Chapter 2: The Green Goddess
The echo of the cracking floor tile faded into the buzzing silence. Rygell stared at the web of fractures under her foot, a strange laugh bubbling in her chest. It came out as a low, stony rumble. The sound was alien. It was wonderful.
She turned her gaze to the barbell rack. The loaded bar she had failed to move with her human body sat waiting. Four fifty. A joke.
She walked toward it, each step a deliberate, earth-pressing event. She didn’t bend her knees. She simply wrapped a gargantuan green hand around the knurled steel and lifted. It left the rack without a whisper of effort, like plucking a pen from a desk.
The metal itself groaned. Not from the weight, but from the pressure of her grip. She brought it to her chest, the plates dangling uselessly. A curl. Her bicep, a solid hill of emerald stone, barely tightened. The movement was contemptuously easy. A flutter of heat, deep and insistent, kindled in her core in response to the contraction of muscle.
It wasn’t enough. The power was there, boundless, but it circled inside her with no outlet. That other hunger, the one that had torn through her during the transformation, throbbed in time with her heartbeat. It was a hollow, demanding ache. She needed to use this. To feel something yield.
A shift in the air. A faint, quick inhalation from the doorway.
Her new senses, hyper-acute, locked onto it. The scent hit her first—fabric softener, cheap deodorant, the faint ozone of a phone charger, and underneath it, the quick, salty tang of human sweat. Fear-sweat. And something else… a sharp, coppery thread of arousal.
She turned her head. The motion was slow, predatory.
Lewis stood frozen in the threshold, one hand still on the doorframe. His phone was clutched in his other hand, screen dark. His lean frame seemed absurdly fragile. His messy black hair stuck up in places, and his tired brown eyes were now wide, stripped of all their usual bored indifference. They were fixed on her, tracking from the shredded remains of her clothes on the floor, up the landscape of her legs, over the dizzying curve of her hip, to the impossible breadth of her shoulders, and finally to her face.
He didn’t scream. He just breathed, shallow and fast, a mouse realizing the shadow overhead is an owl.
Rygell felt a new kind of tension twist inside her. Here was a witness. Here was something soft. Here was proof.
She let the barbell drop. It didn’t crash; she guided it down, but the impact still shook the floor, making Lewis flinch. The sound was a period at the end of a sentence.
“Lewis.” Her voice was a melody played on coarse gravel, depth-charged with power. It wasn’t a question.
He flinched again at the sound of his name. “P-Professor Rygell?” The title sounded ridiculous.
She took a single step toward him. The distance between them halved. He shrank back, but his feet, as if rooted, didn’t run. His eyes were drawn to the movement of her muscles, the shift of green skin under the cruel fluorescence. The fear on his face was pristine. But beneath it, in the parting of his lips, in the darkening of his pupils, was that other thread. Magnetism. Awe.
“Not a professor right now,” she rumbled. The hint of her old, dry humor was there, warped by her new register. She tilted her head, studying him. “Night shift intern. See anything… interesting?”
His throat worked. “I heard… I thought maybe a pipe burst. Or the roof.” His gaze flickered to the shattered belt buckle near the mirror, the tatters of spandex. “You’re… green.”
“Observant.” Another step. She was close enough now that he had to crane his neck to look up at her. Her shadow enveloped him. The heat radiating from her skin beat against him like a sunlamp. The scents of the gym—her sweat, now ozone and petrichor, the blood, her release—were overwhelming at this distance. “Are you on the clock?”
He nodded, a tight, jerky motion.
“Good.” She let the word hang. The command in it was absolute. She raised one hand, not a fist, but with a single, thick finger extended. She crooked it. “Come here.”
Every atom of his survival instinct had to be shrieking at him to bolt. She saw it in the tremble in his legs. But he didn’t. He took one shuffling step forward. Then another. Drawn. Compelled. He stopped a foot away, within easy reach.
Her finger didn’t lower. It moved, pointing to the flat bench press bench, still smeared with the rust-brown evidence of her old life. “Sit.”
He moved like a sleepwalker, perching on the very edge of the cool, stained vinyl. He looked up at her, a silent question trembling in the air.
