Shoot… how long was I out?

Jisoo grimaced and resisted the urge to fall back into unconsciousness. She could feel the room continue to spin even as she took a deep breath and sat up from the floor. 

She frowned and noticed that she was almost completely naked. A few moments passed before a vague recollection of what her intention had been and how it led her to the closet. Dumbly she pawed at the towels she had managed to find and wiped some drool off her chin with one. 

Fortunately the soft carpet provided some small measure of comfort on the floor, but for even the small period of time she had been passed out Jisoo still felt a strong ache in her neck and back. 

Where’s Eren? Gingerly she touched different parts of herself before she moved. In case he was nearby she did not want to risk crushing him with her drunken clumsiness. Only after she was absolutely positive that Eren was not in the immediate vicinity did Jisoo take a gamble and stand up.

It was difficult but she supported herself with a nearby shelf that held some of Grace’s shoes. A few velvety dresses suspended from the hangers above brushed against her face. Something felt very wrong. 

Wait… this is Grace’s closet… isn’t this where she kept…?

Jisoo’s eyes flew open and she whipped around to face the other side of the closet. A long wooden pole that Grace had installed some time ago was there. At its base on the floor were a few bits of discarded chain and torn sticky tape. 

And no sign of Thomas Evans. Or Eren.

A strong sensation of nausea overcame Jisoo. Sweat developed on her forehead. She felt faint, and her heartbeat rose sharply as she placed her palm over her lips to stifle a scream of pure horror. 

Oh no. Oh please no.

The young man who Eren had freed from his restraints was weak and tired. His beleaguered body was covered with bruises and scars, some more recent than others. He said something to Eren, which in his tipsy stupor went in one ear and out the other. Bewilderment overrode any semblance of curiosity beyond simply following the speck out of the closet like a lost puppy once he realized Eren was in no condition for conversation. 

They passed Jisoo on their way out and both slowly crossed the vast hardwood desert of Grace’s hotel bedroom. Before they left, Thomas made a point to stroll into another nearby closet but left after a few moments went by. He was in search of something Eren deduced. 

He said something about his sister. Apparently she’s here too. Eren thought to himself as he slowly stumbled after Thomas. With each room that he checked without any luck, he could see the apprehension in the blonde’s face rise. But why? Why does Grace have this man imprisoned like this?

It was very difficult to form coherent sentences with so much alcohol in his system. Even if he could think straight, any inquiry that Eren could feasibly manage at present would be mired by a strong slur in his speech. Not that Thomas seemed too terribly interested in him. He had a singular focus on his sister. Before Eren had zoned out shortly after he freed Thomas from the chains and tape, he had begged for help to find her. When Eren could not cough up a response Thomas decided to simply investigate on his own rather than waste time with questions.

Eren had enough wits to decipher some of what the other speck claimed. However none of what he imagined Thomas told him made any sense. Surely this was some kind of hallucination, and soon he would wake up from this fever dream. Regardless, his stomach turned as if he was awake. 

Midway through his aimless pursuit of this stranger he had rescued, Eren keeled over and wretched. What felt like gallons of liquid poured from his throat all over his hands and the floor. After a brief respite his body resumed the purge of the tremendous amount of beer and vodka he had drank over the course of the night, until Eren shuddered and returned to his feet. 

A quick glance around revealed that he had trailed Thomas all the way into the living room. Nearby Grace and Xiangling were passed out, asleep in each other’s arms in the blessed afterglow of passionate lovemaking. Despite his best efforts to rouse one of them neither woman paid him any attention and continued to snore loudly. 

Shoot, I was so out of it I lost track of him! Where did he go? Eren slapped himself a few times then rubbed his eyes in an attempt to sober up. He was fairly certain that he had not simply imagined Thomas, however now he had no idea where he went. Who is he? Why are he and his sister here?

The room continued to spin. Eren braced himself against a nearby chair leg and picked a random direction that was not the same way as the room he had just exited. Grace had a massive hotel room, with many other doors and hallways to pick from. Fortunately the other speck could not have gone far. 

He needed to relocate him and figure out what on earth was happening. 

Each step Eren took became easier than the last. Adrenaline and sheer willpower overcame the intense urge to pass out or puke again. Instead he approached the hallway that was closer to Jisoo’s side of the room while they stayed with Grace. He squinted and noticed that there were now two other diminutive people on the other end of the suite. Both tall specks with blonde hair and very fair skin. 

One of them was most definitely Thomas. He recognized his broad shoulders from the silhouette. The other person Eren could only assume was his sister. He must have found her tied up somewhere and managed to release her. Currently they were en route to the front door to the hotel suite. Eren increased his pace to intercept them. 

