Tolerable Cruelty - Chapter 25 (Patreon)

Chapter 25

Piper flew home in a cold rage, high up in the air under the shroud of night. After getting Steven to spill his stupid, but admittedly useful guts, she’d discovered a few things. Yes, he had been visited by two agents that met the same description that Grant had provided. The “dyke” one had thrown him into an interrogation room and broken his finger… from his lurid telling of the tale, even Piper felt sorry for her immature brother-in-law.

And there was even more to worry about. Was Peter’s fidelity in question!? Steven mentioned another woman. Spanish accent. Long, dark hair. Looked and dressed like royalty. And strong. Too strong. What had Peter done? There was no way, right! Piper never felt more secure in her marriage, ever since she started playfully breaking Peter. The thought amused her, causing her to break out into uncontrollable smiles when she was alone. She, standing tall and pretty, next to a bruised and beaten up Peter like some sort of sick domestic situation… except Peter had never come so hard and so frequently. Their sex life had never been better.

So who the fuck was this other woman!?

First things first. She had put her father in a cheap motel and ordered him to stay there until she came back to fetch him… or if he heard some news about her nationally. He protested fiercely, but in the end, she strongarmed him and convinced him that she was deadly serious. He kissed her on the cheek, told her to take care of herself, and that he loved her and Peter dearly no matter what.

So Piper was flying home rapidly, dressed in only her bikini. Fitting, considering the dark thunderstorms looming overhead. Before she knew it, she was completely drenched in the humid troposphere. The water streaked off her body and her glowing, crackling eyes as more of it splashed onto her face and slid down her cheeks.

She wiped her eyes as she peered down toward the Earth. Piper wasn’t all that experienced with the bird’s eye view, and having to fly so high to provide stealth through a dark storm was really not doing her any favors. That, and the grimmer part of her mind kept running wild with all sorts of different fantasy scenarios about how Peter was cheating on her. She discarded one ridiculous thought after another, but her mind just kept fabricating further fantasies that all ended in disaster.

Deep in her thoughts, she barely registered the tinny taste on her tongue or the smell of dense ozone filling the thin air around her.

TIme slowed to a crawl even by Piper’s superspeed standards. Her deep-set emerald gaze widened in breath-stealing panic as a powerful beam of opaque white electricity was forming before her very eyes. No, not before her. Through her.

She’d never been in serious danger before! Yes, Piper knew she was obviously durable given how she could crush even metal objects and feel no discomfort. Or the time she’d shattered glass with a single finger and didn’t get cut from the sharp, raining shards. But a bolt of lightning? A concentrated beam of energy slicing from heaven to earth!? She could see her bikini in the process of disintegrating, flecks of black ash drifting away from her curves.

It all unfolded at once. She could see the destructive bolt above her… no… it was coming from below… she didn’t know which way it struck! Stuck there in midair, frozen in time, too scared to twist her body upon that crackling thin pole that had already impaled her, Piper let loose with a scared whimper as the world once more continued to turn.

Still happening in a sort of extreme slow-motion, the visual-only event all took place in relative silence. The severe bolt of electricity thundered through her body, lighting all of her nerves on fire as jagged streaks of power evacuated from her mouth and held-open eyes.

Piper’s soundless scream stretched out as the storm’s inky blackness returned, only to watch a second bolt of energy arc  through her body. She was attracting nature’s wrath like some sort of lightning rod, despite being completely ungrounded! Her elegant limbs and her svelte back arched, frozen in place by the uncontrollable forces acting on her body.

Her body glowed white hot with heat as her flesh presented the resistance in the gigantic natural circuit. And yet, the sensation she felt wasn’t painful. Even with her super strong limbs pulled taut to the point of breaking, Piper felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience, her skin churning and tingling and somehow… distant.

The gravity-defying redheaded beauty “looked” at herself as her pupils slid left and right. The energy started powered through the core of her body, piercing and gathering right along her toned abs. The bolt of energy seemed to be thinning as her stomach and lower back shone a pure, brilliant white. She couldn’t see past the bountiful swells of her gleaming breasts, but there was no doubt that she was glowing like a sun at that precise location. She could feel it.

The powerful energy unlocked all of Peter’s remaining serum that remained inside of her. Her body had been trying to process it this entire time, but the bio-electric energy at her cellular level simply wasn’t enough. Her cells tried to ramp it up further and further, but now…

This was it. Piper screamed loud enough to drown out even thunder. Fear turned to carnal delight as power flooded through her veins, starting at her very center and radiating outward. Finally unlocked, the fully-activated remains of Peter’s serum flowed through her already enhanced body, completing and perfecting the job that her earlier food-fueled transformations had only vaguely started.

Piper no longer felt the pull of gravity on her body. Her vision telescoped far into space, jumping deeper and deeper into the empty void every second like a time-delayed sequence of still images. With merely a thought, it flipped back to her local position above the earth, still impaled by the second gleaming white sword of electricity that was quickly getting absorbed into her glorious body.

All of the impossible things she could do before, that she had thought was the stuff of fantasy… Piper knew that was just the beginning now. Her heart beat slowly, each steady pulse sending unbelievable force through her even more invulnerable body. Being impressed by lifting a car off their driveway before? Trivial. Lifting a tank? She felt the power course through her arms—no, her fingers. Her fingers alone would prove more than a match for something as irrelevant as a tank.