The ache between her legs was a second heartbeat now, a pounding, slick demand. She placed a hand on the rack behind him, caging him in without touching him. She leaned down, bringing her face close to his. Her emerald skin, her burning gold-flecked eyes, filled his world.
“You’re going to help me with a new set,” she whispered, the sound vibrating in his bones.
“I… I don’t…”
“You don’t lift. I know.” Her lips curved. “Different kind of rep.”
In one fluid, powerful motion, she turned and planted her hands on the bench on either side of his hips. She wasn't human anymore—the span of her shoulders blocked the light. Then she moved, swinging one colossal, green leg over the bench, then the other. She didn't sit beside him. She straddled the bench, facing away from him, her back a wall of muscle, before she began to lower herself.
Not onto the bench.
Onto him.
He realized her intention a second before her body covered his field of vision. “Wait—” he gasped, but it was smothered.
Her powerful thighs, each thicker than his torso, settled on either side of his head, pressing him gently but immovably against the backrest. The world became a valley of emerald muscle, the scent of her—musky, sweet, electric—filling his nose and mouth. He was pinned in warm, living stone.
She settled her weight, not fully, but enough for him to feel the incredible density of her. The heat from her core was immense. He felt the slick, swollen evidence of her hunger against his forehead.
Her voice filtered down, a husky, reverberating growl that traveled through her body into his. “You’re going to worship this, intern. You’re going to use that clever tongue you use for excuses on late papers. And you’re going to make it good.”
He couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe. Terror and a dark, surging thrill warred in him. The sheer scale of her, the power that held him effortlessly captive, destroyed every normal benchmark. This was a force of nature. And it was choosing him.
He closed his eyes. The fear began to melt, burned away by the radiant heat of her. He let out a shuddering breath against her skin, and then, hesitantly, his tongue touched her.
A deep, shuddering groan rolled through her. The bench vibrated with it. “That’s it,” she growled, her hips making a minute, grinding adjustment. “No timid. Mine doesn’t get timid.”
Emboldened, driven by a instinct he didn't know he possessed, he obeyed. He opened his mouth and served. His hands came up, not to push, but to settle on the monumental curves of her thighs, to feel the quiver of taut muscle under slick skin as he worked.
Above him, Rygell’s head fell back. Stars swam behind her closed eyelids. This was it. The feeling. The yield. Not of steel, but of will. Of a human spirit surrendering to her new reality. His mouth was hot, desperate, adoring. It was a focus for the chaotic energy storming inside her. Each stroke of his tongue was a spark on the kindling of her need.
Her own breaths became ragged saw-blows of sound. She braced her hands on the bench behind his back, her fingers denting the vinyl. The pleasure built, not like a wave, but like magma rising—slow, inexorable, tectonic. It was fused with the power, each rolling grind of her hips against his face both an assertion of dominance and a primal plea.
“Yes,” she hissed, the word a crack of lightning. “Right there. Don’t you dare… don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. He was lost in the rhythm, in the taste, in the overwhelming reality of her. His muffled moans vibrated against her.
The climax, when it tore through her, was silent for a second—a perfect, breathless suspension at the peak of a mountain. Then it erupted. A guttural, roaring cry ripped from her throat as her body seized, her thighs clamping around his head in a vice of ecstasy that could have shattered bone had she not held a thread of control. Lights popped and fizzed overhead. The weights on the rack sang a discordant, shivering choir.
It seemed to last for minutes. Centuries.
Slowly, tremor by tremor, it subsided. The crushing pressure of her thighs relaxed. The violent heat ebbed to a profound, humming glow.
She lifted herself off him, moving with a sudden, surprising grace, and turned to look down.
Lewis slumped against the bench, gasping for air, his face glistening, his eyes dazed and unfocused. He looked wrecked. Enraptured.
Rygell reached down, a gesture almost tender, and wiped her thumb across his cheek. She looked at the moisture there, then back at his awestruck face. The deep, hollow ache was soothed. For now.
But as she straightened up to her full, towering height, feeling the cool gym air on her wet skin, she knew it was a temporary fix. The power hummed on, undiminished. The hunger would return. It was part of her now.
She looked at the broken floor, the bent barbell, the shattered lights. Then she looked at the dazed young man at her feet, already craving more.
The sun was coming up. The world was waking.
She smiled.