FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Advance warning: this story contains graphic depictions of infection/infestation, violence, and gore, including the destruction of a giant monster's genitals. If you do not wish to see this or it would be illegal for you to view such material, turn back now.

~~~~~~~

Late one afternoon, a massive, kilometers-wide paw came down over an impoverished village.

People screamed. People ran. And then the village was gone.

The paw which had just crushed hundreds of lives was vaguely feline, yet simultaneously artificial and... off. It had no hair - not on the paw, nor indeed anywhere on the entire body to which that paw was connected - and the creature's naked hide reflected a bright shade of orange beneath the waning afternoon sun.

The bottoms of the paws were not leathery so much as plastic-like, yet it was a paradoxically organic sort of plastic - a living tissue that nevertheless would not decay on its own, and scarcely cared about piercings or heavy impacts. The spaces between its toes were bizarrely nonexistent in practice: when the creature put its foot down, the plasticlike padding squished together perfectly to ensure full coverage from the stomp. Nothing smashable survived, and nothing got away by being in between the creature's toes by happenstance.

This was, by all indications, a weapon-grade foot, a marvel of stomping technology... which it in fact was. The creature was as natural as a liter-bottle of cola, and considerably less healthy for those with whom it made contact.

But the creature was certainly more than just its four massive feet. Indeed, there was an awful lot of the creature. Its impossibly huge body ambled across land masses like a wall of mountains on stilts, and even the largest metropolitan areas fell quickly to its paws, giant serpentine head, clubbed tail, and... other implements.

The front paws were curious in particular, being almost handlike in their appearance, and the forelegs that bore them thick and unelegant, leading up to a barrel torso. The belly sagged as if full of fat. A genital sheath and pair of testes hung near the hindquarters, the flesh of these organs was the same disconcertingly bright orange as most other parts. The rest of the flesh of the underside by contrast stood out as a pale, office-wall-like shade of white. It did not look pale, nor beautiful; it looked artificial, as if it had been painted on..

Atop the creature's back, looking almost like a vast turtle's shell, a great bluish-gray dome rested, about a hundred kilometers long and nearly as wide. Within the dome, the outlines of thousands of tall buildings were translucently visible, looming in the glinting light, concealing secrets and smugness and untold gaiety, a stark contrast to the world outside.

The creature stepped onward for its current destination. The village it had just crushed was nothing, not even a thought in its mind. It had slain hundreds merely by happening to put its foot in a particular spot. No, its destination was a place much grander - an advanced civilization neighboring this poor one. The target country came nearer to being deemed a "worthy" opponent by the creature's masters than this present series of hovels, although still so militarily inferior as to be considered irrelevant in the larger scheme of world conquest.

The great beast now approached what looked to it like a mere watering bowl, but was in reality a vast water reserve many kilometers across, maintained by the targeted civilization for the sake of providing water to its populace during emergencies and times of drought. Leaning its head down, it took in a huge gulp of water from the "bowl" and took the contents down to half before swallowing . It then took in another mouthful, all but emptying the supply, and carried that liquid along in its maw as it tromped onward.

The metropolis of the beast's current enemies lay before it, a city spanning hundreds of kilometers across with a massive sky-scraping downtown, full of research, administration, and culture. Hundreds of lasers and advanced rocket weaponry came the creature's way, coming not as warning shots, but with a decisive intent to kill if possible.

Up in within the vast dome on the creature's back, its masters laughed at the attempt. The creature itself did not give so much as disgruntled grunt. It felt no pain, only faint itching as the finest arms of its enemy dealt the most negligible of damage to its limbs and belly. The huge quadrupede moved, with step after step breaking down first walls, then energetic shields, and eventually civilian and commercial dwellings.

The target was the civilization's center of scientific R&D, and neighboring administrative center, with the intent to massacre both government and technical knowledge in one fell swoop. Doing it looked to be all too easy as the creature padded forward, its vast tail whipping back and forth like an angry peninsula, smashing lingering gun placements and knocking aircraft out of the sky.

The distance of many kilometers to the city center closed for the monster like so many steps across a small playground. Footfall after footfall left ruin after ruin, crater after crater. Its knees and thighs brought down skyscrapers... and in less than a minute the beast had arrived, its masters cheering and extolling their own greatness from within the domed metropolis on its back.

That this metropolis existed on the great creature's back was no secret - all civilizations with aerial reconnaissance technology could find it, and even now the defenses of the present target tried in vain to pierce the dome. It was every bit as impact-resistant as the creature's own body, and it would take more force than puny rockets could produce to crack it open.

