Mankillers: Titaness
By Martin Kane mksequela@yahoo.co.uk
An ancient warrior-goddess seeks revenge


Author's Note:

These tales were originally written for the mankiller.blogspot website hosted
by Dusty Bottums and are based on the characters featured there (themselves
often based on a variety of Superheroine sources.) Though the site is sadly no
longer up, Dusty's work can still be found in his own Diana the Valkyrie
library shelf, and his artworks (including those featuring Serena, Scarlett,
Titaness and Baroness) at the deviantart.com website.

The mankillers site was closed before this particular story went up. Titaness
was a particular favourite of many site visitors and so I'm glad to finally
post it and hope her fans appreciate my take on her.

Please also note that this story contains graphic material, including scenes
of violence which may not appeal to all.

************************************************************************

This time the arena was in a warehouse. No seating, no ropes, no rounds. Just
a chalk ring within which two bulky men were pounding the shit out of each
other.

Brandon had used his previous contact's name to get through the door and it
had worked, just as he'd said it would, although the doorman regarded him with
suspicion. Small towns didn't like non-locals at events such as this.

Like all the other venues Brandon had visited over the previous months he
wondered whether this brute was himself a fighter. He certainly looked the
part despite the ill fitting suit which his brawny mass currently stretched to
intimidating effect.

Once inside Brandon followed the sounds of the baying crowds. There were
drinks available, a pallet of crates that looked perfectly at home in the
warehouse, doubtless illicitly relocated from one just such as this. The
cellophane had been slit open and still half covered the stack. Brandon bought
a bottled beer which was opened for him by an indifferent young career
criminal in the making.

Betting chits and bundles of notes were exchanged in what appeared to be a
chaotic free-for-all. Chalkboards announced fighters and odds. A compère of
sorts hosted the proceedings, a mike plugged into a battery speaker clipped to
his belt. He introduced the next fight as two burley men stepped into the
makeshift ring, eyeing each other with anticipatory hostility.

They both wore full length boxing gowns, as though a tip of the hat to the
legitimate sport which aped this far more ancient and primal tradition.

This wasn't what Brandon was here for. He was looking for one fighter in
particular and had been for months now. He'd travelled the country visiting
every dive, every backroom, every blood and sweat-stained sawdust covered
floor where money can be made or lost on the brawn and brutality of such men.

The rumours had it that she was on the bill tonight, though he didn't want to
get his hopes up. He'd had them dashed too often. But he couldn't help feeling
a tingle of excitement each time the cut-price compère stepped forward. And it
wasn't too much longer before his long months of patient hunting were finally
rewarded.

"Tonight we have a local favourite. Please give it up for the awesome
Griller." The crowd knew the fighter well and cheered appreciatively.

But the words that followed were lost on Brandon. As too was the crowd's
reaction to what must have been a truly shocking development. The opponent was
a woman.

He saw her and everything else just dropped away. She was the totality of his
mind and his focus, nothing else even registered. And she remained the centre
of his attention as she walked through the crowd, finding her place inside the
chalk ring.

Even before the robe came off her tremendous musculature was all too apparent.
The sheer size of the woman was awesome to behold. A creature of such robust
physicality that the mind boggled just to look upon her. Dream-like Brandon
watched, hardly believing that his long search was finally over, that he'd
really done it, that he alone had successfully tracked down the legendary
Titaness.

The silk cape dropped and Brandon saw again for the first time in over a year
the savage wonder that was her physique. A comicbook fantasist would struggle
to adequately portray such excessive muscles and curves. The most dramatic of
superheroine cliché barely started to describe the glorious and voluminous
shape of such muscle-bound femininity. She was a giant of a woman, towering
over her huge six-foot opponent. She exceeded him in breadth and muscle-mass
also, despite the fact that Griller was himself a body-built monster of a man.

When the two fighters approached one another the comparison between them was
extraordinary. In all other circumstances a man like Griller would have been
the Herculean mammoth, he would be the Goliath casting a shadow over his
opponents, dwarfing them into fearful cowering. But face to face against
Titaness he looked atrophied, her colossal muscles shaming and humiliating him
with their gargantuan proportions.

Her limbs were thick and bulging with raw power. Tight and heavy muscles
layering her body like smooth slabs of lead. Her breasts were prodigious,
complimenting her monumental muscles and standing out so vast and firm, so
smooth and round, that they looked almost to consist of muscle tissue
themselves.

Brandon took it all in breathlessly. He'd not seen her for over a year and
though he'd by no means forgotten what she looked like, such a feat would be
impossible, hers was not the type of physique one simply forgot, that shocking
and astonishing visage had the same impact now as it did the first time he
ever set eyes on her.

The word was given and the fight began. It was short and brutal but by no
means one sided. Despite the obvious physical superiority of the woman in both
size and strength, Griller proved to be a dangerous adversary, even for her.

He got the first strike in, a savage blow to the belly. It looked to Brandon
as though the man was striking rock. Titaness' solid stomach muscles were
easily hard enough to withstand the blow but surprisingly she actually
shuddered at the impact. Brandon watched, aghast. The woman he'd once
witnessed under laboratory conditions withstand a cannon-shot to the stomach
with no notable effect now actually appeared to be pained by the attack.

Griller followed up getting the full force of his considerable muscles into a
swing contacting her cheek with a solid fist that looked capable of shattering
teeth. He struck the side of her face with precise skill slamming every ounce
of brutal power he could muster into the blow, throwing her head back and to
the side, actually sending her off her stance and opening her up to a further
and more vicious assault. More strikes to the torso, her rippling abs taking
punishment as two gut- busters followed in quick succession. Followed then by
solid jabs to the face.

It looked like the fight was over. She reeled at every blow, apparently unable
to defend herself against so skilful and mighty an assault. Masculine pride
was restored it seemed. This woman was proving to be just a woman after all,
no matter her extraordinary proportions.

But then Titaness fought back despite the punishment. She struck back at the
man, her fist powering into his chest with such force that he was propelled
backwards, staggering and nearly loosing his footing. She regained her poise
and moved after him. She closed and Griller kicked out, trained technique
obvious in his movements, connecting with her bulky thigh. On a smaller
opponent no doubt the blow would have had more effect. On Titaness however, it
looked like a token protest, not even slowing her. The blow bounced off of her
muscular leg rather pathetically. It was like attacking a safe with a rolled
up newspaper.

She punched him again, a sharp and savage jab which he managed to block. He
retaliated with a blow which she in turn blocked. The proximity of the fight
turned then into a grapple, each grabbing at the other and trying to wrestle
themselves into a position of superiority. It became a matter of sheer brute
strength and accordingly, Titaness quickly gained the upper hand. She grasped
him clumsily about the torso while he fought her. She lifted him bodily into
the air as he kicked and writhed. Without ceremony she threw him against the
ground with all her strength, a move that would have shattered bones in a less
capable opponent.

Griller wasn't done yet however, nor was he stupid. He spun as soon as he
landed, twisting his body quickly away from her and narrowly avoiding her
crushing foot as it slammed down, just missing him.

He pulled himself to his feet and ran at her, fist flying. Titaness actually
allowed him to strike her. This time she withstood the blow easily, showing no
apparent discomfort or effort. She moved quickly, grasped his outstretched arm
as he punched her, catching him at wrist and elbow. Her fingers dug into his
flesh so hard it was a wonder it didn't split open.

Griller realised the fight was over as she snapped his arm, breaking the limb
at the elbow. She kept hold of his shoulder and used it to turn him around,
forcing him down onto his knees.

His neck was now exposed and watching the proceedings Brandon fully expected
Titaness to wrap her huge arm about it. With a quick squeeze and a jerk she
could easily snap the man's neck. In fact, he'd watched her perform just such
a move literally dozens of times, showing as much concern for her victims'
lives as a cat shows a mouse. Or, should she be feeling more theatrical, she
could simply crush his head, use her tremendous strength to squeeze until it
burst like a melon.

Instead she used her strength to force the man down low. She brought her knee
up to slam Griller in the face ending the fight in no uncertain terms.

The crowd were agog. Despite the fact that this woman was obviously the
mightier of the two it seemed that most of those watching genuinely expected
Griller to emerge victorious. They stood as one staring in mute wonder as this
savage mountain of feminine musculature released her opponent, letting him
drop unconscious at her feet.

But then the crowd didn't have the same background knowledge that Brandon had.
Unlike him, they'd not had the experience of witnessing her in action back at
the research station, had not seen the multitude of combat trials where she
demonstrated time and again that no man, not even a highly trained soldier,
came close to matching her in either physical strength or martial skills.

He wondered absently if any of the men there present had won any money on the
fight.

Titaness left, disappearing out back. Brandon also left, returning to his bike
to wait. He'd found a corner spot outside the warehouse that oversaw both
possible exits. He believed that with the fight over she had no reason to
stick around and was rewarded by seeing a non-descript station wagon pull
away. Titaness in the passenger seat.

Brandon followed them, staying back and inconspicuous as his bike tailed the
car. He was not especially surprised to see that he recognised the man who now
accompanied her. Major Jarvis, though the rank was doubtless no longer
applicable. Despite his feelings of bitterness, Brandon was actually a little
glad to see the military scientist, simply because it answered the last little
piece of the puzzle.

The motel was cut price but hardly a dive. There was a large central car park
where he parked some distance from them. They did not go to the rooms however,
departing instead on foot. Brandon didn't follow them, figuring that he knew
where they were staying, that was good enough.

Instead he got their room numbers by bribing the clerk. He guessed correctly
that Titaness' unusual height would be remembered although her extraordinary
build was not. They had some sense of discretion at least. Two adjacent rooms
on the ground floor.

Brandon picked one at random and opened the lock, it taking him only a little
longer than it would have taken someone with a key.

Inside, again there was the impression of cut price, though the room was clean
enough, basic without being decrepit. He'd certainly stayed in a number of
places that were far worse over the course of his travels. Actually, it looked
uninhabited. It looked like a room that had been prepared for the next guest,
rather than one that was occupied. The bed was neatly made, the table top was
clear, no case or personal belongings were laid out anywhere. The wardrobe he
opened was empty, excepting hangers.

Then his blood froze as he heard a key in the lock. He heard the man's voice.
He heard the door opening. Brandon threw himself into the wardrobe, pulling it
closed after him and tripping as he did so, falling into a clumsy crouch.

He thought he would have more time to explore. He also thought he would hear
their approach before they came in. He was wrong. He did at least conceal
himself just in time closing the wardrobe door as two people entered.

From within the cramped wardrobe he could see nothing of the room's occupants
but he could hear them clearly enough. He could also smell the distinctive
flavour of fry cooked chicken.

He heard Titaness' voice, that peculiar mode of her speech, a strangely
stilted mannerism and a flat and even delivery. It made her seem even more
impassive, even more inhuman. Despite the odd, emotionless tilt of the voice
it nevertheless stirred his own emotions as memories came flooding back. So
much so that he almost gave himself away.

