The Aftermath-Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Four Hours Later

Ryan sighed happily as he began to stir. He was dreaming about a pleasant moment from his childhood, when his older brothers had buried him in the sand. The damp sand at his back was firm, but yielded to his movements, and was warm from the day’s sun. The sand being shoveled onto his chest blanketed him with a comforting weight over most of his body. Overhead, a seagull made a loud, protracted, metallic cry. Ryan’s dream shifted: Suddenly, he was falling into a deeper hole. The sand on covering him…bounced, it felt like?…but continued to pile on, uncomfortably hard. Ryan realized he was dreaming. He snapped his eyes open. Eun-seo’s room was dim. Some hours had passed from when he’d first laid down on her chest, but her hand was still laying on top of him, hugging him to her chest. Then Ryan realized that her hand was covering too much of him. Way too much of him. It ordinarily spanned his stomach and lower torso. Now it was draped over him from chest to knees. A second later, Eun-seo moaned uncomfortably in her sleep and shifted, and her hand expanded to cover him from shoulders to shins. “Eun-seo!” Ryan shimmied his arms out from under her palm and pushed up against the first knuckle of her index finger to lift her hand. It was no use. He shouted louder. “Eun-seo!!”

“Hunh?” Eun-seo started awake and half sat up. Her forehead cracked into the 26’ high ceiling of her bedroom. The impact did not hurt her, but it did leave a four-foot-long, ovoid indentation in the concrete. “What the—what the fuck!?” Eun-seo grimaced as pain radiated out from her pelvis to her extremities. She felt something small under her hand and closed her fingers around it, then lifted whatever it was away from her chest. Her eyes widened at the sight of Ryan. He looked a third of his normal size. Her wide-eyed look turned to an expression of fear as Ryan shrank even smaller in her hand. Her blood ran cold at the sensation of her feet punching through the wall between her bedroom and the kitchen/living room. Her bedroom was 50’ long. She also felt something poking her buttocks. Eun-seo glanced down to see the twisted remains of her bed frame—her 25' long, sturdy, titanium bed frame—collapsed underneath her. Another flash of pain radiated out from her core. Her head crunched into the concrete ceiling again. This time, the impact made cracks radiate out towards the remaining walls. Eun-seo felt her heels hit her couch. She could also feel that the back of the couch (which, like her former bed, was sized for a 20-footer) came up to only the middle of the bridge of her feet.

Eun-seo started to bend her legs so she could minimize the damage to her living room, but stopped abruptly when her shins sheared through what little remained of the living room wall and her knees thudded into the ceiling. She twisted her shoulders sideways in the room (which, with a metallic squeal, flattened the remnants of her bed), strained forward as best she could without sitting up, and deposited Ryan on the ground between her thighs. Pain wracked her body again; this time her head grew up through the ceiling. Eun-seo felt rebar scrape against her scalp and forehead. A six-foot-long chunk of concrete dislodged from the ceiling and crashed to the ground next to her ear. The bathroom wall behind her likewise crumbled against her shoulders. She felt the next wave of pain welling up and tensed her whole body as if to hold it back. “Nnngh! Rrrr…ryy...run!”

Ryan immediately did as he was told. He sprinted straight out of the bedroom, between her legs, towards her front door. Ryan took care to cover his mouth and squint his eyes as he ran through the clouds of concrete dust. He had just made his way over the remains of the couch and was running between Eun-seo’s feet when Eun-seo cried out in pain. He resisted the urge to look back, then stumbled and shielded his head instinctively as her feet—which were now more than twice his height—shot by him. He ran past them a second time and looked to his left, at the base of her left heel. It was aimed directly at the man-sized door installed in her front door. Ryan stopped running. His heart pounded. He decided that trying to get out through the door was too risky. If she grew again before he got it open, he would be crushed. Instead, he rushed over to her ankle, scaled it, and sat astride her shin like he was mounting a horse. Ryan looked up ruefully at what he could see of the ceiling and hoped that if Eun-seo did have another growth spurt, the ceiling did not collapse on him.