The metropolis atop the beast had a name by which its own people referred to it, but the rest of the world had taken to calling it "the City of Riders," and the creature which bore it, "The Ridden." No one outside the city knew what life inside it was like. Occasionally victims ran toward the creature, following rumors that the Riders would take mercy on those who willingly surrendered, and would take them up into the dome to escape devastation... but this rumor was every bit as false as it was deadly. The Riders did not begin to care, and were about to demonstrate their only concept of "compassion" for other races in yet another thorough demolition of a society.

The spire of the civilization's governmental R&D rose high, but the Ridden's belly rose higher still. Standing with its thighs held higher than usual and hoisting itself up over the top of the building, the Ridden began executing a very specific set of instructions from its masters: down at its groin, a pair of imposingly studded cocks began to emerge from the beast's enormous sheath.

The Ridden was in no way capable of reproduction, being a creature built as much from synthesis, cybernetics, and cloning as from natural origins... but its genitals had been left in its design as part of an especially sadistic taunting by its creators. The Ridden's twin penes were larger than the greatest monuments of most civilizations, let alone their normal buildings, and rather than allowing the beast to use them for pleasure or procreation, its masters had taught it to use the massive organizes as combat flails, not unlike the way it used its tail.

The dragon-like studs that ringed each length gave each shaft mace-like properties for puncturing through solid walls, often causing a building's structure to crumble over the course of several blows, rather than smashing it all at once. This, its creators knew, provided time for the cretins inside to scream in fear before their inevitable end arrived - to say nothing of how generally insulting it was to be destroyed by something's penis.

And that was exactly what was happening here: like a batter in some bizarrely weaponized sport, the monster gently swiveled its hips, aligning its penes with the tower, leading with the cock on the left side. It took a few slow practice motions to taunt its victims... and then slammed into the tower, gyrating back and forth to bash the structure again and again.

As the upper parts of the skyscraper began to topple, the Ridden began to hunker, spreading its feet to crush more segments of city as it made its way downward, smashing the building down to rubble. Then, again following a specific direction from its masters, it found the opening into the building's basement and began essentially fucking it, thrusting its twin erections erratically into the ground to ruin any other labs down below.

The creature did not linger at this long, nor did it feel any pleasant or unpleasant sensations at the act. Within a minute of the humping beginning, it rose from its position and took a great, roaring leap over downtown to plant both of its front feet all over the government center, which suffered this weight about as well as a biscuit suffers a steamroller - even worse, in fact.

Mayhem continued; there was no other word for it. With every twitch of the beast's muscle fibers came another crashed military air-vehicle, another storefront felled like a twig, another highway permanently closed for repairs that would never be possible or even desired, because there soon would be no one left to want them. The Ridden's feet left tracks across the collapsing civilization that within weeks would look like disturbingly lunar craters if viewed from the air, except in this case the craters had clawlike toeprints to go with them.

It was yet another good day to be among the Riders, the Riders decided. The Seven Admirals in command of the creature raised early glasses in toast - all of them but the one currently in command, anyway, who had his delightful secretary keep it on ice for him till his shift was over.

* * *

Within an hour of further chaos, the administration of the formerly glorious civilization had fallen to shambles, just as planned. Oh, there were contingencies - there were always some contingencies - but no one could pretend they were truly effective. Nothing but a stall, and Riders knew it: not a weapon in this society's whole arsenal could harm their creature-weapon, and that was that! With every passing step the Ridden annihilated more sectors of the civilization, belly-dropping on huge residential districts, and smashing transit systems beneath its uncanny balls and pair of penes, which it erected and un-erected with mechanical ease.

Even the civilian populace of the Riders laughed at their victims, watching footage of the battle for sport on their monitors, following feeds of outward-aiming cameras mounted behind small reinforced domes all 'round the creature's perimeter. Occasionally a straggling enemy aircraft would try to shoot one of these smaller domes, perhaps thinking them a weak point - the fools!

The populace of the City of Riders stayed glued to their seats as their elaborate momentum compensation systems kept the Ridden's various sudden movements from flinging them skyward, and all was happy and well for them - a mere day at the movies, as it were, complete with snacks and off-color commentary.

* * *

Yet in all of this rampaging, no one noticed something very important... literally no one: neither the destroyed, nor the destroyers.

No one noticed the influx of microbial creatures making their way into the Ridden's urogenital system... creatures whose numbers already were multiplying exponentially as they found their way into the more fully organic portions of the creature's flesh.

For at the moment when the Ridden had thrust humiliatingly into the underground of the R&D building, it had unknowingly burst open a concealed vault of bioweapons research, and within that vault had exposed itself to something quite... dangerous.

The research in question had been outlawed by the forward-thinking, relatively peaceful and defensive society years ago, but had gone on quietly underground despite the shift in legality.