Stuffing the heel of his hand against his mouth he got himself in check once
more. Remaining absolutely still and silent he continued to listen.

"I find these events tiresome," Titaness was saying. Her complaint was
delivered like a bland statement as though she was indifferent on the matter.

And then Brandon heard Jarvis, his low voice gravelled, matching his grizzled
exterior. "Well, they pay well," he replied. He was speaking with his mouth
full.

"I do not like feigning injury," she said. "It is insulting to suggest that a
man such as he could put up any sort of defence against me."

"You need to downplay your strength a little bit, you know that."

"Drawing it out for so long... were it a genuine fight it would be over in
mere moments."

"Try to think of it as though you're putting on a show."

"I could rip his skullcap off and spray his brains out across the audience.
That would be a show. It would teach them a little respect."

"Well you did great," Jarvis assured her.

She was not placated however. "You do not even permit me to kill my opponents.
Have you any idea how frustrating that is for me?"

"This guy was a local hero, it wouldn't look good. We wouldn't get so many
gigs if you start ripping your opponents apart."

"Truly, you do not appreciate my position. It's like those women you pay to
carnally engage with you. How would you feel if you were not permitted to
finish? Just stop yourself mid-coitus before you have concluded and walk away?
That is what it is for me to defeat a man and yet hold back my victory
strike."

Brandon risked cracking the wardrobe. They were over by the bed. Jarvis was
wiping his greasy fingers with a paper napkin. He cleared up the trash into a
paper takeout sack and tossed it into a waste basket. Then he wiped his
fingers again on another napkin and tossed it on top.

Titaness stood unmoving watching him with that curiously intent way she had,
almost childlike in its single minded focus. Brandon remembered the habit from
their time together at the research station.

"The word's out for assassination jobs," Jarvis told her. "We get one, you'll
be the first to know. "Trouble is, your style of wham bam slam isn't what most
people want. They like clean jobs."

"Something else then, perhaps another robbery. Remember that factory? What was
it, four security guards?" Brandon saw her smile. A wry curl of her lip as she
dryly recalled. "I took their skulls as trophies."

"Yeah, I'll ask around," Jarvis assured her.

"Have you thought anymore on my proposal?" Even in asking a question her voice
was flat and inexpressive.

"Taking out a whole fight ring?"

"Indeed."

"I don't think it's a good idea," he admitted.

"You secure the exits, trap them all inside with me. Think of it, all the men
who are there to bet, all the men who organise the proceedings. Our profits
would be tremendous. Is that not all you care about?"

"It's not the sort of trick you can get away with too often. People would wise
up."

"No one would survive to announce our treachery. You fill your pockets and I
sate myself on their broken bodies. We can even raise the place to the ground
once I'm finished if it makes you feel more comfortable about avoiding
detection."

"Maybe something to think about further down the line," he said, doubtless
just trying to put her off for a while at least. Surprisingly it appeared to
work.

"Very well." Her voice was as close to a sigh as she got. Jarvis had obviously
read her well enough to know he was being dismissed. He left her alone,
presumably headed to the room next door.

Titaness didn't move. She stayed standing in exactly the same position she had
while Jarvis was there. Not even turning her head to watch him exit. She
remained motionless for maybe thirty of forty seconds. To Brandon she looked
like an android gone onto standby. She didn't even blink. And then she
suddenly spoke, making no additional motion as she did so.

She simply commanded "come out" and then waited for his response.

Brandon froze. Was that directed at him? His shocked and panicked brain
wondered. She knew he was here? How? And how long had she known?

"If you don't come out and explain yourself I'll rip your spine out and hang
you from a coat hook. You can watch me grind the bones to powder as you die."

"Please," Brandon gasped quickly, his pulse thrumming in his throat. He pushed
open the wardrobe "I'm here to help. I only hid because I wanted to speak to
you alone." He stayed where he was, crouched pathetically inside the cramped
wardrobe. She turned that impassive and yet still terrifying face towards him.
Her blank but beautiful eyes assessing him like surveillance cameras.

"You are an intruder," she intoned dispassionately.

"I can explain," he assured her, his voice actually steadying a little.
Despite the terrifying capacity for violence that this woman possessed, she
was not actually making any threatening motions. Such posturing was irrelevant
to one such as her.

"I could rip you in half."

Despite his fear, coupled to a knowledge that made the fear utterly justified,
Brandon presented a calm that was admirable. "That's just a fraction of what
you could do."

"And what would you know of such things?"

"Once upon a time we used to know each other," he told her. "And I've spent
the last year trying to find you again."

"You were at the fight tonight," she stated. It was not a question. "Yes," he
said. There were probably about five hundred men at the fight and yet she had
recognised him, or had she picked him out because she remembered him from
elsewhere? From before?

"I've been looking for you... Titaness."

Her eyes narrowed at the use of her name. It was the first real emotion to
cross her face so far, a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

"You remember that name, don't you?"

Her voice became more distant, wistful almost. "It's like a word heard once in
a long ago dream." Then she snapped back to the here and now. Cold and blunt.
"Not that I dream. I believe it was once used to describe me."

"It was your name. Is your name."

"Who are you? What do you know of me?"

"I used to work for the military," he told her slowly. "I used to work in the
same department as Major Jarvis." He was tentative about this statement, not
entirely sure how she would take it. He had picked up on an understated
hostility between Titaness and Jarvis but that didn't necessarily mean that he
would be able to exploit it. If she had completely forgotten all that had gone
before then all she knew was what Jarvis had told her.

Her eyes narrowed. They motioned towards the dividing wall, a gesture towards
the adjacent motel room. The one which Jarvis had doubtless retired to. It was
a question.

Brandon nodded. Titaness nodded slowly, her mind working, her expression
equivocal.

"He doesn't use that name," she said. "He says we need to remain underground.
Off the radar. Incognito."

"He's probably right," Brandon told her. "I doubt I'm the only one who's been
trying to find you. The military are certainly looking for you too. They want
you back."

"You're not with the military anymore? You have gone... rogue?"

"I guess you could say that."

"Like us?"

Brandon nodded.

Though her face was as expressionless as ever he suspected that his sudden
appearance had disturbed her more than was immediately apparent. Once upon a
time he had known her about as well as anyone could claim to know her and he
could see that there were doubts and concerns beneath the surface.

"What do you remember? Am I familiar to you at all?"

She didn't answer, her face screwing up with confusion as she wrestled with
lost fragments of long buried thoughts and memories.

"The fight tonight," he said, "is that how you spend your time? You do petty
crimes for Jarvis?" Again, she did not answer. "Don't you know what you once
were?" Brandon didn't mean to sound condescending but there was a degree of
despair at seeing a being who was once so powerful now reduced to little more
than a thuggish lackey. The contempt he felt was for Jarvis, anger at what he
had done to Titaness, but unfortunately it was expressed in his tone. "You
were once a warrior-goddess" he told her, "and now you let a man like Jarvis
control you?"

Her eyes blazed with sudden fury. "No man controls me!" she yelled, stepping
forward and grabbing for his throat. Brandon yelled in panic and tried to
escape but she already had her hand about his neck. The muscles in her forearm
swelled as she squeezed tight. "I could crush out your life with the effort it
takes you to crush a beercan," she hissed, drawing his reddening face close to
hers, pulling him out of his little hidey-hole. The motion made her tremendous
biceps swell up too, a giant boulder of muscle bulging just inches from his
face.

Brandon couldn't admire it though, he couldn't even see it. His vision first
blurred then began to fade into an overriding whiteout. But she loosened her
grip, her fury abating just as suddenly. Brandon fell backwards, collapsing to
the floor and gasping for breath.

"I don't understand the hold he has over me," she admitted finally. Brandon
tried to reply but his voice betrayed him. He focused on recovering instead.
He realised that in all the time he'd worked with Titaness, he'd never before
seen her angry. In all the acts of violence he'd witnessed her perform in the
name of military testing, and they were numerous, she'd behaved with a
businesslike callousness, treating murder with a work-a-day casualness that
was almost as disturbing as the atrocities themselves.

He'd never seen her passion riled so. When she'd escaped the military complex
he'd not been present to witness her actions, which was probably the only
reason he'd survived them. She had plenty of reasons to be angry though and
once that anger became focused there would be blood spilt.

Titaness fixed him with her cold eyes. "You will tell me all you know."

He nodded and cleared his throat experimentally. It was still a little tender
but he was able to speak.

"I used to work for a research company. We were employed by a covert branch of
the military that specialised in occult weaponry. We were interested in any
ancient power, any bizarre legend or supernatural artefacts that could
possibly be utilised as weapons or tools for the military. We sought for
Atlantis, we explored Incan and Egyptian technologies, we examined ancient
cultures for evidence of alien intervention. There are references to Genghis
Khan summoning demons on the battlefield. We had a dozen swords that purported
to be the original Excalibur. We studied legends old and new. We monitored
modern day Gurus who could sustain their bodies with minimal food or oxygen."

Titaness listened to all of this, following less than half of it but beginning
to understand how it applied to her.

"Do you know where you come from?" Brandon asked her.

Titaness all but shrugged. "I know that I am not like you. I know that I am...
better."

"What are your earliest memories? Can you remember the warrior you used to
be?"

"Images like vague dreams," she told him. "Faded pictures in my head no
clearer than those of a ruined mosaic excavated from a centuries old site."

"Myths of ancient Greece are just that - myths," Brandon told her. "Histories
that are more embroiled with tales of daring do and philosophising than any
religious texts or romantic narratives. Deciphering the literal truths is
literally impossible and so creating an accurate picture of the hows and whys
for a being such as you becomes futile.

"Your precise origins remained a mystery to us. No matter how hard we tried we
couldn't uncover how you first came about. Some ritual was performed, that
much at least is apparent, but there is no record that details that ritual
beyond a passing reference. They were an ancient race whose skills and magics
are now long lost and you are all that remains of their mystic religion. You
are a warrior with no one left to protect. A soldier without an army. A
champion without a kingdom. We found you and resurrected you. It was believed
by the military that you could be used as a weapon, the ultimate warrior. You
were capable of feats of strength and acts of war that were so far beyond the
capabilities of our greatest soldiers we could scarcely even believe what we
were seeing."

Brandon pulled a handheld computer from his pocket. "These are all the files I
was able to copy before I absconded. They were shutting down the project,
denying all knowledge of it. Everything was being wiped, documents shredded,
all evidence destroyed. It's not complete, not even close, but this was as
much as I was able to save."

He handed Titaness the PDA and she looked through the files. Brandon silently
mused on the careless ease with which she utilised this modern technology
without even pausing to wonder at it or its manipulation. Things had changed
indeed since her time at the research centre.

