◈ Chapter 106:

Rain was no stranger to eating a lot. He’d certainly had more than his fair share in the dungeon, in Lynthia, and in the woods coming to the Orc camp. He’d devoured countless numbers of animals, monsters, and levelers, consuming them and growing bigger, stronger, more powerful.

 

But the Orc clan itself was another beast entirely. Not only were Orcs levelers, what he grew the most from, but they were also physically larger than most levelers, seven-foot tall, broad, and muscular beyond belief.

 

And that wasn’t even mentioning their numbers, hundreds and hundreds of them. 

 

The arena had started out as a wide sandy circle surrounded by crude wooden plank stadium stands. Then it had been cratered, the sandy surface dipping down into the earth in a huge sloping bowl shape under the impact of a Skill empowered anvil hammer. And now that bowl had been filled, filled in with the remains of the clan, the wide bowl a lake of bodies, a testament to the hubris of the levelers, the result of their greedy covetous desire to level up by killing Rain, to kill yet another monster.

 

Rain scarfed an arm down and followed it up with a leg, his motions becoming a little weary. Not that he minded, it was good to finally sate that painful burning fire of a hunger that had been grating on him at every moment since they had left Lynthia. It was just… eating the same thing over and over became just a little repetitive, okay, not just a little, very very repetitive. 

 

Still, that wasn’t going to stop him from reaching the end of this monster of a feast in one go, and for one simple reason: He hadn't taken a break, all the growth, all the strength and power gained was built up and waiting, waiting to flood his body in one immense surge.

 

The metaphorical damn holding all that growth back was straining at the seams, what felt like an entire ocean sat behind the miles high damn walls, vast quantities of backed up growth just waiting to flood his body.

 

Thinking of what was to come urged him on, pushing him, anticipation making his motions faster, more rushed, excited, reaching out and hauling Orc bodies toward his maw to rip and tear, practically drinking them down, his floating shadow paws pushing more toward him even as he ate.

 

He sat at the centre of the sandy pit. What had once been a lake of Orc bodies was now a fraction of that, hundreds of Orcs swallowed and eaten, the great mass draining into a single point, a black hole, Rain’s maw. Everything the Orcs were, their strength, their power, all going into him, being devoured, practically inhaled, the level of the lake lowering as the ravenous monster gorged on Orc after Orc, swallowing entire limbs in a single bite, more and more and more, hunger only rising as it was awoken to just how much there was to subsume.

 

The monster was a predator without limit, taking everything that was the Orcs and making it his own, dominant and growing, unstoppable, their failing making him stronger, larger, more powerful. 

 

He tore through a dozen Orcs in minutes, powerful jaws snapping through flesh and bone as though it were jelly, cutting and gulping down Orc after Orc, what were they but Prey? More to be eaten, his to devour and grow bigger from. 

 

The bottom of the pit was starting to become sparse now, the ground once carpeted with ragged bodies now only scattered with them, the blood-soaked sand beneath revealed. A pair of shadowy paws pushed the remaining bodies nearer, shoving them closer to Rain who sat at the absolute centre of the pit shovelling every Orc he could reach into his mouth as quickly as he could manage, voracious, his eyes alight with ravenous hunger.

 

He couldn't say exactly how many he’d eaten, not all the bodies had been in one piece, but if he had to guess, maybe as many as five hundred of the huge bodied Orcs had gone under his teeth. It was an unbelievable amount, an entire clan of Orcs eaten, but somehow, even this wasn’t enough, and his furious devourment of the mob that had tried to murder him ended with a stutter as he opened his mouth to bite down on the next limb and found there was nothing there to bite down on. 

 

He blinked and looked around, searching frantically for another Orc to eat. 

 

There were none. The great sloping pit and the hundreds of Orcs had been eaten in their entirety, only a blood soaked empty bowl left behind. Truly a terrifying thing for a random wanderer to stumble upon, imagination running wild at what it was that could have created such a bloody pit and the mysteriously empty camp surrounding it.

 

His shadow paws floated patiently nearby, waiting for instruction having run out of things to do. He lifted a paw about to call them back when he felt it.

 

The damn was breaking.

 

That immense amount of built up growth from eating perhaps five hundred Orcs in one sitting forcing its way through, forcing its way into his body. He didn't have a choice, with nothing left to eat he had no way to hold it back. The damn held for a fraction of a millisecond more and then then it was instantly obliterated as the miles tall ocean of growth exploded into him. 

 

He collapsed to the ground and writhed, legs shooting out and digging furrows in the sand as his back arched, paws grasping as a desperately pained groan slipped free, eyes rolling up. 

 

The sounds of bones creaking and groaning filled the air, lengthening and thickening, grinding against each other, muscles tearing and reforming in a constant deluge of motion happening uncountable times a second as their mass swelled outward, becoming denser, stronger, his flesh stretching over his swelling form, organs massing, blood multiplying, his feet inching across the sand as he grew taller, claws lengthening, becoming sharp with fresh growth, paws becoming broader as paw pads enlarged, teeth becoming heavier, jaws becoming more powerful, his entire body shuddered as fresh waves of growth rolled over him.

