In this Chapter: Jaehyun writes in his journal, narrating his surroundings as he recalls a few good and a few bad memories. 

Main Tags of This Chapter:  Crush.  Violence.  Gore.  First Person Writing. 

Seo Jaehyun – Age - 22

February 16th

Asan, South Korea

              We’re sheltering in an old, abandoned aircraft hangar right now in the hills some distance outside of Asan, a place I’ve never once visited until this evening.  A few officers said that this hangar was hastily built during the Korean War by the Americans to house experimental aircraft that ended up never seeing any action.  The weapons and technology are long gone, probably since the late 1950’s, leaving this place empty and hollow except for rotten crates, rusty barrels, and dusty tarps scattered throughout the surrounding dank air.  The eerie echoing feeling of remnants belonging to a long and forgotten era of war and struggle back when our greatest threat as a species was each other. 

I have some hot food for the first time this week, a pillow, blankets, and an actual cot I can sleep in tonight.  We managed to find real running water too amongst the facilities surrounding the remote airfield, maybe even enough for showers, although the pipes are half frozen right now, some of the guys from engineering are trying to drip them to keep the water flowing but… it’s so frigid outside, and who knows how long the supply will last for… everyone is tired of melting and boiling snow…

The winter seems exceptionally brutal this year, more so than I can remember in my lifetime.  Thickets of blizzard-like snow are falling down all around as the sun sets beyond the dark and misty haze of grey clouds blotting out the sky.  We’ll probably have to dig out some of our transport tomorrow morning if it continues to flurry like this throughout the night as we try to cram the rest of our more important armor into the hangars while a strong scent of diesel and oil fumigates the air.   

I’m wrapped up in a few blankets, and I can see my visible breath every few seconds as they manage to close the hangar doors and at least seal in some warmth, nobody wants hypothermia…

Now as we settle in for the evening, all we can hope for is that we’re not found by one of them… they can cover so much ground without any effort, thankfully the snow blanketed our tracks when we moved on from Gongju.   An accidental step from an oblivious one would crush this tiny airfield and all of us would cease to exist… every once in a while, we can all feel a distant rumble as one of their footsteps settle into the earth… thankfully there aren’t as many of them wandering around these days, I bet they find it boring there aren’t as many of us to “play” with compared to when they first arrived. 

But this is paradise compared to Busan, those early days… we were so desperate, we lost so many people during those first few weeks.  We were starving, dehydrated, but sadly, the more people that got crushed or killed, the more food and water became available for the rest of us.  Yeah… tonight feels like a party in contrast, we have people actually cooking over the fires too!  It almost feels… normal, a surreal experience for me and the many of us here, I’m sure.

Word through the grapevine seems to be that we’re going to continue moving further north in the next couple of days, then eventually into the ruins of Seoul, rumors are just rumors, but everyone seems to believe that something big is happening there.  Apparently, the North Korean and Chinese military are pushing over the border to help us again.  I never thought I would witness something like that, but people have been saying it for a long time throughout human history… it would take the truly overbearing reality of global extinction to finally unite us all and work together as the human race.

There is no longer economic divide, no longer racial divide, no longer religious divide.  Creeds no longer matter; opinions are useless… everyone that remains is living through the same devastating and ultimate defining moment of our existence… and we’re losing, if not already lost… no, I shouldn’t say that… the faces around me are already somber enough. 

In his own cot next to me is an American airman, his name is Rashad, he drives the radar truck where most of my responsibilities takes place.  I consider him a close friend even though we struggle with our language barrier sometimes, he was stationed in South Korea with the US Air Force long before they came down to Earth.

Poor guy, he still has no idea what happened to his family.  One of their soldiers flattened his home city in the first few days after they landed, New Orleans, it was called, it’s nothing but a marsh now, their footprints sunken in the water along with the remains of the people who once lived there.  The Americans only managed to tear a few holes in the giantess’ suit, her chest and face bleed some but that was it, but we’ve gotten a bit better at fighting them since those days, but if all it takes is one of them to destroy an entire city, then you can imagine how those fights usually transpire…

I at least have closure with my family.  My two younger sisters, mother, father, and my last living grandparent, are all dead.  We were one big happy family living in Changwon in the south.  Of course, I left because I was conscripted into military service as a national requirement even though I didn’t want to go, but it’s probably the reason I’m alive still… at least, at the time of me writing this…  

My family all cheering me on with support when I boarded the train to leave home, but that was way back when I still didn’t believe in giant aliens… or demons rather… nobody is exactly sure how to define them still.  They could be from a biblical Hell with the way they behave, but they are extraterrestrials by meaning of their interstellar arrival to Earth. 

