Come Out (Patreon)

Chapter One

Zelretch gave a smile that managed to be both warm and cold as his first victim, Hinata Hyuga, ran out the back of the hostel as fast as her legs could carry her. His magic easily prevented the others from witnessing her departure from the bar, especially when they were so absorbed in drinking and conversation. This is almost too easy, he thought. Now, let’s see how that little bird is getting on…

Hinata - kind, demure Hinata - had run from the building with a complete lack of grace, like a charging rhinoceros that needed the bathroom. She wrapped her arms around her slender belly.

“Feels like I’m on fire!” she exclaimed, gritting her teeth as she doubled over in pain.

Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, the tricky, meddlesome grump, stood at the window to the small courtyard that contained the pained Hinata. His lip curled in a wry smile, and that in turn became a grin of real amusement as the magic deep within the drinks he’d been handing out like flowers at a festival began to take effect on the lithe kunoichi’s body.

Such strange white eyes, Zelretch thought, even as Hinata screwed them up with pain. Her loose dark hair, reaching to the middle of her back, flickered this way and that as she rocked, as if she could somehow loose the horror that was building up inside her body. Zelretch grinned again, most of his face hidden in shadow, barring those gleaming white teeth. No such luck, little bird.

“Hrngh! Argh!” Hinata grunted and growled as she fell to her knees, legs unable to support her slender form anymore. A wind began to howl its bitterness through the trees that surrounded the courtyard, trees that had shed their leaves, and were now tilting from their usual twisted tableau. As Zelretch looked on, it seemed more and more as if the trees were turning towards the stricken Hinata…

As that idea floated into his consciousness, Hinata leaned back on her haunches and roared at the heavens, her little fists clenched. The sky remained impassive, unmoved - but Hinata was anything but. As the echoes of her forceful yell died away, the most remarkable transformation began to take hold of the lithe kunoichi’s body.

It began - well, it began everywhere. Hinata’s navy blue pants, already tight, started to rip as the four writhing muscle heads of her quadriceps bulked. The armour beneath her jacket felt a sudden increase in pressure as her abs began to pop and ripple forth, and yet more higher still as Hinata’s pecs, lats, and back muscles all billowed and bulged into sensual strength. Hinata’s roars of pain took on a deeper and more forceful quality.

Little Hinata’s arms took on more and more muscle as the moments ticked by, capped at the top by deltoids blossoming into power incarnate. Her poor coat filled to capacity and then beyond, the stitching stress-tested harder than her pants had been moments earlier. With the addition of her swelling traps into the mix, pushing her body wider by the second, it was a small wonder her sleeves didn’t burst into confetti.

Zelretch’s concoction wasn’t just designed to endow strength to its drinkers, though. Hinata moaned quietly at the loss of her breasts to pectoral power, right up until that most feminine of flesh began to bud anew - and then some. Riding the wave of her pulsating pecs like a surfer on an eternal wave, Hinata’s boobs returned to prominence as vast and perfect orbs, wonderfully set above her brimming bod with delicious veins easily visible on her pale skin, and capped with a fine pair of areolae and simply beautiful nipples; thick, long, and inviting.

Little Hinata was definitely not so little any more! In the shadows of his hiding place, Zelretch grinned until the light caught his teeth and twinkled at the sky. It works! Now to see how high this little bird can fly…

As her body broadened with billowing brawn, Hinata’s coat finally gave up the battle it was always destined to lose and tore in two down the back. Even her beautifully-made mesh armour found it difficult to hold back the tidal wave of expansion ripping through Hinata’s physique. Gaps appeared and grew as she did, giving the watching Zelretch wonderful peeks at muscles built and building, power gained and gaining.

Hinata sank to her knees on legs both longer and thicker. The pulsing of her calves bulged into the strengthening of her hamstrings and even as she beat her fists on the ground in agony, Hinata rose as a result. The sheer bulk her quads took on necessitated a widening of her hips and a strong push on her glutes.

Further up, her tiny thin navel was swallowed whole by the bubbling and brewing of an amazing abdomen: eight of the toughest muscles in the country bulged into block-like being, pressing hard against her armour. Of course, the biggest problems the mesh weave faced were higher up… although Hinata’s boobs were made of softer flesh than her diamond abs, the pecs powering up behind were much more powerful and pushy. Shoulders broad and strong grew up and out, forcing her mighty arms away from her sides with awesome inevitability.

And then it was over. Hinata stayed kneeling for half a minute, panting breath back into her body as she took stock of what she had now become. Slowly she rose to her feet, looking over her massive forearms, patting her burly abdomen, or feeling the incredible sweep of her dominant quads.

“Wow,” Hinata whispered. “I can protect Naruto with this new strength! In fact - I can protect everyone!” The not-so-little-anymore kunoichi laughed as she flexed her chest and abs, ripping her poor armour even further.

Well done, little bird - looks like you’re an eagle now! Zelretch laughed to himself. Now, let’s see how the others are getting on…

As Zelretch walked away, whistling merrily to himself, he didn’t see Hinata gasp, hear her burp loudly, and drop to her knees once more. The now bulging kunoichi pursed her lips and a cloud of green gas emerged. Hinata’s eyes went wide as saucers and she started to tremble.

“Wh-What’s happening now?!” she whispered, slamming her hands to the ground, on all fours once more. Hinata’s thick forearms began to take on a stunning amount of mass, and they weren’t alone. Her upper arm power set billowed up in exactly the same fashion.

More interesting - although ‘worrying’ was the better word for Hinata - was the way her torso was blowing up in all three dimensions at once. The warrior’s abs that had sprouted on her formerly flat tummy were multiplying rapidly vertically until it seemed like she had an impossible twenty-pack… right up until they began to merge horizontally into single bands of waist-width power. All up and down her mighty back muscles grew up and into strange, darting peaks.

“Oh - oh no. It’s not over!” Hinata mumbled. The transformed and transforming kunoichi leaned back into a sitting position like a dog. The breasts that had billowed from her torso - the signs of womanhood she had been so grateful for just moments earlier - began to recede. Hinata didn’t have time to mourn their loss.

Because of the pain.

The tidal wave of change burying her in its wake was higher than the tallest temple, the strongest shrine. Things were very, very different this time: Hinata gasped as she watched her fingers lengthen and turn into what she could only describe as ‘talons’, all the while her arms swelled to identical thickness all the way down. Her skin changed colour; paled to the gentle silver shade of her eyes as it became rough and ready, a far cry from the smooth, womanly beauty she’d possessed only a few minutes earlier.

Her lats spread wider and wider like giant wings waiting to unfold - right up until they became wings, sprouting from her side like a cloak she’d hidden somewhere, the same dark blue as her hair; long, reaching, powerful wings. They brushed the sides of the courtyard that held the changing Hinata but, as soon as they hit the walls, they folded upwards into a resting position and wafted, slowly, ready to engage at any moment. Tears streaked down Hinata’s cheeks and pooled on the uneven flagstones beneath her.

The speed and bizarre nature of the changes continued. Hinata’s neck began to lengthen, projecting her head far above the courtyard walls, which itself began to change wildly from the sweet and demure original. Every strand of her hair disappeared as her nose and mouth merged in what could only be described as a snout, just as her ears shifted up the sides of her head to rest on top and the skin beneath where her eyebrows used to be bulged out into a ridge to protect her eyes.

Perhaps the most unusual change of all - though the list was long! - was when Hinata’s hind end began to swell and extend behind her with some speed, the snake-like slither of flesh eventually hardening with scale to give her a long, shapely tail, as silver-white as the rest of her incredible new form. Spikes jutted from the very tip to form what could be an extremely effective club, if the need arose to use it. By this point, Hinata was certain what was happening and her soul wept its hardest.

With one strong, tearing leap, the dragon Hinata rose into the sky and stayed there, her powerful wings unfolding in an instant to keep her hovering a few feet from the floor. Instinctively her four legs tucked up under her long, scaly body, to give her form the aerodynamics it needed to soar and strike fear into the hearts of any being who saw her. The last of the changes played out, and very few traces of her original humanity remained: just her eyes, their sheen the same, and her voice, had she tried to speak instead of keeping her anguish an internal emotion.

I’m a monster, she thought. The outcast I’ve always been, only now I come with wings and claws and a fire-breathing face.

Sadness threatened to overwhelm Hinata and she was almost powerless to stop it; the melancholy a way to keep the trauma of the change at bay until she was ready to deal with that, too. From the high of being made a strong, capable human to the low of becoming one of the foulest creatures in the world, her dream shattering and scattering around her like broken glass, all snatched away in an instant. Hinata simply let herself drown.

With a soundless cry the Hinata dragon beat her mighty wings and flew away, soaring through the clouds, hoping their fluffy barrier would stop anyone below from seeing her. From seeing the horror she had become. Once hidden from view, she changed direction and flew away from the inn as fast as she dared.

For not only was Hinata determined to leave - she was getting hungry. Very hungry indeed.

Chapter Two

“What was that jolt?” Sakura asked no-one in particular. The inn was filled with revellers, most she knew, some she didn’t, and the hubbub of so many other conversations drowned her words, even from those she was standing close to. So the pink-haired medical-nin took it upon herself to investigate.

With a quick bow to excuse herself from her comrades, she followed the maze-like corridors - getting lost more than once! - to the courtyard at the back of the inn.

They must have tended to horses here at some point, Sakura thought. As she looked around, Sakura sensed nothing out of the ordinary - right up until a serious pang of queasiness settled into her stomach with a loud gurgle. She breathed a sigh of relief when she looked around nervously to check if anyone had heard it… and she was, in fact, alone.

“Hee hee,” she smiled, adding giggle to gurgle before a blush sprouted on her sweet angular face. But the pain wasn’t going away. Nervously Sakura rubbed her flat stomach through her red shirt.

“Ohhhhh,” she groaned, hugging her arms to her wretched belly. Sakura doubled over and nearly fell to her knees, so painful had the pangs become. Then, in one hot, uncomfortable moment, Sakura vomited on the cobbles of the courtyard.

Once done, Sakura shivered and shook, spat and tried to collect herself. The serpentine coils of the feeling in her stomach had not really subsided, so she found small comfort in the fact they hadn’t got any worse. The medical-nin was trying to recollect what she’d eaten or drank that might have caused her this discomfort when things became a whole lot worse.

Sakura stuck her tongue out to pant and got the fright of her life when said tongue fell down to her knees and ended in a pronounced fork.

“Glah!” she managed and, for a ridiculous moment, frantically tried to roll up her new tongue and stick it back in her mouth. But there was no going back now - Sakura’s transformation had begun. The debilitating horror residing in her flat belly spread its tentacles around her entire body and had its way with her.

Sakura tried to walk back into the inn but her efforts were in vain. Each staggering step brought her less further forward than the one before and, in a moment that took her by surprise, her legs stopped obeying her commands some dozen feet before the door and the help within. Sakura sank to her knees and then to all fours, her legs and arms set at bizarre angles, as if she were mimicking a spider.

Her tongue dragged on the ground of the courtyard, helpless and wrong, preventing poor Sakura from closing her mouth. As the pain sprinted around her system, filling her with heat and hurt alike, her lips began to expand and jut forward. Tears spread down the helpless Sakura’s cheeks as her bizarre tongue was swallowed up by the expansion, although it still poked from between her lips in a surreal, animalistic blep.

As her lips elongated and protruded, the whole of Sakura’s head began to change shape. Her nose sank into her new and ugly proboscis, only for her nostrils to emerge above her tongue with a snort of pride. Her eyes grew large, avaricious, and hungry.

In the midst of these unreal - perhaps even unholy - changes, Sakura’s thoughts were made of panic and fear. She groaned and cried and screamed, right up until the sounds she was making became far too animalistic for her to understand their purpose. She instead mewled quietly, little whimpers that carried no further than the inn door; certainly not enough to alert anyone inside to her terrible fate.

Sakura’s body lengthened in slow, unsubtle sweeps, her slender and cylindrical torso pushing out in all directions at once to give her a shape more akin to a watermelon: slight at either end, but huge and bulging in the middle. Her shirt didn’t stand a chance as the transformation continued on its weird way, and it tore down the middle in a great billow of cloth. Only the collar clung to her neck as the wind took the rest of the fabric away and over the courtyard wall, to where Sakura neither knew nor cared.

Not that her torso was the only part of her body to change. Sakura’s arms and legs began to bunch with outrageous muscle, strength beyond strength, power beyond power. The fact that they, too, began to thicken in a way that struck terror - well, more terror - into the medical-nin’s heart only added to the potent soup of surreal that she must have indulged in at some point during the day.

It’s a nightmare, Sakura told herself as she heaved into her strange new form, one gasping breath at a time. In a moment I’ll wake up, tell Tsunade-sama about all this weirdness, and we’ll laugh about it together. In a moment. Just - a moment…

The human mind is a powerful tool for self-deception, particularly in the extremes of life. Sakura’s arms straightened and took on the same thickness almost all the way down. Her fingers turned red as her fingernails went black, the same kind of black she would treat if someone came in presenting those symptoms, and they grew until they clicked on the cobbles beneath her stricken body… and then they grew some more.

Claws… Sakura mused as she stared at the developments, her strangely-shaped head turning from one hand - if you could even call them ‘hands’ at the moment - to the other. Slowly but surely the horror in her body subsided, like flood waters sinking into the ground, to leave a dull, shut-down ache in her mind. The realisation was not a pretty one.

