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Empire of the Ancient Sands

Part 4 - Blood on the Sand

The mercenary captain wiped his brow as the sun beat down on him like a red-glowing hammer. He was used to it, of course, having plied his trade throughout the African continent for over a decade, but that didn't stop him from sweating like a pig. Well, there was no shame in that, he thought as he took another drink from his canteen, careful to keep it steady as the jeep he was riding rattled over the dunes. They were, after all, deep in the Sahara Desert - at just past noon. Even for Africa, that spelled HOT. With a wistful sigh, he glanced over his shoulder, west towards the cool waters of the White Nile that they left behind several days earlier. Of course, he couldn't see it - it had long-since disappeared behind the swelling dunes.

Fortunately, so had the border, he thought as he glanced north. They were close enough to the Egypt-Sudan border to make him nervous about running into some trigger-happy border-guards, but the dunes were on their side there. Foreigners tended to imagine the desert as an endless, flat expanse where the ground and sky disappeared into the horizon - but the prevailing winds had spent uncounted millenia whipping these sands into piles that could be charitably referred to as mountains. Line of sight was extremely limited - good when you wanted to hide, not so good if you were searching for something.

They were, in fact, searching for something - but fortunately, they had a map AND a guide, so assuming one or both were reasonably precise, they shouldn't have any trouble. With that in mind, he turned around to spot the other jeep, driving on his right and just a bit ahead. Sitting in the back was a tall, statuesque woman wearing black sunglasses - a wise choice in these conditions. She was reading a map while holding up a compass, and occasionally, she'd give the driver's seat in front of her a swift kick on one side or another, adjusting their course. She was a real looker, he thought with a sigh - tell, black-haired and sharp-eyed behind the shades.

She was also quite unapproachable. He'd been able to tell the moment he met her - she had the air of a killer about her. The smell of blood on her hands. Her army fatigues were not an affection, but a warning-sign - as was the compact but powerful handgun she kept in her holster, and the large knife she kept on her belt. Those were the OBVIOUS weapons. She also had a holdout-gun in her left boot, three throwing-knives hidden in various sleeves and pockets, a frag-grenade of American origin, and a locally-produced flash-bang with a funny little dark-red stain on it. The fact that a few of his men had tried to put the moves on her anyway was a tribute to both their courage and their stupidity. The fact that they had all survived was a tribute to her self-control.

He'd spent some time trying to figure out what she was. Ex special-forces, from one of the few nations who let women join such groups? Professional assassin, trained by a criminal organization? Bodyguard? Private security? He couldn't be sure. It was an idle diversion, anyway. All he really NEEDED to know was that she represented his client, and that he had been paid generously to support her in her current endeavor. It was a somewhat unusual job for him and his crew - normally, they hired out to local warlords, criminal kingpins, foreign corporate interests and the like, and usually their task involved conclusively dealing with a troublesome village. Maybe the people had formed a militia to resist their oppressors, maybe they were being a bit too loud-mouthed in asking for help from their supposed government, or maybe they were just asking for better wages. Either way, they'd learn their lesson the hard way...

An unpleasant smile creased his lips as he thought back to those missions. The pay varied depending on who was hiring them - the foreign businessmen always paid a premium, while the local governments tended to be tight-fisted - but no matter what the official wages looked like, he and his men made sure they were well-compensated. Sure, those ratty little settlements rarely had much worth looting, but there always were some women... and girls. Some of his guys maintained a strict 'age-minimum', but most didn't care. A woman was a woman, and if she wasn't, she soon WOULD be. The thought made something hard stir inside his sweaty camo-pants, and he found his eyes slipping towards the beautiful woman in the next jeep over once again. She was probably the only woman for miles around...

No, no, he couldn't think like that. Fun was fun, but business was business. A mercenary lived or died on his rep - attacking a client's direct representative would be disastrous. He needed to keep it in his pants for this mission, and make sure his men did the same. When they were done... well, maybe they'd blow off some steam in the nearest city, spending some of their princely salary on the local whores. But he definitely needed to make sure their next job involved dealing with a village. Even if the pay wasn't great, the fringe-benefits did wonders for a mercenary's quality-of-life.

But for now: Focus on the mission. Squinting, he looked forwards, scanning the sand for irregularities. If the client was right, somewhere near here would be one of the entrances to an old, underground temple-complex, which had been used by a local band of raiders as a base... until they ran afoul of the local military and wound up bleeding out on the sand. Apparently, the bandits had gone down fighting, preventing the local authorities from interrogating them about the location of their hideout or their ill-gotten gains. But the client knew where it was - at least, one of the entrances - and there was something mixed in with their loot that he really wanted...

That was as much as he knew. The woman - who went by the obviously-assumed name of Meretseger - was the only one who knew what, exactly, the object was, or for that matter, who the client was. Personally, he was betting 'crime kingpin' on THAT account, most likely after some particularly valuable item that the raiders had stolen from a shipment of his without knowing it. Well, either way, the guy was apparently too careful to send his right-hand woman in there alone. It wasn't certain if the entire gang had gotten killed - some of them might still be hiding out there, armed and desperate. The authorities were likely also searching for the hideout using whatever resources they had available - and if they found it, they'd impound all the loot as 'evidence'.

The fact that the client had hired him and his heavily-armed crew instead of just bribing the local law into handing the item over to him once they found it suggested to him that whatever it was, it was REALLY valuable. Maybe weapons-grade plutonium, or the formula for a new designer-drug, or a vial containing a genetically-engineered world-ending plague... or an album of his embarrassing childhood photographs, who knew? Either way, it was a cushy job. With any luck, they wouldn't have to shoot anyone at all (and, more importantly, they wouldn't have to get SHOT AT at all), and in addition to the generous up-front payment he'd already collected, him and his crew would get to collect whatever valuables remained in the hideout once Meretseger had secured her target. Of course, that all assumed that they could FIND the place, first.

Just then, as if summoned by his speculations, an exclamation could be heard from the lead jeep, and he glanced over at it to see the guy riding shotgun pointing excitedly forwards. Following the finger, he let his own eyes scan across the featureless sand, and spotted it too. Near one of the rocky outcroppings that poked out of the sands here and there, some contours seemed just a bit too straight to be natural. Bulges in the sand formed a pattern, leaping out at the eye despite the general vagueness of it. Meretseger consulted her map, the compass, and the sky, and nodded quickly. Soon, the wheels of the jeeps threw up showers of sand as they braked, skidding to a halt.

Eager to stretch his legs, the captain jumped out himself, and walked over to take a closer look at the piles of sand they'd spotted. Sure enough, the leeway side of them revealed that they were the stocky stumps of ancient, long-fallen pillars, barely sticking out of the sand. Other mini-dunes were piled up along the edge of broken walls, painting the outline of what had once been a rather nice little temple, and which would probably still hold some fascination for an archaeologist. Meretseger, who had jumped out of the jeeps almost as soon as he had, didn't even stop to look at the remnants of the temple - she was walking towards what had once been the back of the complex, and which was now a wall of sheer rock.

While commanding his men to pile out of the jeeps and check their weapons, he kept an eye on her - and not just because her tight, muscular ass made her desert-worn uniform look a lot better than similar fatigues did on any of his men. She was searching around the base of the cliff, fingers digging through the sand that had piled up there, and by the time his crew were ready, she found what she was looking for. With a triumphant grunt, she pulled up a tarpaulin that had apparently been concealed under several inches of sand, and shoved it aside to reveal the dark entrance of a passage leading sharply down into the bedrock.

Grinning, the captain stomped over to the passage to look down. The harsh sunlight didn't reach very deep, but they'd brought powerful flashlights for the express purpose of doing a spot of underground exploring. The important thing was that the passage was exactly where it was supposed to be, which meant that the mission was going exactly as planned so far. Almost enough to make him paranoid about the other shoe dropping. Shaking his head, he walked away from the mouth of the passage again, and gestured at his crew. "A'right, ya louts, form up! Kowalski, you and your squad will be staying up here to cover the entrance. Get your SAW set up and ready in case of visitors. Mbele, you're up on the ridge - see what can be seen, and don't GET seen, as always..."

He was just getting warmed up with the orders, and his men were starting to move to obey them, when the all-to-familiar sound of gunfire echoed between the dunes. Little explosions of sand around the feet of his crew courteously informed him that the source of the noise was pointed in his general direction, and not loaded with blanks. Shouting every swearword in his significant vocabulary, he pulled his sidearm from his holster and dove for cover... only to realize that cover was in short supply. The old pillars and crumbled walls of the temple were too short to provide any appreciable protection for a grown man, and the desert was otherwise featureless.

Along with the rest of his crew, he piled in behind the jeeps, mashing his back against the moderately bulletproof metal of the side door. There were barely enough room for them all behind the broad, square-bodied vehicles, and as he watched bullets hit the sand directly in front of him, he realized that it was even worse than that. They'd all reacted reflexively, figuring out what direction the shots were coming from based on the sound, and had put the jeeps between them and the bullets... but the ANGLE of the fire was another matter. Making up a few new swearwords, he grabbed the side-view mirror of the jeep, wrenched it off (damn thing had been loose for ages, anyway), and used it to peer over the edge of the vehicle.

Sure enough, there they were - tiny little dots on the top of the nearest dune. Far away, which explained the inaccurate fire... but they had the high ground, which meant that the cover was of limited use. Worse, any return fire he could pour in their direction would be EXCEEDINGLY unlikely to hit, and virtually every combat scenario his brain - now running in the highest gear - could come up with ended poorly for him. Charge at them, you get gunned down before you're halfway there. Pile into the jeeps and flee, you get gunned down before you can get the engine started. More gunfire was sounding, now, and more bullets were hitting around the jeeps. So whoever was shooting at him was getting reinforcements, which presumably meant that the brilliant plan of 'just sit there like a dumbass' would get him gunned down too.

In a sudden moment of clarity, he realized that Meretseger wasn't squeezed up against the jeeps along with his crew, and looked towards the last place he'd seen her... the passage leading into the rock. She was a few feet inside, peering out of the darkness warily. With yards and yards of solid stone above her head, there was no way a bullet would find her in there... in fact, considering the high angle of the attackers, they probably couldn't even SEE her. Smart girl. Smarter than him OR his whole crew, from the looks of it, even if red-hot pliers couldn't have pulled that admission out of him.

A bullet shattered the mirror he was holding up. Blind luck, or had someone with a sniper-rifle joined the party? The thought made him flinch more than the shower of glass-shards, and he fervently wished 7 years of bad luck on whoever had fired that bullet. Then he gritted his teeth and raised his voice enough to be heard by his entire crew, even over the gunfire. "Make a run for the hole in the ground on my mark! Get at least a couple of feet inside! Don't stop for ANYTHING!" He gave the message half a minute to sink in, then he pushed himself away from the jeep. "NOW! RUN!"

The group of mercs sprinted across the open ground, military boots kicking up sand while a shower of bullets did the same. The captain kept expecting the same guy who'd just shattered his mirror to repeat the trick on his head as he ran, but no bullet came, and when he stumbled into the cool shade of the sloped passage with his crew close behind him, he realized that they'd all made it. Meretseger was flattening herself against the wall, letting the sweating, hard-breathing men pass deeper into the shade, while maintaining unceasing vigil in the direction of the attackers. Nodding approvingly, he took a moment to catch his breath, and then looked back over his crew while the sound of rattling assault-rifles died away behind them.

They were, as he had observed, all alive... though not entirely untouched. Kowalski had a bleeding gash on his right arm, where a bullet had grazed him. Several others had similar close calls marring their legs. Jackson had one on his left temple, and looked a bit glassy-eyed from the shock. It didn't matter how many gunfights you'd lived through, you were never really prepared for a lump of raw death to pass you by so close you can actually hear its rhythm thrum through your skull. It had happened to him, too, once, and he sympathetically moved to help the shell-shocked soldier bandage it up while the rest took care of their own wounds with the practiced ease of men who had plenty of scars already.

