Tiger & Dragon

Written by Akane :: [Saturday, 16 March 2019 21:43] Last updated by :: [Saturday, 11 December 2021 23:32]

Art by AizAlter and soSiiCK

Edited by Rhys86


Golden scales the size of clouds crossed the sky with all the elegance of a traditional performance, dancing in meanders like ripples of sunlight cast on the surface of a lake. They belonged to a legendary creature, one known intimately to the ancestors of those who currently resided in the sacred land of China, former peak of human civilization, and home to magics of immeasurable power. The being in question was a dragon, one of such awesome size and majesty that the shadow it cast over the land could have blotted out entire nations. Its intimidating body was so long and serpentine that none could tell where it started or ended, forming an endless golden chain, an eternal reminder of man’s cosmic insignificance. 

Not the dragon though, for it was a being of the cosmos, an avatar of power, a presence so potent that its merest rumble was enough to silence nature’s greatest thunders. It was a magnificent and beautiful monster, and as it snaked across the sky at supersonic speeds it breathed fire in all the colours of the rainbow, a sign of challenge to its approaching rival.

The newcomer was a silver tiger, gigantic and proud. Like the dragon, this great feline was of colossal dimensions, and as it sprinted across the heavens great stones manifested in mid-air to support its steps, such that it appeared to be flying. It was a powerful piece of spellcasting, and evidence of divinity to match that of the dragon. With a roar that might have smashed out the sun, it acknowledged the challenge of its peer, consenting to a great duel, a test of strength and endurance.

Both monsters accelerated to impossible speeds, racing neck-and-neck, and leaving a trail of fire and destruction in their wake. Neither paid attention to the consequences of their sport, the thousands of lives lost and the untold millions caused in property damage. No, the only concern of these merciless creatures was to prove themselves the superior. So great was the speed of their headlong passage that the very atmosphere caught fire, atmosphere and ozone abrading away to allow raw sunlight to play upon Earth’s unshielded body. Within minutes the seas boiled and the polar ice caps melted, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction of environmental disasters that would ultimately halve the global population, a trauma that would be scored into mankind’s collective memory for generations…

...such would be the case, were the two contenders not Super Goddesses.

At some point the pace of the race seemed to slacken, the two divinites relaxing their pace, though not the intensity of their competition. Evidently one of them had proved themselves the fastest, and it seemed that victor was the dragon. Lashing and clawing at one another they dropped from the sky, and in the process obliterated an entire city when their humongous mass touched down, crushing everything and everyone for miles around flatter than a pancake. Huge roiling clouds of dust hid the two mythic beasts from view as they continued to fight, a clash that reduced the surrounding mountains to rubble.

This apocalypse of fire and death was merely the background to the two creatures. In truth, neither gave a damn for the consequences of their sport. But when the dust settled, both titans appeared to have vanished, though in truth they had shed their bestial guises for a different shape altogether.

Two young Chinese women glared at one another. Both were graced with a beauty that was otherworldly, possessing the silkiest skin ever to grace the human body. Those bodies were themselves idealised perfection, a par of masterpieces that could bring whole nations to begging surrender at their feet. Their eyes were obscenely big, looking more like something out of a graphic novel or manga. They were almond-shaped and burned with a fiery spirit of competition, an effect enhanced by an extremely-sexy dab of red-winged eyeliner.

They were more alike in other ways too, for although radically different in build and attire, they shared the same height and facial features, genetic hallmarks that signalled their rarity among even the Super Goddesses. They were a matched set, twin sisters, each the perfect ying to the other’s yang. Zheng Mei and Zheng Lei.

The differences though were distinct. Mei sported a mahogany mane of hair so long that it did not so much as brush the ground as sweep it spotless. The only exceptions to this rule were two lengths tied up in a pair of winsome buns, a look that complimented her tomboyish blue qipao, tight matching pants and blue converse sneakers, which were customised with a cute tiger design. Evidently she was aiming to present herself as the sporty girl-next-door, though the effort was not entirely successful. Her features might have been sweetly adorable, and her limbs toned with lean muscle, but it was impossible for anyone to see past her raw feminine divinity and confuse her for the fun, approachable tomboy she presented to the world. Simply put, Mei was far too voluptuous to pull off the look, possessing tits bigger than her head and legs that went on forever, something that her skintight pants made even more evident by how they clung to every sculpted curve and cranny of her thighs and ass. About the only part of the ensemble that matched her persona was her combat gauntlets and stance, both telegraphing her status as a renowned martial artist.

Her sister Lei had a less athletic build overall, tending towards academic activities and bookworm smarts. This did nothing to lessen the impact of her own unbelievable body, which was currently compressed inside an extremely tight red qipao patterned with colorful dragons, its sleeves extended out right to her encased fingers in a manner that suggested a skintight bodysuit. Her juicy legs however were on full display, wrapped up in white latex stockings and adorned with red high-heels. Her own hair was just as long and luxuriant as Mei’s, but was worn in a beautiful braid that had all the length and girth of an anaconda. Lensless glasses framed her indifferent gaze, a quiet statement as to her intellect and her divinity - smart enough to wear glasses, but possessed of godlike vision.

Quite literally, for the sisters were both Super Goddesses, born endowed with power, unlimited power. Which handily explained their transformation into mythical animals, and rendered their destruction of the Earth’s biosphere not that big a deal, considering their power level was beyond universal. The first of their kind to be born from a single pregnancy, their birth had been proclaimed a miracle and broadcast live across the world. Given the rarity of Super Goddesses, the birth of two to a single mother was unprecedented, let alone the fact that they had both originated from the same sperm-egg pairing.

In darker times, one of them would in all likelihood have not been allowed to exist alongside her sibling. Thankfully the Zheng sisters had been born in the late 21st century, and were greeted not with disapproval but with a mother’s smiling love as her two divine daughters phased painlessly up through her stomach and into her waiting arms.

Unprecedented indeed, and yet it had happened, leaving the world curious (and concerned) as to how the two superhuman siblings would develop with time. Given the petty feuds and squabbles common to brothers and sisters since man first crawled out of the primordial ooze, there was some apprehension as to what might happen when two god-children began fighting over who got to play with their favourite toys.

Case-in-point, this little bout. Apparently furious that neither the race or subsequent fight had settled their dispute, the two siblings strode towards one another, glaring angrily all the time. The heat in their stares rose to physical intensity, and powerful laser beams shot forward from their eyes, the collision of the two particle streams blasting out a thermal backwash that instantly melted their surroundings. It was awesome and terrible, and utterly the same.

Unable to gain an advantage over the other, both siblings abruptly stepped back and relaxed into normal postures, as if nothing had happened. They mutually sullen expressions reflected a matching discontent.

"That was totally unfair Leilei, you were only faster than me because I got distracted by those cute nuns praying to me over Switzerland. I say we go for another around, this time I’ll totally beat you!” This protest came from the older (by half-a-second) sister, using a slightly modified version of the proper honorific by which to address a younger sibling. Her competitive, angry look abruptly melted into a cheeky smile, her magical lips curling to just the right degree of cocksure confidence needed to complement her tomboyish, ‘jock with a heart of gold’ persona.

"You are the eternal bad loser, Jiejie. Lei says you should accept defeat, Lei wouldn't have had to embarrass you if you didn't have the ridiculous idea of racing against her." The braided sister answered in a far more delicate and controlled stream of Chinese. This was delivered in what could be called a strangely cute monotone, akin to a sci-fi robot emulating humanity. The uncanny cherry on top was Lei’s almost infantile habit of referring to herself in the third person. Quirks aside, her composure was enviable, with a zen-like calm that might almost have been learned at the knee of the Buddha, Lei’s stoic reserve never faltering in the face of surprise or adversity…  except perhaps when Mei gloated at having the better pair of melons. Some things tried even the resolve of Super Goddesses, and filial envy was one of them.

