The Transformation of Tanner Boyle

Kelly Leak, the newest player, was the first to notice the subtle changes to his short, volatile blond teammate, Tanner Boyle. Not in terms of behavior; Tanner remained the same outspokenly aggressive, bombastic presence he’d always been. No, Kelly’s practiced eye noted the changes in the sixth grader’s performance: the more accurate, more forceful throws; the better batting average and greater distance achieved on a hit; the increased speed on base-running.

At first Kelly had been impressed, thinking Tanner must be practicing a great deal to get better at baseball. As the week wore on, however, he couldn’t help notice that Tanner’s athletic prowess kept improving, far too quickly to be the result of hard training. Curious, he began more closely observing the pugnacious half-pint. It wasn’t until after the Saturday game, in the showers, that he spotted a reason for the difference.

As a young jock, Kelly was lean and sinewy for thirteen years old, but twelve year-old Tanner was genuinely muscular! His stomach was flat, his pecs prominent, his biceps the size of golfballs and his legs were thick with rippling muscle.

“You’re lifting weights to get in shape?” Kelly asked the other boy, assuming the answer had to be yes.

“No,” Tanner answered, looking at him as though he were stupid.

Rebuffed, he let the matter drop. Clearly Tanner was working out, but didn’t want to admit to it for some reason. That was fine with Kelly; the effects spoke for themselves. Tanner was rapidly becoming the second best player on the team, even better than Amanda! His attention thus returned to the latter, who really was quite a girl. Everything was forgotten.

Until practice after school on Tuesday.

“Hey, Coach, my uniform’s too tight!” Tanner bawled.

“So what do I look like, a tailor?” Buttermaker retorted. “You’re probably eating too much, not getting enough exercise! Go out and run around the bases, see if that loosens it up!”

Tanner huffed in exasperation, but stood up to do as he was told. Even from halfway across the locker room Kelly could see that it wasn’t around the stomach that Tanner’s yellow and white uniform was tight, but instead the chest and sleeves, where the growing muscles had been obvious even last Saturday.

Quickly finishing changing his own clothes, Kelly jogged out of the locker room to see the blond boy racing to home base. During the warm-up game of catch that followed, Kelly noticed Engelberg shaking out his hand after catching Tanner’s throws. Tanner was also first to finish in every windsprint, in spite of his shorter legs.

Then, during the practice game, Tanner hit a home run with such force that his bat actually broke in half! As the entire team googled at him, Tanner inadvertently flexed his chest, tearing his shirt in half and freeing his newly developed, extremely defined, and utterly massive chest muscles!

“Alright, fine, I’ll order you a new uniform,” Buttermaker relented sourly from the bench.

After that Kelly wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on increasingly skilled shortstop and noticing the latter’s increasingly obvious changes. To his own consternation, Kelly found himself straining to equal Tanner’s impressive athletic performance, and failing! Tanner now had a higher batting average and hit for a greater average distance, could outrun Kelly without getting out of breath, and his natural throw had become a blazing fastball. He had to be pumping iron, and quite a lot of it! What other explanation was there?

Even a lousy coach like Buttermaker couldn’t help noticing Tanner’s increasing talents, and made the buff boy starting pitcher for their game against the Redmont Wolves. It turned out to be the easiest win so far, with the opposing team unable to hit Tanner’s seeming hundred mile per hour pitches and also unable to strike him out when he was at bat. They had a joyous post-game celebration, going for a triumphant meal of pizza and root beer.

“We’re going to take the championship with me pitching!” Tanner bragged as he lifted a mug, his growing, now baseball-sized biceps already visibly straining the sleeves of his new size large uniform shirt. Nor was it just his arms; his entire body was far more built and ripped than should even be biologically possible for a preteen! In spite of Tanner’s astonishing gain in pure muscle mass, however, his height remained unchanged, as did his attitude. The primary difference was that now Tanner’s trademark aggressive belligerence was forcefully backed up by swelling muscles much bigger, harder and far more powerful than anyone else’s!

This was demonstrated conclusively in the locker room at the end of the next practice, when he effortlessly lifted Timmy Lupus up by the throat, with only one hand! While the rest of the Bears were paralyzed with shock, Kelly quickly shoved his way through the crowd to the pair.

“Put him down!” he ordered.

“I like him like this,” Tanner countered, smirking up at the boy choking helplessly in his crushing grasp. Tanner was half-dressed, wearing his shoes, socks and uniform pant, while his incredibly ripped, statuesque upper body was bared for all to see.