With nobody shooting at them and no bleeding wounds requiring immediate attention, the group took a moment to look back out of the passage. It looked quiet out there, now - they couldn't see the crest of the dune from where they stood. Their jeeps were still standing there, promising an easy way out. Then, a trail of smoke appeared from above, and one of the jeeps stopped being there. In its place was a ball of smoke and a roaring wall of noise, followed by a cloud of burning, gasoline-soaked shrapnel. The mercenaries flinched and tried to pull further back into the passage, which was already packed with sweaty, heavily-armed bodies like sardines in a can.

The captain gritted his teeth, far beyond swearwords by now. Their attackers had an RPG. No, that was being overly optimistic. They had AT LEAST ONE RPG, of some description. And they didn't want him or his men to leave alive. Thinking quickly, he whistled to draw attention back to him and away from the crater that had been one of their trusty jeeps. "Get out your flashlights! We're going in deeper - if the next one hits at the entrance, I don't want anyone eating shrapnel!" The men quickly obeyed, as they tended to when his orders sent them AWAY from the things trying to kill them, and Meretseger slipped around them to join him at the front of the group.

He nodded at her cautiously, glad to see the professional calm on her face. He wasn't seeing a lot of that on his crew - nor, likely, in a mirror... considering that the last mirror he'd used had eaten a bullet. As they marched deeper into the cool darkness of the tunnel, he remembered something from their earlier discussion about the mission parameters, and his eyes narrowed. "Meretseger... or whatever your name really is... you said this place had multiple entrances, right?" She nodded quickly. "At least five, though this was the only one we knew the location of. The raiders who worked out of this place excavated them specifically so they could flee by a different route if they were ever followed back here."

Her words clearly suggested that she was thinking along the same lines as him, and he looked back at the crew. They looked worried. Getting shot at was nothing new, but being ambushed by someone who brought anti-tank weapons to the party... that was a first. Enough to shake them, especially since this had been a 'combat unlikely' milk-run. "A'right, you louts! We're leaving by another route, so that we do not disturb the gentlemen outside. Al-Saleem! You bring up the back, and leave some Claymore mines facing the entrance as you go - if our visitors want to follow us down, we should ensure that they get a warm welcome... and a good reason to advance SLOWLY." The usually dour Afghan lit up in a broad smile, as always when he was asked to plant explosives. With that taken care of, he turned back towards the dark passage and turned on his own flashlight, advancing forwards with a confident stride... as if he wasn't at all worried that the other exits might turn out to be blocked, or trapped by the previous users, or covered by other ambush-squads... or possibly just an illusory creation of bad intel.

The rough voices of the mercenaries resounded off the stone walls as they descended, the men sharing quips and off-color jokes about their attackers, as men tended to when the danger has passed for the moment, and it was time to build up your courage for the next stage. However, as they got deeper and deeper, the weight of the stone above them seemed to lay heavy on their spirits, and the voices fell to whispers or were silenced altogether. Even knowing that someone had used this place as a hideout not too long ago, it still had the oppressive atmosphere of a tomb, however welcome its shelter might be.

It helped somewhat when, not long after, they ran across some solid evidence of the tunnel's previous use. The walls were marred by marks left by power-tools, indicating that some kind of stone blockade had been removed, and just afterwards, the passage turned into a dark pit - with a couple of rope-ladders hanging from the edge, nailed down by mountain-climber's pitons. Shining their flashlights down, they could see the passage doubling back underneath itself, as steep as ever, and though the captain felt increasingly worried about how DEEP they were getting, there was nothing to do but climb down and continue.

In the cool, silent darkness, it felt like the world of beating sunlight, gunfire and explosions above was very, very far away. He'd kept his ears perked for the characteristic roar of a Claymore mine, which would be the first indication that their attackers were pursuing them into the tunnels, but he'd heard nothing... which could either mean that nobody was pursuing them, or that they were careful enough to spot and disarm the mines as they went. Well, either way, it would slow them down, and that was HOPEFULLY all he needed. Glancing sideways at Meretseger, he wondered if the confident, fearless expression on her face was as fake as the one he wore, or if she really was that sure of her intel with regards to the multiple exits.

He certainly felt his own confidence waver when the passage opened out into a large, high-roofed chamber. It certainly looked like an old temple, all obelisks and hieroglyphs and a big-ass statue of a lion-headed woman sitting on a throne in the center of it all, but there were no signs of habitation, no indication that a group of raiders had been hiding out there - and, more importantly, no exits... at least, no open ones. As his men piled into the chamber behind him, happy just to be able to stretch their arms, away from the narrow passage, numerous beams of light criss-crossed the darkness, and the powerful flashlights easily identified four large squares of black stone set into the walls, of roughly the same dimensions as the passage they'd just emerged from.

"I assume those are the other exits..." he grunted, pointing his own flashlight at one of them. It was jet-black and featureless, except for a large symbol resembling a large cat of some kind, probably a lion, what with the goddess enshrined there having a lion's head. "They don't look very passable, though." Meretseger smiled. It was a strange sight. She'd looked very serious and professional so far. "Don't worry, captain... I've got the key right here." She pulled something out of the breast-pocket of her combat fatigues, and stepped towards the nearest obelisk. The item in her hand glittered as it caught his flashlight's beam, and as she ran her hand down the hieroglyph-covered surface of the obelisk, he was able to identify it. A circle of burnished bronze, with a tiny, golden cobra-head attached to the bottom, rearing up in a way that put him in mind of pharaonic crowns and similar artifacts.

Feeling a sneaking suspicion mix with the professional paranoia his career brought with it, he looked around the chamber again. "Not much sign of any stolen loot around here, incidentally. Where IS that thing you were sent here to get... whatever it is?" A click echoed through the chamber as she pushed the ornate bronze disc into an indent in the obelisk, and she straightened up to look over her shoulder at him. She was smiling even more broadly now, and it wasn't a pleasant sort of smile. He'd seen crazed warlords smile in that way while ordering the destruction of entire villages on a whim. "Oh, it's right here... you just aren't seeing it."

A sudden light-show drove the darkness from the chamber. The hieroglyphics covering the obelisk Meretseger had just been tampering with were lighting up in a rapidly-spreading pattern, glowing various shades of red - all of them evoking unpleasant imagery in his mind. Some were more orange-y, and reminded him of the flames rising from a burning village. The darkest resembled the crust of dried blood that would cover the ground hours after a fight had ended. Most, however, were the exact shade of bright red you saw in freshly-spilled blood. And as the light spread along the rim of the raised, five-sided dais that took up most of the space in the chamber, and rose up to cover the other four obelisks, the entire room seemed to have become a lake of blood and fire.

Stunned by the sudden light, paralyzed by confusion as they tried to make sense of it, he and his men watched the display unfold as they gripped their weapons tight. A powerful light was gathering at the tip of the five obelisks, before turning into five beams of clearly-defined energy, like some kind of sci-fi laser-beams. They met in the center of the room, where the huge statue stood, and cracks started to form in it. Even with his attention caught on this, however, he couldn't help but notice that Meretseger had stepped up on the dais and was walking towards the statue... while pulling off her clothes.

The situation was chaotic, indecipherable, and probably dangerous, but that certain part of the male brain that is dedicated to keeping an eye out for attractive members of the opposite sex was still active, and happily ignored all the weirdness to focus on the impromptu strip-show. Her travel-stained fatigues fell to the ground to reveal subtle, rippling muscles beneath well-tanned skin, with just a hint of womanly curves superimposed on them. Her chest was flat enough that she probably didn't really need the practical sports-bra she was wearing, but it still created a certain thrill when said bra was pulled off and thrown aside. Little more than a handful each, her subdued tits were nonetheless tantalizing hints of feminine softness in a body hardened by harsh training. Her equally-simple, no-frills panties followed immediately after, being kicked away to reveal buttocks that could probably crack walnuts, and though the angle didn't give him the best view, he was fairly certain that she was clean-shaven between her legs... probably for purely hygienic reasons, but still.

However, as the extremely attractive, naked woman stopped and kneeled in front of the statue, things were reaching the point where even she couldn't distract from what was going on. He had always been a practical man, and never paid much attention to religion, except for when it gave someone a reason they believed to be good enough to hire him to kill someone. He believed in his own strength, and the well-maintained gun that hung from his belt... and, though he wouldn't say it out loud, in his men, who fought beside him. Some of them prayed, to several different gods, and he left them to it. But despite all this, he was not ignorant. What he was seeing could, perhaps, be explained with science and reason, but it would require some truly insane logical leaps. On the other hand, the idea that it was MAGIC, and that the giant, lion-headed woman who was currently shaking off a layer of stone was some kind of ancient, Egyptian deity, made for a comparatively simple theory.

She rose from her throne with a roar, fragments of stone bouncing in all directions. She was impossibly tall, yet perfectly proportioned - tall, leggy, muscular, and yet possessing every feminine curve one could possibly dream of. A simple, blood-red dress covered her body, from right above the generous bulge of her breasts to her ankles, but it was slit up the front to let her move. Her head was that of a lioness, golden-furred and with eyes glowing like a dancing flame. She looked magnificent, awe-inspiring, and terrifying. Her jaws were lined with huge fangs that seemed to shimmer in the red light. In her right hand, she held a huge, hook-shaped blade, seemingly wrought from some sort of jet-black stone... a Khopesh, he perceived, having spent enough time stealing, protecting and retrieving valuable Egyptian antiquities to have some baseline knowledge of them.

Around him, he saw his men raising their weapons, in an instinctive reaction to the waves of bloodthirst and terror that seemed to emanate from the giant woman, and while he felt more than a little uncertain that it would do any good, he let his own hand slide down to his belt and pull his trusty, high-caliber handgun from its holster. The lion-headed creature, who still had bits of stone clinging to her skin and dress, noticed the movement immediately, her fiery eyes fixing on them while a broad, predatory grin spread across her leonine face. Then she roared again, a terrifyingly primal sound that made the hardened mercs tremble as the blood froze in their veins.

It was nothing compared to what happened next. A muffled thump resounded through the chamber, and several sets of eyes gravitated towards its source. Up higher on the wall, behind the throne, a large, black slab of stone could be seen - identical to the four set into the side-walls, but larger. Hairline cracks were visible on it. Then, a second later, it exploded outwards, showering the entire chamber with sharp chunks of stone - though, somehow, none of them seemed to land inside the pentagonal area of the raised dais. Standing in the now-open passage was a monster right out of mythology, the kind that could've given the heroes of legend pause. An immense lion, roughly the size of a draft horse, was sticking its head out of the opening. His fur was gleaming like blood-soaked gold in the red light, and his mane was a mass of writhing flame, matching his eyes. His claws and fangs gleamed with the silvery sheen of steel.

Then his immense maw opened, and he answered his mistress' roar with a wave of nearly solid sound. Meretseger, who was the closest mortal to him, rocked back on her heels from the sheer pressure, and would have fallen were she not already kneeling on the ground. Many of the mercenaries stumbled back, forced to lean against the rear wall of the chamber to remain standing. Those that managed to keep their bearing were mostly those who had prior experience on the receiving end of flash-bangs, and thus were accustomed to having to remain functional in the face of such deafening noise. Their weapons quickly rose to draw a bead on the enormous feline, and those who had been thrown back by the roar followed suit as soon as they could manage to get their bearings again.

That was a fatal mistake. The force of the roar had hit the four stone slabs lining the sides of the chamber too, and cracked them. Now, they all shattered outwards as well, and a golden river emptied out on the floor. Golden, feline bodies, moving too swiftly and agilely to count, were dashing out of the dark openings - lionesses, no larger than a normal one, but with golden fur and fire in their eyes, rushing towards the mercenaries with their teeth bared. In a split second, the chamber erupted into pandemonium. Some of the mercs turned their guns on the approaching lions, others continued to aim at the gargantuan one in the back, while a few drew a bead on the giant, lion-headed woman again. All opened fire. The staccato pulse of gunfire echoed in the ancient chamber, deafening anyone who still had any hearing left after the roaring.

