Cascade

Warning: death and destruction

PROLOGUE

 

“Have a little too much fun last night?”

 

Claire rolled her eyes at the slightly stocky guardswoman as she swiped her ID card. “Alarm didn’t go off.” She leaned forward to peer into the retina scanner as it extended from the side of the booth.

 

“Lucky you, getting to sleep in.” The guardswoman held out her hand past the window, and Claire took it. She allowed her innate mystic defenses to lower, so the other woman could use her telepathy to scan Claire’s mind for any obvious deceptions. Claire was not a fan of the procedure, but she’d grown accustomed to it over the past year; with the things Magic allowed some women to do, it would not be too difficult for exceptionally gifted saboteurs to steal a staff member’s identity, down to altering their own body to match the appearance. Supplementing the checks with psychic scans was the closest they could get to fool-proofing the system.

 

The guardswoman gave Claire a sly smile, and the Researcher’s Assistant jumped in her seat as she felt the impression of a female tongue give her a deep, sensual lick between the legs. Claire flushed and pouted as the guardswoman gave her a little wink. Claire let out a little breath and shivered as the magic tongue left a sensual tingle that coaxed her sex to moisten. After a few more seconds, the guard released her hand, and Claire let out a little huff as she retracted her arm. She resisted the instinct to reach between her legs.

 

“Alright, you’re clean.” The guard thumbed the switch to raise the checkpoint’s gate. “Well, mostly.” She winked and made a tight little ring with her forefinger and thumb, and made a tonguing motion through it.

 

Claire flushed as the memory of last weekend rose sharply into her thoughts. “Rude!” she huffed. “You want to keep your job, young lady?”

 

The guard just laughed. “You want to keep yours? Better get moving.”

 

Claire huffed again, but shot the guard a wry smirk. “Touche,” she said as she pulled forward. Fortunately, the next two checkpoints were a bit more professional, not pulling any little stunts just because they were bored. She still felt a little tremor of arousal each time she had to let the guardswomen scan her mind, and she had to keep both hands on the wheel to resist temptation.

 

Finally, Claire reached the parking lot, muttering as she had to find a space in the backmost row. She was already late, so she didn’t see much point in rushing pell-mell to her station, but she couldn’t exactly dilly-dally. As she parked and got out of the car, she winced a bit as the heat in her sex stubbornly refused to calm. Had the other guards slipped her a slow-burn Aphrodisiac Spell? She paused as she opened her senses, and with a start, noticed the ambient Lust Energy that suffused the entire campus was particularly strong today.

 

A year at the Pandora Research Facility had trained her to shut out even particularly intense bursts of arousal signals from dozens of men at once. A staff member here had to, if they were going to be even remotely capable of doing their jobs. The amount of Sex Magic and Lust Energy being thrown around to conduct the experiments would have most civilian women, and even some military-trained women, on the floor, writhing in helpless, brain-melting ecstasy if they were in the same room as some of the test subjects. There were times, while multiple experiments were going at once, that little orgies broke out among the staff just to bleed off their own tension.

 

But even the strongest surges of Magic shouldn’t manage to get through the Barrier that surrounded the testing facilities. The parking lot was a mile away from the nearest lab, and she was able to sense the sexual signals coming from the labs, as if she was in the next building over.

 

She made her way to the small tram station, only to see the automated shuttle wasn’t present. That seemed a little odd. Fortunately, there were a couple of Board Boys on standby, idly sitting in their waiting booth for use.

 

Claire put on a charming smile, looking with approval as their cocks, already half-hard, started rising to full mast as soon as they saw her approach. All three of the men were naked, strapping studs, but as they stepped out of their booth, they looked down, almost bashfully, their body language submissive as nervous puppies.

 

Such well-trained lads. Claire reached out and tapped the throbbing cock of the red-headed man, and he immediately lay down on the ground in a supine position, perfectly straight, arms at his sides and his cock aiming skyward at a forty-five degree angle. The other two men shuffled wordlessly back into their booth, as Claire pulled off her heels, and stepped onto the man with her stocking-clad feet. As her right foot planted firmly on his ribs, her left pressed down on his cock, cupping it perfectly with the angle of her foots arch, and the man let out a shuddering little gasp.

 

She sent a spark of Sex Magical power through his organ, seizing total control of his body. She locked him in position, making his body literally stiff as a board. Then she floated him several feet above the ground, using her power on her own body to keep herself perfectly balanced atop him. Then, with a thought, the two of them flew over the shallow ravine that separated the parking lot from the larger campus, following the bridge that was reserved for shipping vehicles.

 

She could have crossed the gap in a minute at her starting speed, but before she was even a quarter of the way across, she was forced to slow down. The rush of Lust Energy signals grew with surprising swiftness as she neared the edge of the Barrier. Her sex was suddenly dripping, her panties and stockings starting to soak before she knew it. The man beneath her feet let out a pained whimper as his cock surged with excess pressure, feeling like it was about to lever her foot up!

 

She cut her speed down to a slow cruise, and dropped the two of them to hover only a foot above the surface of the bridge. Something odd was going on. The Barrier which blocked the artificially cut mesa was supposed to block the extreme signals of Lust Energy and block Sex Mage spells from escaping the facilities’ range. Even the strongest Archmages on staff had to exert a Herculean amount of willpower to get one spell past the mystical wall. Working in tandem, several Archmages could certainly pierce the shield more easily, but there was no reason Claire could think of as to why they would do that.

 

As she got closer, her legs quivered, but her trained resilience held her aloft. However, the man beneath her was not as tough. Despite her full-body binding spell, he physically shuddered, and a disorienting burst of sheer Lust Energy fired off from his cock, spiking straight up her leg, and striking her sex like a bolt of electricity! She let out a sudden gasp, and the two crashed onto the ground as she shuddered in sudden orgasm!

 

The loss of contact kept her from succumbing to a string of climaxes, but with her binding spell broken, the man was writhing and crying out on the asphalt. His penis was so hard it hurt, and yet, the sheer arousal and tingling pleasure from the raw Sex Magic energy spilling out over the bridge made the physical pain pale in comparison to the soul-crushing NEED to be touched.

 

The obedient, submissive, cowed male looked to Claire with a savage sexual hunger. Boy Boards like him were trained, brainwashed if she was being honest, into only acting or speaking on a woman’s queue, at least when they were on shift. No young man of his position would dare to even look a female staff member in the eye, much less presume to leer at her so brazenly, if she wasn’t directly calling for his attention. But the sheer Lust the man was experiencing right now, despite his own resistance training, had snapped something in him. He started crawling towards her, reaching out to grab her, his diamond-hard cock aiming right at her.

 

Fortunately, he was just a man. His carnal drives served only to empower her, and she was already a stronger than average Sex Mage. With a single thought, she paralyzed him in place, freezing his body mid-crawl. His agonizingly hard penis fueled the spell which bound him; he’d be stuck that way until she or another woman undid the Binding. Or, in the very unlikely event he managed to go soft any time soon, the spell would dissolve, and he would likely have his head cleared enough to rush back to his station.

 

Just so he wasn’t in danger of a passing vehicle, she floated his frozen form to the shoulder of the bridge, tucked against the wall. She thought about flying him back to the parking lot, but she didn’t feel like wasting the time. She had to see what was going on here, and he was just one male grunt in the facility. He would keep for now.

 

Still, as she turned to jog the rest of the way towards the facility, the young man let out a heartbreaking whimper. With another thought, Claire opted to at least soothe a bit of his aching need for female contact. She set a looping Blowjob Spell, nice and slow and sensual, to caress his penis while he waited. His mew of relief lasted only a couple seconds before it cut into a sharp, muffled cry as he hit his Orgasm Block. It was always an existential struggle for guys in his position: what was worse? Dying to be touched and not getting to feel it, or feeling sexual pleasure without any relief?

 

His desperate signals were already drowning out in the cacophony of tension as she approached the edges of the mesa which held the whole of Pandora’s buildings. As she got closer, she found she had to exert an effort to block the signals out. What the fuck was going on in there? The Barrier around the mesa was already strong enough on it’s own, but each of the labs had it’s own system of lesser Barriers, with some of the rooms themselves having another layer just to be safe.

 

When she finally reached the edge of the Barrier, a great dome of invisible mystic force, her mind’s eye could see the chaotic rippling of the vast Spell. Something was exerting Magical pressure from within against the whole surface of the field. Like a tire being filled with air until it burst, the growing Magical pressure was threatening to crack the Barrier.

 

Claire swallowed nervously, even as she fought to keep her body under control. She was flushed crimson, her pussy drooling fluid down her thighs, her breathing deep and hot. Before she even realized she was doing it, she had started pulling off her clothes. She managed to stop herself, and concentrated all her mystical strength on shielding herself from the signals. Concentrate… concentrate… as part of her training, she’d been locked in a bunker full of months-denied young men being edged continuously, forced to resist the overwhelming urge to tear her clothes off and fuck herself blind on their helpless bodies! At first, she had nearly cum herself unconscious just standing in the room. Within a month, she had been able to sit calmly and read a book, totally ignoring the dozens of wailing young men as they were cock-tortured with spells five times as intense as when her training started!

 

She could do this… she could resist… she could do it…

 

Wait… what was she planning on doing once she got in there? If it was this bad at the edge of the Barrier, what was it like inside? And how long had this been going on? Did the guards even know what was happening yet?

 

She backed away. Something was absolutely not right. Something was… wait, who was that?

 

Past the barred gates that signified the edge of the Barrier, she could see a naked woman. Tall, blonde, walking with a slow, deliberate step. She was looking around the campus, gazing at the various buildings flanking the main road between them. Even though her eyes passed over Claire, the woman didn’t seem to acknowledge her.

 

It was then she realized there was no one else in sight. Where was everybody? There weren’t even other scientists or guards or the free roaming test subjects or any of the grunt boys… so where…

 

The was something like a high-pitched droning in the air. Something that was competing with the roar of psychic signals Claire was trying to keep out. The more she pushed the signals away, the clearer the roar became. As she spared a few extra motes of brainpower to figure it out while maintaining her concentration, she realized she was hearing screaming. Cries of passion, of pain, of howling desperate pleas. One of those screams was awfully close, and getting louder, ragged gasps of feminine anguish.