He extended an arm into the air and waved to catch their attention. “Hey! Hold up a moment!” Eren bellowed from across the room closer to the kitchen. 

Instantly both siblings ducked their heads and lowered themselves to the floor to hide as they came to a sudden stop. Thomas looked around frantically to see where the noise had come from and quickly located Eren, whom he had previously written off as a lost cause due to his drunkenness. Now Eren could potentially wake up any one of the nearby slumbering giants if he was not careful. 

Thomas grimaced. “Quiet down! We can all escape if we keep a low profile!” He hissed back once Eren was only a few steps away. “You can come with us if you want.” 

“He’s right, I think I know another way out if we can’t squeeze beneath the door but all three of us will need to work together and-!” The blonde woman who Thomas had escorted this far suddenly stopped. 

Both her and Eren locked eyes, and exchanged a look of recognition. Thomas frowned and noticed that Alice became considerably more tense than she had moments before. Her hopeful expression that she might finally escape was replaced by dread. He glanced back over to Eren, and realized that there was a similar look on his face.

The confused and befuddled speck was now very lucid and aware of his surroundings. Even in his current state, there was no chance that Eren would have mistaken that familiar face. After all, he had seen it before countless times in nightmares that had plagued him for weeks after the incident. 

Alice instinctively held onto her big brother tightly for protection as Eren’s lip trembled. Whether out of fear to see her once again or rage she was not sure. 

“I know you.” He eventually murmured, more to himself than the two siblings. “You tried to kill me…”

“H-Hey… please, let me explain everything.” Alice begged as tears began to form in her eyes. A quick look over Eren’s shoulder confirmed that Grace and her lover were both still unconscious on the couch in the horizon, but for how long she could not venture to guess.

However right now there was a much bigger problem. It was the spiteful speck who suddenly dashed towards her with a hateful glare in his eyes. She flinched and Thomas immediately put himself between his sister and Eren to block his punch, and felt the impact crash into his jaw. 

It struck Thomas with all the pent up anger and hatred that Eren had reserved for his would-be killer, and knocked him flat onto the ground with a loud thud. Thomas tasted blood in his mouth and scrambled to get back onto his feet to prevent Eren from attacking his sister once again.

Alice cowered as Eren lunged for her once again. “I’m sorry! I feel awful for what I did!” She cried right as Thomas managed to tackle the dark haired speck to the ground. 

Although Thomas was considerably taller and better trained than Eren, he was also in poor health and malnourished from his captivity. Moreover Eren was no stranger to fights. When rations in Northside were low and tensions exacerbated, violence was to be expected. Unable to restrain Eren for long, Thomas tried to wrap his arms around Eren’s neck and applied a choke hold. 

Before he could secure the submission grip, he felt a sharp pain in his groin which made him scream in agony. Eren used one hand to keep his throat safe and the other to squeeze Thomas’s scrotum as hard as he possibly could. Once the blonde speck’s grip loosened, Eren spun around and jabbed a finger into Thomas’s left eye. 

Why is that witch here?! How is she a speck now?! Eren thought as he thrust Thomas aside and turned to face Alice, who managed to stand up. She reacted quickly to protect her brother and grabbed hold of Eren’s hair and pulled. He winced in pain but managed to shove her away. People don’t shrink into specks… not since The Diminution.

A calmer, more rational side of Eren desperately wanted answers to explain how the woman who was once big enough to toss him into a strawberry margarita and dangle him by the ankle with just one hand was now the same size he was. However the other dominant side of his brain was now committed to caving her skull in for what she tried to do to him. Regardless of how she had come to be here.

Thomas recovered from the damage to his manhood and rammed into Eren, his sister helped drag him to the ground. “You dumbass! We can all escape if we work together!” He shouted as Eren continued to fight tooth and nail against their combined efforts. 

“He’s not a prisoner…This is the speck me and Sylvia tried to kill in that bar.” Alice murmured before she was thrown off the two men in their scuffle. She swallowed hard. “Please stop fighting! Let’s just talk this out and nobody else has to get hurt.” 

“F-Fucking let me go of me!” Eren seethed. Thomas had finally managed to out-wrestle him with Alice’s assistance and pinned him to the floor with his elbow and upper torso. 

Thomas maintained his vise around Eren’s neck. “Look man, what happened to you was awful. But your girlfriend and her cousin have been torturing us both for weeks.” He murmured into Eren’s ear. “We’re even now! Just let me and my sister go and we will never tell anybody what happened, I swear.”

“You think-?!”

“Look at what the fucking did to her! Those burns are from your girlfriend’s fucking stomach acid!” Thomas shouted at him. “Both of our lives are ruined. We are both specks now and we will have to go through the same shit you’ve been through your entire life. Isn’t that enough for you?” Thomas asked angrily.

