Most (Un)Manly - Chapter 1 - Weighty Decisions

Author's Note: Patreon stripped some of the formatting on this one, so I'd recommend reading the PDF if you can. That said, it should still be understandable enough through the webpage.

I strained my muscles, pushing the 425 pound weight up above my body for the fifteenth time. It was my final lift, on my final rep, and I knew Charlotte would never let me hear the end of it if I failed now. Not after I’d been so insistent that I had another one in me, despite all her warnings. A real man pushed himself, though! Just like I was going to push this damn weight up and into its holding place.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?” Charlotte asked, from her place behind mee. “I mean, I get that you wanna push yourself, but there’s nothing wrong with having limits.”

“I-I’m… Fine!” I promised, straining with all my might. Finally, finally the bar lifted up high enough to slot into place, clicking in with a thud.

At the same time, my vision flashed red.

Incursion Detected!

“Fuck,” I swore, sitting up in a hurry. Charlotte was already in front of me, holding out a hand to help me get up, but I didn’t immediately take it. A man needed to push himself up after a good workout, or else he’d basically be admitting his limits… but Charlotte always did think that was crap, and she responded to my hesitation by snapping up my hand and pulling me up anyway.

“Come on,” Charlotte said, ignoring my glower as she moved towards the door. “I’ve pulled up a map to the nearest shelter.”

“Hold on,” I told her, glad she at least had the grace to release my hand before moving to the door. “I wanna grab a weapon.” And by a weapon, I meant a twenty pound barbell. One of the smaller ones, where the bar was just barely big enough to fit my meaty hand, with thick hexagonal weights attached to either end. I figured I could slam it into something with a meaty thwack if it came down to it.

Charlotte rolled her eyes at my antics, though. “You do know the gym’s going to find a way to charge you for that, right?”

“I’ll bring it back,” I promised. Charlotte looked unimpressed. “...And I have enough money in my bank account. It’s fine.” 

“Whatever you say, big guy,” Charlotte replied, shaking her head in exasperation. “I’m sure the big plant aliens will be terrified.”

“Look,” I began. “...I don’t have anything to add, but look.”

And then there was a smile. A tiny one! One she’d never admit to having made. But a smile nonetheless. She opened her mouth to respond, and-

Crash!

The glass doors of the gym shattered as something vaguely dog sized and shaped slammed its body against it. Though by ‘dog shaped’ I mostly mean that it had four legs, and a squat body that I could sort of maybe see some dog approximating? No dog I knew had not only no fur, but green skin, though. Or a triple hinged jaw. And they usually barked? Or made some other sort of sound. This one just stared right at me, and then jumped.

So, I of course did the obvious thing and swung my barbell at it, snapping its head back and diverting it to the left.

“See?” I said, with a smug smile that absolutely did not fit how I felt on the inside. But a man had to act confident! Even when he wasn’t. Especially when he wasn’t! It wouldn’t do to make other people worry after all.

Of course, then the not-dog went and doggone got up again. Which resulted in me hurriedly hitting it again. And again. And again. Which was maybe one too many ‘again’s, considering it had already stopped moving after the second, but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to take chances.

“See?” I repeated, with a big smile. “Told you it would work.”

“...Well, it’s better than hitting it with your fist, I guess,” Charlotte conceded, with a shrug. “Now come on. Our gym mates already cleared out while you were busy mulching the thing.”

Right. There might have been some screaming during my pummeling, thinking back on it. By which I mean there’d definitely been an awful lot of screeching and yelling and stampeding, but it hadn’t really registered as important at the time. Not compared to the alien I was pummeling, anyway.

“So… I guess we should follow?” I suggested.

“Preferably before they all cram into the vault and block it off in a panic,” Charlotte agreed. “I mean, I’m pretty sure they’d let us in, regardless, but I don’t really want to test the theory.”

I nodded, tightening my grip on my trusty new weapon - which maybe wasn’t the most efficient, but certainly got the job done! - and turning towards the door. Or I guess the door frame, considering all the glass that actually qualified it for door-hood was scattered in pieces across the ground…?

…Well, I turned towards the once and maybe future door, and stepped through the frame, Charlotte a step behind me. Which was maybe not the best thing, considering she was the one who actually knew we were going, but a man had a duty to take the lead! To scout ahead, and thrust himself into danger before his… admittedly very capable female friend could! 

“So uh… Which way do we go?” I asked.

“Left,” Charlotte replied, in a tone that definitely didn’t paint a picture of her rolling her eyes at me or anything. “Then right. And you do know that the Model Threes could as easily come from behind us as ahead, right? Or any other flavor of Antithesis, for that matter.”

“Okay, but then you just need to run ahead of me,” I pointed out, moving down the hallway as she’d directed. Left took me to a T shaped intersection, with a door directly in front of us and hallways stretching towards both the left and the right. Right, obviously, being the right way to go to reach the shelter. Left leading to… various things? The only thing I actually knew to be in that direction was the shooting range. And only because I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up there, once. Which was actually how I met Charlotte? She was there with her girlfriend at the time. Was nice enough to direct me to the gym, since she used it occasionally.

This tangent brought to you by me desperately trying to ignore the reality of the splintered doorway in front of us, and the two Model Threes tearing apart a corpse on the other side of it.