I’m turning into a dragon.

I’m TURNING into a DRAGON!

Sakura’s mind almost shut down at that point. In the midst of the greatest distress she would ever experience in her life, she found the energy to scamper back and forth in the courtyard on her alien legs and impossible, half-changed - feet? Hooves? Paws? It didn’t matter. The exercise burned off enough of the fear crashing over her to buy Sakura time to think.

There must be a way to reverse this, she thought. In all of the adventures she’s had, Tsunade-sama will have encountered this before. She’ll know what to do!

I just have to - let it happen.

So Sakura stopped still - apart from the shaking - and let her body change, no longer fighting what was coming. Unstoppably coming.

I’ll have to remember how I changed, Sakura decided. The way the… symptoms took hold of me. That’s often the way to finding a cure!

Not even daring to entertain the possibility that she wouldn’t be cured, Sakura set about memorising how her body metamorphosed. How her arms and legs grew long, so long, and thick, so thick, to support the changes to her core. She remembered when her tail began to emerge from her lower back, how it grew strong and long, how the ability to work the muscles that controlled its sweep and swipe simply appeared in her mind.

She remembered how her neck lengthened, how she crouched low to experiment with swaying it from side to side of the courtyard without hitting its walls, how her - comparatively! - small ears tickled the ragged bricks. With a shudder she memorised how her teeth changed, all separating out a little, sharpening to points instead of the flat ridges of her human ones. She internalised the moment her forked tongue fit perfectly into her unruly mouth.

The moment Sakura’s bright blue eyes shifted more to the side of her scaly, monstrous head was locked away in memory. The instant her small, pink horns formed from the remains of her precious hair was one she stored, even as her hungers changed deep within her soul. The slow growth of pale protective scale all down her long, scarlet monster’s belly was recorded and sent to the back of her mind.

Concentrating like this let Sakura remain calm, as calm as possible, as she made memory after memory of what she still insisted on calling her ‘symptoms’. Somehow the absolute agony of her complete and utter transformation was simply packed away, unprocessed, as if it were happening to someone else.

But it wasn’t.

When her wings emerged from midway down her substantial core, Sakura simply noted it. As the way to flap them and fly away on the currents of the unforgiving wind appeared in her mind, it became just another thing that had happened to her, another thing to add to her memory bank until she could talk to Tsunade-sama and be healed, to return to herself, and then to run to Sasuke and never let go. But some part of Sakura’s soul wept quietly, deep deep deep within.

As it had to.

When the last of the scales on her temporary dragon form rose and set in place, Sakura concentrated on sealing all the memories of her symptoms in her mind. Setting them in mental stone, so she could repeat them back to the most experienced medical-nin she knew, she turned back and forth in the now quite cramped courtyard, feeling the memories to strengthen them. The scale of the majestic sweep of her wyvern form overshadowed the inn until it was plunged into darkness when Sakura simply stood still nearby.

Her pause hadn’t been an intentional one. Sakura had wanted to keep pacing back and forth, crushing the cobblestones of the courtyard beneath her giant feet, working on keeping the list of her symptoms in the order in which they’d appeared. But that was not to be.

For Sakura had caught the scent of another dragon, one who’d suddenly appeared in the courtyard moments before her own change. Dragon-Sakura moved her head in quick, animal jerks, tracing and understanding the path the dragon had taken from the area in moments. The flash of realisation in her thankfully still intact mind was as sudden as it was impactful, and she let out an involuntary grunt of surprise.

Someone else must have changed into a dragon here! she thought triumphantly. Someone else who knows what it’s like, someone else who might be able to help me explain to Tsunade-sama what’s happened!

In a flashing instant there was no other choice. Sakura flapped her wings and was amazed that such thin pieces of flesh, stretched out so far, could possibly hold up a form so big and brutal beastly. The magic of the dragon, I guess!

Dragon-Sakura lifted off from the ground and hovered in place for a moment, a moment in which she made absolutely certain of the direction she needed to head. Her eyes narrowed in determination and, with a mighty waft of her impossible wings, Sakura soared into the sky, perfectly tracking the scent of the other dragon.

I’m coming, friend, Sakura thought. Whoever you are - I will find you, and together we‘ll get the help we both need!

Chapter Three

The inn’s revellers had not yet drunk enough to ignore the sudden onset and just-as-swift retraction of darkness as the unseen Sakura-dragon paced around outside. The legion horrified gasps were waved into silence by those more accustomed to action and an eerie silence settled over them all. As the light changed quality a few more times, everyone stood still until a very inhuman grunt was heard.

Then there was a VWOMPH, and finally… nothing.

The inn’s occupants looked at each other, hoping they wouldn’t be the one who had to take charge of the situation. In the meantime, those with more level heads began to assess the situation. It was Tsunade, the blonde medical-nin of many years experience, who broke the silence.

“Where are Hinata and Sakura?” she asked the crowd, her sweet brown eyes turning from one to the next, and seeing only shrugs or paled faces. “Shizune? Have you seen either of them in the last few minutes?” Tsunade kept the panic at the potential loss of yet more of her loved ones out of her voice, but was unable to prevent the colour draining from her face.

Shizune’s dark eyes widen. “I haven’t,” she admitted, her voice only a whisper. Tsunade’s fists clenched and her mouth turned grim.

“Then we must assume some sort of huge beast has taken them for its own foul purposes,” Tsunade declared, and immediately took charge. “Come with me to the courtyard so that we can make sense of what happened.” Shizune nods.

“The rest of you,” Tsunade added, turning to the others, “watch us from inside the inn, and be prepared to come and help in case the creature returns and we cannot fight it off!”

Not even waiting for assent, Tsunade and Shizune run down the inn’s slender, winding corridors to the courtyard, unable to speak to each other, neither wanting to give voice to their fears. They burst through the final door into the outside air, Tsunade’s green coat flowing behind her and Shizune’s dark kimono flapping in much the same way. The pair scanned their surroundings for any signs of what had happened but failed to check the sky until the tiny dot that was Dragon-Sakura soared out of range.

“What happened here?” Shizune exclaimed, looking down at the cobblestones that had been flattened in odd, elongated patterns. Tsunade-sama crouched to investigate them, ran her fingertips over them. She felt the dust she brought up by rubbing her thumb across them.

“Something huge has been here,” Tsunade announced, looking round. “Something huge that bothered to open and close the gate to make good its escape.”

Shizune frowned. “If it - or they - was big enough to do this kind of damage, would it really…?” With a quick shake of her head, Shizune ran across the courtyard to check the exit. A chill wind ran over and through her when she opened it and saw… nothing out of the ordinary.

“There are no tracks of any kind,” she called back to Tsunade, closing the gate and turning.

But Tsunade wasn’t listening.

Instead, Tsunade was doubled up in what appeared to be horrifying pain, her eyes closed and teeth clenched as she fought whatever was happening.

“Tsunade-sama!” Shizune exclaimed, charging towards her mentor with all the pace she could muster. Dozens of pairs of eyes inside the inn watched the scene as Shizune suddenly found her legs too heavy to move, as if she were walking in quicksand, and she shuddered to a halt. Shizune’s jaw dropped as she stopped, without her mind telling her body to do so.

She gave a quick shake of the head to the people watching to prevent them from coming to their aid - after all, the monster who had captured Hinata and Sakura might still be nearby, and the medical-nin judged it wasn’t worth the risk. Besides, what was happening to her could only have come from some sort of airborne toxin… couldn’t it?

What’s the common factor? Shizune thought desperately, right up until the moment she stopped thinking at all.

---

Tsunade saw Shizune run towards her through her pain-narrowed eyes and wanted to raise a hand to ward her off - but couldn’t. Fortunately, Shizune decided to stop of her own accord. That was one small shred of comfort as the most severe pain Tsunade had ever felt careered around her body like a drunken mob who were moments away from a brawl.

And then - and then.

The absolute physical anguish throbbing through every part, every cell of her body suddenly had a much more friendly companion. Tsunade’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed to a happy smoulder as her body filled with a quite particular heat. Her nipples tingled and her pussy clenched as waves of arousal crashed down around her; not replacing the pain, as such - more like a reward for withstanding it.

To the shame of her disciplined side, Tsunade’s tongue started to loll out as spots of arousal juice slicked into her panties. She began to rub her pussy lips beneath her blouse and through her pants, raising her head to the cloudless skies and loosing a grunt of pure raunch. It didn’t matter to the flushing Tsunade how many people were watching her through the inn’s windows, that nearly all of them were gasping in shock: the heat within her boiling body needed release.

The pain all but forgotten, Tsunade’s fingertips worked their own particular brand of magic and the medical-nin fell to her knees with orgasm. The rumbling of release was not alone inside Tsunade’s body, however: other magic methodically worked its way around her curving frame. The first signs of this second sorcery were most obvious when Tsunade’s breasts pushed aside the top of her blouse and her pale pink throbbing hard nipples strode into the sky.

For Tsunade had developed a pair of huge, beefy pecs.

Her breasts, as big as they were, had been unceremoniously shoved aside by the sheer brawn Tsunade now packed at chest level. The experienced medical-nin’s eyes went very wide as she took stock of the changes in her body that single orgasm had brought about. As her reluctant fingertips trailed upwards from her still-throbbing sex, Tsunade felt up a very obvious, very powerful six-pack of abdominal might, the tinkling obliques on either side the thunder to her abdomen’s lightning.

Unable to resist a quick grope of her left mam, Tsunade let out another grunt that, even in her haze of confused arousal, she recognised as from a deeper voice than her own. Whilst her fingers plied the soft yet firm flesh, she sent her other hand to her legs to find out what was happening. Her thighs, once lean, lithe, and fitting to her frame, were now packed with pounds of expansive muscle, filling her pants to maximum capacity.

I should be panicking, some rational part of Tsunade’s brain managed to murmur. This much change magic in one go is beyond anything I’ve ever seen! I wonder if… oh no!

The thought was swallowed up and fell away as Tsunade’s body grew again, this time with her full attention. Her dark blue obi began to split as her torso grew in all the available dimensions, that six-pack she’d felt a moment ago determined to grow in size and number. Her pant legs tore in both directions at once, the flying fabric causing a billow in her haori as it was forced from her body.

Tsunade grunted, deep and rumbling, as her body continued to change without her consent. Her shoulders pushed broader and broader as her traps burst higher and thicker whilst her delts rounded out to sizes she’d seen on only the strongest of men. Her arms filled with brutal blocks of muscle and the pain as her limbs expanded irresistibly to cope with the power layering on top of them should have wiped her mind.

But Tsunade was made of stronger stuff.

Mentally and physically.

As Tsunade’s hips widened her panties surrendered to her growth and split down the sides. They fell to the cobblestones beneath the muscled-up medical-nin, exposing her pussy to the air. As the wind’s soft touch tickled at her now bulgingly large pussy lips, Tsunade’s hand could do nothing but roar to her sex and begin to rub anew.

Unable to even remember that people were watching her, Tsunade teased her nethers and built up a new, even more powerful orgasm. Her thumb circled her clit, rubbing and teasing it, massaging her juices into its sweet sensitivity. Tsunade’s tongue lolled out of her mouth as her eyes drifted shut: she grunted like a rutting beast when another tsunami of sensation swelled and swept over her, radiating from her gorgeous sex outwards.

The orgasm brought more power to Tsunade’s body: the full thrust of an unstoppable eight pack adorned her abdomen, the veins climbing it from her pussy upwards resembling the branches of a winter tree. Her brutish pecs had roughly shoved her now small-seeming breasts well out of the way, like a battering ram pushing through a city’s gates. Her traps and lats had gained superb size and wondrous width, and those looking on wondered how Tsunade would get back to them through the inn’s narrow corridors, for surely she would fill them now.

All the crowd could really see was Tsunade’s back, which had taken on more muscle than many of them even thought possible. Her glutes had grown too: they’d rounded out to form a glorious butt, swallowing her panties as they’d grown, and making a small number of the crowd wish they could run from the room and bury their faces in its glory. Tsunade’s hamstrings were longer and stronger, but the immense bulge-bulk of her billowed quads could easily be made out from behind.

But Tsunade’s was not the only transformation the crowd could see.

---

At the far side of the courtyard stood Shizune. At exactly the same time Tsunade started to masturbate through her pain, Shizune undid her white obi and shrugged off her kimono. Dressed only in white underwear and sandals, the heat bursting from Tsunade in waves hit the younger medical-nin and, without realising it for a moment, Shizune slid her right hand down her panties and started to pleasure herself as well, as if in chorus.

Seconds after Tsunade came for the first time, Shizune’s expert teasing pushed her over the edge too. Her body positively exploded with incredible muscle, which rose from deep inside her like a volcano bursting lava all around the land. Her underwear was overwhelmed in an instant and the feeble fabric fell like confetti, though her sandals just about held on.

In fact, Shizune had grown all over: from her height of five foot six, a new Amazon of six foot seven had emerged. Unlike Tsunade, Shizune’s breasts had grown to the size of large watermelons, with her long, thick, deep pink nipples thrusting arrogantly into the air, announcing the muscular maiden’s arousal as clearly as her dripping sex. Her hips had also widened, giving her an hourglass shape that never seemed to run out of sand.

