Only one will remain - Chap 1 By Neptune Cheerleader vs School Office Worker These stories follow the premise of the "Highlander" series, where super- natural beings fight to the death until only one remains. Except in this case, the combatants are all women in LA and battle with their super- human strength as opposed to swords. All of the women received their powers at the same time. Betty Betty was just another substitute administrator for the LA county school system when she became Super. She had been a plain, timid woman with no romantic escapades her entire life. She never made enough of an impression on anybody to realize her rather ordinary dream of a full-time school administrator career. So she shuttled from school to school taking the place of other administrators when they fell sick, got pregnant, or moved on to other occupations. When Betty became Super, everything changed. Her physique transformed at once from frail and willowy to strong and healthy. Without working out a day in her life, she suddenly had a body that would rival the fitness athletes she used to watch enviously on television. Her muscles were prominent beneath her old-fashioned wardrobe, which she refused to change along with her new body. The one treat she did give herself was to head down to the local clubs on Friday nights dressed as minimally as she could, in order to watch the men fall all over themselves to talk to her. She reveled in blowing off the men who had ignored her all those earlier years. She took the instructions that came with the gift not to display her powers except in combat with another Super very seriously. She would have loved to go around doing good for people with her new powers, but she never faltered in her dedication. She never showed off her strength to anyone, and only used it in the rare circumstance like the time she dropped her umbrella under her car before going to church. She looked around carefully to make sure no one was looking before lifting the end of the car with one hand to retrieve the umbrella without getting her nice church clothes dirty. Of course, the enhanced invulnerability that came with the strength helped make her less careful chopping up carrots for dinner or doing the gardening. She attempted to learn the basics of fighting due to the fact that she knew that she would eventually have to fight for her life against another woman like herself. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that her coordination had improved along with her strength, so she could emulate the moves she read about easily. However, the idea of committing violence was so foreign to her that she never really got too much out of it. She was hopeful that she could talk her opponent out of the fight when it finally happened. Kyra Kyra had never followed the rules at any point during her young tumultuous life. Her early years were full of pain and anguish as her abusive father made her life miserable. He was a wealthy executive who had pursued and married a beautiful woman to be his servant. Kyra's mother was expected to cook, clean, and screw at his command without any thought to her own personal interests. He demanded that she spend the hours not cooking, cleaning, or screwing in their personal gym, in order to maintain his status in the firm of being married to the sexiest woman. Kyra had only been born because her mother had hidden her pregnancy until it was too late. The father was furious, as the pregnancy distorted her perfect six-pack abs. He forced her to continue working out at a furious pace right up until delivery, but Kyra had been born healthy nonetheless. After the birth, he forced her back into the gym to regain her perfect shape immediately. All this even though his 300-pound plus body had never seen the inside of a gym before. The father had never loved Kyra, and beat both her and her mother for even the lightest transgressions. If Kyra did not perform the best in school in every undertaking, she was beaten for her weakness. Kyra was forced to do all of the stereotypical popular-girl activities to make her father look good, or face tremendous physical abuse later. It was for this reason that she was the head cheerleader on her high school squad, and had been for every year she attended. As you would expect, Kyra developed a disdain for authority and it showed through at school when she was away from her father. While she was the best student and the best female athlete in the school because of her father's threats, she was also the worst troublemaker. The principal grudgingly advanced her through the grades because she was the star performer of the school, regardless of his personal hatred for all the trouble she caused. Kyra refused to follow established rules that made no sense to her, and that was a disruptive influence on the rest of the students. Anyway, Kyra became Super during her Junior year of high school. Her athletic body from years of excelling at sports suddenly developed further muscularity to contain the super-human strength that it absorbed. The muscles in her physique took on the polished, mature look of a seasoned fitness athlete. Even though her gift had come with explicit directions about when to display her powers, this