe there is one usable piece of equipment or test subject in your hands capable of competing in the contemporary military market."

Hearing the ground rumble, beneath him, Mal got off his chair and turned his back on the videoconference. "There are results." He finally addressed his superiors, reaching back to his desk before pushing the button to hang up on all of them simultaneously. "They simply are not for you." He solemnly said, and with those words, the carpeted floor of his office tore apart with a jumping ball of fur and muscle coming through the resulting hole on the ground.

And there she was. Debris and dust rolling off her beautifully swollen form. Muscles far beyond what was naturally possible pulsing and beating like a heart. She was easily his height now. Mal couldn't have been more pleased.

"My door was open to you," Mal joked as he walked around the hole in the ground in order to get close to his test subject.

"Doors are a waste of time now that I can make holes of any size in whatever I want, Mal." Stormy said, her toes curling and shredding the carpeting beneath her as she anxiously looked around the posh-looking office.

"You've grown so much, Stormy. You have assimilated the rest of the Utupu, have you not? Remarkable!"

"Where are the other suits?" Stormy wasn't in the mood for hollow praise. "You have them, don't you?"

"I'm not hiding them from you." Mal shrugged, almost looking offended. He tapped on his phone, making the bookcase on the western side slide up on the wall. A couple of hangers mechanically slid towards them, presenting stormy with U-suits that had the 01 and 02 tags on their shoulders. Her tongue lapped at her chops as the Utupu in the other suits began to squirm eagerly. "It's been a long road. I'd been following this experiment close since its inception, and it was all but luck I was allowed to get as far as I've come. But now we have you."

Before Stormy could will the other two suits' substance into herself, the rational part of her brain stopped her. Her eyes locked onto her benefactor, full of suspicion. "Why are you helping me? I am _ruining_your experiment, Mal. I will take all of this remaining black goop and I'll push myself beyond everything- everybody."

"I see that an absolute win." Mal had managed to stump her. She was now wary of the two suits, and looked at him like she would a 20 question pop-quiz. "For the last week, all I've wanted was for you to succeed. To evolve. And you have. Quite astonishingly fast, in fact!"

"Why? What's in it for you?" Stormy rested one of her enormous arms on her bulging oblique muscles. Her voice was so deep it was making pencils roll off Mal's desk.

"I'm a scientist, dear. Profit is meaningless to me."

"Spare me the philosophical bull, doc," Stormy impatiently demanded, taking a powerful step forwards that made all the books in his numerous cases fall over. "What did you do to those suits?"

"I've preserved them just for this one moment, when the fractured could become whole again." Mal said. "You can hear it, can't you?" Stormy raised an eyebrow, suddenly confused. "I can, too. It was an accident, five years ago. A single cut was all it took to get inside me. Unfortunately, I was not a match."

"You got it inside you, too?" Stormy stood up straight, suddenly realizing why the third voice sounded so muffled to her earlier.

"By now you're probably aware..." Mal walked over to the suits, his face starting to grow tired as years of façade started to take their toll. "The Utupu is not material, no element, certainly not of this world. It's an organism, much like you and I. It attempts to link to a compatible host it can psychically bond to. However, even when it's a perfect, or close to perfect match, bonding overwhelms the Utupu's host. If the host rejects it, the Utupu's numbed and lies dormant. If bonding is successful, however..." he patted each of the two hung suits, "It doesn't always result in a happy ending."

"Am I your happy ending, Mal? Your pet project for the 'ultimate lifeform' goop?"

"The Utupu is a stairway to the top, Stormy. You climbed that stairway all on your own." The hare grinned, nodding. "No greater pleasure exists for a man, or woman of science, than witnessing evolution in the making. And you have evolved beyond what nature has intended for any of us, Stormy. However, you still are incomplete."

Stormy's eyes bounced from one suit to the other. Mal nodded to her and gently pushed the hangers forwards.

"You don't have to trust me, dear." Mal laughed at her apprehension. "Feel it for yourself."

Fuming through her nostrils, Stormy blew air at such pressure the suits and Mal's fur ruffled. She didn't approach him, instead raising her arm once again. The hangers started shaking with the substance covering those suits squirming again, forming tendrils that tore off the fabric and seemed to reach out for the bulky mountain of wolf.

(mERGe)

(moOoOoORE)

Closing her eyes, Stormy willed 01 and 02 to relinquish themselves to her. The suits were unraveled, pieces of tech and neoprene falling to the carpeted floor as Utupu flew towards Stormy, where it splashed before also getting assimilated. Her heart started beating faster, and she grew another four inches taller; now positively taller than the hare. As an added benefit, Stormy's head was starting to clear, the voices finally being put to rest once and for all.

Letting a sigh of relief out, the musclebound amazon's powerful lungs made the office shudder. Her muscles tightened, swelling even more and yet when she relaxed they did not distend. Her bulk had become even greater. So much that she could in all likelihood make a person disappear just by hugging them.