 

She realized the scream was coming from herself. She realized, dully, that she was now on her knees. Her fingers were wet. She was masturbating. She was naked. When had that happened? When was… oh god… she couldn’t fight it anymore. The pleasure was rising in her core, and she was screaming, and her willpower broke, and the cacophony of sexual signals rushed into her like a tidal wave, and she was cumming, and she was thrashing like a madwoman, and she was screaming, and it hurt, and it felt so good, and her vision was blurring and her hearing was muddling and her body was cooking in sexual heat, and it hurt, and it felt so good, and she was cumming, and it hurt, and she was cumming, and it felt SO good, and she couldn’t stop, and she didn’t know why she’d even want it to, and she could feel her own Magic responding to her impossible ecstasy, radiating like a furnace to torment every cock it could reach, turbo-charging them to coax other women to give into the signals, and oh Goddess, she was still cumming, and her mind was going, there was only the pleasure, forever and ever and ever…

 

The last thing her conscious mind registered was the naked blond woman standing over her. Then her mystical senses were blinded as the Barrier finally cracked, and all the surging Energy within erupted outwards like a magical nova. And then, she was gone.

 

 

PART ONE: CREATED

 

1.1

She came awake gradually, first aware of the pleasing psychic hum of sexual desire filling the room around her. Instinctively, she reached forward, hands seeking to grasp the source of these pleasing signals, like a baby reaching for its mother’s milk. Her fingers stopped at a hard surface. The sudden awareness of physicality jolted her to consciousness.

 

She first realized the sensation of warm, thick wetness surrounding her. She next trailed her fingers around the solid surface, smooth, and hard. She could hear muffled sounds of people shouting around her. She opened her eyes, and the world was a blurred mess. But another sort of sense compensated, letting her see everything around her with beyond-human clarity. Something in her mind was able to key into the signals of arousal in the people around her, and in doing so, it opened their minds and bodies to her. Instantly, she knew exactly what all the people around her looked like, who they were, where they were. Her eyes trailed their movements, her mind super-imposing the visual information from her mystical senses onto her mundane ones. She could see them, and the entire room, in perfect clarity, despite her normal vision being blocked by the thick slime.

 

She was inside a large glass tube, floating in some kind of amniotic goop. With instinctive ease, her mystical senses plumbed the information from the mind of the people around her. Scientists. Mostly female, but a few males. Several other males were here as well, test tube clone experiments, speed grown and psychically trained to be obedient Lust Energy batteries.

 

Lust Energy? Sex Magic? Yes, these things she knew about, without even needing to ask. It seemed a natural part of her. It’s what let her dig into these scientists minds. She did so with no regard for their privacy and no regard for their limits. Each and every one of them gasped and dropped to their knees in shock as their bodies flushed with intense sexual heat. The males in the room were used to this sort of thing, but the women were stunned at the sudden invasive rush. They were used to being immune to other women’s Sex Magic, with some rare exceptions. They had not expected her to cut through their defenses in an instant.

 

In just a few seconds, the woman in the tube understood everything. She knew she was a clone, the only successful female clone formed from combining several eggs, without including any sperm, mystically splicing purely female DNA. They’d done it with sperm, resulting in the submissive young men the staff used like tools. But eggs had been trickier, for reasons yet undetermined. Again and again, they had tried it, only for every attempt to fail. They couldn’t figure out why, except to theorize that maybe the Magic just didn’t want it to happen.

 

Until they made her. This time, the merger took. Some slip in the Magic? Some slight genetic misalignment between the eggs? Sheer brute force finally working? They still didn’t know why, but they weren’t going to waste this chance to study what seemed to be their ultimate achievement.

 

Once conceived, she’d been placed in this vat, her body speed-grown to adulthood in under a month, using the Magic to warp her very flesh. The scientists had been planning, once she was physically developed, to download basic knowledge into her mind using their own psychic abilities, over the course of a few days. They had just gotten started with the first batch of memory implants this morning.

 

Their mistake. The woman in the tube didn’t need their help with that. With a simple notion, she sucked in everything from their minds, copying it into her own consciousness, blending it into the knowledge she needed to function.

 

Sex Magic, a mysterious power that had come to Earth a decade ago. Such a strange and uniquely focused power, which gave human females absolute psychic control over human men’s bodies and minds through their genitals and libidos. And beyond merely controlling men’s erections and orgasms and arousal, the magic gave women other powers to ensure their domination of society. Varying degrees of telekinesis, energy projection, shape shifting, teleportation. Most women still only had influence over men’s bodies, but the exceptional Mages proved there was more to the Magic than just a good time.

 

So the scientists got to work, experimenting with the limits. Across the world, breakthroughs were frustratingly sparse. If it didn’t in some way accommodate female sexual domination of men, it seemed the Magic didn’t care. There were ways humanity had been able to use the side-effects of the Magic for other benefits to society, but that had more to do with clever use of what was already there, not in finding ways to bend the Magic into other functions.

 

But they kept trying. They made facilities like this one. As a joke, they named it Pandora, after a woman of legend whose curiosity doomed humanity to endless mortal dangers. They had no idea.

 

The woman in the tube flicked her attention to a couple of the women. Their bodies jerked up off the floor, staggering like puppets on tangled strings to the computer bank that controlled her tube. The other people on the floor, boiling over with arousal, started giving into their urges, pulling their clothes off and reaching for themselves, or each other.

 

The woman stopped them, freezing their bodies in place, making them stay rigidly on their hands and knees, or leaning back with their hands on their ankles. The two women at the computers finished clumsily punching in the commands. The tube began to drain. For several long, agonizing minutes, the gathered scientists and tool boys stared in awe as her full nudity was revealed to them. As the fluid finally cleared her face, the woman opened her mouth and forced the slime out of her lungs, without even needing to cough. She wiped her eyes and finally saw the assemblage directly.

 

The dozen people were trembling, whimpering, bodies flushed. Fluid oozed freely from the women’s legs, their nipples and clits almost painfully stiff. The men’s cocks quivered with excessive tension, pre-cum already seeping from the tips.

 

As the tube’s glass covering slid open, the woman inside took her first breath, a calm, measured inhale and exhale. With a small flex of her power, she pushed the rest of the slime off her body, instantly cleaning herself. She looked at the people on the floor, and smiled. They cried out in unison, their bodies wracked with orgasmic spasms, and the woman cut her hold over them. They collapsed and bucked on the floor, cumming so hard, several of them blacked out. Even the men achieved release, the woman’s gentle psychic caress shattering their Orgasm Blocks with the sheer force of their climaxes.

 

The woman let out a sigh as she drank in the sudden burst of Lust Energy. Most of it came from the men, but even the women gave her a little. It didn’t just feel good, the effect was… nourishing. She felt her body flush with heat, and she felt as though that had been her true first breath.

 

“H-how…” choked out one woman, a swarthy brunette, looking up at her in tears. “Y-you can’t… I-I’m an… Archmage…”

 

The woman from the tube kneeled down in front of her and cupped her cheek. She smiled warmly as the woman choked out a ragged gasp and her eyes rolled back in her head. With no effort at all, she slipped her power into the woman’s mind and bolstered her arousal until all thought in her head burned away, until she was nothing but a writhing, mewling fuck-puppet. That she was an Archmage didn’t matter. Even the strongest woman’s shields had their weak points, cracks and seams that even the weakest woman’s magic could slip through, if only she knew how to look. It seemed most women, however, didn’t understand this trick. They had spent so much time focusing on the men, they hadn’t truly learned how to study each other to the same degree.

 

Of course, raw power certainly helped. Even without taking advantage of the weak points in the shields, it was clear to the woman that she could have cracked the Archmage’s shields with the barest effort. Just to prove it, her power sought out the next strongest woman, sprawled on the floor a few feet away, and popped her defenses like a soap bubble. The woman shrieked and thrashed as her body was left wide open to the extra energy surging from her fellow females, and every nerve in her body nearly fried from the overload.

 

“K-kayla…” gasped another of the women. The woman from the tube looked over at her, studying her calmly.

 

“What was that?”

 

“Kayla…” she gasped. “Stop… please… turn down your… Magic…”

 

She went over to the woman, not bothering to kneel down. With a flick of her finger, she levitated the squirming scientist off the floor. She hadn’t even consciously thought to try and do it; every Sex Magic trick each of these well-studied women knew, she understood instinctively. The scientist gasped as the woman’s mere attention elevated the sexual pressure in her helpless body. She reeled, eyes rolling, mouth agape and drooling, her sex gushing feminine fluid until her pants were completely drenched.

 

“K-K-Kayla… s-stop…” she shuddered, and before her mind went blank, the woman from the tube dipped into her thoughts. “Kayla” was the name they’d intended to give her. How nice of them to dignify her with an identity. She sent another pulse of her power through the scientist, and the woman spasmed in orgasmic seizure, until her mind went totally blank. Kayla let her drop like a dead weight to the floor as she let out a pleased sigh. She turned to the others, a predatory gleam in her eye.

 

They were all screaming now. Crying out not just from pleasure, but pain. With every orgasm they experienced, they felt something deep inside them give. Something was wrong. This wasn’t just an extreme overload of Sex Magic stimulation. An animal panic filled them, trying in vain to cut through the sexual haze. As they came again in rapid succession, their Lust Energy funneled straight to Kayla, who drank it up greedily.

 

Higher and higher, the energy climbed, until she was nearly full. But somehow, she never got entirely satiated. The people writhing and screaming at her feet came and came and came and came and came, until their minds broke and their muscles tore, and even the magic couldn’t keep them going. They fell into twitching comas, barely alive, what was left of their consciousness knowing only blinding pleasure they could not properly process.

 

Kayla frowned. The Energy from them was lessening. Their bodies had been taken too far. But she could sense others beyond the room. Fresher, virile people were all around her, beyond the walls of this chamber. She walked to the entrance, noting it was a an electronically controlled sliding door, made of thick steel. She glanced to the side, where a retina scanner was bolted to the frame. She could have dragged one of their scientists over to open it, but she didn’t think that was necessary. Instead, she simply shoved against the door. The thick steel crumbled inward like it was made of tin foil, the solid steel screeching as it bent, the mechanism sparking and snapping as the door was ripped from it’s track. A simple flex of Sex Magical power, and her strength far surpassed that of a mere machine.