Ryan had only just made it atop her shin when she screamed in pain once more. Her body expanded again, faster than before. Ryan watched in frightened awe as her 18’-tall feet rumbled across the rest of her kitchen, growing larger as they went, and hit the exterior wall of her apartment hard enough that every window on that side of her apartment shattered. He looked up to see Eun-seo’s toes curl, carving parallel trenches in the ceiling. He was briefly entranced by the fact that her daintily-proportioned feet were now 25’ tall. He realized they were taller than she had been just a few hours ago. Then it hit him that her shin was not just growing longer and wider, but higher. He was nearing the ceiling, which was full of ominous-looking cracks. He considered getting down and trying the door, but felt her muscles tense beneath him as the latest wave of pain hit. Ryan hunched down and shielded his head to ride her shin out through the wall. A second later, he found himself dumped off her leg. He thankfully tumbled down atop her foot and rolled off of it to the ground, next to her instep.

Eun-seo was not sure which part of her body burst out of her apartment first. It was probably her knees, when she bent her legs to make sure her expanding feet did not knock the exterior wall down on top of Ryan. In the same instant that she bent her legs, though, she was hit with the most powerful wave of growth yet. Chunks of concrete, bent and twisted pieces of rebar, and dented sheets of titanium shot up in the air as her knees burst through the roof of her apartment. It felt to her like in that same instant, the walls and ceiling turned to powder and toothpicks around her head and shoulders. And, for a split second, what remained of the load-bearing wall between her bedroom and living room squeezed tight around her narrow hips. Then it snapped apart like an overstretched rubber band. What remained of the frame of her building crumbled down on her stomach. Her buttocks likewise grew up and out, wider than the room and higher than the ceiling. Once she was free of the building itself, Eun-seo quickly got to her feet. She needed to minimize her contact with the ground and prevent herself from growing through any more buildings.

Eun-seo nearly stumbled as another surge of pain, this one accompanied by vertigo, suffused her body. She managed to steady herself without grabbing on to anything nearby. She did not want to think about what her weight would do to a building if she pushed down on it. An odd rushing sound filled her ears; she shook her head to clear it, but that just made the noise louder. Finally, these most recent (and worst-so-far) sensations of pain and disorientation passed. Eun-seo’s vision cleared. She looked down at her feet. They were surrounded—barely—by the wreckage of her apartment. They occupied the entire foundation of her building. Her feet were as long and as wide as her entire building. Eun-seo, with quickly-mounting dread, turned her attention out to the various buildings around her.

She, partly for the price and partly for the daily thrills of seeing people of all sizes and consequent strengths, lived in a mixed-size zone. It featured one- and two story buildings for women up to 30’ in height, as well as high-rise buildings for men and women up to 15’ in height. The tallest of the high-rises, a 75’-tall building occupied primarily by men, was only three quarters of the height of her shins. She was nearly 450’ tall. Eun-seo realized that the rushing sound in her ears had been the wind whistling by her ears as she grew.

As Eun-seo surveyed the area around her, she could see people filling the streets around her. Most were streaming away from her in droves. Some were hazarding glances back at her; some were gaping up at her. The crowds included men, who were no bigger than her toes, and tiny giantesses, the largest of whom were merely ankle-height. Eun-seo could also see the telltale light of cell phone screens. She realized she was destined to be all over the news (and stark naked). “Ryan? Where are you? I need to get out of here.”

Ryan reached out tentatively and put a hand on Eun-seo’s four-foot-high pinky toe. “I’m here.” He fought the urge to panic when she squatted down and her 20’-long fingers rapidly closed around him. As soon as she picked him up, though, he relaxed. Her movements were deliberate and gentle. Ryan found himself deposited in her palm, not unlike how Anna would carry Jeremy. Except Eun-seo’s palm was now 25’ wide—as big as her bed had been. He realized she could carry a 20’ giantess in the same way that Anna would carry Jeremy. “We should head for Anna’s. It’s the old hangar, over—”

“I can see it.” Eun-seo’s voice trembled. “Ryan, I’m so…I can see over the whole city. What are we going to—”

“First things first. Get to a safe place. We’ll figure the rest out from there.”

Eun-seo nodded. She held back her tears, but not before a 25-gallon teardrop had made its way down to her chin, fallen from her cheek, and splashed with lethal force on the pavement below. Men and giantesses alike shouted in alarm and quickened their paces as they fled. The evacuation sirens that had been built into most post-Actus construction, which were already sounding in the closest buildings, began to ring out in a widening arc around her. Eun-seo tried to sound as calm as possible as she pointed at the largest nearby road. She addressed anyone who could see or hear her (which, at this point, was not just her entire neighborhood, but all of the adjacent ones). “I’m going to go that way. Please get out of my way. And I’m sorry for the damage.”

