Hero "Impy" (Patreon)

1

Ha, you fucking fools, you're all so damn naive. Typical stupid government lapdogs, following the rules and thinking that if someone answers questions correctly, smiles at the right moments, and says the word "duty" a couple of times when he's supposed to, he can be trusted with power capable of blowing up half a city block.

I followed the woman in the gray uniform, pretending to study the photographs of former teams hanging on the walls with great interest, while actually counting the doors. Three on the left, two on the right, then a glass passageway, a security checkpoint, and another corridor leading somewhere beyond the laboratory wing. There were cameras on the ceiling almost every thirty feet. Almost. Between the last two, there was a small blind spot near a fire equipment cabinet. Useful.

"Keep up, Mr. Smith," the woman said without even looking back.

"Sorry," I quickened my pace and put on that same apologetic smile I'd been practicing in the mirror for the past three weeks. "I just still can't believe I'm actually here."

She finally glanced at me over her shoulder and smiled a little. Exactly what they liked. An excited volunteer. A little scared. A little awestruck. And, of course, incredibly grateful to the government for the chance to risk his own ass for humanity. If that idiot knew how many times I'd changed my last name, passports, and cities before this, she wouldn't have let me anywhere near the entrance.

Finally, we entered a laboratory with a capsule in the middle of the room. A huge glass monstrosity in the middle of the place, surrounded by cables, equipment racks, and people in white coats. I couldn't help whistling. Not for show, I was genuinely impressed this time. In the pictures online, the device had looked a lot smaller. In person, it resembled some hybrid of a medical scanner and a coffin for an especially rich dead guy.

"Is that it?" I asked, moving closer.

"The initiation chamber, yes," the woman said, stopping beside me. "In a few minutes, you'll be placed inside and administered exogen. The subsequent reaction varies from person to person. You did read the documents, didn't you?"

Of course I had. One hundred and twenty-seven pages of fine print about how I might grow scales, swell to ten feet tall, turn into a walking power plant, or, like that poor bastard a few years ago, end up as a sentient octopus. I'd signed every page without batting an eye. Because amid all that bullshit was the important part: you kept your powers. Forever. Even if I ran away. Or rather, when I ran away.

2

"Of course," I answered, placing my palm against the capsule's cold glass. "I know what I'm getting into."

"Then take off your clothes and change," she said, pointing to a privacy screen. "Leave all your personal belongings in the locker. Give me the key."

"Even my underwear?" I asked with a smile.

"Even your underwear, Mr. Smith. Fabric can react with exogen and cause unpleasant side effects. Believe me, you don't want to know about them."

"So you're not going to help me?" I said, raising an eyebrow and flashing my trademark half-smile as I looked straight at this, let's be honest, pretty attractive woman.

She didn't answer, just gave a brief chuckle, and I made a mental note that while I was here pretending to be a "hero" after the procedure, I ought to make a move on her. I like girls with attitude.

After undressing and finally stepping out from behind the screen completely naked, the first thing I looked at wasn't the capsule, but her. Just on principle. She stood by the terminal with a tablet in her hand and, to her credit, didn't even raise an eyebrow.

"That's it?" I asked. "Not even going to rate me?"

"I see volunteers every day, Mr. Smith."

"Ouch. That actually hurt."

"Get into the capsule."

I smirked and climbed inside, managing along the way to spot two more cameras, an emergency door behind a glass partition, and a red manual release button on the rack to the right. Force of habit. You can play the hero all you want, but when you've spent twenty years making a living by spotting other people's mistakes before anyone else does, your brain keeps looking for exits, blind spots, and poorly locked doors all on its own.

"Arms at your sides," she said, stepping closer. "And try not to move."

"And if I get scared, can I hold your hand?"

This time she actually looked at me and smirked.

"After initiation, we'll see whether you still have hands."

…

The procedure itself, once the capsule closed, was a bit like an extremely expensive car wash, except I was the car. First there was hissing all around me, then it got cold inside, then an unpleasant shiver ran down my spine, as though someone had pressed a bag of ice against my back. White lights came on overhead, condensation crept across the glass, and a calm female voice sounded from the speaker:

"Mr. Smith, we're about to administer the substance. Try to relax."