The captain had focused his attacks on the onrushing lionesses, considering them the most immediate threat, but the heavy, .50 caliber slugs emerging from the barrel of his gun at well over the speed of sound, simply disappeared in a puff of black smoke when they hit the golden fur of the incoming horde. Out the corner of his eye, he could see that Kowalski had turned his heavy M60 machinegun on the lion-headed woman, and was pouring slugs into her to no more effect. A chilling laughter emerged from the leonine maw, and then the woman loped forwards with the same predatory grace as the four-legged ones.

She moved with inhuman speed, covering the distance in the blink of an eye, and as Kowalski screamed, the hook-bladed sword descended - severing his right hand at the wrist. Crying out in shock and pain, he struggled to keep the heavy M60 steady with his left, but it was a fool's errand. The fact that he'd been able to fire it from a standing position for even a few seconds was a tribute to the tall slav's enormous strength. No human being could've used that weapon one-handed. Nor did he get a chance to try for long, The giantess' free hand speared into his chest, tearing through his muscular abdomen right beneath his rib-cage... and then closing on its lower rim, lifting him into the air by his skeleton as his blood-spattered weapon fell to the ground.

A sharp-fanged maw closed around the throat of the veteran mercenary, and tore it wide open in one, swift bite. Horrified, the captain watched the terrifying, inhuman woman close her muzzle around the gaping wound, drinking the pumping life-blood of the rapidly-dying man with a clearly audible gurgling sound. Then the lionesses were there, tearing into the rest of his crew - and him. Even up close, the bullets did nothing. More screams joined the echoing remnants of Kowalski's - some of them the terrible, rapidly-snuffed screams of the dying, others the drawn-out cries of men consumed by pain and fear.

A heavy, golden-furred body slammed into him, large paws hitting his shoulders and pushing him backwards. Sliding his back down the wall, he managed to avoid having his tailbone broken, but the golden lion was right up in his face, and as he attempted to lift his nearly-empty handgun for one last shot, her jaws closed on his wrist. Looking directly into the unnatural, feline face, he saw intelligence dancing in the fiery eyes... along with feral bloodlust and a dreadful killing intent, but intelligence still. And so, on a sudden impulse, he opened his hand and dropped the gun. As it clattered to the ground, the fangs around his arm stopped squeezing, holding his hand in place, but no longer trying to kill him.

Around him, others had wound up in the same situation. Several of his men had been cut down, their corpses now cooling on the floor as their slayers began to feast on their remains. But other had been disarmed, by luck or by the sudden realization that surrender WAS an option, and were now encircled by the golden beasts with their backs towards the wall. Trying to calm himself, he let his eyes scan for the one who had to be in charge. The woman with the lion-head. The goddess enshrined here. She was standing over Kowalski's corpse, golden muzzle covered in blood, and was chewing on a piece of pale flesh. He couldn't tell where she'd ripped it from, and preferred it that way - but she certainly seemed to be enjoying it.

Noticing his glance, she turned her head to meet his eyes. Hers were orbs of flame, flickering with mirth. She swallowed a chunk of Kowalski, licked her chops, and then cleared her throat. "You're the one in charge, aren'tcha? I can tell. You're a smart one, or maybe just lucky. Those who aren't either are lunch, as you can see." She was talking in a perfectly understandable language. Arabic, with a very familiar eastern-European accent. She was, in fact, talking EXACTLY like Kowalski - same turns of phrase, same word-choices. He stared at her, and her bloody grin widened. "Well, you just sit tight here and try'n make up your mind 'bout how much you really wanna live. I need to go have a chat with that cutey who awakened me. Wouldn't do to keep her waiting after she went to all the trouble."

As she walked away, the lionesses drew in around Kowalski's remains, eager to finish her meal. Meretseger. He looked in her direction with burning eyes. She hadn't moved an inch during any of it. She was still kneeling naked before the now-empty throne. She'd set him up, lured him in. There'd never been any raiders. There were no other exits. The people who'd attacked them at the entrance were probably working with her, tasked with driving them all into this tomb to be sacrificed. He'd been played, and several of his men had paid the price. Feeling deflated, he just leaned against the wall as the lioness in front of him released his wrist and joined her sisters in feasting on the fallen. Trying not to look, he pondered the question that this apparent goddess had posed him. How much DID he want to live, after this?

Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of fire, war and vengeance, walked past Meretseger to seat herself on her throne once more, absently licking the blood from her obsidian Khopesh as she gazed down on the naked woman's kneeling form. "So..." she said finally, slouching on the throne. "You woke me up, AND arranged for some nice entertainment to get my blood pumping after all that sleep. I suppose you expect gratitude for that." Meretseger swallowed. Sekhmet was famously capricious and quick to anger. Talking to her was like walking through a minefield. The fact that the ancient goddess was addressing her in her own language - albeit with a bit of an accent - was also throwing her off balance... but at least she didn't have to try and phrase her reply in ancient Egyptian.

"Not at all, my lady. I have trained and studied for this moment solely so that I might serve you better. The only favor I seek is that of becoming your High Priestess... and your God-Wife." Sekhmet guffawed, leaning forwards in her throne as if to take a closer look. "Ohhhh? Nothing else, eh? Well, well... suppose you DO look the type. Heh. I'm guessing all that 'training and studying' included lessons in the true language, no? Sorry to steal your thunder there." Meretseger hesitated for a moment. The order had told her to show complete respect and submission before the goddess, lest she incur her wrath and suffer a swift, messy death. But her instincts were pulling her in another direction. Sekhmet's tone reminded her of an easygoing officer, the kind with lots of brass but few chips on his shoulder. She'd met people like that before - they expected deference and respect, certainly, but people who bowed and scraped for them tended to just annoy them.

Going with her instincts, she lifted her head and grinned up at the towering goddess. "Oh, don't worry 'bout that. My ancient Egyptian is terrible, anyway - languages aren't my strong suit - so this suits me just fine." The roaring laughter emerging from the terrible, fanged maw of the lion-headed goddess was warm and genuine. "Yeah? I can't stand linguistics, either. 's why I tend to cheat, like I'm doing now." Meretseger quickly nodded, adding her own laughter. "Same here. I threatened my language-teacher with physical violence to get a passing grade." Their chuckles echoed between the walls, while the huge, fire-maned lion looked down at them with feline aloofness, then jumped down from his perch with more grace than a creature that size could possibly possess.

Sekhmet, sensing the gargantuan lion's descent, glanced around the back of her throne to grin at him and wave him over. As he walked up next to her throne and laid down, she ran her fingers through the flickering flames of his mane as if it was normal hair, and the fire obeyed her touch. Looking down at Meretseger again, while continuing to pet the huge lion, she frowned. "Jokes aside, though... I take it you're with the same group who woke up Anubis, Khnum, and my dear sister Hathor?" Meretseger nodded cautiously. There was a strangely wistful note in the rough, yet melodic voice of the goddess.

Sighing, Sekhmet looked up at the ceiling. "Trying to wake up the whole gang, huh? Wanna change the world? It's a nice thought, but it didn't work out so well last time, y'know. There's a reason we all got stuck petrified under the sand like this. Maybe all you're doing is escalating things. Ever think of that?" Meretseger opened her mouth, then shut it again, thinking hard for a few moment while Sekhmet continued to regard her thoughtfully. Then she finally spoke up. "I... don't know about any of that. I'm a soldier, not a philosopher. But I'll tell you three things I know. I know that things can't go on as they are. And I know how to fight. But finally, I also know that I can't fight a whole country all by myself."

Sekhmet nodded somberly, sighing again. "So... you wanna change things, no matter the risk. And my power - the power of the gods - is what you need to pull it off." Then a toothy smile cracked her leonine face again. "All right! That's good enough for me, really. I'm no philosopher either - I just wanna fight. And if I lose... well, heck, I'll be no worse off than before!" Then she leaned forwards again, pink tongue flicking out to wet her lips. "Ah, but if you want me fighting WITH you guys, 'stead of just whenever and however my whims might take me, then I suppose you really DO need to become my High Priestess, and my God-Wife... and that takes some real guts. Think you're really up for it, hmm?" Relieved that she apparently hadn't said something disastrously wrong, Meretseger returned Sekhemt's burning gaze with a defiant look. "I already told ya - I've trained for a long time for this, and I didn't pass ALL those courses through threat of force..."

Laughing loudly, Sekhmet grabbed the armrests of her throne and pushed herself up again, towering over the kneeling woman. "That's the spirit! I'll just have a chat with the rest of the 'guests', then we can get this party started... who are they, anyway?" Meretseger looked over her shoulder at the men, scorn in her eyes. "Mercenaries and soldiers. Killers and rapists. Especially rapists. Anywhere they strike, no woman or girl is left with her virtue intact." Sekhmet's eyes narrowed at that, the fire in her eyes intensifying. The men, most of whom had been staring at the awakened goddess throughout the conversation, flinched. Then her lips creased into an unpleasant smile, and she nodded. "That a fact, huh? Well, that gives me an idea..."

Advancing on the mercenaries with a predatory, loping gait, she growled deeply - and the lionesses who had been chewing their way through the fallen immediately looked up from their grisly feasts and dashed to her side. They rubbed themselves against her legs, purring eagerly - next to the giantess, they looked like ordinary house-cats. Well, rather large, spectacularly golden house-cats with bloody muzzles - so not all THAT ordinary, really. Grinning down at them, she made a dismissive wave, and the big cats instantly obeyed - forming up on either side of her in a firm line, eyes fixed on the men.

Leaning forwards, hands on her hips, Sekhmet looked over the surviving men - nearly 20 sweaty, bedraggled men, most of them sporting some shallow wounds from tangling with the lionesses. Her grin was thoroughly unpleasant, and their captain swallowed nervously. "All right, you lot... you wanna live to see another dawn? Listen up. I'll give you a chance - a challenge, if you will. Fail, and my girls will feast on your corpse. Succeed, and... well, you'll live to see another day, at least." If she didn't before, she certainly had their undivided attention at that point.

Eyes burning, she spat out the next words. "I hear you like to take what you want... well, such is the prerogative of strength. But this time? YOU'RE the ones who got beaten down. And turnabout is fair play, no?" The lionesses were walking slowly forwards as she talked, their eyes fixed on the men, burning with... something other than bloodlust. Sekhmet's smile widened. "My girls here just woke up after a loooong sleep. They've sated their hunger for flesh, but they're still hungry - for a good lay, that is! If you can satisfy their lust, they'll spare you. If you can't... you'll satisfy the OTHER sort of hunger. Get it?"

The mercenary captain blinked rapidly, eyes panning across the animalistic features of the advancing lionesses. "That's... ridiculous." His voice was shaky, but clear, and Sekhmet raised an eyebrow. "You can't seriously expect us to... y'know, 'get it up', under these circumstances!" The lion-headed giantess laughed, then grinned down at him. "Oh, sure I can. I am, after all, the Goddess of War, Fire... and BLOOD!" She made an imperious gesture with her hand, like a two-fingered 'Get up' command, and the mercenaries groaned as one. Every last one of them was suddenly sporting a significant bulge on the front of their fatigues, as the blood rushed into their dicks with sudden intensity.

Sekhmet chuckled and turned around, walking back towards where Meretseger eagerly waited for her, and the lionesses continued to advance, licking their chops. The men exchanged panicked looks for several seconds. Then one of them jumped up and dropped his pants, sweat beading on his forehead. The nearest lioness made a little growl in reply, and jumped forwards while flipping her body around, leaving her rear end facing him. Her tail was in the air, dancing in an almost hypnotic fashion. Grimacing, the mercenary pulled his sweat-stained underwear down as well, letting the bulge beneath leap into the air - a rock-hard erection, whether he wanted it or not. The lioness looked over her shoulder, a definite challenge in her eyes, as the man stepped out of his pants and leveled his cock at the flash of glistening pink visible between her golden thighs.