With his hands at his back, Mal took a few steps towards Stormy and stopped when she growled at him.

"You will die." She told him unceremoniously.

"I know." Mal said. "Even after all this time, I'm afraid I was never able to remove the trace of Utupu from my nervous system, no matter how hard I tried. However, it is my hope it'll aid you in some way. I'm already prepared for what's to come. Even after all this time, it's still calling out to be put back together, like a forlorn puzzle piece. In some way, it makes me feel more important than I really am."

"You will die, and you will not see what the peak is." Stormy's eyes opened just to look down at the hare. Her eyes held no malice nor hatred; only contempt for someone so vastly inferior to herself.

"I will see the peak. Just not with my eyes," Dr. Malik Arkey explained to the beef tower in front of him. "But before you take what is inside of my head... a word."

Stormy gave Mal the go ahead with a small nod.

"I delayed communications as much as I could, but Eugene has contacted the military already by now, unwilling to take any chances no doubt," Mal frowned, glancing sideways at his phone. "He is a thorough and good man, but short-sighted; blinded by the promise of reputation and money. He, the board, the military... They will stop at nothing to capture you. To reclaim the Utupu, even if they have to carve it out of your body so that they can start the project anew when they realize they can't control you. Now that you're about to be whole and given what we know of the Utupu, it should be impossible to contain you... but that is not my immediate worry. I want you to stay true to yourself. I want to see you shine beyond the limitations this life has given us, Stormy. And that is why..." he spread his arms out.

(My life is yours.)

Stormy held her arm out, letting the last of her feeling of fellowship spill with a scowl. This was the road she was going to walk from now on. A being that has been made whole. The unstoppable force and the immovable object. And if anybody didn't like it...

She had just promoted herself to complaint management.

"Do we have eyes on the target?" the lieutenant colonel was standing behind her techie surveying the camera network.

"Negative, ma'am. Quick footage analysis puts her at one of the hallways over here," the techie put his finger on the timestamp showing Stormy leaving the destroyed vault area with all the unconscious security team. "Then she just vanishes for a whole 15 minutes until now. However, there is one inaccessible camera that seems to be off the grid."

The lieutenant colonel turned around to address Eugene. She wasn't particularly big for a tigress, certainly not when compared to an elephant, but she definitely exhibited an air of confidence and calm ferocity that commanded respect. "Where is that camera we can't see supposed to be, Dr. Klein?"

Eugene fidgeted, "I don't work in security, ma'am. But from what little we know and going off the fact we have yet to find Dr. Arkey..."

"Aha," the tigress straightened up, "You believe our target is with your boss right now. That camera must be placed where they both are." She paused, focusing her feline eyes on the elephant's. "Dr. Arkey's the one responsible for all of this, is he not?" the tigress huffed, "We've evacuated every last staff member and civilian from the building and he is still unaccounted for. I'll direct a team to the third floor right now."

"You don't understand, Ms. Sanchez. I'm now sure U04 went to Dr. Arkey's office after leaving the vault. You should have seen the maddening glare of her eyes. If they've met already..."

"Then as his aide, you'll be around to answer my questions, will you not, Dr. Klein?" Sanchez quickly intercepted. "But in the interest of thoroughness," she turned to her subordinates, "Mobilize a search and rescue party to..."

"Ma'am." The techie manning the security feed raised his voice. Sanchez turned her attention to the camera labeled #14b. In the center of the image was an incredibly bulky wolf with arms like tree trunks and legs that looked like they could kick a truck through a building. From head to toe her body was covered in a neoprene full-body suit coating every last strand of fur in sleek, form-fitting material. Her hands were parked at her muscular hips, with her masked snout aimed in such a way one simply knew her eyes staring straight at the camera with a smile.

Eugene approached from behind, unable to ignore the smugness in that smirk. "She's goading us, isn't she? Damnit!"

"This makes our job easier. We have a perimeter. If Arkey is alive, he won't be able to make it to an exit without getting caught," Sanchez again looked at her team and began dispensing engagement orders.

"Ms. Sanchez, I must insist..." Eugene gulped when he saw the piercing glare on the tigress, finding out too late how much she hated being interrupted. "If you're not equipped to subdue," he started explaining, "You will require tremendous stopping power to kill U04. I'm afraid she's grown too potent, too resistant to traditional weaponry. I couldn't begin to calculate the damage necessary to..."

Sanchez interrupted back. "I will believe the 'indestructible' monster fairy tale when I see it, Dr. Klein. All I see before me is a mutt overdosed in steroids. My men are going to engage and clean up _your_mess, and we're going to do it our way. Now sit down and watch."