The pathogen in question had been designed as a way to subdue the less-advanced neighboring races if diplomatic relations should ever break down so severely that the poor outsides swarmed the perimeter of the city. The disease would have preyed on the poor sanitation available in those poorer areas for maximizing its effectiveness.

The microbes were tiny, flesh-eating, protozoan-like creatures that were attracted to urine and thrived in squalid conditions. If a war ever broke out, the chemical could be unleashed on the unwitting populace to strike fear into them. Of course, the same scientists had also developed a simple systemic antidote that could be administered by syringe into anyone adversely affected in their own population. That antidote and its formula had now been destroyed.

Few among those who even knew about this bioweapon had thought of attacking the Ridden with it, for the simple reason that scarcely anyone believed the Ridden was a sufficiently organic creature for such a weapon to matter. They had no reliable reports of the Ridden ever bleeding real "blood," and had thought it an advanced biochemical robot whose genital design was only a mockery of life, a symbol intended to incite anger and fear in victim civilizations - which, of course, it partially was.

Although the idea of launching the bioweapon had been brought up within the darker corners of the society's government in the time leading up to this no-warning invasion, in the end, it had not been done.

Yet despite the lack of a launch, the creature's left member had come into contact with the pathogen, and troubles for both the Ridden and the Riders were soon to grow, chewing their way along the soft organic parts of his penes like mice after-hours at a buffet.

* * *

On the larger level of things, life seemed quite good for Riders and Ridden alike. The wrecking of the invaded nation's sprawling capital was in full swing, from the swagger of the crushingly huge balls to the tip of the club-like tail.

The metro-industrial sector fell in a hurry, taking only a little more time than other major sectors, as the creature took a moment at its masters' instruction to methodically smash each and every industrial tower using blows from its tail, turning its rump tauntingly high above the victims before delivering each strike. Hundreds of thousands perished from falls and paws, and anarchy reigned in the streets and other pathways below as civilians did their best to run to somewhere, anywhere that might be safe.

But, really, nowhere was.

As the fight wore on, the Ridden did feel a small itch inside its left shaft. This caused it no concern, and for many minutes it did not even attend to the feeling at all, so caught up was it in carrying out the destructive dictations of its masters. Over time the itch grew a bit more intense, and the Ridden began to favor crushing more buildings with its cocks again when not given specific commands to the contrary, as this subtly relieved the itch through the repeated impacts. The itch did not truly go away, however, and it depended on the feeling of its shafts slamming against its foes to keep its limited thought processes off the strange new sensation.

Down at the micro level, a new story was in progress. Free at last, the tiny creatures had begun to feast, carving first into the cloned but still organic tissues of the beast's cavernous urethra. Their multiplication came hard and fast, with their numbers multiplying more than a billion fold since the initial contact, with each newly divided cell feeding eagerly on the treasure-trove of flesh and finding sufficient nutrition even when the partially artificial blood washed over them.

Though contact with the blood did have some toxic interactions with them, it did not kill them well enough to do anything more than strengthen their gene pool, as generation after generation of the organisms began to benefit from subtle selection pressures in favor of resistance to the blood's chemicals.

* * *

Within a few more hours, the creature had inflicted enough ruin to satisfy its masters for the time being. Sunset was approaching, and they guided their Ridden beast to the coast to drink up enough liquid to keep its systems functioning in top condition, and to take a rest drifting on the surface of the ocean.

On its way there, the creature urinated, releasing a two-pronged fountain that covered a tremendous valley in orange piss, flooding out the wreckages of many homes and neighborhoods within. The itching within the left cock felt relieved, and the creature moved on.

The Riders did not particularly favor commencing new attacks at night, for they did as a rule like to spend their evenings at elegant parties. Typically they would either issue their creature a "cleanup" order around this time - an order to go around methodically smashing any lingering structures in a region - or else let it retire early to surface of the sea, its usual place of resting. In this case, the lab's daily report showed that early retirement was preferable for keeping the body's functioning optimal, so they opted for that.

As was typical for this time of day, the creature was left effectively on autopilot while the admirals adjourned for the evening. Leaving the creature to its own devices at a time like this was never a problem, and the office would summon one or all of them back to work if anything of note transpired. All very regular and routine - all very normal!

The itching had faded for now, but the creature soon droned its mind into sleep as it floated along on the water, and deep in the flesh of its left member, hundreds of thousands of problems began gnawing and reproducing their way into prominence once again. The flow of urine had pushed them out in droves, leaving them to die off among lifeless ruins, and giving sections of the urethra a needed reprieve... but they had already chewed deep enough that even that flood of chemical-laden piss could not get all of them, and resurgence was inevitable.