"Love it when someone tells me to relax right before sticking some Martian shit into me."

3

Through the glass, I saw the same woman. She stood behind the terminal with her arms folded across her breasts and said something to the doctor beside her. I couldn't hear anything, but from the movement of his lips, it seemed to me he'd said something to her about me along the lines of something I definitely wouldn't like, so, without thinking twice, I gave them the middle finger.

She chuckled.

Oh yeah. I was definitely going to fuck that woman, she was obviously practically in love with me already, and when I came out of here with some fucking awesome power on top of that, resisting me would be completely pointless. I even imagined her dropping the icy bitch act and finding an excuse to stay late after her shift. Preferably somewhere without cameras.

A restraint clicked shut around my forearm, and it felt like someone had poured boiling water into my vein. I jerked, but the straps held me down. The heat instantly climbed higher, spread through my shoulder, chest, stomach, and down into my legs. My heart started hammering as if it had decided to be the first thing to escape the capsule.

"Fuck..." I clenched my teeth. "You couldn't have warned me it was going to feel like this?"

The speaker crackled briefly.

"The reaction is within normal parameters, Mr. Smith. Don't tense up."

"Oh, I'm the fucking picture of calm."

I wanted to look at the woman behind the glass again, but suddenly realized I had more important things to worry about. The heat gave way to a strange pressure somewhere deep inside my body, as though my muscles were contracting and relaxing at the same time, only without any pain. First in my stomach, then lower, then in my chest. I frowned and instinctively tried to move, but the straps tightened again.

Then suddenly my whole body jerked so hard that the back of my head hit the soft padding. It didn't hurt, but it was enough to make me stop acting like a hero. A spasm rolled through my legs, my feet cramped, my toes felt like they all curled up at once, and then the sensation became somehow wrong. Too short. Too tight. I tried to bend my knees and realized in surprise that the straps around my legs had suddenly gone loose.

"Hey," I turned my head toward the glass. "What the fuck is this?"

Nobody answered. The doctor was no longer looking at me, but at the readings, rapidly moving something onto the neighboring screen. The woman had stopped smiling too. And that was what I liked least of all. I lowered my eyes to my own body and at first couldn't even tell exactly what had changed. My rib cage seemed narrower, my stomach smaller, my arms shorter. My fingers... I blinked. Then again. There were three of them on each hand.

"No," I said in an entirely different tone. "No, no, no. What the fuck?"

Nobody reacted, and I realized I couldn't move.

4

And then it got worse. The pressure inside my body suddenly shifted downward, as though someone had grabbed everything down there in a fist, twisted it, and pulled it inside. I screamed, no longer giving a damn how I looked to anyone watching, jerked my entire body, and for the first time since the procedure began, I was genuinely terrified. My legs cramped again, only now I couldn't feel my feet at all: instead, there was something hard, narrow, and awkwardly pressing against the capsule's soft lining.

"Stop this fucking shit!" I roared, but my voice broke halfway through the sentence. It didn't go hoarse, didn't gradually climb in pitch, it simply ended with a thin, almost girlish shriek instead of my normal voice. I fell silent. Behind the glass, the doctor quickly said something to the others, and two lab assistants immediately moved toward the panel. The woman in gray even took a step closer. "Did... did you hear that?.." I asked more quietly, barely recognizing my own voice.

I looked down and felt everything inside me turn colder than any capsule could ever make it. My hips had become wider in relation to my suddenly narrowed waist, my legs were short and strangely fleshy, and where my familiar male equipment had definitely been just a minute ago, there was now nothing but a smooth line between my thighs. For several seconds, I just stared stupidly at the spot, as if my body might change its mind if I gave it enough time.

"No, fuck," I breathed. "Put it back. That thing, put it back right fucking now."

