At All Costs

(CW: Inflation, fantasy violence, ambiguous perma-popping)

Commission for CynicalGage

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Straining belts, tearing cloth, and the whine of hot air building to a climax within a vessel that lacked the elasticity to contain it. These were the sounds of an overwhelming victory. A kitsune ballooned out of his shinobi gear, rendered naked and defeated, and Tenkai smiled confidently that he had surpassed yet another expectation set for him by his mentors. He briefly considered drawing his short blade and using it to burst the grey furred balloon bobbing indignantly in front of him, but he remembered the last time he turned a member of the clan into confetti, and the scolding he received about wasting resources. It took a lot of manpower to conduct a reformation ritual, and above all, it was expensive. Money was more precious than blood in a mercenary clan.

Tenkai released the grip of his sheathed sword and made a countersign to release the pressurized grip his magic held over his opponent. Their face bulged and from their mouth spewed a geyser of hot wind, sending them flying across the training yard while diminishing in size, more like a child’s toy balloon than a proud shinobi. Tenkai took satisfaction in humiliating his opponents with his prodigious talent, especially when they had been so confident in their own abilities, like the flat kitsune now laying in the corner had been.

“Tenkai,” an elder kitsune, eight tailed and enormous, approached Tenkai from the edge of the sparring ring.

Like the rest of the elders, those who survived the life of a ninja to old age were few, he was enormously fat and cast a long shadow over the young prodigy. His eight tails marked him as somewhere older than eight hundred, but younger than nine. Tenkai, on the other hand, had yet to pass a hundred and sported a single tail. That fact made his apparent ability to master the clan’s techniques even more impressive. He let it get to his head, just a little, that much he’d admit.

Tenkai immediately plunged to his knees and knelt in supplication to his superior. “Yes, elder, what brings you this far from the temple? If you had need of me, you only had to send a message.”

The elder laughed, and stroked his long white chin fur. “Despite our apparent sloth and great size, Tenkai, our clan prides itself on its outmatched agility. Strength in motion, that is our creed. If I couldn’t handle a few hundred steps to bring one of our most prominent members his next mission, then, I might as well fling myself into the abyss of the gulfs that ring our mountains.”

“You... flatter me, elder, what is my mission?” Tenkai retained his composure as best he could, but he could feel the pressure exerted by the old fox. He could vanquish him in an instant. And despite his jolly nature, the elders of the clan had a reputation for being capricious and cruel. Tenkai supposed he had no right to complain about that, not after he had humiliated his opponent by inflating him and nearly bursting him like a cheap balloon for no reason other than his own amusement. “I will ensure it is done according to the will of the clan, at all costs.”

Hopping from branch to branch, Tenkai exhibited the same near weightlessness as his betters when in motion. His wide, pendulous belly shook whenever he delicately impacted a branch, suspending his weight using the mystic arts he had been educated in since birth. He had been moving non-stop for hours now, but his calorie dense body converted subtle amounts of fat from non-essential parts of his body, into sheer energy. Tenkai would treat himself to an indulgent meal with the money he earned from the mission to replenish any lost girth, he envisioned a pot of noodles and broth as big as his waistline, steaming hot and savoury, wafting the delicate blend of spices in invitation.

The eight tailed fox had promised Tenkai an eye-widening sum of gold. All he had to do was eliminate a small town, a holding of a rival clan for hire of ninjas and specialists. The Crimson Toad clan were, as expected of their name, a mercenary clan made up entirely of red toads. Their speciality was in poison, something Tenkai’s clan excelled in, but not to the degree of their croaking rivals.

He would have to be careful to avoid their toxins.

Tenkai cleared the last line of trees before the encampment, and perched in a thick, leafy position where he took a scroll in one hand and unfurled it. He pricked his thumb with his incisor, and smeared a bloody symbol on to the parchment. The paper grew hot, and shined a bright blue light into Tenkai’s eyes. What used to be a blank clearing was now a busy, smoke filled village swarming with the Crimson Toad clan. With their illusion dispelled, Tenkai disposed of the scroll with a gout of fire from his throat using the gourd of alcohol on his hip as an igniter, then proceeded to skirt the village exterior, like a great fat shadow.

“Did you hear?” One toad armed with a spiked iron club said to his peer. He was poised at the bottom of a set of stairs that cut into a hillside, leading through a series of red gates that presumably terminated at a shrine of some kind. “Five of our men were cut down last month, apparently by one of those stinking foxes.”

A second toad replied. He was a darker red than the club wielder, and less muscular. He wielded a sharp pair of hand scythes connected by a thin chain meant for strangling his opponents. Tenkai briefly wondered if it would be strong enough for a neck as thick as his, or anyone from the mountainous fox clan. “Eh, you give those reports more credit than they’re due. Everyone knows the elders inflate the number of people who went on the mission to make it sound more ominous, keeps us on our toes. They’re always going on about not underestimating our opponents, yada yada.”

Tenkai dashed from the shadow of an inn to a bush near the stairs. When neither guard turned to him, he presumed it was safe to keep moving. He made a series of complex signs with his hands, and filled himself with a gust of hot air to further lighten his step. He bounced silently from the foliage, ascending the hill to the shrine. If he was going to destroy the town, then he might as well strike at their most precious treasure and work his way out from there. Another series of bounces and light steps, and he cleared every gate. He landed softly and sauntered, perhaps too confidently, towards a little red lacquer shrine in the middle of a wide-open stone plaza.