 

She flinched, however, as she exerted herself. She had not felt any physical strain, but instead a brief unsteadiness as she pulled her hand back. For a moment, that pleasant, warm feeling had flickered. But the brief feeling of loss was already gone before she’d fully comprehended it; perhaps she had imagined it.

 

The crumpled door opened out into a hallway, lined with more doors spaced far apart. A few such rooms had thick glass to allow others to observe the experiments, but just as many were sealed behind solid walls. Sex Magic, of course, ignored such mundane barriers. She could sense everyone within every room. As she opened her senses further, she took in a full view of the entire facility. There were a few thousand people present, hundreds of staff, hundreds more test subjects. All of them simmered with the Energies of Lust, ripe for the taking. With a thought, she extended her power to coax every man and woman to overflow with arousal. None of them could resist.

 

 

1.2

She took her time, casually strolling the halls of the facility as Lust Energy poured into her from all around. The warmth continued to pulse inside her with each new burst of power from the hapless humans around her. Overcome with rampant lust, men and women collapsed to the floor, writhing and howling. Some of the more resilient ones grabbed the nearest person and started fucking them. A scant few attempted to fight her, Archmages pushing their power to their utmost to block her, only for her to pop their shields as easily as the others.

 

The power spiked higher and higher, the more people she triggered. She noticed, too, an interesting feedback loop. The men, venting Lust Energy like little magic geysers, were further triggering the women around them, causing them to lose control of their Sex Magic, radiating their Arousal Auras at full blast, and randomly firing off Tease Spells. In turn, the women’s Magic just pushed the men’s arousal even higher, forcing more Lust Energy out of them. Kayla didn’t even need to push her power onto them to maximize the effectiveness of the energy flow; all she had to do was rev their erotic engines into the red, and their own power would take over in a spiraling feedback.

 

It felt wonderful. All that Lust Energy filling the whole facility, and then funneling into her. The pleasant warmth and fullness continued, filling her with contentment. She could just bask here forever. She could—

 

Something sparked off her awareness. As she came out into the main lobby of her building, she saw a trio of scientists bucking on the marble floor. There was something wrong with one of them, a skinny young woman who was making a strange rattling noise with her throat. Kayla sensed a spike of mental cold shoot through the haze of lust. She recognized the feeling as a sheer, animal terror.

 

Kayla stepped up to her, and watched her curiously. The woman flopped onto her back and gasped and her unfocused eyes seemed to meet Kayla’s gaze. And then, with a final shuddering seizure, her body suddenly went limp. Kayla felt a final surge of Lust Energy pour off the woman, and then nothing. No Energy, no warmth, no thought, no feeling. Only an emptiness in the husk of her body.

 

Kayla flexed her power against the woman, only to find she didn’t respond. It was as if there was nothing there for her to grasp. She was…

 

…she was dead. Kayla gasped the moment she realized, with a terrifying coldness, what had just happened, and what it meant. Her power was so strong, the spiraling storm of Magic so intense, that it had taken the woman beyond Sex Magic’s considerable protections. Sex Magic, a force that tried it’s best to keep its users and victims alive, could still go too far. It could shatter minds and break bodies. It could kill from sheer energetic overload. In such latter cases, Sex Magic could still be used, if properly applied, to jolt a body back to life, to stitch a mind back together, the way a drowned person could be resuscitated with another’s breath.

 

But this was different. She knew just looking at the woman, that something fundamental had been lost when she had drunk the last of her energy. There would be no bringing her back. She was gone. She was dead. And Kayla had killed her.

 

Kayla frowned. She hadn’t meant to do that. She looked to the others in the lobby, two dozen staff members and a couple test subjects, strewn about the room, all of them comatose, or nearly so, as they cooked in the sheer force of her sexual power. She could tell that several of them were nearing the same peak this woman just had. Curious, Kayla let it happen.

 

In rapid succession, a dozen more people suddenly passed, a final burst of Lust Energy firing off like flares, until to be quickly snuffed as she sucked the power inside her. She glanced back to the room where she had first emerged to double check. Most of them, her first victims, had already snuffed out as well. She just hadn’t noticed while she’d been busy taking in the rest of the facility.

 

More of them started to go. One by one, like stars winking out across the night sky, the burning signals of Lust from the overclocked victims of her power crossed a fatal threshold that Sex Magic couldn’t compensate for. And with every single death, she saw that moment of sheer terror, the horrific realization of their imminent end, cut through the mind-rending haze of lust. Too brief, perhaps, for the mortal mind to really comprehend it before they passed. But strong enough for Kayla to notice, now that she recognized it for what it was.

 

The primal recognition of death. The thought of it chilled her to the bone, and no amount of Lust Energy could warm away that horrid thought of feeling that sensation herself.

 

Maybe... maybe she should stop. She didn’t really care about these people. If anything, she wanted, on a guttural level, to make them writhe and suffer endlessly in her power. But at the same time, did she want them dead? She paused, and with a simple thought, dialed down the magic. It was so easy, as simple as blinking or breathing. The Magic itself bent to her will with no effort on her part, as if it were an extension of herself, to a degree that she knew no other woman on Earth had ever experienced. It was almost as if she was the Magic, made manifest in the form of this unorthodox body.

 

Dial it down, dial it down, to just a low ebb, just a trickle. Let the people around her simmer in it, let their bodies recover. She intuited that, perhaps a bit ironically, the key to healing a person from Sex Magic overload was more Sex Magic. It was sheer intensity that killed, not duration. A steady, light trickle of the Magic would sustain them, and slowly cool their bodies down, mend the injuries, and piece their minds back together. It might take a little time, but she could easily flex the Magic to bolster the healing effects. Perhaps in a day, they would all be back on their feet. And then they would serve her, feed her their wonderful Energy, the subjects of her personal little Queendom. And then—

 

She staggered where she stood. There was a twisting in her gut, and her vision swam. She leaned heavily against a wall, and clasped a hand to her face. She felt a sudden, sick hollowness, a suffocating feeling. The warmth was fading quickly. Deep inside her, she felt a gnawing sensation, a sense of sheer hunger.

 

Energy! She needed more Lust Energy. As she sucked in the last of the overcharge, she was left with only a mere trickle emanating from the people she was trying to recover. She had to let them soak in most of it so the healing could take effect, but even if she drew in everything they were producing now, she knew it wouldn’t be enough. She grit her teeth, and forced herself to bare it. She could feed on a stronger source soon. Maybe she could get the first ones to recover to get her more healthy people to feed on.

 

Feed? Yes, feed. She was hungry, thirsty, cold. The moment the Energy had lessened to a mere ebb, the weakness had overcome her. Where had all that Energy gone? She had drunk in so much of it, and yet, it was as if she couldn’t stay satiated. Like how a Sex Magic Spell needed a constant feed of Lust Energy to function. She—

 

The realization struck her with a sickening chill. She had thought, just a moment ago, that she felt as if she was a manifestation of the Magic itself. She was unique, the only fully female DNA splice attempt to succeed, for reasons none of the scientists could figure out. Was she… was she actually… not just a spliced cloning experiment? Or if she was, could she only function because some Spell was keeping her alive? A Spell that needed to be constantly fed to sustain her…

 

She stumbled to her hands and knees and grit her teeth. No. No that couldn’t be all she was. Or if it had to be that, surely she could reign in how much she needed? She would try to hold on until at least a few of the scientists got their minds back, and then she would pick their brains for answers.

 

She held out for another minute, until she felt something dark and terrifying cross her mind. She recognized in herself, that dreadful spike of darkness she’d seen in the people who had passed. She knew with certainty, that if she didn’t keep absorbing the Energy, and enormous amounts of it at that, she was going to die.

 

She shuddered and her breath grew ragged. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die. Hungry. Thirsty. Breathless. Cold. Dying. Only the Energy she drew from the people around her seemed to make the pain go away, chased the specter of death away.

 

She tried to stop herself. But in the end, as her vision began to dim, she broke. She knew she wouldn’t make it, if she gave them time to recover. With a thought, she dialed up the pleasure storm in those people within the rest of her building. Those immediately around her spent a final few moments in unfathomable ecstasy, before they each died in a violent final release. Throughout the rest of the building, the remaining victims followed, passing several at a time. She drank in their Lust Energy greedily, and their life force with it. In less than five minutes, the building was emptied of all but herself.

 

It stalled the hunger for all of a minute. She had just managed to shuffle across the lobby to reach the exit, and then she was on her knees again. She feel like she was going to implode as her core seemed to chew upon itself.

 

Kayla took a mystic glance around the whole of the Pandora facility. There were a little over a thousand people left. More of them beyond her building had died than she had realized, and those still alive were on their last legs. It wouldn’t be enough. She had to keep feeding. The Lust Energy was her sustenance. If it stopped, she would stop.

 

She didn’t want to stop. What would happen when the people in the facility couldn’t sustain her any more?  She hissed as the pain in her gut increased, and her vision dimmed again. She let her power surge, and set off the remainder of the people in the facility. She tried to regulate the Energy flow, but she was already too starved. Greedily, she sucked it all in. She was going to burn through the rest in ten minutes, tops. Then what?

 

Kayla drew what knowledge she could from her victims before their minds were lost. There was a small military base ten miles away, where most of the staff stayed. Beyond that, the facility was isolated, a hundred miles from the nearest settlement, a small town of less than a thousand, and two hundred miles from the town after that.

 

She knew about the Barrier that surrounded the facility. She knew it couldn’t stop her, living Spell or not. But could she make it to the next settlement in time? Maybe if she flew. She could do that, right? But using her powers to do more than just inflame arousal would drain her; she remembered that brief flash of weakness after pushing the steel door aside.

 

She would have to risk it. She started walking to the edge of the facility conserving her energy as she drew in as much power as possible. She headed towards the bridge that connected the low mesa to the desert beyond. She noticed a woman on the ground, writhing in the Energies that were bleeding through the Barrier. Beyond her, another of the artificially grown men, and further across the bridge, a scant few guards. Just a few more morsels of Energy for the created woman.

