The Great Awakening (Chapter 30) (Patreon)

Showing incredible restraint, considering how satisfying it was to feel the particulate of battleships tumbling beneath the waves as her toes overtook them like microscopic bath toys, Lilly paused in her gait long enough to give the helter-skelter remainder of the first-responder fleet a generous head-start. For several patient minutes, the monumental olive-complexioned islands of her feet stood as new landmasses just off the coast. Having sufficiently made her point by dunking half their number into Davy Jones’ locker courtesy of her gentle wave-lapped soles skimming across the puddle of the oceanic shallows, they were certain to beat a hasty retreat, and all she’d have to do was squint to keep track of their progress, and then she’d be led right back to their “nest.” Indeed, Lilly couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of herself as a predatory animal stalking oblivious prey across the water, the difference being that her destruction of civilization today on land, air, and sea couldn’t be described as much of a fair hunt. But that made it all the more fun.

When the surviving vessels had sped far enough ahead that it seemed they might survive the advancement of their ten-mile destroyer, Lilly ventured to glide her peds along after them, this time purposefully dragging her toes into the watery loam of the sea floor as deep as she could. Perhaps if she didn’t upset the aquamarine surface more violently than necessary to lurch her slender soles in pursuit of the panicked ships, they wouldn’t be thrown off-course, she reasoned, and would guide her directly to their naval base or even the whole rest of the fleet. The immediate problem Lilly discovered with this amusing plan, unfortunately, was that the battleships, even when shooting forth at top-speed away from Manhattan, were scarcely moving fast enough for the giantess to track. In fact, they almost may as well have been placidly bobbing like corks on the tide, or rather splinters of cork, given the difficulty she found in keeping her gaze fixed upon their boringly-slow progress before mistaking them for ocean waves.

“All right, this isn’t going to work,” Lilly announced, crossing her arms. “But I think I know a compromise that’ll get us both what we want, and much sooner! Hold tight, everyone.”

            With this proclamation made, the fifty-thousand-foot ocean-walker knelt without budging her toes again, dipped her fingers into the cooling chop a mile behind the slow-poke micro-boats, then batted the water gingerly enough that she could see the ripples traveling away from her digits as they ascended back from the churned froth. She was cautious, only applying enough force to feel a thin sheen of saltwater submerging and then rolling down the pillars of her fingers as she scooped it toward the surface. The waves were visible even from over five miles in the air, all barreling toward the ships far faster than they could escape, and despite Lilly’s skill in the handling of tiny structures and near-microbial vehicles having improved during her day as a giant, she’d evidently grossly underestimated her own strength again.

Wrinkling her lip and sighing, the girl watched with genuine disappointment as each and every one of the remaining battleships was splashed over by the catastrophic curl of the waves she’d sent their way with the accidental fury of a she-Poseidon. From her perspective, that flick through the ocean was hardly strong enough to have launched a droplet or two that might’ve only reached her ankles, but for the hundreds of naval officers and troopers hanging on for dear life to their state-of-the-art seafaring hardware, they may as well have been traveling on a hunk of driftwood through the Bermuda Triangle. Half-mile-tall waves crashed through the final vestiges of the navy’s first attack force and sunk them all so fast that, even crouching with her nose close enough over the ocean that her exhalations further disturbed the spiraling post-storm waves, Lilly couldn’t spot a single one of the adorable infinitesimal ships she was planning on following home to a wider feast of new toys.

“Darn,” she muttered, balling her fists. “Really?”

So much for the subtler approach.

Shrugging, and with every trace of the living trail wiped out, Lilly was just about to forget entirely about her pursuit of the navy, and turn back to resume her playdate with New York City via systematic crunching, when a second chance miraculously buzzed in her ear. Instinctively she waved her hand to swat the gnats away, before recalling that it would be a physical impossibility to feel, let alone touch, actual insects from this scale, which meant she was instead getting another visit from the nation’s airborne defenders. Smiling, Lilly held the same hand to her face, angling the sunlight just right across the peach-pale ravines of her fingerprints on the middle segment of her longest finger. Nestled between the grooves were three distinct embers like miniature bonfires representing the jets she’d taken out with the most absentminded of swings.

“Maybe you’d like to show me the way instead…” she thunderously intoned. The whine of the whizzing planes briefly halted after Lilly’s finger obliterated the main offenders, but there were more zipping in for a strafing run across her cheek that the giantess failed even to recognize as an assault at first. Their irritating presence was useful, however, in that she could perceive the flitting little flocks of warbirds, only because their irregular speck-shapes stuck close enough in formation that she could distinguish them against the skyscape, and the fact that she guessed they had to be moving at Mach-something speeds, which meant to Lilly, they moved a tad slower than mosquitoes.

No matter how simple it would’ve been for her to extinguish their ranks while they barrel-rolled between midnight-black ropes of hair and careened close enough to blast missiles into her eyes or up her nostrils, Lilly took the peaceful route, and left her guard open with a whimsical smirk. Observation would be her most useful weapon here, when her gentlest counteract would leave them all as forgotten embers harmlessly pinged off her skin cells, and then she’d have no tiny tour guides leading her back to the motherlode. Every insectoid flier that screeched past her face might’ve so easily been destroyed as their comrades had before, with a mighty bat of her eyelashes, a catapulted glob of saliva from the tip of a mockingly-extended tongue, or a well-placed puff of unstoppable wind from her nose.

But still Lilly refrained, knowing that sooner or later they’d run out of fuel and weaponry, so she focused on tracking the fleet’s movements, training her eyes not to lose sight of them against the ocean blue below. Occasionally she was pretty sure she noticed temporary illuminations like gel-spots from glow sticks adorning her cheeks, the result of explosive napalm armaments dumped en masse close enough to her eyes that she could briefly differentiate it from the friendly sunlight. Still, the only way for her to be certain the planes had tuckered themselves out and run out of fodder to waste on her impenetrable porcelain-smooth countenance was to listen closely for the softening of their buzzing engines and the vanishing of their silvery bodies in the blurred focus of Lilly’s short-sighted vision range.

When this occurred, she needed only turn her head, slowly so as not to whip them out of the sky with stray strands of hair, and spotted a pack of a dozen planes retreating into the distance. Best of all, they moved at a pace that wouldn’t bore the giantess so badly that she started experimenting with ways to hustle them along, such as by pouting her lips and blowing a blustery jet-stream tender enough to procure beautiful music from a wooden pan-flute, but to these million-dollar paper airplanes, it would be no less devastating than if Lilly breathed fire. She wouldn’t repeat the mistake of wasting the boats, however, and the girl’s patience was just enough now to tolerate the far-quicker pace of the planes high-tailing it for safety on the faraway horizon, presumably back toward whatever base had launched them.