R.B. Ashton
patreon
Bikini Kaiju – Ch 1
🕑 Added 2025-02-24 11:00:06 +0000 UTCMoving right on, here's the next story in our catalogue starting today and set to run every Monday. Are you ready for some giant monster action? How about some giant monsters fighting scantly clad giant women?! Well, here we go. Though knowing me, it won't be quite that simple... Here's a world that's got complacent about the giant monster threat, and a group of giantesses who've long since given up being traditional heroes.
I'm not sure how long it will be; my initial plan was something like 13 chapters but it may stretch. And if people like it, I could definitely see this being a story with multiple entries.
For now, we'll get stuck right into the return of the kaiju! This was originally intended as the third chapter, but I thought it worked better as an opener to set the tone. So, enjoy!
***
Naomi Cooper wasn’t supposed to be in Taiwan. As a rising journalist for Stellar Indianapolis, one of the world’s most trusted news sources, she had been on her way to Beijing to cover the 2025 World Unity Summit when she received the message to take a layover in Taipei. A problem with the flights, her editor had said, but when the city started exploding it felt like a weird coincidence. She’d been lying in her (enormous) hotel bed brushing up on delegate files when the room shook and her first thought was earthquake. Normal out here, wasn’t it? Or was that just Japan?
Either way, she didn’t like being on the thirty-second floor of a moving building, so when it shook again she ran out of the room, hopping into her jeans and struggling to get an arm in her jacket sleeve. She stumbled into the corridor as someone screamed in one of the rooms, and other people started running out. From the looks on their stricken faces, she was right to be concerned. The next shake shuddered up and down the hall and Cooper that was an impact.
She sprinted on, amongst others, and skidded past the elevators into the stairwell, which was encased in wall-to-ceiling windows. A dark shape slid between the buildings in the distance, and the ground rumbled again. Cooper’s heart jumped as she heard the city cracking, people screaming. It couldn’t be –
She was shoved hard as another guest burst into the stairwell, followed by another, shouting in languages she didn’t immediately understand. She pressed herself to the window, trying to get another look, but the thing had gone. It was far away, the other side of the city, thankfully, or they might already be falling to their deaths. A man grabbed Cooper’s elbow and pulled her on, shouting in accented English, “Run! We have to run!”
She fell into step and he kept his hand on her as they bound down the first flight of stairs, around the corner, until another vibration threw everyone tumbling. Cooper just managed to catch a banister as the man tumbled past her, and she held on, waiting for the shaking to stop. A terrific screech shook through the world, high and feral, from an unmistakably large creature.
Kaiju.
Right here in this city. Close enough, almost, to see.
It couldn’t be – she’d been so young at the time of the last kaiju sighting, Kuala Lumpur, 2005, that it had always felt like myth. Her generation had only truly experienced such things through war stories and old videos. The Sentinels were seen now by only the most privileged or foolhardy, an unattainable link back to a different time. Such monsters didn’t exist now.
But if they did, well, the reporter who brought such a story to Stellar could make their career with it.
As the frightened hotel guests tried to more carefully continue down the stairs, Cooper shoved through them, the other way, back into a hall, to the elevators. The building might come down any moment, this was a crazy idea, but she wasn’t running down thirty flights of stairs. She hammered on the elevator button as a Chinese man yelled at her not to, trying to pull her away. She shoved him off. The lights were moving, the elevator approaching, still working.
The doors pinged open and she bundled into two women and a man all shouting at her to hurry, punching buttons to go down. Another man shouted in despair as the doors closed before he could reach them, then the elevator was descending, whirring peacefully past floors where no one else was daft enough to call it. The tight space shook with another monster vibration and one of the women shrieked. The man took her arms, though he looked equally afraid.
“This is no earthquake,” he said in a French accent, looking to Cooper for confirmation.
She shook her head but didn’t elaborate. Either they were already able to guess what was happening or they were better off in the dark. Cooper focused on the floor numbers instead. Down to 18 already. 16. She whispered, “Come on, come on.”