I’ll never forget the day it happened though.  One of their ships suddenly descended through the clouds and appeared over the ocean like a white monolith in the early morning… then two giants emerged from the water in tight black body suits, both around 1800 feet tall, dripping wet as they marched their way to Changwon from the coast like living gods of divine death.  It's disturbing how much they could almost resemble us; it makes me question the grand design of life in the universe or if there really is an ultimate creator or God, but no… a creator wouldn’t subject us to this severity of anguish, a compassionate creator at least…

These invaders look like demonic women, and we think they have races like us because their skin color varies from pale blue, to pink, to red, to purple, and everything in between those shades with arrays of contrasts and paleness.  They have differing eye colors, slightly varying heights, hair styles, facial features, body types… humanoid by body, feminine by the shape and curves they carry and purposely flaunt over us. 

The real noticeable differences besides their skin colors are that they have horns jutting from their heads, their horns spiral or bend in different directions, some are longer, some shorter, but they alone still dwarf most structures humanity has built.  Their horns are usually adorned with jewelry, chains, or gems too.  Some of them have split tongues, others don’t.   Their skin is sometimes adorned with artistic patterns, almost like tribal markings.  Their blood is much darker than ours as well, the deepest red black you could imagine.  They have slightly pointed ears like elves from some typical fantasy movie… and what I would give to just be able to watch a movie right now and not have to think about anything else... 

Their eyes are like ours, but some of them have brighter silver or pink irises, some fiery orange, blue, or even a demonic red.  They would be such a beautiful sight to gaze upon… if only they weren’t so horrifying while looking down at you as they ruthlessly crush thousands of people in the place that you would have called your home. 

The two demon aliens in question though, the ones who were responsible for taking my entire family away from me…  One had glowing icy blue eyes, the other a pale silver, one had deep black hair, the other had pure white locks.  I remember their faces so well, one with her pale pink skin and the other with red skin, their bright white teeth smiling just like ours apart from their sharpened vampire-like fangs where our canine teeth would be. 

I still want to see them brought down so badly, I wish I could just kill them myself… but they were reported to be somewhere in Pakistan gathering survivors for something we don’t know of for certain, everyone’s best guess is that it’s for some type of slave trade for wherever they came from, but I’ve heard more twisted theories from people who are a lot more invested in the conspiracies than me.  Maybe our species will survive after all if they take us as prisoners, albeit under total subjugation for the rest of our existence, unless they forced us to breed, a disturbing idea. 

I can’t help but think of what they do with us sometimes when they take us to their ships even though I try not to.  Maybe they sell us as food... a delicacy back on their planet… if they even have a planet.  Maybe we’re their slaves forced to do whatever they command of us… maybe we’re just their children’s playthings… maybe they put us in a zoo… my thinking is that we’re used for entertainment, otherwise why would they kill so many of us and take so few… they clearly want our planet for their own reasons, but… our species seems to be just a fun bonus for them.  I pray all my theories are incorrect, but it is clear that God isn’t on our side.  Sometimes I think it was better my family died so painlessly rather than them being taken away and forced to cruelly suffer for the rest of their lives somewhere else in the universe…

I watched on a live feed as the two living gods flattened everything in their path without warning, seeing the exact moment the white-haired soldier pressed her black-heeled boot into my childhood neighborhood, nobody had an advance notice to evacuate, when her boot lifted, all the was left was a crater of flattened houses and scattered corpses mixed with pools of blood as I was left holding a phone with a dead signal.  At least I know what happened… but my friend doesn’t know.  Rashad still hangs onto the idea that his family might be alive somewhere, I don’t think they are… but I don’t admit that because well… I want to have hope too.    

