Twin-Seen - Side A (Commission for Rufran)

TAGS: Kaiju/Macro, Macro Rampage, Destruction, Micro Perspective

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Whenever the sirens sounded, it was never a good time. Didn’t matter if the giant in question didn’t want to hurt people, there came a point where intention stopped being important and the only thing that really factored into things was whether or not they were stepping on buildings or thrashing cars as they went along, which that one… most definitely did.

For Jonah, the few occasions in which a rampage occurred had become something of a benchmark, which was something he didn’t exactly know how to react to. On the one hand, it being ritualised made it significantly easier for him to avoid injury or outright consumption; he knew exactly where to go, how to hide, how to make sure he avoided the same roads everyone else used, and how best to make use of his time to get as far away from the devastation as possible.

On the other hand, his city was occasionally beset by macro rampages, and he didn’t recall the damned real estate agent making any mention of that when he specifically asked for the incidence of macro-scale folk. He knew he should’ve insisted when he got nothing but vague responses and handwaving; in retrospect, that bastard didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were deliberately misleading him!

So now, he had to deal with the odd siren going off, alerting everyone within city limits that another giant had emerged and they had to all run towards the nearest shelter, as if that would work. The last time Jonah actually listened to official protocol, he’d just barely avoided getting himself snacked on by a gargantuan doberman, and even then only through pure, dumb luck; ever since then, he’d spent most of his free time devising better escape routes, hoping that he wouldn’t have to use them… and then, several months passed, and something happened.

Most of the time, it didn’t go that badly. Authorities on-site had plenty of suppressants to use and years of experience and scientific education to rely on; all that changed was how much of the former was needed and how much of the latter the latest macro completely disregarded. Most of the time, the rampage only brought down a handful of buildings, maybe cost a few prey, but apart from that, things proceeded as normal; cloning technology being what it was, bringing people back was relatively easy.

But sometimes… sometimes it went wrong. Sometimes, it didn’t seem to matter just what was thrown at the giant’s face, or how much of it was thrown, or with how much power or determination; sometimes, the macro rampage began and only grew in intensity as the one responsible for it was fed endlessly by the world around them, gorging themselves on destruction and carnage as they grew bigger and more destructive, flattening everything around them as they lumbered through the city. Sometimes, the macro was resistant to the suppressants, had an appetite for the little ones, and a biology that very much agreed with rampant consumption, the perfect firestorm of disaster as far as macro incidents went.

Just like that day.

The local news reports were calling them a “mothbird”, and they certainly fit the description. A fusion of insectile fluff and head with overall avian anatomy, it was hard to miss them as they made their way through the city, and quite literally through the city: one of the few cases where the macro was big enough that they could afford to pick a direction and stick to it, rather than having to weave through existing roads and avenues.

In the distance, Jonah could hear the telltale sound of metal being crushed, cars and trucks turned into pancakes underneath the monster’s… claws? Talons? Feet? Who knew, really; all he was aware of was that the giant could be seen clear over the skyline, seemed capable of toppling entire skyscrapers just by moving forward, and was licking their odd beak-mouth-thing as they looked down at the crowd and presumably imagined what it would be like to devour it all.

And that was more than enough for the young office worker to turn tail and immediately start running. Around him, the city erupted into a panic: this was a new type of macro, they were saying, one bigger and more powerful than any that had come before. The police were helpless, someone else shouted, claiming they had heard it on their frequencies that none of the suppressants were working. Still others proclaimed it to be the “next stage”, whatever that meant, flocking towards the titan instead of away from them.

Car horns, trucks barrelling through entire sections of parked vehicles, people crowding the subway tunnels either as a means of escaping the rampage taking place above ground or hoping to get out of the city through one of the few available lines. Most made the mistake of hopping into their cars and trying to race ahead of everyone else, which worked about as well as one might expect; Jonah was one of the few smart enough to leg it, knowing they’d be halfway out of the city before anyone inside a vehicle even moved an inch.

Looking over his shoulder, however, made for an… interesting experience. The macro casually approaching his location was nothing like anything he’d seen before: an odd mixture of bird and moth, they were more of a fluff titan than one of the “regular” ones everyone was used to. Indeed, judging from the expression on their face, they might even have been adorable, were they not taller than the tallest buildings around and going to town making sure this bar was set lower and lower with every step.

