Chapter 7: The Aftermath
The silence in the loading bay was a living thing, thick with the smell of shattered wood, dust, and the coppery tang of Lia’s blood. Yuna stood there, seven feet of confused muscle and green skin, listening to the fading echo of Yeji’s footsteps in the alley. The storm inside her, Ana, had gone silent. Shell-shocked.
A wet, ragged cough broke the spell.
Lia was trying to stand. She got one knee under her, then slumped against the broken pallets, her breath hitching. The bruise on her side was a violent, dark purple against her jade skin. She looked up at Yuna, and the hatred in her eyes was gone, burned away by a more fundamental emotion: pain. And fear.
“She used us,” Lia whispered, her voice cracked.
“I know,” Yuna said. Her own voice, Ana’s voice, felt foreign. It rumbled in her chest.
“No, you don’t.” Lia dragged herself upright, wincing. “You were the experiment. I was the wrench she threw into it. To see what would happen under stress.” She let out a bitter laugh that turned into a groan. “Corporate fucking team-building.”
Before Yuna could process that, a new sound cut through the bay. The metallic shriek of the damaged loading door being forced again. Not from the alley. From the interior door that led back into the building.
Yeji stepped back inside.
She had to duck slightly under the doorframe. In the gloom, her ten-foot form was a monument of shadow and emerald. She held something in one hand: a heavy-duty roll of industrial duct tape. In the other, a thick nylon strap from a broken forklift tie-down.
She looked at them, her glowing eyes passing over Lia’s injured form without interest and settling on Yuna. “Lesson two,” Yeji said, her voice like grinding stones. “Practical application.”
Yuna backed up, a low growl building in her throat. “Stay away.”
Yeji moved. It wasn’t the clumsy lunge of a monster. It was the efficient, brutal strike of a predator who knew exactly how much force to use. She covered the distance in two strides. Yuna swung a fist, all instinct, but Yeji caught it mid-air, her hand enveloping Yuna’s completely. She squeezed.
The pain was immediate and blinding. Bones creaked. Yuna cried out, her knees buckling.
“You have the strength,” Yeji said, conversational, as she twisted Yuna’s arm behind her back. “But you have no idea how to use it. You’re thinking like a girl in a pencil skirt. That has to stop.”
With her other hand, Yeji shoved Yuna forward, toward a heavy metal office chair that had survived the earlier chaos. Yuna stumbled, off-balance, and Yeji forced her down into it. The chair groaned under her new weight. Before Yuna could surge up, the nylon strap was around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides. Yeji pulled it tight with one brutal yank, the nylon biting deep into green flesh. She fastened it with a complex knot at the back.
Yuna thrashed. The chair skidded on the concrete. She was strong, but the strap held, and Yeji’s knot was unyielding.
“Watch,” Yeji commanded, turning away.
Lia had been trying to edge toward the broken alley doors. She froze as Yeji’s gaze landed on her.
“No,” Lia breathed, shaking her head. “You got what you wanted. Just leave.”
“I haven’t,” Yeji said. She dropped the duct tape and stalked toward Lia. “I need to see the correlation between extreme stimulus and secondary mutation. Your anger spiked your growth before. Let’s find the ceiling.”
Lia turned to run. It was futile.
Yeji’s hand snagged her by the hair, wrenching her head back. Lia screamed, clawing at the massive wrist, her feet leaving the ground. Yeji dragged her, kicking and fighting, back to the center of the floor under the swinging light.
“Yuna! Help me!” Lia shrieked, her voice raw with terror.
Yuna strained against the strap, the metal of the chair squealing in protest. “Let her go!”
Yeji ignored her. She threw Lia down onto the cold concrete, not with a casual backhand, but with purposeful force, pinning her with a knee the size of a cinder block on her chest. Lia’s breath exploded out of her.
“The first time was about pleasure. Yours. Mine. It was a trigger.” Yeji leaned down, her face close to Lia’s. “This is about pain. Ownership. Let’s see what that does to you.”
What happened next wasn’t sex. It was an execution of will.
Yeji kept Lia pinned with one hand on her throat, cutting off her air, her screams becoming choked gurgles. With her other hand, she ripped what remained of Lia’s clothes away. There was no ceremony, no dark seduction. It was clinical violence.