We pass the time and exchange stories, Rashad tells me about playing baseball and football back in Louisiana at his high school before he voluntarily joined the military when he was 18, he also tells me all the time about how amazing the food is where he’s from.  He describes Cajun cuisine like it was sent from the heavens themselves and cooked by real angels, something I wish I could try myself.  I tell him how I played video games and built computers with my friends and how I attempted to swim competitively in my youth but was never very good at it. 

We try our best to laugh, but it’s been getting harder every single day just to deal with life.  I know too many people who killed themselves because they couldn’t grasp our new reality of fighting these genocidal monsters, so I try my best to cheer people up, but my awkward optimistic attitude doesn’t always work or translate well to the others.  There’s only a few thousand of us left now, despite all the stragglers and volunteers we’ve picked up along the way. 

Sometimes a bunch of us gather around to eat or huddle near a fire to keep warm during the snowfalls, it keeps us sane with that thin thread of near normalcy.  It feels like it’s been a decade of nonstop fighting for our division, but in reality, it’s only been a little over half a year.  It’s sad how awful that feels, the pure amount of destruction and death we’ve all witnessed makes it feel like this extinction has been going on for so, so much longer.   I don’t even feel my age, 22, no, I feel like I’m a withered 135 if it were even possible.     

We tell tales and mourn the dead, it’s all we have.  We conserve power and fuel because there isn’t much left as so many of the depots have been flattened.  It feels like a trope of telling horror stories by a campfire as we sip our drinks and eat our warm food.  One of my closest friends clears his throat and starts talking as the wood fire crackles in the eroding metal barrel.

He’s also a radar tech like me, but these days we’re much more useful driving shells and ammo to operators in need around the battlefield.  His name is Ji-Young, he wanted to be a famous drama actor once upon a time, he got close too, cast a few times for small roles in popular shows that were streamed all over the world that foreign audiences fell in love with… but, admittedly, I never saw them.

Ji-Young swallows a few sips of water, his muscles flex as he slicks back his, somehow, still perfect hair and begins the conversation, it’s mostly just talking, just speculation.  Nobody truly knows why they invaded us after the first one landed here… maybe they came for our resources… maybe a simplistic and cruel desire to conquer a lesser species too weak to truly fight back… but he begins… “did you hear what happened in Rome a few weeks ago?” he asks.  We shake our heads, most of the soldiers don’t even want to know, it’s usually never good news when he opens his mouth. 

“She… came to Rome…” he speaks with dramatic emphasis. 

“The Queen?” someone else dejectedly asks. 

              “Yes…” Ji-Young answers.

              “No way… she hasn’t been seen in almost a month…” someone else chimes in.

              “I trust my contacts… she was surely there…” Ji-Young doubles down. 

              “Uh… what did she do then?” someone else nervously asks. 

              “So, apparently The Queen has some kind of fascination for our wonders of the world… like when she ripped the Statue of Liberty out of the ground and took it back to her ship… ya know how we think she keeps it as a trophy to remember what she did to New York City?” he speaks.

              “Uh-huh” one of my comrades nods. 

“So, The Queen is in Rome, right?  She had a few of her giant goons gather thousands of people, shoved them all into The Colosseum.  I’m talking probably 100,000 people easily…” Ji-Young continued.  He definitely has a way of talking about things and exaggerating with a certain arrogance, and he certainly likes the attention… but I keep my mouth closed though because Ji-Young, despite having lost his entire family and home city as well, has demonstrated that he would do anything for us, his comrades, and is always the first to volunteer for the hardest tasks of the day or during a skirmish. 

              “The Queen just starts eating people out of the Colosseum as if they were a bowl of rice… literal handfuls of people… just scooping them up into her mouth by the thousands, sometimes swallowing them whole…sometimes chewing them… my contact said there was so much blood that it was dripping off her chin like rain, flooding the streets with churning rivers of crimson…” Ji-Young dramatically concludes. 

              “That’s a lie…” Hannah loosely says in Korean, she’s our American translator, she impressively speaks 5 other languages very well and even a few more with some intermediate levels of understanding, it’s like her brain is wired for it.  She’s mostly fluent in Korean except for regional colloquialisms and dialects with an occasional misinterpretation of slang.  She’s been whispering Ji-Young’s story in English into Rashad’s ear as he too agrees with Hannah that it sounds fake. 