“Let him go!” Kelly insisted, grabbing hold of the supporting arm with both hands. Even in this life or death situation, he was shocked by the feel of that amazingly iron-muscled arm! It was like trying to pull down a light post! Nonetheless Tanner did drop Timmy-and turned on Kelly.

“Think you can tell me what to do, Leak?” he shouted threateningly, shoving the taller boy in the chest with both hands. Kelly went flying off his feet, back into Jose and Regi. The two caught and steadied him, but then quickly stepped aside as Tanner advanced, his sculpted, extraordinarily large muscles rippling menacingly.

Kelly swallowed, remembering the incredible force with which he’d been propelled backward. If not yet strong as a bear, Tanner was certainly strong as a fucking bull, and Kelly had pissed off the short, short-tempered blond kid muscle stud! Although a head taller, Kelly noticed his opponent’s shoulders were considerably broader than his own, adding to the look of a high school Junior Varsity football player.

“Think because you’re the captain I have to do what you say?” Tanner challenged, pushing Kelly again, sending the older boy slamming painfully back into the wall.

Kelly’s heart was pounding in his chest now, trapped as he was between the immovable object of the wall and the angry, irresistible force named Tanner Boyle! Being a rebel and a tough guy, Kelly had never shied from a fight before. On the other hand, he’d never taken on an uber-buff, twelve year-old powerhouse like Tanner either! Desperate for a way out, he blurted, “I don’t have to be captain! I was thinking maybe you should be.”

Tanner stopped, the combative light in his eyes fading as he cocked his head to one side.

“You want me to be captain?”

“I think you’ve earned it. You’re doing better out there than I am now, and you’re our star starting pitcher!”

He turned to the rest of the team, all of whom were eagerly watching this confrontation.

“Anyone object to me being captain?” Tanner asked cockily, hands on his hips in a power pose, his posture emphasizing the matchless size and remarkable definition of the short, blond boy’s biceps, chest muscles, and cobblestone, eight pack abs. No one dared object to Tanner’s ascension to formal power over the team in addition to his already insanely overwhelming physical power!

“Great!” he smiled, going back to his locker and putting on his T-shirt, which was now stretched skin-tight over his phenomenal physique! He couldn’t hope to pass as normal anymore, not with the flawlessly chiseled, utterly magnificent musculature he so visibly boasted.

With all of the attention on their new captain, Kelly seized the opportunity to quietly change into his civilian clothes and get out of there. He’d been embarrassed, yeah, but at least he hadn’t been beaten to a pulp; he had no doubt Tanner’s fearsomely powerful fists could have easily done the job. The tow-headed, now-tremendously muscular twelve year-old appeared more than capable of pulverizing anyone he wanted with just one punch!

So better a blow to his pride than one to his body, Kelly concluded glumly, starting up his motorbike and then heading for home.
The next game, team captain, star player and starting pitcher Tanner Boyle led his team to a crushing victory over the Coyotes, pitching an almost perfect game! He was respected, obeyed and feared by all of his teammates and even Coach Buttermaker seemed to grant the inhumanly built blond musclekid a certain amount of grudging respect. While not happy about being relegated to being the second-best player, Kelly couldn’t help being fascinated by the new best player in the league and especially by the latter’s absolutely insane muscle growth! At the bottom of the 7th inning, while hitting his fourth home run of the game, Tanner again destroyed his bat and also inadvertently ripped his uniform’s sleeves open with the inadvertent flexing of his immensely muscular arms! He ripped off the torn sleeves and ran the bases regardless, to the enthusiastic cheering of the crowd.

After the win, in the locker room, Tanner bitched about the quality of the bats.

“These shitty toothpicks are too fucking fragile for me!” he complained angrily. Picking one up in both hands, his ultra-defined, enormous arm muscles bulged as he snapped it in half! A gasp went through the locker room at Tanner’s unprecedented display of raw might! None of them could have done that, not in a thousand years, yet Tanner “the Tank” (his new nickname) Boyle had done it easily! How could the foul-mouthed, overly aggressive kid be so freaking built and so fucking STRONG?!?! None of them could understand it, least of all Kelly Leak.