Jisoo’s stomach acid? Eren repeated to himself. Indeed, much of Alice’s skin was molten and deformed like a wax sculpture. Some of her fingers and toes were missing. She ate her then threw her up? Was she involved in this as well? 

Eren suddenly paused. That night just before they had first been intimate with one another, she had said something to him.

‘Eren… I have something to confess to you.’

That’s not all she wanted to say. She didn’t tell me everything back then and she didn’t tell me everything when I learned her real name. Both of these people were brobs once, but now they’re both specks and imprisoned here. It should be impossible but I’ve seen it now with my own eyes. Brobs being turned into specks. 

Suddenly the trio became distinctly aware of powerful quakes as something enormous moved nearby. Eren felt the hold Thomas had on him weaken from fear. Alice quivered and slowly walked backwards towards the front door. 

Not that it would have mattered if she made it there or not. The gap beneath the wood and the tile was too small for even a speck to squeeze under. 

A colossal woman burst into the living room and came to a sudden stop near the couch where Grace and Xiangling still dozed blissfully. Jisoo frantically looked around the floor until finally her gaze found the scene near the exit of the room. Her eyes went wide with horror as she noticed that Eren was with the other two specks who had been imprisoned in her cousin’s hotel. 

There was something else in her glare that sent a chill down Eren’s spine as well. An intense malice that was practically tangible in the room. Their eyes met, and for a brief moment his girlfriend’s terrifying gaze softened.

Jisoo… just how much have you not told me?

There was only one other time in her life Jisoo had been so angry that she simply lost control of her actions. When she was younger and bullied frequently she hated her tormentors more than anything, but had never felt the kind of fury that would completely overwhelm a person. Not until she crippled her own father and destroyed her sister’s life in a fit of rage had she understood what it truly meant to see red. She could still remember the look of heartbreak on Byung-ho’s face just before he slammed into the floor at the bottom of a long stairway. Tae-yeon’s horrified scream as she held her barely conscious father in her arms and sobbed, still stuck with her even after all this time. 

The man who had raised her, albeit begrudgingly, lay in a heap at her feet unconscious and his body contorted at an improper angle. It was an accident. She had not meant to push him that hard, but underestimated her raw physical strength as a result of the Peach of Immortality she had consumed. Byung-ho would never walk again. And her sister would never speak with her again. 

She was a monster after all. Who killed and tortured people for fun, and finally turned on the people who loved her like she was one of their own. This felt awfully familiar to that day when she felt a pure red mist overcome her and drive her to every action. 

The two siblings ran. Of course they did. There was no longer any alternative since they had been discovered by the monstrous woman. With a desperate shout Thomas bid his sister to run and hide while he attempted to take off in a different direction. No doubt his hope was to make himself a bigger target and give Alice a few extra seconds to vanish somewhere in the gigantic kitchen. 

Jisoo was still a little tipsy. Her movements would not be as accurate as they normally were. Thomas’s plan might have worked out in his favor if he had accounted for Eren, who immediately lashed out and grabbed hold of Thomas’s ankle before he could make it very far at all. Immediately the blonde speck collapsed to the floor as Alice began to run. 

And with that slight bit of assistance, the brutal fate of the Evans siblings was sealed.  

The giantess prioritized the target that had attempted to flee. Alice was the one who had started all of this, so it was appropriate that she be dealt with her first. Her only contribution in life was that her actions had led to Jisoo meeting the love of her life. It was for that reason alone that Jisoo decided to make the final seconds of her existence quick and painless. Truly, her second greatest regret in life was that she had decided to spare her the first time to let her cousin have some fun. Now she would correct that terrible mistake and punish these two for ruining the illusion that she could live a happy life.

Alice had made it to the kitchen when Jisoo rounded the corner around the countertop. She squealed for mercy like a slaughtered animal as she noticed the murderous look in Jisoo’s eyes. In a hopeless attempt to escape she spun on her heel and began to run away back towards her brother, who had always protected her in her darkest hours. 

She never made it to him. Instead the ground around her shook like the epicenter of a powerful earthquake as Jisoo stomped towards her. Alice glanced up for the last time to see a horribly familiar sight. A gargantuan foot descended upon her like the instrument of divine retribution. It crashed down upon her like a meteorite into the surface of the Earth. 

With a satisfying ‘splat’, Jisoo reduced the young woman into nothing more than chunks of meat. Her body burst beneath her unfathomable weight like a popped berry, and exploded against Jisoo’s sole into the hardwood. This time, even a Peach would not be able to save her. There were no final words. No last wishes or even sounds of Alice Evans’s legacy. Only a stain on the beautiful hardwood. 