 

Kayla paused, risking a bit of strength to shove apart the bars of the gate and step through them. As she did, she felt herself cross the Barrier’s threshold. With a thought, she cracked it open, the Energies of the shield bending to her will, and she sucked its power into herself along with the final surges from Pandora’s people.

 

Bracing herself, she shot into the sky and rocketed towards the nearest settlement.

 

 

1.3

Kayla paused only briefly to strike the military base, subsuming them with inhuman arousal, and drinking in their Energy before the hunger could strike. On a whim, she decided to bring them with her, lifting several hundred people telekinetically, sacrificing a bit of each person’s Lust Energy to fuel the Spell that held them. She let them trail along after her across the sky, dropping each body as soon as it was spent.

 

She sent her power ahead, and the first town was already writhing in fatal pleasure when she reached it, greedily sucking in the power as the last of the soldiers in her grasp fell away. She hovered in the air, grabbed the most resilient of her victims to hold off for the flight, and finished off the weaker ones before she moved on. She did the same to the next town, and the next.

 

She didn’t set down upon the Earth again until she reached a proper city, five hundred miles away. She dropped into a copes of trees along the main highway that lead into the city limits. Major metropolises like this were a lot emptier than they had once been, as Sex Magic had forced people to spread themselves apart to avoid reckless overspills of Spells and Lust. But they were still bustling compared to the small towns most people had moved out to. A quick assessment told her there were about seven-hundred thousand people living within the city limits.

 

Just getting here had exhausted her Energy reserves, costing her all of her stolen victims from the towns. But here, finally, she knew she could get her fill. For moment, sensing so many bright points of energy in so many people at once, she hesitated. The scale of what she was going to attempt was briefly beyond her. Maybe this would be enough. Maybe this many people could give her enough energy to sustain her, if she could pace the feed, and cycle through the populace…

 

But the twist in her gut told her there was no chance. It would take far more than this. Something about the Magic that sustained her, it needed more and more to keep itself going. The last town of several thousand had barely gotten her this far.

 

Was their a limit to how much she would need? Did she need so much because something inside her was growing to some critical mass? Or was the Spell that sustained her already fraying apart, needing more Energy just to forestall her own inevitable decay? For once, her power didn’t tell her. But whatever the cause, she knew even this city would not be enough.

 

It would take millions. Tens of millions. Eventually hundreds of millions. She couldn’t stop, not until she took as much as there was possible to take, or until she finally reached whatever peak the Magic was craving. Even just standing here, assessing her situation, made the Hunger twist her guts until she fell to the ground and screamed, writhing in the grass at the city’s edge.

 

It hurt. It hurt so much. And even more than the pain, the sheer terror of her demise overwhelmed her. The cold, gnawing need that refused to leave her alone. The Hunger!

 

What if it didn’t stop? Ever? What was she going to do? Was she really ready to consume the whole world?

 

Kayla looked up to the cityscape, gritting her teeth. A dark pit formed in her core. The lives of these people didn’t really mean anything to her. They were her food. She was their predator. But a small kernel of empathy gave her pause. Long enough to know they were just as afraid to die as her.

 

But that was just nature wasn’t it? Everybody died. Everybody had to feed. To drink. To breathe. Did she really care, or was this just the remnant echoes of fear from those she’d consumed already?

 

She screamed again as she felt her insides threaten to tear. She couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want to die. She had only just been born, and she didn’t want to die!

 

She banished whatever sliver of regret she had started to feel. Useless emotions wouldn’t keep her alive. She glared at the city, and unleashed her power towards it. She didn’t hold back. As the warmth of thousands trapped in horrific ecstasy washed over her, she let out a sigh of relief.

 

So much better. Immediately, she felt warm, safe, and relaxed. She stood tall and casually strolled towards the city. There were so many people here, it would take a while to go through them all.

 

But just to be sure, she pushed her power a little harder. She puffed up the arousal of every man and woman straight into the redline, most of them losing consciousness before even realizing what was happening. She supposed, if she must kill them all, she could spare them conscious suffering as much as she could manage it.

 

Then the surge struck her. Just like back in Pandora, the spiral of Energy feedback kicked in. Men radiated their Lust to the woman around them, supercharging the women’s Arousal Auras and unconsciously cast Spells, which in turn spiked the men’s Lusts higher, which drove the woman’s energy higher!

 

Kayla swayed on her feet as the surge of power nearly bowled her over. She recovered quickly, her ever-starving body adjusting itself to suck in as much power as it could at once. She had been so desperate to feed, she had forgotten the risk of this effect. She could handle it. If anything, it made her feel more charged, more alive than she had yet felt!

 

This wasn’t like back at the facility. There were far, far more people this time, and the effects were quickly going out of control! The Energy was spiraling into a maelstrom! Kayla had to brace herself as even her endless maw was staggered by the sheer, overwhelming force of the Magic!

 

But her body adapted. Within seconds, she stood tall again, drawing the power into her as if her form were a bottomless pit. She still could not drain it all at once, but she was sucking it down even faster. The Energy around her form was so thick, the very air around her began to glow. Telekinetic force kicked up a windstorm with her body at its center. Higher and higher the Energy grew, and in a great and terrible wave, seven-hundred thousand people had the life crushed out of them. Kayla screamed as the surge of power swelled even higher, forcing her body to adjust and take in as much as it could, before her body burst from the overload!

 

And then the Energy died. And Kayla was left shaking on the ground, her body glowing and vibrating. After a few moments, she managed to calm herself and get back to her feet. She took a long breath and gazed up at the sun, basking in its rays. For the moment, she felt satiated. But she knew it wouldn’t last. Maybe an hour. Maybe less.

 

If that was what it took, then that’s what she would do. Go from city to city. Get as much energy as possible at each, and keep moving, until she was able stop, or was forced to. She looked to the horizon, and cast her senses to the next large settlement. It was only then that she realized the true depth of her error.

 

She could feel a wave of more Lust Energy already pouring off the horizon. She extended her senses further. Seventy miles away, she found another major city, and everyone within was already writhing in overclocked ecstasy. Kayla blinked in surprise. She hadn’t pushed her power that far, had she? She cast her senses further. Lines of Lust Energy and Arousal Auras extended from that city, radiating like a growing web, connecting one settlement to another. Every place the web touched, the spiraling surge of Sex Magic was already overtaking the populace.

 

Kayla felt a pit in her stomach, a different sort of dread from the hunger. She pieced it together almost instantly.

 

The women in this city were attuned to the cocks of men in other cities. When their Arousal Auras and Spells had started firing off out of their control, their power had naturally reached out to those more distant men, triggering their bodies to start venting Lust Energy at the enhanced rate. And just like in this city, those men’s Energies forcibly triggered the Magic of the women around them, which fed back to the men, which fed back again to the women. And of course, those women’s attunements reached to yet more cities and towns further away, creating an omni-directional cascade that rapidly spread the hyper-charged storm of Sex Magic across the entire country. Soon enough, the rest of the world would follow.

 

The only reason this hadn’t happened back at Pandora was that the Barrier had blocked the effect. But this city, of course, had no such Barrier, and the much greater number of people affected had caused the surge to grow too fast. She could see that by the time she had finished feeding here, it had already spread too far to stop it.

 

The pit in her stomach grew. She knew, immediately, that she had doomed the entire world, and herself with it. All she could do was try to drink in as much of the power as she could, while the rest of the world was still alive to give it. Either she would manage to hit a saturation point that would finally enable to her to survive long term without Lust Energy, or she would be the last victim of her own reckless consumption.

 

 

PART TWO: GESTALT

 

2.1

Brannon moaned as his body’s urges finally fought through the haze of sleep to force himself awake. His body was flushed with erotic heat. His cock felt diamond-hard and his balls ached for release! The nipples of his pert breasts were sensually stiff, and his pussy ran free with wet desire—

 

Hey, wait a minute!

 

Even as his hands moved to clutch his breast and his cock, he jolted awake with a small feminine gasp! He whipped the sheets off himself and stared down at his… no, his girlfriend’s body! His girlfriends body, except she also had his cock, jutting like a throbbing monolith up from where her clitoris should be! And his balls… well, he could feel as though he had testicles, but instead of a sack beneath his dick, he saw two small mounds to either side of his dick, framing the slick slit of his girlfriends pussy. A pussy which demanded he start filling!

 

He let out a girly mew as his urges broke through his shock, and he quickly grabbed his cock with his right hand, pumping quickly, while he dug his left fingers into his/her sex.

 

Oooooh, FINALLY! came the soft, honeyed voice of his girlfriend, echoing in his thoughts.

 

“Damn it, Dini!” he said in her voice, between lustful huffs. “I told you… to quit waking… me up… this way! AAAH!” He/she shuddered as their sensually sensitive body roiled with erotic pressure, and they bucked in the bed as their pussy gushed and their cock clenched! But no semen was forthcoming… the male side of them was being denied, while the female side enjoyed the bliss of climax! If anything, it was as if their pussy was stealing their cock’s release!

 

But it’s sooooo fun! was the mental reply. That felt soooo good! Come on, keep going, keep going!

 

Helpless to disobey the demands of two bodies in heat, Brannon masturbated their shared body with frantic fervor, experiencing the euphoria of multiple female releases, even as he writhed in cruel male denial! She spurred him to keep going, making their shared body writhe and buck and holler and cum/edge in a maddeningly heady state of terrible, wonderful sexual magic!

 

And then, finally, she was satisfied. With one final, staggering climactic edging, their body floated right off the bed. There was a brilliant flash of light, and their one body became two, and they fell back onto the mattress. Dini, his cute Archmage girlfriend, was shivering in the aftershocks of that wonderful string of climaxes, and giggling with delightedly at her little “prank”. Brannon, gasping, was left with the hollow ache of the session’s denial, his blue balls demanding release.

 

“Dini!” he whimpered in his own voice again.

 

She rolled over and kissed him. “Mmm… such a good boy… I think you do deserve a treat for that!” And she slid lower down, and her mouth enveloped him, and he let out a tremendous shout as his cock started pumping his seed down her throat! He cried out like a girl as she suckled his cock lovingly, her mouth bobbing on the top few inches, her tongue sliding around the head, her lips tightly tugging the underside of the ridge with every bob. After nearly half a minute of pumping all the cum she’d made him build up, she finally left him with a soft pop.