Shizune sank to her knees, and the cobblestones beneath her enlarged body cracked with the impact. Her impossible thighs rubbed against each other, neither built block of megamuscle willing or able to cede space to the other, so the medical-nin simply spread her legs in a wide arc, exposing the near-infinite beauty of her bald pussy to anyone who could see. Zelretch, deep in his hiding place in the inn’s roof, took out a telescope to focus on the sight: he blushed a very deep red and his forehead began to sweat.

Above the sense-heavy pleasure of Shizune’s perfectly made sex was an abdomen made of ten brutal bricks, her navel a tiny afterthought amidst the raging sea of strength, her obliques and serrati a stunning model of the anatomy of muscles. Higher still were an intense pair of pecs, sadly invisible behind the sweet splendour of Shizune’s more-than-majestic mammaries - except for the depth of muscle cleavage they added to her more traditional one. Even further up the medical-nin’s body were shoulders you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, mostly because they would likely fill it up.

Shizune’s arms were nothing short of Amazonian. She could easily have won an arm-wrestling contest against any of the inn’s guests, possibly even two at once, and that if they tried to defeat her with both hands. Her biceps had bulked with impossible size, looking devastating and intimidating, even without Shizune flexing them.

The complementary triceps round behind were the perfect horseshoe shape, enough muscle to swell three inches out. Shizune’s forearms hadn’t missed out in the growth, either: they were big blocks of beefy brawn that made her still-dainty hands look a little odd. Somehow the whole worked.

The near-naked Shizune arched her back, and her pillowy boobs bounced all over the place. Her right hand reached for her sex and she massaged both her inner and her outer pussy lips, making sure to brush her hot-button clit from time to time. Her left hand was no less busy, pulling and pinching her nipples into harder, thicker erection.

As Tsunade came, so Shizune was inspired to orgasm; as Shizune’s femmecum splashed on the dusty ground beneath her, so Tsunade worked her fingers faster. The overall effect was like some kind of orgasm tennis, and the watching crowd couldn’t help but feel the heat, even from inside the building. The men’s underwear became quite tight and the women’s quite slick as the ‘match’ outdoors wore on.

In the end, both women won.

---

Tsunade, who hadn’t grown taller during her transformation, was as wide as a stable door when her quick fingers teased out a double orgasm, both overloading her senses in quick succession. That was the catalyst for the most extraordinary events many of the inn’s onlookers had ever seen. With her sex dripping the sweetest juices, Tsunade tumbled onto all fours.

And began to change again.

Her limbs seemed to lock in place and Tsunade-sama - the rigid disciplinarian of many a medical-nin in training - roared and howled in frustration that she could no longer pleasure herself. What only the similarly stricken Shizune could see was the horrible rictus this denial had wrought on Tsunade’s face. The blonde’s eyes were wide and her teeth bared.

In fact, it was the changes in Tsunade’s teeth that Shizune noticed first. Her canines lengthened into fangs: huge, white, shining teeth that protruded from the older medical-nin’s mouth, uncontainable, as if she were becoming some kind of horrific beast. The blonde’s nose and mouth began to push forward, furthering Shizune’s wild impression.

Tsunade herself stayed as still as she could, observing her body’s transformation from a medical perspective (although she wasn’t as calmly detached as she would have liked!). As her muscle-bulked torso widened and lengthened, Tsunade sought the calm from her various sexual highs to clearly catalogue the horrifying events raining down on her once-slender frame.

If this is what happened to Hinata and Sakura - and there’s every chance it is! - we’ll need as much information about the changes as we can get.

Now committed to her task, Tsunade centred herself. She remained centred as her thick bull’s neck elongated several unnatural feet, propelling her lengthening head way above the roof of the inn. She remained centred when tough yet flexible scales began to creep through her hard, pale human skin, a grass-green colour, much like her haori.

Everything Tsunade felt was noted, stored perfectly in some deep recess of her mind. The blonde noted the irony that the person most likely to be able to undo the changes she was undergoing was herself - but if she could explain to another what was required, there was still a chance. So she kept on memorising what was happening.

She noted every sensation as a massive, long tail roared out from her back and whipped around the courtyard, crunching into the stone walls around her. She listed all that happened as her arms and legs became even thicker and somewhat less flexible, swapping for the legs of a dominant dragon. She forced herself to learn by rote how it felt to have an enormous pair of wings emerge and unfurl from her upper back: massive, wide, and powerful, yet thin like a bat’s.

By the time Tsunade’s head had lengthened enough for her new nose/mouth combination to be properly called a ‘snout’, she had dozens of symptoms - if that was even the right word - in her memory. She’d stored them there, ready for use, satisfied with her plan. The final series of scales - those enormous blocks of near-impenetrable, built-in armour - settled into place and Tsunade sighed in relief, which manifested itself as a high-powered billow of smoke from her nostrils.

But it wasn’t over for Tsunade.

There was a final rumble from within her majestic form, right at the bottom of her abdomen’s scale trail. Puzzled, the blonde medical-nin turned stupendous sky serpent twisted her lengthy, highly mobile neck to look back along the length of her newly majestic body. Her eyes spread wide at the sight, once she had gotten used to the fact that her head was upside-down.

A stupidly huge cock had emerged from her dragon-body, all grass green throb and pulse, the giant head with eight symmetrical spikes to stimulate the female in the most brutal way. Dragon-Tsunade blinked several times, and then her eyes narrowed in a smoulder. The most mischievous thought had just run through her head and it was taking all of her extraordinary willpower to resist it.

I wonder…

…but no! I must bury this in a female!

Abruptly Tsunade whipped her head from between her new legs and sniffed the air. Her massive, powerful jaw displayed a grin of the purest, most carnal lust she had felt for years. The light glinted from the Strength Of A Hundred seal, still just about visible in her dragon forehead.

Females! Tsunade thought, and suddenly most of her higher-order thinking disappeared beneath a fog of need. Two of them, young and fresh; ready for my seed! I must find them.

In that instant, Dragon-Tsunade raised their head to the sky and roared. The deep, rumbling sound rose into the sky and sent a shockwave through the air, rattling the tiled roof of the inn and shaking Zelretch to the floor. Tsunade spread their wings and, imperious, left the ground to hover in the most commanding fashion.

But Dragon-Tsunade was not alone.

---

When the first signs of Tsunade-sama’s transformation had taken over her superbly sculpted physique, Shizune was still masturbating, bringing herself to greater and greater orgasmic heights. As the rocket sensations roared around her fantastic physique, Shizune continued to grow: edging past seven feet tall and a bust size that her entire kimono would have failed to cover, her muscles built to burst and her pussy tight and sensitive. Shizune’s roars of pleasure became throaty, guttural; animal.

Moments before she, too, began the final phase of her transformation, Shizune had two fingers buried deep in her sex and was pleasuring her G-spot to Kingdom Cum whilst her strong thumb kept rubbing her engorged clit. Thick slicks of her juices fell to the ground beneath her in oozing splashes. Any shred of Shizune’s sensible, rational personality slunk away as her dexterous digits gave her the most monumental triple orgasm.

The pleasure was too much for Shizune and she slid slowly onto her back: although her legs were still raised, her still spasming pussy was sadly obscured from the crowd by Tsunade’s transformation. Some arcane instinct bade Shizune to get to all fours and she obeyed, her bulked arms pushing into her pillowy tits as she switched position. She even managed to find the scrape of her long, hard nipples against the wrecked cobblestones arousing.

Panting like a dog, the superstrong Shizune’s mind had shattered into tiny pieces. Perhaps that was a defence mechanism against what came next, for in the very next moment her body underwent a second, even more drastic transformation. Zelretch’s telescope shifted from the transforming Tsunade to the shivering Shizune at least once every couple of seconds, so undecided was he about who to monitor.

Shizune’s transformation came in pulses (as did she, adding so much femmecum to the already considerable pool running between the cobblestones beneath her that the sweet stuff slid beyond the gate to the courtyard). First her head was outright replaced outright by a dragon’s: a long, powerful snout with dozens of sharp teeth, billowing nostrils complete with wisps of pre-danger smoke, jet black like her hair, her eyes still onyx and sparkling. It looked for all the world like a busty, muscular giant was donning a dragon costume for a festival of some kind.

Tick… tick… BOOM

The next transformation wave brought Shizune’s neck, shoulders, arms and upper torso to dragonhood. The medical-nin’s sweet and graceful neck had already changed to one whose thickness would shame a bull when it abruptly grew several feet long, fortunately with the solid backing of her now exceptionally broad shoulders and thick-beyond-thick front legs. Nonetheless, unprepared and barely in possession of a mind at the time anyway, Shizune’s head slumped forward and hit the ground with an enormous SMACK, kicking up dust, dirt, and fractured cobblestone.

Shizune’s new tongue poked from between her flush, wyvern lips in what would have been a cute blep on a smaller animal… or, at least, not on a woman midway through transforming into a member of the Royalty of the Skies.

If she’d had a mind to register it, the pain at that moment would have been intolerable for Shizune. Her head and upper torso was that of a jet-black adult dragon, whereas her abdomen and everything below that remained a - superstrong and unusually tall, to be fair - human woman of around thirty years of age. The black scales of Dragon-Shizune just, sort of, flowed into the fair-skinned human body below.

Perhaps most unusually of all was that Shizune had started cumming when her dragon head appeared, and had not stopped.

Dragon-Shizune’s eyelids were half-closed when the next wave of transformation swept down her abdomen, stopping just north of her clenching cunny. Shizune’s torso became the stark, scaled ripples of an adult dragon’s, perhaps its weakest part, but only in relative terms. It would take a magically-assisted javelin of supernatural sharpness, wielded by the finest spearman in the world, to actually pierce the heavily-armoured area.

Right round the other side of Dragon-Shizune’s long, strong body were her wings. They unfolded gracefully and began to waft gently, almost absent-mindedly, which was only fair given her ongoing state of mindless. Each wing was made of five sharp sections, almost the same shape as a spear-tip, and the whole held together by a long ridge of highly armoured skin, almost bone-like in its density.

Now almost entirely dragon, Shizune’s spasming sex would not stop dripping heavenly honey. The mewling purrs that rumbled up the throat now longer than the body she woke up with would have been cute if they hadn’t sent fierce winds into the trees closest to her. The strain on her still-human legs of the multi-ton draconic body was fortunately taken up by her front paws, right up until her transformation was complete and she could take her new place in the world.

Which happened a moment later.

The final sweeping change from ‘medical-nin’ to ‘majestic wyvern’ happened in the sweeping blink of an eye. In one instant Shizune was a sight beyond surreal; a sight that had strolled past ‘perverted’ and straight into ‘wrong’. Then in a brusque flash she was whole, new; different.

Her huge human legs had gone, along with her pulsing pussy: instead the long, thick back legs of a dragon had appeared, tensed and ready to spring. Shizune’s butt, the cute and glute-filled pride and posterior joy, disappeared, to be replaced by a tail almost as long as her dragon body. Most astonishing of all, though, was neither of these.

Instead, much like Tsunade, whose growth still ripped through her on the other side of the courtyard, a massive spear of jet-black cock thudded to the ground, raging huge though it was still flaccid. The heavily spiked tip smashed into the cobblestones beneath Shizune’s dragon-body, whereupon they exploded into powder. Their giant dragon-dick churned into the soil below as Shizune’s mind returned in drips as slow as the oozing of her femmejaculate down her old thighs.

Much like Tsunade, the first thing to cut through the fog that had taken up its residence in Shizune’s mind was the scent of female dragons. Their giant head rose from its sexual stupor and sniffed the potency of the pink dragon, the sensuality of the silver one. Dragon-Shizune stood, their imperious neck turned to the skies to check for signs of the others.

“Females!” Dragon-Shizune boomed, her voice directed at the fully transformed Dragon-Tsunade in front of her. “And one for each of us,” they added slyly. Dragon-Tsunade bared their teeth in what Dragon-Shizune realised quickly was a smile, not a threat display.

“Yes, Shizune,” Dragon-Tsunade said simply. “I too have been tempted. But we must stay and work out a cure with the others.”

“I - I must be sated,” Dragon-Shizune replied. “I was not given this body only to lose it again a moment later. They smell… like angels… they tempt me!!”

---

The next instant lasted for almost half an hour, or so it seemed to Dragon-Tsunade. Regaining control of their thoughts following the haze of raw, naked heat had been trouble enough. It seemed that Shizune was not going to prove as capable as they of calming themselves.

Dragon-Tsunade realised what Dragon-Shizune was going to do with exceptional speed, but before they could open their mouth to reason with their - former? - apprentice, the bulky black dragon had taken to the skies with speed that bewildered every single member of the audience. With a snarl that shook the courtyard walls, Dragon-Tsunade knew what their only option was. The only pause was to check that all the details of their transformation had remained in their memory, stored deep and good and proper.

That done, they too took to the sky with a few beats of their giant wings and sped after Dragon-Shizune, hot on the trails of the scents of the females they both desired.

The females that were their friends.

Chapter Four

The dragons had gone. There was a powerful collective moment where every person inside the inn turned to someone else to check they had, actually, seen what they had, actually, seen. Everyone seemed to blink in unison.

And then the inevitable panic set in.

