Chapter 6

Crouched within a coppice next to the palace, a blue-haired girl tensely waited. Her deep cerulean eyes slowly and methodically scanned the scene before her, betraying absolutely no emotion. The scene reflected in them was static: the hulking mass of the nearly-finished palace back and to the left; the wide, empty path in front, recently covered with a violet-gray, slightly rubbery material that cushioned falls; a dull evening mist in the air, a vague gray sky, no wind, and a total absence of ambient sound. Hidden in the trees across the street, she just barely saw, on her third pass, a squat, perfectly square black building. The artificial-intelligence construct currently monopolizing Kaia's senses and motor functions rifled through the girl's memories; at first it wished to find out directly what the building was, but Kaia had never given it any thought. Then it began collecting her memories and searching for the times she had passed the building, aggregating what sensory data she had inadvertently gathered about its environs and trying to piece its purpose together thence. But that wasn't successful either; Kaia had seen a few people, mostly students, moving to or from the general direction of the building, but there was no pattern. Kaia simply hadn't looked in that general direction often enough to give the construct any information.

At last, the construct decided that it needed to risk seeking information from another source. Kaia's body rose slightly, still half-crouching, and cautiously moved deeper into the coppice, away from the road but parallel to the side of the palace's entranceway. As she continued on, the wall began to incline slightly outwards in the direction of the coppice, which had been trimmed in parallel with it. Abruptly, the stand of trees and shrubbery ended, several dozen yards before the wall took a sharp turn further outwards to enclose a long, wide section overlooking a lake. As she crept to the edge of the foliage, Kaia's ears began hearing faint, irregular noises from somewhere high in the air. The construct scanned the skies for the sound's source, and found it five or six stories above the palace's ground level, where dozens of workers moved quickly around an obscure web of scaffolding, surface black marble and various interior materials. Huge, musclebound girls broke off pieces of marble and other materials from giant slabs on the ground, and tossed them thirty or forty feet in the air to the workers, who noisily cut marble or wood with huge swords, or bent metal with their bare hands.

The construct didn't want to wade into the thick of the construction project, as Kaia's body, its presence inexplicable, might be physically overpowered before all the threats could be mentally subdued. It searched Kaia's memories regarding the new palace, hoping to find out who was in charge. This time, it seemed to be successful. Earlier in the afternoon, when Kaia was tending to the Darkbitch, she had heard her discussing Akiko's progress in orchestrating the construction. Kaia had heard Akiko say that she no longer needed to be present at the construction site, as she could monitor the workers mentally. The construct analyzed this detail for a while. It ultimately concluded that there was a good chance Akiko would drop by anyway, either to make sure everything was going fine or to make some change that was easier to make in person. So it bid Kaia's body wait, and watch.

Tossing her long blonde locks over one massive shoulder, Eri tried to look authoritative as she led her cheerleaders into the old gym for its final game. By now she had grown taller, bustier and more muscular than the rest of the team, which made intimidating them easier. Still, she felt on the defensive by the third or so of the cheerleaders who were also prefects, cocks wobbling under their miniskirts. She had to be harsh with them, she thought as she dragged one of those prefects, the chocolate-brown Tara, to one end of the plush courtside bench where the cheerleaders sat, forcing the girl to her knees, lifting up her skirt and commanding her to lick. Even though all the girls were required to serve the athletes during games, the prefects were more interested in their more assertive role at the end of games, when they helped the winning team punish the losers. That wasn't surprising, but it wasn't any excuse either -- the prefects knew they had to be submissive cheerleaders part of the time in order to reap their privileges at the end.

The sound of conversation in the distance alerted Eri to the arrival of the two teams. Easing Tara off her cunt, she casually scanned the rest of the cheerleaders, trying not to let on that she didn't remember who was carrying the bag. Within a few seconds she spotted it between the long legs of Bree, the former head cheerleader -- a soft square cube, zipped up on three sides a quarter of the way down. Rather than waste her breath, she quickly strode the length of the bench and snatched the bag from the floor. Startled out of staring at the huge ass of the Asian girl in front of her, Bree leapt up to attention, ready to do whatever Eri ordered. The head cheerleader didn't look at her as she tossed the bag to Ino, the captain of the black-clad Army team and the first one out of the gate. As she opened the bag, Ino greeted Sydney, the green-haired captain in her Academy team's white uniform, while the other players dispersed in the vague direction of the team benches located on either end of the far side of the field.

A coldly furious but silent Eri shoved Bree onto her lap, pulled up the girl's skirt and began spanking her ass. But even this spectacle didn't hold the attention of the cheerleaders for long, as Ino and Sydney finished up passing out the contents of the bags -- slender black collars inlaid with a glowing purple material. After dealing with a slightly confusing latch, the players slipped them on, ten on each team -- a few for the first time, none for more than the fifteenth or so. But, when the transformation hit, ecstasy on their faces was as intense even for those practiced at it. Twenty girls who already ranged from about seven to eight feet tall, with musculature anywhere from "really toned" to "actually rather hulking," metamorphosed into virtual deities. Even the slenderest now had huge muscles rippling under their skin-tight uniforms, and most could easily reach up and grab at least the nets of those fourteen-foot rims that normally seemed so intimidating.