"Well, if the race was such a ‘ridiculous’ idea, then why did you accept?" Mei taunted, placing her hands on her plentiful hips.

“A lesson in humility,” Lei answered, a sly and almost imperceptible shift of her lips and eyebrows revealing smug satisfaction masked behind her usual indifference. "Sometimes, Lei just wants to see her sister mess up. Even when the future is clouded, your overconfidence remains a galactic constant, and Lei finds it fascinating to anticipate what consequences you’ll bring upon your own head next. How could Lei put it in sufficiently simplistic language? Perhaps it is like anticipating a disaster. Like watching a train crash or a volcano erupt, Lei finds it impossible to look away."

"You’re horrible Leilei,” Mei pouted. “How could you say such mean things to your big sister that loves you so much?!"

"But it's true." A stern voice spoke from behind Mei. “The two of you are a pair of disasters.”.

“Great..." Mei might have been possessed of omnipresent awareness and omnipotent power, but she still sighed and slumped like a teen anticipating a scolding when she recognised the present behind her. “Hey there, Mom’.”

‘Mom’ was Park Ha-neul; Korean TV superstar, mistress of every martial art to have ever existed, fitness model, health instructor, and Super Goddess. She was also Mei and Lei’s adoptive mother, and right now was clearly angry, but what parental figure would not be utterly pissed-off with two irresponsible youths whose idea of resolving disputes was to break entire worlds? 

“So, once again I find myself clearing up the messes you two leave behind, and on one of my few free days on top of things!”

Right now, Ha-Neul was holding an entire mountain range over her head with one hand. It was the series of peaks that had served as the backdrop to the two sister’s brawl, and cast a deep shadow that leant a grim aspect to Mei and Lei’s legal guardian, one sufficient to even intimidate two divinities.

“I presume you young ladies know why I am here? Really girls, I thought I raised you better than this!”

"M-Mom! We know we destroyed half the planet, but I promise you we were right about to put everything back together!” Mei tried to excuse herself. She and Lei had been born from a thoroughly normal Chinese couple in 2075. Their parents had been poor and not very successful in life, and had consequently asked the Super Goddesses for help in raising two omnipotent girls. Ha-neul had been up to the task and so took on responsibility for the Zheng twins. 

The Korean superstar had become the only mother figure the sisters remembered, and they had accorded her all the love and respect that owed a parent and teacher, for Ha-neul had not only passed on her knowledge of every martial art in existence, but instilled a passion for them in the two girls. Having a pair of apprentices that could go round-for-round with her in the sparring ring had seemed mutually beneficial at the time, but now Ha-neul was left wondering if she had over-indulged the girls and failed to teach them restraint. Having only ever trained against figures who matched their own limitless power, the girls had never gotten into the habit of pulling their punches.

"And Lei, why didn't you reign your sister in?" She directed an all-but-literal death-glare at the supposedly more responsible of the two. “I’m very disappointed in you?”

Disappointment, the worst condemnation any parent could bestow upon a child. The woman in the red qipao immediately hunched over and tried to hide behind her older sister.

"Oh now you choose to act shy and inoffensive!” Mei threw up her hands in disgust. “Of course!"

“Enough!” Ha-neul set the mountain range down and sternly folded her arms. Mei and Lei had become entirely independent at age thirteen, but their little family still met up from time to time, and Ha-neul was just as familiar with dropping in to correct their wayward actions. “You two are both already eighteen, and should be setting an example for other emerging Super Goddesses. Instead you’re making me look like an irresponsible parent."

“Oh come on, Mom, you’re such a pain in the ass! It’s not like I can’t just fix all this!” With that declaration, Mei snapped her omnipotent fingers and rendered their destruction no more. The flattened city was resurrected to its former glory, shattered mountains and blocked rivers reverted to their natural state, the atmosphere reprocessed and the billions of dead resurrected with no memory of their traumatic deaths. “Look, see, fixed, done, reload from save and do-over!”

"If only it was that simple Mei,” Ha-neul shook her head. “Even if you hit a reset button, the truth remains that the both of you caused immense suffering and didn’t care. Worse yet, you barely noticed.. Do you think that's proper behaviour of Super Goddesses your age? Even if you weren't intentionally trying to hurt anyone, your carelessness is an oversight I cannot ignore as a mother."

"Come on Mom! We just got carried away a bit. It won't happen again," Mei crossed her arms. Being a natural empath like all Super Goddesses, of course she felt the pain and trouble she had inflicted unintentionally. But really, was she expected to feel awful about her actions when she could fix everything with a thought? She wasn’t like some dillentente heiress, casually smashing up things and people and then retreating back into a cocoon of carelessness, she actually set things right at the end, with no-body left inconvenienced. Well, no-body that mattered.

“This was an accident,” Lei spoke up in her usual soft monotone. “An anomaly does not warrant a babysitter being set over us, even if she is our own mother. We are adults and should be treated as such.”

“No.” Ha-neul’s voice had a note of finality to it. “These outbursts are becoming too frequent to be called ‘anomalies’ and I won’t allow you to continue such bad habits. Super Goddesses are expected to know better, but I can think of a dozen mortal children at my Seoul dojang more mature than the two of you. Therefore, I am determined to train you.”

"Train...us...?" Lei mumbled in an uncharacteristic show of surprise. Train them in what? She herself was already a renowned martial artist, philosopher, scientist and diplomat, and suggesting she had more left to learn was an outright insult to her prodigious skills as a scholar and master in every field she had set herself to. In her own mind, Lei was mostly well-behaved, and only followed along with her sister's antics out of morbid curiosity. She was not responsible for Mei’s misdemeanours, thus nobody was anyone in the right to chastise her, let alone train her. 

“Right, let’s get moving.” Ha-neul yawned and absently held a hand to her mouth. She might have looked like she came straight from the gym, but even barefoot and wearing only a grey sports bra and spandex yoga pants, the raw sexiness of her athletic body and firm, upstanding breasts proclaimed her a literal Goddess. But even a Goddess could get worn down quickly when riding corral on a pair of rambunctious kids. Motherhood had taught her a lot of respect for the billions of men and women who went through this day-after-day without the safety net of divine powers to catch them. Mei and Lei had always between a handful, but Ha-neul had always been able to be there to keep an eye on her, using an army of self-generated clones to manage other commitments such as her TV appearances, gym classes, side-gigs and studies. Thankfully that meant she could now devote whole days, perhaps even months to seeing the twins straight, without having to worry about throwing her schedule out of whack. 

“Where are we going?”

Ha-neul she scratched at her short, dark, tomboyish hairdo and looked directly into their eyes, her deep obsidian irises gazing into their own bright brown orbs. "To my temple in Szechwan. It’s where I teach my highest-level students in martial arts and self-care, and I’ve now assigned a special friend there so that we can focus on tempering the two of you, so that safely channeling your abilities becomes something you do entirely by instinct. Hopefully that will avoid repeat messes like you caused today."

"Martial arts?!” Mei sparked to life, suddenly enthusiastic at the thought of further fighting. “That sounds more like our thing! I’ve wanted to spar again with you for a long time, Mom!" 

"Oh yeah, you will be learning  from the very best! Also, you will..." Ha-neul was rudely interrupted by Mei, who grabbed her sister’s hands and began to hop in excitement. 

"Did you hear that Leilei? We’re going to train in a real temple!"

"Lei is positively thrilled." Her sister nodded, hardly as impressed as Mei and suspecting that there was a catch to all this. She loved martial arts, but not being as fanatically devoted to them as her sister felt she could see past the hype.