              “Bullshit bro!  Get outta here…” Rashad says aloud with a dismissive chuckle and wave of his hand. 

  Hannah, only 23 years old, so young and bright, once had the sky as her limit.  She was in the process of obtaining her master’s degree in linguistics while attending a semester abroad in Korea as part of her university program before all this happened… all she has ever talked about since we found her up is volunteering around the world and helping people, wanting to start charities for children and thing like that… she’s a kind and selfless soul. 

But Hannah is lucky to be alive…

              In the first few days after the demonic giantesses arrival, there was apocalyptic levels of panic along with many attempts for mass evacuations of citizens all over the country and world.  All the major airports and train stations were being overrun by frightened people looking for any means of escape to any possible safe destination, but all of them were being stomped out under the feet of the demons... millions died…

              Hannah fled from her university apartment with her roommate to the US Navy base in Busan where there was a desperate attempt at an evacuation by the Americans… they were trying to fit people on their amphibious and support ships while the city was being destroyed by one of the giants.  The US Navy witnessed Hannah’s use for translating and asked her to help calm the crowds of people while there was pandemonium during the rush to leave the harbor as some people were being trampled in the panic.  The idea was to sail out as far as possible into the Pacific Ocean to get away from the sudden chaos of the invasion of our planet.   

But the entire fleet was destroyed in less than 30 minutes by a few demon giantesses just off the coast who were waiting like hungry sharks.  The demons toyed with their ships, snapped them in half, and ate sailors and citizens stranded in the water like candy.  Hannah’s carrier was pierced by one of their monstrous horns as the giant slithered through the water, cutting through the hull like a knife through paper.  Hannah screaming as her roommate, her friend, suddenly burst into a bloody pink cloud as wall of scaley black mass shot through the ship, obliterating hundreds of sailors and other people into a bloody pulp with sheer blunt force before the demonic horn was pulled back out, leaving the hull exposed to flood with a rush of ocean water. 

The sinking ship was then lifted from the water like a toy by a demoness, her massive pale orange hands gripping each end.   The inside of the ship rotated along with the movements of the giantess, people falling all over each other and screaming as others were washed out of the hole where the giant’s horn had pierced it.  Hannah gripping onto a railing with her legs and arms for survival.  The giant clawed her sharpened black nails into the ship and started to rip and tear the vessel in half before she dropped each half back into the tumultuous ocean. 

During that time, our division took thousands of losses trying to fight the demon who was destroying Busan.  Her dark blue figure swaying high over the buildings crushing so many of us before we were issued a full retreat by our command.  We hid will the city was crushed to dust…

A few days later, after the demons were gone, we surveyed the decimated city for any unlikely survivors, with not much luck, we searched the coastline next.  The beach was dotted with thousands of washed-up corpses, it was a depressing and disturbing sight.  It was looking rather hopeless until one of our platoons managed to find and injured Hannah on the beach, half of her body underneath an upturned and deflated raft, they thought she was dead at first until she whimpered out a weak plea for help.  She was severely dehydrated and harshly sunburnt on some parts of her skin as well.    

After she fully recovered and with nowhere to go, she volunteered to join us.  We gave her a uniform and some replacement glasses.  She fit right in and has become such a valuable asset for us.  It took her a while to tell us what happened to her though, processing her trauma in her own way.  She has lost almost everything too, much like me… like Rashad… like Ji-Young… like everyone else on this planet. 

We later found out that Hannah’s family was killed in a place called Knoxville, not completely by a demonic giantess, but by a nuclear weapon…

              The bomb was deployed by the Americans, destroying the demon before she could finish off the city, but the city was then wiped off the map by the explosion anyway.  It was the first confirmed kill of a giantess after the invasion started, soon after, a dozen nuclear weapons were launched by multiple countries, the blitz of missiles killed a few demons who were unable to run, but the rest successfully retreated.

              At first we thought it was over, that they were scared of our nuclear devices, their ships flying back into space, so much hope returned, and people actually celebrated.  However, only a few days later, The Queen’s scouts swiftly attacked every stockpile of nuclear weapons across the world, reducing us to conventional weaponry.  Only when the nukes were all disposed, she sent her giant soldiers back down to resume crushing us under their boots, feet, and bodies. 