As she maneuvered a chastened Bree back between her legs, a sighing Eri leaned back against the soft, velour-like material of the bench's high back and let her eyes drift to the players, a handful of whom were still staring at themselves and at the other players in giddy shock. But the new recruits quickly fell into the routine encouraged by the skill-giving-by-touch that Jade had given them earlier: a shootaround, beginning with layup drills. Or, that's what they ostensibly were, but the first few times through the line, the girls were determined to show off their power. The captains shot first, and Ino, who remained the tallest player on the floor at well over ten feet, started things off by lofting the ball such that it bounced high off the top of the backboard, leaping about five and a half feet in the air, twisting her body backwards, catching the ball just as it was falling past the basket, and driving home a reverse jam a few inches left of center. She caught Sydney's eyes and pointed directly at the green-haired tearaway, as if to challenge her to do better. The Academy captain, at nine and a half feet dwarfed by most of her teammates, gave a devilish grin and turned away, her eyes lighting up as she headed towards the basket. She took a catlike leap of astonishing grace and power that seemed to go on forever; when her boobs, accentuated by the skin-tight white fabric, had reached the rim, she swiftly descended, fading to the center to hammer down a crushing left-handed tomahawk. Spinning back to face the Army basket, she mimed firing a gun at Ino as she glided smoothly to the floor.

Eri wasn't sure whether her climax came more from Bree's tongue or from the dunk.

Methodically but quickly, Akiko's powerful legs ascended the last of ten flights of stairs, while her arms, still studded with a few water droplets from the pool, carefully cradled the sleeping Darkbitch. The bedroom she was approaching wasn't the closest one to the pool by a long shot, but it was the primary one, whose location and layout the Darkbitch had intimately planned -- Akiko didn't want the Darkbitch to be confused or disoriented when she woke up. Which, thought the head of the Army as she entered the cavernous, windowless white-and-violet room and gently laid her raven-haired Goddess atop the lavender sheets of the central bed, would hopefully be soon. The Darkbitch always enjoyed attending the Army-Academy basketball games, and then there was the ceremony afterwards. Of course, if the Darkbitch were asleep, the ceremony would simply be postponed -- no one wanted to disturb her. In fact, if she found out her world had stopped to wait for her, she might not be that upset.

With a slight smile, Akiko closed the door behind her Goddess and strode down the hall to the rear balcony. The tenth story had been built when most of the lower floors were little more than skeletons, so that the Darkbitch could have her isolated bedroom as soon as possible. Now the workers had finished most of the floors below her, and had set up shop on the eighth story balcony, receiving material from below, fashioning it and taking the result to furnish the rooms inside. The balconies were being laid out so as to resemble one side of a black stone pyramid from a distance: as one's eye traveled down from the top, each progressive balcony would be closer to the lakefront. (Since all the balconies were the same size, this meant that higher floors were progressively smaller.)

Akiko walked to the edge of the balcony, took one good look and leaped. So as not to crush any of the workers by her sudden appearance, she dove such that she could grab onto the far railing. Swinging herself back around to face the balcony, as her boobs bounced wildly in the camo bikini, she lifted herself up and waved to the workers; those who could see her dropped what the were doing and bowed to their Lady. Those who didn't were quickly elbowed or whispered to by nearby workers, but before everyone could turn around she had already dropped down to the balcony immediately below her. She ran up to the edge, hurdled the railing and landed on the one below, and repeated the process all the way down to the ground. To avoid the possibly chaotic process of cutting through the pool, where girls were still toweling off and retrieving uniforms, Akiko decided to walk beside the building to reach the front hall, to see if Jade had finished preparing for the prefect ceremony, and to help her if she needed it.

When Akiko was halfway to the front of the palace, its rear wing blocking the workers' view of her, she suddenly felt a tap on her shoulder. She whirled around and recognized Kaia, apparently dressed but looking a bit disheveled -- most likely, she thought, the cyan-haired girl had just come from a quick makeout session in the nearby tree grove. The cockeyed smile on Kaia's face and her rather vague stare bolstered her impression.

"Hello, Kaia. Is there some reason you need me?"

"Sorry for the intrusion, my Lady, but a friend and I were having an argument, and, well, um ... do you prefer Nielsen or Sibelius?"

"Well, Carl Nielsen had the better ideas," replied Akiko readily, "and you've got to love someone who ended his last symphony with a metaphorical fart. But, overall, I think I find Sibelius more pleasant to listen to. Just cue up the Lemminkainen Suite, and..."

