The Great Awakening (Chapter 26) (Patreon)

The smile on Baker’s face was short-lived, however. Though their enemy’s fingers continued trembling, the smoke at last billowed to the ravaged ground surrounding the ends of her digits, only for the man to discover that nothing appeared amiss. Not a scratch, not a cut, not a break. The ashes of fallen buildings and smote civilians painted the ends of her fingers like rock-climbing chalk, but otherwise, there was nothing to show for their efforts. At first not believing his own eyes, Baker scrubbed the glass of the window, then ordered his subordinate to check as well. Sure enough, Lilly hadn’t suffered so much as a scuff. The inexplicable wavering of her fingers bewildered the commander, then, witnessing such a spastic flail as though her hand was any moment from plummeting to Earth like a fallen dragon, until the smoke-wreathed area just above the rooftops cleared at the gentle puffing of air, and once the space was made transparent again, the sky-filling face of a giantess became Baker’s new focus.

            The girl was leaning deep down over the city, with her eye pointed near enough to this district in particular that if she’d batted her eyelashes hard enough, they’d have cut down weather vanes on every remaining building. Though it was her enchanting hazel iris, and the black pool of her pupil within it, that took up the majority of the tank battalion’s view now, they and especially the commander felt the overwhelming presence of her attention, the gargantuan window to her soul as well as the rest of her titanic body hunkered closer than ever to the ground without outright sunbathing her heavy yet svelte ten-mile body upon the survivors.

            Warmth from her skin alone, as well as the building-ripping force of her careful yet billowing exhales, upped the localized temperature by twenty humid degrees immediately. Though it remained an intimidating and bottomless cosmic black hole no matter the size, Lilly’s pupil dilated to an even more expansive orb as she observed and shuttered her focus on the uber-small critters she was just a half-sneeze or a flick of her thumb away from accidentally launching a mile out to sea. Her beautiful countenance truly flooded the space above, making it almost feel to Commander Baker more like New York was never a real city, but just a subject in a petri dish, and she was merely some crazed scientist performing mad experiments with the lives of millions of cultures and organisms that literally meant as much as bacteria to her.

            “What the hell…” the commander mumbled to himself, too perplexed and ashamed of their apparent failure to let anyone else hear him. Just WHAT was this girl exactly? Certainly not of this world. “Why is she-”

            “I see you!” Lilly murmured in her quietest possible whisper, which nonetheless made every window below her face vibrate, and cars scatter like dust particles a quarter-mile beneath where her pretty lips parted. “Well, I think I see you. You’re so… short, it’s difficult for me to see you exactly. But I know there’s more of you down there trying to say hello. Well, I felt it! Mostly. Sorry, I know we’re playing a game, so I don’t want to make you think I stopped just when it was getting fun, but that was very brave of you to stand up to the monster like that, even though she’s so much bigger and stronger than you. That’s all I wanted to say. Look, you made the monster get all tired! She might just fall over and take a nap! That’s way better than the little people in the movies usually do when the big ol’ scary thing crawls out of the water, so be proud of yourselves! Uh-oh, though… looks like she got better after all. And I think she’s feeling like dancing.”

            Insulted and fuming at the realization that Lilly was literally play-acting with them, mocking her attackers by feigning injury in her quivering fingers, the commander roared, then slammed his fist so hard into the wall of the tank that it broke a finger. In pain and fury, he crumpled to the ground, unable to look back out the window, while his subordinate begged for another order, but there were none to give.

            The rest of the battalion awaited in just as much consternation, witnessing the rise of Lilly’s middle finger up from the latest crater. Dust swirled again while her equally-untouched fingernail blade led the flying charge, plowing down buildings like wheat stalks on her way. The shadow of the “monster’s foot” swallowed the tank collective in an increasingly wide circle, hovering above for an especially pregnant moment of pause while Lilly, still with her face poised as close to the cityscape as she could without blurring her targets in her vision, witnessed their last moment while avoiding even a single blink. Oily spirals and textured micro-blemishes in her fingertips bloomed into stark relief, looking sleek and camera-ready as though the girl just stepped out of the salon, rather than marched her digits through a wall of fire sent by America’s do-or-die forces.

            At last the puffed curve of the leviathan lady’s fingerprint flesh descended almost close enough to touch. Firearms aside, a soldier could’ve chucked a rock at the giantess’s finger and watched it bounce harmlessly away as every other missile it had repelled today. Her shape blocked out the view of the rest of the world below, leaving the tanks under a gridded vortex of surreally luminescent peach terrain. Every building that previously walled the battalion in was leveled anyway, with the ash spinning so thick that this singular portion of Lilly’s tremendous hand was all anyone could see now. Yet the lower she brought it the more drawn-out the end became, until it was apparent that the girl didn’t mean to crush the tanks flat in a half-heartbeat, like she had everything else unfortunate to fall under her fingers down this stretch of smoldering NYC ruin. She was actually feeling for them, searching. Several tanks made moves to roll out from under her probing digit before it was too late, but beyond, her index finger began tapping out a rhythm on the streets, causing enough seismic activity that the vehicles couldn’t keep steady enough to drive in a straight line, knocking into one another like carnival bumper cars, and by the time they recovered, it was too late.

            The raised grooves of Lilly’s fingerprints were the first pieces of bodily architecture to meet their marks. Many tanks were crunched in easier than single sheets of aluminum foil on the spot, from the first cautious contact, while the remaining forces were shunted around, half-imploded and creaking under the massive weight of the girl’s finger which nonetheless was applied with the most pinpoint-accurate touch she could manage, like she was attempting to irritate a hair on someone’s arm without brushing skin.

            That eye still witnessed everything as closely as she could, but with the termite-like specks of an entire company of tanks now entrapped beneath a single finger lowered deep enough to the ground to pet them, it was tough for Lilly to continue going by sight, so she had to trust feeling alone, it seemed. Commander Baker and his gunman laid flat on their backs inside the tank, watching the roof bending inward from the incalculable forces being exerted down on them. Metal groaned and pre-loaded weaponry still in the tanks’ long barrels caught fire while even the valleys, not just the peaks, of the giantess’s uniquely-patterned fingertip flesh participated in remolding the battalion as a whole, and street below them, into a uniform rounded shape like a bowling ball grip.