"Well, what are we waiting for?!” Mei threw an arm over her mother’s shoulder. “Take us there, please!"

Ha-neul’s answer was delivered through an almost malicious smirk. "Yeah, we’d best get started. We’ll be walking there after all."

"Ha! So funny!” Mei snorted. “Good one Mom.”

“We are Super Goddesses,” added Lei. “Why would we walk over long distances when we can simply teleport there?"

Ha-neul stretched her arms. “That’s all part of your first lesson." Both of her arms were tattooed, each depicting a marvelous and uncannily realistic visualisation of the Universe that actually seemed to slowly glow and twirl. In truth they were actual universes that she had created years ago as a fun management project, and which were now inked permanently into her skin.

"You are joking, right? But that's so boring and slow..." Contrary to what one would believe, Mei's athletic frame betrayed a lazy and indolent personality. Ha-neul suspected she had the largest record of point-to-point teleports in the entire Super Goddess pantheon.

Her younger sister, on the other hand... "Lei is fine with this development. As long as Lei is allowed to read on the trip that is." She was the antithesis of Mei, her intellectual trappings belying as hard-working a person as could be asked for, ever since the day she was born.

"It's two against one then." Ha-neul flashed a smile and directed a V-sign towards a sulky Mei.

"Hmpf. Whatever, at least we’re going to be training together again."

And so the three goddesses started their long trek towards Ha-neul's temple, thousands of miles away in south-western China. The main issue they faced was not one of supplies or surviving in the wilderness, but simply the challenge of staving off boredom. No matter how many conversation topics and Mom-jokes Ha-neul pulled out of her juicy ass, eventually ennui overcame the twins. Walking was a cumbersome and illogical means for a Super Goddess to travel, but apparently Ha-neul was trying to teach them something about patience and discipline and junk. That was in Mei’s opinion, she thinking this entire ‘walking’ thing was hamfisted and counterproductive.

At some point, even Lei stopped paying attention to their mother's rants, anecdotes, reminisces and bar-stories. There was only so much celebrity news that even Super Goddesses could stand, except perhaps for Park Ha-neul, who for all her martial-artistry simply LIVED for soap operas and gossipy social drama.

Instead, the twins made their own entertainment. Literally.

Now, there’s a little-known truth that Super Goddesses can deduce everything there is to know about their surroundings from a quick glance. Sherlock Holmes once pointed out that from a drop of water a true logician could divine the existence of a Atlanic or Niagara, but Super Goddesses, with eyes that can see through matter to the furthest reaches of the Universe, and minds easily capable of categorizing and analyzing such a glut of data, could divine entire theories of existence from something as mundane as a blueberry muffin.

As such, it was child's play for Mei and Lei to mentally trace an entire map of China; complete right down to the smallest city, pebble and subatomic particle, though admittedly Mei’s map got a little fuzzy once you got down to the quark level. With this chart to hand, Mei entertained herself by scanning the horizon and reworking it, devising many ways to improve the surrounding vistas. And so she willed into existence new forests populated with bizarre animals drawn out of myth and fantasy and imagination, complete with all the plants, biomes and complex ecological infrastructure required to support such forms of life. Where possible she threw in a few artistic flourishes, adding great deserts and active volcanoes to otherwise pedestrian landscapes. And while Mei’s imagination ran rampant, her younger sister sister calmly occupied herself by documenting these new creatures and environments in a magical notebook, putting together a thorough compendium of the ‘new’ China as fast as Mei’s reality-warping shenanigans produced subjects for her research, thoughts which directly manifested directly onto the pages as inked typeset.

Remember the Game Boy you brought along on long car trips back when you were a kid? Did you ever keep a diary to enliven a tedious journey? Well, these were the Super Goddess equivalents. And when they tired of these entertainments, Mei and Lei began to invent little games to amuse one another, such as seeing whose hair could grow out fastest. Another little-known fact was that Super Goddesses were so feminine and sexual that, if left unchecked, their hair would grow out at an uncontrollable pace. So just a few short hours after the two precocious devils deactivated the passive magic that regulated their growth, both were dragging around multi-kilometer bridal-trains of hair, organisms that in length and girth rivaled the Great Wall itself.

However, after several days even these amusements failed to adequately pass the time, and the two teens began to feel antsy from trying to maintain their sanity while progressing across greater Eurasia at walking pace! Even mortals using planes and trains and automobiles crossed the continent at a faster clip than this, and the twins could only presume that the other Super Goddesses were looking in on their snail-like progress and laughing their asses off.

The real insult had been when the passed through a small town during a fun-run, wherein they had been outpaced by volunteers running to raise money for charity. Ha-neul had taken this all in a casual stride, cheering on the runners and producing coins and banknotes which she slipped cheerily into every donation bucket, but being overtaken by everyday men and women (and not allowed to compete!) left Mei feeling like poison ants were crawling all over her skin. Even Lei had begun to develop a miniscule twitch in one eye.

‘How could Mom do this, force two omnipotent Goddesses to do nothing except walk and entertain ourselves!’

The truth of course was that Ha-neul was doing nothing to compel the two girls, and that they were enduring this torturous stroll under their own violation, out of a sense of obligation and love… and for two girls used to doing exactly as they wished, that was as unnerved a part of the experience as anything else.

It grew to the point where both of them were going to far extremes to keep their hypercharged brains occupied. At one point, Mei found herself juggling four hundred giant boulders simultaneously, and yawning at how mind-numbingly dull it was. Lei meanwhile was on her 673rd book of the week, a volume she had produced from the bouncy hammerspace between her breasts. A complex and instructable rarified text written by the Super Goddess Irina Volkoba, it dealt entirely with a complex race of quintessential energy beings that resided on the outer rim of the galactic plane. Desperate for anything to hold her attention, Lei read the book at what was to her tastes agonising slowness, turning one page every other second, stretching the interesting interactions between her colleague and these otherworldly creatures out in the manner of an overstuffed novel. 

And all the while Ha-neul casually strolled ahead with her hands in her pockets, seemingly at peace and thoroughly engrossed with the surrounding world. Mei was beginning to think that something was very wrong with their adopted mother if she could treat this terrible tedium so casually. No wonder she found satisfaction in the shallow, simple world of television.

Lei finished Irina’s book in about an hour. Despite its contents being forbidden to beings below Super Goddesses, the subject matter being unreadable and potentially dangerous for organic eyes and brains, she had breezed through it, and quickly began to rummage around between her breasts for another volume to occupy her thoughts.

"I'll never understand how you don't bore yourself with all those dull books, Leilei." The big breasted girl in the blue qipao proclaimed with an exasperated sigh. “You’re such a nerd.”

"If Jiejie was as studious as Lei, perhaps she might not have grown into such a rotten child," Lei retorted, underscoring that wicked burn with a scornful adjustment of her glasses.

"What did you say to me?!" Mei snarled, the jade earling she wore flickering with green light. 

"Lei won't take it back." A matching stone on the younger sister’s ear also began to glow hotly, heralding the advent of another fight.

"Oh yes you will!" Mei brandished a fist, fingers clenched tight enough that her knuckles stood out proud, and was just reeling back to throw a punch when...

"Stop fighting, you two!” Ha-neul’s yell stopped any potential brawling dead. Adoptive or not, she was in every sense the twins’ mother, and the shout of a mother is enough to bring even omnipotent scions in line. “We’re here!"

“All right!” Mei’s frustration turned to enthusiasm at the promise of their journey’s end. “Let’s get down to it... huh?! But, there’s nothing here!” Her face fell flat.