... and she fell on her ass, because Kaia had just kneed Akiko in her barely-covered groin. Within a second or two she had scrambled to her feet, but couldn't see Kaia. Presumably the girl had darted behind a tree, so Akiko did the first thing she could think of, and began simply uprooting the trees, one by one, and tossing them aside. As she headed deeper into the forest, she felt a sharp sting in her head, one of the last warning signs for a psychic attack. Embarassed that she hadn't recognized it sooner, Akiko looked around and realized that she had inexplicably blazed a trail in one direction instead of uproting all the nearest trees -- Kaia was probably still standing five feet from where she started. In her anger, she had never noticed she was being gently guided. She tried to do a psychic scan for Kaia, but she couldn't see anyone anymore, not even the workers.

As Akiko charged back to where she started, she struggled to contain her anger and focus, but the pain was getting worse. She knew she couldn't fight off the psychic attack with her own mental defenses, so her only hope was to find the much weaker Kaia and knock her out before the control was solidified. She began uprooting trees again, but found it much harder going this time, as if her strength was being sapped. After several tries, she finally found Kaia, smiling vaguely behind one of the trees, and reached out to put her in a headlock. As the pain reached a crescendo, Akiko's arm passed right through the illusion. As she lost consciousness and fell forward onto the soft grass, Kaia emerged from behind another tree and stood over her body, her cute face once again totally emotionless.

And Aki was alone in her mind with her old memories.

Harsh light from above, the difficult and unshielded summer sun. This is where men are made.

General Robert Ware had a barricade and fifty good men behind him. What was in front of him, he wasn't sure. Jaw squared and eyes dark, the fit forty-something stared down a dusty Kansas country road, trying to decide if the faint glimmer he saw in the far distance was just the heat, or if it signaled the crumbling of reality.

Ware had grown up steeped in old books on military history and on the memoirs of warriors. He hadn't idealized the army itself -- obviously, it was a hard life -- but he certainly had expected the vocation of an officer to be something serious, adequate to his intellectual interests, requiring not just leadership but strategy and foresight. In Yemen and then in Somalia, he found himself useless, unable to plan because his missions had never been defined, and without enough power to define them himself. So, when a cadre of high-ranking intelligence officers, accompanied by a strange, tall woman with deep red eyes, approached him on a brief vacation stateside, asking him to leave his post and join a secret expedition against the gravest threat America had ever faced -- well, they had picked the right man.

"I know your job is wasted on you," the woman had insisted in smooth, languorous tones. "But this one won't be."

And when he had accepted, Robert was pretty sure that she had taken him to bed. He didn't remember protesting that he had a wife. Or was that after the divorce? Either way, he couldn't really remember anything about it. Maybe he had imagined it all. It certainly hadn't been necessary to secure his loyalty. What else could he be loyal to? Who would turn down a chance to save the country, when he had been hoping to do just that for his entire life?

So Ware called his troops together and ordered them to march. He told them not to stop until he gave the order, no matter what happened. And so they marched, not even Ware knowing where the road would end but eager to get there, to eliminate the uncertainty. And when about two miles of utility poles and dirty had gone by, he felt a faint prickling around him, like a charge of static electricity. Before he even had time to register the sensation, Kansas was gone, and he was marching through one of the World War II campaigns that had filled his boyhood. He was in the H�rtgen Forest in the Ardennes, or the Volkhovsky Forest in Russia. He allowed himself a grin. All these dire warnings, and it was just a forest. He'd burn it down, and they'd take care of these girls, whatever voodoo powers they had.

Looking behind him, he was even more buoyed to see that his troops had already mostly concealed themselves behind the dense foliage. He opened his mouth to give his first order, but before he could speak, an intense pain seized his chest, then spread outwards. He thought he was having a heart attack, until he saw his men falling over one by one, no longer caring for their cover, screaming wildly or just gasping for air. And before long, Robert was on the ground too. The last thing he saw before he passed out was one of his best soldiers wildly spasming in front of him, his hair a long, silky black mane, his breasts swelling and distorting the dark green fabric of his uniform. And he somehow knew the same thing was about to happen to him.

Hours later, Akiko, Supreme Commander of the Darkbitch Army, sprung up from a relaxing nap to her full height. Hands on hips, she scanned the forest for her soldiers, and was gratified to find most of them clustered together, waiting for orders. The rest were presumably still asleep, but she somehow knew they wound find their way back to her, wherever she was. Akiko faced in the direction where she knew her headquarters would be, and led her troops n their first march in the Darkbitch's service. No matter how long the journey, she did not intend to slacken her pace.

After preparing Eri and meeting with the new basketball recruits, Jade had hurried to what she was already thinking of as the Old Castle to prepare its entrance hall, one last time, for the prefect ceremony. She had corralled about a dozen volunteers from the thin stream of girls heading to the game to help. As she had used her ability to give them the apposite skills, they were doing a predictably superb job, but she still insisted on close supervision. Now, they were fling out, done with their tasks, and Jade was double-checking everything in the ceremonial room. Climbing aboard its alabaster base, she lifted the specially built glass-and-ivory throne with one hand to check for spots under it. Finding none, she replaced the heavy throne it just as easily and soundlessly.