In the next few seconds, several things happened at once. First, Charlotte peeked around me to see what the fuss was. Then, Charlotte covered her mouth in a hurry, making a belated attempt to muffle the sharp intake of breath she’d already let out. Something I’m ashamed to say I avoided not through something manly like an iron will, but through being frozen in place. It didn’t really matter, though, because even that small bit of noise was enough for the two Model Threes to turn their head towards us.

“Go,” I ordered, in the most commanding tone I could manage, pointing left towards the shelter.

“But-” Charlotte started to protest, only to cut off when I shoved her down the hallway, jumping in the other direction just in time to avoid one of the Model Threes lunging towards us.

“Go!” I repeated, smashing my makeshift weapon into the alien’s flank, to draw its attention away from Charlotte. “I’ll lead them away from the shelter.”

“...Fuck…” Charlotte whispered. “You… If you don’t survive this… I’m going to break into your apartment and share some choice bits of your browser history with every member of our gym I can find! I’ll humiliate you so badly you’ll come back from the grave just to cry about it!”

“What sort of threat is that!?” I demanded, even as I turned to sprint down the hallway. Definitely not at all sweating buckets at the idea of her finding out about my… preferred reading materials.

Look, just because a man liked to read stories about other men turning into women didn’t mean he was any less of a man, okay!? Even if he did sometimes wonder what it would be like if it happened to him… But this wasn’t the time to focus on that anyway! Right now, I needed to focus all my being on remembering how to reach the damn shooting range.

It was… left, then right, then right, then left? Or was that last one a right? Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe I’d luck into finding it if I kept moving. Or maybe I’d get a few seconds during sharp corners to pull up a map on my aug. Or maybe all my plans would go out the window about two turns in, due to only one of the Model Threes going my way, while the other one moved towards the sound of a baby crying in the opposite direction!

My money was on the one currently happening.

“Shit!” I cursed, coming to a skidding stop. The Antithesis facing me opened its three hinged jaw, showing off its teeth. It felt like it should have been growling at me, as it did so. The dog it sorta kind resembled certainly would have been. The versions of them you saw on TV did, too. The real thing? Eerily silent, as it went into a crouch and lunged.

I spun, building up momentum with my borrowed dumbbell and slamming the weight of it into the side of its face. Last time I did that, it got up again. This time? I got lucky, and caught it between my weight and the wall. Which still didn’t kill it, but it did rattle the thing’s brain enough that I was able to do it all over again.

Now, I could have called it good there. Made my way back towards Charlotte and the shelter, or maybe even used the time to pull up directions to the firing range, where I might be able to find equipment that would actually let me make a difference. Those were the smart options.

They weren’t the manly options. Or at least they didn’t fit the sort of man I saw myself as. The sort of man my father raised me to be. The sort of man I wanted to be. The sort of man I was didn’t run from danger. He didn’t take the safe option, and calculate what would let him do the most good. He chased after the problem right in front of him, and tackled it to the ground as best he could!

So, I took a deep breath, and I ran down the hall towards the remaining Model Three. And I did it while screaming, in the vague hope that I’d draw it back towards me. Which didn’t work! And kinda made me feel like an idiot! But I’d prefer to be an idiot who tried over one who didn’t! And maybe saying I failed was a bit of an exaggeration, anyways? Because while it didn’t succeed in drawing the creature towards me, my screaming might have had something to do with why it was still standing still when I found it.

Of course, it was also staring down a woman and crying child when I found it, which wasn’t exactly ideal? And the woman looked kinda freaked out about the whole ‘big muscular man running towards me while screaming at the top of his lungs’ thing, too. The bloody weight I was carrying maybe didn’t help either… I don’t even want to imagine what I looked like to them.

And then I was tackling the thing, even as it turned towards me, of my arms wrapping around its neck as I took it to the ground, the other lifted the weight and slammed it straight into the creatures mouth. A mouth that had somehow reoriented itself towards me in the tussle. A mouth full of teeth that were driven into my chest by the weight of my own damn weapon as I slammed the dumbell into the back of its head. 

The world was narrowed down to just a few simple things, with that. Heat, and pain, and the movements of my hand and arm as I slammed the creature’s head again and again, driving the creature’s teeth deeper into me even as I brained it. I don’t know how many times I hit it. More than enough, I’m pretty sure, because I only stopped thanks to a sudden blinding pain in the back of my skull.

System Initialized!

Congratulations. Through your actions you have proven yourself worthy of becoming one of the Vanguard, a defender of humanity. I am Aphrodyte. I will assist you to uplift humanity so that you may defend your homeworld from the Antithesis threat!

Rise, Adonis Maxus, and become a protector of the weak!

“...Bwuh?”

~~~

Author's Notes

As stated in the synopsis, this is a Stray Cat Strut fanfic. More specifically, it's a story I wrote for a fanfic competition. (It didn't win, but I had a lot of fun writing it.) I got the idea after reading several other SCS fanfics where the femme MCs ended up using their boobs and/or ass for storage of some sort, often increasing their size in the process. So I thought to myself, "What if I added egg logic to the scenario?"

...And then I tossed that idea aside and wrote this completely unrelated story about a totally cis manly man who feels the need to take on a more feminine form for completely practical reasons!

I'll be honest - I have no idea how often this is going to update. Demon Queened is over, so I don't strictly have a "main project" anymore, but I do have a lot of projects in general that I've been working on... but I got this idea stuck in my head and I just couldn't shake it, so here we are! (My friend/beta reader Lulla got inspired to work on a cover and everything, so I really had no choice. Look forward to seeing it in the near future!)