Hey, some punishments are meant to be creative.
—
Naofumi stood perfectly still, already imagining how the rumors would twist this: The Shield Devil, barricaded in his room, gritting teeth and holding the doorknob with white-knuckled desperation, refusing the summons of a princess. He could picture the faces outside—Malty, regal and venomous, and Motoyasu, dumbly smiling as if someone had just told him a joke he might yet understand. The voices oozed in through the splintered frame with the inevitability of a rising tide.
“Open up, Naofumi,” Malty’s voice, thick as perfume and twice as suffocating. “Don’t embarrass yourself further. The King is expecting us.”
He didn’t answer, just tightened his grip. Silence could be its own shield, if you believed in it hard enough. The girl—no, the princess—knew how to wield words like daggers. If he let her start, he’d bleed out on the woven rug.
But Motoyasu’s voice, too eager, punctured the moment. “Come on, man! You don’t want us to break down the door again, do you?”
Naofumi’s room was a ransacked apology, half-broken and muggy from too many nights slept with one eye open. The bed sagged in defeat. His travel gear was scattered, like he’d packed for an escape and then lost the nerve. Even the window, sticky with recent rain, seemed to sweat with anticipation.
“Alright,” Naofumi said, mostly to himself, then louder: “Alright!”
He drew a breath—through the nose, hold, out the mouth—and released the door. It swung open on a whine, barely scraping the warped floorboards. Malty stood there, a smile just a little too sharp, flanked by Motoyasu in all his peacock finery. The spear-hero’s cape was embroidered with some new crest, probably a reward for surviving breakfast without stabbing himself.
“See? All you had to do was ask nicely,” Naofumi said, pitching his voice flat as a dead cat. Malty wasted no time. “You’re coming with us. Now.”
The threat in her words was mostly for Motoyasu’s benefit, Naofumi figured. He looked Motoyasu over. The guy’s hands were already clenching and unclenching at his sides, anticipation or nerves or both. Naofumi bet on neither. The guy’s brain was probably full of wind chimes.
“You want to drag me to the palace,” Naofumi said, “where the King will do what? Lecture me? Rob me? I’m not in the mood for royal games.”
“Too bad,” Motoyasu said, all wind and bluster. “When the princess says jump—”
“—the Spear Hero asks how high,” Naofumi finished, voice like gravel. “Look. I know you two are here to make an example of me. But I’m not as stupid as you want me to be.”
Malty’s smile never shifted, but her eyes moved—fraction to the left, a signal Naofumi caught even if Motoyasu missed it entirely. He tensed. This was the part where they’d try to strongarm him. He’d thought about it all night, about how the Shield Devil would end up in chains or worse.
But this time, he’d come prepared.
Naofumi reached into his sleeve and flicked his wrist, letting the new Shield—Reality Shield, the status called it—slide into place. The interface only he could see glimmered, a violet overlay on his arm, humming with a low, proud thrum. He didn’t need to shout the activation key. He just thought it, hard enough that the air itself snapped, and then he looked Motoyasu dead in the eye.
“How about you teleport away. Far far away.” Naofumi said.
Motoyasu’s mouth twisted. “What?”
The Reality Shield flared. Motoyasu jerked, like someone had yanked his spine with a hooked wire, and then—
He was gone. Not teleported so much as erased, a chalk mark wiped from a slate. The air where he’d stood folded, shrank to a pinpoint, then popped back out like nothing had happened.
Malty’s jaw dropped, just for a second. Not enough for most people to notice, but Naofumi caught it, savored it.
“Where did you send him?” she hissed, voice gone low and cold.
“Away,” Naofumi said. “Far as I could bear.”
Malty stepped back, but only half a pace. “You think this will stop the summons? The King—”
“I know exactly what the King wants,” Naofumi said. “But I’ve got my own game. And that game begins with you, you snake of a princess. Speaking off…”
Naofumi points the shield at her with a smirk. “May your neck be overrun with scales and be pulled long and flexible. As if a snake's body was separating your body from your head.“
Malty’s hand flew to her throat, fingers splaying, then dragging down the line of her collarbone. A snarl of blue and gold scales crept under her nails, the shimmer alive, as if her flesh was remembering something ancient. Her words tangled in her throat, coming out in a hiss that was more sound than sense.