              There was another rumor going around that there are a few nuclear submarines still out there deep in the ocean with a remaining stockpile of missiles but… we don’t know for sure, our lines of communication are limited, we still have some satellites, arrays, and underwater cables left, thankfully, but only a few of us know how to efficiently manage the technology let alone fix it if it were to become inoperable. 

              The Queen had personally tortured kidnapped government and military officials from nuclear nations back on her ship, at least as far as we know, everyone thinks that’s probably how they found all of the remaining warheads… and I can’t even begin to imagine the torture she put those people through to find out about our weapons… but I still think about how a total nuclear winter would have likely made us go extinct too, but… I don’t know which would have been the better option between the giants and a slow, toxic decay…

              Ji-Young brings me back into the moment.  “You don’t have to believe me… but… tell me that’s something The Queen wouldn’t do with The Colosseum… she has pissed away entire cities just because she could… Krakow… Bogota… Almaty… they’re all just big acidic muddy bogs now…” Ji-Young sullenly explains as everyone falls silent for a moment.  I continue to write, it’s the most calming feeling I have, honestly one of the only things that keeps me alive apart from…  

              “Yeah… I guess she would…” Hannah sadly admits in a soft voice.  Hannah is lovely, but we don’t really talk as much as I’d like to…

Hannah… she took my virginity after we killed one of the giants in Yangsan.  It was a moment of intense vulnerability for both of us.  We got tipsy off a few bottles of flavored soju before we had sex in someone’s abandoned house.  We don’t bring it up, almost like it never happened... 

              That day was one of the worst battles we fought in… we lost thousands more of our own, including many friends of mine, it was 5 months ago in September when we still had a larger force and capable allied assistance. 

High altitude gunships were blasting the giant, but it barely fazing the demoness as she decimated the city beneath her.  I still can see the bottoms of her boots stained a bloody red while she towered over everything in sight.  Her skin was a pale violet, she had silver eyes with a solid black pupil, and like a sick joke, she would lick her teeth with her forked tongue before stomping and twisting her toes into groups of fleeing people, picking them out one at a time.   

              Surviving scientists from all over Europe had been studying the body of a confirmed kill that was brought down near Strasbourg on the France-Germany border.  They informed as many militaries as they could that the demoness anatomy was similar to ours in most ways, they were made of tissue and organs, had some bodily functions we understood, and some that we didn’t, their bones were made of something strange as well.  They had some kind of extra genetic makeup in their cells that resisted injuries and illnesses, they resist cold and heat, defy physics…  but the important message is that they could still be hurt, a small glimmer of hope.

              We knew nothing of their culture or their society… just an evil queen and her minions relentlessly killing us with thoughtless cruelty, and we had to fight back no matter the cost. 

We would have to go for sensitive spots on their bodies, their eyes, their stomachs, their throats, but it’s hard to do that when they’re a living god almost 2000 feet tall, actively trying to step on you like a pestering flea.  They also have some protections.  Their suits are skin-tight but have padded armor in a few places along with markings that we think represent some sort of militaristic or societal caste.  It’s mockery, they grin and take fun in embarrassing us, knowing that we have only killed just a handful of them versus billions of our kind. 

It’s like they have a will to impose themselves over us, they take pleasure in their revealing clothing, all the more humiliating to us if we die by a careless rampaging alien demon who sits on half a city while her curves end entire masses of people…

Hannah and I were bunkered in the outskirts of Yangsan while the giant rocked the city with quaking stomps, our division on all sides were hitting the demon from the ground and the hills surrounding the city while the gunships up high were still raining fire on her, explosions flaring across her body and her spiraling horns atop her head.  Everyone was giving everything they had, even down to the last rock we could throw at her, there were a few cuts and scrapes on her skin, we were inflicting damage, if we could just keep hitting her... 

Hannah and I operating the radar while she translated as best she could under intense pressure to the pilots in the sky.  Suddenly, the giantess turned, her straight black hair whipped around her violet face, her silver irises were seemingly looking right at us, my heart dropped.  She crossed her arms over her chest while explosions lit up her body all over, trails of bullets bouncing off her exposed pale violet skin as she began to laugh at us. 