The yard had become Stormy's favorite place in Jubilee Labs. Her evolution had begun there. From a scared little wolf with hardly any muscles to speak off to the multi-ton hulk that would be talked about in medicine books to the end of times. She was whole now and there was no hum, buzzing or words distracting her any longer. Stormy knew she had crossed the line between fantasy and reality. But she had also torn the line, twisted it into a lasso and used to tie both concepts into a hybrid of fact and fiction. She was at the top and the only thing left to do was convince everybody else about her indisputable stance. If Mal had been right and the military was involved, she knew they wouldn't resist an easy target. There was no need to hold off on an inevitable confrontation. If she was to be indisputable, she simply had to terminate all resistance ahead of time. A little show of strength was in order.

Almost as if in cue, the two exits from the yard, both the regular one on the south and the makeshift one she had made on the west, started filling up with dozens of men and women dressed in black ops outfits. They looked way more robotic than the security team she had seen earlier did. They moved fast, keeping their distance yet coordinating a hexagonal formation around her, leaving only a handful units behind to cover the exits.

Only one of those specialists, the squad leader Stormy guessed, spoke out to her. "We have you surrounded, U04. Thirty-two units and two tanks have formed a perimeter around the laboratories, ready to engage if you attempt to breach outside. We have been told you are extremely resistant to pain and damage, so we've equipped ourselves with anti-tank level weaponry ourselves. It doesn't matter how invulnerable you think you are. You will stand down and submit to questioning, or else you will leave here with holes the size of a tire truck."

Stormy patiently listened until the threat that made her grin. Her baritone made the yard quake a little as she replied: "Your pathetic little guns couldn't punch a hole in a wall."

"Lady, or whatever you are, I'll give it to you." The squad captain sounded calm, yet clearly tested. "You're big, you're strong, and you sure as hell got some cojones not taking alpha squad seriously. But your rampaging and public endangerment are over. I promise this is the nicest we're going to be with you."

"I don't want you to be nice to me." Stormy boomed again, laughing as if she was talking with a kid. "Don't you see, little man? I'm here for a fight. Are you gonna fight or are you gonna show me what a little bunch of cowards you all are?"

Twin roars exploded like thunder, and so did Stormy; a thick cloud of gunpowder covering the center of the yard. The squad captain lowered the hand he had used to get his point men to discharge their anti-materiel sniper rifles.

"She's goading them..." Eugene bit his lips, groaning as he failed to find any way to advise Sanchez. His thoughts didn't get any sunnier when he saw the gunpowder clear off Stormy who had only been pushed three feet back from the impact.

The wolfess dusted her bulky abdominals with an unimpressed yawn. However, she was soon letting an unsettling moan of pleasure when her body began to stretch and grow even bulkier. Her neck was so burly it looked like her head was going to get swallowed into it. Her pectorals had widened to the point they superseded her breasts, making the bloated mammaries look small in comparison to her wide chest. Her suit had absorbed those blasts.

"What the fuck...? She doesn't even have a dent in her!" the captain grunted, "That is some serious hardware she's wearing." He thought, unnerved by the way that titanic beast of a wolfess was flexing. But no matter how resistant it is, it won't be able to hold up to sustained armor-piercing fire!"

"That's not all, is it?" Stormy leaned forwards, poking at her masked cheek. "Right here, handsome. Give me a peck I can feel."

"Cute." The squad captain felt bad for taking the insulting invitation, but he didn't want to suffer this arrogant bitch any longer. "Alright, you asked for it. Turn 'er to swiss cheese! NOW!"

This was different from the bullet hail she had come to know in the white room. These bullets flew faster than those shot by the M-16s the scientists wielded. They hit much harder too; she could feel them actually tickling. And yet just like the other bullets, they became deflected by her wonderful suit, the kinetic force behind them simply fueling Stormy with increasing strength. Her muscles looked like they might burst off her body, but she still happily twirled in place, sticking her hips out, flexing, posing; almost as if she was showering in lead.

"Keep going. My traps need a little extra!" Stormy rumbled out with laughter, curling a hefty arm to point at her swelling back.

"Sir, we're only tickling her. Our firepower isn't enough! We need to bring in the big guns!" the squad captain's team member had a point the captain couldn't ignore. He already was getting beyond ticked off. "Explosives, go!"

"Fireworks?" Stormy snorted at the lack of stimulation before she caught projectiles coming at her from the corner of her eye. She didn't see if it was grenades, or the rocket propelled variety, but she was pushed back by ferocious blasts. However, little else happened. When the dust settled, the monstrous wolfess was still standing there, flexing so powerfully the ground itself was quaking. "I love fireworks. Give me more." She said, ignoring the assault team still firing at her and walking over to the nearest soldier scrambling to put a grenade in his launcher. "Reload faster, little one. Keep it coming." She urged, her tail wagging behind her.

"Damnit! Sanchez, nothing's working!" the squad leader yelled into his comm. "We'll level the building if we bring tanks inside. Advise!"