“What did you—what is—?” Her voice cracked, pitched up, and Naofumi felt a wormy satisfaction. He watched as the scales tessellated, growing larger as they marched down her neck, a fractal eruption mapping out from beneath her jaw to the dip of her clavicle. She clawed at them with both hands, the ragged edges of her nails catching, but the skin just flexed and returned, more reptilian, more inhuman, the longer she fought.
Then her neck started to pull, the bones clicking soft as knuckles, elongating vertebra by vertebra, her head creeping higher, her shoulders dropping away. Malty’s mouth opened in a scream, but the sound was thin, whistling. Naofumi half-expected her tongue to flick out between her teeth. She swayed, knees buckling, and crashed into the doorframe, both hands now clutching her new, snaking neck as if she could push it back into place.
He wanted to laugh, or maybe to retch. It was one thing to imagine her as a snake, another to see the transformation writ literal in her body. He’d imagined her hissing at courtiers, her new head bobbing above the crowd, a python’s grin stretched where her lips used to be. She could still talk, he realized, but only if she figured out how to work the new muscles. Her face was wooden with shock.
Malty’s eyes rolled back to find him, feral with desperation. “Undo it, you monster!” Her voice, oddly elastic, vibrated along her lengthened windpipe, the vowels stretching with each inch her neck grew. She was taller than him now, though her body hunched awkwardly to keep her balance.
Naofumi shrugged, letting his lips bend into something approximating a smile. “You always did think you were above everyone else. I just leveled the field.”
Her arm snapped out, faster than he thought possible, but the reach was all wrong; she misjudged the distance, overbalanced, and fell across his chest. The scales were cold, slippery. He shoved her off, and she thudded to the warped floor, limbs tangled beneath her.
“Get up,” he said. “I’m not carrying you to the palace.”
She staggered to her feet, neck whiplashing, scales catching the sunlight. For a second, she looked like a myth, something painted on a temple wall. She spat at his feet, saliva thick and ropy.
“You think this will save you?” she hissed. “When I tell the King—”
He cut her off with a flick of the shield. “Go ahead. Tell him. See how many words you get in before he stops listening to a cow like you. To that end…”
He once again raised his shield. “May your body be that of a minotaur. Thick strong legs, hooves, and fur over your legs, strong core muscles, thick arms and broad shoulders. A prime specimen of a bovine monster girl.“
Malty staggered, but the words worked faster this time, like venom flooding the veins. Her legs ballooned, thighs and calves swelling, the fabric of her dress splitting with an ugly, tearing sound into ragged pennants. Black fur erupted in a braided, glossy swirl down her shins, pushing her feet into bright white hooves that cracked through the dainty slippers. The shock of it pitched her to the ground again, her hips widening, pelvis grinding into the floor as her body chased the new parameters. The transformation gripped her in fits and snaps—arms thickening, skin going ruddy-tan beneath the tearing sleeves, then fur marching up to the elbows in sudden, almost comically crisp lines.
She screamed. Not the high, practiced wail of a princess in distress, but something deeper, a braying animal sound that tremored the glass in its frame. Even her voice had heft now, a rougher quality that scraped the edge of speech.She looked—God, Naofumi almost laughed—like she could run a marathon and then plow a field after. The sight made something rattle in his chest.
He let her roll upright. Her body was a wrestler’s dream now: massive, roped muscle on the shoulders and deep-cut abs beneath the fur, arms coiled for blunt-force trauma. Malty’s hands—still delicate, still studded with gemmed rings—looked cartoonish on the thick wrists.
She rose, breathing so hard her nostrils flared. The new neck still snaked, but now it looked right at home, like the horns she should have been sprouting were only a matter of time. She swayed, tottered, and for a second, Naofumi thought she might charge.
“Undo. This. Now,” she managed, voice two octaves lower and threaded with fury.
“Why?” Naofumi said. “You look good. More honest, at least."
Her new hooves clopped on the floorboards as she lurched toward him. He braced for a tackle, but she stopped at arm’s length, eyes boring into his, red-rimmed and wild. He couldn’t tell if she was fighting the change or just recalibrating.
He swallowed. The power thrummed in his shield-hand, hot and confident, and a giddy sense of control crept up his spine. “Don’t worry,” he said, softer. “You might still think that you are still the number one princess. That no one else can even compete. Let's fix that.”