Yuna was forced to watch. The chair faced the scene, a front-row seat to a horror show. She turned her head, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Open your eyes,” Yeji’s voice cut through, flat. “Or I’ll break her neck and start on you. Learning requires observation.”
A sob hitched in Yuna’s throat. She opened her eyes.
Yeji positioned herself over Lia’s face. Lia fought, her hands pushing uselessly at the colossal thighs bracketing her head. Yeji simply lowered her weight.
The sound was muffled, wet. Lia’s body went rigid, then began to convulse in a different way—not transformation, but suffocation and violation. Her legs kicked spasmodically against the floor. Yeji watched Yuna the entire time, her expression one of detached analysis.
“See how her eyes change?” Yeji said, as if lecturing. “The fear is being overcooked by rage. The biological furnace is stoked.”
Lia’s eyes, wide and panicked, began to flicker. The green glow, which had been steady, started to pulse. A deep, angry red bled into the edges of the jade.
Yeji increased the pressure, moving with a slow, terrible rhythm. Lia’s convulsions grew weaker. Then, a low, bubbling snarl erupted from her, a sound that wasn’t human. Her hands, which had been pushing, suddenly clamped onto Yeji’s thighs. Not to push away. To hold on.
Her body began to swell.
It wasn’t the graceful, terrifying bloom of Yeji’s first change. This was a violent eruption. Ligaments popped. Her spine arched off the concrete with a series of sickening cracks. She grew, and kept growing, seven feet becoming eight, pushing Yeji’s weight up. The red in her eyes spread, clouding the intelligence that was there, replacing it with a feral, burning heat.
Nine feet.
She was larger now, denser, her muscles knotted and brutal. But her face was slack, drool mixing with tears and other fluids on her chin. A deep, constant growl rolled from her chest.
Yeji finally lifted herself off, standing to observe her work. Lia rolled onto her hands and knees, coughing and retching, her new massive body trembling. She shook her head like a wounded animal. When she looked up at Yeji, there was no recognition, no cunning. Just a dumb, blazing fury.
“Interesting,” Yeji murmured. “The cognitive trade-off is significant. Strength increased by approximately thirty percent, but executive function is nearly absent. Useful for a blunt instrument. Not for a CEO.”
Lia, now a nine-foot brute of pure instinct, saw a threat standing over her. She roared and lunged.
Yeji met the charge. They collided like two glaciers, the impact echoing through the bay. But Yeji was still stronger. She was in control. She caught Lia’s wild punch, diverted it, and drove a fist into her stomach. Lia folded, the air blasted from her lungs. Yeji grabbed her by the back of the neck and the waistband of her ruined shorts, and with a grunt of effort, hurled her across the room.
Lia crashed into a stack of cardboard boxes, burying herself in a landslide of packaging.
Yeji turned back to Yuna, barely winded. She walked over, her footsteps heavy and final. She stopped in front of the chair, looking down at Yuna’s tear-streaked face.
“Your turn isn’t tonight,” Yeji said quietly. “You’re the control group. The one who remembers. You’ll remember this. You’ll remember what happens when you cross me, and you’ll remember what happens to tools that outlive their usefulness.”
She leaned down, her breath hot. “The girl you were is dead. The monster you are belongs to me. You can be a valued asset, or you can be a lesson. Think about it.”
Yeji straightened, glanced at the wreckage where Lia lay moaning, and then walked back toward the interior door. She paused at the threshold.
“The strap will degrade in a few hours. Clean up your mess.”
Then she was gone.
The buzz of the lightbulb was the loudest sound in the world. Yuna sat bound, the nylon digging into her skin. She stared at the scattered, broken form of Lia across the room. The fear in her chest was a cold, hard stone. But beneath it, under the terror and the nausea, something else was cohering.
It wasn’t Ana’s voice. It was her own.
She poisoned my tea. She used Lia to break me. She tied me to a chair and made me watch. The thoughts were clear, sharp as glass.
Her eyes scanned the floor, moving over the shattered pallets, the discarded duct tape, the glittering remnants of a broken mirror from some old cabinet. Her gaze fixed on a long, sharp shard of glass, just within the arc of her foot if she stretched.
The stone of fear began to transmute. It heated, becoming something denser. Something angrier.
She looked at the glass shard. She looked at the door Yeji had exited.
She began to very carefully, very quietly, scrape the chair across the concrete floor.