She read of how she was unearthed and resurrected, though the details and
mechanics of that procedure were very sketchy. There was extensive
experimentation and research which the scientists had undertaken to bring back
this ancient being of power to a modern age but apparently none of the
material had been rescued from the purge.

Her eyes quickly scanned various documents, taking in a multitude of data.
There were video files too and she accessed them curiously. It was somewhat
spooky to watch movies of herself, scenes that she could not recall
participating in. It was almost as if someone had stolen her body to go
joyriding in and only now she was watching these recordings did the faintest
twinges of memory tug nagging at her consciousness. Half-remembered dreams
like the false memories of déjà vu.

Onscreen she was dressed in some kind of glistening plastic, a tight and
flexible second skin in bold red. She could make out wires across it, patches
of sensors recording data, examining every detail about her body and its
capabilities. The bunched muscles of her tremendous physique were taut at
combat readiness, coiled like springs.

A bell was heard and something off camera caught her attention. A timer
appeared in the corner of the screen counting upwards from zero in minutes,
seconds and hundredths.

Titaness watched the video, this other Titaness, this fully realised and
self-aware warrior, a military machine, a weapon. The woman tensed her body
for battle.

Her combatant moved onto screen, dressed similarly to her, a glossy white suit
with the same sensory equipment patched in. He too was immensely muscular, a
fighting machine, and in other circumstances he would have looked excessively
threatening. Compared to the muscular mass of Titaness however, he looked
merely comical. Despite his tremendous development, a mass that rippled and
bulged with every motion, he was dwarfed by the sheer physical magnitude of
Titaness' mountainous body.

And the joke wasn't lost on her. She certainly looked like she meant business,
and was definitely taking this trial seriously, but she couldn't help throw
back her head and laugh at seeing her opponent. It was a cruel and abusing
sound. To complete the humiliation, Titaness flexed her arm, pumping up a
bicep so huge it looked like she'd shoved a grapefruit down the PVC sleeve.

The man just goggled at her, jaw slack. He was obviously familiar with
gymnasiums, his understanding of weight-training clearly expressed by the
considerable development of his body but the sheer immensity of her arm at
full pump was so far beyond his comprehension of what a bodybuilder was
capable of achieving that it utterly beggared belief.

Then something struck him suddenly and his mesmerised expression changed from
awe to abject terror. It had taken his addled mind a few moments to process
the reality of his situation but once it had, the full and unbridled horror of
it struck. He was actually going to have to fight this woman.

He looked from the giant bicep to the sardonic face of the woman flexing it.
She was watching him with open amusement.

"That's correct," she told him. "You do not stand a chance." She dropped the
mesmerising pose and moved her fists before her into a martial prep stance.
"Be comforted by the knowledge that your extermination will be an expeditious
one."

To his infinite credit the man actually managed to swallow his obvious fear
and match her combat readiness. From the smooth precision with which he moved
his bulky physique it was clear he was hardly unskilled. He etched forward
tentatively, maintaining his guard.

Titaness moved with exactitude and speed. She awaited the precise moment at
which to strike, judging the man's movements and careful defensive stance.
With fluid power her body erupted into action, twisting and flexing in a blur
of muscular movement.

Her fist slammed right past his defence, a jab to the head so hard his skull
shattered, collapsing inward. His whole face caved in beneath her fist and his
body was propelled backwards, taken off of his feet by the tremendous power of
the blow. He was dead before his body landed, his face pulped as though by a
sledgehammer.

Titaness moved back to her resting pose, her PVC clad body a synchronous
harmony of muscles in motion. The bell sounded again, this time a double pulse
in quick succession.

This time there was no pause for confrontation, no posturing, the successive
rounds of fighting were to be continuous.

Two men came running at her from either side. Like the first live target,
these two were also highly trained and muscular specimens, their white,
wired-up suits displaying bodies that would not look out of place on a
bodybuilding stage.

She glanced from one to the other, raising an arm out towards each of them.
Both men were stopped short in their attack as she neatly caught each of them
in succession, grabbing first one man, and then the other by their throats.
Having caught both men, halting them in their tracks, she lifted them. The two
one-handed lifts at either side of her body made her arms and shoulders and
chest bulge and ripple as if this were a circus act, the sci-fi strong-woman
displaying her muscular prowess at the expense of two ridiculous clowns.

She swung one arm around, tossing the man like a rag-doll slamming him
viciously against the floor with a bone-shattering force. She followed up with
the second man, landing him atop the crumpled form of the first, ensuring both
of them were broken by the impact. Though defeated, the twitching mess of
broken limbs within the combined jumble suggested that at least one of the men
hadn't yet died.

Titaness stepped up and raised her leg high, lifting her knee up and aiming
her foot. Her thigh swelled heavily, bulging with murderous muscle, before
powering the leg down into the bundle of bodies, mashing and shattering all
that lay beneath. She raised her foot again and repeated the act a few times,
squishing the men beneath her heel, ensuring that there was no chance of
survival, crushing both torsos to a messy pulp. She was still involved in the
excessive human grape-crush when the bell sounded once more, a triple pulse.

Titaness backed away from the two mashed corpses as three men rushed her.

She swung her body around, a spinning kick that broke the first man in half,
folding him over and sending him flying backwards. She continued the turn,
falling onto the kicking leg and using the momentum to power the punch that
all but took the second man's head right off his body, snapping his head
backwards and shattering both his nose and brow as her fist thrust forward.
The third man landed a kick to her flank. His foot bounced off a layer of
protective muscle far denser than the latest and most effective body armour.
Titaness turned at the impact, moving with a blur of speed, catching a tight
hold of the offending leg.

She spun around spinning the man by his leg like an Olympic hammer throw,
something going crunch around his pelvis as she made a full rotation before
hurling the man further than the camera could see. A heavy, splintery thump
could be heard as he made impact with the wall.

He probably wasn't dead yet but apparently that wasn't the criteria for
succession as the bell sounded once more, now up to four, and four men
dutifully rushed in towards her.

Titaness swept an arm around the first, catching around his neck and bringing
him down, pinning him against her ribs, his face clamped against the side of
one magnificent breast, demonstrating by comparison that it was indeed as
large as a man's head. She then took out the other three men whilst keeping
the first man pinned helplessly in place, his neck clamped against her rips by
her huge bicep and forearm.

A swift kick upwards between one man's legs mashed his testicles, shattered
bones and compacted his spine. When his feet fell back down to the floor his
legs failed to support him and his body collapsed into a broken ball of agony
that made the other two men fall back in empathetic horror.

Her free hand swung a punch that shattered the skull of one of the remaining
men. Then she grabbed the other, her hand a claw, gripping him by the face.
Her fingers were so tight at the five points that they almost cracked bone
right there. Instead, she levered the man down, twisting his head back and
lowering him into position.

She brought her knee up hard, contacting the back of his skull, smashing his
head apart, spattering gore up and out between her fingers, the bone crumbling
in her grip.

Ignoring the howling agony of the man still clutching his balls, Titaness
turned her attention to the man under her arm. His nose had been squashed,
crushed flat against the substantial flesh of her weighty breast. He gasped
for breath as she loosened her grip, though she wasn't sure whether it was her
bicep closing his throat that had prevented his breathing or his being
smothered by her huge boob that had done it. Either way, this breath was the
last one he would ever enjoy as she simply wrenched his head around, snapping
his neck with a ripe crunch. His body jerked with a single sharp spasm and
went limp.

Titaness dropped him and awaited the quintuple pulse.

It sounded and she turned slowly, five men rushing her from five directions.
As the number of her opponents increased, it became increasingly difficult to
simultaneously defend herself against all assaults from multiple directions.
It was hardly a concern however as it was all too apparent that no matter how
skilful in combat or excessively muscular these men were (and each of them
were both) they still had little ability to hurt or even inconvenience her.
Punches to her body seemed like pellets fired at a metal plate, her muscles so
solid and so dense as to render her impervious to their assaults. When the men
kicked at her they may as well have been children kicking a brick building.
She didn't need to be faster than them, although it was quite apparent that
she was when she wished to be.

Rather than testing herself here, Titaness was simply enjoying the violence.
It came nowhere close to accurately measuring the limits of her capabilities.
It may have been a practical test for the scientist monitoring the proceedings
but as far as she was concerned this was just playtime. And Titaness liked to
play very rough.

She made short work of the men, ignoring the kicks and punches of three of
them while she grabbed the other two and slammed them into each other. She
smashed their heads together in a concussive explosion of blood and brain and
skull fragments. Their scalps ripped apart and flapped gruesomely while the
messy contents of two heads splattered all those present. The three surviving
men paused, repelled and horrified by the gory trick. She took one by the
throat and ripped it right out, a handful of meat, spraying even more blood,
the arterial spurt propelling the man away like a jet engine. She gut punched
another, impacting and destroying his internal organs and making him collapse,
paralysed and helpless. The remaining man she lifted and held over her head
like a barbell, holding him by hip and shoulder. She dropped him hard against
the broad, muscular expanse of her back and shoulders, shattering his spine.

The bell tolled six and she tossed the broken man away, ready to take out the
next round of victims.

Two kicks rendered them four assailants. Two punches rendered them just a
pair. The pair were taken out simultaneously, her two arms smoothly shooting
forwards and sweeping backwards around their throats. She turned them, pushing
their necks into her armpits, their heads facing upwards behind her shoulders.
A squeeze and a jerk and a flex and two simultaneous cracks sounded two
simultaneous demises.

The bell sounded seven pulses and the violence continued uninterrupted.

Watching this ongoing onslaught Titaness in the present day witnessed a
Titaness she could not remember being as she continued to pile body upon body
slaughtering her way through the continuingly increasing rounds.

The fourteenth round finally broke the pattern of escalation, it had only nine
fighters rushing her, a drop of four from the previous round. There was a
limit on the number of men they were prepared to sacrifice for this particular
exercise and she had effortlessly slaughtered her way through every one of
them.

Even those who she had not killed outright were too badly wounded to survive
with the possible exception of the man still clutching his balls wishing the
damage she'd done to his spine had actually paralysed him, severing the nerves
and sparing him this agony.

She stepped up to the twitching form of her final opponent from the last
round, her swung elbow had floored him but not finished him. As her heel
slammed down against his temple smashing open his skull and spraying the messy
contents out over the already blood drenched floor, the clock timer in the
corner of the screen finally halted its count. It read eleven minutes, six
point eight, four seconds.

Titaness looked up from the small screen.

"This is how I trained?"

Brandon shook his head. "Training suggests practice or learning. You needed
neither. Once we'd awoken you, you were a combat machine, ready and all too
eager to engage the enemy. Any enemy. These were merely trials for us to see
what you were capable of. Believe me, that's only the start."

With a curt nod she looked back down at the screen, looking through the index
of video files.

"These aren't complete," she stated.

"Yeah, I had to run. I just grabbed whatever I could download before I fled.
Some of it doesn't even refer to you."

