FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

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The room thickened, the air solidifying with radiant outrage. The King of Every Continent, Grand Ruler of the Surface and Conqueror Eminent, gave a nearly audible twitch of his leathery snout in the tension. But, no. What this white-furred invader had said about his mother still hung blistering in the air over the perfumed gala crowd.

Nobody remembered her coming in, but there she was, her oddly swirling pink-blue eyes darting about the room to take in the gaslit splendor of his palace. She stood well over even the royal guards, and in her spotless white dress she sported streaks of purple that only blood royals could legally wear. Every bit of her was lean and sculpted muscle, sleek and honed and arrogant, save the extravagant clouds of fur atop her head and capping her swishing tail. She was an insufferable marvel.

The thick scaly pads of his fingers slid across the hilt of his sword. "Give that a blade," he commanded, thick with distaste. Xenos, foreign creatures, weren't even allowed in the banquet hall unsupervised. If this one was to speak its mind, he figured, let it stand in a fair duel and see how bold it was. He rose and stepped forward, robes quietly rustling, every eye on his majestic yellow-scaled form.

A lesser noble, her horns mottled with cosmetic chiseling, offered her sword with an icy glare. The interloper took the hilt without looking. Her hand must have been deformed, four-fingered, the claws looking glassine and fragile. She held the sword loosely and gave it a lazy twirl as the king drew, and the nobles looked on in hushed awe, prepared to see a master at work.

His first thrust was perfectly aimed at where her heart must have been. It never arrived. Her sword appeared- it didn't move or swing, not even in a blur. It simply jumped between positions, faster than thought. He ricocheted off with a sharp clash, not grasping her speed, and she took the pause to tell him cheerfully, "Try harder."

A trick of the eye wasn't enough to stop him. His lips curled back as he drew back again, feinting low before dipping in to the inner thigh- and hitting a sword that wasn't there a blink before. "Mongrel bitch," he snarled, and came at her in a quick flurry of steel. She backpedaled without concern, untouched, grinning as if sharing a private joke as he fanned the air. The nobles began to murmur, and his guards shifted along the walls. As yet another killing stroke blurred through nothing, he glanced behind her to see her tail give an irritated lash.

Dodging soon bored the invader. She finally seemed to remember what she was holding, and her fingers twitched. Her sword jolted into place again. The silky-furred flesh of his arm laid to the bone as a coat would blow open, cut faster than the pain could shoot up his nerves.

Then he felt the pain, saw the fresh stain in his robes, and stared wild-eyed at the guards as he stumbled back. "Kill her! Kill her!" he yelped. Her grin only widened.

Because his culture did not have stories about what happens when people with strange powers challenge the mighty, the guards obediently rushed at her. One of her eyes rolled to consider the rush of ceremonial armor and steel towards her, the woman not pausing in her step. They mobbed her with barked war cries. She touched the metal bangle at her wrist, and the tuft of sapphire-blue fur at the end of her tail flowered open. Strands of fur reached out to the guards as they closed on her, and...

What happened next made the king's eyes scrunch shut, watering, but he still heard the sounds, the shrieks that became something else by degrees.

He'd once seen a bored noble tug on a servant's dress: a pull at a loose thread unraveling the fabric, breaking its weave and turning it into a sad, formless drift. But to see it happen to men-

She walked calmly towards the king, strolling across a suddenly red carpet.

He almost dropped his sword. A lifetime of training alone kept it in hand as the alien's wide feet turned from snowy white to dusky pink, leaving sticky red prints in their wake, each pad clearly defined as if signing her work. "We're not finished," she told him with a bright smile. "I'm still not satisfied."

"This isn't..." He groped for words as he stumbled back before a window. She turned her head then, as if he were no threat at all, and looked out at his capital, jeweled with candles and lamps under the galactic sprawl high above. Her tail gave a happy flourish. "Wow," she sighed. He stared at her with adrenaline pumping and mind racing for a way out. "Pretty nice place you've got here. Let's up the stakes!"

He advanced on unsteady legs, breath huffing, trying to nerve himself to strike down this nightmare before her tail can pick him apart. But she just swiped a finger along her bracelet again, and the world exploded.

He'd felt stone crack against his head before. He'd never felt his head crunch right through it and keep going out the other side. Every bit of him exploded outward, and the hall burst into exquisitely worked flinders, his shoulders plowing through centuries-old beams like dry twigs. The creature grew with him, the shattered stained glass masterworks of the royal family cascading from her fur in a priceless glittering rainbow and twinkling in her fur as the other rubble poured from her body. He still wore his robes, still held a blade the size of a modest bridge, and she was still smiling.

The air felt chill. He was... he had no idea how tall, but his city spread out below him in impossible miniature, the mighty clocktower at its heart not quite up to his knees. The distance muffled like wet cotton the cries of alarm far below, but he still heard them as he stared around himself, then at the creature mockingly saluting him with her sword. Her tail flicked again with the satisfaction of a cat watching a cornered mouse, and toppled the upper third of a tenement block. Tons of brick and stone slid over like a deck of cards being cut. Wood and brick dust billowed from the impact, and tiny voices screamed, briefly. He flinched and looked away.

The stars looked no closer. That seemed important, somehow.

Then she smiled, and his failing nerve sent him back again. He refused to turn his back on her and die an unseeing coward, but he had seen death coming before, and it had never been this horrid, this... inevitable. He felt buildings crumble under his boots, their sturdy timber construction as fragile as thin ice to him, but he had no more heart for his subjects now than any other time. Her immense sword hummed through the air, its tip tracing contrails of ragged cloud, as she leisurely flattened cottages and storehouses, carriages crushed to sawdust under her bare feet.