was just another case of a rule that she didn't like and wasn't about to follow. That night, at home, her father came in from another long day at work to slump in his giant leather recliner. He called out to her to bring his dinner without even saying hello. She was dressed in another workout outfit to display all her hard-earned muscles as he demanded, and she brought out the dinner to him immediately. As she set the tray down before him, she then backed up a couple of steps into the light for her nightly appraisal. She then went into a combination posing and fitness routine, displaying her muscles and strength as she did every night for his amusement as his fat self stuffed his face with dinner. At the completion of her routine, which was never allowed to end before he finished his meal, she stood before him drenched with sweat awaiting his judgment. Her muscles pulsated with the effort they had just been put through as she stood before him - a vision of physical perfection. Nonetheless, the evil man found some perceived flaw and brutally pointed it out to her, demanding that it be corrected before she presented herself to him again. She took his dinner tray went off back to the gym to work on her biceps some more, which he had commented looked a little smaller than they could be. Kyra had watched this spectacle for the first time in a while, and the anger to his reaction to her mother flowed within her. She stepped out in front of him with the rage barely contained inside her. She happened to be wearing her cheerleading outfit, with the short skirt and sleeveless top that showed off her young, muscular body to advantage. As she stood before him unsure what to say, her fists clenched and brought the veins around her muscles into view. Her father broke the silence with a, "I've seen some cheerleaders on ESPN with better arms than yours. You'd better go join your mom in the gym downstairs." Those simple statements drove her into action and sealed his fate. She walked up to the recliner and around behind it. She then bent over and put one hand under the bottom of the huge chair and one hand on the top to get a good grip. Then she simply stood up, powering both the huge chair and the huge man in the chair into the air before her. Her father let out a surprised yelp as he felt himself rise about three feet into the air, and then turned in a rage as he realized what his daughter was doing. "Put this chair down this instant or I'll knock your head off!" he roared. Kyra felt a pang of guilt as if she was doing something wrong soon as she lifted the weight into the air, but her anger quickly overrode everything else. As her father expressed a feeling of helplessness for the first time before her, it filled her with a sense of satisfaction. Then when he yelled at her, she was overcome with a desire for revenge. She complied with his order, simply opening her hands and dropping the chair. The chair hit the ground and broke under his serious mass, bouncing him out and on to the floor off to the side. He lumbered to his feet in a rage and wordlessly pulled his hand back in a backhand position to strike his daughter across the face for her disrespect. The look in her eyes, however, made him hold his hand back rather than strike. It appeared from her eyes that she was relishing the thought of the coming slap, rather than the abject fear he was accustomed to seeing from her mother and her when he was about to administer punishment. It only held him for a second, though, as he decided to smack her and her look into oblivion. As his massive arm swung around in a wide arc, his expectation of a satisfying crack against her face was rudely compromised. A surprisingly strong grip stopped his arm's progress cold inches from her face, and he was left in the uncomfortable position with his arm held in check with her grip around his meaty forearm. Suddenly, a fiery pain shot up his arm as he felt his arm being crushed by his daughter's grip. He saw blood oozing onto his dress shirt between her iron fingers as she dug them into his flesh. He instinctively tried to jerk backwards to escape the pain, but his amazing daughter held his massive girth in place. He looked in her eyes and saw her smiling at him without really portraying any semblance of effort with her amazing strength. Then when she saw the fear in his eyes, she applied even more power to her grip on his forearm. Her father dropped to his knees in abject agony as the pain continued to increase. He used his other hand to attempt to pry her grip loose, but was completely unsuccessful in reducing her pressure in the least. Her grip tightened through his flesh, and she continued to slowly squeeze until she felt something more substantial in her hand. Identifying the mass as bone, Kyra smiled and squeezed harder. The bone soon shattered in her hand, the shards not affecting her skin due to her increased invulnerability. As Kyra let him fall to the floor with blood from his destroyed arm pouring through his shirt, Kyra's mother peered into the room to investigate the ruckus. She saw her daughter standing over their fallen tormentor, with blood covering both her hand and his entire arm. Then she saw her daughter reach her blood covered hand