But Ino Yamanaka is strangely calm. Instead of running around the inn’s narrow, dank corridors to find an exit - any exit - like the majority of its patrons, she simply smashes the window she’d been staring through to witness the galloping horror of Tsunade and Shizune’s unbelievable changes and leaps through the gap. The platinum blonde’s brow furrows as the powerful stench of dragon hits her nostrils like a bo staff.

“Yeuch!” Ino exclaims as her nose wrinkles in disgust, hands on her hips in a kind of visual pout. “‘Horrible’ is too small a word…”

Braving the intense reek of wyvern, Ino makes her way forward to inspect the damage left behind during the, what she now suspects is four, transformations. The courtyard’s cobblestones have taken quite the beating in places: some of them have just cracked, but some are now no more than powder. The gate opposite the inn building will take an expert craftsman a few hours to repair.

But what interests Ino the most - though she doesn’t realise it yet - is the two trails of gooey cum her friends left behind when they changed. The liquid hasn’t quite soaked into the ground yet, and Ino squats on her haunches to get closer to the sweet signs of Tsunade’s many orgasms. Her kunoichi training provides her with perfect balance as she leans closer to the cum, its rich, tangy scent cutting through the deeply powerful odour of dragon like a knife.

Closer and closer she leans, closer and closer, until…

THUD!

Ino Yamanaka, a chūnin of some renown, falls over into the mess. She springs upright immediately, eyes wide in absolute horror, her first act to look wildly about her, checking to see if anyone noticed her fall. There’s no-one within sight, fortunately, so Ino heaves a huge sigh of relief, her slight bust wobbling as the breath literally puffs out of her.

It’s only after this sigh of relief that Ino notices her flat stomach is soaked in Tsunade’s cum, the goo slowly dribbling down her body!

“GAAH!” Ino exclaims, her eyes once more wide in abject disgust, her jaw dropped and sickened. She frantically swipes at her belly with both hands, hoping to wipe it from her flawless body. At that exact moment, the liquid soaks into her skin!

“Uh!?”

Ino’s ice-blue eyes find normality once more as she leans forward to stare down at her stomach, holding her breasts out of the way for a better view. She felt nothing as Tsunade’s cum disappeared, and nothing seems to have changed with her body, either. Her brow wrinkles with thought.

“Maybe I just rubbed it, oh, yuck,” Ino realises. “Maybe I just rubbed it into my skin…”

But she hadn’t.

As Ino stares at her stomach, it began to ripple with wave and motion. The ridges and valleys of a most seductive six-pack pulse forward, bringing the slight curl of her navel to the fore at the same time. Visceral bursts of heat run through her frame, sweeps of seductive passion that focus on her nipples and her pussy, bringing both to the flame of desire.

Like her friends before her, Ino sinks to her knees and helplessly rubs her sex through her clothes as deep waves of transformative magic bring her under. The delicate yet strong fingers that trace her lips are not enough, so she sticks her right hand down her skirt to make skin-to-skin contact. The groan Ino releases when her palm touches her inflamed clit is deep and thunder.

The magic of change takes her body on a journey. Not content to alter her stomach alone, ripples of transformation spread from Ino’s empowered core to every other muscle group they can find, stretching, lengthening, strengthening. Even her abs bulge bigger, harder, better; six becomes eight and, as Ino brings herself to her first climax, ten.

Just above this most marvellous midsection, Ino’s chest changes in two big and important ways. First of all her pecs blossom in all the available dimensions, creating twinned bulges of the most exquisite strength, widening her body to accommodate the new. Secondly - and yet concurrently - her breasts bloom into a pair of mighty mouth-watering melons, her pale pink nipples making short work of her purple blouse as the fulsome flesh billows into view.

The temptation is too much: Ino’s free hand rises to pull and twist her nipples alternately, taking her pleasure to dimensions she never could have known before. The crotch of her skirt is soon sopping wet with her own femmecum, squirting in sweet blasts from her sex as her body becomes beyond. Ino grunts in raw heat as she twists her hand and roughly shoves two fingers into her pussy, ensuring her clit gets some love into the bargain.

The sensuality seems to power the changes… or are the changes powering the sensuality? Ino hasn’t the space in her mind to think of such things. The only thought in her mind is orgasm, rough and hot and oh-so-sense-stunning-sweet.

Above her pecs lie Ino’s traps and delts, both of which seem to double in size as she cums. With each orgasm the power layering on her upper body becomes more and more undeniable, more and more irresistible. After Ino loses count of the number of times she bursts with passionate pleasure and pleasured passion, she’s almost as wide as one of the dragons she saw take flight not moments before.

And her arms!

Her upper arms alone are thicker, more muscular than the thighs she had when she walked into the inn. Ino’s biceps are now made to resemble rocks: huge chunks of the brawniest beef for miles around, she could certainly outflex a travelling strongman. Her triceps are broad, bulky, and beautiful, the classic horseshoe shape very much in evidence, and large enough to shoe the horse of Death himself.

Even Ino’s forearms are bigger than should have been possible, stuffed to the brim with meaty might. Her hands have even had to grow bigger, just to look in proportion with the rest of her extraordinary body! Ino’s current actions, however, are not so much about power as they are about control and delicate touches.

Well, for the most part.

Ino’s rough, perhaps even brutal, squeezing of her giant, pillowing breasts is anything but delicate. The beautifully out-of-proportion overflow of mammary flesh squirms and rolls as her ‘free’ hand grabs and smooshes and teases. Her pale pink nipples, stiff and erect, ‘protest’ at this mistreatment by firing flashes of tongue-lolling sensation, and it’s as if Ino’s nips are directly connected to her spasming pussy.

“More… MORE!” the naked, superbuilt kunoichi grunts, roaring her demand at the sky.

It’s a wish that Fate is only too happy to grant.

As Ino blushes through another series of powerful orgasms, the strands of her squirted cum  layering on top of Tsunade’s, something forces her onto all fours. At the same time as Ino’s fat, long nipples pillow up against the ground beneath her, the sheer weight of her hyperstrong body renders the cobblestones beneath her hands and toes into dust. Ino feels a deep, primal rage as her lust is forced to go unsated.

“Now what?” Ino snarls, her face filled with vicious and wrath.

Then realisation dawns.

“KYAAAA!!!!”

Ino’s panicked yell echoes off the walls of the courtyard - those that are still intact, at least - but to no avail. There’s no help coming her way. There’ll be no stopping of what’s to come and, as the last drops of Ino’s femmecum pool beneath her enlarged and enraged body, it begins.

Her arms - already thick as tree trunks - billow even further outward as all her limbs get longer. She can’t help but emit a “woah!” as her head rises far higher than her usual five foot four. Ino expands in all the dimensions at once as her second transformation plays havoc with her powerful physique.

The slow lengthening of her limbs and body is agony, even for the empowered kunoichi. Ino screams and hollers under the torment, right up until the point her voice becomes so powerful that the trees shake and, despite herself, she shrinks down into fear, falling silent. Her horror at the transformation is not helped when her arms and legs start to turn the purple of her outfit, now ruined beneath her.

The brutality continues as the pain threshold Ino’s enhanced human body is breached and left long behind. The absolute torture of having her core stretch several dozen feet - and not just front to back, but left to right and up and down, too - is not lost on Ino, who’s too tired and out of it now to even whimper. Right now she can only be thankful that she isn’t trembling, or vomiting.

As her pale flesh is swapped out for dark purple and harshly rough scale, Ino opens her eyes. Her vision is coated in broad sweeps of fuzzy blur, so she blinks numerous times, to no avail. Just a few moments ago she would have brought up her hand to rub the muck away, but there’s no chance of that now.

To any observer at this point, Ino would have looked quite the sight. From the neck down she has the body of a grand female dragon - at least, she does when her whipping tail emerges, almost as long as her trunk! - tall, long, purple, and really rather regal, thank you very much. From the neck up, though, Ino Yamanaka has somehow retained her human face.

Her long, light blonde hair cascades down to her brutal dragon body, the warmth of her neck far different to the cool of her scales. Ino’s usual unbeatable confidence has deserted her, left unforgotten next to the path life has taken her on. It’s at this point she realises what the blurring in her eyes is: tears.

The hot wetness, a visible sign of Ino’s inner turmoil, streaks down her face in twin streams as her lips wobble. Through it all Ino is silent: no sob, no whimper, not even the smallest sniff emerges from her mouth as she accepts her fate. The transformation is incomplete and, judging from what she’s already seen, there’s no reason to believe it will stay that way.

The inevitable reaches slowly up Ino’s neck, lengthening and thickening it to suit the quite majestic form beneath.

Ino remains aware throughout the whole process. Her human head powers forward on the wave of eldritch growth. For the second time that day her neck is altered in ways beyond her control: the swan-like grace of the morning became the bull-like thickness of the afternoon, only now to make way for the wyvern’s power and durability for the evening.

And, for all she knows, the rest of her life.

A dragon, forever. No longer the beauty of the city; now a wretched, rampaging, dumb beast with urges she can barely begin to understand. Ino’s tears are thick and full as emotion she dare not express verbally flows up and through her.

Her neck is long enough, now, whatever it is that governs the transformation judges. In accordance, the purple scale of Ino’s dragon form starts to swallow her head with infinite, almost gentle slowness; a lover’s caress where she should have expected none. Silence falls, reigns; is.

Ino’s pride, her long, sweet-blonde hair, just vanishes. It doesn’t fall out, or fold into some new part of her new body: it just becomes the same purple scale, hard and rough and impossibly alien, as most of the rest of her wyvern form. The changes flow round her head, changing the position and size of her ears as they roll ever on.

New information floods into Ino’s brain as her ears begin to function, nothing more than a mild distraction from the utter anguish that’s now her constant companion. The transformation closes up around her face, the only sign that this gargantuan, abominable beast-lady of the skies was once the kunoichi Ino Yamanaka its ice-blue eyes. Ino’s nose and mouth fuse into one, the final bolt of unstoppable, irresistible agony nothing more than a drop in the ocean.

It’s done.

Ino’s tears cease their endless quest to soothe the young woman - what is the point, now? She is no woman: she is beast, the most feared and unpleasant creature of all. The melancholy that’s held Ino’s heart in place shatters into a million million pieces.

With a cry that shakes the leaves from the surrounding trees, Ino unfolds her giant, dark wings and launches her new self into the sky.

No-one must see me! No-one can see the shame!

Chapter Five

Amongst the large group that scatters from the inn is Temari Nara. Her black kimono whips against her as she runs, its large slits revealing sizeable portions of her lean legs as those muscles work to power her away, anywhere away, from the dread terror they have all just witnessed: their friends - former friends, she reminds herself - becoming dragons. The image is seared into her mind, a memory that will never leave.

The departing pack are frantic, frightened into running on instinct through the forest that surrounds the inn. None of them are really aware of what the others are doing, and that’s how Temari’s problems start. A stray elbow from a fellow fleer hits her full in the ribs, and the sandy-blonde kunoichi doubles over in pain.

The person behind Temari - Tenten? Kurenai? She can’t be sure - runs into her full force, knocking her into a nearby tree and the blissful horror of unconsciousness. The last thing Temari hears is a stuttered “Sorry” as the incongruously bright and happy skies above fade from view and sense.

---

When Temari awakes with a start, it’s a very different time of day. Darkness has settled in around her and her sore head, meaning she can only see by the light of a thin crescent moon. Temari winces, holds her head, and tries to rearrange herself into a sitting position.

Her movements are slow, painful, and stiff. Nonetheless, she makes it after a few false starts, and sits on her butt on the uneven forest floor. In the next few moments she checks her four pigtails, the location of her forehead protector, the fit of her gloves and boots, her fishnets, and the tightness of the red sash around her waist. On top of everything else, it would not do to be immodest, she notes.

Once she feels ready to make a move out of the darkened - and therefore dangerous - forest, Temari feels a sharp pang in her stomach. Her stern face turns to wince in an instant, and she expels a little puff of air at the hurt. Realisation forms within her with the speed and devastation of an earthquake - it knocks all her assumptions down around her, and they smash into painful shards at her feet.

It must have been something we ate or drank at the inn! That’s what caused Tsunade and Shizune to change!

I may have eaten the same thing!

As it happens, Temari didn’t eat or drink the same things as either Tsunade or Shizune… but Zelretch’s magic was poured into everything that was served to any of the patrons at the inn that day, so the effect is still the same. A suspicious tightening rings around Temari’s stomach and tightens, as if someone has bound her and is pulling at the cords. Her desperate grunt becomes something of a sigh as the pain begins to change into something quite different.

An unexpected - but quite welcome - wave of pleasure throbs out from Temari’s nethers. Little pulses of joy start to build up and cook her blood to boiling. The normally very well-disciplined kunoichi’s head begins to wobble around aimlessly as a helplessly happy grin explodes onto her face.

She may even have chuckled a little.

What certainly happens starts at Temari’s legs. Obscured by her kimono - at least, at first - her thighs begin to billow with size. The lean masses of her quads, simply toned at the start of the day, grow the trademark valleys and rolling hills of a woman who’d worked them, hard, for many a year.

It would have seemed to any onlooker that Temari was also preparing to stand as her upper legs took on brilliant, bulky brawn. What was actually happening was that her glutes were inflating with delicious, correct muscle, the layer of padding on her butt propelling her upwards. Temari bites her lip as she feels the lushness of her Amazon’s ass spread across the ground beneath her.