Indeed, Ha-neul had brought them to a halt in a scrap of open land. 

"Mother said there would be a temple," Lei said drily.

"Yes, yes I did, now if you’ll just wait a sec..." But by the time Ha-neul was ready to explain, both girls were off the ground and soaring out of orbit. With the tedious journey over and no temple in sight, both had taken the opportunity to blast off and run wild. It was an exhilarating sensation, not only to fall into the thrall of abusing their power freely, but to disobey their mother.

In human terms, the two teens had just snuck off when Mom’s back was turned, running off on some adventure down by the creek in the woods. For all their cosmic majesty, the Zheng girls were no less hyperactive and irresponsible than any other person their age, and so had shot off across several galaxies and dimensions at hyperluminal speeds, covering great gulfs of space and time and causality, entirely without a care for the lack of heat, gravity or atmosphere. What concern did the petite titans have for such things, the concerns of other living beings.

And so like entwined comets they blazed a trail out into the outer reaches of creation, charting a path across the stars, until their omni-awareness guided them to what they sought; a dead galaxy devoid of life.

Grinning sharkishly, Mei slammed on the brakes with a stamp of her foot, arresting her momentum in a screeching slide that dropped her out of hyperspeed and back into space time. In so doing, she wiped out an entire spiral arm of the galaxy they had arrived in, throwing countless stars and planets out into the void, carried on the ripples of her violent arrival.

Lei arrived a bit less destructively, but her stoic expression was marred by the faintest of knowing smiles, fully aware of what her sister was about to do. Mei was now an omnipotent blue singularity suspected in the vacuum of space, and with the ease of someone ripping a flower off a lawn she seized an entire moon out of the orbit of a gas giant, hefted it over her head, and then hurled it towards its parent star at relativistic velocities. Torn apart by sheer speed, the unfortunate moon was ripped apart into a screaming streak of superheated plasma. More unfortunate then for the rocky planet that lay directly in its path. 

The collision was apocalyptic, and were they any sentients resident upon it (which there were not) came so quickly that none would have suspected their approaching demise until the instant when their bodies were ripped apart at the molecular level. The hurtling mass of the molten moon obliterated the barren planet into a cluster of meteoric shrapnel, carrying it along with itself in a FTL kamikaze dive into the heart of their sun. This second impact was so traumatic that for a split-second it penetrated right to the star’s core, inducing an infinitesimal hiccup in the nuclear crucible that sustained it. Nuclear fusion ceased, gravity exerted a fatal collapse, and with a violent death-knell the star shuddered into a violent supernova.

Shockwaves of heat and gravity rippled outwards as the star boiled over and exploded, shattering planets and moons to so much cosmic rubble, flooding the entire system with lethal radiation. Mei took all of this head-on, bathing in all the particulate poison and exotic energies, and all the dying sun achieved in its retributory violence was to give her the slightest of tans.

“Hot, damn!” She threw out a victory punch as the final aftershock raced outwards to flicker and fade in interstellar space. “I needed that!” She let out a satisfied shudder, having managed to turn herself on with this release after weeks of pent-up frustration. Anticipation of her next outlandish feat only made her even more horny.

“Hei Lei!” she looked to her younger sister and bit her lip, expectant and exultant. “How about we play a little catch?” Both communicated in the solar vacuum as casually as if they were chatting on a straight corner, despite the fact that Lei had been observing all this from another system several light-years over. The laws of physics could go fuck themselves.

“Lei considers sports a waste of her time, but Lei agrees to this.” The sibling in question hid a smirk. “If only so that Lei can see how mother punishes Jiejie for this.” 

“Oh, you are such a bitch!” Mei snarked, and teleporting into the same system as Lei she delivered a football kick to the nearest convenient planet, sending it flying towards her sister. “Go on, lets see how catch that!”

Lei shrugged, and despite her disregard for sports comfortably settled herself into a baseball catcher’s position, easily recalled from an occasion when she had researched all ball games in an idle attempt to convince Mei that her passions were the indulgences of cavemen and barbarians. With flippant ease she caught the rocketing planet one-handed, several trillion tons of matter stopping in the instant of contact with her palm, all momentum erased. She considered the colossal ball of dirt, and playfully began to spin it. This ought to have seemed impossible, for a planetary body to move according to the will of a being so physically tiny, but move it did, perfectly balancing it on the tip of one finger, drawing upon her martial arts training and the prodigious capabilities of her own brain.

What that brain had not expected was for Mei to then start sending further moons and planets flying in her direction, flicking them with her finger-tips like an obnoxious cinema patron playing games with her popcorn.

‘Jiejie is such a child.’ Growing bored of this, the Super Goddess in the rid qipao cracked the sphere balanced on one finger in two with a knife-chop, then shoved the two halves on either side of her, intercepting the majority of Mei’s barrage. It seemed the object of this game was for Mei to get as many objects as possible to collide with the sun at Lei’s back - the apparent goal-line.

More ‘balls’ came flying her way from every direction, stirred up by Mei like a cluster of superluminal comets. ‘Jiejie’ it seemed had changed up her strategy, and instead of just flicking planets along a single trajectory had performed a magical gravity pull on several nearby star-systems. It was the ultimate trick-shot, and before long this entire galaxy was being pulled into Mei’s whirlwind assault and aimed square at her younger sister.

Lei now had to protect her ‘goal’ from all of these ‘bogies’, calculating and compensating for quadrillions of projectiles, each travelling on its own randomized trajectory. But for a Super Goddess this was no problem, and Lei was so mind-numbingly fast that she could easily deflect every sun and star and sphere sent her way by her equally-powerful sister. Indeed, from her perspective, all these ballistic baubles were travelling in slow motion, and it was no effort at all to catch and crush each one in her hands, compressing each object into a finite point that was then assimilated into Lei’s own body.

The simple upshot of this was that Mei rapidly ran out of things to throw. Now all that remained of this former galaxy was the two sisters and the solitary star at Lei’s back.

“I’m gonna have to get serious if I want to hit that star!” Mei snarled in savage sport, then puckered her lips and inhaled, drawing space and time itself into her lungs. As if performing an impression of the Big Bad Wolf flattening the homes of the Three Little Pigs, she blew all that conserved reality back out, bending spacetime so radically that all natural processes halted for parsecs around. The star Lei was guarding pauses, electrons stopped spinning in their orbits, and even entropy itself whimpered and tried to crawl up its own butt-crack in an attempt to hide from this perversion of nature’s order.

And Mei’s object in all this was to blow the obstinate star out like a guttering candle set atop a birthday cake. Overkill barely described it, and spacefaring civilisations in adjacent galaxies would be examining the blowback for millennia. It also prompted more than a little panic on less-developed worlds, whose horrified inhabitants remembered this as the night when part of the sky went dark.

As usual, neither of the two Super Goddesses paid these consequences any heed. Those were concerns for their future selves, and all that mattered right now was not letting the loved and loathed sibling win.

"Lei will not lose, Jiejie." Indeed, Lei intended to make full use of her power to repel her sister's attack.

Such was the way it had been since both girls had come into the world, each trying to get an advantage on the other. And of course it was utterly futile, since they were equally matched. Being beings of infinite power and perfection, it was simply impossible for any contest of strength between Super Goddesses to end in anything other than a draw. Hence most turned their attention to specialist interests where they could assert a degree of individual mastery… but for two siblings who had never learned to share, it always came down to these puerile slap-fights… which always ended in a draw.

On some level Lei recognised this, even if her pride refused to let her see her own part in this futility. What she did know was that she just needed to stall until Mei grew bored and called off the match, at which point Lei could claim a win without either girl having actually managed to do anything other than draw level. So as Mei’s blasted breath of spacetime approached, Lei simply began sucking with delicious lips, absorbing everything exhaled by her sister and into her personal Dirac Sea, the quantum vacuum dimension enclosed within her lungs.

