Apex: No Consequences (Chapter 8) (Patreon)
Content
Men, most of whom made careers out of never flinching while business rivals were murdered in front of them, now sprinted for their lives and wailed like emergency sirens. Pushing and shoving one another to be first through the exits, only to find the doors catching against the pile-up of sports cars outside, factions breathlessly split off, with some racing up the warehouse catwalks to reach the ceiling hatch ladders.
Though ordinarily Astraea would’ve enjoyed spending longer to build up their desperation, she couldn’t resist allowing most of them to reach the upper pathway, only to bow her head, extend her tongue, and slide it along the narrow grated railing, collecting at least five runners on the murky flat of her tongue before sucking them all inside, straight toward early retirement in her belly. Even when she paused to lick her lips and moan, giving the others time to muck through the spit-slime tract she left behind and start climbing the ladder, none made it so much as a quarter of the way up the rungs before the Apex came down again. Her newly-cleansed tongue flexed and stickily swept their bodies up one by one off the catwalk as if vacuuming dust mites, though of course using a far-stronger form of collection.
Some of the so-called cleverer men took refuge behind shelving while Astraea concerned herself with the higher levels, then made a break for the weapons caches and began arming themselves with the kind of hardware which could’ve left a tank as cinder. Nevertheless, when they began letting grenades and rockets fly in the warehouse, in the process blowing over more shelves and starting a few minor fires, the payloads all landed on the Apex’s exposed inner thighs and the toned lower architecture of her tan stomach as she elevated slightly-higher in her squat to play with the catwalks. One blast even seemed to land directly on her tight shorts-clad crotch, a move which urgently earned the woman’s steely-eyed attention when she looked down with whiplash-speed and glared through the grating at the hidden fraidy-cats with their RPGs firing the equivalent of nerf pellets at her privates.
“No,” she succinctly intoned, her voice cold as her terrified victims’ blood. Without an instant of fanfare, Astraea scraped her fingers through the whole row of weapon stores, whereupon she collected more than a dozen men and their toys in a handful, and unceremoniously shoveled them into her wide-open mouth for a fast-food delivery. She was tempted to gnash her teeth through them before passage, but didn’t want to half to pick their disrespectful bits out of her teeth later, and so merely disposed of them all in a single swallow to put them out of sight and out of mind.
Meanwhile, others were making their escape attempts through the bay doors. Before they could raise the gate more than a meter, only to discover another impassible dam of vehicles awaiting, thugs found themselves bathed in the thick-striped shadows of broad outstretched fingers waving overhead. Three men who’d foolishly chosen to escape through the main shipping entrance dove apart just in the nick of time for the merciless Apex’s hand to cascade down with a hard eardrum-popping slap to the concrete which marooned each of the three in the low-lying V-canyons between her spread digits: regardless of how obvious her intention was to do this rather than splat them easier than gnats, the trio nonetheless chimed in with birdlike shrieks.
Their dread was given better reason to worsen when Astraea simply cinched her fingers close together again, narrowing her hand to an expansive plank and nonlethally snaring the three in the clamped fault lines between. The boys yelped, fruitlessly firing off shots and battering their fists on hilly knuckles as the Apex lifted them past her bent legs, the washboard edifice of that midriff, then examined the captures pinched astride her straightened fingers as if to study a manicure for imperfections, though her gaze was devoted solely to the squirmy beings now cooked to just the right degree of panic. After her supreme irritation at the victims toting the big guns, she felt in need of a slower catch to rescue her provocative mealtime mood.
“My aim must be improving. Sometimes when I pull that trick, at least one of you gets crunched in half,” the highly-dexterous giantess lied in another throaty purr, sensing their struggles increase as a result. “This way, you’ll get to feel everything on your way down. Lucky, lucky you.”
As the criminals’ worming and tension levels reached a peak, their faces fogged over with scorching steam like a locomotive blasting from the smiling furnace of the Apex’s deliriously-wide lips. They heard the fluidic squelch of cheek flesh pressurizing inside, a massive rippling tongue thoughtfully massaging over the palate, and as her glistening ivory chompers came shining into view with every inch her mouth opened, all three finger-trapped men fully expected to have their heads shorn clean off between the giantess’s enclosing canines. Instead, the Apex impatiently wrapped her lips over her index and middle digit at once, instantly casting the ever-louder gunman into the saliva-shimmering eclipse of her maw.
Though he could see little now as she gently closed her mouth around the majority portions of her fingers, his weapon’s muzzle provided brief glimpses of the truly-cavernous arena of her inner jowls, the harrowing plunge toward her throat, and the bubbling moat below her tongue which was now creeping closer toward the hopeless thing held in the thrall of her fingers. With every bullet he fired off, offering another blink-and-he-missed-it epileptic view of the Apex’s hungry interior, her curiously-ascendant tasting muscle neared like a crimson sea serpent rising from the gooey depths. The buildup to the lick was gradual, but the instant after the man felt the giantess’s oppressive tongue plaster against his body for a taste, the gun dropped from his hands and his head jerked back due to violent suction as she slurped him instantaneously out of her fingers and into her gullet.
Though the second two lads were nearly lost in the process of the hundred-story predator fitting her comely lips around one pair of fingers without releasing the others, she was cautious to keep her hand rigid, and they remained in her capture, hearing gunfire and muted cries from inside as Astraea’s lips came within mere feet of covering them as well. Their turn was soon to arrive, and they both knew it, watching the surplus froth drip from her loosely-closed lips and then redouble to the volume of bilge-pump liquid when the Apex quickly withdrew her fingers from her mouth, with their coworker nowhere to be seen. Winking, she loudly gulped down the second man like a ring pop in much shorter order.
Internally, Astraea knew this style to be a tad indulgent, as were most of her methods for gobbling these fellows down while they were already out of their minds with fright. The unnecessary performative part of the feasting was likely what would’ve disturbed Mitch rather than her choices of meals themselves, and no-doubt their daughter would’ve rolled her eyes at some of her mother’s theatricality, even as she furtively snickered at its effectiveness. Still, the Apex had waited all day for this, and she doubted any of the scum in this room was going to take offense at her messy table manners.
Plus, she really did need to garner some more spectacular fear from these remaining cretins to make up for the piggish chauvinistic offense of that rocket to her groin.
Crystalline spit flowed into the now-vacant spaces between Astraea’s pinched fingers, leaving the third and naturally-most panicky mini-man, still displayed like macabre jewelry, to gift the titanic huntress one last sniff of his apprehension before she downed him in the same barbarous way. Ironically, though, the trickling fluid that added so greatly to his terror, along with the up-close view of the gorgeous silver-maned giantess’s ravenous smirk promising the same end, was flowing over the Apex’s knuckles in a volume now which lubed up the squirmy on-deck victim’s body just enough to let him slide free between her fingers.
Astraea, not wanting to crush and thus waste food which had just reached the perfect temperature of horror, allowed him to slip, then scooped her palm below his flight path to keep him from a crippling landing. As she leaned back to recapture him, however, the man didn’t land in her hand, but upon the hillier and far-more buoyant surface of her left breast, through which he could feel her heartrate instantaneously hasten, and when he looked up to meet her ice-frigid gaze, he knew the rise was born of abject fury, not titillation.
“You…” she spat, straining the word into multiple syllables that made the man’s blood run colder every split-second. “…do not… get to put your disgusting cockroach hands there. Ever. Who do you think you are?”