The wind at altitude carried the chemical tang of distant industry, the thermal signatures of a dozen cities, the particular silence that existed only above the reach of birds. Super San cut through it without effort, her body angled in the perfect geometry of controlled descent, her fists still clenched before her like prow ornaments. The moon caught her, rendered her briefly into sculpture: the muscular definition of shoulders and thighs, the red circle burning between her breasts with the steady intensity of a signal fire.
The strait opened below her, a wound of black water between the luminous coastlines. Here, the charts grew vague. Here, the fishing fleets turned back. She felt it before she saw it, a pressure against her consciousness, the sensation of being observed by something that did not use eyes.
She began to glow... The transformation started at her core, the red circle expanding its radiance outward, suffusing the white fabric with inner light. Her body responded, cells multiplying, density increasing, mass accumulating with the particular physics that the Chrysanthemum Bureau's scientists had never successfully explained. Thirty feet. Fifty. A hundred. The air itself seemed to compress around her, to make way for her expanding presence.
The water below her feet churned with the displacement of her passing. Her fists, clenched at her sides, cast shadows across the surface. Her chest rose and fell with the tidal rhythm of her breathing, the red circle visible for kilometers, a beacon and a challenge.
"I will meet you in your domain, monster!"
The voice that emerged from her colossal throat carried the subsonic harmonics of landslides, of calving glaciers.
"I feel it watching me... The Dream Kraken waits." "Face me, creature! I am Super San, protector of..."
The first tentacle struck without warning, without the displacement of water that should have preceded motion. It wrapped her left arm from shoulder to wrist, the surface not slimy but somehow more intimate than touch should permit, carrying the temperature of fever dreams, of sleep paralysis, of the moment before waking when the nightmare still holds substance.
She twisted, her superhuman strength engaging, and found no leverage. A second tentacle found her right arm, a third her waist, a fourth coiling with obscene precision around her chest, compressing the red circle, dimming its light with pressure that should have been impossible.
"Uuuuh...You caught me off guard, monster!"
The slime began to secrete. It emerged from the tentacle surfaces not as liquid but as vapor, as concept made material, coating her bodysuit with iridescence that soaked through the fabric as though the weave offered no resistance. Where it touched her skin, at neck and wrists and the few points where the suit allowed exposure, it carried the particular sensation of falling asleep against one's will, of consciousness becoming negotiable.
She shaped the word with lips that felt increasingly distant from her intentions. Her fists, still clenched, began to loosen. The red circle between her breasts flickered, its glow intermittent as a failing bulb.
"no...I am... Super San... I cannot..."
Super San - THE SLEEPY ADVENTURES - 11:http://memberslogin.hipcomix.com/gallery3/index.php/Mitru/Super-San/THE-SLEEPY-ADVENTURES-OF-SUPER-SAN?page=3
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