Her fishnets come under tremendous pressure as her calves begin to bulge with stupendous, stunning strength. Temari’s legs are forced to grow longer, simply so that the massive might layering up on them doesn’t look hideous or impractical. When it looks like Temari is smuggling watermelons at the back of her lower legs, her fishnets finally rip and then flutter about aimlessly in the quiet breeze that whistles through the trees.

She doesn’t care.

The more pain she withstands, the more powerful the orgasm bursting her body with soothing fireworks becomes (or, perhaps, be-cums). As her enlarging feet make short work of her boots, Temari sighs with pleasure. Not even the sound of that expensive material shearing can bring her down from this particular cloud.

Having found the lowest part of Temari’s body, the endless throbbing waves of metamorphosis simply go straight back up her frame to find a part of her as yet unchanged that they can remake bigger, better, stronger. As it happens, this is Temari’s flat belly. She had spent many hours in training making it lean but lightly muscled for manoeuvrability.

There is half a second during which the transformation seems to stop and tut to itself, as if saying ‘That simply won’t do’. After that all-too-brief respite - which she secretly doesn’t want anyway, for the sweet orgasms she is being fed like the finest grapes are the very best she’s ever had - it feels to Temari like there’s an explosion whose blast radius runs from just below her breasts to the very depths of her spasming pussy. Little pouts of squirted lovejuice dapple at her shorts in tribute to the changes taking place further up.

And what changes.

Temari’s abs explode from her comparatively dainty midsection as if a burst of magic has gone off inside her. Eight of the richest, most ripping and powerful muscles roar to the surface of her skin, propelling her slender navel upward as the landscape of her stomach changes forever. Instinctively, the still-cumming Temari knows that if some unfortunate punched her steel-hard, ultrastrong belly, they would break their hand.

Not only do the muscles pump out into space, they bulge sideways too, forcing Temari’s body to change in other, more enchanting ways. To preserve her curve her hips widen, and that in turn brings further bulk and power to her glutes, thighs, and calves, as they too stretch out. The feeling as her body builds brings Temari to another orgasm, with a second hot on its heels, and her tongue lolls out as if she were drunk.

And she is, in a way.

Her clothes are in tatters - or, at least, they are from a certain point downwards. The red sash that had pride of place around her waist is now no more and her kimono went with it - its bottom half, anyway. Only her shorts have survived the growth, although the several sweet spots of her femmecum are making the fabric moist, and therefore weaker.

As Temari pushes out a long, dreamy sigh, her upper body begins to join the party and, although it’s late getting started, it makes up for lost time with ease and mesmeric beauty. A rumbling at chest level quickly gives way to the event of Temari’s life so far as both her pectoral muscles swell and her boobs finally blossom in the sweetest and most sensual of ways. As fast as her pecs can bulge into fabulous, perfect slabs of the most serious strength on her body yet, her tits fill out and pillow up against the top of her kimono, spilling over and out into the night air within seconds that see Temari blush out another trio of orgasms.

The cool dusk temperature sees Temari’s nipples spike from her spread, pale pink areolas, reaching the length of her thumb. Her breasts are now so large and sumptuous that she cannot stop herself from reaching her left hand up to them, cupping them, feeling their weight, tracing their outer edges. Before she can touch her nipples, Temari has cum again.

That seems to be the trigger. The rest of Temari’s body joins in with the transformation, making her a new and whole unit of a warrior woman. Her upper back spreads wide and tall  to accommodate the explosive growth of her lats, and this in turn forces her torso to stretch too: Temari’s war goddess pectorals spread even wider, and her love goddess tits indulge in another round of pillowing billowing until the firm, feminine flesh is twice as big as her head.

All that’s left of Temari’s kimono is the short sleeves which cling to her shoulders and arms like a startled, trembling kitten. Like the rest of the failed fabric, though, they are out of luck. Temari is barely used to the abrupt completion of her torso’s transformation when the final wave of change sweeps ever upward.

Her shoulders broaden and raise, traps and delts swelling and stretching in perfect tandem to deliver the perfect level of power. Temari’s neck thickens to cope as her titan’s trapezius rises like a tsunami to engulf it. The gentle slopes rise until the monumental muscles are more like a cliff to fall from than anything else.

But Temari’s deltoids are determined to keep pace, to provide a swollen but well-rounded platform for the wayward wanderer to land on, should they drop from those mighty traps. The hulking pumpkin beef bulges in all directions at once, soon much bigger than Temari’s slender hand could encompass. Several deep striations wrench through both the mirror-perfect muscles as trickles of vascularity boil to the surface of her skin.

Temari’s kimono sleeves give up their futile struggle and rip with the most sensual sounds that aren’t coming from the colossal kunoichi’s mouth. Thus the stoic Temari is naked, but her body is as yet incomplete. This will, of course, be rectified very soon.

The slender tone of Temari’s arms is replaced in the blink of an eye by magnificent, mouth-watering and majestic muscle. Her biceps alone bulk into profoundly powerful orbs of the most stunning strength, a thick single vein rippling down their length, which runs in perfect symmetry from deltoid to elbow. If she were capable of flexing right now, Temari would discover their split peaks and be unable to keep her fingers from trying to press down on them - an act that would be fruitless.

Of course, Temari’s biceps are not alone. They are accompanied by her tremendous triceps, a pair of horseshoe icebergs that rip into being so quickly that a gust of wind emerges as they bellow their arrival on her burgeoning body. It looks as if Temari’s upper body has been chiselled from granite and, given how hard her skin is right now, that might as well be true.

The final sweep of change is over Temari’s forearms. To be in keeping with the rest of her now beyond magnificent body, they grow longer, and spread with incredible, indelible size and strength. They take on the volume of a strong man’s thighs and even greater power than that as what must be close to the final transformative orgasm saturates Temari’s shorts enough for some of the nectar to slip down the canyons of her thighs.

The transformation’s very final flourish is a sweep over Temari’s hands, granting them proportionate size and grace to the rest of her fabulous and fantastic form.

Slowly the newly-formed goddess rises, wary that she saw Tsunade and Shizune both change in similar ways before they became dragons in front of everyone. Temari stands calmly, checking her new, behemothic body for any hint of scale or claw whilst she considers whether or not she desires gold any more than she did yesterday. When all of her checks come up negative, Temari gives the magic that changed her one last chance: she takes in a deep breath through her nose and blows it out of her mouth.

When nothing but wisps of breath flutter and scurry away into the cold night air, a grin so wide it seems to encompass her whole face bursts into glorious.

Maybe the others ate something I didn’t, and the combined magics made them into dragons instead of mighty warriors!

Lacking any other explanation, Temari rolls with that one. In the moonlit dark, the blonde kunoichi makes a very important decision: she will explore her new body, to test its limits! The thought becomes action when she brings her left hand up to her bewitching breasts and her right hand trails down her amazon’s abdomen to her sex.

“OhhhhHHHHHHH!”

Temari squashes her breasts together so that both nipples are in her palm and rubs them as best she can. The sensation takes over her in a series of spasmed gasps, most particularly when she also dips the pad of her middle fingertip into her slit. Words become too difficult for the kunoichi as she slides to the uneven ground beneath her and spreads her legendary legs wide, her boulder-hewn thighs working in perfect, fluid motion.

Before things went very wrong for Temari, they went very right indeed: as the blonde kunoichi indulges in rough play with her nipples, they stiffen, and the thrilling sensations she experiences at their touch begin to ride away with her senses. Her right hand, meanwhile, strokes and teases the outer lips of her pulsing, clenching mound until, unable to resist the siren call, they touch her inner lips. Unstoppable moans and shudders wrack her formidable physique, and her tongue lolls out onto her face, moistening her face at the same time as her lower lips begin to glisten with an altogether different kind of liquid.

Once Temari brings her clit into the play, her pleasure escalates to such an extent she feels like she’s flying, somewhere above the clouds, surging through the sky like an angel. With the infinitely fine motor control of which she is now capable, Temari gently pinches the nub between her index and middle fingers. Paradise opens as she works her sweet juices around the far-more-than-sweet clit, rising from its hood to take centre stage and every single one of the plaudits.

Temari’s gasps are deep in pitch and many in number. A group of nearby birds scatters as she really gets into it: with a small pang of regret, the blonde removes her hand from her breasts, which bounce and jiggle back into place with the most delicious slaps and wobbles, so that she can tease her pussy lips again. Well, that was certainly the plan - what actually happens is that, after she licks them as primer, Temari roughly shoves her index and middle fingers deep into her spasmy cunt, seeking and finding her G-spot in a matter of seconds.

The pads of those fingers, having found their goal, work the area with passion aforethought and afrenzy, the others resting against the thicc of her thighs. Alongside this she continues her clitplay, of course, stroking the rough nubbin just as she should be stroked. The build-up is almost as explosive as the release.

Almost.

The utmost and most complete pleasure sails over Temari after the merest few moments of self-stimulation, her femmecum the sweetest spray of lush cream. Her voice disappears under the weight of personal passion, although the flush of her face and the cast of her lips would tell anyone what she was doing on their own better than any mere moan or grunt could manage. Temari pulls back, for the moment, keeping her quivering fingers at rest as best she can.

When her vocal cords decide to work again, the deepest, most seductive moan Temari has ever heard issues from her lushplump lips. Now just a slave to the deep and powerful lusts galloping over, around, and through her, she begins to work her fingers again, eager for further orgasm to stamp its authority upon her. Temari opens her eyes and grins the grin of someone for whom life has come up trumps, and she’s the only one with cards.

As this thought comes up from her air in her orgasm-addled mind, Temari’s right thumb, at rest on the tease of her lowest row of abdominal might, sends a warning signal: something is Very Wrong. The plate of her muscly midsection has abruptly changed texture - instead of the impervious warmth she’s become accustomed to, it was now cold beyond cold… and getting bigger. With deep reluctance, Temari gently withdrew her hands from her genital area so she could squash her breasts in to see what was going on… whereupon she howled in frustration.

Her abdomen was bulking up and out into that - of a dragon.

Without her willing it, Temari shifts to all fours. All the lust running through her body like stampeding cattle vanishes in an instant, and is replaced by what seems to the stricken kunoichi like gallons of terrified sweat. The worst now happens: again, utterly outside of her own volition, Temari trots away from the forest path; in search of something she can neither tell nor understand.

As Temari moves, the unusual pose she has adopted becomes more straightforward to maintain - natural, somehow; again, in a way she cannot determine. Her legs - why did I just think back legs?! the blonde kunoichi laments - shorten so that they are of a comparable size to her front legs - arms, arms! Tears stream down Temari’s cheeks as she moves on; low-hanging branches and ferns smack her head, now somehow easier to hold in that position, as she carves this new path for herself.

Temari knows, now, what she will become; there is no way to avoid that fate, based on what she saw of the others - particularly if Lady Tsunade was powerless to stop it! - so she simply accepts it. Indeed, there’s a deep and potent sense of bottled power within every fibre of her being. It’s as if the transformation magicks are being stifled within Temari’s suddenly weak-seeming, gangly frame, instead of roaring out as the animal, the beast, she will become.

Some aspects do manage to seep through the prison, though. Chief amongst them is a tail: not the brutal sweep of the built-in weapon Temari saw Shizune and Tsunade develop in the courtyard, perhaps, but enough to swoop and swish against the lower foliage and dirt of the forest floor, giving her already fear-addled brain new information with which to understand the world through its odd touch. Despite her pleading with the new appendage to remain still so she can concentrate on where her journey might lead, it disobeys, like a puppy who has yet to be house-trained.

Temari’s snout is next. From what she could see of Shizune’s metamorphosis - despite the dark-haired kunoichi being so far from the inn - it seemed the most horrific, stomach-ravaging torture to have her nose and mouth fuse together, elongate, and widen, scales and oh-so-many teeth forming along the way. However Shizune experienced it, though, it’s actually quite painless for Temari; in fact, it seems really natural to have them both so close together!

Oh no no no no no… I’m losing my mind to the dragon!

During all of this deep-rooted horror, Temari has been trotting on, on, and on, deeper into the forest’s clutches, away from the known path. Her toes and fingers shrink back into her body and sharp, thick claws emerge, each as wide as a cat’s paw; she trots on. Her abdomen completes its transformation into tough, dragon underbelly, and she mourns for a moment as the powerful bloats of armour swallow up her gorgeous breasts; she trots on.

Much of Temari’s human body is now lost to dragonhood. Most of her fervently wishes the transformation would just take over and complete its terrifying titan task, but the blonde human-dragon hybrid - for that is what she is, right now - can no longer tell if that’s what human-she or dragon-she wants. Even her tears, still a stream of soul-deep sadness, are forced to move differently around her heavy snout.

As Temari’s very skin begins to turn lilac and her dragonborn scales start to poke through her weak human flesh, she sees ahead of her the burgeoning dragon transformation magic’s objective. She risks a little laugh, which emerges as a scuttering grunt and mildly horrifying burst of smoke. Despite this, Temari’s heart finds a way to smile as she scampers forward.

The trees thin out and Temari emerges into a clearing. The moon is clear and strong above her; the grass thick beneath her feet. She gallops into the very centre of the clearing and, her animal instincts taking over, she turns a complete circle to check where threats to her may come from so whatever will happen next has the best chance of doing so.