"This is unbelievable..." the lieutenant general gasped, completely shocked by the fact all their weapons had been rendered useless. "What kind of monster have you crazy bastards created?!" she demanded from the equally nervous Eugene. "This is all state-of-the-art! She should be a pile of smoldering ash in the floor by now!"

"I had no idea she had developed to this level! It doesn't make sense. The amount of Utupu we used for the suit doesn't correlate to the..."

"Spare me the numbers talk, Klein!" Sanchez looked beside herself. She knew now there was no point in attempting to fight her, but they couldn't let a monster like this loose either. "What are this thing's weaknesses? It has to have one!"

"Thu-the Utupu is still experimental, we have yet to find any way to destroy it. However, without a user's input, the suit by itself would be inert! If we could find a way to incapacitate or immobilize U04..." Eugene looked pensive. The battlefield looked like a one sided circus parlor, with Stormy losing her patience with the inactive shooters. She had started flicking them away one by one, using only the strength of a single pinky.

"This is ridiculous! How can someone become so strong?!" Sanchez screamed at the monitors like a fan would yell at a 0-5 football match in favor of their rivals. "These men and women are the best of the best, and yet she's flinging them around like ragdolls. Klein, is there a way to immobilize her or not?!"

"Perhaps there is a way." Eugene's eyes had become locked on camera #14a. Only Stormy's back was visible in it, but what he was looking at was the smelting pit they used for metal works. They had yet to try submerging the Utupu in molten steel, but when exposed to the cold air, the metal would cool down, bringing anything, even an invulnerable creature, to a stop until it permanently became imprisoned within. "She still has to breathe. Her brain needs oxygen to function. Tell your men..." he bit his lips, suddenly hesitating. Death by asphyxiation. He was going to tell someone else how to kill somebody by depriving them of oxygen. But this wasn't about preserving one life. The way Stormy was toying with the military, Eugene saw an impending disaster, casualties left and right.

"Well? What is it?! Speak up, man!" Sanchez demanded. Eugene shut his eyes for a moment and reopened when he shut off all doubt from his heart.

"Tell one of your men to climb the observation tower while she's distracted. They can control the winch from there. If you manage to get her close to it, you can knock her into the molten metal pit. That should stop her!"

Sanchez nodded and put the plan in motion without delay.

"Where are you all going?" Stormy wanted to giggle, but even a small laugh made the soot-covered shell casings at her feet bounce from the vibrations. She was growing far too strong. So strong in fact she was making the military run away from her. "I'm still very much not riddled with holes. You're terrible cheese-makers, haha!"

While a humiliatingly slow game of keep away was being played, the squad leader nodded to each one of his lieutenant colonel's instructions. He sent one of his men up to the observation tower while Stormy was busy terrorizing his soldiers and told his unnerved snipers to fully load their guns. One last burst. Then, he decided it was time to do some baiting of their own.

"Hey, muscle-freak!" the squad captain shouted, standing in front of the sweltering heat of the metal works pit. Stormy turned around to address him. The way she left cracks wherever she stepped was enough to make him voice crack a little. "C'mere..." he started, finding the courage to shout again, "C'mere! No more guns!" he threw his rifle away. "I'm tired of you. Tired of all this! You want a piece of me? Come punch the skeleton out of my body, I don't care anymore!"

"I win." Stormy told herself with a satisfied smile. She made her way over to the squad captain, her lumbering steps making the yard itself quake. She was so tall she was an entire head taller than the soldier, completely looming over him. "Tell your boss they can surrender. Bullying you all was pretty fun, but I'm ready to hear it from their mouths."

"Ruh-right..." the unnerved squad captain slowly reached for his earpiece, eyes swiftly bouncing between Stormy's mask to the observation tower and the winch arm which had been relocated during all the commotion. "I'll tell her..." he took a deep breath, "NOW!" he yelled, diving out of the way before the twin roaring thunders went off again.

Caught unawares, Stormy hardly had any time to respond. Her back itched as it was hit by the anti-materiel rifles again harmlessly, yet they still made her stumble forwards. The next two snipers stepped in and added their own powerful shots while the others rapidly reloaded.

"Don't let up! Keep shooting, keep going!" the squad captain barked. Stormy had already turned around, bringing her arms up simply to allow her to see what was going on. However, the gunpowder clouds made that very hard. All she could do was sink her feet down against broken tiles every time she was forced back.

"Are you idiots?" Stormy grunted, irritated more by the humiliation of being tricked than the barrage of powerful sniper blasts. "All you're doing is making me stronger! Save your pathetic rounds!" she roared at them, but they kept firing. She was surprised this much firepower could be used to move her this far! When her heel began to slide off with no ground to find purchase, the wolfess finally looked back. She couldn't feel the heat until now. A slowly-bubbling pit of molten metal seemed to be welcoming her.