 

Brannon sagged bonelessly into the bed, a trembling, sweaty mess, and nearly fell back asleep again. Dini, sighing with contentment, slid back up and snuggled against him.

 

“F-fuck…” he whispered when he could find his breath again.

 

Dini giggled. “We just did!”

 

“That trick is still too weird…”

 

Her hand reached down and clasped his soft, very well satisfied cock. “You really complaining?”

 

He gave her a wary look. “I guess not.” He tilted his head down and kissed her, ignoring the taste of his own spunk in her mouth.

 

“Mmmm, I suppose I’ll accept that answer for now.” Dini pulled back and stretched with a cute little grunt, and slid herself out of the bed to get dressed.

 

Brannon admired her sexy form as she slid her clothes on, and despite the enormous climax he’d just had, his poor, exhausted cock still started to get stiff just looking at her. He knew he was enormously lucky having an Archmage girlfriend who actually took care of him. But sometimes that meant putting up with her sudden impish urges. Still, she had never callously hurt him, despite the fact that Archmages were as close to goddesses as there were in this Sex Mage World. Most such women had whole harems of men they went through like little chewtoys, and their sheer power and influence meant almost no one would challenge their cruelty.

 

Dini wasn’t like that at all. It perhaps helped that she had an especially rare power, even among the supernaturally enhanced Archmages. She called it the Gestalt, the ability to fuse herself with other people, melding their bodies together to share each others senses and feelings. It was thanks to this power that she could even have normal lovers, letting her adjust their bodies while they were fused so that they could withstand her enhanced Sex Magic even when they had comparatively normal sex.

 

It was likewise, Brannon suspected, why she never truly gave in to the cruelty Sex Magic tempted all women with. Fusing with several men since her empowerment had shown her what it was like, in a way even telepathy couldn’t, to be a man in a world where any woman could casually take control of them, use them for sexual fun, and then toss them aside without a thought.

 

She still put him through intense tease and denial sessions, of course. That’s just how sex was these days. But unlike most other women, she always pampered him when they were done. He was a very lucky man indeed.

 

Dini turned back and smiled at him, easily reading his appreciation. “You’ll make me blush,” she chided.

 

“Heaven forbid,” he said as he finally got out of bed as well. He came over to her, and they kissed again, intimate warmth passing through them as the Magic let their hearts and minds embrace along with their bodies.

 

Finally, though, they had to pull away. They both had jobs to get to, after all.

 

“Try not to let the ladies get carried away trying to pop my shield again,” said Dini with a wink.

 

Brannon laughed. “It was only the one time!”

 

“Once is all it takes to start an obsession!” she warned. She motioned between them, indicating their bodies and winked. “As you well know.”

 

They laughed, and a few minutes later, they were heading out the door, taking opposite paths. Brannon’s job was only a block away, but Dini had to cut through a park to reach her office. She still had some time, so she slowed her pace and took in the cool spring air with a smile. What a great morning! The sun was shining with only a few small clouds, but the air was just cool enough to tame its heat. The birds were chirping. People were walking by with smiles on their faces. She could sense an ambient hum of Lust Energy in the air, the general background of mystic signals that came with living in a city. Thousands of men with varying degrees of blue balls all contributed to a psychic blanket over the whole city, keeping the women healthy and happy.

 

It was a little fucked up that Sex Magic meant men’s sexual suffering brought women so many benefits and so much pleasure, but Dini did her part to not be a tyrant about it. The city wasn’t that bad; you had the occasional vindictive or tyrannical woman, but for the most part, the men got to blow their loads somewhat regularly. Seeing as how there were so many people in the city, it wasn’t quite as necessary to torment the poor boys to keep the ambient Lust Energy up. Not like out in some of the smaller towns.

 

Which is why Dini paused and frowned as she sensed a sudden spike in the Energy levels, starting off to the West. She tilted her head as she looked to the distance, staring past the wall of buildings to hone her senses on the signals source. Before she could even focus on where the surge was coming from, the wave of Energy struck her like a runaway truck. Her whole body was alight with a surge of arousal that took her breath away, followed by a pleasure that ripped through her body like a bolt of lightning.

 

She was completely taken by surprise. The psychic chorus of tens of thousands of high-intensity signals, as if every man in the city were experiencing diamond-hard erections and teased with hundreds of spells at once! Every man was venting Lust Energy like a blast furnace! And all around them, the women were taken completely by surprise! Their Sex Mage senses were flooded with so many signals at such high intensity, their own minds blanked out from the euphoria, as they shuddered violently in a state beyond the most intense climax. Their overcharged bodies bled off Sex Magic with nearly equal force, only serving to further torture the men around them, and enhance their signals!

 

None of them stood a chance. Even Dini, whose Archmage level power normally let her casually block out the signals of hundreds blue balled of men, managed to resist the crushing wave of Energy for only a mere second. And then, her mind was consumed in the torrent, her body collapsing and spasming in an endless stream of agonizingly intense climaxes.

 

Before her thoughts dissolved completely into the chaotic whirl of sexual mania, she mentally screamed, reaching out with her power. Instinctively, she sought out those familiar signals, of her boyfriend, of past lovers, even her brother and father, seeking strength in them. Through the roar of Energy, she thought she felt a few familiar sparks, but they were lost just as quickly. She grit her teeth, and pushed with every ounce of her crumbling willpower, blindly reaching, blindly grasping, blindly pulling.

 

She felt several of the distinct signals suddenly cut off. Not just lost in the chorus, but gone, completely. Fear momentarily cut through the haze, as she sensed, with terrible certainty, that those men’s lives were over, as they died in her mystic grasp.

 

This couldn’t be happening! What could have even caused this? How could it possibly be stopped? She reached for them, trying to draw strength from the storm of Energy, to bolster herself with it. But it was too much. Her body was already overloaded with power, and she could take no more! Unless… unless she used her power… and joined her strength with others… maybe she could…

 

She reached out. She grasped as many as she could. She pulled them to her. But it was already too late. Her senses were scrambling. Her thoughts were fading. She didn’t know who she was anymore. She didn’t understand what was happening. All she knew was that it hurt and she was going to die and everyone around her was wailing in agony and their minds were boiling away and their bodies were rattling their final breaths and it was too late and they were going to die and she didn’t want to die, please, please, someone, anyone make it stop!

 

Her last thought was a psychic scream that echoed in every still-coherent mind for hundreds of miles, a wordless plea for salvation, before everything faded into blinding white.

 

 

2.2

She snapped awake. In the midst of a field of flowers, a small woman found herself lying naked and hot in the afternoon sun. What had happened? What was going on? One moment, she was playing... or had she been jogging... or... making love? Cooking? Cleaning? Doing her taxes? What? What...?

 

She looked at her hands. Pale skin. She held out at a lock of short hair. A pale pink that didn’t look dyed. She patted herself down as she stood. A tight, nubile body, modest breasts, shapely hips.

 

She looked around herself. She was in the middle of a city. She recognized the park in the city’s center; she’d come here hundreds of times a day, walking past the flower beds to reach... no... not... not hundreds... but…

 

She took a hesitant step forward, moving out of the small patch of flowers, walking over to a nearby building. In the windows reflection, she saw a petite woman, pale skin, short pink hair in a pixie cut, ice-blue eyes, red lips and nails. Around her body was a silken white dress, lined with blue trim.

 

She leaned forward and stared into her own eyes. Who was she? She had memories, so many memories. Too many. She remembered the city from so many different angles. Thousands of images, thousands of sounds, hundreds of events, millions of moments of time. As if the memories of thousands of lives were rushing through her mind all at once.

 

She remembered... being a woman. No. Being women. Many women. She remembered being men. She remembered being young. She remembered being old. She remembered being middle aged. But there was something that overwhelmed them all. A single event that seemed to unify each and every lifetime at once…

 

Pleasure. Unfathomable pleasure. Rising to the point of pain, and then going further beyond to a state of bliss the mortal mind could not comprehend. Overwhelming. Terrifying. Rapturous. Until that final moment, when, all at once, everything ceased…

 

And she knew. Sex Magic. Lust Energy. A wave of it had washed over the city, like a mystical tsunami, drowning the entire population in a storm of sexual fever. The sheer overwhelming power forced the Magic to fly out of control, women’s spells firing on automatic as men’s energy overloaded their systems. And among the populace, one woman in particular had a very rare gift. An Archmage whose sheer power had let her hold her consciousness a bit longer than her fellows.

 

She remembered being this woman. She remembered praying, begging for someone, something, to save them. As everyone around her screamed until they had no breath left to give, as they convulsed until their bones broke, and their minds boiled away, this woman prayed for a miracle, a final desperate cry to please let it end…

 

and then...

 

and then...

 

She awakened.

 

The petite woman blinked as she turned to observe the city. Without consciously thinking to, she began to float in the air. She rose above the small park and turned slowly as she cast out her senses. As a Sex Mage, her mystical senses should have let her detect the men around her. And she knew her power was great enough, she should have sensed the women as well.

 

There was no one. She was alone. Except... that wasn’t quite right, was it? As her mind continued to organize itself, as she regained her composure, the context clues rapidly fell into place. The floating woman came to the improbable, yet somehow most sensible conclusion.

 

She was not alone in the city. She was the city, the sum total of it’s citizens, drawn by the last woman’s power, into a singular being. The combined Magic strength of a million women. The endless well of Energy of a million men. A self-sufficient entity unbound by mortal limits. A Goddess.

 

But, as she became fully oriented, she looked to the horizon. The storm of Sex Magic was still whirling around her city. She could see it so clearly, great waves of Lust Energy lighting the world around her, moving in a spiraling mass towards the southwest. It was all being drawn towards something.

 

She extended her senses further. Miles beyond her city, she felt more people writhing and screaming and... dying...

 

In every direction, she threw her senses out, reaching hundreds of times farther than any single woman she had previously been had managed. Everyone around her was trapped in the storm. An out of control cascade of Sex Magic had ensnared every human being across the continent.