into her father's rotund belly, and work to get a good grip in the substantial flesh residing there. Amazingly, Kyra then set her feet and powered her father up into the air with that same one hand. As Kyra's mother watched Kyra defiantly hold her huge father in the air with one muscular arm she was filled with both pride and awe at the seemingly impossible feat she was witnessing. She was also filled with anticipation as she sensed that her hopeless life of torment was about to end at the hands of her amazing daughter. Kyra held her father airborne via her hold on his stomach. While his weight was not a challenge to her amazing strength, the grip on his stomach was tenuous due to all of the pliable flesh. The move was designed to inflict the most agony when she applied it, and it seemed to have succeeded because her father had forgotten about his arm to try to remove her grip from his stomach. It was not lost on Kyra that this feat would be unimaginable for anyone not Super, and she reveled in her power. She watched as the veins on her bulging arm muscles pulsed even though the weight was not too difficult. When she tired of admiring herself, she dropped to one knee and powered her father's spine across the other leg in a Super variation of a move she had seen on a wrestling show. Her father's spine cracked across her cheerleading skirt, and she rolled his paralyzed body off of her muscular leg onto his stomach on the floor. She could tell that he was still barely alive, and she tried to decide how to finish him. Her thoughts were interrupted by her mother's streaking form jumping on his back and grabbing his head. She started to remove her mother so she could finish the job, but then realized by the crazed look in her mother's eyes that she had the same idea. Kyra smiled and watched with curiosity as her mother squeezed his head. Kyra's mother put one hand on his chin and the other on the back of his head. She started to turn his head to the side, and his paralyzed body was incapable of stopping her. She maintained her grip on his head and continued to rotate his head through ninety degrees before his massive neck slowed her progress. She started ranting, "You wanted me to be bigger, stronger, better for you! Now I'll show you what you've done! Now I'll use this body you forced upon me to destroy you!" With that, Kyra was amazed to see her mother's already pumped up muscles seem to expand further than she had even seen them before. Her mother started grunting with effort as she ever so slowly made progress against the ligaments and tendons in his neck. Her muscles gorged with blood and the veins snaking across her biceps jumped into sharp relief as she continued to turn his head against his will. Finally, with an audible snap, she fatally twisted his head completely around to face her behind his back. His dead eyes were still open and his tongue was hanging out as she dropped him back down to the ground. His head remained facing eerily the wrong way. Kyra walked up to her room and locked the door before the inevitable questions from her Mother could drain the joy right out of her sudden freedom. Battle Betty reported to work for her first day at a new high school with high hopes that this would be her last stop. She was taking the place of a woman who had moved on to bigger and better things, and there was no immediate replacement available to fill the space. Betty reported to the principal's office and received her assignments and her workspace, and set about doing the best possible job in order to impress him enough to allow her to stay on full-time. Her first duty was to take care of moving the student files from numerous regular file cabinets into a couple of giant ones three times their size, also performing the quality checks to ensure that the files were complete and ordered correctly. At one point during the morning, she dropped her glasses between the two giant file cabinets far enough back that she could not immediately reach them. When the other office staff broke for lunch, she stayed behind to "keep working." After everyone else had gone, only then did she set her feet in front of one of the giant steel cabinets and heft it into the air. She was amazed at how heavy it was until she realized that the cabinet had its inherent weight plus the paperwork of half of a gigantic school within it. She moved the cabinet over to one side and retrieved her glasses, then carefully replaced the cabinet where it had been. Kyra had an extra spring in her step on the way to school that day. She had slept in until lunch time deliberately just because she wanted to be tardy. She was so charged with her new freedom and her power that she could not wait to use it again. On the back way to school through a tiny forest she came across a small tree that gave her bad memories. Earlier that month, she had tripped on a root of that tree rushing to school on a day she had been late. She had torn a new dress and hurt herself in the fall, and rushed back home to get help from her mother. Her father had not gone into work as early that day and had seen her ruined dress. He had beaten her silly that day, and swore that he would never buy her any clothes again if she didn't want to