"NOW! Hit her with the winch!" Stormy heard the captain's voice just in time to see a large mechanical arm swinging her way. It broke itself against her, managing to tilt her just enough for her to lose her balance. The last two more anti-materiel rounds then managed to explode her back, making her fall into the pit.

"Gah!" the wolfess shot an arm upwards in an attempt to clutch her hand around the broken winch, but it had been damaged so much it simply shattered in her grip, snapping off its mechanical arm and falling into the molten metal alongside her.

The pit sizzled loudly with Stormy in it. She struggled to find her footing, finding the molten steel to be more like some sort of viscous sand trap than swimming in boiling water. She could feel the searing heat being more than a little toasty for her suit, but the truth was her immense weight was pulling her down and she could find no footing to propel herself out. Bit by bit, she sank into the pit until all she could see was a sea of orange swallowing her up. The last the squad captain saw of her was her outstretched right arm sinking deep into the molten metal with an audible 'plop'.

While trapped inside the pit, lives flashed before Stormy's eyes. Not her own life curiously enough, but other people's. She saw and recognized Mal's hands as if they were her own, used to gesticulate so much. A stupid accident during the production of the U-suit's prototype had left a cut in his head. He thought the wound had been tended to and disinfected fast enough. He had spent years enduring the maddening humming noise, only for him to realize the Utupu hadn't chosen him. But the unity the organism sought would not be denied.

Leo had enjoyed a carefree life until a career-threatening injury put him out of the ring. A scout from Jubilee had offered him to become part of the project, giving him something to do with his otherwise impeccably built physique. The suit had managed to return his confidence to him, augmenting his natural strength to the point his injury didn't matter while he had it on. And all that strength was now hers.

Then came people she wasn't familiar with. Stormy saw beautiful feathers scattering in the air as she looked at Mal from high above. There was feminine giggling in the air and down on the ground a big goofy grin that Stormy swore the hare scientist would never be capable of executing. Memories from a distant time. Happier times.

And the final memory brought her way more distantly into the past, all the way out into a black desert.

"That's like no box I've ever seen. And why is it here? How did it survive the blast?"

It was an exchange between Stormy and some large fellow; an ox she guessed. But she wasn't herself. Her arms were lanky, white-ish and woolly. The ox was going back up the slope, leaving her alone. In the next instant, she was mere feet away from the Utupu; the cube she had assimilated.

(Did not survive blast.)

"Huh?" she heard a male voice resonate.

(Landing zone. Match availability. Awaiting interface.)

"What's going on?! That thing's melting! It's... it's coming for me! It's the void! The void's coming for me! It's the void, the void...!"

Stormy then saw blackness. The void. All those memories bleeding into her own were making her head hurt again. She tried focusing on what was most recent. Her victory over the military. A potential truce. Understanding. Betrayal. Humiliation.

Rage.

And then she began to feel warm again. Hot, in fact. Her body was tingling all over.

"The plan worked..." one of the soldiers lent a small pat on the squad captain's back. "For a second I thought she really was going to punch your skeleton out, sir."

"Yeah... everyone did great. Still can't believe we couldn't put a single dent on those muscles." The captain pressed on his earpiece. "Target's been neutralized, ma'am. Steel's all hardened around her. She ain't going nowhere for a while."

"Excellent," Sanchez seemed to be breathing relief, glad the terror of an uncontrollable threat was over for them. "We'll bring in a team of specialists for... hey, that's mine! Klein?!"

Eugene was holding the lieutenant colonel's earpiece, a look of desperation on his face as he shouted into it. "Did you say the steel's hardened already?"

"My fucking ear...!" the squad captain tore the earpiece out before he went back to talking into it. "Dr. Klein, is that you? Yeah, steel's all hardened. She's frozen in there. Can't move a muscle, right?"

"Oh no. Nononono... what have I done?!" Eugene dropped Sanchez's earpiece to the floor and held his head, pacing back and forth while muttering in terror. Unnerved Sanchez grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him in before slapping him across the cheek.

"Speak in sentences, Klein. What the hell is wrong with you?"

Eugene didn't even get to respond to the pain, he was stammering. "Duh-don't you see?! Molten metal shouldn't be hardening that fast unless the temperature's cool enough. Something... someone is taking away the heat; absorbing it! She's not immobilized at all!"

Sanchez let go of the elephant and hastily swiped her earpiece off the floor, directly shouting into it. "Captain, get everyone out of there NOW."

None of the soldiers in the yard had been expecting any more action. However, when one of them pointed out the frozen metal was beginning to crack and fissure, a ball sank into their collective stomach.

The same fist which had earlier disappeared into the molten metal punched its way out of the hardened pit. It wasn't wearing gloves, and it looked significantly bigger than before. A second fist burst out, followed by its unbelievably thick forearm. Both hands pressed down on the metal, applying so much pressure the very ground surrounding the pit started trembling. Angry roars scattered metallic chunks from the holes the creature trapped below had created.