She just laughed… mocking us, then picking up her boots and going straight back to stomping out tens of thousands of terrified people at a time.  She knocked over buildings, threw rubble at different units of artillery.  Tossing whole buildings upward at the gunships as if playing a game, still just continuing to laugh.  She even tugged down the top of her suit, revealing her massive, voluminous purple breasts, that was the first time I realized that they enjoyed killing us more than we thought. 

The demon said something in her own language, her silky voice boomed over the city distorting our surveillance equipment for a moment like some kind of electromagnetism disturbance.  I can’t describe it truly, you’d have to hear it yourself to understand, all the giant demonesses speak it, it sounds like… an ethereal resonance, even if their words are guttural and demonic sounding… it gets in your head like a spreading fire, but gently and flowing at the same time while so thunderous in the air high up above… it’s scary, yet so godlike and surreal all together. 

Hannah was shaking, hyperventilating, and crying, she was fumbling with the equipment too and I don’t blame her, this was one of the scariest moments anyone could fathom.  I reached out my hand and placed it on her shoulder, “we keep going” I said to her.  She sniffled, shook her head, and went back to her radio.  The officers were behind me screaming into their own radios, but I couldn’t hear over another smugly arrogant laugh the giantess bellowed out.  I knew we were mostly safe; we were a couple miles away from the action still, but really that’s only a few steps for them at their height. 

The monstrous demon then peeled off her boots, she wanted to feel us squirm under her soles and toes… she dangled her bloody footwear over the city before dropping them onto more of my comrades without care before she started to pick out people with her violet-colored feet… taking care to grind her bare heels into our amor and tanks.  She slowly rubbed her nails up her body, teasing herself as she smiled and flicked her forked tongue out at the destruction, an image I wish I could remove from my memories. 

She groped herself, her own exposed violet breasts, squeezing her hands against herself, her forked tongue licking both sides of her grey lips slowly before coming back together in unison.  She then began to lower her foot down over a division of armor and many more of my friends before she stopped.  She wanted to watch them squirm and beg for their lives underneath her approaching foot as she wiggled and dangled her toes above them, leaving them in her own massive shadow. 

It was sickening… she was running her sharp nails down herself again, almost clawing at her own skin with fervor.  Then she lowered and slowly pressed her toes onto the hundreds of my friends, twisting her toes left and right as she smothered everyone into paste as the dust and debris shot up from the impact she made in the collapsing city.  She moaned with pleasure, she enjoyed it so much, it was sexually validating for her, and we all understood… which scared us even more about our future underneath these beings.  Her clawlike black nails traced back up her body and violet skin before she closed her eyes and moaned again, and like a thunder, it roared across the sky and rattled our bones.

She traced her sharp nails over her throat before she dug her nails into her own skin, she was hurting herself on purpose, she cooed, it was turning her on.  She clawed at her throat deeper, her eyes closed still as she hung her head back and basked in the chaos at her feet.  Bullets and missiles raining all over her only making her more excited as she stomped her foot at random just to feel more people and buildings explode underneath her power.  Suddenly, everyone could see a long, seeping emission of her deeply, dark red-black blood, her claws had punctured her own skin on the side of her throat as she moaned again, she loved the pain, almost as if we weren’t hurting her enough for her pleasure and she wanted even more. 

She collected some of her own blood on her nails and began dripping it into her awaiting open mouth, dangling her hand over her face as a few drops of her own blood collected on her two split tongues.  A few gigantic drops missing and splashing into the destroyed city at her feet before she licked and tasted with pleasure.  She reopened her silver eyes and resumed her devilish smile, her eyes were somehow brighter, as if matching her newfound arousal before she picked up her foot and went back to crushing us indiscriminately.    

After a few more quaking steps and surely thousands more deaths under her bare feet, we heard it… it was the first time I had ever heard it… there was an echoing boom… then the giantess yelped in pain, distorting our electronic equipment… I ripped off my headset and stood up, staring at the decimated city in the distance.  Hannah right next to me as we saw it.  A massive gush of blood erupted from the side of her neck.  The giantess clawed at her throat trying to stop the profuse bleeding, a giant puff of black smoke wafting away from her face and dissipating above her horns. 

I later found out that a brave bomber crew from China had flown their Soviet era Tu-160 packed with explosives straight at where she punctured her own skin on the side of her throat, the crew flew at the fastest speed the plane was capable of while she was distracted, playfully poking her sharpened black toenails into an infantry division all shooting up at her from the destroyed city streets. 