As the twin bolts of lightning finally began to dissipate, Piper pivoted her body to “stand” In the air. Surrounded by an ethereal glow, looking like an angel of vengeance with her lustrous, long, red hair whipping behind her, the sclera of her eyes turned a thick, opaque white. Drops of water still stuck and ran down her pale flesh, the cold and wet no more bothersome than if she were a marble statue. A statue of outrageously sexy proportions, its sculptor determined to craft the image of the very goddess of lust. The culmination of what her body had been trying to unlock for so long in her fits of anger, but had never actually managed to achieve…

Her deep-set lambent green eyes were crackling with power, sizzling high in the troposphere. The thin, sparkling bolts of lightning sparking from her ominous glare began to come together, forming a single, coherent beam of searing light.

The lance of energy struck the damp earth just as the sound of lagging thunder crashed all around her. Her beams tore deep into the ground, splintering trees and turning large chunks of wet ground into small, flying chunks of dirt.

For a full minute electric violence slashed downwards from the sky, Piper exerting her power, experimenting and growing accustomed to the full hidden potential of Peter’s magical potion. She turned her gaze upon the scenery below, leaving her mark on the devastated public land for years to come as she turned it into a large crater of glassy cindered ruins.

The sound of rolling thunder fading into the background signaled the end of Piper’s effortless destruction. Her muscles felt utterly supercharged, her naked body now perfect in its beauty, inhuman in its seething passions, and unstoppable in its power. Her fears, anger, and love pounded in her head with the same wild intensity of her newfound strength. Piper narrowed her beautiful emerald eyes, clenched her fists with enough force to crush diamonds to dust, and rocketed her way home leaving behind multiple sonic booms in her wake.

She needed to find Peter!

Two agents sat in a van, staking out Peter and Piper’s idyllic suburban home. It was nearly time for midnight donuts.

“We really waiting for the Paloma wife to show up? Haven’t seen her in a week.”

“They say it’s really serious now. Top priority. All teams are looking for her.”

“Did you hear the way Carter was talking about her? That Paloma woman sounds like a real fucking minx.”

“You know Carter, man. Bitch is always horny.”

“Iunno. Have you talked to any of the guys that brought in that Martinez woman? Heard she injured a bunch of our guys.”

“I don’t believe it. Probably just some bullshit they’re pulling and they’re pinning it on her. Some stupid drunk wrestling match. How’s a supermodel like that gonna do that to Johnson’s face and such? I bet Kazunov finally clocked him in the face for that shit he pulled last month.”

One of the agents was sweeping the Paloma household with his night-vision binoculars as the other one slurped on a pastrami dip sandwich. They never saw Piper descend from the night sky aglow with furious rage.

“Hey man, you take over… waaaah!” The agent with the binoculars screamed. His teammate’s sandwich and dipping sauce spilled and ran down to the closed double back doors of the tilted van. Glazed donuts bounced through the air.

Piper stood on the tarmac on her bare feet, fully nude. Her single right arm was extended above her head with the entire vehicle resting upon it. She shook it up and down like a box of cheap theater candy with only two pieces left inside, hearing the shouts and tumbling from the two agents who were clearly stalking her premises. She’d spotted them easily with her new x-ray vision. Darkness and physical barriers meant nothing to her supernaturally glowing irises now, her eyes enhanced past the limits of any human technology. Eyes that had seen instantly the Peter was not in their home.

She peered through the front of the vehicle as the two men crashed into the locked back doors. Dropping the front of the vehicle with a loud crash, she zipped to the back of her vehicle in an eyeblink, ripping both doors off their hinges with a tug of her hand.

“Unng… what was that…” one agent moaned, lying face down.

“Holy shit…” the other one muttered, lying on his back with his head toward the back doors, craning his neck backwards to see a beautiful redhead standing just outside their vehicle, framed by the walls of their surveillance vehicle. “Mike! It’s…”

Before he could utter anything else, Piper lashed forward and grabbed both of them—one by the neck, one by the leg. She held them up and let them dangle upside down.

“What have you two done with my Peter.” Her voice was flat. Cold. Even. Her eyes sparked with electricity.

“Ma’am, you are assaulting an officer of…”

The agent trailed off as Paloma snarled in frustration, letting the power trickle to her eyes. Dampness began to stain his crotch as her gaze grew blindingly bright. The smell of ozone filled the air as the woman’s long red hair began to float up around her head, framing the most beautiful and most coldly ferocious face he had ever seen. The terrified, right-side up agent closed his eyes and felt the fear of God strike his heart. He knew he was going to die.

Instead, Piper squeezed his neck just a little tighter until he lost consciousness. Then she dropped him onto the road like a limp ragdoll and pivoted to plant one shapely foot on his unmoving body. Her eyes darted back and forth, unseen beams of heat drawing scorched furrows in the asphalt around the body of the fallen agent like a chalk outline as a murder scene…

“I won’t ask again,” Piper told the man she was gripping upside down by the leg. With a casual gesture, she propelled him high then let go, grabbing him by the thigh before he fell even an inch. Her long fingers dug painfully deep into his flesh, making even the largest of his bones creak.

“ARRRGH! I’ll talk!! Please stop!!”

“Where.” Piper spoke coldly, while inside her hard outer shell she struggled with overwhelming fright that they’d maybe done more than just taken Peter. She clamped down on the growing terror that he might be…. No! She just had to find him! And that meant interrogating this asshole instead of just vaporizing every one of these monsters!

The agent began to spill his guts.