Wednesday morning Tanner got into a simultaneous fight with all of the boys in the seventh grade, and won! He didn’t have a scratch on him when the fight was done, while he’d bloodied twenty noses, blackened thirteen eyes and punched twenty-one of his opponents in the stomach so hard they’d vomited. He was suspended from school for the rest of the week. Luis had been down in the office when his Mom had arrived, and reported all of the adults seemed uncomfortable in the presence of the triumphantly unstoppable preteen juggernaut, while massively muscled Tanner had acted cocky and self-confident as ever!

When school let out for the day, Kelly went out to his motorbike, only to find Tanner already waiting, leaning casually against the bike rack!
He stopped dead, shocked to see the golden blond, amazingly built He-Boy again so soon.

“You-you’re not supposed to be on school property,” he pointed out, and could have kicked himself for sounding like such a sap. He didn’t follow the rules; why on Earth should Tanner, especially now that he was at least ten times stronger than most men?

“Like I give a fuck!” Tanner scoffed, straightening up to face his teammate. Although still a head taller, Kelly couldn’t help but feel like mighty, muscle-bound Tanner was towering imposingly above him.

“Does your Mom know you’re out here?” he asked next. Damn, he just couldn’t seem to stop! Maybe because, deep inside, he wanted to believe there was still someone who exercised a degree of authority over this violent, short twelve year-old Goliath.

“She knows not to get in my way,” Tanner bragged dismissively. Raising his right arm, he casually flexed, a monstrous bicep bigger than Kelly’s entire head erupting up and splitting the seams of his red XL shirt! Kelly felt his mouth go dry as he stared at that bronzed, bulging hill of pure muscle. Slowly, as though in a trance, the thirteen year-old brought his hands up to cover that glorious peak, squeezing and feeling the marble hardness of that wonderfully huge muscle. He’d never felt anything so solid, so powerful, before!

Abruptly Tanner seized the front of Kelly’s shirt with his left hand and effortlessly hefted the taller boy high overhead. Kelly flailed in surprise, kicking Tanner in the torso a couple of times, but it was like kicking a brick wall!

“Feel something you like, Leak?” Tanner snickered, nodding with his head toward outward bulge in his captive’s jeans. Kelly felt his face go scarlet as he blushed. The worst part was that he couldn’t deny it! Somehow little Tanner’s Herculean frame and superhuman strength
turned him on like nothing else, not even Amanda!

Tanner let him go and he tumbled to the ground. As he scrambled to his feet, Tanner slyly asked, “Want me to show you how strong I am now?”

Kelly licked his lips, hesitated, and answered, “Yes.”

To his horror, Tanner took hold of his motorbike and the blond young musclestud literally ripped the machine in half! Kelly stared down heartbroken at the two separate pieces of his transportation, the metal parted by Tanner’s giant, fantastically powerful muscles.

“How?” he managed to get out. “How can you be this muscular, this strong?!?!”

His answer was a brief shrug of those immense, monumentally broad shoulders.

“Fuck if I know,” he responded uncaringly. “Doesn’t matter, so long as it keeps happening.”

Keeps happening?!?! Tanner was already a virtual boy god, studded with sculpted, gargantuan muscles! How much farther could he possibly go?!?!

“Have you found out what the limits of your strength are?” the older boy asked tentatively.

“Take a walk with me,” Tanner ordered, emphasizing the command with a jerk of his head.

Kelly automatically fell into step beside the short, arrogantly self-confident, and stupendously muscled youth. They went out to the ballpark, stopping on the edge of the oval. Dropping down into a push-up position, Tanner put his thick right arm to his side and barked, “Get on!”

Kelly sat Indian-style on Tanner’s back, and the younger boy began doing rapid one-armed push-ups, going up and down like a triphammer, rising and falling so rapidly Kelly started to feel seasick! After a hundred Tanner switched to the other arm and pumped out another hundred without visible effort. He halted then, holding himself erect, and said, “Get off,”.

Kelly obediently scrambled off that broad, deeply muscled back.

Tanner then flipped up to a handstand, switched to only his left hand, and began doing one-handed, hand stand push-ups! Kelly’s jaw dropped as he beheld the ease and grace with which the short blond boy balanced his chiseled, titanic mass of muscle on a single steely arm, flawlessly propelling himself up and back down, up and down.

At last Tanner flipped back to his feet and hit a devastating double biceps pose, his pumped-up, enormous arm muscles erupting through and shredding his skin-tight shirt sleeves!

Overcome with awe, Kelly slowly stepped forward and again touched the surging mountains of this blond boy beast’s incredible biceps, easily the strongest, hardest things he’d ever felt in his life!

