“There’s another wave coming your way, Zero!” Ciel called over the radio. Thanks to Zero’s erroneously restored body courtesy of Passy misinterpreting their gender during the restoration process the two might have resembled sisters, distinguished only by head, colour, and bust size, but it was the whirlwind of violence that Zero displayed that assured that few would mistake one for the other.

“They’re more persistent than usual today.” Zero commented in her usual stoic tone of voice, unperturbed as what might have been the hundredth Pantheon grunt that day throwing itself at her with suicidal aggression before being cleanly divided in two. In one hand she held her Buster Shot and in the other her Z-Sabre, having to mow down foes from every angle. Foes at a distance were dispatched by a hail of energy bullets and charged shots, while a mountain of sliced up Pantheons stood at her feet for daring to get too close.

“What do you think they’re planning? Even Neo Arcadia usually wouldn’t waste this many troops just trying to wear you down.” Ciel said, concern in her voice even as she watched Zero dispatch half a dozen foes in as many seconds.

“Likely a new weapon.” Zero guessed as yet another Pantheon lunged at her, a slightly different prod to the electric rod that many used as their melee weapon of choice. This slightly modified grunt was the most plentiful type of Pantheon being used against her, while she was kept on her toes by more heavily armoured Pantheons that required her to charge her Z-Sabre to crack, as well as suppressing fire from those with busters mounted on their arms. “That or they’re attempting to occupy me while they focus on another operation. You should make sure the Resistance base is locked down until I return.”



Ciel nodded. Copy X might have been a foolish leader, blinded by ego and insecurity, but he wasn’t stupid either. There must have been some rhyme or reason to this attack.

“I wonder what kind of weapon it could be.” Ciel pondered. “My analysis is coming back inconclusive, there’s nothing to point to what it could be in my database. I don’t think I can do much more while you’re out on the field, Zero.”

“I’ll bring back a sample.” Zero promised, slicing off an arm while leaving the prod intact, assuring that she had at least one fresh sample to bring home even if she cut the rest to pieces.. The hard part would be picking it out of the scrapheap later.

Zero took a momentary respite as she watched a carrier drop in another platoon, taking stock of her weapons. The buster shot was running so hot the barrel nearly melted, forcing Zero to stow it for the time being. The downside was that this left her open to the suppressing fire of the long-ranged Pantheons equipped with busters of their own.

“What could it be, what could it be…” Ciel thought aloud as Zero took the fight to the next horde of Pantheons. “It must be something they think will incapacitate you quickly, or they wouldn’t bother with wave tactics like this… I think it-

Ciel’s voice suddenly began to be filled with static.

“Ciel, I’m losing you.” Zero attempted to boost the signal, but it was no use. Neo Arcadia was jamming them from her own side, likely realising that Zero was likely to cut her losses and leave. With communications out so was the Resistance’s teleporter, meaning that the only way out for Zero was to either run away or reduce the enemy to the last man.

Zero was not, by nature, an overconfident person. They were highly professional, highly aware of their own prowess, and highly unlikely to misjudge a situation. Yet as aware as they were of being in what was almost certainly a trap, the bait was too tantalising not to take. Zero was well aware that Neo Arcadia’s resources were not infinite, and that they were surely taking a severe blow to their army by pouring so many Pantheons into their current offensive. Zero knew that if she could hold out longer, destroy more, it would make the Resistance’s life much easier in the immediate future. Pulling out would be difficult anyway, and either way she would have to clear a path.

And to her credit, cut down the enemy she did for quite some time afterwards. But Zero was not flawless, as a beleaguered Ciel was well aware as she repaired her after half her missions, and thanks to the enemy’s new weapon, one mistake would be all that it took.

Finally, inevitably, Zero slipped. Forced down to her Z-Sabre and pressured by the enemy’s bullets, Zero let a single Pantheon sneak up on her after being forced into a disadvantageous position. Its red eye glowing in triumph acknowledged by its primitive intelligence, it drove the prod clean into Zero’s gut, injecting its energy payload. It barely had time to savour its success before Zero drove her sabre through it, slicing it in pieces as if to reassert her dominance as she prepared to suffer its effects.

Zero was, to her surprise, utterly unprepared for the jolt she had prepared. She had expected some powerful electric shock, or perhaps some sort of corrosive element or sticky substance designed to restrict her movement or partially disable her body. She had continued fighting because she was confident in her body’s ability to resist such things, and yet it wasn’t tripping any of her body’s usual defences or system alerts. It had done something to her, but just what it was was not yet apparent.

Expecting a conventional weapon was Zero’s first mistake. She kept fighting, but noticed that the enemy were slowing down, the bullet-spewing Pantheons lowering their weapons and slowly backing away. She ran a full system diagnosis, trying to find out just what they had succeeded at implanting or infecting her with.

