GIANT {Madness Combat Torture TFTG PMC}

Everything hurts. Darkness, cold darkness, an omnipresent darkness that clouded her dimmed senses. Her thoughts swam, her sluggish senses having difficult collecting them as something clattered in her head clearly:

She’s dead.

Blood spilled from her nose and mouth from her attempt to laugh, her weightless-feeling body stumbling as if on solid ground, throat bubbling and her eyes not opening. Haha. She recalled now. Inhumans, the lot of them, both mentally and physically. Such crimes against humanity, what eager torment, what violent malice, what… What a complete obliteration of her head. Strange that she was able to think at all.

“Madeleine.”

…Or perceive. This isn’t a voice she recognized.

“Miss Thorn.”

Still not recognized. Much deeper than anyone she ever knew in life. It crackled, warm, popping in her ears like warm water managing to drip into them from working in the hot sun. Feeling slowly prickled through her body and limbs, forced to fight through layers of numb pins-and-needles. Salty sweat dripped down her head and stung at heavily-bleeding wounds, gashes, and cleavage seams of flesh. Hot. Hot. Hot. She’s so hot.

"Madeleine Thorn.”

Her entire body trembled with heat. Her vision snapped through the blackness and into color and imagery, barely-functioning eyelids clumsy and sluggish in movement, hands rushing to grab at her cobbled-together, rattling head. All she saw was a deep red void, her feet standing on one of many small grey stone islands floating within it. This wasn’t any kind of afterlife she remembered being told about.

“What-” she gagged as she keeled forward, nose and mouth sputtering blood, head rattling like a toy filled with metal pieces. “-WHAT IS IIIIIIT?”

She slowly raised her head to look in front of her, hand held up to her misshapen head and trying to wipe away the ever-flowing streaks of blood. Black fire seemed to endlessly extend upwards into the void, somehow emanating red light like a back-glow from a spotlight, the inside of its shape marked with two red slits, but yet it had condensed itself into an all-too-familiar form. Oh, hell. Must be the grey bastards’ boss.

“I am the Auditor, and I demand your attention.”

“Attention deman-” she attempted to snicker, though her attempt was quickly cut short by a large section of the left side of her bottom jaw ripping away from her head and falling to the ground with a loud, wet splat. Her ragged breathing hitched and her eyes went wide, too stunned to even bother to pick it back up. Looks like he can’t take a joke.

The Auditor sighed, the red slits furrowing further like eyes, seeming to slide across the barren ground with extending tendrils of flame to slowly close the distance. Madeleine’s trembling body froze in place: She was too weak to even step backwards, especially considering that what was passing as an intact head could probably fall apart at the drop of a hat. She watched the strange entity stare daggers into her, pulling his round head a hair’s breadth away from her own face and locking his scowling gaze with her own bloodshot eyes. A scowl… Well, she couldn’t actually tell his expression, especially without a visible mouth or eyebrows, the squint prominently asymmetrical compared to pure disdain. His thoughts behind those pupilless eyes were an enigma.

“Do you want revenge?”

She slowly tilted her head, cobbled pieces of her head pulsating strangely, remaining patches of dark hair standing on end even with being matted with sticky blood. His voice carried a noticeable twinge of amusement. The black fire’s heat burning into her made it difficult to speak for a few moments, her speech slow to minimize the risk of anything else falling apart and heavily slurred due to already sustained damage.

“What… What do you mean?”

“Do you really think that those cannibalistic dredges are under my employ?”

She was silent. Wait, he isn’t their boss?

“They’re more in my way than any humans that they try to hunt!” the Auditor boomed. His flames flared more intensely and crackled against her ears, seeming to instantly evaporate her sweat. “And I need humans! You humans are too entrenched in this world for me to bring order through anything else!”

She remained silent, though she lacked the strength to raise her eyebrow like she normally would. The gears slowly turned in her shrapnel-filled head. What the hell is he going on about?

The Auditor quickly ceased his seething temper, a hand materializing out of his shadow-like black mass and picking up the partially-dissolved piece of her jaw that had fallen off, holding it up and attempting to bring her attention to it. Like those of the strange goons, his hands were four-fingered and floated without connecting arm lengths.

“So, tell me.” he willed to state, feeling less like actual speech and more like a deity projecting his thoughts outward. “Do you want revenge?”

All she could do was slowly nod. To just be brought back to life is one thing, but something specifically for revenge… Maybe not just nod.

“What do you need from me?”

The Auditor paused, eyes noticeably widening while still remaining squinted, before elaborating.