The only route into the clearing, it seems, is the one she herself just made to get here. Indeed, the space is beautifully unspoiled, apart from the pseudodragon’s footprints in a series of trampled ovals. Knowing that she will be vulnerable - there must be plenty of dragons around now, and they’re not known for being the most sharing and co-operative of beasts! - Temari turns to face the way she came.

The stage is set.

Do your worst!

With the space in which to grow around her, the transformation magicks work to move Temari on from the eldritch human/baby dragon hybrid she currently stands at to something more fitting. After being held back for so long, the changes come quicker than they should. Pain is Temari’s only friend for a good few minutes, despite the preparations the magic already put in place.

Temari’s torso blows up like a balloon in all three dimensions but most especially length: her five foot five body suddenly stretches out to something multiple dozens of feet long, generous underbelly thick with armour, and complex layers of lilac scales all around the rest of her trunk - except for the dozens of jutting protective spikes. Her tail, likewise, blows past the cute baby phase of her hybrid form into a version of the incredible, powerful nightmare weapon she saw on Tsunade and Shizune, at once club, bo staff, and knife. Temari’s legs - all four of them, a gurgling and strange part of her mind reminds her - surge stronger and longer, bestowing upon the former kunoichi the gift of majestic, imperious height.

The transformation necessarily prevented Temari from growing her wings as she travelled through the forest to the clearing: even small ones would have brushed up against the trees and alerted potential predators to her plight. The release as her vast wings unfold and spread out to their full reach is incredible: at their widest point, they brush the leaves of the trees at the edge of the clearing. The flood of bliss Temari experiences makes her desire most deeply to flap those wings and take to the skies, as is a dragon’s birthright - but some deeper power holds her in place.

The very last moment of Temari’s transformation was the swallowing up of what remained of her human head. Her signature x-shaped ponytail arrangement disappeared as her dragon’s eyes and ears took their rightful place on her (comparatively) lean, lithe, lilac body. However, the magicks involved were not so cruel as to take away Temari’s identity completely.

Four huge lilac spikes emerge from the back of her head to replicate her old human look as best they can manage. Later they will aid Dragon-Temari in battle; for now, though she cannot see them, she senses their presence, and is pleased to have this reminder of her old life in place. I must never forget who I was.

The best, however, is yet to come.

As the very final flourish, Temari finds an extra motor control in her mind. Puzzled, she activates it - and a huge, rigid fan emerges from the tip of her tail! The webbing used to hold it in place is as strong as her wings, which it greatly resembles; she wafts it a few times, and deep joy overtakes her dragon’s mind.

Now, it is over; now, Temari takes that leap into the air and flaps her giant wings. The sudden supergust of wind bends the trees on either side of her; branches snap and fall like twigs. In moments Temari is clear of the forest and can see for miles and miles; she spins, slowly, to take everything in, and deep contentment becomes her friend.

And it is in that moment that another dragon plunges from the skies to attack her.

Chapter Six

Like the others in that fateful inn, Karin stood and watched Tsunade and Shizune transform into huge, powerful dragons. Like the others, she was entranced by the spectacle, gripped by horror’s slimy fist, sending shudders down her spine. Like the others, panic had overtaken her and sent her fleeing from the cursed building like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Unlike the others, Karin had experienced an anger that changed into a fertile and deft curiosity.

How could that incredibly powerful magic be hidden from me?! she’d wondered, and continued to wonder at that very moment, a couple of miles from the source of the terror that sent over thirty people running - but whether towards destiny or away from it, Karin did not know. What she was certain of was that whatever the dragon curse is, biting herself will not rid her of its… consequences. Instead, Karin rifled through her impressive mind, certain a cure was only moments away.

She would not allow negative thoughts to cloud her thinking, although they did keep knocking on the door of her brain. Karin refused to remind herself that the region’s greatest healer - if not the world’s - was currently flying somewhere far beyond her reach, perhaps breathing fire, or accumulating gold, or another of those clichéd activities that dragons indulged in. Her reasoning was simple: if it can be done to a person, it can be undone… or perhaps prevented from ever happening in the first place.

The Fifth Hokage may be out of action - but she may have some item or magic that could save us from our fire-breathing fate in her home! Karin was delighted with her reasoning, and yet she still set a part of her incisive intellect to the task of finding other possibilities, other routes through the maze. Pleased to have a plan, Karin set off in the direction of Konoha.

Karin allowed her chakra-sensing powers to take her down the correct path to the village. There was something of a spring in her step as she set her feet to walking where they would without her specific say-so whilst she thought on and on. The brightness of the day - away from the spectre of the dark clouds that covered the inn, as if foreboding - was even cheering.

Of course, sunshine can also be harsh and unpleasant if taken in extreme quantities.

Nonetheless, for the moment, Karin was in high spirits - comparatively! - as she made haste towards the legendary Konoha. The trees on either side of her were lush, green, and verdant, whilst the birds chirruped most sweetly. A kind of serenity settled on Karin; she even found herself tempted to smile.

It was at the very moment her lips started to curl upwards that it began. She had hoped to stave off her fate for a few hours longer, at least, but fate - that cruelest and most invincible foe - had other plans in mind for Karin. Rapidly her mind switched focus, to what could be achieved in the moments that remained her human form.

Her transformation began by seemingly welding her left leg to the ground. No matter how much energy, chakra-based or otherwise, Karin put into the limb, she could not move it in the slightest. A gentle sprinkling of panic dripped into the perfect architecture of her extraordinary brain, tainting its pristine perfection like rain would harm a grand master’s magnum opus.

Thoughts queued up in a kind of mental antechamber to make themselves known, considered, understood, and acted upon. We know what the physical transformation will be - but what of the mental transformation? was perhaps the chief and most key of the questions let through into the majesty of her mind. If I retain my mind and its control, then my plans stand; if I do not, well…

…all is lost.

A number of plans and planlets flared to life and were discarded as soon as a flaw in them was found. In the meantime, physical sensation barged its way to centre stage as Karin’s left leg bulged ominously with building muscle, putting her black stocking and sandal on that side under a great deal of stress. A hugely sensual tear ripped into the sweet air as the stocking’s seams gave up in the face of the growth of a calf that would spill out of a strongman’s hand.

Karin’s left sandal tore in multiple places as her ankles burst out, her foot widening and lengthening to give a better platform for what the genius knew must happen with the inevitability of tide. Her left quadriceps then billowed into gorgeous life, her entire leg lengthening to lift her from the ground in what looked like a very unnerving, stomach-flipping ballet move. Karin’s shorts took the brunt of the new bulge of bulk, stretching thin around the magnificent muscle that had been building.

It was fortunate for Karin that her left leg was strong enough to take her entire weight, such as it was, for her right leg was as useful as a stained glass shield. The now pointless limb dangled in the air, flicking from side to side like a metronome, as the metamorphosis of the scarlet-haired kunoichi continued. The window in Karin’s lavender uniform started to fill with a whip of hard, vicious abs.

Big blocks of perfect power bubbled to the surface of her skin and surged into the sky, forcing her light green belt further up her body - for the moment. Each pair bulked up, adding definition and depth to Karin’s svelte physique… and finally starting the growth on the right side of her body. Her slight navel was lost amongst the ridges of her new and sensational abdomen.

The metamorphosis powered ever on.

Mostly, though, it powered up Karin’s body, still frozen in place, except for her dangling right leg. ‘Up’ the direction, too: her displaced belt had nowhere to hide as the paired pulsing of her pecs and her slight bust began. Little by little Karin’s pectorals truly earned their ‘majors’, just as push by push, her breasts became pillows - and then far, far beyond.

Karin, meanwhile, interpolated and extrapolated throughout this first phase of her transformation. Her brain, which she was very grateful was still in full working order, wrestled admirably with thousands of variables, lost in calculation and computation. The overoverload of scintillating sensation she should have been experiencing was compartmentalised - as if someone else was experiencing these changes, the most dramatic physical changes imaginable.

And yet, a teeny drop of the lust rampaging through her body like a herd of wildebeest fleeing a horse of predators landed in Main Control when Karin’s breast flesh became so sensitive there was no other choice. Mind over body indeed: the thump of plump, ripe roundness that pressed hard against the fabric of her lavender top sent scores of pinprick thrills of the finest feeling rocketing around. Karin was surprised to see fireworks of some description.

She shouldn’t have been.

As the press of Karin’s breasts became the crush of Karin’s tits and then the onslaught of Karin’s udders, the scarlet-haired kunoichi grunted like a rutting beast. Without her brain giving it express permission, the fingers of her right hand slid down the powerful pretty of her abdominal trail, barely pausing to take in the ridiculous ridges of meaty muscle now barely concealed, and on to their goal. As soon as the pads of her fingers made contact with the outer lips of her pussy, Karin’s grunts evolved into the groans and moans of the beast being rutted.

Fascinating, a vanishingly small part of her focused mind declared. It’s as if this phase of the transformation prepares for the next by overloading the pleasure centres of the brain! Not that Karin would ever learn the truth of her supposition - but she was absolutely correct.

Behind her plump and plush pillows of lush pulsed pecs to give anyone pause. They weren’t done growing, either, and Karin’s shift was open both above and below that annoyingly intact belt, displaying much of her sexystrong stomach… but almost infinitely more of a cleavage that could turn rocks into sand. The great slabs of most majestic megamight signalled that Karin was now a far more formidable foe than ever before.

The transformation flowed on and up and to the sides of Karin’s as yet unfinished physique like some kind of freak fountain. Karin’s shoulders burst up like geysers, and muscle ripped along their entire width like a volcano exploding. Her traps rose like loaves of bread, if bread so sturdy it could break through walls when thrown; her deltoids purred with growth exquisite, only stopping when their striation-drenched beauty was bigger than Karin’s own head.

The metamorphosis then split its work into two parts. The first continued down Karin’s arms, treating the muscle groups it found there as if they were precious objects. Certainly, the sight of a woman with such wide, powerful shoulders and yet such slender, almost muscleless arms is so stomach-wrenching it had to be fixed.

And so fixed it was.

Karin’s biceps and triceps come in pairs, of course, and the transformation magic treated them as such. So at the same time as her biceps billowed into blocks of brickbeef brawn, her triceps mushroomed into marvellous mounds of mouthwatering muscle most magnificent. The pulsating perfect pair pounded against Karin’s sleeves; most unfortunately they were found to be rather lacking, as they were both turned to tatters with an effect like confetti being thrown by several dozen people.

The revealed biceps were stupendous: big, barbarian beauty that filled Karin’s upper arms to bursting point in every direction. Their crowns were thick, protruding veins that slid straight from top to bottom as if its life’s purpose were to cleave the muscle in two. They were as large unflexed as many mere men would dream of; when flexed, they became those same men’s nightmares.

Karin’s triceps were quite precise mirror twins of each other: huge, handsome horseshoe-shaped hunks of size and spectacular strength that responded to the merest flexing with power beyond understanding (except for her own, of course!). Their arcs were so precisely made - fit for purpose, perhaps - that the eye could not help but be drawn, the jaw could not help but drop. If they were built to intimidate… well, they succeeded admirably.

There was a brief instant where it seemed as if Karin was wearing a pair of long lavender gloves - but it was only an instant, a literal blink-and-you’d-miss-it fraction of a moment, as her forearms filled with fantastic force. The veins snaking down Karin’s biceps continued over her limbs to her wrists, where they were joined by many others. When the metamorphosis finished with her arms, Karin resembled some kind of superhuman brawler.

But that was only the first part of the transformation post-split: there was a second.

Reaching down Karin’s back this second set of changes runs, turning what has not yet been touched into muscle in the greatest quantity and quality alike. Her trapezius muscles formed a huge crest, almost, from neck down to the middle of her back. Its strength bulged to such an extent that a hand placed in its middle could be broken with the merest twitch.

Her lats spread like wings, powerful and deadly - the latter most particularly for her uniform, which burst apart, exploding from her frame as if propelled by the strongest throwing arms in existence. The soft, thin air that hit Karin’s naked form had two effects: it brought her nipples to greater prominence, and it made up what little remained of her mind to finally plunge her middle and ring fingers deep into her sex. Once there, she spread them a touch to test the power of her cunt; that was the hay bale that broke the camel’s back, and Karin started to tease her G-spot with all the skill she possessed.

Reaching further down Karin’s back, the transformation tickled at her glutes. Before this moment, Karin’s butt was nothing more than a stopping point on the journey from her back to her toes. In the moment, though, it became the plumpest, most ripe and scrumptious of peaches, filling up - and out! - to a form more fitting of her current barbarian body.

Muscle piled on top of muscle, layering on Karin’s backside as if in competition with itself. The sweet striations sank from sight as plushness took their place, hiding forever from view the seat of power that the scarlet-haired kunoichi possessed. The warring sides - mighty muscle and shapely fat - reached an accord when Karin’s ass was at its peak for beauty.

There was only one more piece to slide into the puzzle to make the picture complete: Karin’s right leg, still ticking strangely, although its pattern was a touch more erratic now Karin’s actions are a touch more… erotic. So, as there was only one place left for the transformation to go - it went right there. In seconds Karin was a complete new woman.

A complete new woman with her mouth open and panting as orgasm after orgasm raced around her system like a litter of puppies chasing each other.