In the end, the first thing she felt was tightness. It didn’t come from her oblivious systems or damage detection, but from her dress, namely around the green arrow that covered her belly. She looked down, and a less stoic reploid’s jaw might have dropped when they saw that she could see a distinctly round orb formed from her abdomen, as if she had suddenly formed a human pregnancy in a matter of moments. It pushed her dress out and her skirt up, almost exposing her panties. It was taut to the touch, as if her belly had been turned into a balloon that slowly but surely inflated itself.

Even the seemingly emotionless Zero was in shock. Of all the things she had expected it to do, bloat her was the last she would have predicted. But she had no time to gawk at it, as more Pantheons were pouring in. Zero’s swing was as keen and deadly as ever as she danced around her enemies, but her movements were starting to become awkward as she had to manoeuvre around her belly’s bump that had already swollen out to the size of a full nine month pregnancy. She could see now how they intended to defeat her: using whatever method had bypassed her system’s defences, they would slowly but surely render her body too awkward to fight back.

Just from this alone, Zero had to modify her footwork and positioning, and if she were a human warrior she might have already been rendered incapable of fighting by this. As it were, she estimated that her fighting ability was down a good ten to fifteen percent, already adapting to her awkwardness and vulnerable new area. With that alone, Zero might have still been able to make it out of the fight otherwise unscathed, but without understanding the nature of what had been done to her, she made her next, worst mistake.

Accosted by two burly Pantheons with their colossal arms thick enough to stop even her Z-Sabre for the first few blows, Zero began to charge her sabre as usual, intending to cleave right through as if their defences weren’t there. But her charge seemed unusually slow, energy coursing through her body as it spread from her internal reactor to her feet and fingertips.



Ready to strike, Zero released it, and instead of the ZWOOM of her Z-Sabre intensifying and cleaving through the hardest alloys, she heard an audible BWOOMF as the energy failed to leave her body at all. And yet it was too much for her body to contain, and so her body grew outwards, her belly ballooning so far it hit the Pantheon in front of her and caused her to bounce backwards off of it, Zero tumbling backwards onto a rear end far larger than it had been a moment ago.

What Zero didn’t know was that the weapon used on her altered how the energy in her body worked, any new energy her body produced being converted into a lighter-than-air energy that would inflate her body wherever it could and could not leave her body to be used in her various weapons. The prod and its initial jolt had provided enough energy to blow up her belly, but had she ended the fight then, it likely would have progressed slowly enough that she could have easily returned to Ciel’s side and diagnosed it before she looked full term with triplets. By charging herself, she created an overflow that spread from her chest to her feet to her fingertips, and thus her entire system.

The result was that Zero got big in every direction, and fast. Her hips bulged out to her sides until she was twice as wide, her waist following suit and giving her an almost obese appearance save for her smooth and round she was. Her thighs bloated, doubling in width and almost squeaking as they rubbed together, Zero having to spread her legs wide apart to keep them separated as she awkwardly hobbled to her feet. The arms she used to push herself up were bloated as well, becoming difficult to move and limited in articulation as she could no longer reach her own belly button, both from her gut being too large and her own arms being naturally pushed out to the sides, struggling to push directly ahead of her. Any attempts to push them out to the front were thwarted by her now head-sized breasts, dwarfed by her belly but obstructive in their own right. Everything directly in front and below her was drowned out by a sea of red followed by a sea of green, her brightly coloured dress managing to scale surprisingly well without ripping.

Her belly was a magnificent sight, having begun to spread wider rather than just longer until it was starting to resemble the size and shape of a beachball or perhaps even a medicine ball, her whole body starting to look distinctly spheroid as her ass cheeks filled out into the size of sofa cushions. Her skirt was long pushed up, orbiting her belly around her synthetic belly button and leaving both of her ass cheek orbs exposed to the world. Even her face looked puffy, cheeks puffed up cutely as her stoic exterior was starting to crack and give way to panic.

Zero stumbled back and forth, trying to adjust to her bloated body as she ponderously put one leg in front of the other, thighs smooshing against each other and squeaking as their over-stretched synthetic skin pushed them onwards and outwards. If they got much bigger, Zero feared that they might become useless altogether.

Although Zero didn’t know how her inflation worked, she did have enough sense to realise that the charge had caused it. She held out her Z-Sabre as far as she could, threatening the two beefy Pantheons even if she wasn’t sure she could swing it horizontally anymore. One charged at her and Zero jumped back, immediately disoriented as she was spent spinning, tumbling head over heels as she flew far higher and further than she expected, just now realising the lighter-than-air part of her inflation.

She landed with a bounce on her belly, tumbling a few more rotations until she landed almost dazed on her back, only her synthetic senses keeping her from laying there stunned on the sand. She managed to get herself back to her feet, feeling her knees sink into her balloon-like belly in the process. She shook her sabre desperately, losing her composure as the now almost completely passive Pantheons surrounded her. Trying to seize her one advantage she leapt into the air again, but by now her body was so light that by the time she floated back down to the sand, the Pantheons had already formed a ring around her, making her feel utterly foolish for the attempt.