The sounds of screeching metal and groaning steel, of shattered glass and muffled screams, filled the air in every direction, resonating within the urban jungle as the walking disaster area grew closer and closer still. For Jonah, it was a warning to get out of dodge as quickly as he could, as much as it was a reminder that he had no chance of actually doing so; even when running full tilt in the opposite direction, the cacophony was only ever getting louder, with him growing increasingly aware that for every step the giant took, he would have to take a hundred or more, and he could only keep that pace up for a limited amount of time before it caught up to him and left him doubled over on the sidewalk.

But he had to try. He knew what awaited him if he gave up and let himself fall, he’d seen it happen; the moment he came close enough to the colossus, that’d be a hand coming down to pick him and several dozen people up, scooped in one palm so the macro could let them all fall into their maw. If he was lucky, he’d make it all the way down into the stomach before blacking out and waking up in a vat some time later; otherwise, he might just find one who liked playing with their food.

Regardless, Jonah couldn’t let that happen. Even when the throng grew dense enough that he could easily walk on it if need be, he needed to keep pushing, needed to find an opening, even if this meant throwing himself into an alleyway and coming out the other side thoroughly coated in garbage from head to toe. Ducking into side streets, exploiting construction sites and wrecked buildings left behind from the previous macro rampage, anything was fair game when it came to getting away from that thing in the not-so-distant distance.

He closed his eyes, breathing in deeply. The stench of sweat filled his nostrils, the taste of copper on his tongue; if he pushed himself further, he might just collapse from exhaustion and find himself waking up in a lab a mile or so beneath the surface of the planet, wondering why he’d just lost several days. He had to keep moving, so he turned to face one end of the alley he was in and took a step towards it.

Immediately after, a hand fell down. One colossal enough to turn multiple cars into thin disks, one that caused enough of a seismic disturbance that Jonah found himself falling on his ass when the ground shook him off his feet. A hand belonging to the monster up above, who had bent down and cracked open the ground in their first attempt at gathering snacks; a hand, which was scraped forward, reaping whoever was in front of it, as the crowd shouted and yelped to be let free.

Jonah watched, horrified, at how closely he’d come to being scooped up as well. Now that he could only see part of the arm, he figured he was fine to poke his head out from the alleyway, only to be presented with a scene of utter destruction: an impact site where the hand first landed, and a deep, gouged-open canyon where the road used to be, bits and pieces of piping spurting with water and refuse, the distant wailing of car alarms soon silenced by another thundering crash. Far in the distance, a fluffy appendage was moving upwards, where the source of the shadow cast upon Jonah was.

He made the mistake of looking up, and was utterly paralysed as a result. He’d been in a similar situation before, and had wished never to be there again: so close to a macro that he could practically reach out and touch them if he wanted to. Rising into the big blue sky was a big blue giant, covered in fluff and looking utterly oblivious to the carnage they were responsible for. Hell, they were smiling when they brought their hand over to the beak-mouth, opened it up, then dropped who knew how many people inside of it, licking their non-existent lips after an obscenely loud gulp brought all of the unfortunate ones down their throat and into their stomach.

They looked… peaceful. Almost like they’d just snacked on a candy bar and not who knew how many lives, right before taking another step and driving one of their legs straight through several city blocks with about as much difficult as if the buildings were made out of tissue paper; for all that the creature looked like, the city itself might as well not even be there, little more than a meaningless obstacle in their enjoyment of a good rampage.

But for Jonah, what he saw was his death, approaching at high velocity. All he knew what to do was duck, flattening his front against the ground and hoping it would be enough. His eardrums ruptured as a cascade of rubble came pouring down onto him, courtesy of every building around him being turned into crumbling ruins with a single step; he could barely hear, he could barely feel, and once the big blocks of concrete started falling around him, he could barely think either. All he could do was hold there, curled up, his back turned to the world, as everything slowly fell to darkness…

… and he didn’t wake up in a vat. Mostly because he hadn’t gone under at all.

Jonah opened his eyes, scanning his surroundings only to find that he was likely still trapped underneath the rubble caused by the macro’s movements. There was no discontinuity there: he hadn’t fallen unconscious, so the titan was likely still relatively close; nevertheless, he had to get as far away from there as he could, or else he’d end up staying buried beneath who knew how much random junk, ready to be smushed the moment the macro turned around. Thankfully, most of it was loose rubble he could easily push away from him, letting him dig his way out in just a couple of minutes… back onto a desolate patch of destroyed urban landscape that he suddenly became very aware used to be his workplace.