take care of them. The pain from that day swelled up in her mind and she decided to take it out on the tree. She wrapped her muscular arms around the trunk and squatted down in front of the tree. Using her immensely powerful legs, she began to stand up with the tree in her arms. The tree bark had no effect on her young skin and peeled off in places against her arms. The young tree was unable to resist the Super power in her legs, and the tree yielded slowly but surely. The tree's root system was exposed completely as she tore it from the ground, and held it over her head. Then Kyra tossed it aside like it was a branch and continued on her way to school. When she arrived in the school's main hallway, a sudden feeling washed over her like she had never felt before. It was a combination of fear, anticipation, and adrenaline and she felt her muscles flex involuntarily to their maximum size. The short sleeved midriff top stretched even thinner across her muscles as they expanded, and her denim shorts became a little tighter against her expanding quads. One of the other cheerleaders passing her in the hall smiled as she brushed past and yelled back, "Looking especially pumped today, Kyra! Maybe today you can play for the team instead of just cheering for it!" Kyra just smiled and headed to the locker room to put her freshly washed cheerleading outfit in her locker. Betty felt it too at the same time. Betty felt the muscles in her arms expand and press against the soft cotton of her cardigan and felt a slight shortness of breath as her stomach quivered. She recognized it immediately as the sign that another Super was near. Her mind started racing as she tried to figure out how to find the one Super in the huge number of bodies in the school that day. Her thoughts also went to her arguments that she would use to avoid the combat that she was seemingly destined for. Betty walked into the hallway outside the office and merged into the cattle drive of students making their way back to classes after the lunch break. She felt herself being drawn in a certain direction and soon found herself heading downstairs into the athletic wing, a place she had not been that day. As she made her way through the gym equipment and the wrestling room, she noticed that there was nobody around. Of course, she thought to herself, everyone would be back in class now. Her adrenaline surged and her muscles expanded beneath her cardigan, and she knew that her confrontation was nigh. She thought to run, to avoid the battle, but she was inexplicably drawn further forward to her destiny. Kyra had her hand on her locker to close it as she felt her excitement grow. As she felt her muscles expand and tighten, she squeezed her hand into a fist, the flimsy metal of the locker crushing and tearing off in her grasp. She suddenly ran out of the locker room and toward the wrestling room, eagerly drawn to the battle. She burst through the door to the wrestling room and came upon a lone woman walking in her direction. Kyra was immediately disappointed as she perceived no threat from the frumpy office worker in the old person clothes before her. Then, upon closer inspection and the feelings in her heart pounding in her chest, Kyra noticed the woman's obvious muscularity under her old-fashioned clothing. As Kyra realized the time of the battle was finally at hand, she let out a war cry and leaped at the woman. Betty watched a young student burst into the room and her heart beat faster. She recognized instantly that her opponent had arrived, and she was just a young girl. The girl looked like a Super, with her muscles flaring under her too-short clothing. Betty was surprised that she felt no guilt that she would have to kill someone so young, but she supposed it was her destiny. Besides, this was a kill or be killed situation. As Betty saw the girl launch herself at Betty, she readied in one of the positions she had studied and planned what to do next. Kyra's Super legs powered her toward Betty at unbelievable speed. Kyra had her hands up to punch the woman in the face and end it quickly. As she started her arm pistoning forward, she was shocked to see the other woman's arms shoot out just as fast to grab her arm. Then Kyra felt her body leave the ground and hurtle airborne toward one of the walls of the wrestling room as Betty executed a judo move to parry Kyra's sloppy attack. Because the walls of the wrestling room were padded, the combination of Kyra's momentum and Betty's strength on the throw made little noise even though the padding did little to soften the blow. Kyra's impact against the wall would have certainly killed a regular human, but served only to render her more angry. Kyra jumped to her feet to continue the attack, but she was met with a tremendous punch to her midsection. The force of the punch sent her hurtling back into the wall she had just hit, causing another silent but painful impact. Then, as Kyra sat on her hands and knees momentarily to recover her senses, a sharp kick to her exposed stomach sent her hurtling through the air toward another wall. Her impact against that wall was not as severe as the first two, but the cumulative effect of the collisions was affecting her more. Betty rushed over