And so, between Mei's breath and Lei's suction, an unstoppable force collided with an immovable object. The matching jade earrings they wore brightened and strobed to almost epileptic levels, their animosity and fury growing with every passing instant.

Each of them had to win, needed to win, was consumed by a selfish, aggrandising desire to prove themselves the sibling supreme. As always, it was not them that paid the price for these shows of braggadocio. The exchange of power became so great that existence itself began to tear apart, cracks in reality forming as the space-time continuum was bent beyond its limit. Matter and energy and the very fabric of the cosmos itself distorted and peeled, space tearing away to reveal the null and void that lurked beyond its most fundamental and conceptual foundations. At this point the Multiverse itself faced a very real existential danger because of these two squabbling siblings

“GIRLS!” Two different copies of Ha-neul materialised, expressions livid as they grabbed each of the twin brats by an ear and dragged them back into the same space and time, where the clones mothers fused together into a single being, hands still gripping her daughters by the ears. Around them reality gave a sigh of relief and relaxed back into a natural state, tears in spacetime quickly scabbing over.

"Ouch!" Both teens exclaimed at the pain of being punished by their infinitely strong mother. “Mom, you’re hurting us!”

“I’m hurting you?” Their mother snapped. “Do you have even the FAINTEST conception of what you’ve just done, the lives you’ve just thrown onto a pyre without even noticing! You have the gall to say I’m hurting you when you smash up an entire galaxy and nearly trigger an apocalypse because it amused you!”

“Mother,” Lei opened her mouth. “Lei was just responding to Jiejie’s-”

“NO MORE EXCUSES!” Ha-neul’s fury would have split the cosmos in twain, were she not more responsible than her daughters. Instead she kept her anger focused and localised. “The BOTH of you have behaved despicably. If it were possible I would have the both of you transformed into mortal girls, stripped of everything that makes you Super Goddesses!”

Mei and Lei both quailed before this terrible threat. But Ha-neul was far from done.

"You agreed to train with me, yet the moment I gave the two of you an inch you flew off and almost destroyed the Multiverse!” She sighed heavily, ominously. “Don’t the two of you see why you can’t keep acting like this? The last time a Super Goddess ran out of control and wiped out everything in existence was Irina a few years back, and that was a genuine mistake on her part which she quickly set right.”

“Please Mom, we were just having fun!” Mei protested. “We would have fixed everything afterwards, look!”

“No!” Ha-neul smacked her daughter’s hand down before she could snap everything back to rights. “Irina made a mistake, but the two of you keep repeating this same bad behaviour over and over again. I won’t allow my daughters to stay a pair of vandals, and if that means you need shaking up then that’s what I’ll do! No easy outs for you this time, no running away from the consequences. You two destroyed this empty galaxy for fun, so it’s going to STAY destroyed - a little black mark on the night sky to serve as a conscience! And every world that saw this tragedy and has been scarred by it, you are going to PERSONALLY visit and set to rights! No easy snap, no rewriting of memories, you are going to take responsibility for this and OWN it - after we’re done training, you’ll be going down to those planets to apologise and GROVEL for the mistakes you’ve made. Anyone who died or suffered because of this, you will individually resurrect and bow to, pleading their forgiveness. And if they don’t forgive you, then you’ll have to find a way to live with the guilt! Maybe that will teach you a little wisdom!”

"I..." Lei intervened, forgetting to talk in third person for a moment, thanks to her fear.

"No excuses, you are coming down to Earth with me." Taking both girls by the hand, Ha-neul teleported the three of them back to their point of departure, that vacant plot in China, and then just as quickly absented herself again. The only clues left to the twins were a roll of blueprints, and an echoing suggestion that they “Get to Work.”

Mei looked around, and then down at the blueprints - they were architectural elevations - and moaned softly. “This is why there was no temple when we arrived?”

“Lei understands,” the marginally-younger Super Goddess nodded. “Mother expects for us to build the temple in which we shall train.”

It made perfect sense of course, going hand-in-hand with martial art’s goal of teaching discipline. 

“Alright, should be a snap!” Mei grinned, and then paused, her finger against thumb. Her expression fell. “This is a test too, isn’t it? Not just that we build the temple, but HOW we build it?”

Lei’s forlorn expression was answer enough. Seeing it, Mei groaned.

“We’re really going to do this the old fashioned way, with our hands?” She sighed, and then straightened up from her slump, expression resigned but a little bit of light glinting in her eye. “Well then, let’s get to work.” 

After all, a challenge was a challenge.

The work wasn’t entirely performed ‘the old fashioned’ way. Lei had been able to parse all the materials they needed from a survey of the plans, and then Mei had flown to the nearest city, purchased what they needed and then carried most of the initial materials and equipment back herself, the rest following on a series of trucks that would make daily deliveries of wood, stone, wiring, plumbing and other-such supplies. This was not going to be a small structure.

Foundations had been dug with super-strength, laser-vision trimmed hardwood to size neater than any saw or plane, and after Mei had completely failed to master the principles being a cement mixer had found it simpler to mix the stuff by hand, crushing the aggregates to size in her palm and then stirring it up in a steel barrel. The first two batches went completely wrong, the first thanks to them confusing ‘cement’ with ‘concrete’ and the second due to rushing the cooling and curing process.

“Jiejie, if the Hoover Dam were poured in a single concrete cast, it would have required over a century to cure,” Lei reported from one of her infinite supply of books, during a break in digging out the second failed set of foundations. “But by making lots of small, controlled pours and weaving coolant-pipes through the dam, it was built in just five years.” 

Instead of mocking that factoid, Mei had taken it onboard with a click of the tongue, expressed admiration for the engineers who had achieved that feat, and asked Lei how they could apply that lesson to their far more humble project. On the third try, they laid the foundations perfectly.

The girls had expected to work continuously from start to finish, but come sundown on the first night had actually found themselves wanting to rest. The process of erecting even as large a structure as this temple was nothing compared to their ‘games’ of earlier, but doing it by hand was an entirely new experience. And by intentionally hobbling themselves like this, reducing themselves to merely superhuman instead of the outright divine, for the first time in their lives they were feeling the effort of their exertions. 

“Is this a blister?” Mei held up her hand by the light of a campfire that evening, examining the tender swelling on her palm in fascination. In response, Lei held up her own hands, and revealed them to be covered in multiple blisters. Both girls blinked, and then shared a round of laughter. 

They did not sleep, but sat through the night brainstorming how they would manage the next day’s work, deciphering the details left vague on Ha-neul’s elevations, and discussing how they might decorate the finished structure. Surprisingly, none of their disagreements escalated to a fight, the two feeling too engaged in a common task to come to blows.

When dawn crested the mountains they returned to work, and that became their routine for the days that followed. Not everything went to plan, in fact very little worked out right the first time. Poorly-supported timbers had collapsed, unseasoned wood absorbed moisture and warped overnight, and Mei’s attempt to use heat-vision to help dry paint faster started a fire that might have burned down all their efforts. In the second week, they had to order in additional materials to make up for those lost through their blunders.

The fact was that, some things just took time. Nature had her own tempo, and the girls had quickly recognised they had to work to the pace set by the work and by the materials. And yet they found it engrossing and far from boring. It was actually kind of… soothing, and satisfying to see someone come together from their own efforts and hard work.

“Lei thinks this is feng-shui in action. The temple’s design is configured to aid relaxation and meditation, but the action of building it itself a form of harmony.”