There was another tearing sound as Tanner’s shirt, overstressed by his carved, magnificent pectorals and shoulders, ripped right down the middle, leaving the hulking muscleboy’s awesome upper body fully revealed.

Tanner snickered, pleased by Kelly’s open worship of his breathtakingly fantastic form.

Kelly could only nod dumbly, all but entranced by overwhelming raw power and pure physical perfection before him. Proportionately, mighty Tanner outsized and outmuscled any pro bodybuilder alive! Unable to help himself, Kelly caressed this short, masculinely beautiful boy god’s boulder-sized biceps!

The next thing the thirteen year-old knew he was flying backwards through the air, slamming down hard on his back. With the breath knocked out of him, he struggled to draw in a breath, only to have Tanner’s right sneaker slam down on his chest, pinning him to ground.

“I could crush you like a bug, Leak,” Tanner bragged, and the aroused, terrified Kelly had no doubt the monstrously muscled young bully could easily follow through on the threat. With a smirk he pressed down playfully and Kelly gasped as he felt his sternum actually bend under the overwhelmingly enormous pressure! Fuck, Tanner was so STRONG!!!

“From now on, you do whatever I tell you, whenever I tell you. Got it?” he asked, his most muscular leg casually adding what honestly seemed like another full ton of weight to the older boy’s chest.

Unable to even speak, Kelly nodded frantically, and wheezed in air with relief when Tanner removed his shoe from the former’s chest.

“Later, Leak,” Tanner tossed back as the blond, bare-chested muscleboy strutted away.

From then on Kelly obeyed Tanner’s commands at once, but he was hardly the only one: EVERYONE obeyed Tanner! Even the teachers didn’t dare anger the brazenly insolent, colossal mass of pure preteen MUSCLE! In spite of the “no hats” rule, the tremendously built twelve year-old wore a black, backwards baseball cap like a crown and not a single educator called the smirking superboy on it. During class Tanner would lean far back in his chair, hands cupped behind his head to incidentally flex his gloriously bulging, globe-sized biceps. He’d openly yawn, loudly pop his gum (also forbidden in school), and call out rude comments during class, enjoying the frustration of his intimidated teachers, though a few of the female ones longed to lick and kiss their young, mega-stud student’s gorgeously ripped, gigantic muscles! A smitten Mrs. Schaffer, his Spanish teacher, in particular saw Tanner not as a disruptive problem child, but as a wonderful role-model for the other children to admire and emulate! Not even a teenager, and he was already so much more manly than all of the other males in the building combined! Rebellious against all authority, violently dominant, and extremely intimidating, the massively muscled Tanner Boyle was truly the ideal alpha male! He was so unbelievably strong he had snapped apart the metaphorical chains of societal expectation and restraint which bound and bowed all others, able to openly do whatever he fucking wanted!

And the other kids recognized Tanner as their absolute, undisputed leader, constantly following him around and sucking up to their aggressive, bad-tempered idol. In baseball Tanner surpassed all Major League pitchers, his tree-trunk thick, phenomenally muscular right arm firing the ball over the plate at speeds in excess of 120 m.p.h.! He was tested repeatedly for steroids and his birth certificate closely examined by a district court judge, but nothing was found to exclude him from the league. Tanner then pitched five perfect games before the foul-mouthed captain led the Bears to a shut-out championship win!

The following pizza party celebration lasted until almost nine p.m. Afterward Tanner began trudging home, alone but, given the twelve year-old’s giant muscle mass and unbelievable strength, completely unafraid of anyone who might dare cross his path.

Then a young woman with long, dark hair approached him. Nice, Tanner concluded, but he also noticed the bags under her bloodshot eyes, the slight tremble of exhaustion in her limbs.

“Are you Tanner Boyle?” she asked uncertainly.

The blond boy boasting the Mr. Universe champion physique snorted in impatient contempt.

“Who else in this shitty town has a bicep like this?” he demanded offensively, L’ing his right arm and pointedly flexing up his bulging, grapefruit-sized bicep.

“I need to talk to you. Please, come with me,” she invited, turning and heading for the Starbucks down the block, one of the few businesses still open at this hour.

Tanner hesitated, weighing whether he wanted to hear her out or just ignore her and go home. Finally, with a careless shrug of his inhumanly massive shoulders, the hulking, golden-haired musclekid followed her into the building, pulling out and reversing a chair to sit down opposite her at the table nearest the door, his weight causing the wooden frame to groan in strain.