* * *

The next morning, the Ridden's masters directed it to attack several straggling city-states that existed north of the major metropolitan region it had crushed the day prior. Probes showed that some of these places were even bold enough be sending aid to the ruins to the south, and the Riders would not allow that!

The Ridden emerged from its torpor-like "sleep" with that itching feeling back in full swing. This time it not only afflicted the left shaft quite severely, but had also spread faintly to the right one as well. As the creature stepped out onto land, its bladder felt strangely full, and it began to urinate right away, expelling another flood of liquid along the shore and bringing some temporary relief to both shafts again. Unbeknownst to either itself or its masters, it had consumed a larger-than-usual amount of seawater in its sleep.

The urine proceeding from the left shaft contained significant traces of the Ridden's blood-fuel, but it mingled with the coastal sands and waters so quickly that it escaped the notice of the lab and the Admirals alike, despite having cameras pointed on it. Piss was a thing their high society found revolting, and they preferred not to watch it unless it was being used to make a point by aiming the fluid like a cannon at some inferior society. A morning pee? No, that was not worth a look, and would have still been boring even if it was.

The next admiral on duty for giving the commands settled into the tele-psychic ordering chair, and the day's first round of society-crushing carnage began. The Ridden carried out the duties like clockwork, with a steady string of positive reinforcement hitting its half-cybernetic brain as usual, each time it carried out one of its master's commands. More pancaked cities, more screaming villages; it was all very ho-hum to the specific admiral on duty, who had come to regard his time in the chair as one of the most tedious aspects of his job. Go here, stomp that - so boring! There were no fun opponents left anymore! Yet far be it for him to say a word against their usual procedure; this was how the Riders did things, after all.

The microbes in the Ridden's two shafts knew no such thing as boredom, and carried out their biological duty with considerably greater eagerness. Growing gradually more accustomed to the environment of the Ridden's body, they nommed the urethral lining of the left shaft entirely away and began tunneling into the fringes of the meatus, while further numbers of them began expeditions deeper into the genital plumbing. The right shaft also suffered, with its lining also deteriorating into nutrition for the billions of tiny life forms.

This new day still seemed like a good day to be a Rider, and apparently also a good day to be this particular strain of tiny organism, for whom the "all you can eat buffet" nature of the Ridden's cock was clearly only a challenge - and not a limit by any means!

For the Ridden, however, life was not so pleasant. Erect its cocks though it did (even erecting them was starting to feel "weird"), and slam objects with them all that it could, that itching feeling still would not leave, and the masters gave it no uncommanded time for further efforts to fix this.

During every brief lapse of commands the Ridden would take a gulp of water from any convenient source, its limited brain already "hoping" to find some way to pee more often for additional relief of the nuisance, since that was the only action that seemed to offer any help. The itch burned hotter like so much tiny fire, and the Ridden's brain began to long for urination more and more, as if it were a great and righteous dream.

The microbes feasted on, having torn tiny increasingly deep and "bloody" holes in both shafts, and with the expeditions deeper into the creature's body proving interesting and successful. The vasa deferentia were quickly falling host to the tiny freeloaders, as were the testicles - in ways that would no longer be cured by urination. The faintest, tingly itching deep within the Ridden's balls went easily ignored for now, but that burning in the shafts,and the subtle accumulation of drops of blood-fuel within its plumbing... these things were much more frustrating.

* * *

By lunchtime, a dossier arrived at the office of the Seven Admirals in command of the Ridden. The dossier contained information on the location of a small underwater society that their probes had lately discovered. The admirals discussed this, sipping on a coffee-like drink with considerable glee at the thought of crashing the society's party. They had crushed so many underwater civilizations already - how had this one escaped their notice? Perhaps it had been lately rebuilt! The thought made them all laugh. The admiral on duty for directing the Ridden for this task returned to the tele-psychic command booth, where it would guide the creature to its new destination.

* * *

The Ridden's body redirected itself seamlessly in the direction of its new destination. Images of a city under the sea flooded its mind, and it trudged rapidly toward the coast.

While underwater, it had the good pleasure of relieving itself again, ejecting a spray of piss and blood-fuel that faded swiftly into the distance behind it as it moved along. The itch felt... not quite so frustrating? Yet it did not feel "right."

Urged onward, the Ridden went down to say hi to three large domed cities. It greeted each of them with a one-two punch from its bulky, gorilla-like arms. The motion of its fists alone was enough to crack the domes open like cheap apartment windows. Water flooded in, triggering panic, and then the huge chimeric-feline feet crunched through as well. The balls and cocks came next, pressing down against the glass and crunching it under the combined weight of themselves and the creature's flabby gut. At that point it thrust its genitals into the air above the inpouring rush of water, thrusting mockingly at the victim race before swimming away to start this process on the next dome.