At last, the clearing between snowy peaks and wooded hills ceased to seem like a construction site, and from it arose the giant temple. Ha-neul’s design had clearly been inspired by the architecture of her native Korea, austere yet tasteful. To this the girls had added their own flourishes, from elaborate tilework and hand-smoothed statues of folkloric deities, to an extensive zen-garden that surrounded the entire structure, through which a diverted mountain stream meandered peacefully.

Most impressive of all was the design of the front door, a towering structure that on the architectural designs had been left blank. The sisters between them had filled in the vacant space, and produced an elaborate design on which a red dragon and a blue tiger peacefully circled one another in a harmonious balance of yin and yang. It was the centerpiece that tied the entire temple together, and the result was spectacular.

The Temple of the Tiger and Dragon. It was beautiful, it was tranquil, it was…

“Ours…” Mei murmured in a tone entirely bereft of her usual ego. Both girls were standing on the steps leading up to the door, beholding the fruits of their labours. Both were sore and wearied, and yet this alone was a testament to their divinity, for between them the two teens had constructed in under two weeks what would have taken an army of engineers and artisans entire years. “We built this.”

“And I could not be more proud,” said a familiar voice. The great doors swung open at the touch of a powerful mind, and as the two Goddesses approached they saw their mother waiting within, a delighted smile on her face as she admired the artistry and quality of her daughter’s work. “Well done.”

Seeing their mother in her usual workout clothes, standing straight-backed among the temple they had built, both Mei and Lei remembered Ha-neul as she had seemed when they were still children - a tough but fair master and mentor that had never forgotten her roots even after adopting American citizenship. Despite all her power and fame, she had never let any of it go to her head. In some way, the past few days had imparted the wisdom of that onto the two girls.

“Thank you for this lesson,” both students bowed formally to their teacher. When they rose back up, they saw that Ha-neul had not come alone.

Accompanying her was another woman, a stranger to Mei and Lei, and yet their perceptive abilities were so vast that they were readily able to divine much about her. She was not a Super Goddess, but was more than merely human - an Enhanced then, a mortal bestowed with the blessing of the Super Goddesses. And this was clearly a companion treasured be Ha-neul, for not only was her power far greater than the average enhanced, suggesting deep favour from her patron, but she wore a gemstone pendant of similar design to Ha-neul’s own earrings. That not only marked her as a member of their mother’s American harem, but proclaimed her a favourite among Ha-neul’s many lovers.

All this was parsed at a glance. Mei and Lei might have even gone so far as to read the woman’s mind, and from that learn her name and deepest secrets, but both held off, because that seemed opposite to a lesson that might still be in progress.

“Girls,” Ha-neul beamed, and motioned to her friend. “This total hottie is Leah Holbrooke, your fellow student at this temple.”

"N-Nice to meetcha!" Leah waved in greeting. Her voice was sweet, and yet had a delightful tomboyish rasp blended in with what sounded like a New Jersey accent. It went with her bearing, a winning mix of confidence and nerves, as might be expected from a superhuman Enhanced brought into the company of three goddesses.

"The pleasure is ours." The twins recited and bowed. Even before recent events they had never forgotten the good manners their mother had taught them, even if the rest of their behaviour left much to be desired. Greetings complete, the two eyed up their new companion.

Leah’s attire was fairly simple, consisting of a black tank top and short jeans. The body they adorned however was flawless, and hypersexualised, hefty breasts held up by rock-hard abs, one example of the powerful musculature sculpted into her entire frame, extending down her thick thighs and calves, and out to the very tips of her strong, athletic hands. But beyond mere physical strength, she practically shone gold with the great power that had been bestowed upon her. Leah might not have had the omniscient perception of the Super-Goddesses, but the strength that dwelt within her was enough to mark her as a herald of her patron deity, an apparently-mortal woman capable of lifting galactic superclusters in her bare hands, and diving headfirst through stars without so much as singeing a hair. Enhanced of such phenomenal power were rare indeed, classified as ‘ultipotents’.

But what made Leah so intriguing was how innocent she seemed of her own abilities. She carried herself with the genuine girl-next-door charm that Mei tried to affect, and power-restraining rings on her wrists and ankles spoke to her having trouble controlling her powers, much like the twins. The key difference was that Leah’s difficulties stemmed from lack of training, rather than possessing the wrong mentality. Clearly she had only recently been Enhanced, and as of yet had no idea of the glory to which she was now an avatar.

Mei found this combination of innocence and awesome power irresistible. Leah was like a newborn genie fresh out of her lamp, yet to grant her first wish, and the blue tiger’s inner lesbian was drawn to that charm like siren-song. She had to resist licking her lips at the thought of touching those taut abs, to restrain herself from pranced towards the Enhanced and pinning her in a kabedon stance, seductively stroking those short, fluffy brown locks, fingers dancing across her exposed skin. In Mei’s fantasy, Leah responded to this daring aggression with a sweet moan of surrender, a sound that unleashed a torrent of desire within Mei, whispering goosebumps rippling across her flesh, her snatch dripping hot and wet.

"Nice to meet you, Leah." She greeted, holding herself back, but unable to hide the desire in her voice. "I look forward to getting to know you better.”

She might as well have proclaimed that she wanted Leah to join her harem and engage in the best sex imaginable for all eternity.

"T-Thank you..." Leah stammered, clearly finding it hard to think straight herself, as if completely overpowered by Mei's erotic presence and borderline-hypnotic super- pheromones. All three Super-Goddesses saw the excited shivers dancing along her spine, the subtle faltering of her strong, fit legs.

“Easy there girls…” Ha-neul smiled and touched Leah’s shoulder. Immediately the girl leaned into that caring, gentle touch. “You two can have all the fun you like, can fuck each other’s brains out if you wish, but not until we’re done with our work here.”

Just a few days ago Mei might have thrown a little tantrum at being denied so wonderful a prize: "B-But mommy, she's so sexy! I need her, please!" Instead she averted her own eyes and tried to hide the aroused dampness between her legs.

"You are such a dummy, Jiejie..." Lei whispered, hiding a blush of her own behind one of her books. Mei had to bite her cheek to not laugh at how wet her sister was for Leah too. Perhaps a threesome was in their future...

"Alright, settle down you two, you’re gonna scare my girl over here.” Ha-neul’s words were stern, but warm with affection and humour. “You two have put together this amazing temple, and now Leah will explain how we shall use it to learn restraint and humility. Go ahead sweetheart."

"Ah yes!” Leah proclaimed with enthusiastic determination. It was adorable. “For the next few days, we shall be meditating together, with no food or socialization, closing our minds and senses to all existing stimuli."

"Quite right. Leah here needs to learn to master the strength I’ve given her, and you two need to see if the patience you’ve learned building the temple has stuck. Same training, same results. You'll see!"

The three pupils bowed in acknowledgement to Ha-neul’s statement, and their mentor’s expression became a little smug. 

"Of course it won't be so easy as sitting still and staying quiet. While you three delve into the depths of your psyches, I will be putting your bodies through weight-testing, and subjecting you to mental exercises, but I won't spoil the details."

"Okay!" The two Super-Goddesses and the Enhanced quickly assumed their best meditation poses and closed their eyes. Fingertips tented lightly together and legs crossed, they allowed themselves to become disconnected from the physical realm. As Super Goddesses and master martial artists, Mei and Lei had little difficulty in reaching a state of universal oneness, thoroughly untrammelled from the material world and such crude concepts as time, space and dimension, yet this time they achieved that spiritual threshold far more quickly than they expected. Maybe they were just weary from their labours building the temple, or perhaps they had achieved a new maturity through the diligent work of their own hands.