The other mercenaries exchanged a few more glances, looked at the gleaming fangs of the advancing beasts, and followed suit. Threadbare military fatigues hit the ground, and the men advanced on the eager lionesses with varying degrees of reluctance. The big cats, meanwhile, were clearly all more than ready, turning around as soon as one of the men approached them, often arching their backs and spreading their hind legs to give a good view of the wet slits between them. As rock-hard cocks found their way into the welcoming embrace of the lionesses' pussies, and rough hands gripped furry hips or the base of a tail, the sounds of sex filled the room.

Sekhmet grinned over her shoulder at them as she once again returned to her throne, pulling off her one-piece dress as she walked. The simple, blood-red garment fluttered to the ground, revealing a lithe, muscular physique, a pair of large, yet perky breasts, and a firm pair of buttocks covered by golden fur. Just above them, a slender tail was wrapped around her waist, and freed of the fabric's constraint, it now unfurled to weave sinuously through the air. Meretseger licked her lips as she saw the naked form of her goddess at last - the being she would serve for the rest of her life. Of course, if she screwed up, that might not be all that long.

Slouching down on the throne, Sekhmet pushed her hips forward until her ass rested on the very edge of the throne, and spread her legs wide. Leaving her obsidian blade leaning against the side of the granite seat, she reached down and spread her labia with her fingers, showing the pink interior. "All right, no more distractions. Lemme try those skills of yours. Show me what you've got..." Meretseger nodded, licking her lips nervously, and rose from her kneeling position to close the distance between them. Bending down, she lowered her head between the golden-furred thighs and let her tongue flick out across the wide-open slit between them.

It looked pretty much like a human pussy, she decided - despite the thin layer of golden hair covering the outer labia. Inside, it was all the same, and more importantly, the important stuff was all where it was supposed to be. Vaginal opening, urethral opening, and the thick tissue of the clitoral hood, in that order. Below, a tiny, star-shaped hole surrounded by fur in a darker shade. Yeah, she could work with this. She had, in fact, studied cunnilingus under a skilled teacher, and what she had lacked in talent, she'd compensated for with hard work and dedication.

But where her eyes saw similarities, her tongue reported something different. As the first feathery caresses became deeper, her tongue pushing into the pulsating hole behind the veil of the inner labia, the taste hit her like an electric shock. She'd previously practiced her skills on her teacher, and a few of her fellow students - the taste had varied, but largely been some combination of salty and sweet, and not particularly strong. Now, with her face wedged directly into the moist pinkness, she found something far from her experiences. Sekhmet's love-juices were sharp and zesty, with a flavor and a kick that reminded her of strong, but fine, alcohol. Like a well-aged scotch or an expensive, imported burbon, the juices tingled on her tongue and burned in her throat as she eagerly lapped them up.

Of course, the heady taste only spurred her on, pushing her to surpass the best performance she'd managed in the classroom. Her tongue, as muscular and well-trained as the rest of her, danced tirelessly around the walls of Sekhmet's wet pussy-hole, digging in as deeply as it could possibly manage. Every few minutes, however, she would shift her face further up, letting her tongue tease the tiny opening of the urethra, and the slowly-emerging clit above. Even when she was busy sucking on the main hole, however, her nose provided stimulation up there, rubbing against the clitoral hood as she breathed deeply of the smell. The scent of Sekhmet's pussy. It was wild and dangerous, the musk of a predator in heat. It was everything she'd dreamed of...

The mercenaries were fucking the lionesses with feverish intensity, muscular hips flexing again and again. It was surprising how easy it was, really. The big cats were tall enough that, with a slight spreading of the legs, they were the perfect height for the men. The men, meanwhile, were... well, men. Despite the craziness of the situation, the bestial nature of their partners, and the threat of a messy death hanging over their heads, the testosterone flowing through their veins cared only for one thing - the warm, subtle flesh wrapped around their cocks. Sexual pleasure flooded their systems, and lusty groans could be heard from many of the men who had, only minutes earlier, grimaced at the mere thought of what they had to do.

It wasn't long before some started to climax, moaning and thrusting as they shot their load in the depths of the leonine pussies. But by the blessing - or curse - of Sekhmet, none of them softened in the least afterwards. Affected by this priaptic condition, they could continue to thrust with undiluted ferocity, fear and lust alike whipping them to the limits of their physical performance. But even as some of them started to think "Hey, maybe this won't be so bad after all", a bloody reminder about the balance of power arrived. The first of the mercenaries to leap into the enforced mating, still thrusting into the lioness before him with piston-like strength, reached his second climax... and seconds later, the lioness jumped forwards, letting his shining-wet cock flop out of her pussy.

Then, with practiced ease and agility, she spun around on a single paw, and slashed him across the chest with another. Sharp claws raked across the bulletproof vest he was still wearing, shredding the layered kevlar with ease, leaving painful red marks beneath. He stumbled back, gasping in pain and surprise, and from her throne, Sekhmet laughed. "You guys are starting to bore them! My girls don't like to be bored. You're gonna have to get more creative if you wanna live... oh, and you only get the one warning. You disappoint her a second time, it'll be your throat." Even with Meretseger burrowing her head in the goddess' golden-furred crotch, the fiery eyes of the leonine head remained fixed on the unfolding orgy.

The mercenaries stiffened for a second, causing several lionesses to look over their shoulders and growl warningly as the fucking stopped. Then, they began to change tactics. As mercenaries, they were used to staying flexible and adapting to changing circumstances or new intel, and it wasn't as if they didn't have some ideas about 'creative' approaches. Most of them were heavy consumers of pornography, often really kinky stuff, when they were between the 'good' kind of jobs - and having access to unwilling yet pliable partners as a 'fringe benefit' had led to lots of experimentation. And while none of their interests had much to do with pleasing women, they nonetheless provided a starting-point...

Several of the men licked their fingers and began to test the receptiveness of their feline partners' assholes, finding them surprisingly pliable. After warming up with a bit of digital stretching, the men mopped the nervous sweat off their brows, and began to push their well-lubricated cocks into the tight sphincters of the big cats. The lionesses, fortunately for them, did not seem to mind, and several growled appreciatively as the thick shafts pushed into them. Other men took a different tack, not wanting to risk annoying the lionesses by attempting anal, and so instead tried oral. Trying to ignore the bitter smell of their own cum, they began to lick the well-fucked pussies before them, attacking the sensitive tissue with more enthusiasm than skill. Nonetheless, eager mewls of pleasure could be heard from their partners...

Meretseger's tongue, on the other hand, moved with the skill and grace of a dancer, caressing all the most sensitive parts of Sekhmet's pussy, but never lingering on any one spot long enough for it to begin to lose sensitivity. The goddess was purring with pleasure, fingers gripping the arm-rests of her throne, rhythmically tightening and relaxing. Her back began to arch as she leaned back, a low, throaty roar beginning to rumble out of her throat. Her thighs quivered as she resisted the urge to snap them together and hold the source of the pleasure tight. Finally, the climax hit her, escorted by Meretseger's oral skills, and she threw her head back to shriek in ecstasy.

As the goddess came, a flood of thick, sweet juices hit Meretseger's tongue. The taste was razor-sharp, akin to a potent, high-quality Vodka, but with an underlying, smoky sweetness. Feeling a familiar buzz begin to build in her mind as she lapped it up, she found herself wondering if it was more than just a taste - if perhaps the lady-juices of the Goddess of Fire and Blood really WAS alcoholic. Well, that was hardly a deterrent - she'd drunk her share of men under the table in her time. The lightheaded feeling only served to chase away her remaining nervousness, anyway, allowing her to focus fully on pleasuring her goddess.

However, as soon as Sekhmet had gotten her breath back after the climax, her arched back collapsing back to the throne, Meretseger found her head pulled away from the seeping source of delicious juices by an overlarge hand. The goddess gazed down at her wet face with a broad grin, and then pushed her further back, making her stumble and fall on her ass, surprised at how much her balance had suffered from the lightheadedness. "Well, girl, my compliments to your teacher - you really DO have some skills! But I like to think that I can give as good as I get... so spread 'em and let me have a taste of you."

Of course, Meretseger did not hesitate to obey, laying back on the dusty stone floor and spreading her legs wide enough to qualify as a gymnast's split. She licked her lips, simultaneously aroused and nervous, as the goddess' huge, leonine head descended on her groin, pink tongue flicking from between the sharp fangs. However, just before reaching her pussy, Sekhmet paused, her nostrils vibrating. Then she grinned again. "You know, I completely forgot to ask... but now that I'm really getting your scent... you're a virgin, aren't you?" Meretseger nodded, returning the grin. "Yeah. Never found a man worthy of me. So I thought I'd try a god." The goddess laughed at this, and without warning, buried her head between the muscular thighs before her.

Meretseger shivered as that tongue made contact with her gleaming-wet pussy-mound, the surface as rough as sand-paper. This was a tongue designed for licking the meat off the bones of prey, not for tender kisses. The sheer intensity of the stimulation, as it licked across her labia - not to mention her exposed clit - was downright painful. Just resisting the urge to pull away from the source was a challenge - but Meretseger was well experienced at handling sexual challenges, and simply moaned as the rough treatment woke memories of the things she'd put her pussy through before...

Her father had been a retired Special Forces commando, once a member of the infamous and secretive Unit 999. During his career, he'd found the time to get married and have 3 sons, all of whom he was proud to see follow in his footsteps and join the military. Then, shortly after his retirement from active duty, an unplanned accident had happened - her. With his new job as a close-combat teacher for the military leaving him with more time on his hands than ever before, he doted on his new daughter, lavishing attention on her - and she returned it with the pure love of a child.

However, as years passed and she began to grow up, it became increasingly clear that she would soon blossom into a rare beauty, and her father was tormented by the memories of how he'd regarded such pretty girls during his own youth - as marks, prey, trophies... and indeed, how he'd silently cheered on his older sons' pursuits in similar directions. Terrified of his little girl winding up as a victim of someone just like him, he resolved to train her, harden her... make sure no man would ever lay hands on her without her full approval. Even his sons had not started training as early as her, but her overwhelming love for her father and eagerness to earn his approval drove her to meet and exceed his expectations.

For years she trained, both under her father and under various military acquaintances he'd called in favors from. She learned how to handle a variety of weapons, and how to turn her own body into one. She learned how to ferret out traps, how to set her own, how to conceal herself, and how to spot someone in concealment. She learned how to tell if someone was a potential enemy or a harmless civilian just by the way they held their eyes. By the time she reached her teens and entered the dangerous realm of puberty, her body was a sleek, deadly machine made from tightly-wound whipcord muscles, topped by a mind that automatically assessed everyone she saw for potential dangers. Before she turned 18, she was capable of taking down all three of her older brothers in hand-to-hand combat - at the same time.

It was also at this time that she started to understand WHY her father had pushed her to learn. Her beauty was everything he'd expected - and feared - but her physical condition and fearsome reputation held all but the most foolhardy boys away. Those who DID approach her, unfortunately, were largely the ones who were sufficiently dumb and misogynistic to believe that a 'girl' couldn't really be all THAT dangerous, and lusty enough to let the sight of her well-trained body overrule all the rumors. They confirmed everything her father had warned her about, and usually received a number of broken bones in payment.

Nonetheless, the hormones bubbling up through her teenage body would not be denied. They DEMANDED an outlet. Fortunately, she'd found one. Her training in spotting concealed traps and ambushers proved useful in other contexts too, allowing her to ferret out the hidden porn-stashes of her older brothers, the youngest of which still lived at home when not on base. The colorful magazines provided her with the education her school hadn't, and she began to see... other possibilities. Mastering the art of masturbation came first, usually aided by the aforementioned pornography. For a while, she was able to find sufficient satisfaction in her own fingers to continue holding those lecherous weaklings who called themselves 'men' at arm's length. Later, when she could do so without her parents' notice, she managed to purchase a few simple 'toys' to spice things up.

