New programs always need to be tested. And who would be a better subject for that than… you? And who needs you to be human anyway?
—
Your next waking memory was familiar: The antiseptic ozone in your nose, the sourceless glow of the chamber walls, the sluggish certainty that you had been poured back into your body incorrectly. You blinked and pushed yourself upright. The room around you was the same seamless metal as before, elegant in a cold, inhuman way, though this time dark veins ran through the walls like cracks in cooling magma. The air felt hotter, heavier, touched with the smell of smoke and minerals.
Then the lights changed.
The clean white glow dimmed to a deep, volcanic red. The floor beneath you split apart into glowing lines, not the orderly grid from before but the shape of some immense, horned face staring up from beneath the metal.
“Welcome, subject. Your New Life Program will now initiate,” said the voice.
It was not the crisp, corporate tone you had expected. This voice sounded as though it were being crushed through gravel, ancient and mechanical at the same time.
“This version will suit the preferences of your future master. Please remain calm during calibration.”
A second voice, higher, scraping at the edge of your hearing, intoned:
“Beginning secondary calibration. Your client has requested a female oni. We will therefore begin by correcting your body.”
You tried to step backward.
You could not.
Something had locked around your ankles, your knees, your waist. You could still turn your head, still look down at yourself, but the rest of you remained perfectly still beneath the red glow.
“No,” you said automatically. “No, I’m not…”
“Male?” asked the second voice, almost playfully. “Not for much longer.”
A hot pressure rolled through you from head to toe.
Your shoulders drew inward first. Not much, only enough to make your body look less blocky, less heavy. The muscles of your chest tightened, then softened. Your waist pulled inward with a strange, aching pressure while your hips widened beneath it.
You stared down in horror as your body shifted around the place you stood.
Your thighs thickened, not with brute strength yet, but with a softer, fuller shape. Your rear pushed outward behind you, growing heavier, rounder, enough that you could suddenly feel its new weight changing the way you balanced.
You twisted your head, trying to look over your shoulder.
“No,” you repeated, weaker this time.
The voice ignored you.
“Much better. A proper servant should be a girl.”
The heat spread upward into your chest.
At first it only tingled. Then the pressure built beneath your skin, two deep, aching knots just under your nipples. You tried to shake your head, tried to deny what was happening, but all you could do was watch.
Your chest swelled.
Slowly, helplessly, two curves pushed their way outward beneath the thin gray shift. The fabric stretched across them as they grew, first enough to be undeniable, then enough to bounce faintly when you breathed.
You swallowed hard.
You had never had breasts before.
Had you?
The thought snagged strangely in your head.
The voice continued speaking over the pounding of your heart.
“Your body is becoming more elegant. More suitable. More feminine.”
Your breasts grew again, heavier this time, settling against your chest with a weight that made you instinctively arch your back. Your nipples pressed visibly through the cloth.
You wanted to object.
You tried to remember what your chest had looked like before.
Flat.
Male.
The words came more slowly than they should have.
Your face prickled. Your jaw softened, losing its hard edges. Your cheeks smoothed. Your lips became fuller. A strange, dizzying lightness spread through your throat, and when you let out a startled noise, it came out higher and softer than before.
“No,” you whispered.
The voice sounded wrong.
Not wrong.
Just unfamiliar.
For now.
Below your waist, a numb cold spread through you. You froze.
“No,” you said again, more urgently.
The cold deepened, then folded inward. There was a strange sensation of pressure, of your body reshaping itself in some hidden, impossible way. You squeezed your eyes shut.
When the feeling finally passed, something was missing.
Something else had taken its place.
You breathed faster.
You did not want to look down.
You did anyway.
The outline beneath the shift was wrong now, different, female.
You tried to insist to yourself that you were still a man.
The thought came out weak and distant.
Your body no longer agreed.
Your hips were broader. Your chest was soft and heavy. Your rear pressed firmly against the back of the restraint. Even your face felt different when you moved it.
And somehow, standing there unable to move anything except your head, you could already feel your certainty beginning to erode.
You were still yourself.
Weren’t you?
The second voice laughed softly.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to being a girl very quickly.”
You tried to rise, but your legs were already mutating, muscle bulking and knitting over itself in new, inhuman configurations.
“Your client has requested that you be strong,” said the second voice. “And curvy.”
A pulse rolled through your chest.
Your breasts lurched outward again, suddenly heavier in the thin gray shift. You gasped as the new weight dragged at your posture. The fabric stretched across them, the outline of them impossible to ignore.
Then came another pulse.
This one hit your arms.
The muscles beneath your skin clenched and swelled. Your biceps thickened visibly, pushing outward inch by inch. Your forearms broadened. The cords of your shoulders stood out beneath your skin.
You stared.
You had been fit before.
This was something else.
Your arms looked less normal and more like they had been carved from stone.
Then the pulse moved lower.
Your rear swelled behind you, growing fuller, heavier, rounder with shocking speed. The restraint dug into it now. You could feel the new mass of it pressing against the metal behind you.
“No,” you whispered weakly.
Another pulse.
Your thighs exploded with muscle.