Leah however struggled. Despite being a powerful Enhanced and a capable martial artist in her own right, she was still very much a child of the physical world, and did not possess the internal otherworldliness of the natural-born divines. That, and possibly because she was struggling to set aside the extremely sexual first impression Mei had made upon her: those giant, meaty tits, her soft lips, her confident attitude, her smell, oh that wonderful smell… still, in losing herself to this vision of the feminine divine, she eventually made her way to the plane of enlightenment. 

By this time the Zheng twins had begun to levitate, their bodies surrounded in a subtle white aura as they reached a point of where spirituality and science blurred, a state of quantum superposition, at once part of the world and apart from her. Their earrings gleamed too, shining in soft pulsations that matched the rhythm of their breathing. To an outside observer, they appeared at peace.

But in the mystical world of their minds, there was nothing but turmoil. Meditation was the practice of not thinking, of separating oneself entirely from consciousness and just existing in a state of perfect being. To the twins, this was always a boring and somewhat stressful endeavour, and typically short-lived, usually ending in an abrupt release of energy, spontaneous displays of omnipotence.

Today however they found it possible to sustain their meditative trances, and did not like what was revealed to them. After two weeks of focused labour, it became far easier to separate their current mental states from their previous norm, the paradigm of rampart dynamic and unbridled, undirected creativity. And lurking beyond all that wasted energy was the root of their immaturity, the childish desire to assert themselves over one another, the insatiable game of one-upmanship that had defined their relationship since they were little girls. 

And then everything shifted, and the disconnected between their past and their present sundered into fresh insight. Minds entwined they were cast over into a frenzy of flashbacks and futures, visions of the past that blurred into visions of premonition. They saw their lives represented as slides in chronological order, all their achievements, triumphs, fights and failures flickering past like frames in a film reel. Shamefully, there seemed to be far more conflict that conviction - more fights that wrecked heedless damage on bystanding worlds and lives, thoughtlessly rewound with a careless snap of the hand, leaving none the wiser, not even the sisters themselves. 

Yet there were scenes of love too, vignettes of compassion and care and true sisterhood, the unique bond that existed between siblings, and the deeper union that bound twins, paired lives born from a single genesis, their very conception a shared experience.

All this transpired in a second, and an eternity, for time had no meaning in the houses of the mind, the throne of the soul. To see their strengths and sins laid bare was a bittersweet experience, all the more for they saw and felt as one, two souls returned to the unity that they had known in the womb. Mei felt Lei’s desire to be respected by her older sister, her resolve to play the mature sibling fighting with her childish quirks, themselves an expression of her desire to be supported and uplifted. Lei in turn felt how her actions made her come across to Mei as a manipulative cunt, and how her older sister wished to be seen as powerful and wise, a role model to aspire too. That was the seed of Mei’s assertive confidence, the desire to be a positive influence to her little sister.

They were both so alike, desiring both to support but also to be respected. Similar too, in how they utterly failed to see the traits they shared, instead projecting their own insecurities onto one another, resulting in this asinine cycle of self-destructive squabbles. It was behaviour unbecoming of any sister or daughter, and stunting they growth as Super Goddesses, and more importantly as human beings. Strip away the power and the person remained - a full and rounded being worthy of dignity and respect, but without humanity what was a Super Goddess but an unfeeling storm, a devastating tempest, a casket of volatile nitroglycerin... 

They saw their lessons under Park Ha-neul, and all the wisdom and discipline she had tried to instill in them, both as a master and as a mentor. Sparring, duelling, testing and measuring, but always lacking in balance, in calm, in unity, unless they worked together. Out of the mists shone their brightest memory, the day Ha-neul had demonstrated the power of teamwork to her two young charges, for what was more empowering in life that the knowledge that one stood stronger together than alone. The twins saw that lesson replay in infinite detail, saw Ha-neul handily hand their younger selves their collective behinds, until the twins fought back as one, and through skill and co-ordination and unity of purpose, pinned their master to the ground.

It had been a radiant moment, where both had touched the truth with outstretched fingers. And then almost immediately young Mei had begun to brag about how she had done the tiger’s share of the work, and Lei had adjusted her glasses and replied with her familiar acerbic wit. At the final threshold, they had snatched defeat from victory’s jaws.

Enlightenment dawned with crystal clarity. They were those little girls, and they were not. They had grown, and had refused to grow.

Those two girls could not have built a temple, a sanctuary to the soul and monument to their bond. But they could break mountains, shatter worlds, and waste entire galaxies in puerile games and shows of wasted strength.

The time had come to set aside such childish things, but also to embrace one another as they should have when as children. Time to finally reconcile and treat each other like adults. And the first step had already been taken, for their efforts to raise this temple - the Temple of the Tiger and Dragon - had bonded them as sisters, and as grown women. Yes, they had struggled and stumbled in the effort, but supported and nurtured one another. Divided, they were a waste of potential, but united,  they could put their hands and minds to anything…

...in the depths of the meta-space, a shared consciousness divided into two figures, who eyed one another and bowed in respect, and then hugged one another close, brought together by bonds of love in perfect, peaceful harmony. Now was their chance to recover all that lost time, the years wasted in a pointless feud. And here, beyond the tick of any clock, they had nothing but time in which to bond, to share in their passions and hobbies. Here, Mei learned science and literature at Lei’s knee, while also teaching her little sister the simple joys of games and play, and hokey old Kung-Fu movies.

Such was their inner peace. 

The outside world though made for a very different vista. Ha-neul was having the time of her life, using her powers to create heavier and heavier objects to balance upon her daughter’s stationary bodies. Her first summons had been a great sequoia tree, a giant redwood which she had casually tossed upon Lei with her casual strength. Ten elephants had followed, merged into a single titanic specimen that perched itself peacefully atop a great turtle suspended upon Mei’s crown. To these glories Ha-neul added mountain ranges and continents, each a further test of her daughter’s endurance and commitment to the meditative experience.

In truth, it was also a good way for her to stay entertained while her girls bonded… and maybe capture a few funny photos to tease them with later. But much as the endeavour amused her, to Ha-neul’s delight neither had budged so much as an inch under the phenomenal load, or stirred from their zen-like-trance.

She was rightfully proud of them, especially after both had come away stronger from the visions with which she had flooded their minds when they entered the trance. Now they were bonded, and matured, and made a formidable duo.

“True Super-Goddesses,” Ha-neul reflected, breaking in her games to indulge in a little exercise, a workout that left her toned muscles glistening and the universes tattooed on her arms shining like twinned constellations. One truth that she had never shared with the girls was that those two constellations were named in their honour - Bright Tiger and Wise Dragon.

"This place is perfect for introspection…” She reflected as she flexed and flowed through the familiar crunches and katas. She might have laid out the design, but the execution was entirely the work of the girls, and its harmony of form and function spoke to what they could achieve together. “Now you understand why I asked this of you."

Then there was Leah, who after some initial struggles had managed to sustain a meditative trance. She too now floated above the floor, bathed in her own powerful aura, and gradually Ha-neul had began to place weights upon her too. Magically-altered barbells as massive as entire galaxies were stacked on her shoulders and crossed knees, and with each addition, one of Leah’s magical restraints had been removed. Now she was in the full flood of her power, and remained both centered and balanced, in perfect control of her mind and spirit, an achievement which delighted the Korean tomboy, filling her with pride as she continued to work out like the dedicated gym-rat she was.

The sublime form of the temple had another, somewhat unintended effect. Acting like a nexus between heart, mind and soul, it gathered in Ha-neul’s raw sexual energy, pouring off her in the form of her pheromone-laden sweat. It also absorbed her pride and joy and delight in her daughters. All these, and the calm and peace and love being experienced within Mei and Lei’s minds, were then catalysed within the structure and broadcast across the surrounding area at a subconscious level.