“You shall be my muscle. The hammer that plunges the stakes that seal the cage of chaos.”

Her wide, lidless eyes twitched and looked to the side in thought. Muscle. Strength. Strength. It made her unbeating heart flutter. Such tantalizing strength…

Another hand emerged, a spike emerging from the underside of its thumb, stretching from the end of the digit and seeming to rip away from the crackling blackness to reveal a shiny, metallic grey shine with a wider, flat circular end like a railroad stake. It floated within his hand as he pressed the piece of her jaw back where it once was with his first hand.

“With this, I will pin you to the coil. What torture they have done unto you, you shall return unto them.”

Her remaining teeth chattered as she forced the amalgamation of flesh that was her head to smile. She couldn’t help it.

“With interest.”

A much clearer expression formed in the Auditor’s eyes. His mouth may not be visible, but the squint of his eyes was that of an eager smile. He slowly plunged the small stake through the semi-melted piece of flesh and bone and into her skull to keep it all in place after he removed his hands. It felt like it had somehow pierced deeper than the size of her head despite its small size, and her head sloshed and rattled with blood and a new pain as a bright red color overtook the entirety of her eyes. The dream-like muddling of her senses melted away for her nerves to simmer in fire.

It felt like her head was boiling.

The hair across her heavy-feeling body stood on-end. Her senses only became more awry as the Auditor channeled himself into the stake and forced the whole of his form within her body. Black fire leaked from the various seams of damage, and her form felt fuzzy as the hellish scape around her slowly melted away. She felt like she was being lifted into standing up to plant her feet on solid ground that no longer existed: Heaviness, a muddy cacophony blaring in her ears, colors blooming across her vision like paint spilled on glass…

The stagnant air buzzed with a new heat and frenzy as the denizens slowly took notice. Fire pulsated throughout her whole form as she was pulled back into reality, her body pulled up to stand upright even as unnaturally long veins stretched and grew from the stump of her neck and across where the viscera and bone fragments of her head remained on the ground and walls. Pulsating veins grew into thick webs of rubbery flesh as the carelessly-splattered remains of her cranium were siphoned and returned to their rightful owner, black fire running throughout them, collecting even the shrapnel and shells of the offending bullets by melting them down. She tasted rot and iron even without the reformation of a mouth, saw the shine of raised scrap blades and guns without eyes, heard the grating sound of incomprehensibly slurred Scottish panic without ears, felt growing bone force against partially necrotized flesh. Color did not return to her skin even as she regained the ability to move her body.

Black fire pulsated from the growing mound of flesh, bone, and metal growing from her neck stump, reaching high to touch the ceiling of the cramped building. The smoke of it bypassed any filtration systems and the entire building was quickly filled with harsh coughing, many of the weapons being thrown to the ground with the demise of their wielders. She wanted to laugh even as the ones that were resisting the poison managed to fire their arms and send bullets ripping through stiffened flesh. She barely felt it. Bullets entered but didn’t exit, blood splattering before being chased by a black fluid that radiated heat and flowed like freshly molten slag. She barely noticed the bullets having torn through her clothing. Her clothing was already tearing.

Her clothing continued to tear as pitch black slag coursed throughout her body and invaded deep into the structure of her bones, intermixing metals and extra thickness into them as they cracked and repaired to grow larger while stretching flesh. The color in her skin only drained further as it thickened with artificial components and became less elastic, leaving behind a more matte texture and a mid-tone grey that darkened down her neck and across her torso and legs to leave her skin looking almost as if made from grey clay. Compared to the fire that seared through the rest of her body, her arm lengths were bizarrely numb, all without inhibiting both the movement and feeling of her hands which were eager to commit acts of violence. She knew that he wasn’t done yet, but she was already so eager…

“Keep fuckin’ firing!”

They were still firing?

“I aaaaaaaaaaaammmm!”

They were still firing! She stopped noticing until they began yelling something intelligible about it. The bullets weren’t doing anything to her! It’s even funnier!

Her fleshy, underdeveloped head brushed against the short ceiling even as multiple vertebrae of her neck cracked and merged together to shorten her thickening neck and force her head to hunch farther forward. This place was already cramped back when she was a normal human, she still couldn’t comprehend how they tolerated this place’s small size. Flesh grew and stretched to catch up with still-growing bone, muscle thickening with strength and body fat redepositing while her growing skeleton twisted in structure to compress her hips, flesh reshaping itself across her torso to flatten her breasts and fill out her waist into a familiar tube-like shape. Even as the distinct muscle and bone structures that defined her shoulders and controlled her arms, such as her pectorals, dissolved away under her skin, she didn’t feel weaker, hands still retaining feeling and full motion even as the lengths of flesh connecting them to her body hung limply like jelly. The material that made up her now-useless arms merged with either her torso or her hands to strengthen them further before the skin containing it gave way and smoothed over at the base of their original connecting points.