At that moment, something began pressing in three places at once: my forehead, my back, and my tailbone. The pressure quickly grew until it felt as though someone was slowly screwing blunt screws into my bones from the inside. I squeezed my eyes shut, hissed through clenched teeth, and then heard a nasty crunch right inside my head. The skin above my eyebrows stretched tight, something pushed out through my hair, and within seconds I could feel two small, hard things, like little bumps, which rapidly grew for several seconds. At the base of my spine, something jerked so hard that I arched my back as far as the straps would let me, and suddenly there was something underneath me that made lying flat uncomfortable.

"What now?!" I squealed, immediately getting pissed off at my own voice. "What the FUCK NOW?!"

The answer came as another movement somewhere behind my lower back. At first I thought a cable or strap had gotten underneath me, but the thing moved again, by itself. Goosebumps ran down my back. I tried to turn my hips and caught a glimpse of a thin dark tail nervously whipping against the capsule wall. At its very tip dangled a little heart-shaped tuft. And the worst part was that I could feel that tail as part of me.

5

"Are you fucking serious?.." For several seconds, I just stared at it. "Horns. Hooves. A tail. Are you turning me into a fucking devil?"

Behind the glass, the doctor finally raised his head from the monitor and quickly said something to the woman. She looked at the screen, then at me, and the expression on her face became completely different. Not frightened. More like that same professional curiosity people have when looking at a rare laboratory rat.

I thought it was over. And it was true. And at the same time, it wasn't.

The final blow to a reality that had already gone completely fucking insane was my skin. Right before my eyes, my familiar skin tone began to disappear, as though someone had changed the wrong setting on a screen: first a barely noticeable lilac tint appeared, then it grew richer until my entire body was an even shade of violet. At the same time, my scalp began to tingle unpleasantly, and my hair started growing downward so quickly that within seconds dark strands were lying across my shoulders, slipping beneath my back and tickling my sides, and right then an unpleasant ache started in my breasts.

I only had time to think 'oh no' before pressure appeared beneath my nipples, quickly turning into an entirely new sensation of weight. My breasts rose, rounded out, and finally stopped at a fairly modest but completely fucking unmistakable size. I stared at them, then carefully tugged with one three-fingered hand, testing the strap, and the two new mounds swayed ever so slightly with my body's movement.

"Have you people completely lost your fucking minds?!" I squeaked. "What the hell is this for?!"

At the same time, my eyes began to sting. I blinked several times in quick succession, and the world broke. The white lights were no longer simply white: thin colored halos appeared around them, I could suddenly make out fingerprints on the glass that I hadn't noticed before, and the people beyond it seemed to stand out much more sharply from their surroundings. I saw my reflection and froze. My pupils were no longer human. Staring back at me was a tiny violet horned girl with long dark hair, huge unfamiliar eyes, and lips that were visibly growing fuller until they became so plump that I instinctively ran the tip of my tongue along the lower one.

"Fuck..." I said, then fell silent again when I heard how sultry my voice sounded.

And then it all stopped. Just like that, all at once. No more pressure, no heat, no crunching, just heavy breathing, my pounding heart, and the feeling of my own body, which now took up a ridiculously small amount of space inside the capsule. I'd already opened my mouth to demand an explanation when my stomach suddenly cramped. Some kind of gnawing emptiness had appeared inside me.

6

Hunger. So sudden and fierce that my mouth instantly filled with saliva, and all my attention shifted on its own from my reflection to the people beyond the glass. And I immediately realized another really shitty thing: there was now something coming from those people that I'd never noticed before.

"Hey..." I frowned and swallowed again. "What the fuck is this now?"

And then...

Then everything was a blur, because my brain, stunned by that hunger, suddenly decided that everything else, the horns, hooves, missing dick, and even the prospect of remaining a four-foot-something violet freak forever, could wait a little. I could now almost physically sense the people beyond the glass. Not even by smell, but through some kind of warm presence that made my stomach twist even harder. Especially the man in the white coat, and I remember very clearly that at that moment I knew he hadn't come in over two weeks. The knowledge simply appeared in my head as an established fact, just as obvious as the fact that the woman in the gray uniform beside him was tired, and the lab assistant on the left didn't even want to think about sex because he'd spent the entire night fucking his girlfriend and now only wanted to get to bed and sleep.