She looked up at him again, her impassive face tilting quizzically. "Then
who?"

"You weren't the only project. There were other research stations on other
military bases. They were all linked up, a shared database." Titaness looked
through the PDA files. It was true, there were documents concerning other
projects. Other warriors. Curiously she called up a video log.

It was a different woman on screen now, standing poised and ready despite
being completely naked. She appeared to be a perfectly normal young
bodybuilder, albeit an exceptionally well developed one. Her tender age had
not prevented her from already achieving a physique to shame the typical male
champion.

The project labelled the girl as "Ultragirl" and the name seemed perfectly
appropriate. Though not especially tall the girl was heavy, her tremendous
muscles taking her weight to far beyond human norm. If the stats that ran
across the screen while the video took in the stunning and epic contours of
her muscular landscape were to be believed then this young woman would appear
to be like Titaness in that she too was Human-plus.

The camera steadied and pulled back, having finished documenting the visual
splendour of her various hyper-developed muscles in close up. Now it was time
to see what they were actually capable of as she was confronted with a stocky
looking opponent.

Unlike the girl, he was dressed, a non-specific combat uniform, tight enough
to evidence the fact that he was athletically built though lacked the massive
power of a bodybuilder and especially the tremendous, solid mass of his
opponent.

He was obviously a fan of muscled women, his eyes drinking down the delight of
her glorious naked form with unabashed wonder. She just smiled at this,
obviously amused by the man's awe, so inappropriate considering the manner of
the practical trial they were about to engage in. How erotic would he find her
muscles when she was using them to beat him to a bloody pulp?

With sudden clarity of purpose she brought her fists up before her, a karate
stance, balanced on the balls of her feet, legs carefully spaced despite her
nudity. A little shaken, he nevertheless matched her pose. Slowly and
cautiously they closed on one another, a careful move left or right by one
fighter mirrored by the other.

And then a sudden explosion of activity as the fight broke out in earnest.
They each moved with skill and speed, a precision ballet of motion as fists
and kicks bounced off of defensive blocks, a balanced choreography like a high
speed dance.

With her blonde hair and blue eyes she had a bright and breezy appearance that
evoked a sweetness and gentility that quite contrasted the violence and
strength she was evidently capable of. She also appeared to be completely at
ease fighting naked. There was a simple and pure joy she took from the
powerful and fluid motion of her body in action, the honest, exuberant
pleasure of indulging in the explosive activity of a highly capable physique.

It was apparent that she was just toying with the man, holding back on her
power when punching and kicking, not wanting to destroy her opponent too
quickly. She was enjoying the fight too much, enjoying the obvious physical
discrepancy between them.

But he was making an effort at least, punching out at her, throwing his fists
forward with all the skill and strength he could muster. She batted his blows
aside as though she was lazily swatting at flies. Every now and again she'd
fight back, wounding him a little, reminding him exactly which of them was the
stronger and superior fighter.

Each blow she landed did a little more damage, rendering him more and more
helpless as the confrontation continued. Her punches became harder, her kicks
more precise, her desire to do violence against him becoming more and more
apparent. A swift and skilful karate chop snapped his forearm with a ripe
crack. Then a sweeping slap to the face took him off the ground sending him
sailing backwards across the fighting chamber.

It was true that there was nothing especially supernatural about these
proceedings. The immense musculature of the young woman was clearly enough to
render her the man's obvious superior. It was no surprise at all that she was
able to beat him up with such ease, her strength was all too evident just by
looking at her vast build. But what she did next would at least make you
wonder if there was not something just a little bit different about this
particular body-built babe.

She took the man's arm holding it by his forearm and triceps, her grip tight
but careful. She braced his shoulder, placing her foot against the joint to
keep it steady and she neatly tugged the limb off, ripping it away from the
torso with a squelchy crunch, bone and torn meat exposed within the gory
opening.

She stepped back to admire her handiwork. The man was screaming and thrashing
as his remaining hand clutched the torn wound. The girl reached down, pulling
his hand away from the bloody mess, straightening his arm out and repeating
the hold she had taken with the first amputation only this time she used just
one hand.

Foot braced against his shoulder she took the strain. The man was screaming in
hopeless pain, shaking his head, desperately pleading with her to stop. With
the sickening slurp of meat and the cracking of bone, the man's other arm came
free, sending a spurt of blood out. She backed away from the howling man,
happy with her work. She grinned and clapped his hands together. He failed to
see the funny side, too engrossed in his own personal hell.

It was true that there was nothing indicative of the supernatural in this act
either, a woman without superhuman strength might well be capable of tearing
off a man's arms, had she such muscles. But it did seem to at least support
the statement that this girl was indeed somehow more than human, if only by
the ridiculous ease with which she had disarmed him.

Reading the screen, Titaness saw that there was also one other project
detailed though only a couple of documents concerned the subject in question.
She read through a brief summary, having to repeatedly check what was written
on the screen. It was so outrageous as to be almost unbelievable. Just what
lengths would these people go to in order to try and develop new weaponry? To
genetically alter a woman? Combine her DNA with that of a reptile? It seemed
so extreme and so bizarre as to be hard to believe. But then, they had also
resurrected a mystical, ancient Greek warrior-goddess. How crazy was that?

Titaness watched a related video. The subject was titled "Pythonia" and it too
was an appropriate name. The clip was only a partial scene, most of the action
had already taken place, the fight already won. Titaness was disappointed to
have missed the confrontation but she did get to see the woman in question.

Pythonia was in her fully human form, rather than with the genetically
transmutated snake-tail as a weapon. Titaness would have liked to see that but
looking at the woman as she currently was it was apparent that she hardly
needed any additional weapons. Her tremendous musculature was surely more than
enough to destroy her opponents. She was dressed in an odd looking suit, skin
tight like the PVC comic-book costume Titaness herself had worn. But it almost
seemed to resemble snake- scales, all in keeping with the theme.

It accentuated the rolling swell and bulge of every overdeveloped muscle that
the woman flexed. It would appear that in the various projects these people
worked on they seemed to favour intensely muscular women as subjects. Titaness
was hardly about to complain. Pythonia had been in combat against three men
and she had already defeated them before this video began. All three still
lived however. For the moment at least. Given their current predicament,
Titaness guessed that wouldn't be the case for very much longer.

She was laying back, the three men trapped beneath her. One had his head
clamped between her thighs. It was all but obscured from the camera by the
mass of her muscular legs. Only the top of his bald head was just about
visible, half-way between her hips and knees.

The other two men she held to her sides, one in each arm. The man to her left
was pinned about the waist, her arm wrapped around him so that his arms were
free to beat her about the chest and face. This he was doing with increasing
panic, raining blows upon her solid body, desperately trying to make her
release him to no avail. His pounding had no effect against her tremendous
physique, his blows were like those of a kitten swatting playfully at its
parent.

She held the last man by the neck, her large bicep jammed into his throat, his
cheek pressed mercilessly hard against her massive right breast. His hands
were also working to free himself, fingers digging into her forearm and bicep
but her body was like solid steel, so hard that he could not hope to give
himself even a sliver of breathing space, let alone stand a chance of forcing
open the choke-hold.

Pythonia was grinning, enjoying the few moments of calm, the anticipation of
violence. Her breathing was steady and her stupendous abdominal muscles
rippled, clearly discernable beneath the second skin of her suit.

And then she began to squeeze. She flexed her muscles against all three men
simultaneously trying to synchronise their deaths as best she could.

Even so, the man between her thighs went first, his skull cracking apart
beneath the tremendous pressure exerted by her enormous muscles. Then the man
to her right, her bicep squeezing into his throat, choking him mercilessly,
though it was the crunch of his neck crushed flat that signalled his final
demise.

The last man was thrashing about like a wild thing, the tightening about his
waist absolutely agonising. There was a sharp crack and he suddenly went limp,
collapsing as though in slow motion onto her chest. He fell onto that awesome
bosom, each breast larger than his head, which came to rest snugly between
them. Sluggishly and with much pain and effort, he actually managed to move
his neck, tilting his head upwards to look into the eyes of his killer.

Pythonia smiled at him, her face expressing the sadistic joy she took in so
effortlessly destroying the three of them. She reached forward and took her
breasts in her hands, splaying her fingers to get an even grip upon their
substantial mass. Then she began to slowly press them together. They gave a
little, the flesh squishing pleasantly against either side of his head,
closing over his ears and cheeks, his brow and temples, like two warm, solid
balloons. And then the substantial mass of them became more apparent, the
encompassing weight pressing heavily against his skull like a slow, monotonous
momentum, an unstoppable pressure increasing as the cushioned vice began to
crush him in earnest. His head finally caved in as though in slow motion, the
bone slowly crumbling beneath the relentlessly closing grip as she squashed
him between her breasts.

Titaness enjoyed watching the clips. A wry smile crawled across her face,
signifying her amusement at so many men being defeated by these various
superwomen.

"So what happened to me?" she asked finally. "Was I utilised as a weapon?"

"No. The project didn't get that far. Go ahead was never approved. Instead
they tried to... terminate the project."

"I don't understand. Why? After they'd spent so much time and effort on me.
And so many test subjects killed in the process." She smiled wryly as she said
this. "Was I not everything they required?"

Brandon was more than a little intimidated by her careless sadism but found
enough bitter humour within himself to smile too.

"And that was the problem. Most soldiers don't enjoy killing."

She didn't deny the accusation. It probably didn't even occur to her to deny
it. "They could not accept that? It seems a minor issue considering the
benefit of my weapon potential, the devastation to which I was capable. Does
not my power outweigh what must be considered at best a petty moral issue?"

"You scared them because they couldn't control you. They knew that should you
take it upon yourself to turn on them they'd be helpless to stop you."

"So they decided to take me out first?"

Brandon sighed. "They tried," he admitted. "It was brutal. You think the
death-toll was high during the testing? I don't know how many you killed, the
whole project's been wiped from all official records. From what I heard you
took out scores of men at a time. You just tore them apart."

"What happened?"

"Various methods were tried to bring you down. There were already a dozen
different sub-departments working on different ways to try and defeat you,
should it become necessary. Or mind control methods to try and keep you under
their control. That's what Jarvis was working on. I heard that you'd been
killed, that's what was officially stated before the project was buried but
there was doubt even before it became apparent that there was no sign of your
body. There were rumours that you'd been subdued somehow and sneaked off-site
to another research station. Some people thought that you were kidnapped to be
sold as a weapon on the black market.

"Do you remember any of this?"

She shook her head. "Like my memories of my time as a warrior, only vague
impressions. The thrill of battle. Blood and adrenalin. The pure and simple
joy of violence. As to what happened to me, I have no idea."