Her hands, her floating hands, physics and gravity-be-damned, were already enormous to go with her increased size, yet they only grew further even as the ring and pinky fingers on each merged together to leave her hands four-fingered. Her hands overall grew thicker, fingers squaring to match her widening palms. The ends of her fingers seemed to melt, primarily the area of her nails, bone fracturing and merging with them to create thick, metal-infused talons, almost comparable to those of a cat. Her hands shook, though it wasn’t entirely from pain. Her reanimated heart raced with physical excitement. The sound of shouting and gunfire blaring in her ears…

It is irritating.

It must cease.

Her left hand seized one of her assailants and cleaved clear through their pittance of armor and flesh with startling speed for her already-massive, still-growing size, and she proved to already be deft with her claws as she maneuvered her hand to slice another goon in two. The floating of her hands, the reduced number of digits, their massive claws, they felt not wrong, but natural to her now, yet she barely focused on that as her body grew even larger to compensate for the dramatic shortening of her legs into what looked almost like nothingness. Her feet looked proportionally larger as a result even before their digits merged to leave her with three toes on each foot. She paid no mind to her physical exposure from her dirtied, ruined scraps of clothing, nor to the physical traits of her humanity melting away, her nipples and navel vanishing and the black ichor churning within her dissolving organs to make her physically sexless.

The black ichor bubbled in her chest and burned her throat and mouth like intense acid reflux, a deep, rumbling chuckle somehow emerging even without a mouth as she gripped her left hand tightly around one of the entities that terrorized her. Even without eyes, she stared them down with a felt scorn.

“Very persistent, aren’t they?” her head buzzed as the grabbed entity struggled in her grip, even attempting to bite her hand. It was the Auditor’s voice. His voice was a chuckle that ended up being contagious.

Indeed.

The flesh that made up her head twisted, bubbling within with blood and boiling black ichor that spilled from wounds like burning oil cast from a flamethrower as her head shape was forced much rounder and its lumpiness was smoothed over into a shape akin to a tall oval. Fluid sputtered due to an increase in pressure as the pin that returned her to the coil materialized and grew within her head: The rounded stake, which not only grew to match her gargantuan size, but grew further to pierce through the top of her head while its hammering point forced its way from the bottom left side of her jaw. The various metals her body had collected, left behind after her bones were adequately strengthened, were drawn to her head to form another stake that mirrored and somehow intersected the first on the right side. Lacking a mouth, ears, nose, hair, and eyes didn’t feel strange, but she did feel the bizarre X-shaped structure that the stakes created, the image of a skull-and-crossbones flickering in her mind. The only wounds left behind were those from the piercing stakes as the original morphing points entirely smoothed over.

Her grip only tightened. A new pain in her head, a new pressure, like both her head and mind were cramped, her grip having tightened in reflex and eliciting a pained squeak from who was stuck in her grip. The stakes didn’t hurt this much. The room was silent save for her own deep, ragged breathing and the occasional sound of awe from one of the many remaining pairs of green eyes watching her. A hand shot to hold her head as two rough, intersecting black lines, one going horizontally over her eyes and another going vertically down the area of her nose, formed on her face.

His face. His face… He didn’t know why, but that felt better to him now.

The burning pain slowly subsided, aching slowly melting away even though his blood was still running alongside the Auditor’s black ichor. The ragged tatters of his much-too-small clothing hissed as the blood that stained them boiled, eating away at the remains and its bubbles popping to release red flames which grew and vigorously spread across his body. The crackling fire cleaned and repurposed the tatters, any present color stripped away as a white dress shirt stretched down the length of his torso, quickly followed by a black suit and a black tie that wrapped around his neck, the suit and shirt both lacking sleeves and extending across his legs as a pair of simple grey shoes formed on his feet. The realization that he didn’t have pants felt strange for a moment, though he quickly brushed it off: He didn’t have anything down there, anyway.

Sparks danced across his face and condensed themselves into solid, dark material, taking the shape of angular black shades with a red sheen that somehow held themselves up without ear handles or being on a nose. He didn’t feel anything about the various leaps of logic that made up his appearance any more. Probably held up by the same logic that makes my hands float, he thought. No matter.

He’s feeling better.