The Ridden felt something... unknown.. when it squished its two penes between the dome and its belly. It was a sensation it had never properly felt before, and its mind had no way to understand it, nor did the Riders have any immediate way to detect it. The feeling was something called "pain," a concept to which the Ridden was quite the ingenue.

So, being a beast of guided command, it ignored the feeling and kept on rampaging. At least, it ignored it as best it could. That itch was certainly start to get to be a nuisance, though. It wanted to crush it! Crush! It slammed many buildings and the sides of domes with its members, yet somehow they only felt worse....

Blood-fuel flowed freely from the Ridden's tip as it swam away toward the surface. While the Admirals and lab celebrated another triumph, their horse of victory was having its time leak gradually away....

* * *

The Ridden came out of the sea while its masters were still gloating about the day's triumphs.

It was mid-afternoon, and the Admirals didn't particularly care to start anything new today. Routine analysis from the lab came back indicating that the Ridden had lost a minor amount of blood-fuel at some point during the day's encounters. This was curious, but in no way threatening - probably just a flub-up of their testing instruments - so they decided they would check into it later.

Left largely to its own devices with a "cleanup" order while the admirals chatted amongst each other, the Ridden plodded over to finish off stragglers from the city-states from earlier in the day.

The lab greenlighted this cleanup to continue into the early hours of the night on account of the creature's systems being on uncharacteristically "high" alert and energy, with some advisors attributing this to an insufficient amount of destruction committed today. A scientist tried to point out the correlation between the fuel loss and this alerted state, and pushed for further investigation, but the admirals laughed him out of the room and told him to take the next month off - unpaid. Such ridiculous paranoia was not needed here!

Once the Ridden had cleaned up for a few more hours, it would be free to set out to the surface of the sea again for the night. Once again, the narrative the Riders created for their lives all seemed regular and routine and normal.

Down below, of course, things were not regular at all. The Ridden urinated again, but this time the liquid voided was more blood-fuel than urine. The strange "itching" intensified to its worst heights yet as it relieved itself into a vacant valley (formed by its prior crushing actions), yet the itch still felt somehow better once the urination was over. The itching was still there, but at a lower grade. Peeing was still a net gain.

The creature shrugged its great shoulders and shook its head, feeling very... out of sorts. Not only had it never experienced pain before - it didn't have a terribly varied experiential profile for "discomfort" either. The Riders had purposefully designed it to have a high tolerance for such sensations to begin with, as the creature flinching or reacting to any hypothetical wounds during battle would not fit smoothly with their plans for its usage.

Because of all of this, it did not know what these feelings were, and merely decided to drink more seawater and wait. With the itching slowly but steadily worsening again, it moved on and set about its menial evening-time crushing.

Only one admiral remained on duty in the office after the others left - the laxest of them, who often took evening duty on purpose because it meant he wouldn't have to actively sit in the chair enduring the annoyingly mentally taxing psychic linkage with the Ridden for so long at a stretch. While his compatriots excused themselves early to go party, this lone admiral entertained himself by listening to an audioboo on the job, with the world of the story coming to life in front of him on his Virtual Immersion Overlay glasses. It was a world of primitive tribes where strong men rescued strong and beautiful women from strong and ugly creatures with fur. The greatest technologies available were wooden spears with flinty tips, and fire. Such a simple world - a thing for which he gently and silently pined.

* * *

Ruins, ruins, all around... and nothing to quell the itch!

The Ridden tromped and stomped across the meaningless cityscapes, making sure to convert the places it had missed into flat fields of compressed plastic, metal, and stone. It was a small world after all, and the Ridden's duty was to make it all compact!

Yet, that burning, itchy... gah!

The Ridden could not speak, but it could grumble and rumble and make an agitated hiss, and its snakelike head now did all of these things. Its cocks erected and pulsed almost involuntarily, as this position made the discomfort feel the least... distracting. Yet something in its impulses gave it pause each time it considered to strike buildings with them. When it did strike things by force of habit, both penes felt increasingly... heated. Especially the left one, which just didn't seem to have quite as much oomph to it as usual, and always burned worse after striking something.

But finally the inevitable time came, more than an hour into the process of this cleanup. The Ridden happened upon a particularly tall commercial building, one of the few not yet claimed by its earlier devastations. Its left member ached dreadfully at that moment, the constant fiery sensations from within it reached a fever pitch that prompted the creature to try anything to get them to go away. The Ridden lifted itself above the structure to prepare to strike it with mace-like fury. The pointy ridges of its member throbbed in diseased anticipation; the Ridden swang its hips to the right and then clocked its members directly into the side of the building.

