Once again, Matthew found himself tumbling out of her hand and dumped into a hard surface.

      Maia was already heading somewhere when he managed to regain his bearings. Looking around, he found himself to be in some kind of a personal gym. There were all sorts of modern equipment around, and even a punchbag in the middle of the room. He was standing on top of a counter of some sorts, devoid of any objects bar a dark, rectangular box to his right.

      But his eyes couldn’t ignore her for long. He didn’t know what it was with those workout leggings that women wear, but he swore that they made their legs look heavenly beautiful. And that’s saying something for Maia herself considering her natural beauty. Perhaps it was because of the dark material providing not much more than an outline of the shape, blocking out any other distracting features that the eye might perceive, or perhaps they just did something else to their legs, but he could not get his eyes away.

      Especially not after she started working out.

      It was quite a sight to see her massive body move so fast and with such raw power. She first warmed up on a treadmill, then lightly worked various muscles before she proceeded with the punchbag. And only a couple of minutes with it was enough for Matthew to know that she would put quite a fight against him on a fair level even though he was quite the martial artist.

      The way she punched and kicked the bag though, the style was entirely alien to him and something he had never seen before. Another one of those points he had to add to the large mental list of weird things he had seen so far in this place.

      He watched for quite some time, he had to anyway. He wondered what it would mean if she displayed such excessive force against shrunken people. He imagined the strikes of her hands beating against a small, weak body of some unfortunate guy stuck on the surface of the punchb-

      Then he noticed the faint traces blood on it. He shivered at the thought of someone having indeed experienced the very same fate he just imagined.

      He was left to his thoughts for many more minutes, perhaps half an hour. He couldn’t think much about anything but her. She captured his imagination in every conceivable way. This mysterious woman with her flowing red hair, now tucked in a ponytail and damp from sweat. This goddess whose ways both awed and terrified him at the same time. This heavenly angel come forth from the deepest pits of hell. He could go on with purple-prose descriptions all day when it came to her.

      After some time, when her skin was pouring sweat and glistened, she paused with heavy breath and looked towards him. But not at him directly, she looked at the black box to his side. She slowly made her way towards the box, gave Matthew a wink and a playful smile before she ran her hand above the box. It suddenly became transparent.

      There were people inside, dozens of them. And they were much smaller than Matthew, perhaps one fourth of his size. They were sprawled inside, hunched down on the surface or laying on it entirely, resting.

      “Say hello to your friends, Matt.” She said between breaths.

      “My friends?”

      “Yes.” Her breathing was getting calmer. “Take a closer look, they can’t see you.”

      Indeed. It’s like they didn’t notice Maia’s massive frame looming above them. He approached the box slowly, feeling the heat radiating from her body, but his eyes firmly set on the people in front of him, separated by an almost invisible wall. Only when he was close enough to touch the glass-like surface did he know what she meant by friends. They were the group he was brought to this place with.

      “What are they doing? Can’t they see you either?”

      “They can’t see or hear anything from the outside. That’s about to change though.”

      She hovered her hand above the box again, and was about to swipe when-

      “Wait!” Matthew shouted.

      She glanced at him, slightly annoyed. “What?”

      “Listen.” He said with a shaky voice, and walked to the front of the box, facing it with Maia behind him. “I won’t pretend that I can stop you from doing whatever it is that you want to do with them, so at least let me watch them, study them.”

      “Huh?” She raised an eyebrow. “Study them? How?”

      “Humans react. To everything. It’s what we are designed to do. And each one has his or her own way of doing that, an own view of the world. But most never get to experience every spectrum and intimate detail of human emotions because we don’t get to experience every imaginable situation in our lives. We can fake emotions from the outside, but not entirely, and especially not from the inside. So, if I can’t do anything about whatever it is that you want to do with them, at least I can watch their reactions to a situation most of them have until very recently thought to be impossible.”

      “And what reaction would that be?” She asked, rhetorically of course.

      But Matthew turned to look at her and still obliged her with an answer: “It’s a special kind of fear. I like to call it Theophobia.”