"Somewhere, somehow in all the carnage, I guess Jarvis got a chance to test
his own particular theory. He had been working on a mind- scrambling device.
He knew that your tremendous strength meant that you were a formidable warrior
and to defeat you on the battlefield required an unknown level of fire-power.
But he thought there was a way of pressing the reset button, of rendering your
mind helpless, seeing as your body was near invulnerable. Utilising the same
techniques by which your spirit and powers were resurrected and reborn into a
current body, a certain type of pulse-wave could be used to shock your senses,
scramble your mental faculties. After that, once you came around, all he had
to do was to convince you that he was on your side. He'd be able to tell you
whatever he wanted to. You wouldn't know any better than to trust in whatever
he said."

"So how do I unscramble my mind?"

"I'm just hypothesising here," Brandon told her. "Understand that I don't know
how he did it in the first place. But from what I could find of his project
notes, whatever it was he was able to do, the effect should have been a
temporary one. Your full and uncluttered memories would naturally come back to
you in a short time. To retain his influence over you or to keep your mental
faculties from returning I can only guess he'd have to feed you a particular
cocktail of neural- inhibiting drugs."

Titaness' expression was dark as she considered all this.

"Does he give you drugs to take? Anything? Vitamin pills even?"

"He scrupulously retains all responsibilities for securing food."

"I've got no way of knowing anything for sure," Brandon admitted.

"Do you have any other hypotheses?"

"No." It also occurred to him that she had no more reason to trust him than to
trust Jarvis. It appeared however that she did.

"Is there any further use for the man?" she asked.

"What?" Brandon said, his voice actually shuddering.

"Come." Titaness stood, tossing the PDA onto the bed. She strode purposefully
to the door, exited and walked to the adjacent room. Brandon hurried after
her.

Brandon was about to offer to open the door, pick the lock like he had with
her room. Titaness however was far less discreet in her methods. She punched
out, making a ragged hole in the wooden door as her fist ripped right through.
She took hold of the door, gripping it by the hole she had made, and she
ripped it right off. The frame broke and tore apart, strips of metal and wood
splitting as she simply yanked the whole door off of its hinges. The lock
mechanism snapped under the force, twisting apart as she tugged the door free.
Titaness tossed the heavy door behind her totally without regard for what
damage it might do, not even glancing behind her as a heavy crunch and smash
was heard and a car alarm barked into urgent, panicky life.

She strode into the motel room, eager to do more damage. Jarvis had been woken
by the furore. He sat up in the bed, staring in shock and horror at the sight
of Titaness descending upon him with murderous intent. He was dressed only in
a vest and boxer-shorts. Trying to scrabble away, he tangled himself in the
bedding but managed to kick it off. Titaness was already upon him however.

Fists like iron closed about his upper arms, squeezing so tightly they almost
split the flesh and crumbled the bones beneath. She lifted him and spun
around, throwing him the length of the room. Brandon, who was behind Titaness,
took a shocked step backwards as the hurled man sailed flailing past him to
crash roughly against the wall hard enough to make the whole room shake.
Titaness closed upon him again, reaching down to the shaken but now very much
awake form of her partner and companion.

"What?" was all he managed to gasp as she grabbed him by the throat with one
hand and heaved him up into the air. He was braced against the wall, pinned
against it in fact, his arms and legs flailing wildly. He kicked out at her in
panic but to no avail. Her body was as rigid and solid as a statue. He tried
to prise apart the grip about his throat but he'd have better luck bending a
steel clamp without a crowbar.

Titaness lifted him further, her muscular arm bulging with power as she did
so. His head banged against the ceiling and here she held him, callously
regarding her former colleague. Her face was as stony and impassive as ever.
Through the entire assault, no matter the excess of her violent fury, her face
had remained utterly expressionless.

"Can you give me a reason not to kill you?" she demanded coldly.

He couldn't. Even had he been able to think of some magic words to mollify
her, the grip about his throat was far too tight to allow any breath let alone
words to pass through.

Titaness punched him in the stomach. It was a blow like the one she'd used on
the motel room door and the effect it had on Jarvis was much the same,
although the consequence was somewhat messier.

Her fist tore not only right through the man's body, ripping a hole from solar
plexus to spine and out through the back, but she also put a hole in the wall
behind him. The motel room's interior walls were ridiculously thin, barely
more than plywood, and her fist smashed right through it. There was a scream
from the adjacent room as a bloodied fist plunged through their wall like
something from a horror movie, spilling blood and intestines. As the fist
retreated they were treated to the view of a demon seen through a bloody flesh
frame.

Brandon swore, not believing what he was seeing. Jarvis looked down, still
pinned in place by the tight grip about his throat. Lack of oxygen was making
his vision go blurry and spotted but he could still make out enough of the
bloody visage at his gut to make sense of the insane cascade of white agony
her blow had wrought. He tried to scream but couldn't. It felt like he was
soiling himself, though he couldn't be sure whether that was just the
sensation of his innards slopping out beneath him.

Titaness wrapped her other hand about his throat also, a round grip of thumbs
and forefingers overlapping. Brandon watched as Jarvis' face went from red to
bluey-purple. The eyes bulged obscenely, so much so that he wondered if they
might actually pop. He also noticed the tremendous bulging of Titaness' arms
while she did this. The tense and flex of her forearms changed. Ropes of
tendons and muscles altered as the motion of her squeezing adjusted. She
wasn't simply strangling the man, he realised, she was pulling at his throat
too.

With a sickening crunch, Jarvis' head came free, propelled by the force of her
wrenching. It sailed through the air as though tossed like a basketball,
bouncing off the far wall with a wet thud and falling back onto the bed. The
rest of the body slumped heavily into a gruesome heap at Titaness' feet, the
ripped hole at its centre still spilling its contents. A manic face could be
seen through the stained and broken hole in the wall - a woman who might never
stop screaming. The head on the bed still expressed the agony of its dying
moments. Brandon looked at the thing aghast.

"You have a car?" Titaness asked him.

Unable to break his glazed eye-contact with the head she had so callously
ripped off of the man who had been her only friend and ally for over a year,
Brandon answered her in the mechanical tones of a robot, and still he sounded
more human than she did.

"Bike," he replied flatly.

Titaness strode to the nightstand, going through the assorted odds and ends
deposited there. She found Jarvis' keys and retreated again.

"Come, we must go now," she told him.

Dully, Brandon followed.

They walked away from the erupting panic and chaos, Titaness simply strolling
down to the car-park and Brandon placidly following, a man in shock. As the
car pulled away, Brandon seemed to come back to life, striking the window as
he turned in his seat.

"My PDA," he exclaimed, panicking.

"No matter," she told him, her voice flat but firm.

"But it's got all my files on it, it's got... everything!"

"No matter," she insisted, making no change in either her tone or the steady
acceleration of the car.

"But..." he began, his tone pleading. But his protest faded. She could not be
swayed and he couldn't really bring himself to care. After what he'd just
witnessed nothing in the world seemed to matter.

"You have a room?" she asked.

"No," he said, his voice cold and neutral once more.

"We'll hire one," she told him.

They drove for an hour before looking for another motel, wanting some small
distance between them and the carnage they'd left behind them. They found one
quickly enough. Given the bloody state of Titaness' apparel, Brandon went to
the office alone. He booked a double room, took the keys back out to the car
and she drove around to the small block of rooms, parking right outside
theirs.

"I feel good," she told him, looking down at her hands. They were still bloody
though the mess was now mostly dried, if a little sticky. "I feel more like
myself. I feel as though I were awakening finally from a long and cumbersome
delirium. I feel as perhaps a coma patient might, as though this life I have
been living is a dream and now I am again entering the real world."

"That's good," Brandon told her, not sure how he was supposed to respond. "I
think your memories should begin to return more fully and more quickly as the
effect of the drugs gradually fades." He knew that they wouldn't work their
way out of her system so quickly but in all that had happened to her, all that
had been revealed, she had already begun the process of healing.

She looked up at him then and Brandon shuddered involuntarily. It wasn't just
because of the ever present fear and awe he had of her, there was something
else too, a sense of the familiar. His own memories haunted him, rekindled by
her presence. Titaness was inhuman in nature but she was neither stupid nor
blind. She regarded him curiously, increasing his discomfort.

"You never explained your part in this," she said.

"I told you," he said, his voice just a little nervous, his tone slightly
hesitant. "I was a researcher."

"Your part now, not then. Why did you come looking for me?"

"The men who did this to you, the men who tried to kill you, they still live.
Your escape was brutal and bloody but it was mainly troops that you
slaughtered, normal soldiers. Those in command escaped your wrath. General
Holden escaped your wrath. There's a research station, a military base, less
than five hours from here. On it are all those people who were involved in the
original project. All those involved with the decision to destroy you and all
the soldiers responsible for guarding their secrets. General Holden is still
in charge, still looking into ways of creating the ultimate weapon, no matter
the human cost."

"You want me to have my vengeance?"

"Yes." And his eyes gleamed with a righteous sadism every bit as violent and
furious as hers as he said this.

"Out of benevolence?"

"I'm surprised that you even know that word."

"Why?" she insisted.

He knew it wasn't his comment she was questioning. "Because they deserve it. I
want you to kill every one of them. And I want them to scream as they die."

"There is more," she stated bluntly. "There are things you have not told me
about myself. About yourself."

"Yes," he admitted.

"There are files missing from those you showed me, more than those which you
had not the opportunity to copy. They are out of sequence. You must have
removed some yourself. You handpicked the material you let me read."

"No, I just kept a few things back until you were ready to hear them." And
there was grief in his tone now.

"So tell me," she insisted, her voice almost tender.

"When they resurrected you, it wasn't a case of awakening a preserved body.
Superhuman you very well may be but you're not immortal. You are Titaness of
ancient times, but you here now are not the same physical being."

"I can recall the glorious battles," she insisted. "I remember the feel of my
enemies' crushed bodies at my feet. I remember their corpses carpeting the
battlefield thigh deep."

"We found your body but it was a stone relic - a statue. You were dead, not
asleep. You were preserved but not in any way that we understood. To tell you
the truth, we don't even know whether what we found was actually your literal
body or just an artefact which the ancient magicians used to preserve your
essence and your powers.

"From what our experts could ascertain it was a bizarre construction of magic
and stone, some weird, supernatural, technological marvel. It was a mystery we
could never hope to unravel. Whether or not it was once your actual body, the
methods the ancient sorcerers used never intended you to be literally
reawakened. To resurrect you we needed a new body through which you could live
again, a new vessel into which you could be transferred.

"Understand that in every real and meaningful way you are the same Titaness,
the same warrior who slew armies single-handed, the same guardian who defended
her kingdom and slaughtered her enemies, making trophies of their skulls."

"But the body was once that of another?" she asked, looking down at her hands,
slowly beginning to understand, putting together the final pieces of the
puzzle. She looked at Brandon and understood that sometimes when he looked at
her he was not looking at the warrior she had become but at the woman she had
once been.