The streets were not empty. Those fleeing the destruction of their homes, or rushing out in the general panic humming from lane to lane, were nothing beneath the thundering feet of the great titans above. The king felt his boots growing slick, and the catweasel creature stalking him dipped her feet in fresh glistening rose as they scuffed through the throngs.

Every step, every desperate scramble away from her punished the city below. Did she know she was forcing him into the richer quarters? The marble and gilt towers of his powdered aristocrats crunched under his leather bootheels like dry straw, threatening to send him wobbling backward. She strolled forward, not seeming to even notice the spires and lightning rods underfoot. Their iron snapped and broke like dry grass long before piercing her soles. The achievements of his rule were dust adorning her plushly rounded toes.

"Everything," he gasped to himself. "Everything I did for this city- everything I fought for-"

"You can save it all," she offered, stepping forward. The Enoran Academy of Chemical Arts, and with it the brightest minds on the planet, vanished under the ball of her foot. He fancied he heard the bricks crumble. "Just kill yourself now and I'll leave. I won't even let your corpse fall on anyone, promise!"

His hackles rose, even then. Not even the dignity of being killed on the spot like a toothless old cur... he shook his head, dazedly, and managed to angle his blade past the horizontal again. His limbs were growing cold as his body tried to substitute rage for blood.

"Okay, I guess we're still fighting!" She was still smiling. His sword swung like a man falling over, and this time she didn't bother turning it aside with her bridge-sized blade. She let him hack right into her neck. The blade bit in a fraction of its width and slid loose again; her fur pinked for a moment, and nothing else. It wasn't concerning enough a wound for her to touch.

"But..." He looked up to the colossus as hope withered inside him and his sword fell from his fingers, flattening hundreds in a muffled crunch of fine marble.

"Sorry, my liege," she answered with a jingling cheerfulness. "I don't feel like losing." She tossed her sword aside. It rolled through a row of crowded houses and clattered to a halt in a red tangle.

He stepped backward, and more of his subjects died under his boots. Running wouldn't be any escape- there was no place to hide from the divine, no wall that could stop the infernal, and this woman, this thing was both- but a very primal instinct told him to stay clear of her all the same.

She simply moved to keep pace with him. There was a tiny metallic clattering far below as she broke open the royal treasury, and the wealth of five continents poured into the streets. Her foot came down and stamped it into a single glittery film of wealth beyond words. She didn't bother looking down as soft gold molded between her toes into a perfect print.

"I... I have not sinned." He kept backing away. What was his city now, to his immortal soul? "Everything I did in the campaign- they aren't even people-"

"Oh, your conquest." She said the word as if in a private joke, indulging him. The catweasel's eyes glittered in the dark. "You think I've come for you over that? Supreme punishment?"

He staggered back from her. Part of him wondered if the blood running down his arm was battering or flooding on the neighborhoods below. Certainly the houses trampled under his boots seemed like sketches on paper, miniscule, easily swept away. Just as had all those rebel villages, when he first looked upon them on the maps...

The intruder tossed her mane back with a silvered cascade of prismatic starlight. Even then, with his city crumbled over her feet, she was beautiful.

"I got a real smile out of it," she continued on conversationally. She dragged a toepad in a line down the crowded central avenue and turned to study the cherry streak left behind, absently flexing her toepads to work the liquid that once was his subjects into the crease. "It's the perfect turnaround! And not just because of your comeuppance."

The catweasel's tail flicked again in its devilish speed. The backs of his knees burned with sudden narrow pain, and down he went, crushing the royal armory into dust and flinders on impact. He jerked away from her, but her tail lashed again to hold him motionless in its coils, its muscular length inescapable as steel under deceptively soft pelt. Every exhale, it cinched a little tighter around his ribs. He wanted to speak, but he tasted blood, and every breath throbbed.

"The thing is," she calmly explained as she suffocated him, "you weren't having one bit of fun the whole time. Crusade this, noble that. All doom and gloom. Me, though?" She lifted her foot to his face. His head turned away in disgust, but he couldn't keep her from smearing a red line along his cheek, a film of wet blood thickened with a paste of pulverized clothing and gummy flesh. "Me, I'm loving every second!"

Her toes pressed insistently at his muzzle to let him taste the gore, spiced with the smell and taste of fresh rain. "And I have a lot of seconds of this still to look forward to."

He arched his head with a muffled wail, screaming his disgust into her dripping sole as it plastered to his face, garnishing him with his own citizens and a trace of her sweet rainy petrichor. Then her tail lifted him up without any apparent effort and brought him to her muzzle.

The last thing he saw was her smile, filling his entire field of view with a flawless white, the sharpest, cleanest teeth he'd ever seen in his life, scissoring open. His own body blocked most of the moonlight, but he saw enough to see glimmering pink, and the black hell waiting beyond. Then everything was slimy dark, and crushing muscle, overpowering his enlarged body with ease. Every gulping wave drew the king closer to his fate. But he was beyond fear, then. There was nothing left to contrast it with.

Then his judgment came as he fell into the final nightmare, and outside, Enari Cobalt Lakh dam Kharva stroked her swollen middle and gave a soul-deep sigh of gratification, already padding over to the royal palace and crushing rich citizens with every step. There was still a line of succession, and she was still feeling frisky.

Inside, the king shut his eyes against the caustic burn and screamed, and screamed. But as molten as the pain was, as savage the sizzling acid was, oblivion refused him. He kept breathing inside her, if only to scream, and the blurring agony rolled on as if he would never be fully consumed. The acid didn't kill him. Her power made very sure of that.

He died of starvation, a month later.