July 2025 Sketches

A feline duo, King is now the ultimate heavyweight and Shere Khan puts the "big" in big business. Enjoy!

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King should have known that it was a bad idea to take dieting advice from Ganryu. All he had wanted was a few tips on bulking, to keep the edge in the heavyweight division— but naturally, the boisterous sumo had been asked for an inch and given a mile, and King had gone from aiming to put on about ten pounds to putting on a full half ton. Granted, it's not like the sumo had been forcing food down his throat— he could have stopped any time he wanted to, it's only, the jaguar-headed wrestler didn't really want to stop. He had spent his whole professional career with careful training and holding back with considerable restraint, but this strange, binge-laden plan that had gone horribly awry led to King literally being in a league all his own: the world's first extreme heavyweight wrestler, outpacing the next biggest wrestler on the roster by as much as a small elephant.

From his built and toned musculature, the feline-headed wrestler was now a wobbling, waddling mountain of a man. His body was now dominated by an enormous churning cauldron of a belly, plush as a pillow, but immovable as a boulder. His once impressive musculature was presumably somewhere under all those multiple layers of blubber, mostly being kept in service of holding up his steadily growing weight, all of it thoroughly insulated. His barrel-like legs rolled off one another with each heavy stomp, his huge arms were swaddled in blubber, and his doughy chest shook with each movement he took, his wrestling gear ready to burst apart at the seams if he moved too fast or deliberately.

It was a mixed blessing, being in a league of his own— by default, King was the champion of his division because no other wrestler was within a quarter of a ton of matching his newfound, sprawling girth. On the other hand, it meant he was no longer fighting at all— which was only accelerating his growth, as he hadn't really taken any steps to moderating his diet. But then, on the other, fatter hand, if he did keep up the weight gain, by the time someone did enter his weight range, well— so long as King was still able to stay upright, all he would have to do was sit on them to end the fight. Either way, King saw himself coming out on top, literally crushing the competition.

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Khan Industries was the largest company in the world— it made Shere Khan's recent metamorphosis rather fitting, then. Khan tried his best to take any major shake-up in stride; clear-headed stoicism and careful application of logic had made him the powerhouse of the business world he was today, and any predator that could keep a cool head during the hunt would always walk out of the jungle with prey in hand. 

This one, however, this most recent challenge, it did leave him with a bevy of emotions that Shere Khan could not quite settle easily. There were too many unknown variables, too many open-ended questions about his next steps— and a very noticeable change he couldn't hide under anything he could think of. The tiger still had no idea how this happened, or who had done it— a Thembrian formula, perhaps? Some godforsaken, cursed artifact? One of his company's own projects that had developed something completely unpredicted? Whatever the cause, the result was the same.

Shere Khan had turned into an absolute freak of nature— he had heard of some weightlifting, circus strong-men strutting about in trunks, and called it bodybuilding. Now, it seemed, he had quite suddenly put them all to shame, as one way or another, he had worken up a behemoth of a tiger— bristling with an unimaginable, monumental mass of muscle. His chest was like a canyon, jutting out past his muzzle and close to swallowing up his chin and chiseled jaw. His arms were enormous pieces of heavy artillery, his stripes warped over his inflated biceps and anvil-thick triceps, held up by a sprawling mountain range of broad shoulder muscles. His abdomen was dense and diamond-cut, and his pillar-like legs rippled with the slightest flex, thick, sculpted, round glutes, tensing the only scant few garments left clinging to his frame.

The tiger's mind raced as he raked fingers over his own massive body— the sheer impressive size belied an unprecedented amount of power and strength. Shere Khan's mind raced at the possibilities— snapping steel girders may not help his bottom line directly, but he had always considered himself a creative problem solver. If he was now mighty enough to move mountains, what other venues out there were his for conquest? Of course, first of all, he had to figure out who, exactly, had done this to him an by what means— he hadn't quite settled on what he would do with them. Strangle them with his bare hands? Maybe. Thank them for this wonderful new opportunity? Perhaps. Either way, he would be handing them a bill— when he had suddenly grown so magnificently large, it had meant the demise of a very expensive suit.