"I thought they'd find a volunteer. Some solider willing to risk her life by
submitting to the program. Someone who had signed a consent form."

"Who was she?" Titaness asked and her voice was more tender than he would ever
have thought possible.

"The being you resemble is that of a woman who used to work in the research
department. A woman whose passion and dedication to science enabled you to be
reborn. A woman who was betrayed by her own military commanders."

"A woman you loved," Titaness concluded. Brandon nodded.

"That's why you want vengeance. They murdered your love, used her so that I
might be born. You wish them to pay?"

"Yes."

Titaness nodded. "I understand. I will make them pay. I will punish them for
their sins against me and their sins against you. I owe her my honour and I
owe her my allegiance."

Brandon smiled sadly. "She would have loved to meet you."

"Susan?"

Brandon looked up at her suddenly, his eyes alight with surprise, tearing up.
"What?"

Titaness' face crinkled with concentration. "Her name was Susan?"

"Yes," he croaked, voice shuddering with emotions.

"Pieces of her memories are still reflected within my neural pathways, I can
almost sense what she was. Nothing specific, just an impression, just a
feeling." And she looked at him, her intent expression burrowing into him. "I
think I know how she felt about you," she said. "I think I can recapture those
emotions should I wish to give myself over to them." Her tone was so soft and
so gentle that she could almost pass for human. "And I wish to," she
concluded.

Brandon was weeping now, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. But
Titaness knew. She reached for him, managing to retain that sweet and longing
tenderness even as she pulled his clothes off of him, even as she stripped
away her own.

She smothered him in kisses, her tongue discovering new ground. A body built
for war exploring these bizarre and beautiful new sensations. And it was a
combination of two women that took him, the lost love of a gentle but
brilliant scientist and the savage potency and passion of a warrior-goddess.

Brandon was pinned down against the bed, giving himself over to the rapturous
pleasure he never thought he'd know again, a pleasure now amplified by the
tremendous augmentations her body had since undergone.

And when her body parted to allow him entry, even this most private and tender
part of her was tremendously powerful and muscular, encompassing him with
fearsome strength, demanding his surrender and complete capitulation. She
conquered him utterly with her strength, muscles designed to tear men apart
instead rendered him helpless with delight and ecstatic pleasure.

Gasping with desperate need and desire, Brandon did all he could to satisfy
her passion. She closed her legs around him, pulling him tight against her,
closed her arms about him, pressing his face between her mighty breasts. His
own arms reached around her torso, his hands stretching up to grasp at the
intense musculature of her back and shoulders. He grabbed tight, ever
thrusting into her despite the colossal weight and strength of her body
pinning him down, trapped and helpless.

Titaness finally understood her previous companion's rampant need to fulfil
himself in this way, so often and at such financial squander. She felt for the
first time the pleasure of such intimacies and it was utterly overwhelming.
She was unused to such sensation, unused to allowing herself the luxury of
giving in and remaining vulnerable as the sheer ecstatic joy of it totally
overshadowed the rest of the world.

Even the feeling of a man's skull as it cracked and caved in between her
thighs could not match the exquisite sweetness that now erupted within her at
Brandon's motions. A silvery shimmering like raw electricity cables running
through her nerves made the entirety of her muscular physique go into helpless
spasm. And even as her body broke into this helpless climax, rendering her
incapable of anything but continual sensual need and command, she refused to
release the man, demanding everything from him, squeezing every last drop of
pleasure that she could from the act.

Titaness finally turned over and lay back onto the bed, her body actually
having broken into a sweat from her exertion. This physically weak and
feeble-bodied academic had put her body through a more strenuous trial than
all the men she'd defeated in bare-knuckled match- ups. She ran a thumb
between her breasts, examining the slick wetness with amused curiosity.

"Who would have thought such effort could be expended upon such an act?" she
remarked. She propped herself up on an elbow in a manner that she'd witnessed
characters in movies do. It felt strange to her to ape their behaviour so, but
had little other experience to fall back upon here. The motion made her bicep
leap up and harden into a gigantic peak.

Brandon showed no reaction to the impressive display however, despite the
ardent delight he'd recently taken in that very pose. He'd joyfully squeezed
and caressed the flexed muscle, begging her with desperate lust to slowly pump
it, letting him feel its fullness as it rose and hardened within his grip. She
was a little disheartened by his lack of response. Had her appeal fallen so
quickly from his favour?

Though she knew that technically his desire had been for the woman this body
once housed, rather than the muscle-bound creature it had now become, she
still felt a little dejected by his behaviour. Again, not knowing how one was
supposed to act under such circumstances she ignored the unfamiliar emotion.

"That was most gratifying," she told him. "Did you not find it so?" Once more
Brandon did not respond. She reached over and ran a hand over his chest,
lovingly feeling the gentle and smooth body. It was sopping wet. She had
broken into a sweat, but Brandon looked like he'd just stepped from a bath he
was so drenched.

"I was most pleasurably fulfilled," she assured him. "However, even so, I
would like to engage with you once more." She looked more closely at the
silent form of her new lover. "Are you even listing to me?" she demanded.

"Please," he gasped exhaustedly, barely audible, "just let me get my breath
back."

"Very well. And then we'll engage each other again?"

He laughed painfully. You have to learn something very important," he told
her. "It's called patience."

Titaness smiled at him with a playful mischief that was new to her. "I'm not a
patient woman," she said and she climbed back on top of him. He lay still
beneath her, still breathless. She took his arms and pressed them down above
his head, gripping them both about the wrist with one hand. It was redundant
for her to hold him down however, he hadn't the strength left to lift his arms
let alone struggle against her might.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "You're about to learn something about the way men
work. And more significantly, the way that they don't work. What you've just
done to me means that the recharge period is gonna be even longer than it
would normally be. No matter what I want to do, and believe me, I want, I'm
just not capable. Unlike you, I'm not superhuman."

"I don't mind doing the hard work," she assured him, moving her free hand down
his still sopping body. She licked her lips, still rampant and hungry.

"You're going to have to, I can't even move."

"I wasn't planning on allowing you to move anyway," she told him, squeezing
the grip she had around his wrists.

"Well, feel free to take whatever you can get from me," he offered.

"That's sweet," she told him, smiling evilly. "That you think I would await
your permission rather than just take what I want."

And incredibly, her manipulations yielded results. Though exhausted beyond
anything he'd ever known, though he doubted he'd even be able to stand up
without assistance, incredibly the woman had provoked his body into a state of
semi-excitement. Though slovenly and reluctant, his erection nevertheless
raised itself to obedient attention. Her pleasure and joy at this victory was
contagious, further strengthening his resolve. He tried to reach his body up
to kiss her but she squeezed her grip about his wrists again pulling his arms
to pin him back down against the bed. This time her domination had a more
potent effect, his body awakening fully to her intense allure despite his
exhaustion. Titaness slowly lowered her muscular body down upon his using her
strength to render him utterly helpless beneath her.

"You thought the last time was strenuous?" she asked him, grinning that
mischievous smile once more. "I know what I'm doing now. Believe me, compared
to what I'm about to put you through, that was nothing!"

Inside the communications centre of a covert military base located out in the
desert, a panicked voice called out, shouting to his commanding officer.
"Something just broke through the main gate."

"What do you mean something?"

"I don't know what it was, I've lost contact."

"Cameras?"

"Dead."

"What was the last thing they recorded?"

"Bringing it up now."

The officer stared in horror, hardly believing what he was watching. "Oh holy
fuck. It's her!"

"Her who?"

But the officer had already leapt to the phone. "Get me General Holden," he
screamed furiously into the receiver.

On the screen bullets were flying but the woman seemed no more perturbed by
them than by gnats on a summer's evening. She turned towards the camera,
facing the guard station where it was mounted. She smiled.

"I don't care," the officer was screaming into the phone. "Don't you
understand? She's back!"

He looked back at the screen but it had gone dead. The sound died a few
seconds afterwards. The last thing it had recorded was the sound of men
screaming.

Two open top jeeps with rear-mounted guns came racing towards her across the
compound, spinning up dust from the hard-pan desert ground. Their paths split
to either side, coming to a halt fifty yards apart, each side of her. The gun
turrets both swivelled in her direction and began to churn out their deadly
cargo in a cacophony of death.

Heavy calibre bullets rained into her but Titaness flexed her mighty body and
they fell away, unable to pierce her muscular form. Like an explorer battling
through against the oncoming sandstorm, she chose a jeep and began to head
towards it, face down against the onslaught of cannon fire.

There was a mad panic inside the jeep as the men realised they were up against
something way beyond normal. The driver picked up his rifle and stood in the
seat, braced against the windscreen, adding very little to the firepower but
desperate to do something.

The mosquito bites of his bullets were having no more effect against the
superhuman woman than the hardcore gunnery beside him was. The gunner for his
part tried varying his aim, trying to take her first in the head and torso,
then, when that utterly failed to stop her, he tried to take out her legs. But
it was all to no avail. He could see the shells bouncing off of her mighty
muscles as she battled ever forwards through the blaze of death, slowly
closing on them.

They panicked in earnest as she finally reached them, the driver dropping back
down to his seat, meaning to gun the engine and make their escape. But she was
already on them. Titaness leapt up onto the bonnet. She grabbed the frame
about the windscreen, the metal buckling as her fingers tightened about it.
The glass windscreen shattered into a spider web, whitening out the driver's
view of her before she ripped the whole thing off and tossed it away behind
her. Before he could escape she leapt down onto him, legs either side of the
driving seat. She grabbed his flak helmet, pressing tight on either side to
ensure she had a firm grip, crushing the man's ears to pulp in the process.
With a sharp twist she snapped the man's neck, practically wrenching his head
around backwards in the process.

Throughout, the gunner was working on the rear mounted cannon, adjusting the
mechanical mount so that he could aim it at Titaness in the front. He finally
succeeded as she turned his fellow soldier's head about gruesomely to face
him. He let rip with the machine gun again but point blank range had barely
any more effect on the woman. He saw the vibrations ripple across her solid
muscles as the bullets ricocheted off of her mighty chest. Raising the aim to
her face he saw bullets bounce away from her chin, her nose, her eyes, her
cheeks. Even her hair was barely mussed up by the heavy calibre gunfire.

He stared agog at the woman as she just stood there taking it, letting the
bullets fall away, no more concerned for her safety than as if this was a
water pistol he fired at her. Then she responded, grabbing the red hot muzzle
of the cannon.

The gunner was actually shocked that she was able to do this without burning
herself despite all that he'd witnessed so far. His brain was hardly
functioning clearly though, one could not see first hand what Titaness was
capable of without falling at least into some state of shock.

She lifted the muzzle, fighting against the mounted framework. The weapon was
heavy duty, designed for strenuous usage. The mount broke before the gun
itself did, metal tearing. She ripped the gun free, plucking it off of the
fixed jeep frame, spilling shells as it came away from the automatic magazine
feed.