Their plane luckily hitting the most perfect angle possible after crashing into her seeping puncture mark, rupturing into the giant’s artery, sacrificing themselves and becoming heroes.  The giantess gurgled as her dark blood pooled from the wound.  Their skin would mostly just absorb projectiles and bombs like they just sparks… we were in shock at the sight.

The giantess stumbled backward, flattening a neighborhood under her foot, her bright silver eyes fluttering with worry before she fell, her body slamming into an entire company of my comrades as well as entire districts of the city, the blood from her wound pooling out into a neighborhood like a pulsing tidal wave, submerging the suburbs with a deep red-black blood and drying soon after, the dust finally settling hours later.  We managed to recover a few of their bodies from off her… rear… for proper burial.  Those giant barbarians just leave their dead where they lie without care, we are not like them, and we will maintain our humanity despite the horrors above us. 

We tried with unmanned drones for a while without success to repeat the idea, but we’ve been told that other brave pilots out there in the world have tried to recreate the Chinese pilots’ sacrifice, the giants simply started wearing what look like collars to protect their throats from anything like that happening again, and without any puncture marks to target, countless planes just crashed into the chokers or other parts of their bodies in attempt to be heroic, but failing...  a shame…

Later in the night, Hannah and I snuck away with a few bottles of soju we found scattered around in the crushed city.  It was truly an apocalyptic sight, gut churning, there were almost no buildings left, massive boot-prints and footprints filled with twisted and flattened bodies embedded deeply all over the city, a towering corpse in the distance taking up the horizon, her discarded heeled-boots looming upwards taller than most skyscrapers, her black hair splayed out over a crushed neighborhood.  We walked by one of her pale violet arms, the massive wall of purple flesh looming over us mixed with rubble, Hannah turning away as we walked by dozens of crushed bodies.  The looks on what remained of their faces were horrifying. 

Passing her upturned purple hand, her nails black and filed down to a sharp, vorpal point as Hannah shivered at the sight, reminding her of the pale orange giantess that killed her friend and violently tore her ship apart at sea.

We could almost see down the length of her body only covered by broken buildings blocking some of the view, and her smell was so distinct.  You would think the demonic aliens who acted like monsters should smell as such, but no, I would compare it to almost that of a burnt-out match, smokey, yet mixed with a fruity sweetness, almost like a citrus… but… the air was also still scented with the dried blood of the giant and the thousands who were gnashed and squished underneath her titanic body. 

We eventually found a sizeable house that was still somewhat intact near the outskirts, the roof was mostly caved in, and the front door was blocked, but we wiggled through the rubble and found a bedroom.  Hannah and I were drinking all night and talking about good memories, laughing even, we were probably so traumatized from the fight, we couldn’t process our feelings properly, if there is a proper way, I still can’t process mine.  I think we both just wanted to feel something else in that moment besides hopelessness...

We started to kiss, her round glasses and clothes came off soon after, then my clothes, hands going through one another’s hair.  I saw her naked, she was embarrassed at first, covering herself with her arms and hands.  The well-built and cute American girl, fair skin, freckles on her cheeks and nose, dark blue eyes, and dark hair a little past her jaw, her shameful eyes staring at me then towards the floor.  Us courageous soldiers had just taken down a 1900-foot-tall monster, her violet corpse a few miles away still, but there Hannah was, exposed to just me and blushing as if ashamed of herself.

In that very moment, I realized that Hannah could have been any one of those giant alien soldiers.  I briefly imagined Hannah with fiery blue eyes towering over Changwon instead of the two monsters that murdered my family.  I looked away and took another drink from the bottle.  Hannah took a deep breath and held my face, pulling me back toward her gaze, we both started crying, we couldn’t help it. 

We sniffled and dried our tears while lying on the soft bed, we held one another as we stared up at the night sky through the broken roof of the small house, the stars still shining and the moon bright, a black and red dot in front of the moon’s glow though, The Queen’s ship, a constant reminder that she was always watching us from above... 