And from eyewitness accounts and that damn security camera, whose footage they eventually showed me when I stubbornly refused to accept the truth about my "nature," I realized that I'd gone into what they later called "succubus frenzy," although "frenzy" wasn't quite the right word. I wasn't raging. I wasn't growling. I wasn't trying to kill anyone. I simply stopped thinking properly all at once and became fixated on one single thing: I fucking needed to satisfy that hunger. The recording clearly showed me lying there for a few more seconds, staring in a daze at the people behind the glass with my new eyes, then suddenly slowly turning my head toward that same doctor. My pupils dilated, my tail stopped nervously whipping against the capsule and went still, and my plump lips parted of their own accord. The most humiliating part was that I didn't look like a dangerous creature. More like a little violet idiot who'd just been shown some food.

So... half an hour later, I was already kneeling in front of that very doctor, both three-fingered hands wrapped around the base of his cock, sucking him with such pleasure that afterward I hated that recording.

My hooves slipped awkwardly apart on the cold laboratory floor, my tail curved of its own accord and trembled faintly, and my small breasts bounced in time with every movement of my head. My plump lips gripped his shaft tightly, almost all the way to the base. Saliva ran down my chin, dripped onto the violet skin of my breasts, and I could feel it with each of my new nipples.

In a word... I'm fucked.

7

…

Three months later.

…

Impy. They gave me the name "Impy." Short for "imp"! If I were the creative genius who came up with that bullshit, I would have ended my creative career right then and there.

But I wasn't in his place, I was on my knees in a storage closet behind an electrical panel, with the duty officer's cock in my mouth, and at that moment I was a lot less concerned about anyone's creative career than I was about getting him to finally come while I could already hear people stomping down the hallway looking for me.

I'd tucked my hooves underneath me so they wouldn't clatter. My issued tank top had ridden up, my small breasts bounced freely, and my nipples kept catching on the seam every time I took him deeper. My tail with its heart-shaped tuft had wrapped itself around his ankle and was trembling faintly. My plump lips gripped his shaft tightly, saliva ran down my chin onto my violet skin, and between my widely spread thighs it was wet and empty, and every movement of my tongue made that emptiness ache so much that I found myself leaning forward.

"Impy!" someone shouted from outside, very close now. "Where are you?!"

"My lunch" flinched and tried to pull out. Cursing myself and the fact that I'd once again given in to my body's provocation, I dug my three-fingered hands into his thighs and didn't let go: my stomach had cramped right at that moment, warmth was already building toward the tip, and everything I was feeling was written all over my fucking face.

"Fuck," he breathed, placing his hands on top of my little horns. "They're right here. Get off."

I just moaned and took him all the way to the base, realizing far too late what I was doing. Those damn horns... I'd asked them so many times not to touch them, and they still always went for them.

Heavy boots stomped past our door, then someone peeked into the kitchen.

"She's not here?"

"She was here about ten minutes ago. Carrying plates around."

"Then where the hell has that little slut disappeared to again? The Delta team is coming back in five minutes, we've got work to do."

I looked up at Mark standing in front of me, finally regaining a little self-control. The huge bastard from the second squad was looking down and laughing his ass off without making a sound, perfectly aware that I couldn't answer right now and knowing my entire history and who I'd been.

I gave him the middle finger, and the gesture looked pathetic: a three-fingered hand, a short finger, saliva on my knuckles.

Mark bit his lip to keep from bursting out laughing and, completely deadpan, held up two fingers in return. What a fucker. I narrowed my eyes and silently promised myself that one day I'd find a way to ruin his life specifically, preferably in a costly, long-lasting way with documented proof. Then my stomach cramped again, and all my grand plans for revenge had to be postponed for another twenty seconds.

"Impy!" someone roared from almost right outside the door. "I'm calling you for the last time!"