However, as she grew older and moved away from home, that satisfaction waned. She had the kind of money and independence that many would kill for - her father's connections had set her up with a number of 'low-profile' bodyguarding jobs, usually involving her taking advantage of her gender to slip beneath the notice of potential enemies, posing as the secretary, mistress or 'personal assistant' of various VIP's heading into high-risk meetings or dangerous areas. Potential assassins might map out and plan for all the hulking men with the black suits, dark glasses and plastic earpieces, but they usually did not expect the pretty-face secretary to know 50 different ways to kill a man with her bare hands. It was mostly boring, but profitable, and once or twice she actually got to jump into action - though usually in the kind of circumstances that got quietly swept under the rug and kept far away from the press.

And yet, she was unsatisfied. Her work had put her into contact with a number of tough, well-trained bodyguards, both from official government organizations and private enterprises. She'd hoped to find a 'proper' man, as her father had sometimes put it, amongst them... but no luck. Whatever professionalism they had tended to dissolve when they saw her in the often somewhat revealing clothes that her 'cover' tended to require, and while they no doubt thought their sunglasses concealed it, she could tell they were leering at her - no different from the boys she'd fended off back at school. When one of them worked up the courage to actually ask her out, she always answered the same way - with an invitation to the sparring-ring.

There, each and every one of them fell before her. Some managed to actually put up a decent fight, while others were entirely humiliated. All were turned away after their defeat. Soon, she learned that she'd picked up the nickname of 'Black Sonya' in the protection-community - the black-haired beauty who'd only sleep with the man who could defeat her. She didn't try to disabuse the notion - mostly because part of her really DID want to know the touch of a man, at SOME point, and partially because the challengers this reputation drew to her door offered up some frequently invigorating matches.

And yet, she remained undefeated, and increasingly unsatisfied with the faint orgasms she was managing to give herself with the handful of simple dildos she'd used since she was a teenager. Hoping for new insights, she turned to her original source of 'sexual education' - pornography - and the intervening years had only made it easier. No longer was there any need to obtain colorful magazines. With the rise and spread of the personal computer and the internet, a vast world or pornography was only a few clicks away, and she approached it like an army scout approached an unfamiliar territory.

Vast reams of porn existed out there, but much of it, she easily discarded. A lot of it was just downright unrealistic, and thus useless to her. Much more involved men, and was also discarded. The plentiful lesbian porn she found gave her some pause, but realizing that she was even less likely to find a WOMAN who could match her, she pushed those thoughts away too. Left behind was a fairly limited selection of ideas, some of them obscure and possibly illegal, others somewhat more approachable.

One of the former involved animals. Finding pornography involving such things was difficult and risky, but she took it as a challenge, and ferreted out a variety of images and videos. It was an idea that had never occurred to her before, but now she found herself wondering - if no man or woman could prove her match, maybe she should try to challenge something more formidable. Wrestling with a wolf, a lion, an alligator... the idea caught on with her, and helped her get a bit more out of her masturbation for a while, but ultimately, she had to discard it as impractical. All the REAL images she could find involved domesticated animals - mainly dogs, with some horses and the like thrown into the mix. That much made sense. If she was 'defeated' by a wild animal, its first impulse wouldn't be to mate with her, but probably to kill her - or just to escape.

With that idea thus regretfully pushed aside, she focused on another approach: Dildos. She already had a couple - simple simulacra of male tools, rendered in plastic and rubber. But her research showed her that she'd been too narrow in selecting them. There was an immense wealth of 'toys' out there, showing various shapes, sizes and textures. Some of them were patterned after beasts both real and imagined, others had no origin save the creator's fertile imagination. The vast majority would have to be 'imported' from overseas, but she had plenty of funds at her disposal... and so, it began.

She bought many toys. Several of them proved to be larger than she'd imagined from the images and measurements. Others looked more intimidating than she'd expected, the bumps and ridges seeming somewhat more unpleasant than when it had just been a picture. This, she took as a challenge. Seeing the toys as something to be mastered, like so many other disciplines she'd tried her hands at over the years, she set to work, stretching her pussy open to accommodate large, strangely-shaped toys, gritting her teeth as deep ridges and large nubs pushed against the sensitive tissue.

In this challenge, she found new fulfillment, and an increasing obsession. Driven to seek new possibilities, she began to experiment with anal insertions as well, something she'd ignored earlier despite being aware of it. The difficulty of pushing even her smaller toys past her puckered sphincter, and the pain involved as she tried, only egged her on. They would not defeat her. She knew what her body was capable of, and what degree of pain could be safely ignored. With practice, dedication, and lots of lube, she began to explore the potential of ass-play, even as her pussy stretched around ever-larger toys with ever-greater ease.

And oh yes, she climaxed - frequently and copiously - but only when she was pushing her limits. Once a toy had become easy for her to handle, it seemed to lose the capacity to satisfy her. But at the same time, it was becoming harder and harder to push herself to a new tier in terms of size. This led her to expand her 'training' along two different lines. The first was to train longer and harder - beyond the realm of her free time. A simple harness of metal and leather was easily purchased from the same overseas vendors that provided her with toys. Tightened around her waist and between her legs, it could easily be concealed beneath her panties, even while wearing the usually short skirts of her cover-identities. The harness would then keep a pair of toys - usually right at her current limit in terms of size - safely lodged inside both her holes for the duration of her work-day.

The toys, often covered in nubs and ridges, would shift inside her as she walked, sat, even sparred. They kept her in a state of constantly heightened arousal that she found also served to improve her focus and awareness - and better yet, whenever she had a few moments of privacy, she could get herself a quick-and-dirty orgasm just by gyrating her hips and sticking her hand under her panties to rub her clit. Her employers and colleagues were none the wiser, except in commenting that she seemed more upbeat and energetic these days.

The other line of development, she saved for when she was off duty and could dedicate all her attention to it. It involved using more... 'extreme' toys, usually either custom-made or ordered from sites with disclaimers that they were 'for display purposes only', and that the seller was not accountable for any injuries related to actually trying to use them. Rather than the subtle pliability of silicon and rubber that her usual toys possessed, these were usually made from harder substances - glass, ceramics, even metal. Thick, long and unyielding, they could force open the reluctant flesh of her orifices, pushing aside well-trained muscles that would simply squeeze lesser materials into a new shape.

At the most extreme end of the scale, she had toys that were sculpted and shaped with ridges and spikes - usually metallic, and while the points were always dulled, they certainly didn't feel that way when inside her. Her favorite was an oversized, solid-steel replica of a lion's cock - complete with the countless spines covering the head. She would ride it for hours at a time, reaching several orgasms that straddled the line between pleasure and pain. When her training reached the point where she could fit it fully inside her ass, she was so loathe to remove it, she wound up wearing it to work the next day despite her self-imposed restriction on using her 'extreme' collection for that purpose. The large steel rod barely fit in her ass, pushing against the leather of the harness to escape, and whenever she sat down, she could feel the metallic head pushing harshly against her intestines as her full weight bore down on it.

She spent the day shivering her way through countless mini-orgasms as the tiny metallic barbs on the leonine cockhead dug into her intestines, and had to fend off several colleagues asking if she was alright or maybe had caught a bug of some kind. By the time she got off from work, she was resolute that she'd stick to the rules from now on - it was simply too risky to do anything else. She then spent the next couple of hours masturbating her way to a series of mind-shattering orgasms, which had apparently built up during the day-long state of hyperarousal... and her resolve weakened.

The most extreme toy in her collection was actually a repurposed piece of anarchistic art. A life-sized fist and forearm carved from marble, wearing a black leather biker-glove, complete with metallic rivets. She often rode it hard, gritting her teeth at the sensation of the cold stone fist literally punching her uterus. The next day, she went to work with it strapped into her pussy, and the steel lion-cock once again lodged up her ass. Neither toy could fit its full length inside her, despite all her practice, and they bulged out by more than an inch each. The base of the marble fist was also wide enough that she couldn't entirely close her thighs while it was there. There was no way for her panties to cover something like that - anyone who got a glimpse up her rather short 'hot secretary' skirt would instantly be able to tell that something was up, and she worked with a number of men whose job it was to notice every detail.

Nonetheless, despite the insane risk she was running, she once again evaded discovery. Perhaps the truth was simply too bizarre for anyone to guess - the men had largely written her off as an eternal virgin by now, no doubt. And so, unnoticed, she spent hours sitting on top of the two huge toys, feeling them dig into her sensitive insides with painful force. When she needed to walk around, every step made them shift inside her, grinding against one another through the thin tissue dividing the two orifices. Nevermind mini-orgasms, she had at least five full-on climaxes during the day, and only the physical discipline of her harsh training enabled her to hide them from those around her, biting down on the moans of pleasure.

There was no escape from it, either - no way for her to remove the toys until she got home from work. Even if she slipped into the ladies' room and took them out, she'd have nowhere to hide them - the toys were large and heavy, and there was no way they'd fit in the compact hand-bag she wore as part of her cover. The moment she left home with the harness tightly strapped around the two toys bulging out of her orifices, she'd consigned herself to going through her full 10-hour shift like that. At the end of the day, however, the head of the 'official' security-detail pulled her aside and, with exquisite politeness, suggested that she might want to take a few days off. Like everyone else, he'd noticed her constantly reddened cheeks and occasional shivering, and come to the logical conclusion that she was suffering from a fever and just trying to tough it out instead of staying in bed.

Realizing that she was letting her 'hobby' seriously impact her professional conduct, she took the sick-days... which soon turned into a prolonged sick-leave. She could afford it, after all, and she needed some time to sort herself out. Unfortunately, now that she was left with no schedule to follow, her obsession only worsened, and she spent entire days pounding various oversized toys into her holes, breaking only for biological necessities. She was rubbing herself raw, pushing her genitals beyond endurance... which was, of course, the point. It was only when she was pushing herself that she felt the true pleasure. The self-discipline she'd cultivated through her training crumbled to dust as the flood of endorphins - both from the frequent orgasms and her body's injury-response - swallowed her mind.

The arrival of a new, special-order toy from overseas - a huge, phallic thing covered in black leather and studded with metallic spikes - pushed her over the edge. The monstrous thing could barely fit in her pussy, so large was it, and while hardly razor-sharp, the spikes had not been significantly dulled either - obviously, the one who'd created it had not anticipated that anyone would actually try to USE it. Caught up in the challenge of using such a terrifying toy, and simultaneously practicing to fit her old 'gloved marble fist' toy into her ass, she wallowed in semi-masochistic hedonism for weeks, never leaving her home except to buy food, and even then she was always wearing her harness...

It was in this state that the Order found her. They had tracked her purchases, the steady stream of ever-more-extreme sex-toys, and apparently identified her as a potential convert based on it. They could hardly have come at a better time - she had become increasingly terrified by her inability to control her base urges, feeling helpless for the first time in her life. They offered her answers. They taught her how to indulge herself without losing control. They provided her with training in skills she could never have acquired on her own, and more importantly, they provided her with new challenges.

Under their tutelage, she learned the arts of pleasuring women and men alike. She trained in the discipline of cervixal stretching with all of her old enthusiasm. With their support and equipment, she continued to push the limits of her pussy and ass, stretching the two flexible orifices as far as they would go, and toughening their insides with heavily-textured toys. All with an eye towards the ultimate challenge - to become the lover of a god. She'd never been religious before, but she made the decision of following the faith of the Order until she saw proof that they were wrong. Perhaps more importantly, she'd spent enough time in the company of various political and economic VIP's to know that their agenda was justified. Change was needed. And if they spoke truth, she could earn the power to affect that change with her battered, heavily-stretched, but nonetheless technically virginal pussy.

All of this flashed through her mind as she writhed on the floor, wracked by powerful orgasms courtesy of Sekhmet's painfully-rough tongue. The goddess wasn't relying on that alone, though - several long, slender fingers had already been thrust inside, easily parting her labia and pushing deep inside her. The tongue, meanwhile, was dancing all around the edges, rasping over the sensitive tissue. Her clitoral hood was literally pushed back by the powerful tongue, leaving the tiny, blood-filled nub unprotected before the rough instrument.