“What do you want?” he asked bored tone.

She took a deep breath before saying, “I’m here with a message from your father.”

That caught both Tanner’s attention and his ire.

“My Dad abandoned us. I don’t give a shit what he has to say!” Tanner spat out, rising up to leave.

“Wait, please!” she begged, reaching out to grab the preteen juggernaut’s twenty-inch, iron-muscled left forearm. Of course, Tanner could have effortlessly pulled free from her hold, but the desperation of her expression made the five foot four, monstrous mass of pure muscle pause.

“Please, just hear me out. Please!”

Slowly he sank back down into his chair, narrowed eyes glaring at her as he crossed his great arms defiantly over his carved, boy behemoth chest.

“Haven’t you wondered how you can possibly be so young and yet so strong? So phenomenally built?” she asked.

“Who gives a fuck?” Tanner riposted rudely.

“You should, because it’s an inheritance from your father.”

That claim set Tanner back. Could it be true? All of the rippling, gargantuan muscles he sported certainly hadn’t come down to him from his mother’s side of the family; when he went around the house shirtless, she cringed back at the sight of her unbelievably mighty son’s sun-bronzed, obscenely idealized physique! He was the matchlessly muscle-bound, preteen head of the household and his mom instantly did whatever her shining-haired, physically awesome offspring told her to!

“So who’s my father?” Tanner inquired curiously. Given how remarkably cut and ripped he already was at only twelve, it’d have to be someone literally world-famous for their spectacular build, like Jay Cutler or maybe Ronnie Coleman.

She took a deep breath before speaking. “I know this will sound ridiculous to you, but I swear it’s the truth. Your father is Atlas, the Titan who holds the sky upon his shoulders.”

Disappointment was almost immediately replaced with rage. His right hand shot out and caught her firmly by the throat.

“You think it’s funny to screw with me, bitch?” Tanner hissed dangerously, his eyes glittering with rage.

She brought both hands up to grab at his, but her efforts were useless; the massively muscled, tow-headed youth across from her was more than thirty times stronger than she was! Nor did anyone else in the coffee shop at this late hour seem willing to intervene against the short, violently volatile town muscleboy; Tanner could literally crush her neck down to the dimensions of a soda straw and then strut out of here free and clear!

“Please,” she gasped out in his painfully crushing grasp. “I’m not lying! Let me explain!”

“Explain what?” he sneered.

“H-how . . . “ she got out, and Tanner seriously considered killing her. He could do it effortlessly, like stomping on an ant! All he’d have to do was close his fist around her throat. He was so fucking strong he wouldn’t even feel any resistance! In the end it was the urgency on her face, not the fear, which led him to grudgingly release her.

She coughed a couple of times and immediately asked the waitress for some water. Tanner waited impatiently while she drank, restlessly and intimidatingly flexing his basketball-sized pecs beneath his specially tailored uniform.

“Listen to me!” she implored. “You’re not just the strongest kid around here; you’re the strongest kid anywhere on the entire planet! It should be biologically impossible to do what you do, to be as ultra-physically developed as you are! It is possible only because you’re the son of Atlas! You’re half-Titan, Tanner. You always have been. It just took until puberty for it to become obvious.”

He started to toss off a smart-ass response, but the woman cut him off.

“Titans exist, and so do the Greek gods. They’re not myth. Your father sent me here because he needs your help. He needs you to come and free him.”

“Free him from what?”

“From his burden of holding up the sky. When they were defeated, the Titans were all imprisoned by the gods in some way. Atlas was condemned to hold up the sky. He wants you to come and temporarily take up that burden, which will give him the chance to liberate the other Titans.”

“If he’s stuck ‘holding up the sky’, then how the hell did he ever screw my mom in the first place?”

“Like the gods, Titans have many powers. He was able to create a temporary projection of himself, a human-sized avatar. He used that avatar to father you.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “You’re a crazy bitch,” he spat, glaring down at her as he stood up. “Come near me again and I’ll break you in half.”

He stormed out of the coffee shop, angry at the woman for her insanity, angry at himself for getting his hopes up, for believing, even for a moment . . .

“Ask your mother!” the cry came from behind him. He slowly turned back around to balefully regard the dark-haired woman, who’d come out onto the sidewalk after him. “Ask her about your father. And when you’re ready to believe the truth, come to me and I’ll take you to him. I’m staying at the Holiday Inn, room 212.”

Then she walked away.