The building shook again and the lights blinked.
12. 8. 6.
There was a pained metallic screech and the elevator jolted hard, throwing everyone into the walls, before it came to a lurching stop. The lights went out and a dim blue emergency light came on. Cooper met the Frenchman’s eyes again, and he took a breath. Wasting no time, he launched himself up and clawed at the doors, cursing as he pulled with all his strength. Cooper twisted about to pull from the other side. The mechanism complained, but the doors stretched open, a foot, just a little more, then caught. It revealed a wall – mostly. They were just above an exit, with about two feet of doorway visible. Also closed.
Cooper and the man crouched and hammered on the doors, shouting for help, before trying to tug them open themselves. At this angle, it was harder, but these doors resisted only a moment before pinging and rolling back. Men below were shouting, holding their hands up to help. The building shook violently, though, scattering them. Cooper waited for it to stop before scrambling for the opening, barely a two-foot square. She wriggled out on her belly, into the light of a hallway, at head height. A man came back to help her down, but she fell out head first and crumpled on top of him. She crawled off him and got upright, looking back to the elevator where one of the women was now sliding out on her rear, legs first. Much more sensible. A couple of guys in suits returned to the elevator to help her down, then began shouting for the others to follow. The last trapped woman was too scared to move. The Frenchman inside raised his voice, frustrated, trying to force her, but she shrieked and he snapped, giving up to crawl out himself. He got his head and shoulders out, reaching for help, and the other men pulled.
The building shuddered again and Cooper fell back against the wall as something loud snapped and the elevator jerked down. It happened almost too fast to see – one second the Frenchman was halfway out of the gap, the next he was pulled down and his torso came free to fling across the floor. The men helping him fell over from the released pressure and a spray of blood. Everyone was screaming, then, shouting. Cooper stared in horror. She shook herself out of it. No time – the building was still shaking, vibrating in a way she understood might not stop. She sprinted to the side, for the stairwell, and vaulted down the steps. Screams and stampeding footsteps echoed around her as she followed a general push, and the sea of bodies bottle-necked at the bottom. They shoved hard against each other, yelling in panic, and Cooper was caught in the crush, barely able to move. She was swept through the door into the lobby where people were diving over furniture and smashed lamps, the chandeliers swaying dangerously above. Skidding across the polished floor, Cooper followed the general rush for the main doors, and joined a group jumping through a smashed panel of plate glass, out to the street at last.
Cooper took in a huge, desperate lungful of air as she darted aside, more people bundling out past her. The street was even more chaotic than the lobby, with cars and vans stuck at awkward angles, fleeing people blocking the way in all directions. Screams and shouts bounced off the glass towers. Concrete was cracking all around in loud snaps without particular origins. Cooper moved out of the way of the madness, to catch her breath and pat her pocket – yes, her phone was still there. She closed her eyes and recalled that Frenchman getting cut in half by the elevator. Grimacing, she turned towards the sound of another enormous impact. The buildings either side of the street swayed, glass splitting all around. Shit. That was ridiculously close. She started moving towards the sound as everyone else piled the other way, trampling each other, flopping over cars. Cooper was wrestling her phone out of her pocket when the sky between buildings was eclipsed by a vast black shape sweeping between them. She followed it past a skyscraper on a corner to a busy intersection where abandoned vehicles and panicking people were clustered.
The creature’s giant foot landed right in the middle of them, smashing through the road in a splintering divot of shattering asphalt, a dozen or more people and cars disappearing underneath, squashed. Cooper was rigid in horror. The creature moved slowly enough that she got a good look as its body followed, pressing in. That wasn’t a foot, no – a gnarled and twisted claw, wide as two lanes of the road, sticking out from thick, coarse brown fur. The leg above was wide as a building, hinging back before swelling to a giant shoulder above, attached to a body almost too immense to take in, a field of fur.