 

And it was killing them. Overloading their bodies until their brains cooked from the sensory overload and their flesh pulverized in vicious orgasmic spasms. She traced the flow of Energy towards the eye of the storm, and saw…

 

She wasn’t sure. A bright, blazing star of pure Sex Magic, surrounded by a corona of Lust Energy that seemed to be disappearing down a bottomless well.

 

The short woman sank back to the ground for a moment, getting her bearings. She filed through her memories, trying to decide what she could do. The knowledge of millions was sifted through with a speed and clarity surpassing human capability. Whatever she was now, she was free of the storm. Did she have the power to stop it? She weighed her options. She didn’t know what was at the center of that star of energy, but she had to try something.

 

She rose into the air, prepared to rocket towards that strange star. But she knew there were better options of travel. Multiple Archmages were a part of her, and the entire suite of powers at their disposal was hers to command, and she had their knowledge to use them perfectly. Several such women had the power to teleport. And using the men within her to fuel her own powers, she could use them at will, with no need to find other males.

 

With a thought, she folded space around her, and vanished into thin air. She reappeared within a few miles of the edge of the Magical storm. The small woman, despite her sudden newfound power, had to make an effort to focus, mentally “squinting” to get her sexual senses to see through the haze of energetic light. Gradually, her mystic vision made out the form at the core of the glow.

 

It was a woman, standing tall. She seemed to be in a daze, floating in the air as the torrent of Lust Energy drew into her like light into a black hole. As she gazed down at the energetic being, she realized it wasn’t just flesh and blood. The glowing woman’s entire body was alive with the Magic. No, not “with” the Magic. The woman before her was Magic. A humanoid construct of pure Sex Magic energy, feeding on the Lust Energy storm.

 

Myriad minds put it together in a heart beat. She knew this Sex Magic Entity was the one responsible for the storm that had taken the continent. To fuel her own existence, she had triggered the cascade of power, and was now feeding on it! She either didn’t care that was going to end the lives of everyone caught within, or perhaps she desired it. Either way, the Sex Magic woman was going to consume them all!

 

The small woman stopped hesitating and shot forward like a bullet. She tried to strike the woman, aiming to punch her head and crush her skull with a blow that could have shattered a skyscraper.

 

At the last second the tall woman opened her eyes and jerked back, throwing her hands up and deflecting the other woman’s punch. Instinctively, she lashed out, backhanding the shorter woman with a flailing hand.

 

The blow sent her flying into the sky. Stunned, the woman arced through the air for several miles, before crashing down into a field of flowers, digging a long rut through the earth. She lay there for a moment, coughing up dirt, before forcing herself to hover back into the air, shaking her head to clear the daze.

 

The small woman knew how powerful she was. The strength and toughness of a million Magically enhanced women stacked together, with telekinetic force and regenerative healing to match. And that strange living construct had just backhanded her across the countryside. As powerful as she was, that thing at the storm’s center was drawing in magnitudes more Lust Energy than the small woman could generate herself.

 

She was quite likely the most powerful Sex Mage to have ever existed, and immediately, she had been laid low by that living force of supernature. How could she possibly stop a monster like that?

 

The small woman floated back into the air and braced herself, balling her fists and zeroing in her senses back on the woman. She had to try. There was no one else in the world who could even survive being near her. That thing was going to annihilate the entire human race. She had to do something to—

 

She jerked to the side as she suddenly sensed another person zooming straight for her, another burning point of Sex Magical power. Gods above, was there more than one of these monsters? She whirled and braced for impact, taking small comfort in sensing that this newcomer’s energy signature didn’t seem quite as overwhelming as the other one.

 

However, instead of slamming into her, the new being came to an abrupt halt a dozen feet away. It was another young woman, dressed in a black frock, with twin black ponytails and amber eyes. “Hey,” she said. “Who are you? You have any idea what’s going on?”

The small, pink-haired woman blinked, and gave the new girl a once over. She could sense the Energy brimming inside her, a match for her own. She could sense the densely woven threads of millions of signatures roiling in her core.

 

She gave the girl a curious look. “Do you know yourself well enough to ask me that?”

 

The girl in black slowly nodded. “I think so. I think...” she gazed at the shorter girl intently for a moment. “I think you’re like me.”

 

“It would seem so.”

 

The noirette looked to the horizon, towards where the monster woman had left. “What was that thing?”

 

“I don’t know, but I think it’s responsible for this. For us, too, in a way.” The pink-haired woman turned to her new fellow. “Do you think there are others?”

 

“Like us?” said the noirette. “I don’t know. I think maybe—”

 

A tall blonde woman in a green dress suddenly appeared next to them. The other two whirled back, hands up in a defensive posture. The blond held her hands up and pulled back a bit, floating back with a panicked look on her face. “W-wait! I’m sorry, I just... I don’t know what’s going on, and you were the first people I sensed still awake and—”

 

The other two traded a glance. “Let’s get on the ground” said the pink-haired woman. They set down in the field of flowers, a few yards away from the big dirt rut.

 

“They’re dying,” whispered the blond woman, looking with panic to the horizon. “God, they’re all dying!”

 

“We know,” said the pink-hair. “I saw the thing that caused this. We have to stop her, somehow. I tried, but she punched me across a whole state.”

 

The noirette was looking out in the opposite direction from where the monster woman was still absorbing power. “I think... I think I can sense more like us...”

 

The pink haired woman cast out her senses and confirmed it. Other women brimming with power were heading their way, no doubt having sensed their gathering. “Good. We need to find as many of us as we can.”

 

“And then what?” said the blond.

 

“Then we kill that thing.”

 

The noirette grinned. “I like your style.” She paused. “What’s your name, anyway?”

 

The pink haired woman glanced around, frowning. They were still in the field of flowers. Her eyes settled on one that was the same color as her hair. “Rose.” she said. It would do for now.

 

 

PART THREE: JUGGERNAUT

 

3.1

For three straight days, they came at her. Dozens at a time, pounding her into the dirt, until the sky was black with dust and ash, and the land turned molten for miles around. They rained down lightning and fire and radiation and waves of sheer force at her. They teleported around her and struck and blasted with insane speed.

 

And she refused to fall.

 

Kayla defended herself like a panicked girl flailing madly at stinging bees, but the sheer strength of her power had them reeling. For every dozen hits one woman successfully landed, Kayla’s fist managed to connect, and reduced her attacker to a bloody smear across the landscape. When they swarmed and peppered her with energy blasts, Kayla’s erratic return fire launched several of them into high orbit.

 

And when the battlefield grew to unstable, Kayla took to the sky and burned through the atmosphere like a mystic meteor, smashing through the women who tried to grab her. Now matter where they engaged her, Kayla continued to drink in the still-roiling Energies of the surviving humans.

 

Most of these women, these strange gestalt creatures, had dedicated their efforts to suppressing the Cascade, trying desperately to lower the out of control Energies so that the rest of humanity could at least survive it in stable comas. They had tried to absorb the excess energy for themselves, but even they could only drink in so much. It still served Kayla well enough, however; stabilizing the planet meant that Kayla’s deadline had been extended. As she flew towards richer pastures, she continued to drink down the Energy as fast as ever, tearing away every bit she could find as she flew over every settlement, and draining the waves of it still coming over the horizon. As she did, she pushed her power to undo the women’s progress, bolstering the storm to stay out of control just enough to keep the majority of them occupied with stabilization, rather than joining their fellows to attack her.

 

She knew, however, that at some point, she was going to run out, and the longer the women hounded her, the faster she was going to burn through her own reserves. She was drawing in so much Energy that fighting back no longer taxed her, but the continuous assault kept her from securing her defenses.

 

It didn’t help that they were nearly as relentless as herself. Kayla was draining the Lust Energy around them so efficiently, the women immediately around her weren’t able to take any of it for themselves, but it didn’t seem to matter. She could sense the gestalt women had men as a part of them, making them capable of fueling their own powers. Even as she brute-forced her way through their attacks, their own energy reserves just didn’t seem to end. And no matter how hard she struck and blasted them, shattering their bodies with single blows, shredding the flesh off their bones with each blast, each one that fell was back on their feet within minutes.

 

In a move born more from frustrated improvisation than planning, Kayla braced herself for impact from two more of the gestalt women, and instead of punching them back, she dodged, twisted, let them fly past her, and then lashed out with both hands, gripping them by the back of the necks. She surged her Magic directly into their bodies. Their defenses were astonishing, able to resist her power for nearly a minute before Kayla broke through. But even these unfathomably strong women could only resist a being of Living Sex Magic for so long. Kayla kept pumping them with Energy, sacrificing some of her own feed. She staggered where she stood, struggling to maintain her grip as even the temporary drop in Energy made her feel weak. But she powered through, maintained her grip, and overloaded the two women’s bodies beyond their ability to adapt. Completely overcome, the women writhed and screamed in an ecstasy even their own radically enhanced forms couldn’t quite comprehend.

 

And then, something inside them broke. Their bodies glowed like twin stars, and the two women exploded like bombs, knocking the other women away. Kayla was sent crashing into the ground from the shockwave. But even as she hit the dirt, she pulled at the Energy with all her might; the two gestalt women’s own power joined the spiraling storm of Lust Energy and she sucked their essence down along with it.

 

Kayla grinned. She felt stronger than ever. Each woman held an entire city of people within them, and they were stupid enough to get within her reach. After days of dealing with these little irritations, all she had to do was gobble them down. As she rose from the crater, body crackling with renewed strength, she grinned like a lunatic at the women flying back to resume their assault. An icy chill cut through them all, and they knew most of them weren’t going to survive this fight for much longer.

 

But it was this, or extinction. They flew forward, attacking with a renewed fervor.

 

 

3.2

“SHIT!” exclaimed Rose as she pulled herself out of yet another crater. The whole fucking continent was going to look like the surface of the Moon at this rate, as they smashed their bodies into the dirt again and again. Already, the threat of nuclear winter was upon them as the battle tore the very land asunder for miles on end. The sky was choked black with dust and soot and debris.