The mighty left member crashed into the targeted building... and it broke.

Oh, the building most assuredly fell to pieces, but that wasn't all in this case. Much like in a collision between two large vessels, both objects crumpled from the impact. The building crunched backward before collapsing like a falling tree, while the left side of the Ridden's shaft splattered open from the force of that strangely ill-resisted blunt trauma. Giant hunks of flesh and the blood-like substance that fueled the creature's actions began to rain down, peppering onto the cityscape below, mere moments before the building itself finished falling.

The extent of the damage was visually shocking: what had formerly seemed like a solid body part and working war-flail now revealed itself to have been feasted upon so harshly that more than sixty percent of the shaft's flesh - the bulk of that from the sturdy "middle" region of the shaft's length" - had simply fallen out in great globs after the impact, carrying blood-fuel along with them. The tip (which was not yet broken purely because the rest of the flesh had absorbed the impact well enough that the shockwave hadn't reached it) began deflating into a pathetic, dangling lump that snaked around to join the thin band of similarly deflating flesh that remained along the shaft's right side. What remained of the upper two thirds of the cock drew inward toward the sheath in a fiery flurry of neural stimulation, while meanwhile the remaining lower third of the shaft throbbed and spurted blood-fuel out of the wound, paradoxically trying its best to remain turgid while the plumbing beyond it kept pouring forth its contents like an upturned water bucket.

The creature's astonished roars boomed so loudly that the ground below trembled in resonant vibration. If the Ridden's mind had never tasted pain before, it was tasting it now, and it found the taste bitter and undesired.

And it ran.

It stampeded toward the seashore, the larger consequences of the impact now apparent: the left cock was cracked sideways into an L-shape, and dripping a well-blended milkshake of blood and tissues and protistan waste products onto the devastated ground as it went. Feeling a sensation surging through its body, a sensation too strong and overpowering, it could only move, move, move, run!

It leaped off the coast and landed roughly in the sea, practically doing a belly-flop. Upon contact with the water's surface, the remainder of the left cock's deteriorated flesh smushed flat against the surface tension and melted away into a liquified, bloody paste. The globules of the infected flesh drifted along like so many oil-bubbles in the water, leaving behind only the tiniest, rapidly-deflating stub of the shaft's base, which continued leaking blood-fuel copiously into the water.

The Ridden roared out in ... terror? Agony? The emotions were not well-differentiated. It swam, it went down, down to the deepest parts of the ocean it could find, and it hid. The monster's mouth opened wide as it swam, and in went a flood of seawater. It swallowed. Then it opened its mouth again. And again. And again. And again. Its brain had concluded, through pure association, that it needed to pee as much as possible.

By this time, the on-duty admiral's psychic voice was trying to wrestle control away from the auto-piloted nincompoop. The voice was angry, and further fueled the Ridden's fear....

* * *

Up in the City of Riders, the early nightlife danced and swiveled in full swing. The utopia of foods and drunken excesses performed its daily song of self-praise, the music and lights proclaiming that they were still there, and would remain there forever till all over races were crushed quite literally beneath their empire's heels.

No one in the general populace questioned why their great war-mount had taken to the ocean so briskly today, although a great many at least noticed. This sudden submerging was not on the schedule, was it? But then a propagandist announced joyfully on a national broadcast that the City was taking an undersea excursion tonight in order to get a different, interesting atmosphere for celebrating their recent victories. The well-trained citizens rejoiced, responding with scarcely more critical thought than the Ridden itself did, despite having brains far more capable of doing so.

Reassured of their ongoing victory, the people felt no threat whatsoever in their present state... yet even as the people partied, the seven Admirals in charge of various aspects of the creature's command were summoned to a late meeting in the Imperator's office building. Quietly they stole away from the partying, grumbling all the way, quite sure that some office worker or other had flubbed up in some ludicrous way that had caused this change of plans.

If only!

* * *

The monster dove further into the water, continuing to gulp greater and greater quantities of seawater as its simplistic brain overemphasized the associations between its urination and the momentary relief from the Great Itch. Nevermind that one of its members had broken half-off and even now bled untold liters of its blood-like sustaining fluids into the water as the Ridden moved along - that strange pain feeling was something else entirely, and something that made even its artificially regulated heart-rate prone to attempting over-acceleration!

The admiral-on-duty's frantic attempts to get the Ridden under control could only do so much. He was one of the weakest-willed of the Seven, and had never been faced with a situation in which the Ridden was not properly pliable for his use. More frustrated and worried about his job security than concerned for the safety of his people, he eventually bit the bullet and sent out the distress call to summon the other admirals back to the office. He needed their guidance, and possibly for one of them to take over the chair.

