Prologue - Beginning

Zara woke up feeling slightly nauseous, lying in the van’s backseat. She couldn’t see anything, then remembered that she was blindfolded.

“Hey, you,” she heard Margaret, the old researcher, spoke as she took off Zara’s blindfold. “You’re finally awake.”

“What happened? Did you guys knock me out?” Zara asked, her voice still groggy.

“No. You fell asleep not even a minute after I put the blindfold on you,” Margaret smirked.

“Oh, I guess I was just really sleepy,” Zara replied with a yawn. “I haven’t slept well the last few weeks.”

Indeed, she had sleeping issues because of the stress, since being a monster hunter in a busy city like Crowsend is no easy task. The number of monsters is skyrocketing, just like the competition among hunters. To stand out from the crowd, one has to be the best. Unfortunately, Zara wasn’t the best. The Hunter Society Alliance began experimenting on their hunters a long time ago by giving them various augmentations from their experiments with the monsters. But Zara could never dream about something like that because she had no friends or family in high places like the rest.

She thought she wouldn’t be able to continue and would have to quit in the next one or two years but a few days ago she got a call from the HSA. They chose her for an experiment with a powerful monster that could finally elevate her career. It seemed impossible to say no to this offer, although she began to worry later about this experiment’s safety.

“Get out of the car, we have an experiment to do today. Remember?” Margaret said impatiently.

Zara stood up and stepped out of the van. The whole place was dark except for the light above a big metal door.

They walked to the door. The echoes of Margaret’s high heels and Zara’s boots sounded like a morbid waltz in there.

“Hi, guys!” Margaret said as she opened the door. The bright lights momentarily blinded Zara’s eyes. “Sorry for being late, but we had to wait for the council’s approval.”

Finally, Zara’s eyes adjusted to the brightness. The room was the polar opposite of the place outside. It was filled with light and people. Most were busy watching the monitors in front of them, but some waved when they noticed Margaret.

“So, this is...” Zara started.

“Yes, the Hunter Society Alliance’s monster containment facility, or as you hunters call it, the Crypt,” Margaret announced proudly as she led Zara through the room.

Zara glanced at the monitors as they passed by. Each monitor’s footage was a horror show. She saw a naked woman, crawling on all fours with a huge snake-like creature halfway inside of her ass with its head being outside. It looked like the snake thing was in control because the woman was crawling backward as if her lower body with the snake monster would be her front side. Zara quickly forced her gaze to another direction.

“I have to talk to the guards to let us through. You can wait here,” Margaret said as they stopped near a vending machine. “If you want to eat or drink something, do it now because you’ll lose your appetite for a while after the experiment,” she said with a grin.

Zara wasn’t hungry. She was still a bit nauseous from the ride, but she checked the vending machine anyway.

“Oh,” she thought to herself as she noticed her reflection in the machine’s glass wall. She had always had a pale skin tone, and her brown hair made it look even paler, but right now, she looked sickly. Her eyes looked like two green marbles half sunken in a puddle of milk, which was her face.

She hadn’t felt good all week after hearing about the experiment she was chosen for, but she felt different now, like an instinct. This was the first time in her career as a hunter when she was genuinely afraid of something.

“Wow! A ghost,” she heard the voice of a girl standing nearby. She was seemingly near Zara’s age.

“Yeah, I look like shit, got it,” Zara replied wearily.

“Nah, it’s not that bad. Just go outside more often,” she smiled. Zara stayed silent.

“By the way, I’m Akemi Yoriko,” she said, sticking out her hand, her grip firm and strong. “But feel free to call me Aki.”

“Okay, Aki,” she replied timidly. “Are you here for the experiments as well, or are you working here?” Zara asked.

“No, I’m a hunter. My grandma works here as one of the researchers. She called me here to check on my augmentations,” she replied.

“You got augmentations?”

“Yeah, check this out,” then an empty soda can from one of the tables flew to Akemi’s hand. She squeezed it with a crunch, and then the can flew into a recycling bin.