The continuous succession of painfully-intense orgasms only ended when Sekhmet lifted her head from between Meretseger's legs with a chuckle. Her fingers made a wet, sucking sound when she pulled them out of the hungry pussy-hole that was so tightly wrapped around them, and she casually licked the long digits as she looked down at the naked mortal before her. "Ya know, girl... I just got a great idea... wait here a sec." Meretseger could only nod, her muscles too shaky to do anything BUT lie there and try to catch her breath, anyway. The goddess jumped agilely to her feet, towering over the prone woman, and sauntered towards the still-ongoing man-on-lioness orgy.

Said orgy had become increasingly desperate AND increasingly perverse in the meantime, helped along by several mercenaries falling over dead with a slit throat. Those lionesses who weren't currently being 'serviced' gathered around the fallen, chewing off the choicer bits while the corpses were still warm... providing plentiful motivation for the survivors. All of them had five painful, bleeding lines painted across their chests by now, the 'warning shot' that was all they got. This, too, pushed them to new heights. The Damocles Sword hanging over their heads pushed many of them to lengths they had never imagined they'd be willing to go to.

By now, a pattern had emerged, for those observant enough to pick up on it. The lionesses enjoyed a good, thorough fucking, certainly - including anal - but they took particular pleasure in humiliating and tormenting the men, lording their life-and-death power over them. As such, most of the survivors were now kneeling behind a lioness with his lips locked around her sphincter, tongue prodding and stimulating her tender anus. The combination of anal pleasure and the men's abject humiliation seemed to pleasure the lionesses greatly.

A few, however, had taken a different, more risky tack. Giving up on vaginal and anal sex, they'd offered their still-hard dicks to the mouth of a lioness. Fortunately for them, they had not replied with their fangs. UNfortunately for them, that just meant that they'd started licking instead - and these lions, too, had sandpaper-rough tongues. The men, unlike Meretseger, hadn't spent years toughening up their genitals, and now writhed in pain as the rough surface brutally caressed their sensitive parts, outright drawing blood in places.

In a way, the LEAST of the humiliations they'd been put through was the pissing. Sometimes, a lioness would just push her love-slave to the ground, down on his back, and seat herself on his face, pressing her moist pussy into his mouth. When hot, strong-smelling piss then started to spray into his mouth, there was no need for verbal communication to make it clear what he was supposed to do, and he would inevitably obey. On this, however, they could justify themselves. A man lost in the desert, desperate to survive, drinking piss? That was an old story. Nothing wrong with that. Granted, these circumstances were a BIT different from the usual stories, but at least they could explain it away to themselves, far easier than the other acts of humiliation and submission they were forced to perform.

Certainly, none of them had much attention to spare on Sekhmet's approach, and thus they did not notice her crouching down to pick up a blood-spattered M60 heavy machinegun. In her hand, the weapon - which was normally mounted on a tripod and operated by two or three soldiers working in concert - looked more like a light submachinegun. Sekhmet grinned, brandishing the weapon as she walked back to Meretseger's side. "So many interesting new weapons... and yet, the same old truths. It seems like men will always build their weapons in phallic shapes. Compensating for something, no doubt." The pleasure-dazed woman just nodded silently, glancing up at the weapon and wondering what Sekhmet intended to do with it.

The goddess posed with the large, heavy weapon in front of her naked crotch, as if to illustrate her point about the phallic nature of weapons... and then started to push it back. She moaned slightly as she ran one hand up and down the barrel, and between her legs, the rear of the weapon seemed to morph, becoming sleeker and more curvy. The morphed stock disappeared between her labia, right up to the point where the bulky box-magazine suspended beneath the weapon stopped it. Holding it in place there with one hand, she continued to pump the other up and down along the barrel, jacking it off... and before Meretseger's eyes, it began to change.

The weather-worn black finish of the weapon shifted, various plates and mechanisms sliding around and changing shape. Even the box-magazine wasn't safe, becoming increasingly rounded. Within half a minute, the classical shape of the old M60 had turned into something completely different - an object from the most fevered dreams of the perverted artists Meretseger had once purchased her toys from. A long, sleek, black-metal cock now rose from Sekhmet's loins, pulsing with life despite its obviously metallic nature. Pulled together from the parts of the gun, it was a mass of overlapping plates and ridged rubber, with large protrusions formed from things like the sights and the handle. Hanging beneath it was a heavy ball-sack that had once been a magazine, gleaming military green.

Sekhmet gave it a few more jerks, as if to check it was working properly, and a few gulps of fragrant gun-oil emerged from the barrel. Grinning, she smeared it across the shaft as she looked down at the awestruck Meretseger. "Well, then, mortal... prepare to have your every orifice invaded! Get on your knees..." Despite her fatigue, she obeyed within seconds, rolling over and pulling herself up on her hands and knees - before, as an afterthought, letting her chest drop down to rest on the floor, and instead using her hands to reach back and pull her muscular buttocks apart. A large, discolored circle around her sphincter marked the profits of her anal training, and as she relaxed the local muscles and pulled harder, the tiny hole swiftly gaped open in a bright-red invitation.

Dropping to her knees behind Meretseger, the lion-headed giantess wasn't about to turn down such an invitation... not that there was much choice with regard to orifices, anyway. The sheer size-difference between the two of them meant that Sekhmet HAD to make her approach at a downwards angle, and reaching the smaller woman's pussy would've been exceedingly awkward like that. So instead, the huge guncock was pushed into Meretseger's eagerly-opened asshole with unyielding force, its harsh ridges of metal and rubber grinding through the well-trained sphincter.

Meretseger groaned as the mix of pain and pleasure washed over her, her ass filled to capacity by hard and heavy metal. Not, in itself, an unfamiliar sensation - but THIS metal was throbbing with life, warm and mobile. The overlapping plates that made up the exterior of the transformed weapon were constantly moving, grinding against each other - and against her. As Sekhmet's large hands closed around her hips, she moved her own arms lest they get in the way, and instead crossed them beneath her head. She had a feeling she'd need all the support she could get.

She wasn't disappointed. When she'd been playing with her collection of increasingly extreme toys, she hadn't held much back - whether she'd been riding something balanced on a chair or attached to a wall with a suction-cup, or thrusting the dildo in and out of one of her holes by hand, she'd made full use of the raw strength her training had afforded her. But as Sekhmet held her hips in an iron grip and began to flex her hips, she learned just how different it was when it was somebody ELSE pushing a long, thick metal rod into her ass. Specifically, a literal giant with inhuman strength. And Sekhmet did not appear to be inclined to hold anything back, either.

The metallic dick pounded her ass like nothing ever had before, stretching her open in every direction, and stimulating the entire internal surface of her already tenderized intestines with its surface of sharp ridges and protruding knobs. The sheer power of the thrusts made her bones rattle, each sending a shockwave of force down through her muscular body. Her well-trained ass managed to absorb nearly all of the huge, metallic shaft, leaving only an inch and a half outside the clutching grip of her sphincter as each thrust thundered home. At that point, the large, heavy ballsack dangling beneath the shaft would swing forwards between her widely-spread legs and impact her pussy with bruising force.

Needless to say, with this rough treatment pushing her body to the limit and beyond, Meretseger climaxed swiftly, powerfully, and repeatedly. Indeed, the orgasmic convulsions were shaking her more than the jackhammer impacts of Sekhmet's metallic guncock. She speed of the thrusts only seemed to increase, whether due to the lubricating gun-oil leaking from between the various plates and sliders of the living mechanism, or due to Meretseger's overstretched ass becoming increasingly accustomed to its girth and thus loosening. Finally, after an indeterminate time-period during which no human could have maintained such a furious pace, Sekhmet reached an orgasm of her own...

Meretseger felt the guncock shake and rattle deep inside her, and then, a hot, metallic sensation. Something hard and pointy was pouring into her, and as they piled up inside her intestines, she could tell exactly what they were - bullets. 7.62 caliber Full Metal Jacket bullets, hot and covered in slippery oil. Fortunately, they weren't emerging from the jerking tool with anywhere near enough speed to perforate her body - just enough to sting a bit as they piled around the bend in her intestine, leaving a heavy mass of metal deep inside her. She could not suppress a giggle at the realization that she would soon be literalizing a popular and colorful figure of speech concerning a particularly hard-assed soldier by 'crapping bullets'. Considering that she'd gone down on the Goddess of War shortly before, one might even argue that she had, indeed, eaten danger.

The giggle turned into a groan of pain, however, as Sekhmet pulled out, the harsh texture of the guncock ripping across her already sore sphincter. She remained in her position, however - face-down, ass-up, with her gaping asshole winking at the ceiling - wondering what the no-nonsense goddess had in store for her next. She didn't have to wonder for long. Manhandling her as easily as if she'd been a child, the lion-headed giantess rolled her over on her back and pushed her legs apart, before covering her body with her own. Holding her body up with just one hand, Sekhmet used the other to guide her mechanical cock towards Meretseger's slightly-open, somewhat-bruised pussy, grinning down at her willing victim as she penetrated her in an old-school missionary position.

It didn't stay that way for long, however. In a swift stroke, Sekhmet fully entered the smaller woman's pussy, her steel cockhead pushing up against a cervix that was nowhere near as tight as it had once been. Her dangling breasts took up all of Meretseger's field of vision, but as they enveloped her head, threatening to smother her, she felt a strong pair of hands slip between her muscular buns and the dusty floor. Then, in a quick rotation, she found herself on top, instinctively pushing herself up and away from the smothering heat of the melon-sized titties. She was now sitting on top of Sekhmet's loins, her legs spread wide to accommodate the size-difference, and the rough-and-ready goddess was grinning up at her from the floor, hands still tightly gripping her hips and buttocks.

Sitting astride the imposing guncock was a thrill all by itself. It was bigger than her pussy could handle, and wider than even her well-trained cervix had any hope of allowing for. As her weight bore down on the point of connection, she could feel it in her womb - the blunt sensation of a significant force pushing against it, and the sharp pain of her cervix attempting and failing to stretch around the intruder. But even that wasn't to be the main thrill of this position. As she leaned forwards to take some of the pressure off her insides, an immense shadow covered her. A vast body stood above hers, radiating heat through its golden-furred chest as treetrunk-thick legs landed in front of her, just above Sekhmet's shoulders.

She'd entirely forgotten about the humongous, draft-horse-sized alpha lion, which had rested quietly next to Sekhmet's vacated throne while his mistress went to work on her. But now, the beast was on top of her, and she felt something thick and hot prodding at her still wide-open asshole. Head swimming with desire, she leaned further forwards, far enough to grip one of Sekhmet's huge tits and start to suck on the rock-hard nipple. This, of course, exposed her rear even further, and gave the giant lion a better angle of entry. Almost instantly, he found his mark, and she felt a broad, conical head push its way past her sphincter. It was riddled with tiny bumps, and she knew all too well what those really were...

It was bigger than the metallic toy-version she'd once been so infatuated with, if somewhat less rigid. If her asshole hadn't just been reamed out by Sekhmet's huge, thick guncock, it would've been a hard fit. More importantly, it was alive - a flesh-and-blood cock, the first-ever to enter her body, and it was attached to the biggest, most powerful predator she had ever seen. The impossible fantasy she had once masturbated to was now reality - and more than that. She was well aware that, had she actually managed to mate with a male lion, she would likely have found it unsatisfying due to his relatively mediocre dick-size - comparatively. This lion, though... he filled her up wonderfully. Stretched her to the limit. And she hadn't even felt the sharp ends of his cock-spurs yet. She could not think of a better way to lose her 'true' virginity...

As he thrust forwards with the powerful hips of a pouncing predator, she felt his thick, hard cock drive into her to the very limit, pushing against the bottom of her ass while his soft bellyfur rubbed against her back. Still impaled on Sekhmet's mechanical cock as well, she had never been so filled, so stretched, even when playing with her most extreme toys. Her fingers and mouth moved mechanically, automatically, as she swooned with pleasure. Pinching, sucking, and lightly biting the nipples. Squeezing, kneading, licking and kissing the soft breasts they were attached to. Sekhmet purred softly in delight, and began to flex her hips, announcing the beginning of the most mind-blowing ride in Meretseger's life.