 

She had watched with her senses as Kayla had killed, and then consumed, the other two women. And already, she was grabbing another one, pinning her down and overcharging her body, overwhelming her with Magic sensation to the point she couldn’t teleport away. It was then Rose noticed the monster woman falter. The funnel of Energy ebbed for just a moment, as Kayla pushed her power into her victim.

 

Rose took advantage of the distraction. Maintaining her distance, she aimed down her outstretched arm like a rifle, and fired a spear of plasma at Kayla. The burning lance struck Kayla in the chest, causing her to stagger back. For just a moment, Rose though she might have made a fatal blow. But then, Kayla’s victim erupted into raw Energy, which Kayla immediately absorbed. The lance snuffed out, and the smoking hole in her chest filled back in immediately.

 

It hadn’t worked, but it was something. Several others lined up similar shots, but with her defenses back up, Kayla stood her ground and didn’t even stagger. But the moment opened her up for another physical attack. Not daring to risk any one of them getting caught by her again, several women at once dog-piled her. Rachel, Devika, Lisa, and Catya all teleported right up next to the woman and each grabbed a limb, a second before Anissa, Gemma, and Valeri slammed into Kayla’s stomach like living cruise missiles. Kayla was thrown back with her attackers still clinging to her, the three chargers jack-hammering their fists against her.

 

Gritting her teeth through the assault, Kayla managed to swing all her limbs together, smashing the seven women into each other with bone-cracking results, before whirling her body and flinging them in all directions.

 

Six others zoomed in to take their place, striking with burning fists, as another six blasted Kayla with lightning between every punch, until the monster woman unleashed a huge surge of telekinetic force that blasted them all away.

 

From her vantage point, Rose had been about to rejoin the charge, but paused as Rachel, the noirette she’d met first among their army, appeared next to her, wiping concrete dust and glass shards off herself. “This is getting us no where.”

 

Rose nodded. “And she doesn’t even know how to fight.”

 

“Are you nuts? She’s rag-dolling us!”

 

Rose shook her head insistently. “No. I have a few hundred martial artists and a thousand soldiers and cops in me. I can tell. She’s just overpowering us. All her attacks are purely reactive, or the most basic defense. She isn’t trying any energy tricks aside from a basic telekinetic blast. She’s not trying any transformations, or size alterations. She isn’t even teleporting around. She’s mostly just kicking and punching and flying.”

 

“So how does that help us?” muttered Victoria. The blond in green had appeared next to them halfway through Rose’s explanation. They watched together as Kayla smashed another of their kind out of the air, and began to overcharge her. The three linked hands and directed their power together into a point in front of them. A ball of crimson light appeared in front of Rose, and the three fired it towards Kayla, striking her like a bullet.

 

The ball didn’t do significant damage on impact, but it detonated a moment later, throwing a huge cloud of dust into the air. Kayla was staggered, half-buried in molten rock, half her skin cooked off. Her victim was nowhere to be seen. Kayla grit her teeth, spotted the three, and shot towards them with a manic fury. They teleported out of the way a moment before Kayla reached them. She whirled and lashed out with another wild telekinetic blast, but the women were no where in range, reappearing several miles away.

 

“Goddamn it!” cried Victoria. “What are we supposed to do?”

 

“You can start running!” yelled out a voice overhead. The three looked up to see a fiery-haired woman flying overhead, nine other women in tow. Each of them was carrying a massive missile. The red-head, Chandra, gave them a wild grin. “We got them!”

 

“Oh fuck,” said Rachel. “Are those…?”

 

“Biggest ones we could find!” she said. “Get some distance!” The ten women shot forward like small fighter jets, zeroing in on Kayla.

 

As the monster woman saw their approach, she braced herself in the air, readying herself to dodge. Instead of the women directly trying to strike her, however, they got within a thousand feet, then suddenly teleported away, letting momentum carry the massive artillery the rest of the way. Kayla casually floated around them, rising higher into the air and wondering how they could have possibly thought that would hit her.

 

Then a series of pencil thin beams of white light struck the missiles from afar, and all of them instantly went off. Ten nuclear bombs fished from silos around the country, detonated at once right beneath her. The blast wave was unbelievable; even bracing themselves miles away, the powerful women had to fight to maintain their position in the air, as the landscape was blasted flat around them. The sky, already thick with smoke and debris, was further subsumed by the massive plume of radioactive ash and dust. Even with their own superhuman bodies and mystical shields keeping them protected, none of the women imagined they would have survived that blast point blank.

 

“No way,” said Devika. The others sensed it too.

 

The Energy of the Cascade was drawn with relentless force towards ground zero. A great hole in the dust cloud opened up as a sphere of telekinetic force whirled around a female form at its center. Kayla hung the there, glowing with sickly light, body tattered, but still mostly intact. As they watched, her wounds sealed up, and her healthy pallor returned, impossibly regenerating the damage faster than the radiation and heat could inflict it.

 

“We can’t beat her!” said Lisa, hopelessly.

 

Rose stared with a mixture of horror and abject fury. They had thrown everything they had at this monster, but as long as there was any Lust Energy at all for her to draw upon, she would simply keep going. Even the strongest weapons on Earth couldn’t put her down.

 

So what was the solution?

 

Deprive her of the Energy. But how? Her very presence kept the Cascade going, and all the Lust Energy it was generating was funneling into her. No matter how much of it they try to draw away, she pulled it from their grasp. No matter how much the other women tried to tamp the Cascade’s effects down, Kayla forced it to keep going. The longer they fought her, the more out of control the Cascade’s energies seemed to get. They had even tried to erect miles-thick Barriers around the battlefield to cut her off, and she shattered them with little effort, drinking their power into herself.

 

Rose hung back and looked to the sky as she wracked her brain for a solution. Roaring wind from the forces around Kayla tore gaps in the clouds, and Rose could see it was nearing nightfall again. A glimpse of the Moon peaked through.

 

She could have kicked herself. How had they not thought it yet?

 

If they couldn’t block her feeding of the power, they had to take her some place she couldn’t reach it. And they had to do it while she was vulnerable. There was only one method they had seen that had even briefly staggered her.

 

Rose psychically called out to all the women around her. “Everyone! I need all of you to draw the Lust Energy away from her! Every single one of you across the world, I need you to pull!”

 

There was a moment’s hesitation. If the women stopped trying to directly suppress the Cascade, it would immediately spiral into an unstoppable wave; what was left of humanity would have only minutes before they all burned away.

 

“NOW! While she’s preoccupied with repairing herself! I need ALL of you to do it!” She braced herself to charge. “Then, when you see her grab me, I need at least a dozen of you to tackle her and drive her into outer space while she’s distracted!”

 

“Are you nuts?” said Rachel. “She’ll just blast us!”

 

“WE DON’T HAVE TIME TO ARGUE!” Rose launched herself towards the monster woman, and prayed the rest would follow.

 

 

3.3

Kayla felt the world dissolve into light and thunder and heat and pain. She didn’t know how she managed to stay conscious. But in the moment before she would have lost herself in the storm of nuclear fire, that icy spike of terror cut through her soul.

 

She didn’t want to die! With a surge of panicked strength, she drew in the Lust Energy as fast as she could, opening her mystic maw even wider to sustain her existence through the cataclysmic power of man’s deadliest weapons. She had to hold on! She had to survive! She had to endure!

 

And so she did. She weathered the storm, and as the sheer force slackened, she held her body together atom by atom, forcing herself to continue being, regenerating even as the multiple bombs’ fall-out tried to eat her away. The pain was enormous, but she could suffer it. She could suffer anything, as long as she could still feed on the Lust Energy. Nothing was worse then the churning agony of the Hunger. She could still—

 

And then, that horridly gut twist hit her, and she almost fell out of the air. Somehow, impossibly, she felt the flow of Energy ebb, felt it being pulled away. She grit her teeth and tried to pull it back, but something was fighting her. Even as she could sense the Cascade burning ever stronger over the horizon, something was blocking her.

 

The damned women again, still trying to deprive her of the nourishing power. All of them must be working together to do it, to hell with the rest of the world. She opened her eyes and grit her teeth, and readied herself to put her all into fighting them with what Energy she could still draw—

 

And then one of them, a small, pink-haired woman, was stupid enough to slam into her. Immediately, the woman pushed her upwards, putting all her telekinetic strength into an attempt to hurl her up past the clouds. Kayla had already proven throughout the fight that any attempt to forcibly teleport her was useless, so wherever this little brat was trying to take her, she was forced to do it the hard way.

 

And all she did was deliver another life-giving boost right into her lap. Kayla grinned and pushed back against her, and clapped her hands onto the woman’s skull. She would have to bear the pain for just a bit, but it would be worth it. She drove her power into the pink-haired girl, throwing her body into a mind-rending overcharge of the Magic. Kayla felt a sickening wave of vertigo, felt her guts nearly tear in half! Her vision swam and her skin sizzled and her head felt like it would split open.

 

But the girl screamed as she writhed in Kayla’s grip. Her strength left her. In just a few seconds, Kayla would consume her, and then, one by one, she would feed on all the rest of them! She would—

 

And then, suddenly, six more bodies slammed into her. The pink haired woman fell away. “NO!” Kayla screamed. “Get! OFF!” She unleashed another blast of force, and three of the women were knocked for a loop. A fourth woman, Kayla delivered a blow with desperate strength, hard enough to blast her chest wide open. The fifth and sixth women teleported out of reach, then grabbed Kayla again, each taking an arm, and drove her even higher. Two more women joined them, attempting to grab at Kayla’s legs, but she kicked them with savage fury, sending them crashing to the Earth. The other two struggled to maintain their grip, and Kayla swung her arms closed, smashing their heads together hard enough to crack them. She pulled her arms apart, ready to do it again as the two women hung addled in her grip.

 

But then, she cried out in renewed pain as the twisting in her gut bit deep. She staggered in the air, and she realized her own cry had been barely audible. She realized as she blinked away tears of pain, that the air around her was no longer blackened with dirt and ash. She could see the clouds below her, well below her. And the roiling storm of Lust Energy she desperately needed to survive was getting farther and farther from her grasp.

 

She realized what they were trying to do. She shrieked in panic, her voice barely audible in the too-thin air. The two women forced themselves to refocus, shaking even as they tried to renew their grip. But, still recovering from the blow, neither could put their full strength into it, and Kayla started dragging them back down to the Earth.