Hannah… her skin was so warm and soft, caressing her on that bed felt like a moment I could live in for forever, I forgot about everything that was happening in the world before we deeply kissed and pushed myself into her… it felt amazing and I could feel our emotional connection, staring into her dark blue eyes and her staring back at mine while I was over her… her soft and gentle noises of pleasure following my hips rocking into hers, her hands hugging my back… I made sure to finish outside of her, the worst thing would be a pregnancy in a time like this.  This is the kind of world where you wish you didn’t have children, to subject pure innocence to such suffering.  I can’t imagine.  I really like her still… I hope she comes around and just talks to me…

I place my pen down for a brief moment after my memory drifts away, bringing me back to the present conversation.  Ji-Young still going on about something, always on his current events whether they were made up or not.  “The Finnish took one down near the Russian border” he says with a tempered excitement.    

“Really now?  Everyone left says they kill one every week just for propaganda and boosting morale” one of the officers says.  We still pay attention to rank sometimes, but… we all treat each other the same… a multi-star general talks to a private as if they were real friends, we all care about human life now, protecting everyone, just hoping for a future. 

“Imagine what their winters feel like…” one of the tank mechanics mumbles. 

“Look!” Ji-Young says as he holds out a screen, on the screen is drone footage dated only one hour ago.  The camera showing a dead giantess from above laying in a snowy crater surrounded by bloody boot prints along with soldiers in heavy winter gear and troves of tanks, the giant footprints filled with flattened tanks and mangled bloody bodies buried deep into the muddy snow.  The giantess’ darker red skin was beautiful in comparison to the snow that surrounded her body, her corpse was lifeless, her orange eyes still slightly open as a stream of warm dark blood dripped from her nose and stained the snow a deep black. 

“That makes 13 confirmed kills…” a captain softly speaks. 

“That only 6 without nukes though…” Ji-Young says.

“Good for the Fins…” the captain mumbles. 

“I wonder how they did it…” Hannah says. 

“You have anything to say, Jay?” Rashad asks me in a joking manner, he notices I’ve been quiet all evening since I’ve been mostly just writing and observing.  Jay, my nickname to the Americans, easy for them to remember and pronounce.  I clear my throat and take a breath, ready to talk, but just as I begin to voice my opinion…

“Oh no!  no… shit!”  Ji-Young yells out, he holds out the screen once again for us all to see, this time it was more drone footage from eastern Nigeria, and the time was current with the present, a live feed.  The camera showing bombs lighting up the legs and lower body of a giantess, the camera panning up as the younger looking dark pink demoness slammed her bare foot down into the already destroyed city, she was naked, her entire body exposed.  Her hands against her hips as she carefully picked her targets, twisting her pink toes left to right with precision while she shook the bombs off like simple tickles. 

Her horns curled like a ram atop her black hair fluffed and draping down to her shoulders as she smiled wide, parting her plump black lips, her fiery red eyes blinking with glee as she was enjoying the death and destruction at her feet… much like the silver-eyed giant we took down in Yangsan, she was deriving an arousal for her power as she curled down her hand and twisted her fingers into her awaiting sex.  A few people including Hannah looking away at the image with disgust. 

“I thought they already got Nigeria?” Rashad questions. 

“They must be circling back for any survivors” I say.  The giantess dropped to her knees with tow loud thuds and more smoke and ash flying upward, she was straddling over her destruction as she continued to tease herself between her legs, her eyes dart upward though as she growls and swipes her hand in the air, aircraft explode on her slightly paler palms as the camera feed cuts out, everyone groans in frustration followed by a brief moment of defeated silence in the hangar.    

“I didn’t want to see it anyway…” Ji-Young says with some dejection.  I hate seeing all that death, especially when the giantesses seem to take pleasure from it, it pains me… all those families, people…  I sigh before looking back up at everyone. 

We’ll have to put the fires out soon as nightfall encapsulates the sky… we don’t want the horns to spot the glows or any smoke to give ourselves away… it’s going to be a cold night…

I stare at Hannah for a moment through the fire, the flames from the barrel are dancing between us.  She awkwardly smirks at me before looking back at the floor toward her feet, the flames reflecting off her glasses… when I look at her, I think just maybe for one second, there’s more hope in me somewhere… we need to win…somehow… and I want to be with her when this is over… I just want her to feel the same…

                                                                                                To be continued...