"Shit... what the heck IS she?!" the squad captain started pacing backwards in sheer fear. He turned to address the remainder of his team, "We're out of options here. Spread out, make for the exits! Go!"

But before any of them could start running, the pit behind the captain burst with a loud crash. A black figure bolted into the air and crashed down violently between the captain and the rest of his team. The creature was so heavy its landing was brutal enough to generate localized tremors that made that destabilized footing.

"Uwah...! Damnit!" the captain grunted, finding himself on his behind and forced to witness the creature that had reemerged to loom over them.

Balancing beastly, overgrown muscles on her haunches, Stormy utterly dominated the view of those she had so casually knocked down with her landing. She had to have been nine feet tall, impossibly tanky physique absolutely in display now that the neoprene had all but melted off. Her fur had gained significant volume, clumps of hair curling in a messy, almost woolly way. The chevron markings under her eyes were now lit up much like the streaks on the U-suit. Her musclebound back was covered in a hardened, flat shell from where dozens of spear-like spikes intimidatingly protruded.

Nails at her feet and hands had grown into talons and claws, razor sharp and enormous on her immense hands. Fangs were always present now, having grown so long and massive they pushed her jaws apart; saber-tooth length canines reaching beyond the bottom of her chin. Her tail had been altered into a long, smooth appendage where the same kind of spikes littering her back had nested all the way down to the tip.

Whereas before no matter how inflated her muscles became she still looked fluffy like the typical wolf, she now sported arms like a gorilla on steroids, biceps so immense they were twice the size of her head even when she wasn't flexing them. Stormy's blue eyes were missing her pupils, now an unsettling sea of white with unfocused blue pools in them.

Stormy turned around with a snort so powerful it blew the five soldiers ahead of her back. When she was facing the squad captain she noticed not a single part of him wasn't shaking. It was almost like the chilling embrace of winter had taken the suddenly mute soldier. A warped voice resonated throughout the compound like a dissonant chorus. "I GAVE YOU A CHOICE!" she shouted, so loud in fact, the soldier was blown back into the pit. But Stormy swiped him off mid-air, dangling him in front of her monstrous fang-riddled muzzle. "NOW I WILL MAKE AN EXAMPLE OUT OF YOU! RRRRRAAAAAGH!"

"Please don't...!" the squad captain had no time to bargain. She didn't let him appeal to her. She was tired of them. All he managed to do was let out a whimper as he was flung into the air with such force he crashed past the ceiling and into the second floor. None of his subordinates were eager to go check on him.

"You will all go to your leader." Stormy turned to the small group of terrified soldiers, "And you'll tell them what you're seeing now. GRRRRAAAAH!" Moving with surprising speed, Stormy was suddenly in front of the observation tower. The soldier manning the station at the top desperately banged on the window as Stormy ripped the very tower off its base and made it crash through the ceiling. Balancing the half cylinder in her undeniable grip, she tore the contiguous floor apart making it rain debris all over the yard. When she was bored, she slammed the tower down with such force it cratered the floor.

Regardless of experience, background, gender or age the soldiers in the yard began to scream for their lives, reduced to sniveling, overwhelmed people whose only wish was to escape the ire they had contributed to unleash. The only reason they were not bloody paste was because she was purposefully missing them, focusing on thrashing the place instead.

"NOW GO! I have some toys outside to play with!" Stormy roared one last time, grunting and crouching before she jumped through the ceilings of the first, second and third floors.

"Cuh-call the major general..." Even Sanchez, who had seen all the action from her comfortable seat on the floor, was having trouble breathing. Eugene had passed out, useless as they came. Sanchez had to repeat her command three times to her paralyzed techie. Those roars. Otherworldly. Demonic. Pure animosity. They weren't dealing with a person anymore.

And she was afraid they had all been partly responsible in unleashing this Hell on Earth.

The military perimeter stood no chance. Stormy descended upon them like a meteorite from outer space. Guns and helmets flew into the air as she intercepted them not to prevent them from shooting, but to give all the others a show of what they were dealing with.

Some of them were arm-slammed into the distance like in a game of baseball. Others were trampled underfoot as she rampaged in the direction of the densest unit packs, pouncing on them like a feral predator. Few of them survived her mind-bending weight.

As she stood up, Stormy realized she couldn't even feel the armor-piercing rounds or even the anti-materiel rounds they were so desperately pumping into her exposed hide anymore. "YOU PATHETIC FOOLS!" she gestured with her right hand at the five soldiers discharging their ammunition, as if pointing at them. Her white hand then blackened, fingers elongating and whipping out like tendrils which snapped around all the firearms and yanked them off the soldiers' hands.

Crunch. She brought the military-grade rifles to her mouth, where they splintered into pieces under the force of her mighty teeth. "This is what I think of your guns!" she whipped her arm down, returning her hand to normal and breaking what remained of the rifles against the cracked floor.