“Well… least I’m not coming in tomorrow,” he mused aloud, the words escaping from his lips before he could catch them, “good heavens.”

Absent any direction to take, Jonah had little recourse but to stay where he was until he figured it was safe to move; being underneath a rampaging giant was about the last place he wanted to be, but the eye of the storm was at least safer than any of its wall, or, heavens forfend, what awaited him on the other side of them. Figuring he needed some perspective, the young man climbed to the top of the nearest pile of rubble to get a good look at his surroundings, occasionally finding bits and pieces from his workspace that he did his best to ignore.

With the fluff titan so close, he was surprised to see a crowd a short distance to the south. By the way they were moving, uncoordinated and constantly tugging and pulling at one another, they were likely struggling with the same indecision that Jonah himself was: move at all, and they risked attracting the macro’s attention, stay in place, and risk being swept in the carnage. There were no right answers; Jonah himself was only relatively safer on account of being alone, allowing him to pass by unnoticed, whereas a large group of people inherently made one’s life expectancy plummet into the single-digit minutes.

And not just because of the giant looking down either; being as big as they were, the macro above them had a higher chance of hitting large groups by sheer virtue of volume occupied: the more folk were in one space, the bigger the target they became to sheer happenstance. And, just as Jonah formulated that thought, he saw it: the approaching foot.

Now, under normal circumstances, he would’ve shouted for the group to move. About three dozen or so people all stacked together, all it would take would be one breaking away for the whole thing to disintegrate and turn into three dozen individuals scattered to the winds. But he was far enough away that any shout would get lost in the din of a city being destroyed, and even if he wasn’t… well, he’d just barely escaped one encounter with the colossus, and he wasn’t about to risk another one, not so soon after the last.

So he stayed quiet, and watched as the titan brought up the one they hadn’t moved through Jonah’s general vicinity. He watched as, just like before, the giant broke through multiple city blocks about as easily as he himself would cut through butter. And he watched as, after being momentarily halted by an old, brutalist concrete block of an apartment building, the macro lost balance for a seconds and had to quickly readjust by moving their foot to the side… right onto the terrified-looking crowd of bystanders who suddenly found themselves cursing their decision not to move.

Jonah sat there and watched as the shadow cast upon the group grew smaller and smaller, until a point where, just before impact, it was just as large as the circle of people it was ready to engulf. He watched as the titan, uncaring, unknowingly honestly, brought one of their feet down on a whole host of people, the screams muffled almost instantly… but not silenced. Jonah would’ve expected that, but in between the odd anatomy and the last-second dodging bursts, quite a few of those underneath the talons actually managed to escape being crushed, only to end up clinging onto the damned things for dear life.

And as before, the titan seemed blissfully unaware of the destruction it brought to its surroundings, as it simply pulled its foot upwards and carried on as before. Carrying with it equal parts rubble and people, the talons and the calf above them destroyed a few more blocks before being planted firmly on the ground again, and by then, it was impossible to tell whether the vanishing screams came from the passengers being permanently silenced, or from the general distance and overall chaos surrounding Jonah.

Jonah, who for all that he saw the whole thing happen, still hadn’t moved. Hard to, given the weird position he suddenly found himself in: there was actually a genuinely positive outcome for him there if he just stayed still for once. The giant was going away from him, so if he just did nothing, there was a decent change h might actually make it out there relatively unscatched; just as long as the macro didn’t turn around, then he had all the time in the world to turn around and head back to where the rampage had started, putting some distance between himself and certain death.

So he got up, observing his surroundings with as much attention as he could muster in his rattled state. He saw the pathways light up in his vision: a chunk of road here, a pathway of crushed cars there, a couple of alleys as well, all of it leading further into the devastated section of the city where the giant had first emerged from. If he was quick, then he might just be able to get through the wreckage, find a way out of the city, and not have to worry about the incident until he had to come back to work.

Looking back, Jonah gave the colossus one final look. He could only imagine what it would be like to be that enormous, to wield such power that he’d be able to turn a city upside down, seemingly without even realising he was doing it. To be so gargantuan that he became a natural disaster. Surely, it shouldn’t be activating as many neural pathways as it was, but alas, one never lived through a disaster such as that one without taking its toll in some way.

Shaking his head, Jonah turned away from the macro mothbird and jumped down from the wreckage he was on. He still had plenty of space to clear if he wanted to get away from it all, and sitting there musing about it wasn’t going to help.

He could do that later.