The lion and the goddess were, unsurprisingly, in perfect sync. From the first thrust, they set a fast, but forceful rhythm, each thrusting in while the other pulled out. When Meretseger felt the bony spines of the huge lion's cockhead scrape across her intestines, as they did whenever the beast pulled back, she was distracted by the Sekhmet's metallic cock once again pushing into her pussy deep enough to kiss her cervix. When that construct of living steel then pulled out, its metallic ridges and knobs pulling at her insides, she could focus only on the feeling of the lion's huge, vividly alive cock pushing into her ass again.

She was lost in the pleasure, overwhelmed. She never wanted it to stop. Even as she continued to tease Sekhmet's nipples with her lips and tongue, a steady stream of ancient prayers of thanks emerged from the corners of her mouth as a mumble. Unclear though the words were, however, they were also precise - the Ancient Egyptian Language-classes she'd suffered through suddenly standing with perfect clarity in her mind. She could think of no other way to convey her gratitude to the goddess who had fulfilled her darkest wishes - not just by letting her live out the fantasy of having sex with a great predator, but also by pushing her body so much further than she'd ever had the courage to push it herself.

Amidst it all, she barely noticed Sekhmet's large, powerful hands gripping her hips, cupping her ass to hold her in place as she was furiously double-penetrated. She did, however, notice the intense, burning pain suddenly radiating from her right buttock - and as she felt it, lifted her head to look past the bulbous breasts before her to the face of her goddess, mouth twisted into an ecstatic smile. She knew what that sensation was, and what it meant. She'd heard of it from those High Priestesses who had already bonded with a god. A mark, a contract, proof that she'd been chosen as God-Wife and High Priestess.

Crying with happiness, she threw herself into the fucking with renewed vigor. Guided by Sekhmet's firm hands, she began to move her hips - down and back, down and back, in the same rhythm as the two of them. Pushing down on Sekhmet's lifting thrusts to let the metallic cock smash into her increasingly frayed cervix with increased force, pushing back against the lion to take his shaft fully within her ass, forcing it to deform as necessary to accommodate it. The pain mattered less than nothing now that she had the favor of a goddess.

Her cervix was torn open by the barrage of blows, splitting messily to let the steel head force its way into her womb. Sinking into a full split at last, her clit touched Sekhmet's. Her intestines were pulled loose from the surrounding connective tissue by the inhuman strength of the great lion's thrusts, forcing a previously-curved portion of her intestines to straighten and causing significant internal bleeding in the process. The thrusts never slowed or paused. Neither did the motion of her hips. Even as hot blood lubricated both of the piston-like intruders, however, Meretseger felt her flesh begin to knit with impossible speed. She was regenerating rapidly, healing injuries that would've normally taken months or years to disappear, in mere seconds. Of course, since the thrusts were continuing apace, her body healed up accordingly - her cervix now wide-open and as much scar-tissue as not, her intestines permanently rearranged in their new, more accommodating shape.

It all seemed so much better now. She could feel the huge lion above her thrusting into her to the root, his furry haunches mashed up against her buttocks. The lingering soreness of her internal injuries magnified every sensation tenfold, ensuring that she felt every thrust, every hip-twist, far more keenly than before. They were so deep inside her, literally filling her beyond capacity, the metallic grooves lining the head of Sekhmet's guncock scraping across the insides of her womb. Abandoning herself to the pleasure, she let all thought flee, surrendering herself entirely into the strong arms of her Goddess, her Mistress, her Wife.

Not too far away, another selection of human/lion pairings were reaching a similar state. Those of the mercenaries who harbored any real reluctance or resistance had already fallen, throats slit, their flesh turned into a feast for the hungry lionesses. Only a handful of the mercenary group remained - they were the ones who had abandoned all resistance, held nothing back. Rather than being conflicted about the pleasure they were deriving from the forced intercourse, they had embraced it, escaped into it. It had been hours by now, but their cocks remained hard, and their balls still churned with sperm - offerings for their leonine mistresses.

They fucked the big cats with long, steady strokes - not a sprint, but a march. Had they not all been hardened soldiers, accustomed to pacing themselves, they would've been exhausted already. Instead, they were still going, hips flexing in a steady rhythm. They could feel the soft warmth, tightly enveloping their cocks. A pussy, an asshole, it did not matter. Their attention was entirely focused on the lionesses themselves, watching for the slight tightening of the shoulders that indicated that they'd grown bored with the current position and required a change. The big cats could not speak, but their intelligence was definitely human-like, and their body-language was surprisingly easy to pick up on. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that those who COULDN'T pick up on that body-language quickly had already been filtered out.

A lifted tail, legs spread: Lick my pussy. Legs together: Lick my asshole. Bent forelegs with an arched back: Fuck my pussy. Bent forelegs with a straight back: Fuck my ass. A backwards step, pushing against the man's chest: Lie down so I can sit on your face. Spinning around with mouth slightly-open: Present your dick to my tongue. Every command was instantly and automatically obeyed. They'd all felt the rasp of a lion's tongue on their tackle by now, rendering them sore and sensitized even beyond the expected wear-and-tear from the hour-long orgy, but they kept going anyway, with feverish intensity.

There were far more of the lionesses than there were of them, by now, and whenever one was satisfied, another took her place, leaving the men not a moment's rest. Most of the lions had a full bladder as they joined in, no doubt replenished by the blood they sucked from the flesh of the fallen, and after each switch-up, it would rarely take long before the man found himself on his back with the lioness planted on his face, using him for a urinal. Sweating heavily from exertion, the men welcomed the bitter liquid as a delightful refreshment, their tongues continuing to caress the leaking pussy as they drank from it. In the name of survival, they had pushed aside their humanity and become willing sex-toys for the lionesses...

Meretseger was barely conscious when Sekhmet and her Totemic Beast finally tired of pounding her holes. Both of them had cum several times - the lion had filled her ass with thick, hot loads of animalistic jizz, while Sekhmet had filled her womb with a heavy, metallic load of oil-slicked bullets. They jingled and shifted inside of her with every thrust of the steel guncock. But, finally, the huge lion stepped back, pulling his huge tool out of her widely-stretched ass, its spined head stained by cum and blood. Then Sekhmet unceremoniously lifted the nearly-catatonic woman off of her metallic cock and threw her aside on the floor.

She landed on her stomach, jostling the wombful of bullets she was carrying, and as she tried to catch her breath there, a pool began to spread between her legs as both of her battered orifices began to empty. A rose-colored mix of blood and cum oozed out of her gaping ass, with the occasional bullet from Sekhmet's earlier anal assault suspended in the slimy mix. Her pussy, meanwhile, simply birthed oily clumps of bullets, usually stuck together by partially-dried blood. The bullets might have been deposited inside her at a rather sedate speed, but there had still been a lot of pointy metallic things getting bounced around inside her for a while - constantly scratching up the insides of her womb, only for it to regenerate just as quickly.

Despite the mixture of numbness and pain spreading out from her entire groin area, she struggled to get back to her knees, pushing aside the orgasmic torpor so that she might attend to her goddess as needed. Looking up, she saw Sekhmet standing over her, rubbing her guncock with one hand while smiling wickedly. "Still with us, are ya? Good. You had your fun with my big buddy here, and now you gotta thank him for it properly. Can't let a divine beast walk around with mortal blood and crap all over his cock, ya know." Immediately, Meretseger switched her gaze to the great lion. He was sitting back on his haunches, his tool still fully-erect and unsheathed - and obviously stained from having spent an hour or more lodged deep in her ass.

Before, she might have at least hesitated if given such a humiliating duty, but no more. Fanaticism burned in her eyes, eliminating all doubt. She knew that she had been chosen by a goddess, and whatever purpose her goddess gave her, she would strive to accomplish it with every fiber of her being. And so, despite her soreness, she crawled to her feet for just long enough to stumble over to the huge lion and then fall to her knees before him. Resting her hands on his golden-furred loins, she bent down over his thick rod with her mouth already open. It was so big, she could hardly imagine how all of it had fit in her ass - certainly, she couldn't take more than just the head into her mouth.

But that was fine - that was where her cleaning tongue was most needed, anyway. The rough, bony bristles that covered the lion's thick cockhead had a reason for existing, after all. Like a natural brush, they would help scrub the remnants of previous matings out, cleaning the insides of the female's pussy - or, in this case, ass - so that he would have a slightly better chance of being the father of whatever cubs she might bear. The bristles had thus worked exactly as designed when they scraped out the contents of her rectum, leaving the lion's cockhead coated in a gooey mix of cum, blood, gun-oil and ass-slime... along with, no doubt, the occasional trace of something worse.

The rank taste covered her tongue as she closed her lips around the base of the head and began to suck intensely, licking up the slimy mix. As her spit loosened it, she swallowed, and gagged slightly as the thick gunk slid down her throat. It took mere seconds, however, and once the worst of it was gone, she could focus on a more detailed cleaning. Her tongue pried the bristles apart, bringing out tiny traces stuck behind them as she explored the large cockhead in exquisite detail. She rotated her head frequently to bring new areas of the surface within her tongue's reach, carefully keeping track of what areas she had and hadn't gotten to. The top was the hardest, requiring her to pull her head back far enough for the spurs to dig into her lips from within, just so she could push her tongue up and over.

As she worked, she could vaguely hear a slurping, sucking sound (other than the one she was making herself, that is) behind her, followed by a series of grinding, metallic noises. Curious and strangely familiar, but irrelevant to the task at hand, she determined as she continued. With a gasp, she opened her mouth wide and let the bristled cockhead escape from between her lips, not gleaming with spit and nothing else. She took a moment to admire her work before letting her eyes pan down to the thick, hard shaft - she still needed to clean that, after all. But before she could, a huge paw landed on the back of her head and pushed her forwards again.

She instinctively opened her mouth as her head was thrust down towards the huge-lion cock, and as the cockhead pushed past her lips again, she became aware of a deep, rumbling noise from above. In her eagerness to clean the cock as ordered, she'd all but ignored the being it was attached to. The paw now holding her down with the strength of a steel vise, however, had a message that was hard to miss, and she quickly obeyed, resuming the tongue-caress from before. She could hear Sekhmet chuckling in amusement behind her, and took it as an encouragement, bobbing her head up and down as much as the heavy paw on her neck would allow.

It didn't take long before she got a reaction - the big lion had obviously already been close by the time she finished cleaning his cockhead. The pressure on the back of her head redoubled as the lion growled, and she found her head forced far enough down that the conical tip of the jerking tool was forced partially into her throat, its sheer size creating a firm seal. Cum flooded her gullet, rushing towards her belly with enough force that she didn't need to worry about swallowing fast enough - her throat was simply pushed open by the pressure. Caught between a paw and a hard place, she could only wait passively for the huge beast to finish emptying his balls down her gullet, and hope that he did so before her blocked airways made her pass out from oxygen deprivation.

The edges of her vision had, indeed, started to grow dark when the flow of thick cum turned into scattered spurts, and then ended entirely. As the powerful paw on her neck disappeared, she quickly lifted her head from the broad cockhead - ignoring the minor discomfort of the bristles raking across her palate and gums - to take several deep, healing breaths. The moment she no longer felt like she was about to suffocate, however, she dove down there again, tongue emerging from her mouth to lick the very tip of the still-hard shaft. There was something she wanted to confirm. The whole load had bypassed her taste-buds entirely, and for the moment, her only perception of it was a sense of heavy warmth in the pit of her stomach.

However, significant traces of it remained stuck to the cockhead, dripping from the urethra, and she eagerly licked them up to sample their flavor. Rich and thick, salty and remarkably savory... as she had hoped, without the taint of her own ass mixed into it, the great lion's cum was delicious. She licked up every trace she could find, and passionately kissed the tip of his cock to suck the last remnants clear out of his urethra. Only when she was sure there was nothing more left did she stop, and even then, it was only to lick her lips and relish the taste for a minute before resuming her original duty.

