Arcarsenal

  I came to consciousness face down in dirt.

  I y there for a moment taking stock. All my limbs were present. My head hurt. Something that smelled like pine but wasn't quite pine filled my nose, and the air was warm and heavy in a way that had nothing to do with any weather I'd experienced in my nineteen years in Ohio.

  I pushed myself up to sitting and immediately registered two things. I was naked. And I had absolutely no idea where I was.

  The forest around me was wrong in a way I couldn't immediately articute. The trees were too tall, the canopy too dense, the light filtering through in thick golden shafts that caught particles I didn't have a name for. No sounds of traffic. No distant hum of anything man-made. Just birds I didn't recognize and the slow creak of massive trees settling in a warm breeze.

  "Okay," I said out loud.

  My voice disappeared into the forest without an echo.

  I stood up, brushed dirt off myself, and did a slow three-sixty. Trees in every direction. No path, no structure, nothing. I was also, I noticed with mild resignation, already half hard. I was nineteen. It was my default state. Being mysteriously teleported to an unknown forest had not fixed it. If anything the warm humid air pressing against every inch of my bare skin had my nervous system running hot in a way that wasn't helping the situation at all.

  I was about to pick a direction at random when something caught the light about ten feet away. Half buried in the moss at the base of a rge root, like it had been sitting there waiting specifically for me, was a ring.

  I walked over and crouched down.

  It was too big. That was the first thing I noticed. Not comically oversized but clearly not finger jewelry — too wide, too rge in diameter, with a smooth dark interior that caught the light differently than the outside. No stone, no markings. Just warm metal that had no business being warm in the shade, humming against my palm with something that wasn't quite vibration and wasn't quite heat but was definitely something intentional. The hum traveled up through my hand and settled low in my gut and my cock, already at half mast, finished the journey to fully hard without any input from me.

  I tried it on my index finger anyway. Slid right off. Middle finger, same. I went through every finger on both hands with the systematic optimism of someone who knew where this was going but wasn't ready to commit to it yet.

  Too big for every single one.

  I held it up and looked at it. Then looked down at myself. My cock was fully hard now, seven inches, the size I'd been quietly pleased about since sophomore year, standing at full attention in the warm forest air and casting what I can only describe as an enthusiastic vote in favor of the only remaining option.

  "No," I said.

  The ring hummed warmly in my palm.

  I looked around the empty forest. Nobody here. Nobody anywhere as far as I could tell. I was nineteen years old, naked, already achingly hard, holding a magical artifact sized for exactly one part of my body, alone in a forest on what I was increasingly certain was not Earth. A fat bead of precum welled at my tip and dropped onto the forest floor and I watched it fall with the detached resignation of a man who had run out of counterarguments and knew it.

  "Fine," I said. "Fine."

  I wrapped my hand around myself and stroked slowly a few times, which was completely unnecessary given how hard I already was but felt like the appropriate ceremony for the occasion, and then held the ring at my tip and began working it down.

  The snug fit of warm metal sliding over my head made my breath catch immediately, my hips pushing forward on their own. The hum that had been sitting in my palm transferred directly into my cock the moment metal met skin, running up through me from that point of contact like a current finding the wire it had been looking for. I worked it down my shaft inch by inch and every millimeter of progress drove the hum deeper into me, spreading outward through my hips and up into my stomach and chest.

  I got it halfway down and had to stop and breathe.

  Something was happening.

  It started as warmth, the same warmth that had been in my palm but concentrated now, sitting exactly where the ring was and radiating outward in both directions simultaneously. I looked down and watched my cock begin to change beneath the ring's position. Thickening first, the girth increasing visibly and immediately, skin pulling tight, the ring adjusting with it, accommodating, as if it had always known what was coming. I was transfixed. My own cock was becoming something else in real time and I physically could not look away.

  I worked the ring the rest of the way down to my base with increasing difficulty because the thickness was still growing as I went, the ring tight and then tighter and then settling fully at my base with a deep pressure that was unlike anything I had felt before in my life. The moment it seated completely the warmth stopped being warmth and became something else entirely.

  I looked down to assess the situation and stopped.

  The shape was wrong.

  Not wrong badly. Wrong in a way that required a specific moment of processing. The head had changed during the transformation, fring outward dramatically into a wide ft ridge that tapered back to the shaft in a shape that my brain sorted into a category immediately and without any ambiguity whatsoever. I grew up on a farm until I was twelve. I knew exactly what I was looking at.

  "You gave me a horse cock," I said to the ring.

  The ring pulsed once. Warm. Satisfied. Correct.

  I stood in the forest holding myself and sitting with that information for a solid fifteen seconds. The fred head. The smooth thick shaft. The weight of it resting in my palm in a way my old anatomy simply hadn't, heavy and warm and substantial in a way that the word substantial didn't quite cover.

  I couldn't decide if this was good news or bad news. I filed it in the rapidly expanding folder of things I was going to think about ter and returned my attention to the current situation, which was that the ring was fully seated at my base and had been building toward something since the moment it touched me and that something was arriving whether I was ready or not.

  The growth hit all at once.

  I felt myself lengthening and my hand had to move to keep up, traveling outward as inch after inch pushed forward in a deep stretching pressure that started at the base and moved outward in a slow relentless wave. It occupied the same neural real estate as pain and pleasure simultaneously, more sensation than my nervous system had a clean category for, and I was making sounds I wasn't consciously producing. My knees had gone soft and I'd put one hand against the nearest tree without deciding to.

  I looked down.

