Spyro wins his bet, but it looks like it's going to cost Moneybags a literal ton of money to belly up, now that the dragon's gained another massive victory.
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"Hah… hoo… A-alright, Sparx… h-how many… hrph… how many lambshanks was that?" Spyro groaned.
The dragonfly buzzed curtly in his ear.
"A hundred and thirty eight, huh? That's… hoo… okay. Six lambshanks left. Would you mind? I… I don't know if I can move my arms right now."
Sparx began another rant, but Spyro listlessly waved a few digits. "Ahh! Look, Sparx, this is the last thing on the list, a-and then… we just gotta… gotta figure a way home. Save the lectures for when we get back, okay?"
The dragonfly flittered down to the last six cuts of meat, and Sparx took a few seconds to lift it up to Spyro's open and waiting maw.
"O-one hundred and thirty nine…" he grunted, thinking back through the whirlwind tour he had taken and the mountains of food he had devoured. "Mmph— How did Magnus get through all this and not end up a mountain?"
He thought back to the breakfast buffet at Aquaria Towers— that had been a particularly good meal. He wasn't quite sure if he had to sample every dish, but he wasn't going to let Moneybags have the satisfaction of catching him out on a technicality. But after one particularly huge omelette, he officially lost his utility belt; even the strongest cured leather couldn't stand up to his yellow-scaled, overstuffed boulder of a gut.
"Hundred and forty…" Spyro gulped down another mouth full of meat, exposed to the tantalizing taste. The biggest taste he had to contend with was the supreme amount of spice that had somehow been cooked into the Molten Crater Hot Pot— he was belching fire for a week, which only just managed to help the hot air balloon keep aloft, even as his hefty folds of fat were starting to overflow the basket.
"Hundred and forty one…"
He barely knew if he could walk anymore, but he remembered exactly where he had lost the ability to fly, not just because of the obscene amount of weight he had managed to pack on, but the limbs of his wings were even packed with fat, making the flapping of his wings a wobbly, anemic exercise in pointlessness, only good for fanning the folds of back fat when he got too hot.
"Hundred and… oof… forty two…"
The last steps he remembered taking was two days ago, when he had endured the last massive dessert on the list— the obscenely decadent Knickerbocker Glory that was a specialty of the Dream Weavers, a dessert of twelve layers of ice cream, cake, fruit, and chocolate, all served up in a crystal bowl the size of a cauldron. It was supposed to be a dish for a whole feast, but when Spyro licked the last of the bowl clean, his swollen, overstuffed belly had grown so huge, when he laid on his belly, scales strained and his entire body cooled from the vast amount of ice cream he had engorged himself with, his feet were left up in the air. And when he was rolled back onto his bloated rear, his feet weren't just cut off from his line of sight, they were smothered entirely by a heavy blanket of dragon blubber. Lateef himself had to give him a special enchantment to float Spyro on a cloud to carry him off to Twilight Harbor, as the hot air balloon had long since been out of commission.
"Hundred forty three… hrmph…" Spyro paused, listlessly flailing his flabby arm to try to thump his vast, pillowy chest— and then he let out a belch loud and forceful enough to rattle the windows around him. "Guh! Hundred… forty… four. Hah— hah!"
Spyro lifted his arms in triumph, raising up a tide of extra chins, round, flabby cheeks, and folds of fat reamed around his arms, nearly overwhelming his snout. "I did it! That was it, last item on the list!"
The dragon only had Sparx to give a heavily sarcastic congratulations at his monumental task. He gave Spyro a snippy little buzz to remind him he still had to make it home— and he had no idea where they were going to find anything to haul him home, save for maybe a tanker. The dragon was a whale-sized mass of fat and lard, scales strained to contain every single opulently overfed pound. His enormous, sprawling continent of a belly was piled on in multiple thick, hefty folds of stretched out yellow scales, spreading out several feet ahead of him and spreading out listlessly in every direction. His chest, each blubbery breast roughly the size of a mattress and pliable as dough, drooped over the sides of his mammoth gut, while his purple scales were bunched up over love handles thick as tires, feeding into thighs so absurdly plump and round as kegs, he would have to shave off the weight of multiple full-grown elder dragons just to be able to get them moving again. The pair of boulder-sized cheeks that made up his titanic rear was starting to swallow up his fat tail, pressed down by the multiple folds of fat that made his back look like a half-melted wedding cake.
Sparx continued to buzz irritably in Spyro's ear. How were they possibly going to haul multiple thousands of pounds of fat back to the Artisan's Castle in time?
"Nyeh! Relax, Sparx! I-I'm— Urph— a problem solver, aren't I? Look… if we can just get a few extra balloons, we'll be good…"
The dragonfly redoubled his efforts to scold and lecture Spyro, but the dragon rolled his neck, lost somewhere between the rings of extra chins to give him a look. "Listen, you're forgetting the bet, right? Moneybags said he'd pay for all the upgrades to my balloon, right? This is a whopper of an upgrade— just go get the balloons we need, and credit it to Moneybags, right?"
Sparx stopped his nagging buzzing, and paused, hovering in the air in thought.
"Eh, see?" Spyro nodded, his jaw dipping into his double chin. "I've still got it— we can stick him with the bill, and hey—" He gestured to his enormous leviathan of a body, practically filling up the room. "We're gonna be costing him a fortune at this point, aren't we?"
A few hours later, Twilight Harbor, and every realm between there and the Artisan's Castle included, was treated to a strange sight. It was the single oddest aircraft anyone had ever seen; no one had seen a blimp quite like this before. A purple and yellow mass, inflated into an odd, blubbery shape that drooped in oddly round folds, surrounded by four other balloons, limping across the sky. Very few people realized they were looking at one of the most famous dragons across the realms, overblown into a morbidly obese, overstuffed parody of himself.
Sparx buzzed in Spyro's ear out of concern. The secured ropes that were keeping him aloft were cutting deep into his soft, doughy flesh, but Spyro waved him off.
"Nah, nah, I don't feel a thing, Sparx. I'm ridiculously insulated from anything— you could hit me with a battering ram and I don't think I'd even notice. Heh! No, I have no idea what I'm going to do when we get back… D'ya think we could talk Gavin into delivering, though? I'd kill to get my hands on one of his Grande Chocolate-Caramel Frappucino's right about now. I want something to drink when I see the look on Moneybags' face— how much do you think an industrial-sized fridge would cost to put on a hot air balloon?"