Her eyes went wide as he pointed the shield at her again. “May the base of your snake neck become five times thicker, but then split into five identical snake necks, all of which ending in an identical head to yours. The only difference being that each of them has different colored hair to you.“
Malty’s neck wobbled, the new muscle along the base undulating beneath the scale. The skin at the root of her throat bulged outward, straining the gold-trimmed dress to its engineering limits. He watched, stomach twisting, as the swelling doubled, trebled, then split. The four new necks spiraled upward in perfect symmetry, scales iridescent as oil on wet stone, each one capped with the distant promise of a head.
A sick marvel at his own handiwork froze Naofumi for a second. He’d half expected the process to look like something out of a nightmare—blood, maybe, or flesh tearing repulsively—but the effect was almost…elegant. Like watching a flower open in time-lapse. The five necks fanned out at the top, writhing in a lazy, hypnotic motion. The heads popped into being at the ends, each uncannily identical to Malty’s own—same sharp chin, same haughty brow, same fine, arched nose. But the hair: where the original Malty’s hair glowed copper in the sun, the new heads sported shades of plum, silver-blue, lime green, and night-black, all styled in her signature waves.
He blinked. The effect was, somehow, more disconcerting than the cow-legs. Each Malty-head squawked in chorus, their voices fusing into a tangled echo. The original glared at him with all the force of a firing squad.
The heads argued amongst themselves, squabbling with identical venom—“Fix this!” “You’ll die for this!”—until the original screamed, cutting the others off. The volume left his ears ringing, and the echo shimmied around the little room, vibrating in the floorboards.
“Undo it, you freak!” said the original, her voice now modulated by the other four, an ungodly quintet. Three of the heads snapped their teeth at him, their jawbones clicking like beetle carapaces. The other two—lime and black—just spat curses and insults, one after the other, building toward a crescendo of pure, undiluted rage.
“Nice,” Naofumi breathed, more awed by the horror than pleased. “You know, I didn’t actually think it would work.” That was a lie, but he liked the sting of it on her faces.
The five heads fixed him with hatred. For a moment, he thought they’d lunge, all at once, and take a chunk out of his throat. But the new body was still clumsy; as Malty charged, she tripped over her own too-wide hips and hit the floor with a crash, the heads smashing into each other in a knot of snapping teeth and tangled hair.
“Maybe you should get used to it before you go for the big kill,” Naofumi said, making no move to help. He could watch her wrestle herself all day.
She staggered upright, the five necks arching in a fan, each head giving him a withering, synchronized stink-eye. The cow-body steadied itself, new muscles flexing, and Naofumi was already reading his next step as he pointed his shield at them. “Now let's put some diversity into your new heads. May all of the new heads have different personalities from you and each other. With only a few things being consistent between them. They are all mischievous, perverted, honest, devoted and loyal to me and very willing to do as I say. May also each of you sisters have equal control over your body, meaning that the body moves in the way that the majority of you wants it to move.“
It hit like a thrown brick: their faces snapped toward him with uncanny synchronization, every jawbone clicking as the five mouths gaped in tandem. The air in the little room curdled, thick and hot with their collective attention. And then the riot began.
The original Malty—copper-haired and beautiful as a razor—scowled with all the practiced entitlement of her bloodline. But the others, their voices tumbling sloppily out of unfamiliar mouths, lit up like lanterns: the silver-blue one leaned forward, eyes gone wide and hungry, tongue darting in a way that would have been cartoonish on any other face; the black-haired head snickered low, a mirthless chortle that left the skin crawling; the lime-haired one blinked, then, bizarrely, smiled, like it was discovering the concept for the first time; and the plum-head wriggled its tongue at him, eyes heavy-lidded and lazy, the picture of decadent mischief.
The blue one spoke first, words falling out in a rush: “Naofumi-sama! Did you make us for yourself? How thoughtful!” The voice was higher than Malty’s baseline, with a manic tilt, and when the head craned toward him, scales along the neck shimmered with anticipation.
“Don’t be desperate,” black said, rolling its eyes at blue and fixing Naofumi with a predator’s stare. “We’re clearly built for better things than this idiot. Or did you not notice how sturdy these new hands are…?”