to close the distance to her opponent. She assumed from the high school girl's spectacular muscles that the girl was stronger than she was, so the only way to prevail would be to maintain her advantage. She was surprised to see the girl staggering to her feet once again after another Super blow that Betty had intended to be fatal. Betty reached over and grabbed the girl by the back of her shorts and top and lifted her off of her feet. Spinning in place with the girl in her hands a few revolutions to maximize velocity, Betty then heaved the girl head-first at impossible speed toward the wall right next to them. Unfortunately for Betty, although she had intended to crush the girl's neck against the concrete wall, her aim wasn't true and Kyra's body went hurtling through the doors to the weight room instead. Kyra flew into the empty weight room at great speed, her body's incredible momentum overturning benches and weight racks as she flew. She finally stopped her flight when she impacted the wall on the far side of the weight room. This time, she was very slow to rise, and she laid upon the ground seemingly feeling every bruise on her body where she had been beaten. She opened her eyes to see her unexpectedly fierce opponent striding over and through all of the overturned weight equipment, throwing impossibly heavy weights aside as if they were nothing. She reached around for a weapon, anything she could use to slow her opponent. Grasping a 100 pound weight disc, she struggled up on to her feet to face the older woman once again. Betty strode over to her swaying opponent. She could sense her impending victory, and the anticipation filled her with adrenaline. She knocked aside the heavy steel between them with disdain, barely registering the incredible feats she was performing. Her heart was pounding and her muscles were charged with an indescribable energy. She felt her soft cardigan straining against her arm muscles as she hurled heavy equipment around the room. Betty saw that the girl had grabbed a giant weight disc and was now brandishing it defensively in front of her. Just before Betty got within striking distance of the girl, she reached down to grab a bar off of the floor to help her finish the job. As the woman looked down to the ground to grab a bar from the floor, Kyra gambled desperately. As the older woman's attention was diverted, Kyra released the disc with all her might like a frisbee in the woman's direction. The disc fortuitously struck the bending woman in the neck with tremendous force, spinning her around and knocking her from her feet. Kyra felt a rush of excitement as she saw that her gambit had succeeded, and stumbled over to her fallen opponent. She recognized that the woman's fighting skills were superior to her own, but she felt confident in her strength advantage given their respective physiques. Betty was in shock at the sudden turn of events. The shape and speed of the projectile striking her neck had badly hurt her. She randomly wondered if she would have been decapitated if not for her gift. Still, she lay on the ground and labored to breathe. She knew that her advantage was slipping away, but she simply could not get enough oxygen to stand up. She suddenly felt her body rise into the air through the power of two indescribably hard arms around her chest. Then, her breathing was stopped short even further as the arms constricted horribly around her ribs. Kyra felt a surge of power as her opponent rose into the air. Kyra lifted the woman in the air with her back to Kyra and set her feet. She clasped one wrist in the other hand, arched her back, and squeezed the woman's chest with all her might. Kyra could hear the woman struggling to breathe through the combination of the neck injury and the lung trauma Kyra was inflicting, and it filled her with hope. The woman's hands clawed at Kyra's muscular arms, but Kyra knew that she was the stronger of the two. Just when it seemed that Kyra was squeezing the woman as hard as she could, she would find another reserve of power and constrict her muscular arms even further. When Kyra felt the woman's arms go limp and dangle at her sides, she was filled with another surge of adrenaline at her impending victory. Even the woman's enhanced ribcage could not resist the resulting supercharge to Kyra's amazing muscles, and most of her ribs shattered at once under Kyra's Super onslaught. Death was almost instantaneous as her lungs and heart were punctured by fragments of her once mighty ribcage. The audible crack accompanying the shattering of the woman's ribcage signaled to Kyra that she had prevailed. She dropped the woman to the ground and noticed a trickle of blood running from the woman's mouth. Then, before she could make another move, a bright light filled with sparks surrounded the both of them. The light grew so bright and the energy so overcame her that she closed her eyes. Eventually, the crackling and the energy receded, and Kyra opened her eyes to notice that her opponent's broken body was gone. She stood up and walked out of the weight room. Deciding not to go to class looking as beat-up as she was, she headed out the back door for home. "I think I've learned enough today," she thought to herself.