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Heat.
That was all you could feel. The air was so parched, so bereft of moisture that it latched onto you, sucking away at any spare droplets of moisture on your skin as though it were dehydrated itself. It overwhelmed each of your senses: your skin only feeling the leaden sensation of scorching air, your ears hearing the dull roar of flames, nose and tongue alike were choked by the smell and taste of cinders and ash. As for sight, well… you were currently gazing upon the source of this inferno.
Hephaistos.
At the end of Abyssos, you had confronted this fragment of Lahabrea to put an end to his warped scheming and rescue Erichtonios from whatever machinations he had planned for him. With a glance upwards and beyond your quarry, you breathed a sigh of relief; Erichtonios was imprisoned, but otherwise seemed unharmed. A fact that you were determined to keep as such.
Turning your attention to your enemy, you glowered at him and drew your weapon.
"Erichtonios is mine, heart and soul! And with your death, none will be left to stop me!"
With that said, those wretched magicks that had plagued you and your allies throughout Pandaemonium wrapped around him like a cloak, blocking your view of him. When it dissipated, you saw that it had warped his form just as surely as the long years of imprisonment had warped his mind. He had grown, frame looming over you and bulging with manufactured muscles, a skintight suit of armor sheathing him from harm. Chains snaked around his body and claws tipped spindly fingers and monstrous feet. You could see occasional pulses beneath his skin, as if a network of massive, shifting veins were crawling their way across it, imbuing him with this new twisted vigor of his.
Still, you didn't have time to ponder over exactly what sort of powers his new form might contain as he threw a wave of fire towards you, intent on showing you himself.
You ducked around the spell before, with a cry, you charged towards him to meet his attack with one of your own.
The battle properly commenced, the two of you trading blow for blow. Your clothing and hair were singed by his attacks and bruises and cuts soon bloomed across your body, but you still fought on just as hard as ever. Hephaistos, likewise, was quickly beginning to carry the signs of battle and he even seemed to be flagging, your relentless assault appearing to be wearing him down.
You had been through enough battles at this point to sense when victory was at hand.
You grinned triumphantly and charged forwards for one, final time.
…Only to skid to a stop from a wall of flames leaping up in front of you.
You glared across the barrier and Hephaestus gave you a downright smoldering look in return, one that was the personification of an ember left in an unattended stove, primed to burn the house down around it.
"Behold the fruits of sacrifice!"
Before you could respond, he rose into the air as those pulses hastened in frequency, shuddering across his entire being. With a meaty tearing noise, a fleshy growth sprouted from his lower half, rapidly expanding outwards. In the front, just below his stomach, a vaguely canine head bulged out, tentacles quickly pushing forwards to ooze out of where its eyes should have been. At the rear, four legs tipped with wicked claws burst out at the same time a fleshy tail whipped out, all dripping wetly with some clear, unidentifiable fluid. Hesphastus lowered himself onto all fours then, nails clicking on contact with the floor.
"Much better. Now, enough of this charade."
With barely any effort on his part, his legs kicked off the floor, sending him leaping towards you. Still in shock over witnessing his transformation and not expecting such speed from a beast this large, you were unable to get out of the way in time. Searing claws made contact with your chest and you were bowled over by the sheer weight of the thing charging into you. Despite your best efforts, your weapon was jarred from your hand at the impact, flying off to the other side of the arena.
You had underestimated your foe and were now paying the price.
Hephaistos tilted his head down at you, eyeing you as though you were nothing more than the latest specimen to catch his interest. You crawled and squirmed under his searing gaze, but those heavy paws kept you pinned down, the canine head breathing cloying air into your face.
"By all rights, I should destroy you here and now. After all, without a little worm like you to wriggle your way through my traps, Lahabrea and Themis have no hope of stopping me." He paused and leaned down to have a closer look at you and you hissed at the way your bones strained from the shift in weight distribution.
"But… it would be an utter waste to so carelessly destroy a creation as intriguing as you."