Plum laughed, a slow, syrupy thing. “Look how thick our arms are. We could tear him in half and then—” A yawn, sharp teeth glinting. “—put him back together if he begged nicely.”
Green, the lime one, looked at Naofumi with alarming tenderness. “We serve you now?” “Of course we do!” said blue, and the other heads nodded as a unit, except for copper—original Malty—who hissed and tried to force them apart. But the other four met strength with strength, locking the necks in a beautiful, writhing stalemate.
Naofumi’s face changed to a smile. This was pretty much what he’d pictured, but, in a way, it felt even better than what he imagined. There was no denying it, this was exactly what Malty deserved.
Original Malty’s voice cut through the chaos: “Stop it! Stop talking, you freaks! This body is mine, mine by right!” The other heads cackled, moving the mouth in mocking unison.
Black—not one for patience—flexed the new, massive hands, popping loud knuckles. “Think he’ll let us hunt for him? I want to break something.” The plum head sniggered, teeth gnashing.
Blue whined: “I want a treat! Naofumi-sama, will you pamper us? Dress us up prettier than the other heroes’ girls? Maybe let us curl up at the foot of your bed?”
“Hey girls, listen up.“ Naofumi declared, making all five Malty heads turn to face him. “You know that your sister Malty has been a very naughty girl to me. She lied and cheated and framed me, among other things. Girls, do me a favor and play with her body. Make sure to talk her ears off about how great I am so that she might just finally realize it.“
The heads snapped around, knotted and tangled but still fighting for their moment. Malty—original, copper-haired, her eyes gone pale with horror—tried to duck, but the other four caught her in their centrifuge. The blue head butted in first, nuzzling nose-to-nose with the original, a giddy delight dancing along its mouth. “How could you do that to Naofumi-sama? He saved the world! He’s the greatest!” The lime-haired head slithered around from behind, brushing its cheek against Malty’s with a conspiratorial sigh, then whispered, “You should be grateful to serve such a genius. He’s more of a hero than any of the others.”
Black-haired Malty didn’t waste time with sweet talk; she gnawed at the original’s ear with a soft, gnashing bite, then crowed, “He’s the only one who made you interesting, you boring prude! Without him, you’d just be another dead-eyed princess, sucking up to the king.” The plum head licked its own lips, flickered a sly look at Naofumi, and then wrapped itself around the rest, constricting the necks in a python’s embrace. “Let’s see what else he can do to us. I bet it’s going to be wonderful.”
Malty writhed, but her body—thick, bovine and powerful—was at the mercy of the five wrangling heads. She tried to force her hands up to swat at the blue and black heads, but the other three forced the arms towards her breasts and started squeezing them for pleasure. “Let go, you freaks!” she shrieked, but the effect was undercut by silver-blue’s delighted, echoing, “Never! We’re a part of you just like you are part of us.” The new voices overlapped, trilled, and taunted, a chorus of mischief and obsession. Each jabbed at Malty’s old pride, shredding her one remaining dignity by degrees.
Naofumi’s satisfaction was a hot coal, heavy in his lungs. He watched the five heads bicker and harass, their voices rising in a cacophony of praise for him and mockery for her, and for once, he let himself enjoy it. All the things she’d done, the lies and the betrayals—the universe had finally let him clap back.
He found himself grinning. It felt wrong, but also, for once, entirely right.
“Hey, girls,” he said, holding up his shield. The five heads whipped around to stare, anticipation rippling through their joined necks. “Let’s give you something to play with.” He focused on the Reality Shield, letting his mind twist around the next command. “May each of your ears become long, sinuous, scaled and extremely sensitive. And while I’m at it, may your tongues be triple their normal length, forked, mobile, and just as sensitive. So make sure to give Malty plenty of kisses both on her lips and on her ears.”
He pressed the command into the shield, watched as the five heads jerked in unison. Their ears stretched out like wet clay, pulling and warping into long, serpentine whips, covered in the same glassy blue-gold scales as their necks. They quivered as the heads tested their new range, flicking about, brushing each other and the original head’s cheeks, then flopping against Malty’s shoulders. Malty’s face spasmed, horror and involuntary pleasure at war as blue and lime shrieked with joy, twining their new ears around each other like eager tentacles. Black and plum’s ears lashed with greedy precision, snapping at the air, tasting the shimmer of their own new flesh.
