Coming Up Short (Chapter 10) (Patreon)

Tracking these suckers back to their lairs was almost too easy. Nerea simply traced the grey sky-line of the weapon’s trajectory, until she located the second missile silo some ten miles away, in an even smaller complex. The girl didn’t deign to destroy this one with another concentrated finger-strike, but instead let her thumb curl downward, allowing a single black flip-flop to float downward. It fluttered briefly, end-over-end, until its rubbery platform pile-drove into the earth, wiping out the second military complex under its treads.

“Bullseye!” Nerea cheered. “More or less, anyway…”

Two down, and an unknown number to go. Playing dodgeball with nukes would at least provide a semi-diverting activity for the rest of the day, but just for added insurance, Nerea decided it couldn’t hurt to bulk up her own defenses. Of course, she could already cream the enemy forces with a simple wave of her fingers or plop of her flip-flops, but who was going to argue with her wanting to be even stronger? She was the queen, after all. Scooping her shoes back up, Nerea made her way back toward the general area of her college town in the distance.

A distance she was, incidentally, capable of covering in a startlingly small number of long-stride lunges. She giggled, imagining the hundreds of yet-unconquered cities which were provided a shadowy glance up the length of her bronzed legs and into the forbidden, silken-clad zone below her skirt. Likely they were all too terrified that she was about to crush them to even think about the fact that they were getting the perviest view of their short lifetimes.

Obviously, someof those people were right to make that guess, as she had to plant her naked feet down somewhere in order to travel anywhere. But at least she gave them a lovely, fleeting last sight up at the pantied crest of her skirt and thighs, right before burgeoning eight-square-mile sole came careening down upon them with extreme prejudice.

“All righty, now where is it? Where’d all my favorite classmates and teachers go? Angelica? Think I’m big enough for the cheer squad yet?” Nerea sang sarcastically as she arrived back at the general site of her original growth. This region, in particular, was nearly unrecognizable, due to being the original site of her thirty-mile inflation. It looked much more like the earthen remains of a snow angel than the area which contained a college town. Shrugging, the girl dropped down to her haunches. There was no need for hesitation here; earlier, she had rather thoroughly reduced the standing population to zero in her sleep, literally.

Another nuke whizzed by somewhere above Nerea’s head. They were awful shots; she didn’t even have to roll aside. However, it was unlikely they’d miss again while she was sitting still. The giantess swept aside the papery remains of the university’s surrounding province with her fingertips, flicking and brushing where necessary, looking for any remotely recognizable landmark to give her an idea of her location.

At last she found it. Nerea vaguely recalled the formation of the vein-like streets which surrounded the university, and the football field gave it away, especially. This was once her vision of the big time. Ironic to think that, at one point, she’d have given anything to be a cheerleader on that field during game day, waving her pom-poms and roaring her heart out for a bunch of meathead dudes in shoulder pads. Now the place would fit snugly upon a single fingertip. Or beneath the squishy pad of a single itchy toe. What a silly fantasy that was.

This, right now, in her current circumstance, was the real big time. The real game. Better than any pathetic aspirations to school clubs or social acceptance she might’ve once hoped for. Nerea scrunched her toes, involuntarily ripping through a battalion of tanks and helicopters which had been approaching from behind her and, as it turned out, would never even be known to her at all.

Nerea opened her jowls wide, wiped away a small string of hungry drool, and brought her teeth down directly upon the square mile site containing her university. Like a well-aged apple, the earth gave way easily around her gleaming white chompers. A residue of spittle was left, along with the swooped indentations of her canines. Satisfied with her chomped selection, Nerea came away with a mouthful of the land containing her former college and the entire likely-deceased student body and staff beneath the ruins.

The rationale was simple: the lab was somewhere inside her mouth now. The same lab which contained Marcus, his experiments, and the little miracles which had gifted her this growth spurt. If one pill was enough to put her at thirty miles, then all it would take was one single pill managing to dissolve through the wreckage and make contact with her body. Just one. And she’d have all the defenses she needed.

Nerea rolled the mealy lump of land around between her cheeks. From one to the other, then atop her tongue, whereupon she pinned the university to her palate. Anything to make sure the mass could melt and let the pills through to their intended consumer. The taste wasn’t as gritty or bitter as she expected: more like an over-ripe vegetable, with the occasional fleck of salt and tin. Not even unpleasant.

Another nuclear whistle sounded in the girl’s ear. They were coming for her again. In no way frightening, but certainly by now a major irritation. And one she intended to settle in the very near future.

The humming grew longer, but Nerea decided it hardly mattered. Evidently one of the pills, so small it couldn’t be perceived by the naked eye without a five-mile-tall microscope, had made its way into her bare throat. Her muscles tensed as a byproduct of the jumpstarted growth, and this time in unthinkably rapid spurts, miles at a time. Smiling with self-satisfaction, Nerea swallowed the sloppy little bite of the college, as it had already shrunk upon her tongue to the size of a marble. Gathering saliva in a moat around her teeth, the girl swallowed the school as well as the silent population of her former peers and professors down into her gullet.

Nerea’s palms flattened to the earth. They swelled ever-larger, as the patchwork of the landscape grew yet fuzzier and less distinct in color and texture. At this point, the young woman might as well have just been staring down at Earth from outer space. In effect, she was, because when the former cheerleading-hopeful staggered back to her feet at a gob-smacking new size of no less than seventy miles, she had entered yet another new stage of being even further removed from her former humanity. She was approaching the size and worth of a celestial.

The humming had ceased, and Nerea realized the nuclear bomb had plinked against her cheek and exploded before she even stood up. However, rather than turning her skin raw pink as it had before, the heat of the mushroom cloud left no more impact than a pair of lips blowing warm air upon her face. Hardly a tickle. Nerea swept away the lingering beads of fiery wrath and arced a foot high above, taking advantage of the afternoon sun to dramatically alter the size of her cast shadow over her soon-to-be victims.

There was no need to estimate the missile trail this time. With feet ten miles long, Nerea needed to do little more than thrust her foot forward to ensure she dealt with the overzealous military complex, and then some. Her toes spread wide to catch cities and citizens by the thousands, the girl’s foot glided easily along the surface below, breaching through a half-mile depth of crust along the way as easily as she might have slid her sole through a rain puddle. Platforms of earth and overturned cityscapes piled like dustbin debris around the earth-breaking foot. In fact, it took so little effort to wreak havoc, it nearly caught Nerea off guard and caused her to lose her balance, but she held firm.

With that single sweep of her foot through the countryside, Nerea realized she now had the capacity to wipe out civilization in lengths rivaling the scale of her entire formerly thirty-mile body. Talk about an environmental footprint. If the odds of humanity were unfair before, then she’d truly broken the very fabric upon which the rules of reality were devised.

“This is definitely a step in the right direction,” Nerea commented to herself, turning her hands over and over, simultaneously brushing aside clouds which teased at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. “Let’s see them try to knock me over now.”

In the meanwhile, she felt the pinprick tickle of a few more nukes uselessly ping-ponging off the cataclysmic pillars of her svelte legs. Reflexively, her toes curled and snatched up the tumbled remains of another little town, which moments before had been throwing down screamed prayers to uncaring gods for allowing them to miss the destruction. The doughy dewdrop tip of Nerea’s pinky toe twitched, now more insatiable than ever for toys and massage meal to trample.

“All righty, then,” the seventy-mile-girl thundered churlishly. She stamped her island-sized sole into the flaky wreck of the land below, causing seismic activity on the exact opposite end of the planet. “Who’s next?”