  Past ten inches and still going. Thicker than my own fist could fully close around, the wide fred head flushed dark and slick, my tip producing a bead of something that caught the light slightly wrong, faintly luminescent, running down the length of me in a warm glowing thread. The ring at my base had gone from warm to genuinely hot, pulsing in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat and then outpaced it, driving the growth forward in steady increments.

  It stopped at twelve.

  The deep stretching pressure ceased cleanly, completely, like a mechanism that had finished its designed function. I stood against the tree breathing in shallow careful increments and looked at what the ring had made of me. Twelve inches. The wide fred head of something that belonged on a different animal entirely. Thick enough that substantial felt like an understatement told in a very quiet room.

  I stood there for what was probably thirty seconds just looking at myself.

  "What," I said.

  The orgasm arrived without warning.

  No buildup. No escation. No courtesy whatsoever. One moment I was standing against a tree in a state of profound anatomical surprise and the next my entire body seized from the base of my spine outward and I was coming with a force that had absolutely nothing in common with anything my nineteen years of experience had prepared me for.

  My hips drove forward into empty air. My hand spped against the tree bark and gripped it. My ass clenched so hard my entire lower body locked up simultaneously, thighs rigid, every muscle from my lower back through my glutes contracting in a single powerful wave that lifted me onto my toes and kept me there. I heard myself make a sound that the dense forest swallowed whole, long and broken and completely involuntary.

  The orgasm rolled through me in waves that started deep in my gut and kept going, rolling outward and doubling back and rolling through again, my cock pulsing heavy and insistent and urgent with each wave, and I looked down expecting the obvious and saw nothing.

  The ring had gone dark.

  Instantly. The moment the orgasm began the ring simply consumed everything, drinking it down in real time as fast as my body produced it, the metal shifting from its original color to something richer and deeper and thoroughly satisfied. Whatever came out of me went directly into the ring. Stored. Gone from the world and into whatever the ring was using it for.

  The orgasm finished with one final deep rolling pulse that left me slumped against the tree with both arms braced against the bark, my legs doing the bare minimum required to keep me upright, my breathing ragged and my whole body wrung out and simultaneously more awake than it had been sixty seconds ago. That doubling of exhaustion and crity sitting in me like two things that shouldn't coexist but did.

  I looked down at myself going soft, which took longer than it used to given the new geography, settling out at six inches fccid. Still thick. Still heavy. Still shaped in a way that was going to require expnation in every future human interaction I ever had in this world. The wide fred head sat at my tip looking exactly like what it was and the ring sat at my base looking dark and warm and entirely satisfied with everything it had done.

  I stood against the tree for a long moment just breathing.

  Then something appeared in my vision.

  It materialized dead center, transparent enough that I could still see the forest through it but impossible to ignore or look around. I tried cutting my eyes to the side. It followed. I closed one eye. Still there. I waved my hand in front of my face. It did not care.

  I read it slowly, squinting, trying to make sense of what I was looking at.

  ? SYSTEM UPDATE — NEW SKILLS REGISTERED

  ─────────────────────── STATUS — JACK HARTLEY Sex Mage — Unique Css | Age: 19 | Level: 1 ───────────────────────

  STAT

  VALUE

  STR

  10

  END

  10

  AGI

  10

  INT

  10

  WIS

  10

  CHA

  10

  RESOURCE

  CURRENT

  HP

  100/100

  SP

  100/100

  Charge

  ██???????? 20%

  ACTIVE SKILLS

  TYPE

  COST

  DESCRIPTION

  Dick Sp

  Active

  Low

  Blunt force strike scaling with charge. Leaves Morning Dew residue on contact at high charge.

  Cumbalm

  Active

  Medium

  Direct fresh cum application to wounds. Requires ring override. Serious wound closure only.

  PASSIVE SKILLS

  TYPE

  DESCRIPTION

  Morning Dew: Passive/Active

  Healing and fertile precum. Minor ambient healing on skin contact. Accelerated pnt growth on soil contact. Eating provides strongest minor healing effect. Active use requires ring override.

  Charge Aura: Passive

  Ambient field scales with charge. Enemies hesitate. Allies steady. Wildlife reacts with uncomplicated devotion at high charge.

  Enhanced Physique: Passive

  Speed, strength, endurance and pain tolerance scale directly with current charge. Low charge: survivable. Full charge: superhuman.

  Rapid Closure: Passive

  Minor wounds close automatically while charge remains above zero. Scales with charge level.

  RING STATUS

  Evolution Stage

  Unawakened

  Evolution Progress

  12%

  Bond Slots

  None established

  I stared at it for a long time.

  Sex Mage. That was my css. The system, whatever it was, wherever it came from, had watched me standing naked in a forest with a magical horse cock ring and assigned me the css of Sex Mage and listed my skills with complete institutional sincerity. Dick Sp was an official registered ability with a type and a cost and a description. Cumbalm was in there. Morning Dew. The ring had a name and an evolution stage and was apparently twelve percent of the way to becoming something more than it currently was.

  I read the whole thing twice to make sure I hadn't misunderstood anything.

  I had not misunderstood anything.

  Sex Mage. Dick Sp. Cumbalm. Morning Dew. All official. All registered. All sitting in a status screen floating in my vision in a forest on a world that wasn't Earth while I stood there with a horse cock and a ring and no pants and twenty percent charge and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next.

  "What is happening to me," I said quietly and with complete sincerity, to the ring, to the forest, to whatever had decided I was the right person for this particur destiny.

  No answer came.

  I closed the screen by blinking at it twice, which worked on the first try, which suggested some part of me already understood how this worked even if the rest of me was still several steps behind.

  I picked a direction and started walking.