Finally, at least, Karin’s quads matched, and both her legs reached the ground. They were so stuffed with muscle that she had to spread her legs… although she was, of course, already doing that. There was enough strength in Karin’s new legs to kick fortified buildings to rubble in a matter of moments.

Although the transformation was complete, Karin kept masturbating for a short while. She played with her stiff nipples, pulling, pinching, and tweaking their beautiful sensitivity to new heights. After a minute of very fruitful self-fulfilment, Karin came back up for air.

Interesting! she thought, and selected from one of thirty plans her subconscious mind had concocted whilst most of her brain was… elsewhere.

This plan was quite straightforward: Karin ran, hell for leather, towards Konoha. Her aim was simply to use her muscular form - whilst she had it - to get to Tsunade’s office as fast as possible. Karin’s strength, her stupendous, startling strength, had given her speed beyond imagining, and the wind whipped behind and around her naked form as she moved.

Now back to her full mental agility and acuity, given the orgasmic brain fog had lifted like the curtain to the first act of a play, Karin let her abilities guide her to the Hidden Fire Village once more. Some of her generous genius was deployed in the quest for better ways to stop or reverse The Dragon Problem. She directed the rest of her brilliant brainpower straight towards sounding out the physical capabilities of her bulging, bulked-out body.

Thighs the size of barrels, solid and set as she ran. Abs like cobblestones, each as solid as rock. Tits like overripe watermelons, the big ones, as plush and soft as the finest pillows, bouncing hither into her brawny biceps and yon into her force-filled forearms.

It was enough to make a grown woman cum her brains out.

But Karin was better than that. She set aside her more primal urges in the pursuit of her goals. Her famed chakra-sensing abilities guided her better than any map, even though she was now running through a forest… and sometimes right through trees, which exploded into a million wood chips as her effortless power pumped ever on.

My stamina must have improved a thousandfold, if not more! Karin crowed to herself. And my durability - these trees feel like thin curtains to my incredible new physique! A girl could really get used to this level of POWER!

Deep within Main Control, the central seat of Karin’s incredible intellect, she knew what was coming as she ran through the forest - and through the forest. There was nowhere near enough data to hand to find ways to eke out further time in her superhuman form, either. ‘Hoping for the best’ was one of Karin’s least favourite strategies, the refuge of simpletons and people whose luck had run out - but it was all she had left, so she stuck to it grimly, like a climber who had fallen and was now clinging on to the edge for dear life.

Karin - tall, strong, superpowerful Karin, whose physique was now quite the sparkling match for her mind - broke through the edge of the forest and altered course slightly to what she recognised as one of the main paths into Konoha.

I’m going to make it! she crowed to herself. I can’t believe it! I’m only moments awa-

CLANG

From nowhere - and yet, from every piece of knowledge Karin had about the transformations she’d already witnessed, inevitably - her right leg glued itself to the ground and wouldn’t move, no matter how the stricken kunoichi tried to persuade it to budge. Her mouth open in anguised, soundless gasp, Karin turned to the offending limb and instantly felt nauseated: it pulsed a vivid, inhuman scarlet as it bloated into the hind leg of a dragon. Thick, bestial muscle poured on to her leg as scale appeared to coat her second sweep of strength with the most incredible protection.

Tears slid from Karin’s eyes as it happened again: she was frozen into place and forced into a metamorphosis to which she had not consented. She tried to distract her wild emotions, and managed to note that it wasn’t quite the same as before. Oh, there were certain similarities, to be sure: she had definitely lost control of her body, for example, and indelible, irresistible feelings of arousal flooded her system as if to distract her from the intensity of the bodily torment she was undergoing.

But there were definite points of difference, too. The main and most urgent one, to Karin’s mind, was how she was forced onto all fours, her body slowly, definitely and without grace, arcing to the ground to take up that most undignified position. So upset was Karin, in fact, that she snorted through her nose forcefully.

A pair of thin wisps of smoke shot up and frightened Karin into inaction, if not quite to outright acceptance, and she quietly set to the task of memorising as much of the sensation of transformation, just as she did before.

Only the merest handful of people could appreciate what Karin was going through at that moment: how her body was changing, shifting, aching, internally as well as externally. How her form swelled in every direction, all at once, filling up the path and more, knocking into the trees to her left and the walls of Konoha on her right. How her inner workings were shifted, grown, sometimes removed altogether or created on the spot: the internal combustion necessary to breathe fire, for example, whilst useless things like the pancreas or the spleen vanished without trace.

Of course, the changes external were dramatic enough! Where did her tail come from, as long as a fallen tree with spikes vicious enough to pierce the mightiest armour, in addition to the mental controls required to make this new appendage a most formidable weapon? Where too did those wings emerge from; huge, wide sweeps of skin stretched thin between strong bone reinforced by scale most strong and hardy?

The magic required to make this a reality must have taken so long to learn, to perfect, Karin thought, continuing to isolate her mind from the absolute agony she was experiencing as her poor body stretched from human to wyvern. Her neck, now thicker than her torso had been a few seconds ago - for her torso was now the thick hide, sloping stomach, and terrifying size of a full-grown dragon’s - stretched long; long enough for her to raise her still-human head above Konoha’s protective walls. She puffed out a sigh of wretched grief: she could see Tsunade’s office most clearly and, if she’d had maybe ten seconds more, would have made it into the building.

As it is, once her neck finished elongating, Karin’s face began to change into a more fitting one for her current form. She lowered her head back beneath the village’s defensive wall and all the way to the ground, in fact, miserable in her defeat. Her hair fell out in big clumps as dragon hide overtook her head from the back of her neck and up and over.

The only pain Karin felt now was mental: that shock of being so close and yet so very, very far away. Her once-proud scarlet locks fluttered uselessly to the ground below her imposing new body, a thrilling scarlet colour (except for the tips of her wings and tail, which were a most wonderful lavender), and her glasses fell too as her ears became the alert, sharp ones of a dragon. In a fit of pique, Karin brought her left foreleg up and then horrifyingly down to smash them into powder - it didn’t hurt her in the slightest.

Physically, at least.

Her brow became tall and ridged as her eyes separated to the sides of her head; Karin cared not. Her nose and mouth fused in what should’ve been the most exquisite and perfect pain, lengthening out to fit and be fitting; Karin was not at all bothered. Her tongue’s tip switched to a fork and slithered around her maw, as if she’d been afflicted with the most acute hunger: Karin was a world away from this most earthly of considerations.

Dragon-Karin blinked her coal-black eyes, trying to reconcile her new senses. Whilst she waited for the information to filter correctly, she noted with relief that each and every moment of her second metamorphosis was locked away in some powerful and secure storage unit, deep within her memory, in case it could ever be possible to communicate what has happened to… well, not to Tsunade, of course, but to some other, deeply powerful healer. We must take the victories where we can.

Just as Dragon-Karin realised that her most important sense was now smell, with powerful scent-trails emerging all around her from creatures great and small to track and hunt and kill most mercilessly, a yell emerged from somewhere close by. One of Konoha’s guards had, as well he should have, spotted that there’s an enormous blood-red dragon standing on the outskirts of the village. He called for back-up in the same instant, and Dragon-Karin decided not to wait to see what - or more precisely, who - that would mean for her.

In a movement so swift it terrified the quickly-assembling guards and kunoichi, Dragon-Karin swept her mighty wings out to their very fullest, smashing through the village’s walls and the trees on the other side of her. It was the work of a moment to gain enough waft to lift from the ground, scattering the feeble men into each other and then the ground beneath them, as she took to the sky with majestic ease. One single volley of magic was all the dozen or so humans could manage, and Dragon-Karin easily swooped to her right to avoid it.

Dragon-Karin had no idea where she was going, for once - she just knew it was important to be far, far away from where she was.

Chapter Seven

Rin Nohara found herself deep in the forests surrounding the mysterious inn before she realised what had happened. Fear had powered her flight and nothing had gotten in her way, not branch, not root, not person. The only logical course of action in the circumstances, Rin thought when she came back to herself.

The night had not yet fallen around her but it would not dally - and neither should she. Rin’s surroundings were unfamiliar to her and though that didn’t frighten the young chūnin as much as it might have, it was something to note, understand, and plan for in the immediate future. Rin let calm settle in her mind and be her guide as she slowed to wandering pace along the path between the trees, tall and foreboding.

She touched her Konoha forehead protector to remind herself who she was and where she’d come from. A few strands of her sweet brown hair had strayed from her preferred position, so she tucked them back into place with a calm and steady hand. Rin Nohara closed her eyes and let her senses take in as much information about her location as they could.

Touch and taste were non-starters, of course, so Rin concentrated her attention elsewhere. The scents of a living forest worked their way into her nose by wafts and wisps: mostly the smells of rich earth, the flowers and bushes that were its consequence, and the dung that created it in the first place. There was nothing of help there… but her ears hit upon a jackpot.

Water, she thought, for the sounds of running water were carried to her on the breeze. If I can find the river, or stream, and follow it, they always lead to towns, settlements, people. That has to be my goal!

Rin opened her deep brown eyes and took the world in by sight again. If she was going to find the river, it would have to be soon: the light was fading, and fast. She turned towards the sound of the water, away from the non-existent path she’d been on, and began to walk through the dense trees.

Branches and twigs unavoidably brushed across Rin’s body as she walked, whipping little bursts of pain into her forearms and legs against her stockings. The balance between speed and care was a difficult one for the young chūnin to find, but a decision was quickly made. As she knew her body would heal, Rin abandoned any attempt to find it and chose speed.

My body’s good at healing, she smiled to herself.

The sounds of running water were flooding Rin’s ears when the first salvo of pain tore into her body. The brunette grunted and leaned on the nearest tree, wrapping her arms around herself to hold everything together. Arms that just happened to be a little bit bigger than when she’d woken up that morning.

“Hrngh!” Rin grunted as more spasms of physical agony took charge of her form. She doubled over and was fortunate not to push the tree behind her over in her wake. Her black shirt began to fill with pounds of muscle as her stockings did very much the same.

And it wasn’t just strength that Zelretch’s magic had blessed/cursed Rin and the others with. She began to grow not only taller but much more beautiful, too. Her waist cinched in as her breasts grew from gentle buds into something with a little more bloom.

And then a lot more bloom.

Backed by pecs that had changed from ‘subtle’ to ‘thick’, Rin’s breasts tore through her shirt as they blossomed into melons worthy of the name. They were simply huge, truly unsubtle, and wonderfully mouthwatering. Their perfect shapes were complete with thick pink nipples, already as long as the ends of her thumbs, and picking up size with every one of Rin’s ragged, panting breaths.

As the forest breeze whipped through and around the trees - and massaged Rin’s nipples into resplendent and happy stiffness - her growth accelerated into a whole new phase. Even as her waist shrank slowly, abs like perfect plate armour bubbled to the surface of her pale white skin. Her slender navel shrank inwards under the pressure of the pulsing appearance of an Amazon’s abdomen.

Rin, gasping and with tears of pain dripping down her face and placing streaks of changed colour on the purple rectangular markings on the sides of her face, couldn’t help but spread her fingertips on what could only be her abs as they grew wide and deep and proud. She pressed down on what had to be her skin and found it tough, strong - mighty, even. As her mouth twitched into a smile of power-crazed joy, a memory Rin had never had before worked its way to the front of her mind.

Her body, drained of nearly all its power, was lying on something - something soft, a little yielding, designed to support her. Her face was still, unmoving - until Obito’s voice reached her, as if from far away. Her eyes refused to open… but some of the pain eased from her.

“Rin - come back to us!”

And that was it: one snatch of a memory, and there was nothing more to find. Rin would’ve gasped if she’d had time; there was more to her story than even she knew. As the magic had its way with her, Rin dedicated a portion of her mind to searching for more memories like that one.

To piece more of her story together.

Rin smiled bitterly as she realised both her past and future were a mystery to her.

At least I’ll know my future soon, she thought sourly as the magic continued to course through her veins, pumping them up and bringing them to the surface of her skin. Pump was a theme, as her muscles followed suit - and took the breath away. I’d better not turn into a dragon like Tsunade and Shizune!

Rin’s legs tore through her stockings and shorts, making short work of the feeble fabric with fierce fire as quads as wide as tree trunks tore through their prison. Her hands moved from her stalwart stomach to thighs far, far bigger than she would ever have been able to build them, both as wide as her torso… and still growing! As her fingertips slid along the deep separations between the individual muscle groups, she sighed in appreciation at what her new body could bring her.

Calves bigger than Rin’s palms rumbled up and out, and the remnants of her stockings slid down her legs as a result. The super swells of strength looked like biceps, big and grand with marvellous splits between the twinned mounds of might. Not so much diamond-shaped as diamonds-shaped, they felt ever-so-right to the bulking brunette.

As her lower body continued to make short work of her stockings and long, pained work of growing to the size of a powerhouse’s powerhouse, Rin’s upper body was picking up the baton and running wildly away with it. Pecs that started just below her neck bulged out to the size of slabs just bigger than her former abdomen, hundreds of pumped fibres knitting together across its spectacular canyon-like cleavage. The pulsing power pushed her perfect breasts - now more like the largest, ripest watermelons she’d ever seen - out and away to try to stop the spread of her biceps.

