Luckily for Nala, whoever had set out all this food for her had known what they were doing. She came to a stop with another faceplant into the side of a dead animal, obviously a zebra this time. It took her a little longer to get over her dizziness this time, since she had been rolling faster, but once she felt a little better, she ate the zebra with the same determination she'd eaten all the other animals. She didn't even wonder how she was going to get back home, in fact, she didn't even think about her home. All she could think about was the meat in front of her and getting as much of it inside her as possible.

Once the zebra was finished, she kept rolling into more animals, each a little larger than the last. When she came to a cape buffalo, less than a full day after the last one, she had already eaten more than two tons of food in the past twenty-four hours, and she was getting to the point where eating was starting to be painful. Not that she stopped eating when it started hurting, of course. She had trained her stomach better than that.

And the weird thing was that, unlike when she had eaten the hippos, the pain didn't actually feel bad. In fact, as she worked her way through the buffalo, she found, more and more, that the terrible distention of her gut thrilled her in a way she wasn't used to. She moaned and panted and ate faster, either trying to make the feeling go away or make it stronger. The more she overstuffed herself, the more it built, like there was a roaring furnace inside her. It made her feel strangely light and empty even as she was as full as she'd ever been.

To her surprise, the next animal she ran into was actually a hippopotamus. Such a huge beast would have been a challenge for her on an empty stomach, but with the furnace roaring inside her, she felt that she could handle anything. The strange pleasure-pain continued to grow in her mountainous gut until she didn't think she could take it any more. Desperately, she increased her pace. Her useless little limbs scrabbled against her huge stomach, trying to reach the food to shovel it in even faster. For the first time ever, she wished she was being force-fed: she imagined that other people working in concert could feed her a lot faster than she could eat on her own.

Even at the furious pace she was going, the hippo took her a long time. It was as heavy as all her previous courses combined, and eating it took her well into the night. Her senses blurred together after a while, until there was only that white-hot furnace feeling and the desperate, keening need to consume and consume and consume. When she finally swallowed the last bite, she exploded--or, at least, that was what it felt like. All the tension that had been building as she gorged herself came to a searing crescendo and then released. It was all a bit too much for Nala. She passed out.

Once she had been unconscious for several minutes, figures came out of the darkness and dragged her away.