Titaness turned the gun around, pointed it at the shocked soldier. He was
rooted to the spot in fear, not that he would have survived had he tried to
either fight or turn and run. She found the trigger and let rip, holding the
gigantic cannon like a machine gun. It roared into life once more, turning on
its master. At short range, the gun finally achieved that for which it was
designed and shredded the man to pieces. It was a burst of only a few seconds
but in that time it reduced the man to something that looked like it had come
out of an industrial blender accident. Road kill got away prettier.

Throughout this entire assault the other jeep's mounted gun had continued to
lay hot lead into her, the deadly rattle of its fire never ceasing. She began
to make her way over to it, returning fire now that she was armed, letting rip
with the odd controlled burst of streaming bullets. But her ammo was highly
limited, the continuous stream of rounds being cut off when she had ripped the
weapon free of its housing. The driver had got it in the chest, the gun
cutting him to pieces. The gunner however managed to survive and was merely
wounded. He was trying to pull himself away, crawling without the use of his
legs, both of which were bleeding profusely from a number of wounds. He
dragged himself along the ground, digging his fingers into the hard, desert
earth and hauling himself through the dust. When he saw Titaness closing on
him he shrieked and threw his arms in front of him as though they would offer
any sort of protection against the heavy calibre cannon she wielded. But the
bullets were already spent and he would not die by gunfire.

The weapon would still be the method of his demise however. As Titaness
reached him she grasped the muzzle of the huge weapon and swung it about like
a club, breaking his body beneath its great weight. She lay in with another
few blows, just for good measure, battering him into the ground. The gun was
not designed for such usage and did not stand up well to her treatment of it.
She discarded the mangled remains of it and headed through the courtyard.

The main building ahead of her looked like a huge concrete hanger. Though
further in she could see higher levels of the building. The main entrance was
a giant set of heavy double doors, large enough for huge armoured and
transport vehicles and sturdy enough to stand up to massive assault. It was a
steel barrier, doubtless worked by hydraulics or some such machinery as no man
could possibly open them manually. The thick sliding doors were toothed and
grooved to interlock into a single solid wall of steel, so barricaded that it
was probably easier to tunnel through the mountainous concrete walls. But the
designers hadn't thought it would need to stand up to the might of Titaness,
nor were they capable of constructing such a defence. The barrier certainly
wasn't adequate to stop her for more than a few minutes. As soon as she
reached the giant barrier she proceeded to punch at it, pounding the heavy
steel doors with a barrage of blows.

From inside the building shock troops positioned themselves ready, fanning
around the door in formation. It was clear almost right away that she would
certainly make it inside. Each shuddering blow a heavy strike like a gong that
made the doors bow inwards, the metal bending and distending just a little
more every time. With a steady and relentless rhythm, the door continued to
buckle, her fists caving an ever increasing dent into them. The enclave in the
once flat metal surface was stretched to tearing point now. The shocked
troopers watched in horrified awe as their last hope for protection against
this woman slowly but steadily gave in to her indomitable strength. They could
actually see the impression in the metal that her fists made with each
successive blow, the bowed in section softening under the relentless assault.

And then, horror upon horror, the first tear. Those men closest to the front
could see her fist come through the gap. The pounding ceased. Fingers prised
their way into view, easing into the narrow tear with muscular insistence. Two
hands were in the building now, two hands that curved around to grasp the
sides of the buckled indentation, two hands that were beginning to part the
metal.

She ripped a hole in the solid steel barrier, tearing the gap lengthways and
parting the sides as though it was a pair of curtains. The soldiers watched in
horrified amazement as Titaness was first revealed, and then stepped into the
building.

Even at close range, the relatively small calibre of their automatic weapons
could not slow her. The spray of bullets bounced off of her body with no
effect, cascading off of her chest and limbs and even her face without leaving
so much as a scratch.

She took two bounding steps forwards, pouncing on the nearest row of troopers.
They parted, backing instinctively away from her, turning the weapons as they
did so, keeping up the stream of gunfire. The man she had landed on had pulled
out a savage looking hunting knife. He was attempting to stab her with it. The
large and keen blade bounced off of her belly with no more effect than the
bullets had had. She held his shoulder in one hand and grabbed his chin in the
other. She wrenched his head around so far she almost faced him backwards, not
only breaking his neck but utterly pulverising it. As the soldier fell away
she grabbed his machine gun, plucking it from his dead grip.

Those closest began to make a tactical retreat but Titaness didn't open fire
with the gun. Instead she took hold of the long barrel and swung it like a
club. The gun was not an ideal blunt weapon but she swung it with sufficient
force to break bones with every impact. It had less heft than the heavy
calibre cannon she'd ripped off of the jeep, but was far more suitable for the
task. Those who did not get clear in time were knocked flying as she battered
them mercilessly.

A side-on swing to a fleeing soldier broke his back, folding him in two as the
force flung him away, knocking down another man and in so doing, enabling
Titaness to turn on him next. She brought the gun down cleanly on his head and
split it open like a watermelon.

Foolishly, the troops did not simply make a break for it. There were so many
of them that some would certainly be able to get out in the time it took her
to finish off the others. Instead they kept attempting to regroup and make a
new stand from a distance. If they had all tried to flee at once, some might
well have made it. As it was, Titaness kept a slow but steady pace, making her
way through the men, slaughtering them as she went.

She tossed the gun when it became boring, taking a hunting knife from a
soldier and using it to open him up like cattle in an abattoir. But this too
was not as satisfying as using her bare hands so she discarded the blade
burying it hilt-deep in the top of a man's skull and began punching and
kicking, her body every bit as lethal on a one-to-one basis as any stolen
weapon possibly could be.

When men faced her down she punched out at them, felling them with single
blows. When they used guns or knives, she tore them in half with her hands.
She pulled their toys from them and broke their bodies as easily as a child
could pull apart a doll. When they fled she chased them, pouncing on them like
a cat, bringing them down, landing heavily atop them and breaking their bodies
beneath her, snapping spines with her knees, drawing their shoulders backwards
and twisting bones and joints until they gave with a long, drawn-out crunch.
By the time she had killed every man still left inside the cavernous chamber,
sirens were blaring, the whole base on high alert.

Gas began pouring into the room, the ventilation shafts awash with slow, heavy
smog. She could smell the poisonous taint of it already despite the vastness
of the room. Titaness smiled. How little had they learnt about her if they
thought such a thing would be any more effective than any of their other petty
toys? Maybe they shouldn't have purged all their files after all.

She walked to the other side of the room, the door into the inner complex. She
waited there almost a minute doing nothing. If they were watching her on
camera and they were smart then they would be contacting whoever was pumping
the gas into the vents, screaming at them to stop.

This door was large and heavy, almost like a bank vault, but tiny compared to
the giant security barrier she had ripped apart in order to get this far. No
one could be in any doubt that this one would offer her no resistance.

When the poisonous gas had built up enough, she began pounding at the door.
Though it was thick and heavy the door was only metal and like its big brother
it began to buckle and bend beneath her relentless fists. She drove a dip into
the thick, solid sheet, mangling the metal. It put up less resistance than the
larger model had and she quickly drove a hole right through the half-a-foot
thick door. Instead of ripping the thing apart as she had earlier, she used
the hole to get a proper hold of the door. She pulled at it with all her
strength, trying to wrench it as a whole. The giant hinges groaned, beginning
to fold and tear. With a final burst of effort she heaved the vast metal door
right off of the solid frame. The thick locking bars bent and broke to allow
it clearance. She tossed it aside, the huge weight landing with an almighty
crash.

As she strode through the ripped opened doorway she noted with satisfaction
the build up of visible gas falling into the corridor, dissipating into this
inner sanctum.

This time there was only one soldier to greet her. He was at the far end of
the corridor, fifty yards from her. He lifted a missile launcher to his
shoulder, looking like a builder carrying a length of drainpipe. He aimed and
then fired. The explosive projectile flew towards her and struck her chest
dead centre. The impact failed to rock her but the explosion threw her
backwards, back into the vast chamber which she had littered with corpses.

A little shaken, shocked that anything they had actually had the capacity to
hurt her, she sat up. She inspected the spot were the missile had hit her,
right between the breasts. It was a little tender but apart from that she was
undamaged. She stood, annoyed to have been knocked over. She watched the
soldier finish levelling his weapon, preparing to fire again. This time she
threw herself to the side, letting the missile sail past to explode harmlessly
somewhere behind her. Then she continued up the corridor towards him.

The gas reached him first however. As he raised the weapon for a third
attempt, his eyes began to bulge and to bleed. He collapsed onto his knees,
dropping the missile launcher and clutching painfully at his chest and throat.
Titaness had reached him now. She knocked him carelessly onto his back, simply
pushing the man with her foot, and retrieved the missile launcher. Turning the
weapon around, she placed the barrel against his face, completely covering it,
muffling his pleading protests.

When she fired it exploded in her hands, much of the concussion blowing back
up into the weapon, but she retained her balance, unhurt by the explosion,
even at this close range. She felt its heat however, and she realised that
anything more intense or concentrated might actually be able to pain her. Was
she really seeing the limits to her strength? Did they actually have weapons
that were capable of harming her? Incredible as it seemed she had to
acknowledge the potential risk. After all, was it not a military scientist
who'd found a way of scrambling her mind, deranging her senses? The thought
rekindled her wrath and potential threat or not, she continued her assault
unabashed.

She forced open another door, this one a metal gate like that of a barred
cell. It folded aside with ridiculous ease, bending as though the bars were
made of pipe-cleaners. Compared to those she'd already destroyed, it might as
well have been.

More troops layered the long corridor, staked out at every convenient nook,
firing their rifles left and right-handed accordingly while offering as small
a target as possible to their enemy. There were only a dozen and the first few
pairs stood their ground. Even as it became apparent that their continuous
gunfire had little effect upon her, bullets bouncing from her tremendous body
as if they were made of spit and paper.

She strove forward irrespective of their weapons, reaching the first two
soldiers who continued to fire their automatic rifles at her even as she
reached first for the man on her left and then her right, taking a firm grip
about the neck of both. She lifted them high above her head, demonstrating to
the rest of the company further down the corridor exactly what she was capable
of. A simple squeeze and there was the crunch of bone. Both men slumped down
slack and heavy in her grip, their struggles dying. She released the two
bodies and headed further up the corridor.

The next two men also stood their ground, backing into their respective
alcoves, bracing their guns against the wall but continuing to fire forth a
stream of bullets. They didn't know what else to do. Titaness grabbed one man
by the face and simply slammed his head backwards against the wall causing it
to burst with a wet explosion of ripe gore. She repeated the trick with the
other man, flattening the skull so thoroughly that her palm slapped the wall
behind him, the broken fragments of flesh and bone and brain splattering out
beneath her hand.