      She regarded him for a few moments, then smiled down at him before she shifted her eyes at the box and proceeded to swipe her hand above it.

      Indeed, it was a special kind of fear. Matthew turned and looked them in the faces as their craned their heads up, squinting at first from the streaming bright light from outside before their eyes adapted and beheld the gigantic sight of the woman of their nightmares. But they didn’t see her as a monster. No, it was different.

      The fear in their expressions betrayed a hint of reverence, just as she told him so. Deep inside, they saw her as higher being, perhaps the religious equivalent of a divinity bent on punishing them for their sins. It was like they accepted her having the right to torment them.

      Naive idiots, he thought. It seemed to him that he was the only one who knew and understood what their one and only ultimate sin was: That of merely being a human.

      A gigantic hand lowered, screaming erupted. She removed the transparent lid of the box, but she didn’t lower it in afterwards, instead she grabbed it by its side and lifted it. Matthew turned to see what she was doing, and saw her other hand tugging the elastic band of her leggings forward.

      “Enjoy the ride.” She said, then tilted the box.

      Matthew shivered once more. They could not hold onto the slippery surface of the glassy surface, and so they fell, still screaming, one after one into the dark, hot, humid abyss of her nethers.

      Then she released the band, snapping her leggings back and trapping dozens inside. Matthew could clearly see the squirming bulges on the dark material, and could also faintly hear their pleadings. But he could only imagine the conditions inside, being forced against a sweat-laden skin while it released unbearable amounts of heat. Especially at the large bulge against her sex, the damp patch indicating copious amounts of sweat and sexually scented juices washing over the mass of struggling humanity.

      Maia pinched that spot as she bit her lower lip, tugging it forward and then gently massaging it back, spreading the warm bodies all around her crotch and letting many fall down and back against the crack of her buttocks before she let the elastic material snap back yet again.

      Then she went back to her exercising.

      Running, weight lifting, punching and kicking the bag. More sweat, more heat, the whole routine again, but only with a mass of wriggling humanity strapped within her leggings. Matthew had to watch it all over again. Her ways of torment never ceased to amaze and terrify him at the same time. And at the end of her routine, there was stretching.

       She stretched her hands first in different positions, releasing the tension out of them, then clapped them together like being in prayer, closed her eyes, and slid her legs horizontally apart in a slow manner, lowering her body towards the ground.

      Matthew could almost feel the pain, and he could clearly see the pleasure she obtained. Her breathing slowed, but grew deeper, she stopped midway from the ground, her hands parted and one of them moved and pressed a bulge against where her clitoris would be, and she gasped. Then she continued lowering, and Matthew thought that, ironically, the safest spot would be inside her sex at that point.

      A foot from the ground, she paused again, her well-trained legs keeping her in position effortlessly. She opened her eyes, looked at Matthew with a sly smile, and lowered down in one swift motion.

      “Uh…” She moaned. “I think I broke a lot of them this time.”

      Matthew said nothing.

      She rose up again and did some more stretching before she grabbed a bottle of water and glanced at him. Her gaze lingered on his form for a while as she drank out of the bottle, judging him perhaps, or deciding to finally have or way with him, it was always difficult to tell with her. And it was impossible to remain calm and composed when a being of such difference in scale and power brought its attention down upon you.

      Its, he thought. Great. He hated how at times he formed this genderless concept of her on his mind, just like gods were and what she pretended to be, playful or not.

      Then she turned and walked towards him. He took a few steps back in instinct, he could never help it when she did that. In a few swift steps, she was right in front of the counter, and placed her arms to his sides, leaning forward and resting on them.

      She surrounded him, dominated him, made him feel even smaller and helpless. The massive mounds of her breasts protruding against her tank top hung right above him, and a few drops of sweat fell here and there, but the most distinct feature of her presence was the sudden wave of heat washing over him. Her exercising generated colossal amounts of it and at his size, the effect she had on the air around her body was especially noticeable.