Time and again the Ridden gulped more of the salty water, until its fat belly pushed outward, its movements growing increasingly awkward and sluggish as a new feeling of fullness overtook it. Despite this, the itching now seemed to worsen at an even worse rate than before, spreading from its remaining shaft further into the flesh of its groin, the tiny creatures within multiplying at an exponential rate and digging deeper into its flesh.

It swam still deeper, finding the lowest areas of the ocean floor. Its eyes detected the flat, hard surfaces below. Despite the present admiral telling it to calm down, the Ridden mostly followed its impulses, and only somewhat more slowly continued to scour the ocean floor... looking for... something.

* * *

Hastily prepared dossiers told the remainder of the Seven all that they needed to know. Photographs from emergency camera-probes assessed the damage to the left-side "phallic flail." Further reports came in from the military's monitoring lab, indicating that the Ridden had in the past half-hour consumed a quantity of seawater that required a ten-digit number to express in their standard metrics for its fluid consumption, when its usual daily intake only required eight.

Reports also came in that the creature's desalination systems seemed to be acting slower than expected in the wake of such an influx of seawater - the systems had never been stress-tested this severely. While the systems were not failing per se, the prognosis was that the monster's blood-salinity would reach toxic levels before the sluggish processing systems could counteract the salts. The organic components of the Ridden's body would be in for severe problems, most notably in terms of circulation and proper functioning of the fleshy portions of its nervous system.

All of these things gave the Seven considerable pause, and filled them worries like they hadn't felt in many years. The Ridden was damage-proof. Its more advanced regenerative systems were almost never called to task because it never needed them. What, then, had done this? What had blown off that hunk of weaponized genital member?

The admiral most proficient at speaking commands to the Ridden's brain swapped into the chair to prepare to communicate, mocking the failure of his comrade and making a rude gesture as the two switched places. The one who had been on duty grumbled to himself and sat down quietly at the conference table.

Meanwhile, the remainder of the Seven set to work on outlining a plan of action: which additional regenerative chemicals would be injected into the Ridden's system to assist with recovering this damage, and what narrative the propagandists would present to explain away any consequences of the damage. They had too much at stake here to risk further harm to the Ridden or the large stain on their reputation that would come up if this got out to the public.

* * *

While the new man-in-command prepared himself for communication, the Ridden finally saw something that made its body react with interest: a massive, yawning crevasse in the ocean floor, a hole wide enough to accommodate one of its giant members.

The Ridden bore down over the hole, pressing its body down against the seafloor nearby. If the Ridden had been an altogether more natural type of creature, its position would have suggested it was getting ready to breed the hole, but this was purely a visual similarity. In fact it was instinctively attempting to "scratch" the itch within his remaining member by thrusting into the crevasse and scraping the shaft along the rocky walls. Though an unpleasant texture to most males, for a creature of the Ridden's size and nigh-invulnerability, it would have been a perfectly fine solution - under normal circumstances.

Now however, the wrongness of the action would have been immediately obvious to anyone who could have seen it, though positioning currently kept the shafts out of sight of any of the body's cameras.

The one-and-a-half members emerged from their sheath, and the monster set to work on scratching... only to get hunks of deeply infected tissue flayed off with each thrust, peeling back the flesh of the member and causing it to bleed with increasing severity. The Ridden, too tiny of mind to understand that this smaller initial hurting sensation was not good, continued thrusting faster and faster until soon the member's flesh had eroded down to two-thirds its normal thickness.

The hunks of flesh chafed off like dandruff, the parasites within sinking helplessly and eventually perishing with it in the high-pressure environment of the sea. Yet, certainly, the damage was done.

The new commander's orders reached the Ridden's mind right around the time the damage from the thrusting was reaching its most severe levels. The admiral's orders were clear: that he must go to the surface slowly and patiently, following a slowly curving path (this to make the citizens of the city feel more like they were in fact on an undersea tour).

The new commander had composed himself enough to ask calmly and confidently, just as the creature was accustomed to hearing. Obedient to a fault, the creature tried to push itself away from the hole, toward the surface... but found it hard to do so.

Something, some conflicting system in his brain, resisted the commands as the pain got worse. His hips continued to thrust, his vestigial pain-response systems grew desperate to end both itch and pain. Yet all he accomplished was further and further damage - damage which showed up on further lab reports that flowed into the Seven's meeting room like prices on a stock ticker.