With that, the giantess began to walk.

As in all places except for the few “men-only” enclaves that had sprung up after Auctus, the streets of the city had been reinforced to withstand the weight of women 50’ tall. Those same streets still buckled and heaved with each of Eun-seo's steps. Again and again, the 25,000 tons behind each fall of her dainty feet slammed into and destroyed the pavement: The whoom of her heel, the rumble of her instep pivoting down to bear her weight, the shattering thud and crackling of pavement as the balls of her feet and her toes pulverized concrete and asphalt alike, then the whoosh of air as her foot lifted away so the process could repeat. Car and building windows shattered; underground pipes snapped and burst. Eun-seo left 63’-long footprints in the reinforced road and sidewalks just as effortlessly as she would have if they had been made of new-fallen snow.

Eun-seo moved at what felt to her like an excruciatingly slow pace. In truth, however, her legs tore through the air at 100 miles per hour with each of her strides. Gale-force winds flipped a few men’s cars on their sides and ripped street signs off their rivets. The trunk of an older tree along the street—one that Eun-seo had always admired—snapped and fell from the combined forces of the winds generated by her legs swinging through the air and the tremors from her footfalls.

Ryan watched his lover's pained reactions at the sounds of the destruction she was causing. “Eun-seo, it’s okay. I promise. I know this is hard. I know you feel like you’re hurting people.”

“I am! Look at the damage—!”

“—is not your fault. You need to get out of the city. Keep focusing on being as careful as you can. You’re doing great. People will see that you’re being so thoughtful and deliberate. It’ll be alright.”

Eun-seo sniffled, and nodded. She did not want to cry for fear of hurting something or someone with her gigantic tears. She was grateful for Ryan’s reassurance, even though he felt no larger or heavier in her hand than would a quarter. She continued down the road gingerly, taking care not to step on or near the men and various-sized giantess evacuating the buildings to either side of her. After a few minutes, she reached the outskirts of the city—a primarily men-only area, with the pre-Auctus (and now waist-high) 30-story apartment buildings to show for it—and paused between two apartment buildings to re-orient herself. Eun-seo noticed that a large force of public safety officers ranging in heights from 20-45’ were directing evacuees out of every building within a ten block area. From what she could see, the smaller officers were shepherding men out of the ground floor doors. The larger ones were simply pulling men out of fourth- and fifth-story windows by the armful. Eun-seo craned her neck around to look behind her. She did not want to turn for fear of causing even more damage to the streets and buildings with her weight and feet. There, she saw a cadre of smaller public safety officers, ranging from 8’ to 15’ tall, continuing to herd people back away from her and setting up a cordon. She addressed them in the hopes of coordinating efforts and further mitigating any harm. “Officers, I’m headed for the old airfield. Please clear the roads leading there. Once I’m out of the city, I’m going to go fass-aah! Aaagh!”

Ryan instinctively flattened himself against Eun-seo’s hand at the sight of her 20’-long fingers contorting in towards him in pain. He was briefly thankful that ridges of her palms were now large enough that he felt like he could work his fingernails into them. An instant later, insensate panic drove away all of his other emotions. He found himself suddenly floating, weightless, with his feet in the air above his head. He crashed against Eun-seo’s palm (without injury—the downward movement of her hand must have cushioned the blow) at the same instant he heard a massive whud-crack-thoom. Ryan looked to either side of them. He saw shattered glass falling from every single window of every single apartment building in view. Given the din of what sounded like driving hail all around him, the actual radius of blown-out windows was much larger. Ryan divined that Eun-seo had dropped to one knee as pain wracked her body. He could also see that she had, in her agony, tried to steady herself by grabbing the top of a 30-story building. Dust and debris rained down from where her fingers had crunched through the building’s stone facade and exterior walls. Ryan could see her fingers digging deeper into the building, exposing and then cracking its concrete core. Ryan feared that If she put her weight on it to stand, it would collapse. He tried to sound calm for her sake. “Eun-seo, your left hand. I know it hurts, but you need to let go of that—”

Bystanders would later describe Eun-seo’s foot growing towards them as like watching an out-of-control cruise ship crash through a dock. Her knee, followed by her entire left shin and the balls of her feet, punched through the street, collapsing it into the service tunnels and sewer system below. Chunks of asphalt, concrete, brick, and then stone bulged up and spewed out like the bow wave in front of a cargo ship. The 60’-long foot (like the rest of her body) grew half as large again, rushing towards the crowd behind the public safety cordon.