Even when the overwhelmed military brought in the tanks in response to the monster's attack, all she did was hold her arms out as if expecting a hug. The cannons shot with enough firepower to level buildings, but the impact didn't even make Stormy budge. She had to peel the flattened shell off her tits. "Is this ALL you've got?!" she cried out with almost unnatural desperation. Even with all the Utupu coursing through her veins turning its abilities hyper-efficient, there was no weapon so far capable of replicating the necessary force to engage in further improvement. It made the beyond-angry Stormy even more furious.

"USELESS!" she blamed them, rushing the tanks and ramming her fist up from below. Before the tanks could re-aim, she had already crushed one of their cannons and was now holding the turret still. "NNGHHAAA!" Stormy roared, pulling the immense vehicle up with just one arm. As the tank's threads left the ground, the hatch on the top popped open with its driver desperately making their exit.

While Stormy held the one tank up, the other vehicle locked onto her, letting loose a point-blank shot that filled the area with smoke. But when the thick curtain cleared, the unbothered Stormy was using her other hand to twist the turret's cannon backwards. She briefly saw the second pilot escaping but didn't let them get very far before she started using the tank in her grip as a hammer. "Your toys are BORING me!" she yelled, slamming one tank against another with enough force to make both explode in a gigantic ball of fire.

"Nnghh... ahhh... this pisses me off so much!" Stormy held her head, "These gnats have to learn what they get from messing with me. Their better! I need to... bring this terror to where it'll hit them the hardest." She formed a wicked grin as she looked out into the city. Before she could begin jumping towards it however, Stormy started groaning and convulsing. She doubled over, feeling bumps growing on her shoulders before her skin burst with an impressive set of leathery wings erupting at her back.

Hissing at first, Stormy glanced back and spread her new wings, noticing how quickly they were becoming wreathed in freshly grown plumes of white. They didn't feel out of place as she flapped them. Something in her mind was telling her how they worked and how they were meant to be used without using words. It was like muscle memory on muscles she had never used in her life. To Stormy, she suddenly felt like she had flown all of her life.

What remained of the military outfit at the perimeter of the mountain-side lab saw the winged monster take to the skies, heading out into the city with startling velocity.

Coming to a stop two hundred feet in the air, Stormy got a good look at the city she had called her home for so many years from a bird's eye point of view. A beautiful place full of opportunity and she had been looking forwards to moving up in its world. Money now seemed like a distant worry, and tall apartment buildings only served to remind her of her previous self. Poor little old, pathetic Stormy. A runt of a wolf forsaken by Mother Nature and shackled to mediocrity in a society. Had she not signed up for this experiment, where would her life had led to? A slightly more cramped apartment, résumés continuously ending in trash bins, perhaps a new pet fish she couldn't afford to take care of?

No more. It pissed her off just thinking about it. Reality and fantasy were now one and she stood at the apex of the dream. She stood above it all now. All that remained was simply to crush all opposition, anything and everything that could stand in the way of supremacy. It was time to get the people on her side in the most effective way a monster like her could.

She hurtled through the air like a fluffy bullet, wings slicing through the walls of buildings like a hot knife through butter. It took only a second to enter through one side and come out through the air, inner devastation making structural integrity fall. She gave survivors and a fifteen-minute grace period to get out if they could, levitating herself only 50ft. off the streets to allow the masses below look up at her and become aware of her presence.

They pointed. Some laughed, some cried. They all ended realizing this was no stunt when the building she had flown through began to collapse. Half of a tall office building started crumbling down, caught by the floating Stormy who held it up with just one hand.

A hero? Thought the masses. Is it an angel? A savior here to prevent disaster?

No. Stormy convinced them when she punched the incalculable weight above her with such force a storm of debris that used to be the top of a building projected over the highway on the opposite side of the mountains.

And then the screams began. Police sirens had already been getting close. The firemen department was racing around in an attempt to stage rescues. Good, she thought. She needed more witnesses for this chaos. More. All of them. Get the news caster too. She purposefully avoided contact with their approaching choppers.

Darted through two more skyscrapers, Stormy demolished them for the sheer spectacle of it. She knew anybody who hadn't evacuated by now deserved their fate. She was done waiting for idiots.

Special operation teams were frightened of engaging the mysterious flying beast. Qualified snipers from the police whose crack shots had war-veteran level of accuracy found themselves cussing at the wind or soiling themselves when they realized their high-velocity projectiles were less than a mosquito bite on the creature's forehead.

In only half an hour, the entire city's defenses had been systematically shut down by Stormy, who still took pauses for entire minutes just to pose and flex for the cameras. She could see them among the runners. The ones who didn't understand her vision ran away in a panicked wave, but those who could appreciate her existence as something superior, as something undeniable and inexorable, remained with their eyes glued to her physical perfection. She was no demon nor angel. She had become storm of power.

