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Sebastian didn’t expect his task of taking down Urbanshade to be an easy one, but recently he felt like he had hit a steep wall in his progress.
His sense of doom had only been growing. The facility was decaying, almost entirely stripped of food or sustainable shelter. No matter what obscure far-off room he stayed in, he would hear bullets, screaming, scraping metal, walls cracking, creatures wailing, lights flickering and buzzing, glass shattering, and any other sound that would invoke anxiety. His gathering of information, or blackmail as he was hoping for, had been slowed since he had concluded that scavenging the blacksite on his own every day was far too risky. For the most part he had himself to blame for this, because without him they'd still be locked up.
A few weeks into his quest, he devised a new strategy, one to direct research away from being recovered by Urbanshade and towards himself instead. Business seemed to come in waves as divers would be sent out. However this time it had been somewhere around a week since the last group of expendables showed up to his shop. He had to re-locate himself since then, as he does every few days to keep himself hard to track. Hopefully this new location was still easy enough for potential customers to reach.
Sebastian slowly woke up from his sleep, signaling to him that it was probably a new day, and therefore time to set up his shop. He yawned and slithered over to the crate nearest to him, opening it up to see what stolen goods he still had in stock: a medkit, some batteries, various light sources. He tested the flashlights and lanterns, uncomfortably brightening his pitch-black darkness, especially after he had just woken up. He did not test the flash beacon; he wasn't making that mistake again. He grabbed his belts from the floor near the crates and fastened five items to the length of his tail. Now for his least favorite part of his days, sitting in a small dark room and waiting for someone to show up.
Sometime during his wait, he found it becoming difficult to stay awake, but not in the sense that he wasn't well-rested. More like something had exhausted him, or that he was losing strength. Then it hit him that the last time he had eaten anything was when he was relocating those few days ago, when he had found some dead salmon that had come in through a cracked wall. In his years being imprisoned by Urbanshade, he had eventually developed the skill to ignore his hunger — perhaps a little too well. He sighed and prepared to unfasten all of his belts and go lurking for something to eat until a strange noise stopped him. It started quiet and muffled until it became an ear-piercing screech. A bright flash of neon pink shone through the vent and the sound vanished down the other side of the hall. But he began to hear another sound as well, of rapid footsteps and heavy breathing. The footsteps became louder and more panicked until they seemed to be mere feet away from Sebastian. He moved his hand over to his shotgun, preparing to have to deal with a wall dweller.
He relaxed his tense posture once he saw that it was just an expendable. They were still halfway in the vent, sweating and panting as if they had seen a ghost, or more likely something worse. He waited for them to stop hyperventilating, and before they started to walk away, he turned on his lure light, causing them to whip around quickly and scream with what little energy they had left.
Sebastian tried not to laugh at the extreme reaction. "Sorry friend, I didn't mean to scare you. My name is Sebastian, and I'm on your side. In exchange for any research you have collected, I'll trade you for these items on my tail. I'm sure they'll be much more useful to you than some silly data, no?"
The expendable looked him all over, trying to decipher what he even was. In the brighter environment, Sebastian got a better look at them. They were somewhat friendlier-looking than most of the divers who would come down there, especially the ones who would climb all over him, flashbang him, and try to steal his wares. Perhaps he found this one’s scaredy-cat personality endearing, or maybe it was their bruised face and minor bullet wounds that he saw as pathetic and cute. Sebastian's acute senses could smell the blood on their wounds and he wasn't quite sure how he felt about the fact that it made his mouth water a little. He would try his best not to think about it for now, he's got a customer to serve.
They slowly stood up out of the vent and walked over to inspect the items for sale. They finally seemed comfortable enough to stop breathing heavily but they weren't fully relaxed either, shooting nervous glances up at Sebastian every few seconds. They picked up the medkit and stood back up to look at him in the eyes.
"Good choice. You look like you need that one. That'll cost ya 200." Sebastian bent down slightly to meet the expendable's outstretched hand when his stomach made a loud groaning noise. They quickly retracted their hand. Sebastian flustered slightly but still kept his hand out.