Then the tongues: slick, purpled, forked at the tip and rolling out like party streamers, each head’s mouth gaping in surprise, then delight as they extended, retreated, then lashed back out. The sensation looked overwhelming; five heads darting tongues at each other, at their own new ears, at Malty’s face, which twisted as the others assaulted her with frantic, perverted affection.
Malty—original—tried to close her lips, tried to glare the rebellion into submission, but the four others battered her with a relentless barrage. Blue coiled its tongue around her left ear, tickled the inside with a vibrating hum, making Malty yelp and shiver. Lime went for the right, whispering and slurping, her face flushed dark with humiliation. Black and plum got in on the act, weaving their tongues together, making a slippery rope that wrapped around the original’s throat, squeezing until Malty’s eyes threatened to roll back.
The body, under dueling commands, staggered and tottered in a wild dance. The hands—her hands, but not her hands—pinched, kneaded, and mashed at her new bovine breasts, which swelled further under the attention, dark nipples poking through the ruined dress. The legs buckled, hooves clattering, the whole tangled mess of her body slumping into a squat before Naofumi.
She gurgled, whether in protest or some reluctant pleasure he couldn’t tell, and for a second Naofumi felt a pang—a pulse of guilt, quickly overridden by the memory of Malty’s gleeful, cruel smirks. She’d never expected him to win. Never thought she’d lose control of her story, even for a second. Now here she was, helpless to resist the litany of praise and taunt spilling from her own five mouths.
“Keep going,” Naofumi said, looking at them with approval. “Keep yourself on my bed. Lick her, kiss her, tease her, masturbate her. And make sure that the entire time you do it, you tell her just how great I am.“
The five-headed monster that used to be Malty flopped and writhed on Naofumi’s mattress like a sea beast stranded in the wrong myth. Each neck arched and bucked with a will of its own, jerking the mass of the body from side to side, backs of the heads thudding against the bedpost with every lunge. They were in a tangle of silk and fur and ruined bosom, hands distractedly groping and kneading, blue and lime cackling in delight as they took turns entangling original Malty’s tongue, then lashing it with their own. They didn’t hold back. Forked tips flicked and lashed. Every touch seemed to land with electric clarity—a jolt that made all five sets of eyelids flutter.
Naofumi let them work. The room stank of girl-sweat, musk, and the old perfume that had soured into something coppery and brutish. He sat in the only chair—bare wood, recently fixed with a wedge of scrap to keep the legs from splaying—and rested the shield on his knee. What did it mean that watching her, or them, reduced to this, didn’t even make him feel dirty, only vindicated? He tried on self-loathing, and found it thin. Considered mercy, found it tasteless. He let himself bask in the raw decadence of his own petty victory.
He wasn’t sure what was more surreal: the reality of his handiwork or how quickly the heads adapted. Black was the first to use the length of her new ears against the blue head, wrapping the scaled whip around its neck and pulling it into a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss. Blue cackled and reciprocated, the two of them putting on a show that would have had the court physician either faint in terror or furiously taking notes. Original Malty, caught in the vortex of attention, did her best to protest, but the other heads wouldn’t let her retreat. They carpet-bombed her with praise for Naofumi—his genius, his power, his clever hands and “deliciously villainous smile.” Every compliment doubled as a jibe, landing with the heavy, sickly weight of self-inflicted shame.
The body responded, betraying Malty at every turn. Her nipples grew so dark and swollen that the ruined fabric clung to them like mourning clothes. The hands—she couldn’t keep track of whose will they answered—kept sliding up her own sides, over the absurd breadth of her new hips, then between her legs. Hooves clopped on the floorboards, flexing in short, awkward stomps. The lime head, meanwhile, developed a worrying tendency to lick anything within reach: fingers, fur, the very air. It kept turning its face to Naofumi with a look of giddy expectancy, as if waiting for a treat.
At some point, Naofumi said “Keep it up girls“ and simply left, leaving the five headed girl to her own devices. It's arguably though if Malty even noticed, given how over-stimulated she was at the moment. There was only one thing that went through Naofumi's mind as he left.
“Boy, I can't wait to see her face when I come back.“