The third pair of troopers actually had the sense to retreat, irrespective of
orders, attempting to flee down the corridor. One abandoned his post and the
other quickly followed suit. But they'd made the choice too late, Titaness was
already upon them, grabbing both men from behind as they tried desperately to
escape. She wrapped her arms around their necks, drawing them back against her
mighty chest, one massive breast between the shoulder blades of each man. She
pulled them so tight against her body that they were lifted off their feet,
legs dangling. She simply squeezed, driving the rock-like peaks of her
enormous biceps into the men's throats, completely crushing them.

The rest of the soldiers had abandoned their positions by now, six men fled
down the corridor to the secured door at the far end, beating against it,
pleading and demanding into their throat mikes and through the door itself for
it to be opened.

Titaness caught them up with her fists swinging, each contact breaking
something vital, each blow shattering bone and rupturing organs. She dealt
death with the ease and fluency of a professional, quite aside from the
personal stake she had in this mission.

The door proved no more of a challenge than the slaughtered team guarding it,
no more of a challenge than the previous ones had. The next corridor had rooms
to either side, various science laboratories and testing stations, offices and
conference rooms. This was where business was done, where projects were
researched and where experiments were carried out.

Titaness ripped a door off of its hinges and tossed it into the busily
cluttered laboratory. It was a room full of tools and odd instruments, every
surface of space filled with a variety of interesting looking toys. Two white
coated individuals - scientist engineers - looked frightened by the noise and
the alarms, and now shocked by the intrusion into their domain by this
muscle-bound woman. They cowered in a corner.

"You will tell me where to find General Holden," Titaness stated.

"Then you'll let us go?" one of the scientists pleaded, a young woman with
clear, grey eyes, bright and shiny with fear.

Titaness' expression remained blank although there was the slightest hint of
the quizzical tingeing her eyes as though she was confused that they would
even think such a thing.

"No."

"Then why should we tell you?" the other scientist asked, stepping in front of
his colleague, playing the protective man, as though there was anything he
could do to stop this woman.

Titaness didn't answer, instead simply stating again, "You will tell me where
to find General Holden."

And as she approached the man he did indeed tell her, making the answer in a
panicked bark while falling backwards in his haste to escape, all thoughts
about acting the hero immediately evaporating at Titaness' approach.

She caught him in her hands and lifted him. She twisted his head around,
ending his squirming struggles by snapping his neck with a loud, resonant
crack.

Next she turned on the woman, seeing that she had grasped a glass beaker and
was currently filling it by adding another clear liquid to the one it already
contained. She looked up as Titaness approached, holding the beaker out as if
attempting to ward off her assailant with it.

"Stay back!" the girl screamed, fear and fury turning her voice into an animal
roar. "This'll burn the flesh off of you!"

The liquid was boiling inside the beaker, the reaction already taking place.
More scared of what she held than of the monster woman closing on her, the
young scientist threw the glass, turning to flee as soon as it left her hand.

The beaker actually exploded before it crossed the arc to Titaness, showering
her in fragments of glass. Despite the razor sharpness, this lethal shrapnel
rained upon her without damage. But the spontaneous ignition of the chemical
mist as it hit the air was violence personified. A dense, sticky flame seeming
to suck against Titaness' face and body and she felt the heat and sharpness of
the explosion.

Even though the hurt was minimal, it was enough to assure her that she was not
invulnerable after all.

The young woman had made it as far as the rear door before Titaness caught up
to her, grabbing her from behind and breaking her spine with a sharp, twisting
snap. She slammed her head down against a desk to finish the job; she was
nothing if not an equal opportunity mass- murderer.

Instead of continuing along the corridor, continuing her straight line of
slaughter through the base, she diverted. She took the elevator to the top of
the building. The scientist had not known where the general was, though he
knew where his office was located. But that wasn't where Titaness headed. The
scientist was a smart man, had certificates to prove it and everything. He had
guessed that the general wouldn't be in his office anyway. The base was too
small for a shelter, the type of underground bunkers that were kept fully prep
in case of nuclear strike. There wasn't even an airstrip. But there was a
helicopter landing pad. And there was a fully armoured, twin-rotor gunship
currently sitting upon it. The scientist hadn't known where General Holden
was. But he was willing to make an educated guess. And he was right, for all
the good it did him.

The elevator had been locked out and refused to go to the roof, coming to a
frozen stop and sounding an alarm. Titaness was tall enough to touch the top
of the elevator and she punched a hole in its low ceiling. She ripped folds of
metal down, widening the hole until it was large enough to allow her broad,
muscular body to pass through. She hauled herself up using the elevator cable
to climb hand over hand. At the top, she wrenched open the doors, the gears
grinding in protest but unable to resist her tremendous strength.

The helicopter gunship was there, half a dozen soldiers surrounding a man who
had to be the general. Curiously, they hadn't taken off yet, hadn't fled
despite the fact they'd had time enough while Titaness was working her way
through the scores of men she had already slain. It was clearly their
intention to run, the helicopter was prep, two pilots in the front, the twin
rotor-blades already up to speed.

And then she saw why. The gunship carried four missiles, huge great cigar
shaped monuments to death, mounted two a side. But the symmetry was off, one
missile had been dismounted. It had been removed from the rack and now sat on
the roof. The panel was open and one of the soldiers, an engineer, was
kneeling as he worked on the warhead. The soldiers responded immediately to
Titaness, the by now familiar rattle of automatic weaponry as regular and
annoying as the spatter of bullets that they pelted at her.

Six soldiers, not including the two pilots who were already sitting inside the
helicopter, ready for immediate take-off. Six soldiers, not including General
Holden who now leapt aboard and screamed at the pilots, ordering immediate
take-off. Six soldiers, not including the engineer who was furiously working
on the missile's warhead, turning it into a bomb powerful enough to destroy
this whole building. Six soldiers. It barely took her six seconds.

She grabbed the first one, spinning him around, his automatic rifle still
firing. She wrapped her arm around him, grasping hold of the gun. She was like
a parent teaching a child the correct stance, her arm against his arm, her
hand over his hand as she guided his movements, forcing him against his will,
her finger curling around his, keeping the trigger tight.

She swept the gun across the five remaining soldiers, mowing them down with
violent efficiency, the bullets churning their bodies into burger- meat. She
did not have to kill the last soldier, the man whose bloody body even now slid
slowly down the muscular wall of her physique. The others had continued to
shoot at Titaness even while she clutched his body against her own.

The frightened engineer looked up from his work, seeing this murderous machine
slaughter an elite squad on protection duty, saw the helicopter taking off
without him. He raised his arms in a gesture of surrender. He motioned to the
warhead.

"It's a bomb," he told her. "I'm the only one who can disarm it."

"Then do so," she instructed as she got to the helicopter. It was lifting off
and she had to reach up to catch the landing skid as it rose into the air. Her
unexpected weight tilted the helicopter to the side but it still steadily rose
as Titaness pulled herself into the rear of the machine, the sliding door
still open.

Instead of taking out the general, her main target, she headed through to the
two pilot seats in the front. Without pause she punched into the backs of the
seats, her blooded fists driving right through both pilots to erupt out the
front of their chests. A synchronous gasp and death- rattle, the gush of blood
as both men died before she even retracted her fists back through the ragged,
torn holes in each of them and the broken seats they were strapped into.

The helicopter came back down, landing hard and heavy with a shuddering crash,
but doing no major damage to either the roof or the machine itself. Titaness
turned back to the rear of the helicopter. General Holden was shaken up by the
crash but otherwise intact. He met her severe gaze and then he made a run for
the still open door. She caught him easily, wrapping her hand about his neck.

The soldier struggled against her grip, trying to tear her murderous fingers
from about his throat but she held him tight. There would be no escape. She
stepped out of the helicopter, dragging the general along with her. She stood
in its shadow, lifting the man so that his head was level to hers, requiring
her to hold him half a foot off the ground to equalise their heights. His feet
swung uselessly kicking out, trying to find purchase and relieve the pressure
of his full bodyweight against the grip at his throat.

"There's so much I could say to you," Titaness told the general, her mild
voice almost lost in the roar of the rotor-blades. "I was trying to decide how
best to express what you are and what you deserve. You know what I realised?
It's pointless. It's useless. There are no words. No way of even communicating
with one such as you. And anyway, I am not a creature of words, I am a
creature of action. And there is only one way I can express myself."

And at this, she simply lifted the general, slowly raising him up into the
deadly range of the spinning blades. She held him there a few moments, letting
the vast power of the blades tear his head apart before simply loosening her
grip to allow the sweep of them to pluck the man from her hand and fling him
across the length of the roof, leaving a bloody spatter as he went.

There was only one man left alive now, the engineer still kneeling beside the
armed warhead. He'd watched this latest murder with shock and horror on his
face. But there was steel there too. He was holding a pistol which he raised
and pointed at Titaness. He fired at her head, so close she could have slapped
the outstretched gun aside if she'd wanted to. The bullet bounced off of her
cheek, ricocheting away to the side. He almost smiled himself as he accepted
this with a sigh of resignation. And he turned the pistol around and blew the
top of his own head off.

Titaness didn't need to look at the warhead to know that he hadn't disarmed
it. She thought about the close-range explosion of the tiny missile that had
been fired at her earlier and of the chemical burning she'd survived. Both had
barely registered against her but the warhead was a lot larger and a lot more
devastating. She didn't know that it would do her any damage at all but she
could not be certain that it wouldn't.

She folded the panel down, closing the exposed section and scrunched up the
end to seal it, her fingers moulding the metal like tinfoil. She moved to the
rear end of the missile and took hold of it. She lifted it and began to turn.

Titaness swung around, dragging the huge, heavy missile along with her. She
spun around and around, swinging the weapon like an Olympic hammer throw,
momentum building, her body twisting faster and faster as she built up power.
Its weight had it howling through the air, so heavy that should it contact an
oak tree right now it would knock it down, ripping it out by the roots. She
was a little off centre and the insane momentum as she spun ever harder and
faster moved her closer and closer to the edge of the building.

And she finally released, heaving the huge metal tube into the air, propelling
it with all her inhuman might.

Titaness shielded her eyes against the sunlight as she watched the giant arc
the missile made, slowly sailing through the air, out towards the desert
horizon, far beyond the extended area of the military base. Whether it was the
timer or not she didn't know but the warhead exploded just before the missile
crashed against the rocky desert terrain, a bright conflagration that was
spectacular even in the bright light of the midday sun.

Satisfied with herself she dusted her hands off and began to head back to the
wrenched open elevator doors. How many lives had she just saved by casting
away that bomb? It didn't matter, it was only a brief reprieve. Though she'd
destroyed her main target - the general - that didn't mean she was finished.
She'd come here for blood and she hadn't finished spilling it. Not yet. If
there were other lives here then she would claim them all.

Titaness headed back into the building, flexing her muscles in joyful
anticipation of further and greater violence.