 

Safe to say Waiting this long might have been a mistake. He felt like he was being torn apart from the inside out, like a morning stretch that had gone too far and disastrously twisted into a cramp, all he could do was hold on for dear life and ride it out. 

 

He grew, putting on more and more mass and height and just when he thought he was going to pass out from the strain it ended and he slumped bonelessly, lying limp, just struggling to get out basic ragged panted breaths.

 

“That...” he whisper groaned. “That was... a lot.”

 

After a few minutes of gathering his scattered senses he started to move, placing one large paw beneath and bit by bit heaving himself up onto all fours, then shakily leveraging a foot beneath and rising, up and up. It wasn’t hard to recognise he had grown far more than at any other time since he’d passed eight foot, which was all the more impressive as he knew he needed to eat so much more to gain the height he had in the past

 

Eating hundreds of Orcs would do that he supposed. He held up his paws and rolled his digits. His paws had grown significantly in size. Big. Big enough to easily enclose heads.

 

His gaze moved to the ground and tried to make a rough estimate of how much he had grown. He had been eight foot eight and a bit. He judged his new current height at somewhere around nine foot five, a staggering increase of nine inches, which due to the square cube law was an insane amount of mass.

 

His presence had been large in the arena space before, now he was a purely dominating presence, a great black wolf monster with a massive flowing mane, a barbaric beast, completely unavoidable, something that grabbed and held all eyes… and fears.

 

The sound of the last of a drink being slurped through a straw broke the silence and he turned to find Opal perched on a chair at the edge of the pit. A parasol had been crudely tied to its side to keep out the sun and she held some kind of fruit drink in one hand.

 

She finished the dregs as she looked over Rain, studying, then nodded approvingly. 

 

“Not bad, not bad, grew a lot. Mm, more than a lot.”

 

Rain made his way up, climbing from the pit and looming over her. She bit her lip as the chair and parasol fell under his shadow.

 

He narrowed his eyes at her, suspicious. The goblin girl looked decidedly less bloody than when he had last seen her.

 

“Did you… wash? You look... clean...”

 

“...”

 

“...”

 

“There was some water okay! and I slipped, and then I fell out of my clothes, and landed on some soaps and then slid across the soaps and then landed in the nasty water. It happened in moments, there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop it, it was very traumatic for a preggers Gobbo like me.”

 

Rain raised an eyebrow, “So you evolved into a Goblin who likes baths?”

 

Opal spluttered “No! No! I was mercilessly dragged into it by that ruthless cackling dictator of a sheep! She held me down and drowned me clean!”

 

“I thought you fell in? Which one is it?”

 

Opal glared up at him, clearly annoyed that Rain wasn’t being distracted with her feeble explanations.

 

“I…”

 

“Yes?”

 

“I… cleaned, okay!” The goblin girl shuddered as though she had just spoken something utterly disturbing on every level.

 

“You cleaned, on your own, by your own decision?”

 

The goblin girl looked stricken, as though not quite believing it herself.

 

“I’m- I’m-”

 

“You’re learning. A lifetime of thinking one way doesn't change easily. You can agree now that being clean and not completely covered in filth is probably a good thing right?”

 

“I....yeah, it’s kinda nice... I guess.”

 

“Great.” Rain crouched down beside the goblin girl, suddenly dead serious, “Now tell me where you got a fucking bath so I can have one too.” he gravelled, eyes flashing.

 

“Pshh, it was fluff butts idea, she stumbled across it in the big tent,” said Opal tossing her finished drink on the bloody sand and climbing from her chair.

 

She paused as she stood next to Rain, looking up at his new greater height and size. A little shiver ran through her body as she took it in.

 

“Bath Opal? I neeeed a bath.”

 

“Uhh, r-right.”

 

She ran ahead and Rain followed, his new longer legs eating up the ground with ease. 

 

They left the arena and made their way through the now deserted camp. The place was almost eerie, a toppled barrel or table here and there, someone’s lunch left out half finished, hunks of monster meat left skewered over fires slowly turning to charcoal. It was like the entire clan of boisterous violent Orcs had just up and vanished, disappeared into thin air. 

 

Which wasn’t far from the truth.

 

As they passed through a red scaled Kobold rushed by, piles of gold held to his chest, necklaces hanging from his neck and wrists, a crown and two tiaras balanced on his head. In moments he was gone, disappeared between the tents.

 

“The place is completely deserted? No one has attacked Red?”

 

“There were a few dumb levelers outside the arena at the start, but they either ran away when they realised things were going badly, like the annoying merchant Orc, or they jumped into the arena too... didn't work out so well for the ones who did that.”

 

It did slightly bother Rain that he had just eaten pretty much an entire clan of Orcs, that sounded insane to his past human self, hell, it sounded insane to his monster self. But it bothered him more that there was still a small hungry part of himself that liked it and wanted more... More.

 

It wasn’t long before they arrived at their destination, a large tent amongst the others, bigger than any other tent around by some way, nearly two storeys tall it was more of a building in of itself than just a tent. 

 

“Fluffbutt said it’s that one hunter Orc’s tent, Tamriel. I guess she was pretty important huh?”

 

Opal pulled aside the main flap and slipped inside.