“That was telekinesis?”

“Yeah,” Akemi nodded. “They put some Brain Beast tissue samples into my head. I had a terrible migraine for a few weeks, but I’d rather choose this again instead of what that poor girl will have to endure today. I heard that the monster specifically asked for her, nobody knows why.”

“Who is this girl?”

“If I remember well, her name is Sarah ... Sarah Crowbell ... maybe? Or something that sounded like that,” Akemi said thoughtfully, her eyes scanning the room as if searching for someone. “But I’ve never met her before.”

“Miss Cromwell, it’s time to go,” they heard Margaret’s voice from the other end of the room.

“I’m coming,” Zara replied and left Akemi there, her mouth hanging open.

“Follow me,” Margaret instructed, opening a door with “Staff Only!” written on it.

“See you later, Aki,” Zara waved goodbye to her as she entered the door that Margaret held open for her. They entered a large stairway. It looked almost infinite both up and down.

They walked for almost half an hour when they finally stopped in front of something that looked like the door of a building-sized vault. Margaret slid her card through the card reader, and a red light turned green.

“We are about to enter the Meat Circus, one of the special sectors of the facility. They keep monsters here with biokinetic abilities,” Margaret explained as they walked through.

“And the monster my experiment will be is a ... what did you call it?”

“It’s a Flesh Fiend. They almost went extinct a few decades ago, but they were tougher than we thought,” Margaret said, looking at the line of similarly large vault doors of the holding cells as they walked across the corridor.

“Hmm, I heard about them during my training. How did the HSA manage to capture one alive?”

“Well, this one was beaten by one of our best hunters, Aritimi,” she explained while searching for the right door. “And Cell B-4. We’ve finally arrived.”

“I guess I’ll go alone from now,” Zara said, her voice cracking with anxiety.

“Oh, I’d be glad to see it in person, but protocol is protocol. I’ll watch it from the monitor room though,” she said, sliding her card through the cell door’s reader.

“They are going to record it?”

“Of course, they will. For future research,” she replied with a wide grin as the door opened.

Zara swallowed and entered the room silently. She almost jumped when Margaret closed the door behind her back.

“Is anybody here?” she called out. She saw no humans or monsters there, no one.

She glanced around. The room was large like a hangar with white walls and a pink floor. There was a makeshift bed in one of the corners made from a big pile of mattresses.

“Hello, Zara,” she heard a calm feminine voice calling for her. She looked around but still nobody. Then she noticed it. What she was standing on wasn’t a pink floor but the monster disguising itself as the floor. Now she noticed a small smiling face in the middle.

Suddenly, the stretched and flattened body of the creature began to reshape and pulled itself from below Zara’s feet. She fell backward and landed on her butt while the creature reformed its body in the middle of the chamber.

Zara was mad at herself for being caught off guard like this. The Flesh Fiend finally took a new shape. She looked like a four-meter-tall naked woman with long wavy blonde hair and green eyes. Her face was bony with sharp features that reminded Zara of that scary woman from one of Junji Ito’s stories.

But the weirdest parts were her breasts. There were dozens of breasts of all sizes scattered across the front of her torso. Some were small, like a ping pong ball, while the biggest were larger than beach balls, all bouncing independently while the monster moved as if they had a life of their own.

Zara stayed on the ground as the Flesh Fiend approached her.

“He he he! Sorry,” the Flesh Fiend chuckled, her voice filled with mischief. “I like to sleep on the floor this way after dinner. It’s surprisingly comfy.”

“No ... no problem,” Zara stammered awkwardly. This was the first time she heard a monster speak like a human, and for some reason, it made her seem even more frightening.

“Wow! Nice spikes,” she said, pointing at Zara’s spiky hair. Then hers began to retract, switching from blonde to light brown, and within a few seconds, she had rows of brown spikes just like Zara. “Does it look good on me too?”

“It ... um ... looks good.”

