Coming Up Short (Chapter 14) (Patreon)

For minutes on end, the girl rubbed her soles in irradiated loam. She finished crushing what the nuclear disaster had failed to obliterate, and then some. Nerea took a seat and proceeded to massage her feet from every possible angle in the Ukraine’s deadly city: spinning her heels, rolling her soles from side to side, and scrunching her toes to work the filth deep into her skin. After a while, though, Nerea gave up. Nothing was changed, except for the dirt frosted on her feet. She shrugged, and propped herself back up, gazing over Asia again, with only a single trail of colossal footsteps so far, otherwise surrounded by spotless land. Even if she couldn’t grow past one hundred miles, she could still have plenty of fun with Earth’s survivors.

Then Nerea took a step, and noticed her foot was now almost double the length of the meager print crater beside it. She grinned. Elation spiked her adrenaline and even her primal desires. It worked. The girl crouched, watching the patchwork nations below her feet growing even tinier at an alarming rate, far faster than before, which could only mean one thing. Nerea was multiplying in size. Just by taking a few steps across the continent, the girl found her bare feet sank clear through the land, until water gushed up between her toes, without even trying to press.

Nerea giggled. As her body more than doubled in size, three times over, she had to take her time strolling around the crumbling land, if she didn’t want to use it up too fast. Though she couldn’t be certain of her exact stature, based on her tremendous height ascension in the last few minutes, Nerea had to guess that her foot was now the same size as her entire body had been before the visit to Chernobyl. She could only imagine what it would feel like to be down there, seeing the entire sky literally replaced with a female college student’s rosy, spongy, unstoppable foot underbelly, decorated with past victories over humankind and rife with skin details more complicated than any city left on the planet.

For that reason, she tried to let her foot hover over each new landing site for a minute before she set it down, so the millions of lives she was about to wipe out with a single footfall would be able to see their destroyer coming. It seemed unfair, Nerea decided, that she should squish everyone without them knowing what happened or having the chance to appreciate her. Out of instinct, the girl’s hand explored between her legs during these moments, and she didn’t think anything of touching herself from this inspiration.

Thus, she took her time, gradually squeezing her foot down on the earth a section at a time. First came her powerful heel, acting as the anchor for the rest of her body, and causing the tectonic plates to tip toward her. Next, the girl would painstakingly roll her lengthy sole down into place, until the entire parabola of her meaty arch was kissed to the trembling ground. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her sole that wasn’t stuffed with plant life and stone architecture, though no substance on the planet was any match for a single pulse of Nerea’s firm foot, flexing the creases to and fro and wiggling her toes, and in doing so crushing anything caught between into a fine particulate. She gasped, lust and ecstasy coursing through her veins.

Finally came those five mealy digits themselves, smooth and glossed with sweat and ocean water, which were stamped onto Asia’s remnants one at a time. Nerea started with the piggy toe, to give a warning of the destructive capability contained in her smallest and beadiest phalange. By the time the beefy big toe came to rest, though, and her whole foot was at work smudging and crushing hundreds of cities straight down into the globe, Nerea’s point was made clear to the microbial people below in what little life they had left before the girl’s glistening, pedicured foot compressed them.

At the moment the girl’s foot fully embraced the Earth, her eager fingers withdrew from her womanhood and she climaxed, causing her fluid to rain on rubble below. Her cry of exhilaration tore through the atmosphere.

Despite Nerea’s attempts to take her time, Asia was done for in even less time than it took to crumple Europe. She was still growing, now in bursts that took her up by dozens of miles in a split second. The girl waded out into the ocean, or at least the closest she could approximate, since the deepest portion of the water could barely rise high enough to touch her pinky toenail. The curvature of the planet was apparent to her now, and fitted snugly to the arch of her soles, which seemed appropriate to the girl. More comfortable and self-assured than ever, Nerea began walking circles around the planet, never discriminating which way she headed, and after a while, she succeeded in trampling every land mass on Earth. Most of the continental landscape had sunken into the seas on contact with her dense heels, or merely broken apart the instant her gangly toes burrowed through their foundations.

By the time Nerea had finished walking, there was nothing recognizable left on the global map. Fortunately, the girl had grown far beyond the care of such things. Now tall enough to walk all the way around the planet in just a matter of steps, the girl was operating on a new plain of existence. She’d applied the idea of godhood to herself earlier during this strange adventure as a placeholder title for her absolute power over humanity, but now it really stuck. No one could do as Nerea did now, standing on the very crust of the Earth and feeling it sink toward the hot core merely by the planetary weight of her body, and not be divine.

The time had come, Nerea affirmed to herself. Everything was leading to this. And she was ready.

The girl looked down, wriggling her toes one last time in the vulnerable bulb of the broken planet as a way to say goodbye to her old home. Though Earth had outgrown its usefulness to Nerea, she was just sentimental enough to her old life to pat her soles lovingly on the surface, though this caused a crack to rip through the direct center of the celestial sphere. Balanced on the fracturing husk of the world, Nerea lifted just one foot up, scrunched her sole as a last farewell, and brought it crashing down on Earth.

Her thunderous impact split the planet into tiny chunks, easily as though she’d shoved her foot through gentle beach sand, separating to chaos. Freed now of a place to stand, but not finding herself in need of one, Nerea stretched her arms and legs and swam through the cosmos in search of the next world to conquer: preferably one much bigger than Earth, because the girl was still growing bigger and bigger, higher and higher in all directions, and showed no signs of ever stopping.

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THE END (for now?)