But nothing could get in the way of the ungentle expansion of Rin’s biceps. Their forms had gone from ‘pretty much non-existent’ to ‘pray to your gods or goddesses that you don’t do anything that annoys her’ in a matter of seconds and, although they showed some signs of slowing down, they clearly weren’t done yet. Her arms had broadened to twice their previous width, simply to accommodate the huge hunks of megamuscle.

Rin’s biceps had rumbled up and out and all around. They’d taken on the appearance of the world’s largest strongman’s - but his would have to be flexed to match the size of Rin’s when they were relaxed… and the transformation had even more than that in store for the brunette. A series of veins emerged from deep within to feed precious blood all over the formidable forms, the longest and thickest of which ran straight down the middle of each bicep, right from forceful deltoid to delectable forearm.

No part of Rin’s musculature would be denied its ascent into superior size and the most majestic might. Her deltoids had inflated to the size of boulders big enough to threaten a house: large, spread, and power-packed they were, and covered in striations deep enough to pass for ravines. Even the largest man she knew would be unable to cover them with both of his hands - and they were still growing!

Needless to say, Rin’s shirt was in tatters. Morsels of the failed fabric had floated away from her body as she changed, powered up and away as the muscle groups beneath burst bigger and provided them with the impetus, and were now litter on the forest floor. Any part of her clothing that still stuck to the formerly average-sized woman was now there through sheer bloody-mindedness or stuck in place due to the sweat her change had caused.

And yet the transformation still had more up its sleeve (for the transformation’s sleeves, at least, were still intact). If Rin’s biceps were huge, her triceps were monumental. The classic horseshoe shapes burst from her upper arms like they were trying to escape a prison of some kind: huge, thick, extraordinary muscles with the most powerful and intimidating shapes outside of Rin’s own thighs, which could crush watermelons to paste with the merest flex.

Leading up and away from Rin’s devastator delts were her traps, mountains in their own right - in fact, possibly the mountains that her boulder arms had fallen from in some kind of muscular, Amazonian avalanche. Their curves were a muscle fan’s paradise: broad and straight like huge hams attached to her neck, which they caressed like a lover on both sides. Of course, Rin’s neck had also broadened as the metamorphosis danced with her: at the moment it would shame a bull.

Every single one of Rin’s muscle groups followed suit, transforming from ‘nothing special, really’ to ‘really very special indeed, actually’. Her back muscles rumbled to life like a bubbling cauldron, only with much more spectacular and strong results. Rin’s glutes had made short work of her shorts, and her abdominally bursting waistline had torn her apron-skirt in several places seconds before. Even her hamstrings became thick and corded masses of might.

By the time the magic had finished repainting Rin Nohara, she was a musclebound warrior no-one would dare tangle with, no matter what ninjutsu or weaponry they had to hand.

Broad as a barn door and seven feet nine in height, the new Rin Nohara was the most incredible of physical specimens. As she got her breath back and her mental house in order, Rin moved to the nearby river with unsubtle and caution-free strides that befitted a physical goddess of her stature. If the trees in her way could have cowered out of it, they would have.

All throughout the transformation Rin had been trying to snatch at the tendrils of the disturbing memory that had floated to the surface of her mind moments before. Nothing could stop Rin searching throughout her mind, reliving as many experiences as she could, even ones that seemed to have no link with that bizarre thing her brain had made her relive, but to no avail. There was simply nothing else there, apart from that one odd fragment.

Rin’s physical strength was not the only thing to have been boosted during the transformation: she found herself able to see and hear far better so, despite the almost totally faded light, she saw her reflection in the river water with better clarity than she could have hoped for. The woman who greeted her with a surprised gasp was recognisably her - albeit with a lantern jaw and hair so long it obscured even her broad and beefy shoulders. The gasp turned into a grin… right up until a second slice of memory slipped into her grasp.

This time it was dark, unyielding dark; Rin realised her eyes were closed and, worse, she couldn’t open them. Cold had spread its harsh, icicle fingers throughout her form and she felt herself shake with a shiver so profound it was like she was vibrating. A heavy weight kept her in place, centred around her abdomen, but with effects felt over her entire frame.

“NO!” Obito’s voice burst into the memory like a bolt of lightning. “Don’t take her away from meeeee-!”

There was a thump, a hard one, that sounded like someone taking the end of a staff to a rock. This was followed by a sigh and the sound of a body collapsing to the ground. Rin felt her memory-self frowning angrily at her inability to act, and her conclusion about what had happened was instantaneous.

Her reflection forgotten, Rin’s mind began to make the best sense of the two memories she had recovered. Her eyes flicked from left to right as the strongest connection she tried to forge the strongest connection she could between them.

So I appeared to be gravely unwell at some point, she concluded. Obito is urging me to live - as he always would - and I am unable to get up and comfort him. Then someone, or maybe several people, come for me to take me away from him… but who? Who would want me, and why?

Having emerged from one dead-end with these eerie ‘new’ memories, Rin simply found herself face to face with another one. The bulked-up brunette ground her teeth in frustration and tensed muscles that would perhaps be better used to wrestle oxen. The best course of action she could think of was to wait for another memory to resurface, as if they were slowly emerging stepping stones on a lake to show her the way to a hidden temple.

But another fate awaited her: one she had already seen befall one of the most powerful people she knew. Rin had hoped to escape what she’d seen happen to Tsunade and Shizune, but the magic Zelretch had invoked waited for no-one and spared fewer. A tsunami of gut wrenching pain seared its way across and through her barbarian body and brought Rin to her knees, which splashed in the riverside mud beneath her.

“NO!” she bellowed but her voice was not her own. The depth, the snarl, and the venom it produced frightened the young chūnin into silence… for the moment. The grunting - and worse - would begin shortly.

Rin felt nothing other than the most appalling pain during the next couple of minutes. Her body shot up, rising a dozen feet in the air, and yet still at that barn-door width she’d been gifted not moments before. As the now-giantess’s body rose into the air, she saw far above the mere treetops of the forest - and Konoha’s soft embrace was about four miles from where she was standing.

Or rather kneeling in the mud.

Even that didn’t last long. Rin didn’t have the mindspace available to concentrate enough to keep herself upright, basically having the body of a flagpole at this point. She fell forward, her arms flailing wildly, and fell into the river whilst her legs stayed safely on the bank.

Rin plunged face first into ice-cold water and it was at that instant that whatever was releasing these dark memories into her mind chose to give her another fragment of a past she didn’t know she had forgotten.

In this sliver of mental souvenir, she was sitting, bound, in a chair, and was fully conscious. The room was featureless: chosen, Rin now realised, for its utter blankness. It could have been anywhere.

It could have been nowhere.

A door behind her, to which she could not turn - or even find a reflection to spy what was happening - opened. The room changed, simply for having this presence inside it: the drab became bleak and the bleak became utterly without hope. Rin’s memory-self swallowed.

“Good.”

It was a man’s voice, a whisper, thin, and with next to no impact on the room. There was the opposite of an echo. Despite that, Rin’s memory-self shivered with the most abject chill and could not stop.

The memory ended there, for which Rin was thankful, as she was drowning. Her hands touched the bottom of the river, which was only surprising for a fraction of a second, as action had to be the order of the day. She pushed down, hard, on the thankfully rock-filled river floor and released her hands with the right amount of force to break through the surface of the water.

Rin took in as much breath as she had time for before gravity took charge once more and she fell underwater again. She now fought this bizarre battle on two fronts: the first was a repeat of the same action she’d just undertaken to free herself from the ice-cold confines of the river. The second was to frantically scrabble backwards with her legs through the mud and soil and rich, depressing dirt.

A different battle was taking place throughout her body, although the word ‘battle’ implies a conflict of some sort, with two sides fighting with their relative merits and faults. No - Rin’s body was undergoing conquest, despite its awesome physical strength. On her side there was only surrender, and that in case there would be more pain if she did not.

Every part of her body was on fire with agony. Parts of her body Rin could not even name were aflame, bursting with so much physical anguish that she had to fight to keep her brain from shutting down and her wild-eyed river dancing going, to keep alive this tiny pinprick candle of hope that she wouldn’t die in the most ridiculous way possible. On the fourth splashrise moment, the worst possible thing happened.

Her feet hit a tree.

There was no space in her brain left to process this moment, so she wasted a breath on roaring with the most incredible and incandescent rage. Rin tried to kick the tree but it was old, sturdy, and rather set in its ways; even with her powered-up legs it refused to budge. Water surrounded her head once more, but she pushed herself up and out, fighting for space to think.

Despite the impossible-to-count number of shocks and surprises that had already happened that day, the biggest one happened at that moment. From nowhere a clear thought ran to the front of Rin’s brain space. It was as if a messenger, that had covered untold miles to be there, panting and dripping with metaphor-sweat, had triumphantly dropped a thought she should never have had on the mental equivalent of the desk.

Swipe it aside with your tail.

MY TAIL?!

In all the commotion - mental and physical - of splashing up and down in the river, Rin had not realised how much her body had changed. Without her say-so an enormous tail, several metres long, had emerged from the bottom of her back. She very quickly found the mental controls to work her new tail muscles and scythed away a dozen of the trees behind her.

It’s happening, then, she thought, and the melancholy that flooded her mind at the thought of sharing the fates of Lady Tsunade and Shizune nearly made Rin stop jumping out of the river and succumb to the cold water. A powerful survival instinct kicked in, one so strong she guessed, correctly, that it had come with her new draconic body. Her arms thickened enormously and she wasted precious breath on a horrifying scream when dragon scales started to force their way through her skin.

The scream was a garbled and horrific mess, as her human voice mixed with the far stronger vocal cords of a dragon; what came out would have chilled the spine of even the most hardened warrior. The transformation didn’t care, though, and continued to rip dragon scale from pretty much Rin’s entire body. The young chūnin began to cry, though whether it was for what she was about to lose or for what she was about to become, not even she could tell.

The legs on which Rin waddled her enormous body backwards had gotten a little longer but mostly a whole lot thicker: after all, they would soon have to help support the body of a fully-grown female dragon. The growth gave her the extra power she needed and her new legs powered her backwards fast and far enough for Rin to finally be able to haul her wildly wrong half-dragon, half-human body from the river. Truthfully, though, she was more than three-quarters dragon now.

Gasping and panting for the true breath that had eluded her during those wildly panicked moments, Rin felt her fate slip from her own hands… and not for the first time. She turned her head to look down at her arms - which just felt more comfortable with palms flat on the ground, like a big dog sitting - and watched with mounting horror as they thickened up and dragon scale pushed on through. The nigh-invincible built-in armour took on a light blue colour as it made her human body a memory, and Rin realised with a sob (which sounded more like a snarl) that it was the same shade as the river in front of her.

As Rin’s arms transformed into the front legs of a dragon, her actual legs - which she had to think of as ‘hind legs’ now - had already completed that journey. Not necessarily much longer than her human legs, what they did have was extraordinary thickness and those protective and, in many ways, beautiful scales which ran almost the entire length of her altered limbs. The only exception was right at the base of her feet: no longer gentle and perfectly trimmed toenails, Rin’s heavy, black claws curved like scythes and would be just as deadly.

Her midsection, stupendously, inhumanly long, had bulked out considerably, blowing up like a balloon. Now Rin had the sturdy, robust, forceful body of an adult dragon, with dozens of wicked spines running the length of her back. Round at what had once been her front, her body boasted the wide, broad beams of the classic softer underbelly.

Of course, ‘soft’ is a relative term: the most perfect javelin thrown by the best spearperson on the planet would still buckle and clang off Dragon-Rin’s stomach as if a marble had been thrown at a rampaging rhino.

The scales ran right up to the base of Rin’s still-human neck, leaving the transformation only one more place to go to finish its wicked work. Rin couldn’t resist looking down at the river to see, by what light remained in the day, her reflection complete the metamorphosis and turn full dragon; to lose whatever humanity she had left. Her eyes were wide and her face drawn as the scales began to layer onto her neck.

Rin’s mind was at war with itself. Her dragon instincts were kicking in, very ready to overwrite her human ones and leave nothing behind, scorched Earth style. Rin wanted to hold on to every shred of her humanity, to be her intelligent and dedicated self for as long as she could possibly manage.

And that’s when the final memory of her ordeal, both with and without Obito, fell back into place.

Once more Rin was sitting in that dank room, no air, no light, except for what a sputtering candle in a far corner could provide. There was someone else in the room with her: a man, a man whose smile sat somewhere between ‘genuinely happy’ and ‘snarling, childish frustration’. Rin could tell that without even seeing him; he projected the vibe as if his life depended on it.

The pain that had wracked her body earlier was now merely ache, as if her body were trying to heal, but couldn’t complete the journey as far as it wanted. On the table in front of her was a flask, which emitted a strangely wisping steam, of bright green liquid. Something told the part of Rin’s brain that was experiencing this memory that this wasn’t the first time she’d seen that liquid.

“Just one more dose, my dear, and then you will be back to normal,” the man said, his voice strangely twisted and high in pitch. “Don’t you want that? To return to your friends?”

Memory-Rin nodded and immediately wished she hadn’t: the pain from that one simple neck movement was overwhelming. She gave a gasp she couldn’t stifle in time. The man tutted and stroked her hair in what he must have imagined was a soothing fashion.

“You see?” he cooed softly. “You’re not healed yet. Once you have this dose you’ll be back to normal.”

Will continue next week...