She just wanted to experiment to gain some powers like that Japanese girl she met in the monitor room. Why does she have to chitchat with a monster? It’s a thing that she hates to do even with humans.

“Hmm, I guess I will switch it back,” the Flesh Fiend nodded while reshaping her hair, then she sat on the ground right in front of Zara.

Zara wanted to say something, but her eyes were glued to the creature’s pubic area. The Flesh Fiend’s genitals were completely obscured by a thick bush of blonde curls.

“Oh, you don’t like it hairy?” the blonde giantess said, noticing Zara’s gaze on her womanhood. “What about this?” She snapped her fingers, and the hair completely retracted and disappeared under her skin. Her pussy was now bare, with smooth skin and meaty pink lips.

“It’s ... it’s very nice...” Zara stuttered.

“Or do you like some hair but with funny shapes?”The blonde curls grew back above her pussy, but this time they formed an arrow pointing down towards the labia. It retracted and grew back again in the shape of a vertical rectangle with some weird formation within it. As Zara took a better look at it, she realized that it was a picture. The monster made a replica of the Mona Lisa painting from her own pubic hair. It changed again, and the hair began forming letters “What do you think now, Zara?” was written with the hair.

“Um ... that’s cool. I wish I could control my body like that.”

“He he!” the Flesh Fiend chuckled. “You must be the real Zara. The fake one they sent previously was lame. She didn’t like my powers.”

“Fake one? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zara protested.

“She is talking about Sarah,” they heard Margaret’s voice from the loudspeaker on the ceiling. “I misunderstood when the Flesh Fiend was asking for a hunter for the test. I accidentally heard Sarah Crowbell instead of Zara Cromwell. When it turned out we sent the wrong girl, she was taken hostage by the Flesh Fiend. Sorry, I forgot to mention this detail. By the way, the real Zara is here, so would you release Sarah now? Her family is threatening us with a lawsuit.”

“I will, once I’m finished with Zara,” the Flesh Fiend said, raising one of her arms, which turned into a human woman’s head. It had short spiky hair, similar to Zara, but it was red instead of brown.

“Please! At least just let me die!” the head screamed.

“Hush,” the Flesh Fiend shrugged, and the head formed back into a large arm.

“What was that? Did you kill her?” Zara asked, fighting her nausea.

“No, her entire body has been absorbed into my biomass, and her memories have been saved in an additional brain I created for this occasion. I can eject her out from my body in one piece whenever I want. Cool, isn’t it?” she asked with a broad smile that reminded Zara of a shark.

“Yeah, it’s super cool. Flesh Fiend, you are great,” Zara said.

“Nah, you can call me by my name.”

“You have a name?”

“Yeah, it’s...” she produced a noise that sounded as if someone was trying to say all the words from every known language at the same time.

“Um ... can you repeat it?”

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you humans are anatomically unable to say our words,” she giggled. “You can give me a nickname if you want. I’d like it.”

Zara began thinking. “Hmm ... you are a Flesh Fiend, so what about Fifi? You know, based on your initials ... I mean your race’s initials.”

“Fifi? I don’t like it!” she paused for a moment. “I love it!!!” she exclaimed. She reminded Zara of a hyperactive child.

“Can we start the experiment now?” Margaret spoke again from above.

“Yeah,” Fifi replied with an ear-to-ear smile.

“So, how is this experiment going to happen exactly?” Zara asked although she was afraid of the answer. “Margaret was talking about some kind of cellular rebuilding, rewriting, and stuff like this.”

“In a nutshell, I’m going to copulate with you,” Fifi replied with her cheerful but creepy smile.

“Excuse me?!”

“He he! The method I will use to experiment on you is the way my people reproduce. We plant our DNA into all cells of our victim’s body and then each cell will be rewritten. We usually erase the consciousness of our victims and replace it with either a replica of our own or create a new one from scratch. But don’t worry, Zara, I will definitely keep your consciousness. It would be a waste to lose you. He he!”