8

I sped up, pressing my tongue against his shaft, and Mark immediately stopped laughing. His hand tightened around my little horns, his hips jerked toward me, and I felt that familiar tremor run through his cock, the one that now filled me with such anticipation that for literally a moment I ceased to exist. No modern drug could compare to it. I swallowed without pulling away, my plump lips holding his shaft tightly, and every swallow went down as a hot weight, until it was completely wet and empty between my widely spread thighs, and that emptiness gave a sweet little clench of its own beneath my hiked-up skirt.

Mark exhaled through his teeth and held me by the horns so I wouldn't jerk away.

"There, there, little one," he whispered. "Stop slurping. They're right outside the door."

I still made sure to get the last drops, not giving a damn about his words at that moment, and only then pulled away. A strand of saliva stretched from my lower lip to the tip of his cock, my tank top clung to my small breasts, my nipples stuck out through the fabric, and I could feel it with every movement as I wiped my chin with the back of my three-fingered hand.

"Impy, I'm about to kick this door down!" someone roared outside.

"One second," I squeaked in my new voice and grimaced at the sound of it. "I dropped a plate."

God, how I hate myself now every single time my mind comes back and I realize that this "snack" wasn't even necessary: I hadn't even started getting properly hungry yet, Mark had simply walked past the kitchen, adjusted his fly, and my body had decided all on its own that twenty minutes could be spent like this.

I somehow managed to pull my skirt straight. The fabric immediately stuck between my thighs, where everything was still wet and empty, and with every step on my hooves the seam rubbed so much that I wanted to get down on my knees again, this time for no useful reason at all. My tank top clung to my small breasts, my nipples showed through the thin fabric, my tail with its heart-shaped tuft refused to stay still and kept trying to poke out from under my hem. Mark was already zipping himself up, flushed and satisfied, and looking down at me as though I'd just brought him coffee.

"Wipe your lips," he whispered. "You've got stuff all over your chin."

"Wipe them yourself," I squeaked, running the back of my three-fingered hand over my plump lips. The gesture was pathetic. "And stop grinning. The last thing I need is someone finding out. I'm going out first."

I walked quietly, especially considering my hooves, up to the door, pressed my ear against the cold metal, and listened. Outside, someone was irritably tapping a boot against the floor. Judging by the voice, it was Kira, the head of housekeeping and, as it happened, the person who'd learned to find me in the most unexpected places over the last three months. I quickly smoothed my hair, wiped my mouth one more time, and turned to Mark.

9

"Stay here for a minute. And if you come out right after me, I'll fucking kill you." He gave a silent chuckle and pointed at my tail.

I looked down. The little heart at the end was sticking out from under my skirt and twitching happily.

"Fuck," I hissed, caught it, and shoved it back under the fabric.

I opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through sideways and almost immediately rammed my horns into Kira's stomach. At four feet seven inches tall, most conversations now started with me staring somewhere around people's breasts while they looked down at me, and after three months I was just as fucking sick of that as I was of the hooves.

Kira folded her arms across her breasts and looked first at me, then at the storage closet, then back at me.

"Am I better off not going in there?"

"Better not go in..." I replied, turning away and feeling my violet cheeks flush. But in that same instant, remembering that I wasn't some slut or fag, but a normal man trapped in this shitty body, I looked up at her and added much more confidently, "Actually, go right ahead, I don't give a fuck!"

Kira smirked, glanced at the door again, and nodded with perfect calm.

"Well, if you don't give a fuck, then tell Mark he left his radio on the kitchen table."

I froze. It went suspiciously quiet behind the door too.

"What Mark?"

"The one who walked past me toward the kitchen twenty minutes ago and then, for some reason, disappeared at exactly the same time you did." Kira bent a little lower to look me straight in the eyes. "Impy, I couldn't care less what you feed on or where. But in four minutes, twelve guys from Delta are going to pile in here after spending two days out in the field. They want to eat, shower, and get drunk, in that order. And the tables still aren't set."