"Sorry about that. I'm just a little hungry is all. Come on now, you're not getting that for free."
They extended their hand again, now with some dripping wet loose papers and files, and in that moment their sleeve slid down to reveal a completely unhealed bloody gash running along the underside of their forearm. The sight and smell of the fresh liquid hit Sebastian like a slap to his face, and with incredible speed he yanked the expendable by the wrist and pulled them tightly to his chest, gripping them with so much strength that all they could do was tremble and cry out. The medkit and research folders fell to the floor as he pulled their bloody arm up to his face, his gills puffed out as he took in the delicious scent.
He pulled their arm back up to his face, opening his mouth making them widen their eyes in fear at his huge set of all-canine teeth. He ran his long thick blue tongue along the wound. The disappointingly small amount of blood only seemed to make Sebastian’s stomach feel emptier. Even when he bit down on their arm, it wasn’t enough. If anything, he was more satisfied by their squirming and squealing. With how severely he overpowered them, they were completely helpless to fight against him.
Sebastian removed his mouth from the wound and licked the blood off of himself. The expendable saw an opportunity to escape once he lifted one of his arms to adjust his hair back behind his fin. They kicked back against his torso to leverage themselves out of his grip, twisting their injured arm to free it from the hold of Sebastian’s third hand, falling a few feet to the floor and landing clumsily on their knees. With their good arm they snatched the medkit and bolted in the direction of the vent.
Sebastian looked up and was immediately angered, violently whipped his tail around the room, causing most of the goods fastened to it to fall off, and slammed boxes and crates to the wall in front of the vent before the expendable could flee. The impact sent shockwaves across the floor and the diver stumbled to the ground. They started panting, almost as much as when they arrived, as they turned around to look up at the gigantic fish man that had trapped them in there.
His relatively positive opinions of this expendable had faded. He had plenty of customers who had harassed him before and all he did was kick them out. But at the moment, he was so hungry and enticed by the scent and lingering taste of their blood that all he could think about was how they looked like a rich source of protein. He circled his tail around them, enclosing them in a way, and slithered his body nearer to them. Despite already being on the ground they almost appeared to shrink and lower with every inch he came closer. Their eyes got impossibly wide, and then even wider on top of that. Rapid heartbeat, nervous trembling, labored breathing: all things that Sebastian couldn’t get out of his ears, couldn’t look away from. He felt like a wolf that just had a small helpless sheep show up at his feet. A starving wolf.
“What do you think you're doing? Did I not make myself clear? I said it's not free.” He snarled, lowering his eyebrows and locking all three of his eyes onto the expendable's frantically shaking ones.
They started to sob and wriggle in his coils, trying to say something along the lines of “I didn't mean to,” but most of what came out was unintelligible begging. Sebastian had enough. He had reached his breaking point. He lunged at the expendable and clamped his hand around their neck, lifting them into the air, hanging over his wide open mouth. They choked and clawed at his hand to no give from Sebastian. His long slender tongue curled around their ankle and slowly dragged them lower, closer to his throat. They looked down as best they could with his hand constricting their neck to see his huge gaping maw with finely-pointed, slightly bloodstained teeth. His throat looked like it went down endlessly, with barely any light except for thin strings of saliva reflecting faint amounts of his lure light. They tried to pull their legs up to their chest, but his tongue plunged their right leg back down even further than before. Sebastian used one of his other hands to pull down their left leg and coiled his tongue around it as well. He lowered them enough for his teeth to snag the bottom of their diving suit, shredding a hole in it big enough to use his hands to rip it off of the rest of them in an easy upward motion, just like he was taking the wrapping off of a snack. They were left only in a pair of thin diving shorts and a tank top undershirt.