 

And then, a third figure joined them, a pink-haired bolt smashing into Kayla’s gut like a rocket, powering her into the sky with every ounce of strength she had. Rose carried all four of them upwards, Kayla reeling from the blow, while Victoria and Rachel fully collected themselves, and joined her in the rush.

 

Upwards and onwards, the three women flew, pouring on the speed. Kayla screamed soundlessly as she saw her source of life shrink into the distance. She clawed at her captors with manic fervor, scratching at them, biting at them, using her own power to try and draw the three women’s own Lust Energy right out of their bodies. With no other source to distract her considerable power, she almost succeeded. The three women could feel their own strength waver as Kayla sank her mystic fangs into their essence and tried to drink in their Energies. But without trying to overcharge them first, the three women were able to resist enough to keep going, increasing their speed even higher. The only thing that mattered was putting as much distance as they could between the monstrous woman and their world. Even if she did manage to drain them, they had to make sure it wouldn’t be enough power to let her come back.

 

And then, a wall of pale grey filled their field of vision, and they slammed into a new surface, blasting a new crater into an ancient field of rock and dust. Kayla’s power released them, and the three women let go, forcing themselves to not pass out. They teleported several miles upward, and hung in the vacuum as they watched the woman scramble in the pale dust.

 

From the surface of the Moon, Kayla reached out to them, silently begging. She tried to fly after them, rising into the air with a tremendous leap, but already, the power was failing her. She fell back to the lunar surface. The Hunger overwhelmed her, the pain of feeling her body tear itself apart flooding out all other thought but the sheer terror of the creeping black finality.

 

She tried to gather her strength for one final push, to jump at them, to figure out how to teleport to them. Instead, she collapsed onto her hands and knees, then fell onto her side. She gave a silent scream and tears of pain instantly drifted into floating vapor. With the last of her strength, she raised a shaking arm towards the three specks that watched her from on high.

 

“P-please…” she mouthed into the void. “I don’t… want to die…”

 

And then, bit by bit, the last remnants of Lust Energy in her form burned away, and her Spell ceased. Her body crumbled to dust, and mixed into the lunar surface below.

 

The three women stayed for just a minute longer, to make sure she wouldn’t somehow suddenly reform herself. When nothing more happened, they finally relaxed, a deep exhaustion setting in. With a weariness that beings of their nature should have never had to feel, they flew back to Earth.

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

Kayla had succeeded in draining their personal wells deeper than they had realized. They were so exhausted when they reached Earth’s upper atmosphere that they almost blacked out and burned up on their way down. But before that could happen, several other women flew up and caught them, gently bringing them back to the ground. They carried the three to another field, far distant from the shattered lands of the battle.

 

Rose came awake quickly, her body naturally soaking in some of the still-seething mass of Lust Energy in the atmosphere to bolster her recovery. Rachel and Victoria were awake just seconds later. The three got to their feet, and faced an assemblage of a dozen of their fellow gestalts.

 

Rose was the first to notice. “The Cascade is powering down?”

 

An Asian woman with short black hair, Sayaka, nodded. “Once you got her past the outer atmosphere, the Energy became easier to manage. It seems her very presence was keeping the Cascade going against our efforts. It’s still pretty strong, but in a few days, we Megami ought to have it under full control.”

 

Rachel cocked her head to the side as she gave the other woman a curious glance. “Megami?”

 

“Japanese for Goddess,” Sayaka said. “I thought it was appropriate, given what we are.”

 

“Huh.”

 

“Why not just say Goddess then?” said Victoria.

 

“Call yourselves what you like,” said Sayaka with a flat expression.

 

“Well, I like Megami!” said Rachel. “I’ll go with it!”

 

Rose looked to the horizon, watching the Energy roiling, and seeing the dark clouds spreading in the distance. “How much loss are we looking at?”

 

“With our powers, we can recover much of the damage,” said another woman, an Indian named Devika. “We can prevent the nuclear fall out from spreading. We can gather all the dust and ash from the sky to prevent a nuclear winter scenario. We can even reshape the land to make it habitable again, given time.”

 

Rose gave her a stony look. “That is good to hear, but not what a meant. How many people did we lose?”

 

There was a dour exchange of glances. Devika cleared her throat. “We’re… still taking assessment, but…”

 

“Current estimate.”

 

Devika sighed. “Extrapolating from what we’ve been able to sense, we’re looking at three and a half billion gone. And that’s a conservative guess.”

 

Rose felt her veins turn to ice. She had a brief instinct to fall to her knees and cry. Instead, she forced herself to retain her composure.

 

“Jesus,” said Victoria, unable to stop the tears from welling up.

 

“That’s… that’s at least half the world…” said Rachel, who had gone pale.

 

“Many are still trapped in their comas,” said Sayaka. “Right now, we are focused on dampening the rampant Energy. Between the lot of us, we will soon have it down to the point where the healing effects of the Magic will be able to overcome the negative side effects, and people will start naturally recovering. Once the masses have awakened, we can dissipate the fall out completely.”

 

“Most of the survivors were people in isolated living conditions and in small towns,” said Chandra, the redhead who’d lead the missile strike. “The fewer the people in an area, the weaker the Cascade was. But that means pretty much every major settlement, cities with at least a million people, or regions where the population was densely packed, were the hardest hit. Whether or not Kayla obtained their energy, they just couldn’t survive the intensity of the overcharge, and we weren’t able to get to any of them soon enough to revive them.”

 

“Of course, some of those cities became us,” said Devika. “Notably, those cities that held at least one Archmage with that gestalt power. That gift got supercharged by the Cascade and became the catalyst that formed us.”

 

Rose slowly nodded. “Yes. That makes sense. One of my memories is from a woman with such a gift.”

 

“The same for the rest of us,” said Chandra.

 

“And that woman we just fought?” said Rose. “What was she? A freak awakening? A Cult creation? Some experiment gone wrong?”

 

A brown-haired woman named Lisa spoke up. “I have some memories of a few scientists who worked for an organization called Pandora. They were researching the limits of Sex Magic, including increasingly radical cloning and gene-splicing techniques. I’ll have to investigate the path the woman took, but given the proximity to where Pandora’s main laboratories were, I’m pretty sure she was one of theirs.”

 

Rachel let out a disgusted scoff. “Pandora? Are you fucking kidding me?”

 

Lisa nodded grimly. “Doesn’t seem so funny now, does it?”

 

Rose once again cast her gaze past the horizon, and stood in silent contemplation for a few moments. Soon enough, she would do her part to help in taming the Energy. But for right now, there were hard decisions to be made. She cast her thoughts outwards, psychically broadcasting to every other Megami on the planet, while she turned to verbally address those physically next to her.

 

“This can never be allowed to happen again,” she said. “Once we get the surviving people back on their feet, I propose we re-establish a new system of governance. Small settlements, with significant space between them. New countries with an minimum of contact with one another. No more radical experiments. Zero tolerance for any Cult resurgence.”

 

“You really think the Cults are still a threat?” said Rachel.

 

“I know they are,” said Rose. “I have the memories of several Cultists inside me.”

 

“Me too,” said Victoria in a low voice. “Everyone thought they were rooted out and shut down years ago. They’ve still been around all this time.”

 

Sayaka said nothing, but it was clear from her expression that she likewise had such memories.

 

Rose continued. “Our entire species just nearly went extinct. Every civilization on Earth just went through a joint near-death experience. There is no telling what that level of trauma is going to do to our people, the madness it could inflict on them. Our best bet is to present ourselves as their saviors. Not just because we defeated that monster woman and stopped the Cascade, but as the guides that will lead them into a new future.”

 

Devika’s eyes widened. “You mean we should take over the world? Be their Queens? Their Goddesses?”

 

Rose nodded grimly. “Yes. Form new countries, take in the survivors, and make sure they don’t do anything stupid that will jeopardize the planet again.”

 

Rachel gave her a frown. “I mean, I’m all for helping keep our species safe, but I’m not sure I want to become some tyrant Goddess.”

 

Rose’s expression softened just a bit. “I don’t mean to say we should crush the masses under our heel. I am saying we are in a very precarious position. We need to make our lands as self-sufficient as possible and keep our populations protected. In the event another Cascade occurs, or more mad experiments are attempted, or Cult activities resurge, we can shut them down much easier in contained environments.”

 

“As well as put some distance between us, so we don’t cause trouble for one another,” said Sayaka. The others glanced at her, and she gave them a thin, humorless smile. “I can already we are not all going to agree on how exactly to run things. If we are going to each form our own little nations, I think it would be best we agree to a Pact of Non-Interference as well.”

 

Rachel scowled, crossing her arms. “And what if some of us turn out to be lunatics who can’t be trusted to govern?”

 

“Unless the actions of such women pose a threat to your own lands, you’ll just have to look the other way,” said Rose. “A fight between any of us would not bode well for our people.”

 

“Is that really how it must be?” said Victoria. “A return to some kind of isolated feudalism?”

 

“Do you have a better idea?” said Rose. “The old way of life is done. Truthfully, I’m astounded it lasted as long as it did, with everything Sex Magic had changed. But after this? The global economy is ruined and not recoverable. International conflicts cannot be allowed to jeopardize the populations we have left.”

 

“More over,” said Sayaka, “We can assure that people who join are countries are those who already agree with our way of doing things, to ensure a lessening of civil unrest.”

 

The others glanced to Rose, who gave Sayaka a hard gaze, before saying, “Agreed. Those who cannot make peace will be removed, one way or the other.”

 

Across the world, the Megami psychically debated with one another, weighing the various options. But in the end, they all agreed that Rose’s plan was the best to start off with. Maybe, in the future, when things were stable again, and the threats were more assuredly under control, they could come together to renegotiate. But until then, each Megami would handle their own affairs, and barring extreme circumstances, leave one another alone to rule their countries as they pleased.

 

Within a week, the survivors had been revived. Within two weeks, news of the great restructuring was announced. Within three weeks, borders had already been drawn up, and the vast migrations began. Within a month, the Queendoms were officially in order.

 

And thus, a new era began for the Sex Mage World.

 

END