Frustrated, the admiral repeated his commands, but this time both the wording and tone of it came out a little "differently," which compounded the conflict in the monster's mind. Pushing up off the ocean floor in an attempt to comply, the Ridden became confused about the paths the admiral wanted it to swim, and also felt its instincts demanding more rubbing of shaft against sea-rock.

Confliction was not something the Ridden was at all equipped to deal with - again, mostly because its brain so seldom experienced it: it followed calm and direct commands and encountered little to no complication while performing them. It also never experienced pain. These foreign feelings - pain in its body, and now more frustration in the Admiral... what was it to do?

Its brain, in fact, overloaded. Its coordination slipped; its body tried to emit a roar underwater and only succeeded in blowing huge bubbles. Then it kicked its legs in a frenzy, upended itself, and slammed the dome of the city into the rocky surface of the ocean floor at a speed of whole kilometers per second. Then it slammed the dome against the seafloor again.

The admiral's force of will was coming through the psychic connection as "shouting." The Ridden didn't know how to respond. Reversing its movements suddenly, it seemed at first to right itself, but then paddled erratically until it flipped onto its back via the opposite side, and struck the dome against the seafloor there too. Despite - and partly because of - the admiral's excited and angry efforts, this rampage of confusion only worsened.

Alarms went off in the Admirals' office but not around the city itself (even now the propagandists were dutifully playing the impacts as part of the show). But after twelve high-velocity bounces against the seafloor two things happened near-simultaneously: the nigh-impervious dome around the city finally cracked enough that it burst, causing high-pressure seawater to flood into the city, and the admiral's psychic scolding grew so intense that the Ridden peed itself, bringing some relief to its partly inflated bladder and the mostly-destroyed twig of its remaining cock. The urine dribbled out of the openings of both the destroyed shaft and its flayed counterpart, and the itch didn't feel quite so bad for now. Even the admiral's shouting had suddenly calmed down. The very basic processes of the Ridden's mind wondered: did it do... good?

The seawater pressure ripped the hole in the dome wide open, and that was that.

* * *

Just like that, the tyranny of the RIders had ended - collapsed in a few blinks of an eye.

Many people within the City of Riders didn't even have a chance to comprehend what was going on before their bodies were crushed under the millions of liters of water falling in upon them. A few, like the admirals in their high tower, had the experience of observing the destruction for at least a few moments before it engulfed them as well.

All of the admirals consumed their emergency suicide medications to grant them a painless death, but nothing could stave off the even bitterer pill of watching their pride bring them to ruin. Each died with that feeling etched into his mind - utterly defeated and ashamed.

Meanwhile, down below the waves, the Ridden gulped onward quietly as its Riders got crushed by liquid. It swam aimlessly in circles, touring the depths and periodically smacking into the seafloor as if perhaps that rocky bed were another civilization for the crushing. It broke up stony surfaces with its paddling feet and left deep gashes in the oceanic crust. More and more it drank of the seawater, its systems overloading and its biology responding cluelessly to the infestation, while deep within it the munching microbes only continued to breed and deepen their grip on its system.

Before long - it knew not how long, but it was a matter of two delirious days - the Ridden's body suffered a critical fluid and salinity imbalance. While the excess of salt also slowed the action of the parasites, in this case it inhibited them less than it did the gigantic Ridden, whose mind continued to haze out worse and worse in the absence of commands, the presence of the ongoing pain, and far too much salt in its blood-fuel.

The parasites found their way through its urinary system into the fringes of its vulnerable kidney-like structures - which, bogged down as they already were from processing the saltwater, had no resources to spare for regenerating in response to the flesh-eating menace working their way into the outer tissues.

The parasites feasted, and bit by bit, the Ridden's systems began their agonizing, delirious failure. The feelings were all so strange, and the Ridden could not fathom what to do without the thought-voices of its masters giving their commands. It swam onward like that, pathetically, its shafts and groin eroding down to nothing at all save for some inorganic skeletal components that were included in its design.

By and by its mind faded to black, and the great body came to rest near a deep trench in the seafloor. It never moved again.

* * *

It would be almost a century before a cautious submarine scouting vessel from a neighboring nation would discover the mountainous pile of bleached "bones" and cybernetic parts, mysteriously picked clean - with the failed dome and wreckage of the City of Riders collapsed into rubble off to one side of them.

The stories that would abound thereafter, about "the race that had everything" sinking suddenly into the sea on the back of its champion-monster, would offer hundreds of different possible reasons why the catastrophe occurred: deus ex machina, deliberate and twisted mass-suicide, accidental failure... but the real heroes of the empire's fall would remain ever a mystery, their population wiped out in the inhospitable salinity of the sea.

Story (C) 2013 dolphinsanity and was anonymously commissioned.