      “This is what I don’t get.” She said. “You’ve seen me kill. You’ve seen me take lives simply because I can. You’ve seen me cause fear, pain and humiliation. You’ve seen me use people in the most degrading ways. And even now, you know I’ve stuffed dozens within my pants. They have to endure the darkness, the heat, the mixed scent of my sweat and cum, the soaking blood of the dead surrounding them. They crawl around my privates, and if you listen closely, you can their shrill screams of pain from those with too many broken bones. Some trapped within my cunt, begging for mercy while slowly drowning, suffocating. And all of it only brings me pleasure.”

      She crouched down, resting her chin on the counter, stacked her hands in front of her head, and looked at him with her menacing green eyes like a true deity. “Yet still, you don’t resent me. Why?”

      Matthew only lowered his head in response, and she chuckled.

      “See?” She said. “It’s like you’re ashamed that you don’t hate me.”

      “I don’t know!” He shouted, immediately regretting his outburst. “I don’t know why. Ok? It’s not like I can make sense of my emotions automatically. I’ve been born with this innate ability to read people well, especially their emotions, but most of the time I didn't understand why they feel that way, and why their emotions reflected the way they did on me. In fact, I only understood that others weren’t like me in my early teens. I’ve had to train myself my whole life to make sense of it afterwards.”

      At that moment, a sudden burst of curious courage engulfed him, and he took a step forward, then another, and then he found himself walking towards the gargantuan face. His heart beat rapidly as he approached her hands, being that it was the first physical act he did without her consent. He was sure any other one would have been a stain by the time they reached and rested a hand against her skin the way he did right then and there. But he knew she wouldn’t do that to him, not yet. And the tangible feeling of touch was a very effective way of transforming her image back to a human being within his mind.

      He looked up, needing to shift his head back and forth to be able to see both her eyes which were now crossed, giving him this weird feeling of being watched by two separate beings, and also feeling the shifting air arounding him by her now calmed breathing through her nose. But the otherwise lack of motion from her encouraged him.

      “Somehow… ” He said, pausing briefly while trying to formulate coherent words out of his thoughts. “I feel like there is a very good reason not to resent you. I don’t know what that reason is exactly, but the feeling is there. You reflect on me in a similar manner as people who don’t even flinch when people get killed in movies, but shed tears when dogs, cats or other animals do.”

      Then he saw it, the small twitches in her eyes, his perception amplified multiple times by his smaller size compared to the vastness of her face. He must have triggered memories, again. He was onto something, and so he continued.

      “For some reason, you have removed yourself from having any sort of feelings towards humans. Where normal people have within themselves this innate ability to be less selfish with each other than many animals, you have shed that trait completely. You don’t care if someone is in pain, sorrow, or despair and you won’t try to help unless it somehow benefits you. You don’t empathize, you don’t relate, you just take. I don’t know why you became this way, but if I had to guess, someone betrayed you and hurt you badly when you were young, perhaps even a child. That much you said it yourself in our session.”

      She still listened, her silence inviting him to keep on going.

      “But in that removal, you found something. Unhindered by the burden of empathy and exponentially amplified through whatever this ability to control the size of others is, you came to know just how good the feeling of power felt.

      So you abuse it. You induce terror, pain, and grief in you victims because you can and because you think humans deserve it. Maybe they do, I don’t know, but you are not cold inside, you have just surrounded yourself with a barrier of ice. It’s the only way you can forget whatever it is that you are trying to bury. And that’s why I don’t hate you. You are lost, but not a lost cause.”

      She suddenly stood up, a blowing rush of winds forcing him to back off as her body, previously hidden by the slope of the counter, became so indescribably immense again.

      “And what are you going to do about it?” She said down to him as if mocking him considering the vast difference in power.

      “I… “ he looked up, unsure how to respond.

      Then her lips formed a warm smile, and she stretched a palm against the counter. “Come, I want to show you something.”

      Matthew looked at the palm. Something didn’t feel right, but he only knew what after he made himself climb on it: It was the first time she didn’t outright grab him, but instead invited him to climb on her hand. Was she starting to care?

      “But first, “ she said after she started walking, “I need to clean myself. Especially the mess I made down below.”