They couldn't think, they citizens mesmerized by Stormy could only feel the sheer power exuding from her. Some dropped to their knees to pray at that force of nature while abler others filmed her, spreading the news of that unholy beast wreaking havoc.

"Just in time..." Stormy let out a dissonant purr as she heard jets zoom overhead. They had sent the air force to engage her. She could see bigger, bulkier tanks with mean looking turrets and missile launchers rolling in. Almost no infantry other than the rescue efforts to evacuate civilians were present now. It was time for fun.

First, she elevated herself to be level with the fighter squadron in the skies. She patiently waited for them to make the first move, which was to lock on to her before letting loose micro-projectiles that burst before they even come close to her. Stormy was surrounded in some sort of red haze, which when in contact with the flames from a missile's thruster ignited into a gargantuan ball of flame.

"Is the target neutralized?" one of the jet pilots passed by the rising tower of hellfire slowly dissipating on its way to the heavens. However, he screamed when his cockpit was invaded by several hundred tons of wolf-beast.

"Is this seat taken, handsome?" Stormy laughed with a maddening cackle, tearing the pilot off his seat before hurling him into the air.

"Aaaaaah!" the pilot found himself spinning in mid-air for several hundred feet over flight altitude before his seat stabilized. He was fortunate the parachute ejected without trouble. He got a good view of his descending craft spiraling downwards with the winged beast still in its cockpit. "What is she doing? Is she really going to crash land with... oh no." He began making desperate gestures at his partner from far away when he saw Stormy climbing out of the cockpit and grabbing the jet by its nose, flapping her wings. "OUT! OUT!" he yelled into the brisk air, waving his arms as hard as he could.

Stormy spun in mid-air, bringing the aircraft around before she let go of it, hurling it in the direction of the other fighter jet. The pilot barely ejected in time before collision.

The mid-air fireworks display was enough to dissuade the rest of the squadron from direct engagement. Stormy gave them a silent wave before returning to ground level.

"COME ON!" she goaded the four tanks blocking all traffic in the streets. She was grinning. Her heart raced. She had never been this excited before in her life. The military stood no chance against her. They would sooner destroy themselves than leave so much as a microscopic dent in her flawlessly over-developed musculature.

To her surprise, that lesson had been delivered in spades already. If they had not been worshipping her already, Stormy's descent had prompted those who had been intending to resist her to drop to their knees, prostrated before her greatness.

The cost of defending themselves against this unstoppable threat had quickly become unbearable. All it had taken was an hour for Stormy to dominate the readily available military force they had on hand. And while she had been eagerly awaiting for the conflict to escalate where she could prove to the entire world that she was beyond what anything civilization had been able to achieve... this was a great start. Social media would take care of the rest, she thought.

"Please spare us."

"Please save us!"

"Don't destroy us, oh mighty Goddess!"

"We'll follow you, no matter what! Please flex those gorgeous muscles!"

Prayers reached Stormy from every cardinal direction. Some were apologetic, other eager, others seeking absolution. "Goddess?" Stormy began to laugh. "Yes. I am like a God. You can hardly fathom, hmm? Yesss... I like this. I like this very much. Hnnngh!" she flexed, muscles exploding out with sheer power. The streets fissured for whole blocks at a time around her, many discarded vehicles falling into the resulting crevices. Many of her worshippers fell to the cold ground and curled into the fetal position, hope leaving them. Meanwhile, others' faith in their new goddess redoubled. She was either a fetish or a divinity to those, perhaps both. And yet to her, they were all the same. Vastly inferior.

And it was high time the whole world learned of that unequivocal truth.

Epilogue

Earth's civilization had not been ready for the kick-started evolution of any of its organisms. Not one planet with any established military could withstand what its scientific component had dubbed, at least in Earth, the 'Utupu', once its program started running.

The organism launched into a potentially desirable yet occupied world would merge with one of its inhabitants, exacerbating their abilities while gradually taking control of them, amplifying their destructive tendencies until they would inevitably endanger and trigger that civilization's defensive response. And once resistance had been quelled, the planet would be ripe for the taking by the organism's designer.

It had tried so hard.

Over days, months, its corruptive influence attempted to take over Stormy's consciousness. But her ego knew no bounds anymore. The memories of Malik Arkey and all of his investigations had led her to discover the true essence of the black sludge that had turned her into the queen of Earth. She had learned, with great ire-awakening disappointment, that less than a queen, she was only meant to be a pawn.

But now she was the dominant side of this union between Earthling and alien. Earth was hers, and no uninvited guest was going to step on her planet without her having something to say about it.

And yet, Stormy didn't prepare. She didn't build up Earth's defenses at all. She let time pass as she leisurely enjoyed her new existence as unquestionable goddess of her home world. Every day, the date when her true benefactors finally made themselves appear before her grew closer. And she knew if they had been the creators of the Utupu...

They would surely bring more with them.

---

The End.