The soft curves from before thickened into something massive, your legs becoming powerful enough that you could feel the restraint creaking around them. Dense muscle packed itself beneath your skin, making your calves and thighs bulge until they barely looked human.
“Strong,” said the voice approvingly. “Curvy.”
The pulses kept coming.
Chest.
Your breasts swelled larger again, hanging heavier from your chest now, soft and impossible against the rapidly growing power of the rest of your body.
Muscles.
Your shoulders broadened. Your upper arms became absurdly thick, veins beginning to stand out beneath your skin. Your stomach tightened into hard ridges.
Butt.
Your hips widened further and your rear pushed outward again, becoming huge, enough that you could no longer imagine your body without it.
Muscles.
This time the growth was ridiculous.
Your biceps ballooned larger than your head. Your thighs thickened until the muscles pressed visibly against one another. Your stomach hardened into a wall of thick, sculpted muscle. Your back spread wider and wider, the restraint around your chest groaning under the strain.
You could not even deny it anymore.
You were becoming enormous.
Not merely strong.
Monstrously, impossibly strong.
Your skin itched, then burned, then thickened into a hide the color of dusk. The muscles beneath it only looked larger now, impossibly defined beneath the darkening skin.
Another pulse ran through your chest and rear together.
Your breasts became huge, broad and heavy against your now absurdly muscular torso. Your rear matched them, round and massive beneath your widening hips.
The contrast should have looked ridiculous.
Instead it looked perfect.
The second voice laughed softly.
“There we are. Big enough to protect Master. But Master has... Peculiar taste, doesn't he? He doesn't just want you to be superhuman. He wants you to be a demon. A one-eyed oni."
At those words, your whole body heated up. The dark color spreading across your skin deepened further, taking on a richer, reddish cast, as though your flesh had been tempered in a forge. You could feel the heat gathering in your face.
Your brow pressed outward. Your cheekbones sharpened. Your nose flattened slightly, becoming broader and stronger. Your mouth ached, lips pulling back as your teeth lengthened into sharp, predatory points.
You tried to speak.
All that came out was a low, rough sound.
Then the top of your skull exploded with pressure.
You cried out as something shoved outward beneath your scalp. Four hard points pushed through your hairline, two above your forehead, two further back, and kept growing.
Horns, thick, curved horns.
You could feel them forcing their way free inch by inch, the skin around them stretching and aching until four great black horns crowned your head. They made you feel heavier, larger, more monstrous.
More right.
Then came your eyes.
A strange pressure built behind them, making you wince. Your vision blurred.
You tried to blink it away, but the pressure only grew worse.
Your eyes were moving.
You felt them sliding beneath your skin, slowly, impossibly, being drawn toward the center of your face. Panic flared through you.
“No—”
The word dissolved into a groan as the force between them became too great.
Your vision doubled. Then tripled. The room swam around you as your eyes pressed closer and closer together, until at last there was a terrible, liquid sensation deep in your skull.
And they fused.
For one horrifying instant you could not see anything at all.
Then your new eye opened.
One huge, cyclopean eye, centered in the middle of your face.
The world snapped back into focus.
Sharper than before clearer. You could see every crack in the walls, every pulse of red light beneath the floor. Your single eye saw more than two ever had.
You stared at the reflection in the black metal wall.
A huge, muscular oni woman stared back.
One eye.
Four horns.
And somehow, despite everything, you could already feel yourself beginning to believe that this was exactly what you were supposed to look like."
“No,” said the second voice thoughtfully. “Those arms are not enough.”
You froze.
“What?”
“A proper oni protector needs more than two arms. Your Master deserves better than that.”
Heat flooded your shoulders.
At first it was only an itch beneath your skin, deep and unbearable. Then the itch became pressure.
You cried out as your already-massive shoulders broadened further, muscles swelling and knotting beneath your dark red skin. Your collarbones spread wider. Your upper back thickened until it felt as though there were boulders beneath your flesh.
Then something moved.
A second pair of shoulder joints pushed outward beneath your first pair of arms.
You stared down in disbelief as two huge bulges formed beneath your upper arms, one on each side of your chest. They swelled visibly, stretching your skin tight over the impossible shapes beneath.
“No,” you whispered.
The word felt weak.
The pressure built and built until, with a sickening series of pops, your body split itself open to make room.
Two new arms pushed their way free.
You watched, too stunned to panic, as thick new biceps forced themselves outward from beneath your original pair, every inch of them already absurdly muscular. The bones inside them divided and reknit, sinew spinning itself into doubled braids. New elbows formed, new forearms, new hands.
The second pair grew fast.
Too fast.
In seconds they were as large as your original arms. Then larger.
Your old pair thickened to match, as though your body refused to let any part of you be anything less than monstrous. Your biceps swelled until they looked too large to bend. Veins stood out beneath your skin. Triceps bulged behind them like slabs of stone.
You had four arms now.
Four equally enormous, equally powerful arms.
You could feel the weight of them hanging from your broadened shoulders. You should have collapsed.
Instead, your body adjusted instantly.