Cooper moved on automatic as she took in the head, her hand rising, phone activating, calling up the camera. Everyone else was running for their lives through the wreckage, shrieking in terror. She stood firm and watched, videoing the unthinkably huge creature as it lowered its head. A long snout with a wrinkled nose, sharp curved teeth jutting out the front. Its eye shimmered red with terrible malevolence, beneath a twitching curved ear. A rat. A city-scale rat.
Scratch that – from the notch on its ear, a jagged, very familiar rip, it was the rat. Queen Rat, the Rodent Riot herself. One of the original kaiju.
Pushing down all other feeling, Cooper focused on framing the shot. She kept her hand steady, body steady, as the rat bent its head towards the road, jaws stretching wide. There were too many vehicles and people for everyone to get out of the way, the monster too large to avoid. It bit into the road and scythed forwards, scooping up everything in its path – the lucky ones were tossed to the sides to slam into lamp posts and walls, while others were tossed off wailing through the air. Queen Rat reared back, tossing a group of people up above her stretching jaws, along with a crumpled Toyota van, and they fell down across her tongue and jagged teeth as she snapped her mouth shut. Cooper saw a flailing lady in a cream dress scream as she fell into the rat’s mouth. She kept filming, not letting the terror grip her.
Queen Rat snapped at her morsels viciously before swallowing and turning her snout down Cooper’s road, bulging red eyes searching for more. Framed between buildings from below, it made for a magnificent shot, though if she’d known it would come this close Cooper could’ve stayed in her room. A shot from the top of the hotel would have been incredible. That thought anchored her as the rat lifted an immense claw to stretch towards the fleeing crowd.
The rat was struck out of nowhere, a devastating blow hitting it full in the side and sending it crashing through a skyscraper in a cloud of dust and rubble. It was a great object that had hit it, which came to rest in the mangled intersection. As the rat rolled, smashing everything in its path, and the tower across the street swayed dangerously, Cooper swung her phone around to take in the attacker. She had to pivot up, and up.
It was something straight out of the Sentinel movies, a sight familiar from posters and historical videos but rarely seen now outside the tenets of the most reckless adventure tourism. A giant – a living, moving giant, in the flesh. A lot of flesh, at that, with tanned, toned legs on show all the way up six storeys or more. It was a giant woman, only concealed by delicate blue pants and a red bra – delicate for her, in how little they concealed, but garments big enough to clothe a billboard. She was athletic in build, showing off an ample cleavage and a panel of abs, all rising to a beautiful face framed in a waterfall of silky blonde hair. Young and model-perfect, she stood in a fighter’s stance with both fists raised. Cooper’s first thought was Viking Mary, with that blonde hair, before she took in her face properly and realised this giant woman was not familiar. Cementing that, the giantess spoke in a thick Southern American drawl, voice booming through the momentarily settling streets: “Wanna dance, big cheese? Just as well I like rat-and-roll!”
She was grinning, holding that pose for whoever might be watching, while the rat shrugged its way out of the remains of a few tumbling buildings, blocks away. The giant woman’s eyes slid down to the street, spotting Cooper filming her, and she winked, stopping the journalist’s heart in a way that the enormous rat hadn’t. But Queen Rat screeched again, announcing she was preparing to fight back, and the giantess turned towards it. Cooper began running to get around the corner, to keep an eye on all this. This was incredible – a genuine kaiju attack, after all these years, and a new Sentinel appearing to face it? With her right here, ready to get the scoop first-hand!
The giant newcomer kicked out of the intersection, her heel churning up the road as she jumped towards the rat. As she landed out of sight, the city shook again, so hard Cooper lost her footing, phone skittering across the sidewalk. She rolled, scraping her arms, and landed on her side just in time to see her hotel cracking apart, starting to fall.
Cooper gawked in horror as the street erupted in dust and falling masonry, buildings collapsing both sides of the road. All she could do was raise her hands and scream as the cloud of debris swept over her.