You gasped, both out of surprise and out of a desperate bid to draw air into your compressed lungs. Your unique status had been quite the boon for you in your time at Elpis and it seemed as though it would continue to aid you. Still… you doubted that Hephaistos had good intentions for you.
"What… What are you going to do with me?"
"Ah, now that is the question… Despite your strength, your aether is far too thin to be used as a proper vessel… Nor do I suspect that you would be able to survive were I to pour you full of my magicks as I did with the keywards…" He frowned and thought to himself for several long, agonizing moments, his paws idly kneading at your chest in the meantime. They stopped when he was finished and that frown was replaced with the slow, arrogant smile that you had come to associate with most incarnations of Lahabrea.
"Yes… As refined as it is now, my aether would be far too potent for you to withstand. If it were mingled and diluted with something else, however, then I could safely dose you with it without fear of it snuffing you from existence."
"...Meaning?"
"Meaning that I will have to resort to a rather… unorthodox method of giving you my aether." That smile widened. "But, unlike my more rigid other half, I am nothing if not unorthodox."
His paws raked downwards then, rending your clothing to little more than tatters and leaving you screaming from the long scratches he carved into your skin. Reflexively, you bucked up against him to try to push him off, but Hephaistos merely settled his paws back atop you once more and his weight proved too much even for your sizable strength, even with desperation and adrenaline pulsing through your veins. So, after your body strained until your muscles began to ache, you flopped back against the floor, figuring it was a losing battle on your part.
…At least for now—you may have given up on escaping for the moment, but you knew more opportunities would likely present themselves.
Hephaistos, however, apparently knew precisely what was on your mind. Sharp chains tinted a color as scarlet as his flames snaked up from the floor, twining around one another to form a weave as they climbed higher and higher. Eventually, at a height to accommodate even his monstrous form, they converged together, creating a dome of red around the two of you, cutting off any hope of exit that you had before.
"There. I daresay even one as slippery as you would be hard-pressed to escape from this trap."
Gazing up at the sea of red surrounding you on all sides, you couldn't disagree with him; even you were unsure how you were going to get out of this mess. Pinned down by a being that had gotten the upper hand, heat prickling at your now-bare skin, unable to communicate or reach your allies at all…
You've definitely been in better situations.
Your internal musings were interrupted, however, by Hephaistos' paws moving off of you… only for one to push against your side, forcibly rolling you over onto your stomach. Even as it gripped tight to your side, you craned your head to look behind yourself and see just what Hephaestus was up to now.
You almost wish you hadn't.
That horrid wet noise rent through the heavy air again as, from the underside of his transformed body, two more fleshy masses surged out, every pulse of his heart making them grow longer and larger. While they remained as a shapeless, bulging mass where they connected to the rest of the body, they soon tapered out to a thin point, leaving each roughly as long as a hyur's arm and about as thick as one. The overall shape of them and how they glistened with a copious amount of some dark, shiny fluid left no doubt as to what precisely they were.
You could feel your face flushing even as you raised yourself to your hands and knees, determined to at least try to escape from this.
Your efforts were easily thwarted when another paw landed heavily between your shoulder blades, shoving you right back down against the floor.
"No… Please… Those aren't going to fit…" Your cracked lips parted to deliver pleas onto what you assumed to be deaf ears, but your instincts for survival demanded you do anything to keep this from occurring.
A scoff then a pause, during which you could feel those nails digging into your bare flesh again.
"I suppose you are right; no sense in possibly tearing you apart on these when I am trying not to kill you."
Relief flooded you as your muscles relaxed, your body sagging against the floor… Until a wisp of red-tinted aether trailed around your body. Tensed, wary, you watched it hover around you until it wriggled beneath your side and, based on the warm tingle you felt, melded with your stomach. The paw still on your back kept you from raising yourself to look, but you grew frantic, wriggling beneath him as much as you could to catch even a glimpse of what it had done. Would you start transforming? Becoming some abomination of the flesh such as him?
As if reading your mind, Hesphastus clicked his tongue impatiently.