The people in the path of the advancing wall that was the arch of her foot and her heel, and the wave of debris being blasted up in front of it, made for cover. Many of the men in the crowd suffered whiplash as giantesses grabbed them unceremoniously and ran. But that was a small price to pay. Had the crowd not fled, hundreds or thousands would have been pulverized as Eun-seo’s body rapidly doubled in size. Her 90’-high, then 120’-high, then 180’-high foot tore through the street. It also expanded to nearly 70’ in width. Her heel spanned the entire four-lane street, plus fully half of the wide, sized-for-giantesses sidewalks.

Eun-seo grunted in pain—both from the growth and from the impact when her knee dropped hard through the street. Her body pitched to the left when her left leg collapsed the sewer tunnels underneath; she reacted by planting her left palm on the ground to steady herself and avoid the greater damage she would cause if she fell sideways. Eun-seo felt something like dry sand, plus the occasional pebble, pouring in over the back of her hand from the sides and between her fingers. She also felt herself still tilting off-balance to her left. In a further effort to avoid falling over, she shifted her weight to the right and sat back on her haunches. She also brought her right hand in close, between her A-cup breasts, and pressed the side of her palm against her sternum. Eun-seo wanted to make sure that she did not use that hand to steady herself. She would rather fall than crush Ryan. She cried out again, this time in surprise alone as there was no pain, as her right leg joined her left in plunging through the street and sewer tunnels below. A similar sensation of pouring sand tickled the tops of her thighs and knees. Eun-seo, who was both extremely ticklish and in extreme pain, half-laughed, half-hyperventilated at the feeling.

Ryan’s brain struggled to process the visual and tactile sensations as Eun-seo’s hand swelled out in all directions beneath him. The closest he could come to categorizing it was the omnidirectional stretching one feels when he puts his hand on an inflating balloon. Except this sensation was spread over his entire back and legs, and was so fast that Ryan suffered friction burns. He watched Eun-seo’s palm grow to over 60’ wide in just a few seconds. Her long, slender fingers now looked to him to each be more than 50’ long and ten feet wide. Over the horizon of her slightly cupped palm, Ryan could see only the night sky. Above him, all he could see was the moonlit silhouettes of Eun-seo’s 10’-wide, 18’-long nipples. He could, however, hear every detail of what was happening as she grew. The sounds were unmistakably ones of utter devastation.

There was a constant, crackling rumble that only grew louder as Eun-seo’s growth accelerated. Her expanding feet and shins plowed out through the ground. Her increasing weight sank her deeper into the earth below. Across the city, power flickered or failed as the underground wires and conduits nearest to the burgeoning giantess twisted and snapped. Pipes burst both under the street and inside buildings for miles around. Eun-seo’s weight, which climbed rapidly to 530,000 tons, combined with a radiating underground wave of compacting soil to drive the city’s water pressure up to alarming levels. All the while, a neighborhood full of something realtors marketed as “pre-Auctus charm” was reduced by her swelling knees, shins, and feet into a 300’-long, 200’-wide crater with a midline ridge.

Because Eun-seo was doubled over in pain and kneeling during this wave of growth, those who were able to watch her while fleeing (mostly men who were being carried) could not see her head. What they could see was her ballooning ass.

When Eun-seo had been a mere 5’1” tall, her hips and ass could have been called “narrow” and “flat”—except her face was the kind of beautiful that made men walk into things, so people only ever described her buttocks and hips as “slender” or “svelte.” When she had been 22’ tall, “slender” and “svelte” remained the words she heard most often, but she would jokingly call her hips “boyish” because, well, it was amusing to describe her hips, which were about as wide a man was tall, in a masculine way. Now, however, while the contours of her hips and buttocks were unchanged, they had grown so large that the only words anyone would ever use to describe them were variations on “humongous.”

From the perspective of those fleeing her unintentional destruction of their homes, said humongous ass was bearing down on them like a tsunami. The giantess’s hips, which barely fit between the buildings when they were 80’ across, grew out, demolishing a buildings in cone as her body lengthened and widened. While, at first, they were toppling over buildings on each side of the street one at a time, her hips quickly grew to 110’ wide, then 130’, then 160’. Eun-seo’s titanic ass went from demolishing two buildings at a time to four, then six. By the time this latest growth spurt ended, Eun-seo’s hips had swelled to two-thirds the size of a small city block. Her buttocks formed a wall just shy of 185’ high.