Finally, the worst happened: her Z-Sabre flickered, then turned off entirely, leaving her genuinely in shock as she stared at the now useless handle, a weapon she had thought would never let her down. With her body unable to transfer the required energy it had been running on its own limited battery, now exhausted.

Knowing that she she was nigh-harmless, the Pantheons and their prods closed in. Zero could barely fight back with how clumsy and awkward her body was, almost falling over as she was prodded in the belly once again, then fell over for real as she tried to push them away. She fell with a soft thud on her behind, looking all the world like a beached whale as her engorged legs flailed and her arms uselessly tried to reach even one of them as they prodded her, each electric zap adding more energy to her increasingly spheroid body. The sensation became more intense with each prod until Zero could hold it in no longer and began to moan, embarrassed at the sensations her defeat was causing her to feel. Her mind nearly delirious, she was just glad that Ciel couldn’t hear or see her now.

From that moment, the fight was well and truly over. Zero’s belly grew bigger, wider, rounder, until it began to almost consume the rest of her. Her body seemed to be naturally taking the form of a sphere, and all other parts merely accommodated this shape. Her thighs began to sink into the orb until they were consumed almost up to the knee, leaving two useless legs sticking out. Most of her vision was cut off as her neck sunk into what felt like a pit at the top, her momentarily impressive breasts looking proportionately miniscule as they failed to grow out as well, as if to avoid disturbing the perfect roundness of her body. Her butt was the same: her ass cheeks were large enough to make themselves known, but without disturbing her appearance as an orb.

Inevitably, as somebody becoming lighter than air, Zero slowly but surely felt herself start to float off of the ground. It was faster than she might have expected, but thanks to her belly-up position she didn’t realise that she was higher than her opponents until one grabbed her by the foot that was sticking out otherwise uselessly, Zero only able to wiggle it a little in defiance.

Tilted by being grabbed, Zero momentarily glimpsed the most embarrassing realisation of all: her enemies were almost completely decimated, less than ten remaining by the time she was incapacitated, with seemingly no more reinforcements on the way. This realisation sparked what little resistance she had left in her, just barely managing to squeeze her almost helpless arm over to where she had stowed her Buster Shot, the internal battery likely enough for her to dispatch the Pantheons that remained. But before she could squeeze off a shot, the Pantheon holding her leg spoke in a monotone, synthesised voice.

“Release your weapons.” It said. “Please comply for your own safety.”

At first, Zero assumed the obvious. She was a huge, helpless target, and they could likely take her out before she managed to shoot all of them. If she failed to take out those armed with ranged weaponry, she’d simply be shot out of the sky. But then it hit her, and the truth was even more humiliating: even if she did succeed, she had nowhere to go but up. If the Pantheon released her, she would simply float up, and up, and up… The Resistance had no means of retrieving her, making the best case scenario a Neo Arcadia aircraft scooping her up later, if they didn’t just let her perish.

Utterly defeated, Zero released her grip on her Z-Sabre and Buster Shot, and it was over. They hit the dirt, were collected by one of the Pantheons, and she was pulled along like a balloon on a string until a transport arrived to collect her, where she was to be taken back to Neo Arcadia to receive her fate…

–

Zero’s fate was appropriately humiliating, as befitting a legend who had been defeated in such a pathetic manner. She had assumed that she might be destroyed in her helpless state, but she was to be given no easy way out. She was brought to Copy X, thoroughly taunted and humiliated, Zero remaining totally silent and trying and failing to not look despondent and embarrassed. For the first week she was tied to Copy X’s throne by a wire, floating around as a living reminder of his victory.

For a while, Zero was in the dark: although Copy X frequently appeared to gloat over his victory and enjoy the presence of his defeated nemesis, he didn’t share any information about what was happening to the Resistance. For a while, she entertained the possibility that she might be rescued in a daring operation, although she was forced to admit that she was being stored in the most impregnable part of Neo Arcadia directly under the supervision of Copy X and the Four Guardians, particularly Leviathan, who delighted in showing up to taunt and mock Zero, occasionally playing with her over-inflated body until Copy X shooed her away. She had promised to make Zero squeal, a battle that Zero was steadily losing thanks to how sensitive her blown-up body had become.

Inevitably, her feeble hopes were to be shattered by the appearance of Ciel, brought to the throne room in a nearly identical state to Zero, which finally put in perspective her own appearance and how hopeless the idea of escaping on her own was. She was informed that after her disappearance it had been a simple matter to drive the Resistance into a corner, picking off their agents one by one with deliberately non-lethal means, inflating them with the same weapon that had been used on Zero. Eventually they had easily assaulted and conquered the Resistance base, inflating every last one of them including Ciel, who had a special variant used on her designed for humans proving that regardless of human or reploid, all dissidents could be easily captured.

As time passed, it seemed like the only question remaining was whether she would be a permanent fixture in Copy X’s throne room, eventually moved to his trophy room, or be granted to Leviathan to be used as an oversized beach ball in her private pool…