By the time Alice had been dealt with, Thomas had managed to kick off Eren’s hands around his ankle. His intent had been to sacrifice himself to give his sister at least a chance to survive, but failed and realized what had happened as Jisoo turned to face him and Eren, who were both on the ground a few steps away from her. He looked down with a mortified expression and saw his younger sister’s blood and viscera ooze from between Jisoo’s toes. 

He let out a roar of anguish and dropped to his knees, his head buried into the ground as he sobbed. It was strange, Jisoo thought. She had just murdered his sister right in front of him and he did not seem sad. Or disheartened. Rather so angry and defeated his only response was to cry. 

Somewhere in Jisoo’s subconscious she realized that Eren had seen everything she never wanted him to learn about her. But it was too late to change any of that. If either Thomas or his sister survived no doubt he would want to hear their side of the story to learn the truth. With their deaths she would determine what the truth was to fit whatever she desired it to be. Even if that were not the case, perhaps it was time he saw who she really was. 

Jisoo calmly walked towards Thomas as he continued to sob endlessly on the ground at her feet. As she walked, blood dripped from her bare foot to the hardwood floor below. No matter. It was not carpet so it would not stain anything. 

Eren watched in utter silence as the godlike woman strolled forward. Internally his instincts, borne from years of time experiencing the worst of what humanity did to specks screamed at him to run away from this beast of a woman as she casually snuffed out lives beneath her feet. He watched as the woman who had once nearly killed him died ignominiously beneath Jisoo’s foot, and watched his girlfriend turn on the young man he had just saved.

The only thing that kept him in place was the love and trust he placed in Jisoo with every fiber of his being. He could not bring himself to flee from her.

I’m fucking tired. Of everything. Jisoo thought to herself as she dropped to her haunches and sent a tornado of air towards the two specks. Both were pushed backwards a few inches. I thought my life was getting better. It could have been perfect. But this worthless piece of shit ruined it. 

Jisoo pinched Thomas’s torso between her leviathan fingers and raised him up into the sky. He made no effort to resist her. What little will to live that he had retained from Grace’s torture was evaporated. Subconsciously part of her mind, that annoying shred of ‘morality’ that she had somehow deluded herself into listening to screamed at her to stop. Jisoo ignored it this time, as she always should have. 

Eren watched, enamored by her every move. He opened his mouth to say something, but could not form words to express any one of the slew of emotions that ran through his mind. 

I’m tired of pretending to be a good person all the time. I’m tired of walking on eggshells around Eren. I’m tired of lying to him and lying to myself as to who I am. I’m tired of bottling up all this anger and hatred. 

She suspended Thomas over her lips and opened her mouth. He was still dressed in rags, but frankly Jisoo did not particularly care. Thomas opened one of his eyes and looked down to see the long dark tunnel that was Jisoo’s throat below him. A dark, ominous abyss that was meant to be his final resting place before he was reduced to some extra meat on her bones. 

Eren felt his veins fill with ice as Thomas suddenly fell from Jisoo’s tight grip around his midsection. He landed with a soft splat on her tongue. Today she was not feeling particularly adventurous to bother tasting him. Instead she merely tilted her head back and swallowed. On the ground beneath her feet, Eren watched the lump travel down Jisoo’s throat before it vanished altogether. Jisoo licked her lips and touched her tummy where she could feel a little quiver within her, as her stomach acids began to melt Thomas into a slime of nutrients for her to digest. This time there would be no peach droplet to save him. Not that one was readily available nearby anyways like it had been before. 

Finally after a few blissful moments she felt the slight commotion inside her stomach come to an end, and sensed as the life essence within Thomas extinguished. Jisoo opened her eyes and looked down at Eren, who remained pinned to the ground, strangely transfixed by what he had just witnessed. 

She sighed. This was not the way she had imagined this conversation would begin. However, whether or not he witnessed this in a decade or a century, one fateful day Eren would eventually learn the truth as to what an operations specialist like herself really did. Perhaps it was better he learned like this, before his mind was warped by her family’s teachings to accept their vision as absolute reality. 

Carefully she got on her haunches once again and extended her hand towards his tiny, helpless form. For an instant she saw a flash of fear cross his face and felt a slight pang in her heart. He had never expressed apprehension when she picked him up before. Now she had most certainly given him a reason, but there was no need. He would never have anything to fear from her whether he realized it or not. 

Fortunately he did not resist when she plucked him off the ground and held him in her open palm. She would not have blamed him if he tried to run. It would have been an attempt spawned from human instinct to run away. Still, Jisoo could feel him shiver in her grip. 

“Eren… We need to talk about who I really am.”