Eun-seo relaxed her muscles as the excruciating pain finally came to an end. She took a moment to catch her breath and, mindful that she must be taking up more space kneeling than she would standing, once again rose to her feet. What she saw when she turned her attention down horrified her. To her left, where her hand had been, there was a 120’-long, 100’-wide line of absolute destruction. All of the buildings along it were gone. Eun-seo looked at the back of her hand and drew a deep, shuddering breath. The dust there—the “sand” that had tickled her—was concrete dust from the buildings that had been simply wiped away by her growing limb. She then remembered the similar sensation on her thighs and, before thinking about the consequences, whipped around to look behind her—at Mach 2. The movements of her shoulders, right elbow, left arm, and hips created deafening sonic booms. Had all of the windows in the buildings around her not already shattered, those windows would have been blown in by the shockwaves. As she surveyed the area around her, the entire blocks full of high-rise apartments turned to dust and ruin, Eun-seo said, in an incongrously tiny, raspy voice. “Oh, god.” She caught sight of what she remembered as the tallest building in the neighborhood near her house. She knew it was 30 stories, or 400 feet, tall. It came up to the midpoint of her thigh.

“How b-big am I? Oh, god, how m-many people—?” Eun-seo could hold back her tears no longer. One thousand, four hundred gallon drops of salty water, each weighing five tons, rolled down her cheeks and plummeted from her chin to the ground nearly 950’ feet below. Her tears pocked the exposed earth in the crater dug by her shins like heavy rain pocks the sand. And, most dishearteningly of all for Eun-seo, the slap-sploosh of each tear hitting the ground was not merely audible, but frighteningly loud. She cried harder. Then she felt a minuscule tickle on her palm.

“Hey.” Ryan was momentarily glad that she could still even feel him. He fought not to throw up and/or pass out as the expanse of Eun-seo’s hand rose to her eye level at near-supersonic speed. Once he could, Ryan stood to look up at her 160’-high face and into her eight-foot-diameter irises. “I know this is hard. I promise we will figure this out. But we still need to get out of the city.”

“How, Ryan!? I’m—I’m humongous! I can’t even be n-near buildings without d-damaging them! I can…” she sniffled “…I can feel the ground moving un-under my feet!”

“The world figured out Auctus. We will figure out this.”

“I’m destroying ev-everything! I’m a f-freak!”

Ryan replied “no” with force and conviction. “You’re you. Still you. Still the woman I love. And we are going to get through this together. But I need you to get out of the city. Okay?”

The shock of his confession of love in this particular moment was enough to break her out of her self-pity for just long enough for her to realize that he was right. She nodded at her boyfriend and tried to push away the fear arising from the fact that he looked barely a third of an inch tall. She said, quietly, gratefully, “Okay.” Then she saw the telltale red and blue lights of a public safety officer’s car driving towards her feet from the direction in which she’d been heading. Eun-seo was impressed with the officer’s bravery. The fact that she was using a car at all strongly suggested that this giantess had to be under 15’ tall. Eun-seo knew would make her current size all the more frightening.

The 9’ tall officer got out of the car and clicked on its loudspeaker. She tried (and failed) to keep her voice from quavering. The presence of this massive giantess was scary enough in its own right. But the prospect of Eun-seo being patient zero for a new, obviously more potent strain of Auctus was terrifying. “Ms. Choi, we’ve cleared the roads leading to the airfield. If you can, uh, use them as a guide instead of your actual path, rather than walking directly on them, it’d be…we’d like the roads to remain passable.” She clicked the loudspeaker off, then back on. “P-please.” The officer was relieved as the distraught titaness nodded in understanding. Then she fell back onto the ground in a mixture of awe and terror as a 550’-long leg and 180’-long foot roared by overhead, then impacted the Earth a little over 400 feet past her. That was followed by the other leg, which slammed down over 800 feet away. And even though the enormous woman was clearly moving in a slow, deliberate manner, and even though she was placing her feet down gingerly, toes first, the tremors from Eun-seo's steps rattled the officer’s bones. As she turned to watch Eun-seo make her way towards the old base, the officer muttered to herself, “Jesus. If this is Auctus again, I hope she’s one of the big ones.”

Eun-seo made her way out of the city as carefully as she possibly could, moving as slowly as she possibly could without risking losing her balance: One hundred seventy-five miles per hour.