The expendable shuddered when Sebastian's tongue touched their bare skin, warm and slimy. The feeling of his breath on their skin didn't do much to ease their fears either. Sebastian chuckled at the grossed-out faces they made before he let go of their neck to put his hands on their shoulders instead. What was initially a relief for the expendable, who was now gasping and trying to catch their breath back, turned into even worse panic as he started to use his hold on their shoulders to push them down faster than his tongue did. Once he got them low enough to where his mouth was around their thighs, he let go of them entirely and instead tilted his head up with a big gulp that sent them down several more inches. They panicked and tried to push on him with their hands to escape, to which he laughed through his nose, clearly trying to mock them while he was in a position where verbally insulting them wasn't an option. Just as they started to be able to slide themselves out, he gulped as strongly as his throat muscles were able to, swallowing them down far enough to where only their hand stuck out of his mouth. They made one last attempt to escape, one last futile effort as he swallowed one more time and completely trapped them in.
Sebastian laid back against the wall and sighed with relief. Finally, his emptiness had been replaced with a sensation of being overwhelmingly stuffed. He didn't have to look down to know that his belly had gotten visibly much bigger, but he did anyway. It amplified his sense of accomplishment to see his prey fill out his shape. In the dim light he saw, and felt, hands frantically rubbing along his stomach walls, searching for some way to freedom. The expendable's muffled cries and screams were nothing but indecipherable gibberish to him, but either way, he loved to hear it. The writhing and shifting around pushed a loud, deep burp out of him, catching him a bit off guard.
He put a hand on his belly to meet the expendable's soft hand imprint, gently at first, then he shoved on it and snickered at the quiet squeak it resulted in. He kept pushing and shaking around his victim, eventually until his stomach made a loud gurgling noise, not unlike the growl from earlier, but more impressive. He rubbed his hands over the arch of his belly, feeling the way he was stretched out two or three feet more than usual. The more thought he gave it, the more he realized that he really liked how he looked stuffed, and how it felt to be so painfully full. As he rubbed, the noises continued, maybe even getting louder, and that excited him too, though he wasn't sure exactly why.
While Sebastian was relishing his meal, the expendable was in hell. Sebastian's stomach was hot, slimy, and completely dark. His stomach walls squeezing around them made a constant squelching and growling. The acid they were covered in from head to toe was gradually transitioning from sticky and uncomfortable to stinging and painful. None of this was helped by him hitting and prodding them from the outside, laughing at them, mocking them, and doing everything possible to make sure they were having a worse time than he was. They didn't expect to return from their mission, especially after being classified as something disposable, but they at least didn't think it would end this shamefully.
Sebastian moved over to his primary spot, near his desk, and reclined a little more comfortably. He picked up the folders that were “exchanged” for the medkit. It was a bit hard to read them when he kept getting interrupted by loud growling and gurgling, his prey occasionally trying to weakly kick and push at his insides, and him having to burp every few minutes. The documents seemed to be unimportant anyway. Most of the research he received was infuriatingly clean, consisting mostly of financial records, oil rig safety reports, employee insurance, everything boring, and still nothing about the horror they put him through. In fact, it was all so boring that it was making him drowsy – either that or his overly full stomach. Perhaps it was both of those things. Still, he continued to read through the pages in full, just on the possibility of finding something he could use against Urbanshade.
His poor prey was fading in and out of consciousness. Their skin had become soft, gooey in some places. The searing pain had been overridden by a heavy fatigue, their energy rapidly depleting from them. All they could see was black, and all they could hear was the sloshing and growling around them. All they could feel was Sebastian's stomach walls massaging more acid into their skin, draining them of their last shred of strength.
By the time he finished sorting through the research, he was so tired it was next to impossible to sit up straight. He curled up loosely, giving himself enough room to still see his large belly. It had definitely become softer. He poked at it again. Unfortunately, this time there was no response of yelping or kicking, only a low rumble from deep within him.
Oh well, what a shame. I should do that again sometime.
He flicked his lure light off and closed his eyes. He would have to relocate again tomorrow. Maybe he would have another snack on the way to his new hideout.