"I'm not a waitress," I snapped, automatically tugging at my skirt and getting even angrier at how natural that gesture had already become. "I'm actually a volunteer in the hero program."

Kira spent several seconds silently looking at my little horns, then at the heart-shaped tip of my tail sticking out from under my skirt, which I hadn't noticed again, and then shifted her gaze to the storage closet door.

"Of course. A hero. And now the hero picks up a tray and gets to work."

Blushing despite myself and exhaling heavily through my nose, I stuffed the heart-shaped tip of my tail back under my skirt and went to get a tray, because arguing with Kira while my nipples were sticking out and the fabric between my thighs was wet was even more humiliating than silently hauling plates around.

"Tray's on the right, hero."

"I can see it."

"Then why are you going left?"

10

I stopped, looked at the corridor door, then at the tray by the wall, and silently turned around. Kira snorted behind my back.

That, basically, was what my glorious career after initiation looked like. And yet for the first few days, I'd still been seriously convinced that there had simply been some unfortunate mix-up in the assignment process. Okay, so I was four feet seven inches tall. Okay, so I had hooves. Okay, three fingers. Okay, horns, a tail, and that whole fucking bargain-bin fantasy demon-girl package. But surely there was some power hidden somewhere inside me that made putting up with all this worthwhile. Teleportation. Mind control. Magic. At least fireballs shooting out of my ass, I'd have settled even for that.

The scientists had been hopeful too. They ran tests on me for two weeks until they finally established that my magnificent set of superpowers consisted of increased flexibility, pretty good night vision, the ability to somehow sense the sexual state of nearby people, and a very specific way of replenishing my energy. For some reason, they recorded the last one as "exogen-induced alternative metabolism," because scientists just love inventing long names for things that a normal person can describe in two words.

But they did give me a chance.

One.

And I really wish I'd stayed at the base that day.

My first and last combat assignment took place twenty-three days after initiation. They even issued me a uniform: a short black jacket, pants that had to be altered to accommodate my hooves and tail, a tactical vest, and a radio almost as big as my forearm. They didn't give me a weapon.

We were sent on what they told me was a routine arrest. Some asshole had learned to grow bone plates out of his own body after initiation, decided he was above the law now, and barricaded himself inside an old shopping mall with three other gifted dickheads just like him. Nothing special: one squad enters through the main entrance, the second blocks off the parking lot, and I stay at the back with two others to watch the service exit. They even specifically told me not to get involved in the fighting. Naturally, I took that as a personal insult.

But the mission actually started going to shit while we were still in the van, before we even reached the target. Delta sat on the benches in full gear, two days without showers or women, and the feeling coming off them was so intense that I spent the whole ride squeezing my thighs together just to keep my short pants from rubbing the emptiness between my legs even more. My jacket was short, my breasts bounced under it with every bump, the radio on my belt kept hitting my thigh, and there was nowhere to put my tail, so its heart-shaped tuft kept getting under Gor's knee.

My colleagues didn't even suspect what was going through my head at that moment. And it was a complete fucking nightmare in there. In my imagination, I'd already fucked every last one of them in every possible position, while at the same time hating myself for those thoughts and trying to concentrate on the mission.

11

The complete disaster came when the rear doors of the van opened and Gor was the first to jump out.

Until then, I'd somehow managed to hold myself together. I'd sat there with my teeth clenched, staring at the floor and repeating the operation plan, channel numbers, exit locations, anything at all to keep from thinking about the fact that I could sense every man in that fucking box. But all it took was for Gor to walk past me and slap me on the shoulder:

"Come on, little one. You're up."

And for some reason, my body decided the words "you're up" meant something completely different.

I lunged straight for his fly in the open doorway of the van, grabbed his belt with my three-fingered hands, and yanked so hard that instead of jumping out, Gor stumbled over my horns. My short jacket rode up, my small breasts pressed against his thigh, and I was already rubbing my plump lips against the fabric without even finishing unfastening it, because the heat coming off him after two days without women was so strong that my stomach cramped before I even managed to remember the service exit.