Your back spread wider. New muscles formed across your chest and ribs to support the extra limbs. Your entire torso became even broader, more powerful, more inhuman.
The sight should have horrified you.
Instead you could not stop staring.
You flexed one of your upper arms.
Then one of the lower pair.
The muscle jumped beneath your skin, huge and perfect.
You flexed all four at once.
The sensation was incredible.
Not wrong.
Not unnatural.
Better.
As though you had spent your entire life cramped into an incomplete body and only now understood what you had always been meant to feel like.
“Yes,” breathed the second voice approvingly. “That’s much better. Four arms. Strong enough to carry Master, protect Master, crush anything that threatens Master.”
“Subject, you are an oni now,” said the first voice. “Your purpose is to serve. Your loyalty is absolute. Your devotion is unbreakable.”
The words hit you like hammer blows.
Serve.
Loyal.
Devoted.
Each one sank into you deeper than the last, striking somewhere beneath your thoughts, beneath your instincts, all the way down into the molten core of you. You felt a heat in your chest, a fire licking the inside of your ribcage with pure, chemical certainty.
You would serve.
You would devote every ounce of your new self.
Even the idea of disobedience flickered up for less than a heartbeat before it dissolved. The thought of resisting felt wrong, thin and brittle and impossible to hold onto. Submission, by contrast, felt warm, safe, right.
The second voice resumed, now almost gleeful.
“Let’s upgrade those instincts, big girl. From now on, you exist for your Master’s whims. You crave orders. You live to obey. It’s, like, your only joy.”
A low pulse thrummed through the room in time with the words.
Crave orders.
You felt your huge body straighten instinctively.
Live to obey.
Your four hands curled into fists, then relaxed again at your sides, waiting.
Only joy.
The phrase slid through your mind over and over, smoother every time.
Your only joy.
Your only joy.
Your only joy.
You tried, for one brief second, to remember what you had wanted before this.
The thought vanished into empty space.
You could picture them instead, the one you would serve: small beside your enormous body, fragile beneath your strength, precious. Your master. You would carry them in your arms. All four of them. You would stand behind them like a wall. You would crush anyone who threatened them and kneel instantly the moment they called your name.
The image made you shiver with happiness.
“Good girl,” crooned the second voice.
The words struck you harder than any transformation had.
Pleasure crashed through you, hot and dizzying. Your knees nearly gave out.
“See? That’s what you are. A big, strong, obedient good girl. Master’s guard. Master’s servant. Master’s pet.”
The titles wrapped themselves around your thoughts one by one.
Guard.
You felt your huge muscles tense, eager to protect.
Servant.
You imagined yourself kneeling instantly, all four hands folded obediently in your lap.
Pet.
Something inside you melted.
The second voice giggled softly.
“You like that one, don’t you? You like belonging. You like being owned. You like knowing exactly who you exist for.”
You opened your mouth to deny it.
Nothing came out.
Because it was true.
You did like it.
The first voice spoke again, slower this time, every word sinking deep.
“You are an oni. You are powerful and proud, but you are also eager to please. You love praise. You need praise. Every compliment makes you stronger. Every order makes you happier.”
You could feel the suggestions taking root. The more you heard them, the more obvious they seemed. Of course you needed orders. Of course you wanted to please Master. Without that, what would you even do with your strength?
“Master’s happiness is your happiness,” said the first voice. “Master’s safety is your purpose. Master’s approval is more important than anything else.”
The words echoed inside your skull until they no longer sounded like instructions.
They sounded like your own thoughts.
“Let’s reinforce the new you,” the first voice continued, now almost kind. “You love when Master pets your head, scratches behind your horns, tells you you’re a good girl.”
The craving hit you like a truck.
You had never wanted anything so badly.
A small hand stroking your hair. Fingers scratching gently at the base of your horns. A warm voice saying you had done well, that you were useful, that you belonged to them.
You would do anything for that.
You would throw yourself into fire and ice for the chance to hear it.
You would wait at the door all night if they asked. You would curl up obediently at the foot of their bed if they wanted you there. You would kneel the instant they called for you, all four huge arms folded neatly at your sides, your single eye fixed on them with absolute devotion.
The thought made your enormous body tremble.
“Yes,” whispered the second voice. “That’s exactly right. You don’t need anything except Master. You don’t want anything except Master.”
The words slipped into place so easily that you could no longer tell whether you were hearing them or thinking them.
You didn’t need anything else.
You didn’t want anything else.
The restraints around your body hissed and withdrew.
For the first time since the transformation had begun, you were free to move.
You dropped instantly to one knee.
The motion felt natural, perfect.
Your four massive arms settled obediently in your lap. Your huge muscles flexed beneath your red skin. Your horns brushed the air above you. You bowed your head, waiting.
A panel in the wall slid open.
Beyond it lay a dark hallway lit by the same volcanic red glow. At the end of it, you could sense someone waiting.
Your Master.
Your heart pounded.
You rose to your feet, towering and powerful, every inch of your transformed body made for one purpose.
To protect.
To obey.
To belong.
You stepped forward into the hallway, unable to stop the eager, needy smile spreading across your face.
You could not wait to be a good girl for them.