"As I stated before, I cannot properly warp your body to my whims as you are now… No, that was merely an infinitesimally small amount of my aether that I just transferred to you. While your body will remain the same in appearance, it should now be far more pliable for my needs."
He didn't need to explain any further this time around; you could make more than an educated guess at what he was getting at. You looked back over your shoulder at those twin cocks, pulsing rhythmically, and tried once more to crawl away from him.
Again, your motions were stilled by the paw on your back, claws digging in warningly.
And then you felt him settle down over you, taking several agonizing, painstaking moments to line himself up.
Before his rear hips swung forwards, sliding his cocks into your ass and pussy.
Your jaws had already yawned open in preparation of the scream you were planning on once the pain of penetration shot through your nerves… pain that never arrived. Instead, you were surprised to find that there was only a sensation of impossible fullness as he buried more of himself inside you, as he stretched you open in a way that should have ripped you to shreds.
The would-be cry escaped as little more than a startled, confused squeak .
"...I thought you would be screaming by now." Hesphastus commented from above, a frown evident in his tone. "Perhaps an unintended side effect of my aether melding with yours… If that is the case, I will be glad to see the creation that emerges from your rebirth!"
His hips snapped downwards then, somehow managing to hilt both cocks within you. You gasped sharply, so stuffed, so full of him that the heated air struggled to enter your lungs. A flame sparked to life in the pit of your stomach where the aether had settled, coming to life now that it was this close to the source it broke off from. As it flickered, it began to heat you from the inside-out, a surprisingly pleasant warmth steadily working its way out to your limbs, making your body relax despite what was happening to you. There was no pain. There was only that impossible fullness and that heat warming every ilm of you.
It was almost enjoyable.
Almost.
Your body might be suffused with that eerily relaxing flame, but your mind was still sharp as ever, still knew full-well what Hephaistos had planned for you. It took every bit of your willpower, but you managed to turn your head to glare up at him.
"You're not going to get away with this. My allies will c-come for me."
"Oh, please, do you truly think that giving me a nasty look and some simple heroic speech would dissuade me?" That damnable arrogant smirk again. "Still… once you have properly received my aether, it would be rude to look upon your benefactor in such a way. No, best to eliminate that nasty habit of yours before it becomes a true problem."
With that said, he drew his hips back and you gaped at how surprisingly empty you felt… but you didn't experience it for much longer before he pushed forwards again, sheathing himself fully in one smooth motion.
Any and all protests evaporated from your mind, replaced solely with the raw sensation of pleasure as he slid back into your body, of feeling how deep he had buried himself into your core. Reflexively, your walls clenched around the two cocks violating you, grip tight enough on them that you could feel every ilm pressing against your most sensitive nerves, stimulating them and the burgeoning heat inside you. He started to slide out once more and the way his cocks scraped against every bit of your inner walls on the way out left you keening long and slow in the back of your throat.
Though you realized the raw sensations you were feeling likely weren’t all your doing.
As he moved, you could feel some type of slick, oily substance leaking out of those dicks, smearing against those same walls that squeezed them so tightly… before quickly being absorbed by your body. The flesh where it sunk in tingled pleasantly, every sensation amplified twofold, making sensitive nerves more sensitive, clouding your mind from the sheer amount of pleasure, of bliss every thrust brought. The more sane part of your mind fell to it then, consumed by the maddening flames of pleasure raging in your body. What was left over was an animalistic lump of meat, a thing that could only conjure up one thought.
You loved it, you loved this .
Shivering from the feelings wracking your body, you tried to rise once more, only succeeding in straining your head back to look up at Hephaistos. You opened your mouth and let out a louder cry as those dicks hit a particular spot inside you, one that left stars dancing in the sides of your vision. For some reason, you expected he would like that, would enjoy hearing his opponent cry out their pleasure in such a way.
But your noises were rewarded with a couple of the tentacles sprouting from the dog head deciding to shove themselves into your open mouth.