"What the fuck?!" he roared, grabbing me by a horn. "Impy, for fuck's sake, we're at the target!"

"Fuck off!" I shrieked, refusing to release Gor's belt and trying to twist away. "I'll be quick! Two minutes!"

"What the fuck do you mean, two minutes?!"

Someone behind me, one of our teammates, burst out laughing, someone else swore, and Kira, sitting by the far door, said calmly into her radio:

"Control, delay in disembarking. Technical problem."

"What fucking technical problem?!" Gor roared, still holding me by the horn while trying to put his uniform back in order with his other hand.

Kira looked at me, then at him.

"A very small purple one."

The entire van exploded with laughter.

"Oh, fuck all of you!" I shrieked, finally realizing what the hell I was doing and recoiling from Gor. My hoof immediately slipped off the metal step, I landed on my ass on the van floor, and my tail wrapped itself around my own leg in surprise. "I just... it's the exogen! It's not me!"

But as soon as my gaze dropped between his legs, my hand reached for him again.

The mission was canceled, officially due to an "unstable exogen reaction in accompanying personnel," because nobody wanted to put in the report that a little violet girl had latched onto Gor's fly while still on the van's step and refused to let go until they dragged her off by the tail.

After that, they reassigned me to the fucking kitchen unit as "support personnel with restricted access to operational activities." The wording was so humiliatingly official that at first I even asked whether they were joking. They weren't. Just yesterday, I'd been planning to acquire superpowers, outsmart the government, and disappear with them somewhere on the other side of the country, and now they gave me two regulation tank tops, three short skirts with a slit for my tail, and explained which cabinet the clean towels went in.

12

"So now I'm a dishwasher?" I asked Kira back then, standing in the middle of the kitchen and staring at my new set of uniforms with hatred. "Are you serious?"

"No," she replied without looking up from her tablet. "Our dishwasher works better than you. You help in the kitchen, clear tables, serve food, and run small errands. And no, you won't be allowed on combat missions anymore. But at least you'll get to hear plenty of stories from the guys in the evenings."

The guys in the evenings.

I didn't even bother asking what exactly she meant by "the guys in the evenings," because we both knew that what I needed for nourishment was fresh semen, not that disgusting, foul-tasting shit it turned into after even a few seconds of exposure to air, and I had even less desire to discuss out loud exactly how my new body preferred to get its food.

"Don't even start," I muttered, throwing the regulation skirts back onto the table. "I'll figure out my own... diet somehow."

"Wonderful," Kira said, finally looking up from her tablet at me. "Then there's only one rule: not during your shift, not in the kitchen, and not with someone who's supposed to report for duty in five minutes."

"Why the fuck are you listing those things like they've already happened?"

Kira paused for a second, looking at me over her tablet.

"Because I'm a professional, Impy."

"Don't fucking call me Impy."

A professional. Yeah, right. I'm ashamed to admit it, but that bitch was right. And not once. Not twice. Not even three times.

You'd think I'd have gotten used to having cocks in my mouth by now, and to all the other fucked-up peculiarities of my new body, but fuck no. Every time after eating, the same wonderful moment arrived: the hunger disappeared, my head cleared, and with it came the full realization of exactly what I'd just been doing and, much worse, how eagerly my body had taken part in it.

So now I picked up a tray, stacked a pile of plates on it, and trudged into the common room, trying not to look at Kira's smug face.

"What are you smiling at?"

"Nothing."

"I can see your 'nothing.'"

Kira nodded behind me.

I turned around. Mark had just come out of the storage closet, buttoning the collar of his uniform and quite casually picking up the radio he'd forgotten on the table.

"Oh, right, lunchtime. I'm starving too, could eat a horse," he said, looking at the tray of food.

The tray in my hands gave a pitiful crack.

"I'm going to kill you someday."

"After your shift?"

"Go fuck yourself, Mark."

And at that very moment, the front door flew open, Delta came crashing inside, and my cursed body happily informed me that twelve men really had spent the last two days out in the field.

I closed my eyes.

It was going to be a long shift.