Coming Up Short (Chapter 13) (Patreon)

Never in her wildest dreams could Nerea ever have imagined where she’d be a mere day after facing campus social disgrace. It seemed so long ago and yet so near, much like the way that the one hundred mile-tall young woman only had to bend over in the span of a second to change her elevation between stratospheric levels. Back then, the biggest concerns on Nerea’s mind were the cheer squad, asserting herself enough to climb the hierarchy, and besting an overwhelming sense of ineptitude and poor self-esteem. Such ideas were so very small now, much smaller than anything the towering giantess could see with her naked eye. The university campus she treated with such frightful revere was now a crumb so miniscule that it could’ve fit easily into the grooves between the oily, spiraled loops of her toeprints, even upon the smallest of her doughy digits.

At this moment, instead, the only thing upon the powerful girl’s mind was the continued ravaging of her personal world-shaped playground. Not just because it was funny to crush everything into dust with just a single step from her petite peds, although that was a plus. No, there was far more to it than that. The more of it she wrecked, underfoot and between her giddy toes, the better she felt. Thus, it only made sense to keep right on going, mashing countries into earthen pancake beneath her high-arched bare soles and trampling the seas to raging typhoons with her zig-zagged flip-flop treads, if only to see just how high she could go: in terms of her staggering size, and in her growing sense of purpose and worth.

Nerea stood tall on the border between Europe and Asia, her broad soles stretched across numerous international lines at once. Far above in the clouds, her brilliant black hair whipped as though in solar winds, though her calm and beautiful expression remained stoic, her dark eyes dead-set on the fruits of her labor. Above, she found peace and quiet, enjoying the absolute authority of being a hundred-mile literal goddess to the pitiful species that had always treated her with such contempt during her formative years. Below, the story was much different. While the world was menaced by Nerea’s entire mighty body, it was a very particular segment of her immense form that humanity had become so acquainted with during its violent undoing.

Her weary toes bathed pleasantly in the watery craters formed where her body weight had caused some of the weaker rock formations beneath the land to sink. Any survivors floating in the swirling waters found themselves at the mercy of those meteoric toe-tips repeatedly striking and stirring through the waves with such grace and aggression, and soon those stragglers were drowned, though many were accidentally adhered to the girl’s plush skin itself. Meanwhile, Nerea’s hardy heels bobbed against mountain ranges, gradually crushing the jagged heights down as though sanding a piece of wood into a fine curve. This escalated into multiple avalanches leaking into Asia, as the populace could already spot the oncoming calamity of the giant girl, even if they hadn’t yet been visited by her feet. Finally, Nerea’s bronze-tan soles, decorated in every color and texture of destruction, housed samples from each conceivable European ecosystem, including whole forests from countrysides entrapped in her fleshy wrinkles, while the silver remnants of crushed metropolises were powderized into her buttery skin like sparkle makeup.

Gazing across the expanse of the continent, Europe now appeared to Nerea more like a childhood sandbox at the end of a long day, as opposed to a tremendous land mass where hundreds of millions lived. She’d certainly kicked and smashed every distinguishing piece of geography into nothingness. Now there was just anonymous smoldering ruin, with the only distinct features being that of new “canyons” in the ovular feminine shape of a certain harbinger’s lower appendages. If any space program satellites were to spy down on Europe now, they would likely only recognize it as a blot of dusty misshapen rock imprinted with dozens of remarkably humongous soleprints. The map barely resembled a livable terrain any longer; the topography was covered in crisscrossing footsteps the size of whole countries, where Nerea had shuffled back and forth across the land, sometimes tip-tiptoeing in effort to paint lines in the ground with her dainty little sausage-like digits, and sometimes stomping as hard as she could just to see her foot’s imprint bleed into the very crust of the planet. Her mood at any moment alone determined how she would treat the next span of cities unlucky enough to exist on the land where she was about to press her foot down and take a step.

As Nerea at last turned around to face her next and much-larger destination, she paused. She’d have to plan out how to do this, given there was a limited amount of world for her to toy with. Her first thought was simply to dance across Asia in much the same way as she had with Europe. Perhaps she’d slip her foamy pink sandals back on and bring down every jungle in her wake, crashing through acres of ancient trees with just the rubbery instep and the charging plastic thong. After that, she could go bare again, spreading her meaty toes and letting the Russian snows seep lusciously through the crevices between, until the warmth of her radiating body heat melted the caps into another sea.

Once her toes were relaxed by a snow soak, she’d go after the mountain ranges there next, wrapping her muscular toes around the dizzying summits and snapping them clean off like anthills. The island nations she could take care of with just a dash of her heel. No tricks or fancy footwork, just a clean swipe across the pitiful patches of land to clear them all away, either pushing them into the ocean or adding them to Nerea’s collection of landscapes smeared as civilization paste across every curvy contour of her radiant, sun-lavished foot. Any remainder of the continent that survived the initial flattening would then have to contend with Nerea marching about, hammering her naked soles on the battered countries like rolling bread dough, until her silk-smooth arch shape was molded into each and every square mile.

Still Nerea stood at the border, teetering back and forth, anxious to begin. She could see it all now, and it was beautiful. But she didn’t act. To stomp through another continent in the exact same way as the last would be to waste one of her few remaining opportunities to pillage an untouched world. After all, the planet was finite, and Nerea could tell already she was going to use every scrap of it for her amusement by squashing everything into oblivion under her peachy soles. She had to make the most of this gift.

Nerea knelt in the desert, letting trillions of sand grains wash between her toes grooves and along the rivulets of her sole furrows, as well as a few thousand brutalized towns somewhere in the mix too. She closed her eyes, recalling her geography and social studies classes. Suddenly all her studiousness was coming in handy like never before. Empowered, the girl reopened her eyes and strode purposefully across Asia. Her feet didn’t land with the intention of creative devastation, though of course it happened anyway just by nature of island-sized soles colliding with unsuspecting life below and creaming everything into flame and grit. Rather, she went straight for Chernobyl. When she reached the radioactive land, Nerea wasted no time in planting both feet hard into the soil.