His whole body shook. It felt like his body was more than eager to go off on a massacre on its own, crackling with a fire capable of magnifying his strength to unfathomable heights if he simply cooperated on those whims. And why wouldn’t he? He didn’t recall holding anything in his right hand, yet his fingers curled around something solid and with a satisfying weight. It had a noticeable weight even with his new strength, yet it was smooth and seemed deliberately designed as opposed to a simple hunk of metal or stone, before it clicked in his mind like the trigger his finger pressed down on. It was only through his focus being shattered by a deafening bang and the ensuing pandemonium, eliminating his original tunnel vision on the figure he grasped, did he realize what had formed in his other hand.

A shotgun. A massive shotgun. His thoughts swam with new knowledge as he found himself recognizing it as a Mossberg 500, though it took more of a backseat in his mind compared to the fact that it was, ridiculously, sized for him.

A haze of wispy black fire hung around his head. A deep, bassy chuckle shook in his chest and his face began to hurt, like when one smiles too intensely for too long. Unnatural black fire continued to spill from the wounds caused by the stakes as he slung his gun to sit where his shoulders would be.

It turns out that he did have physical eyes and a mouth. He just needed the Auditor to force them to show themselves.

His shades did very little to hide the massive size of his eyes as they snapped open and entirely radiated scarlet fire. His mouth split open in a deluge of black slag, revealing sharp fangs as he let out a skull-rattling cackle and embedded his thumb into the neck of who he was holding tightly to pop off their head, like a sadistic child removing the head of a plastic doll. The body was quickly tossed aside to allow him to hold his shotgun with both hands. He twisted his neck to crack it and relieve pressure. The place was too cramped for anyone to flee, windows entirely boarded up, but was still much too small for him to maneuver properly. Why not remedy that?

Bright light flooded the building’s interior as he stood up and forced his way through the ceiling and roof, releasing a massive plume of black smoke into the air, falling debris blocking the door to the subterranean tunnels and crushing many of the goons that weren’t already dead or having fled yet. Light. Sunlight. He remembered being dragged here in the middle of the night. How long was he dead?

No matter.

Nobody is to be left alive.

It was a good call for him to have cracked the roof open: The choking scent of blood and gunpowder would have driven him entirely mad if it wasn’t properly diluted. His shotgun was held more limply in his hands from his growing exhaustion. He still felt stronger than he ever remembered before, but it felt like the previous berserker excess was being drained away, his body shaking and his breathing a ragged, coarse panting as the Auditor’s black fluid lurched from his mouth. The red color drained from his eyes as they sealed back over, as did his mouth shut and morph into no longer being noticeable and the hazy black aura around his head slowly dissipate away. The ichor grew and congealed into a familiar silhouette as it siphoned itself away from his body to leave behind only his blood within him as the Auditor’s form in reality became fully realized. The Auditor was small compared to him, now. That familiar scowl…

His body slumped over from exhaustion and aching pain. Black fire lapped harmlessly at his cheek as the Auditor cradled the side of his jaw, attempting to push his head up.

“I appear to have overexerted you, Torture.” the flaming entity stated, snaking under his chest and attempting to push him upright. His voice was noticeably tinged with worry even with his aggressive expression. That must just be his default expression.

He grumbled as he planted the muzzle of his shotgun into the ground and gripped it with both hands, attempting to force himself to stand up. Torture? That’s what he’s to be called? Then again, it’s a more fitting title for his behemoth form than Madeleine…

“Hold on, hold on-” Torture grunted, stumbling on his shaky legs. “I’ve got it-”

The Auditor waved his hands, his eyes wide and filled almost entirely with black with antsiness.

“No rush, no rush!”

Torture wobbled for a few moments as he leaned on his gun to stabilize. He cracked his neck again, shuddering at the rough, wet sensation of layered blood on the back of his neck. The perpetual bleeding from the stake wounds already soaked deep into the fabric of his suit. That’s going to take some getting used to.

“We can’t stay here.”

“Yes, we need to get moving.” said the Auditor. “I have a base nearby. You’ll be able to rest more comfortably there.”

“And?” asked Torture, tilting his head both in curiosity and to lay his head on the butt of his gun.

“Hm?”

“And then what?” he continued. “You brought me back for a reason.”

“That can be discussed in-detail later. You need to rest.”

Torture nodded and rubbed the back of his neck as his balance began to fully stabilize, feeling the wetness of soaked blood on his fingers. Yes, rest, definitely. He felt like he was hit by a train… Ugh.

He’s going to need to get his suit cleaned.