“Too easy.”

“Was it?” Tenkai froze, the voice of the scythe wielding guard reached his ears seconds before one of his blades whipped past his cheek. Tenkai managed to move out of the way, acquiring only a surface level cut, that dyed a patch of his grey fur red. He turned and breathed in, his throat and tongue still coated with the incendiary liquor from earlier. Amplified by the hot air in his gut, Tenkai expelled a blast of flame that streaked towards his target and set him ablaze. The toad’s natural oils contributing to the conflagration.

While his friend was rolling on the floor, desperately trying to extinguish the fire consuming him, the club wielder rushed at Tenkai. He was as tall as the fox, and as wide, albeit with muscle and sheer bodily width rather than fat and air. He brought his club down in a diagonal arc, attempting to crack the heavy iron into skull or shoulder bone. Tenkai evaded deftly, narrowly avoiding a shattering wound, and swiped at the toad’s shoulder. His claws raked the slimy flesh, and distributed the poison that he had learned to secrete through them. In seconds, the toad’s throat expanded to the size of a hot air balloon, and the rest of his body followed its example at separate times. He blew up like an asymmetrical pile of balloons, until he rounded out into an almost perfect sphere with a bulging, panicked expression.

Tenkai grabbed hold of the club the inflated toad had dropped when he ascended. He grabbed it, and swung it into the creaking red orb. It didn’t puncture him, his hide was too thick, but it did send him hurtling towards his ignited friend. And with the combination of a dangerously overblown toad filled with flammable poison, coated in flammable oils, and his blazing peer, the two contributed to a brilliant scarlet explosion that reached the clouds. Tenkai was thrown back, but he had to marvel at the beauty of his handiwork. The fires, dyed by the frog’s oils, had blown a crater into the stairs around the topmost gate. Nothing but rubbery shards remained.

Tenkai was about to bring out the compacted mystical bomb he had planned to use as the focal point of the town’s destruction, when he stiffened with fear, and noticed the shadows congregating over him. He looked up to see over two dozen crimson toads, with differently coloured throats denoting their rank from initiate to grandmaster, all plummet to ground level from their kites. They ringed him in, weapons drawn, and poison swelling in their throats.

“You did well to dispatch two of our men,” a wizened toad with a bright fuchsia throat stepped forward, clapping his scarred hands. Just like the eight-tailed master from home, Tenkai could feel an invisible pressure from him. It threatened to crush him under its weight if he so much as made one false step. He looked at the blue metal sphere in his hand out of the corner of his eye, and considered his next move with the utmost care.

“They were weak,” Tenkai declared proudly. The toads didn’t budge, they weren’t as easy to incense as he had hoped. If they were easily angered he could incite them to charge and in that chaos, he might have a chance at escaping with most of his limbs intact. “Just like you, which is why I’m going to prove it, and wipe this town from your maps. You’ll have nothing but charred land when I’m through with you,” sweat beaded Tenkai’s forehead. He had one idea, one monumentally stupid, desperate idea that had a chance of working.

But for it to work, and for him to claim his reward, he would have to hope his clan quartermaster was in a generous mood.

“And what do you plan to do, you’re hopelessly outnumbered.” The elder toad laughed, raising his hand in preparation to give the signal that would end Tenkai’s career as a shinobi.

“I plan to take you all with me,” Tenkai swallowed the bomb. He clicked his incisors together, and swallowed the gout of fire that would normally be projected outwards at his target. The compacted mystical fire in the tiny blue sphere began to expand and unravel inside of him, his fat hanging belly tightening up like a massive balloon. His belt snapped as he reached the size of an enormous festival lantern, and the netting of his shinobi suit began pinging off like so many threads in a loom improperly stretched by a novice.

“He’s going to explode, run!” The elder toad was the first to begin running, realizing the threat a gigantic firebomb posed to a clan composed entirely of toads covered in natural, flammable oil.

Tenkai’s limbs swelled up like long, thick tubes painted to look like the limbs of a grey fox. His hands became spheres, with his clawed digits sinking into divots and becoming utterly immovable. Without the ability to make hand signs to concentrate his inner energies, he couldn’t do anything to expel or extinguish the fire welling up inside of him, even if he wanted to.

And for some reason he didn’t. He felt drunk, the heady warmth of too much alcohol on a summer evening. As he grew ever swollen from the azure immolation that was growing hungrier for its release, he felt an electric sensation sweep across his skin. The magical properties of the bomb had turned his textured fur into smooth rubber, he was as shiny as a precious jewel and still growing bigger, fatter, his soft cheeks hardening with superheated fumes. Like a pair of grapefruits, stuck to his maw.

He rose to the size and expanded to the width of a small temple, the farthest curves of his body pressing into tree branches and the sharpened corners of rooftops. They threatened to puncture him and release the fire, but that wouldn’t be necessary. Tenkai groaned, pleasured by the overwhelming erotic tension he experienced. With one little whimper of joy, he felt himself give way. The grey sphere looming over the Crimson Toad clan’s town stronghold exploded in an azure flash, and left nothing but smoulders in its wake.

Tenkai should have been preoccupied with praying that his clan would pay for a reformation ritual to bring him back from exploding, but instead, his last thought was on how good it felt to be so big, even if just for a moment.

He completed his mission at all costs.