His shaft was nowhere near as filthy as his cockhead had been, being largely smooth - but it had still been coated in a mix of sweat and ass-slime during the lengthy anal assault she'd suffered through, and here and there were traces of cum that had slipped past the broader head. Most of it had started to dry by now, but her wet tongue quickly dissolved it as she licked her way down the shaft in a spiral pattern. She paid little attention to the taste - compared to the gunk that had stuck to his bristled cockhead, it wasn't all THAT bad... in fact, it compared favorably to some of the MRE's she'd eaten during her training. Besides, this was duty- enjoyment, or lack of same, did not enter into it.

Once she reached the base of the huge cock, she carefully cleaned the edge of his sheath. It tasted of musk and old sweat. Then, just for a final flourish, she gave his testicles - sticking out of his fur as a slight, skin-colored bulge - a perfunctory but thorough tongue-cleaning as well, rinsing off the sweat that had accumulated there while he'd fucked her. Only then did she lift her head to regard the sparkly-clean tool in its entirety, satisfied that she'd done the best job she possibly could. She looked up to see Sekhmet smiling down at her with a bemused expression. "Well, you're certainly thorough, I'll give you that... heh. Guess it's to be expected of someone who've received my mark."

Remembering the searing pain on her right ass-cheek during the earlier session, Meretseger craned her head to look down her back. It was upside down, and the angle was poor, but she recognized it anyway from her studies - a stylized representation of a hooked blade, a Khopesh, favored weapon of the old Egyptians and thus a symbol of their war-goddess, Sekhmet. It was burned indelibly into her flesh, a mark of the goddess' favor. As she turned her head again, she suddenly realized that the metallic cock that had hung heavy between Sekhmet's legs was gone - leaving an ordinary-looking, is slightly-gaping and dripping-wet, pussy behind. The goddess noticed her glance and grinned again. "Looking for something? Heh. Tell you what - you can keep it, as a badge of office or whatever..." She pointed towards the throne, and Meretseger quickly followed the finger to spot... a somewhat gooey-looking but otherwise ordinary M-60 Heavy Machinegun leaning against the granite seat.

"It's still got a bit of me in it, ya know... so it'll never jam or run outta ammo, it's indestructible, and no armor will stop it. Might come in handy, I figured." Sekhmet's offhanded statement was punctuated by a shrug, while Meretseger's eyes widened. The soldier in her immediately saw the enormous advantage of such a weapon - after all, the main problem with heavy machineguns were their tendency towards mechanical failure, enormous ammo-consumption, and the tendency for the barrel to overheat and melt into slag with sustained use. Removing those issues would turn even a fairly old-model machinegun into a truly terrifying weapon, and if one interpreted Sekhmet's statement about armor to mean that it could shoot through armored vehicles, as she suspected, then... the mind boggled.

Such militaristic concerns were best saved for later, however. and she quickly refocused her attention on her goddess, who was watching her lionesses' continued toying with the beleaguered mercenaries with an air of detached amusement. Only a couple of the mercs were still moving - the rest of the survivors had simply collapsed, muscles quivering from overexertion, either writhing in the floor from the accumulated pain, or just plain passed out. Their cocks, however, still stood hard and stiff, despite being literally worn ragged and - in several cases - bleeding from places where the rasping tongues had cut a bit too deep. The lionesses, too, seemed to have worn themselves out somewhat, and many of them were sleeping peacefully on the floor, tails twitching.

Looking back at Meretseger, the goddess smiled, a hint of wistfulness in the feline grin. "Well, it seems like the party's starting to wind down... but there's something we need to get out of the way first. If you've talked to whatever lucky gal woke up Anubis, you might have an inkling as to what..." Meretseger quickly nodded. She had, in fact, had a chance to speak with the High Priestess of Anubis - Iset - before embarking on her own attempt to be accepted as a God-Wife. "Another mark, for the lesser kindred of your Totemic Beasts. A scent-marking. Right?"

Sekhmet licked her lips, stepping closer and spreading her legs as she reached down one hand to spread the fleshy labia with two slender fingers. "That's right... my little cousins may not be as plentiful in this age as they were in the good old days, but they're still around, and I suspect their roars still awaken icy terror in the hands of men. My scent will mark you, so that they might know you..." Meretseger, knowing what came next, had already positioned herself on her knees between the goddess' legs, her head upturned and her mouth open. Sekhmet moaned slightly and thrust her hips forwards, a golden stream emerging just above her wet pussy-hole, splashing down over the waiting woman.

The sharp-scented piss washed over Meretseger's breasts, hair and belly before the stream stabilized on her face. It soaked into the pores of her skin, filling her nose with is bitter smell and burning in her eyes - but she stubbornly refused to close them, and instead tried to move her head so that the stream was directed towards her open mouth. As it covered her tongue, flowing down across it towards her eagerly-swallowing throat, she carefully sampled the flavor of her goddess, relishing it as a sign of closeness. It was strong and bitter and salty, with strong undertones of predatory musk, and just a hint of the same potent alcohol she'd tasted in the goddess' pussy-juices.

Eager for more, she pushed herself up on her knees and thrust her head in between Sekhmet's thighs, her hands rising to grip the golden-furred hips for stability. Her lips closed around the spurting urethra, ensuring that the golden flow was directed down her throat and nowhere else... and, as an added bonus, giving her a fresh taste of the potent juices flowing beneath. Her neck bulged as she swallowed swiftly and repeatedly, sending mouthful after mouthful of warm piss into her already-full belly. She could feel a warmth spreading from there, radiating out through her internal organs, and all the way to her already-flushed skin. This, she knew, was the second mark - invisible to mere humans, but a bright beacon to animals... particularly those who were closely related to Sekhmet. Lions, of course, but probably tigers, panthers, jaguars, cheetahs and all the rest, too. Their willingness to aid her might have fairly little tactical usefulness, but as a weapon of psychological warfare, it would be devastating.

Sekhmet purred quietly, putting her free hand behind Meretseger's head, pushing her forwards, egging her on. She didn't need much encouragement. Her tongue danced around the top edge of the goddess' pussy, even as the piss continued to wash over it. As the flow began to slow, it rose to caress the erect, fully-exposed clit right above the spurting urethra, drawing delighted moans from Sekhmet. Even when the last few drops of warm urine had emerged and made their way down her throat, Meretseger did not relent - she merely broadened her area of stimulation, roaming lower, burying her by-now well-worn tongue directly in the wet pussy-hole beneath. There was a faint taste of gun-oil there, but it was easily concealed by the tongue-numbing flavor of strong alcohol.

She managed to bring the standing goddess to one more orgasm - it was easier this time, presumably due to the lion-headed giantess being significantly sensitized by all that had come before. She would have happily carried on there, but the hand that had held her gently in place between those luscious thighs suddenly pulled her back by the hair instead. Sekhmet was smiling down at her, but there was an edge of steel in her voice. "Well, now, I'm afraid I'll have to reel back your enthusiasm a bit at this point... even though I might want to, I can't stay here all day. But know that you have pleased me, my Priestess, my God-wife... repeatedly, even." The deep, growling voice softened towards the end, and carried a mischievous note as she added the last bit to the formulaic title.

Meretseger, recognizing the finality of the declaration, nodded and answered in kind. "I serve you always, my Goddess, my Wife, my Love. In any way I can, whenever it may please you..." Sekhmet chuckled and nodded, then surprised the now-standing woman by bending down over her, grabbing her by the hair to turn her face upwards, and planting a kiss on her lips. The golden fur covering the leonine head tickled her nose, and a rough tongue pushed into her mouth to prod and wrestle her own. The deep, intimate kiss lingered for several minutes before Sekhmet straightened again, breaking the contact and releasing Meretseger's hair from her firm grasp again. Then, without further ceremony, she turned around and whistled sharply.

The lionesses, most of whom were resting on the floor - sated in every way - immediately perked up their ears and jumped to their paws. Only one was still availing herself of the services of the mercenaries - specifically, the last of the men to remain conscious, if just barely - and she immediately walked out of his reach to leave his still-hard dick dangling wet and useless before him. He stared after the great, golden cat with a perplexed look in his empty eyes - then, without a sound, he simply keeled over and started snoring. Sekhmet glanced at the slightly bow-legged lioness, noting the satisfied grin on her leonine face, and shook her head with a bemused chuckle. Then she gestured for the lioness to come closer, and took a long step towards where the mercenaries had fallen.

As the lioness paused next to her, Sekhmet bent down and picked up a large, high-caliber handgun - at least a .44, maybe even a .50. Meretseger's practiced eyes identified it as an old-model Desert Eagle with a long-barrel modification. In the hands of a man, it would be a monstrous and heavy weapon, with enough stopping-power to bring down a bear and enough recoil to break both wrists on an untrained shooter. (Or several other bones on anyone retarded enough to attempt firing it one-handed.) In Sekhmet's hand, however, it looked like a child's toy. Fortunately, she didn't seem to have any intent of firing it - her finger likely wouldn't have been able to fit within the trigger-guard. Instead, she squatted behind the lioness and began to work the hilt of the gun into the big cat's wet, well-reamed pussy, while running her free hand up and down the barrel.

The lioness purred with enjoyment, and as Meretseger watched, the gun began to warp and shift, brushed metal bending and sliding over itself. The barrel thickened and developed a slight curve, the ridges along the side became wider and deeper, and the smooth finish instead turned into a scale-like arrangement of overlapping plates. The base bulged out as well, widening and becoming rounder, hiding the delicate lines of the big cat's pussy behind it. When Sekhmet removed her hands and rose to her full height again, the lioness had a big, thick, heavily-ribbed metallic cock swinging between her legs, complete with the same kind of flat-against-the-skin ballsack she'd seen (and licked) on the oversized male lion.

Sekhmet winked at her, smiling naughtily. "I figured you'd need some company, and I can't really spare the big lug - so this lusty lady will have to do. Make sure you keep her weapon well-lubricated... not that you weren't gonna do that anyway, eh?" An imperious gesture from the goddess sent the lioness - and her new, metallic accessory - walking silently across the floor to rub her head against Meretseger's arm. She had sat back down after Sekhmet had walked away, her legs more or less giving out from the strain despite her training. Smiling, she rubbed the big cat's neck, and received a low purr in repayment.

Then, the goddess turned her glare at the mercenaries - those that still lived, anyway. They were passed out on the floor, hard cocks still throbbing against their bellies until a simple wave of Sekhmet's hand made them flop over, draining back down to size in a flash. Her smile showed too many fangs as she grinned. "Guess I need to deal with this sorry lot too, huh? I can think of several of my brethren who'd love to pass some self-righteous 'judgment' over them. But fuck that. They were weak enough to choose slavery over death, so slaves they can stay. Such is the perils of living by a code of strength..."

Then she threw a last glance back at Meretseger and her new companion, and nodded. "Well, then... 'till next time, kids. Go do my work." Then she lifted her hand, and the glowing red sigils covering the five obelisks flashed into a blinding explosion of light, forcing Meretseger to squeeze her eyes shut against the glare. When she opened them again, the tomb was empty, dusty, and dark - except for the flickering light of a dozen flashlights rolling on the floor near the entrance. Several half-eaten corpses littered the same area, their blood silently mingling with the dust - but of the surviving mercenaries, there were no signs.

Looking to the side, she realized that she was petting a cat. A rather big one, with short, sand-colored fur, who looked like she'd be more at home chasing rats away from a granary than sitting in a precious little basket in somebody's parlor - but definitely an ordinary, domesticated cat. Her dark-yellow eyes, however, seemed to flicker with both an inner fire and a burning intelligence. Nodding, Meretseger forced her tired legs to cooperate and pushed herself to her feet. Then she collected her discarded military fatigues, picked up the battered old M-60 machinegun leaning against the empty granite throne at the center of the room, and began the long walk back towards the surface with the cat walking soundlessly by her side. The commander of the assault-forces would be waiting for her up there, with transportation ready... oh, and she'd best remember to disarm the Claymore mines that the mercenaries had scattered on the first part of the descent, unless she wanted to give her new healing-factor a real workout. A soldier's work, it seemed, was never done...

END - SEKHMET IS FREE