The results were instant. Flowers bloomed, trees shook off their torpor and grew tall and strong. Animals went into a sexual frenzy, and in the surrounding towns and villages, local citizens found themselves invested with a new zest and love for life, and for lives of zesty love. 

A week later, when most of the local inhabitants were feeling twenty years younger (and when most of the women were feeling the first signs of morning sickness), the three students opened their eyes. By this point Ha-neul herself had been overcome with the raw sexual miasma the temple was putting out, and had spent the past two days engaged in some legendary feats of masturbation, which of course had further empowered the broadcast feedback loop of love and lust now flooding the entire area.

Leah awoke first, not having the power to have sustained quite so long a trance as the true Super Goddesses. Free and unrestrained except for her own newfound self-control she had thanked Ha-neul profoundly for her tutelage, and then confidently stripped naked, scooped her patron Goddess into her strong arms and kissed her deeply and lovingly, whispering promises of what to come into Ha-neul’s ear, who was delighted to see her favourite lover and apprentice coming out of her shell. The sex that had followed had been the stuff of nirvana, full of tender affirmations and strong passion, while Mei and Lei slowly drifted towards the climax of their own transcendent experience.

“It seems so simple,” Leah had mused. She and Ha-neul were naked and entwined in one another, content to just hold and be held, while contemplating the twins. “How did they never realise they just needed to respect one another. From what you say they were never apart, even when they fought. How did something so basic escape them until now?"

“The root of human suffering has always been from man’s inhumanity towards man, and that in turn is rooted in such basic flaws as envy, want, hate, and the inability to understand what is right in front of our eyes.” Ha-neul explained, nuzzling her lover close. “Super Goddesses are no different from other human beings in regard to this stuff. We have natural empathic abilities, but the ability to actually understand another’s emotions and perspective is another thing entirely, especially when the human experience is so different to our own. We’ve never gone hungry, or felt true pain, or known death’s sting. All these things we experience second-hand. It’s such a simple truth, and yet even with our superior perception and sensory abilities, we oh-so-easily become blinded by our preconceptions. Take these two - they’ve not been separated since birth, and yet never learned to value one another. I think because they took each other for granted, as a constant thorn or presence. If they’d ever spent some time apart, perhaps they might have realised how important they were to each other… which is just a much a failure on my part as a parent.”

“So all this has been your attempt to set things right?”

“Yes, to teach them basic human values, the things that are common to anyone born on this Earth, mortal or otherwise. Hope, love, loss.... without this basic understanding of what we hold in common, the conceptual truths that bind us, a Super Goddess is nothing of the kind, just a powerful brute. We need to be complete in ourselves, if we are to truly connect with one another, be we Goddesses, Enhanced or a wonderfully regular Homo Sapiens."

"I see..." answered the American,and then spared a chuckle for the wise yet down-to-earth goddess of some 72-years, who didn’t look a day over 20. “You make it sound so profound… and at the same time it sounds like some cheap maxim from out of a fortune cookies.”

“The simplest things can sound the corniest,” Ha-neul admitted, and then tickled her lover teasingly. “And don’t go dissing fortune cookies, they’re the greatest dispensers of wisdom on the face of the Earth!”

It was to these scene that the twin Super Goddesses voluntarily awoke from their slumber. Both had tears in their eyes, and looked like nothing but angels as they turned and held one another close. Then they ran to hug their mother.

“Mom!”

"My little girls, all grown-up now. I’m so proud of you..." Ha-neul couldn't stop herself from shedding happy, nostalgic tears. She thought back on how fast time had flown by, on all the wonderful moments they had shared as a family. These two miracle girls might not have been born from her own womb, but they truly were her daughters, and no amount of argument could persuade her to think otherwise. “Well done.”

"Thanks, Mom. We really needed this lesson, and we’ve taken it to heart." Mei assured her.

"Lei doesn't need to look for forced acceptance anymore, Lei knows that Jiejie loves her already." Lei added, breaking her robotic monotone for once.

"Awww. That's nice." Although standing slightly aside, Leah could not help but be moved by this show of sisterly affection. She made a mental note to call her own siblings when she got the chance..

Ha-neul put her hands on her girls’ strong shoulders. "Well, did you two come to any further revelations while you were in there? I wasn’t expecting you to discover anything beyond the truth that you love and care for each other, but any further cosmic insights would make for a great dessert." She laughed heartily. “Just curious.”

“Oh, you just had to mention food..." Mei's belly groaned. "Well, I guess we do want to eat something after spending so much time disconnected from the physical world. Super Goddesses might not technically need to eat to survive, but we were in that shared trance for the better part of a decade from our perspective…”

“Ouch!” Ha-neul winced, then smirked. “Well I’d say you’re entirely justified in feeling some spontaneous cravings, but I’m guessing this goes deeper.”

"Indeed. Lei and Jiejie have had much to discuss regarding our deprivation from external stimuli and nourishment." Lei’s expression grew solemn. “And perhaps this would be a way for us to give back to those communities we have transgressed against.”

Ha-neul nodded thoughtfully. “Go on.”

“All those worlds we scarred with our last fight, the collective trauma we inflicted. We had the idea that we not only visit those worlds to personally undo the damage we caused, but leave something behind as a lasting apology that might benefit those societies. Like a restaurant and a dojang and a temple and a community centre.”

“That’s really ambitious!” Leah remarked, but her eyes shone with the possibilities presented.

“Jiejie and Lei enjoyed working together to build this temple, and we wish to continue in that vein, not only spending time together, but working together, keeping Jiejie and Lei’s hands and minds occupied and busy.”

“We don't know much about cooking or teaching or community outreach but...I mean, we are Super Goddesses. It won't be difficult for us to learn. Heck, we mastered constructional engineering in a fortnight."

"Lei has a lot of ideas for our future chain of establishments to be a success. We aim to become the best in any world." Lei magically made a beautiful neon logo appear out of nothing with a clean swipe of her hand. "We will name it in honour of this temple: Tiger & Dragon."

"That's wonderful girls. But don't go overboard too quickly, okay? Start small, test this out with a flagship establishment in say, Hong Kong, and take it from there. Consider that a bit of advice from someone with experience building up her own brand. "'m happy to know you finally have something concrete you want to achieve with your lives, and maybe there’ll be room in those lives for a burned-out old martial artist TV star." 

“Mom, don’t put yourself down like that. Besides, we’re going to need your TV skills to help publicise this business.”

“Just kidding,” Ha-neul chuckled. "I’m totally game to support everything you choose to do."

"We love you too mom,” Mei hugged her tightly. “It was thanks to you that we came to this realization, and we’ll be forever grateful for everything you taught us, and the love you showed us. Ever since you volunteered to be our mom, you given nothing but your best."

"Lei also loves mommy..."

“And I love you too…” Ha-neul touched her forehead to Lei’s, then Mei’s. “Both of you, more than anything in the world… and is that Lei’s stomach I hear grumbling?”

“Lei denies everything, but Lei could eat a horse right now… in one bite..”

“Haha, I know you could. Alright, let’s go cook something.”

"Finally!" the three other women yelled in unison.

"This will also be a good learning experience for setting up the Tiger & Dragon,” Ha-neul held up an instructive hand. Lesson one in the culinary arts is ‘how to grind cheese on your abs’.” 

That prompted a round of mutual laughter, and as they made their way to the kitchen, Leah felt someone touching her perfect ass.

“I didn’t forget about you.” It was Mei, a teasing smile on her lips, and a hunger for more than just food in her eyes. “We’ll have some fun afterwards.”

“Yes, my Goddess.”