Coming Up Short (Chapter 8) (Patreon)

For the first time since she began the journey home, Nerea turned her chin up toward the cosmos again. Now with a firmer grasp of reality, the girl could appreciate she was, in fact, sitting on the earth with her shoulders above the atmosphere, allowing her to stare directly into the starry universe without the buffer zone of pollution and clouds. Truly, she was a celestial body, even if she was still loosely tied to the ground by Earth’s gravity.

Squinting, she could make out whole starscapes and galaxies beyond, stretching toward infinity and well beyond the distance her eyes could make out. Thirty miles was massive upon her home planet, after all, and a beacon of world-ending destruction, yet out in the endless reaches of space, she decided, it was still nothing. Almost as if she hadn’t grown at all, so insignificant was her form to the rest of creation.

Nerea looked back down to her hands. She cupped a scoop of wrecked urban filth in each palm, hardly deigning to notice the specks of neighbors’ homes dotted across the top like sprinkles on a cake. Never had she felt so simultaneously omnipotent and useless in the scheme of Earth and the universe, respectively. Everything was relative.

What was she, really, to the rest of space? A dot? An atom? What was Earth? Something even smaller, undoubtedly. And, in that vein, then, what was the planet of Earth to her?

“Nothing,” she murmured with greater confidence than perhaps any word she’d said in her life. “It’s nothing to me.”

Nerea upturned her palms, watching the helpless handful of cracked streets and tumbled homes spilling between her outspread fingers. The increased focus of her cosmic pertinence had somehow brought with it a greater perception of her surroundings, and though the mighty brunette knew it was probably impossible, she could almost make out the infinitesimal bacterium specks which were the people she’d surrendered to gravity and the wind. Hundreds of them, falling, in desperate droves. Appropriately, she felt no twinge of guilt as she’d felt when first arriving home, even as she watched their tiny bodies all disappear back into the smoking ruins of the city between her powerful thighs.

She paid them no moment of mourning. Instead, Nerea arched back to her full thirty-mile height and proudly planted her feet into two untouched green deserts on the outskirts of civilization. Trees felled by the dozen under each of her buckling toes.

“Anyone out there who can hear me? This is a public service announcement, coming to you now, courtesy of me, your… new queen,” Nerea boomed, commencing the sentence as seriously as she could, but giggling by the end. “I just want to let you know that I… own you now. All of you. Your bodies, your homes, your cities, your country and… whatever else you have. It’s mine now. And I’m going to take it back now. So, just… sit tight. Do your best to bow to your queen if you can, but if you can’t, well… I guess I’ll just make you. You won’t have to wait long. I’m coming for every single one of you.”

She twisted her heel on the forested landscape and stretched the four-mile tip of her burliest toe out to the nearest blip of civilization. The bulk of her digit descended slowly, swallowing all it could touch in circular shadow black as midnight. Power stations and oil fields imploded in a fiery mess which registered as little more than a tiny flash of light in Nerea’s eye and a ticklish poke on the underside of her gridded toe pads. In a flash, half the state lost its electricity. Those people not yet literally confined to the darkness beneath the meteoric peds of the giantess were instead trapped in their powerless hovels without an idea of what was happening to their world.

Nerea smirked. Earth and greenery squeezed up through the crevices of her toes like hot clay. This act confirmed yet again, even in the same wavelength of acknowledged reality, that she was greatly contented in stepping on the world. It was relaxing like nothing else she’d experienced outside of a luxury spa too expensive for her to be stopping inside anyway. And at her new size, she had no use for such frivolity anyway.

A long stride brought the girl to the sister city of her hometown. This time, Nerea didn’t give up a second in laying waste to the silver pockmarked anthills that constituted the urban sprawl. Her stubby digits opened wide to receive the buildings, snatching and cracking the breakable towers amidst the firm flesh of her toe valleys. The ball of her foot stamped a broad sphere at the center of the city, marking her territory, and practically inverting the weedy skyscrapers down into the crust of the planet. Her heel pivoted and spun on an arc, smearing away the fickle remains of the city until it had joined her collection of destruction encrusted around the dainty flesh of her sun-bronzed feet. Another city down, and it was not even yet noon.

“Well,” Nerea observed with a click of her tongue. She bent back her sole and examined the handiwork of fire and dust speckled over her arch, with no small amount of joy. “That’s a good start, I think.”

Casting her gaze to the horizon, the newly anointed queen of the planet examined her next potential targets: cities she could turn into her toys. She drummed a finger on her lower lip, studying the array of options. So many glittering insect kingdoms just begging to be mashed into the skin of her sole. An entire country still awaited beyond the coast, and past that, the rest of the world, to be subjugated by their thirty-miler ruler and her silky, doom-bringing bare feet.

She was finally home.