You gagged at the burnt-flesh taste of them and the slippery fluid that coated them, seeming to stubbornly cling to every bit of your mouth it touched. However, despite your best efforts, you couldn't dislodge them once they slithered their way in, making themselves right at home in the moist cavern of your mouth. With tears welling up at the corners of your eyes from attempting to expel these new intruders, you looked pleadingly up at Hephaistos through a blurry haze.
Hephaistos, on his part, reached down to possessively cup your chin, pulling your head back even further to stare down at you with that researcher-to-specimen gaze.
"It seems as though you've forgotten all about our other guest. It would be rude to awaken him with all that wretched noise you are making, after all."
He relaxed his grip on your chin then, allowing you to lower your head and look once more upon Erichtonios still bound in his cage. Some dim, quiet part of your mind whispered something about how there was something important you had to do for the man. Some key duty you had to perform for him that was tickling at your brain, right on the edge of your addled understanding.
But then Hephaistos pumped into you again, filled you with just a bit more of that wonderful, stimulating fluid and any concerns you had for Erichtonios were gone, swept away in this latest wave of pleasure washing over you.
Surely Hephaistos was right and that something important must have been about letting him slumber.
Content with the reasoning your mind provided, you settled back down and focused on nothing but enjoying the sensations wracking your body. Every thrust into you felt like heaven, those cocks stimulating your walls in ways that never would have been possible before this encounter. Even the tentacles joined in, thrusting into your mouth and twining around your tongue almost with a greed of their own. They also started to leak whatever liquid was dripping from Hesphastus' cocks. It was thin and watery as if diluted, but the taste…
It was like drinking deep of the madness that infected these halls.
Sweet and dark, with a smoky aftertaste that stayed and a consistency that clung to whatever it touched until it greedily sank into it. You leaned your head in closer to those tentacles, taking them as deep into your throat as you could manage, wanting, needing , more of that liquid no matter what you had to do.
…Not that Hephaistos was making it easy for you.
Every thrust into you at this point was powerful and stimulating enough to wrench a muffled cry from your lips, jolts of pleasure racing through your body like an electrical current. The tentacles were still crowding into your mouth on their own accord, making you gag around them even as you drank up the-now more copious fluid they secreted. That fire nestled within you grew hotter and hotter, now blazing bright with all the aetherial fuel that had been added to it, scorching you from the inside-out until it felt as though you were nothing more than a husk filled only with raw bliss.
You wouldn't be able to handle much more of this.
Thankfully, blessedly, it seemed as though Hephaistos couldn't either.
With a growl that rumbled through the heated air, Hephaistos ground his claws down into flesh and floor alike and came. A seemingly-neverending tide of that corrupted fluid spurted into your body, every twitch of his cocks sending another sickeningly-sweet pulse of it into your core, soon bulging your stomach out with the sheer volume being put into you. At the same time, the tentacles in your mouth released their load as well, thick ropes of that same fluid shooting into your mouth and down your throat.
In the midst of it all, you also hit your peak, shuddering and making muffled, animalistic noises as the heat, the pleasure, everything grew to be too much for you. Almost on its own accord, your body rocked back against the cocks spearing you, milking you for every drop they had. As for the tentacles in your mouth, you did your best to suckle on them between your noises, giving them pleasure just as the liquid scorched the same sensation down your throat. Unfortunately, your cries made that difficult and some of the fluid escaped from your mouth, staining your chin and cheeks a deep purple, almost black.
As the heat raged within you, as you were pumped full of gallon upon gallon of Hephaistos' aether-laden cum, you felt your body begin to resonate with every beat of your heart, once-rigid form shifting more and more with every life-giving pulse. Fueled by the tainted aether flooding your body, you were transforming like the keywards and Hesphastus himself. Bones snapped, flesh bulged outwards, skin stretched and creaked.
And, through it all, you stared up at Erichtonios, still imprisoned and comatose.
Wondering if you could give this most wonderful of gifts onto him after you settled into your new, beautiful body.