Late Bloomer (Chapter 5) (Patreon)

###

            Although their situation was still far from ideal, millions of terrified citizens spread throughout the metropolises adjacent to Jimena’s monumental flip-flopped feet had nevertheless begun to let themselves feel the relief of hoping they might yet survive this day intact, once the goddess-statured brunette had loudly made her peaceful intentions known, and then proven it by not crushing anymore of them following her initial growth. Plus, based upon her thunderous responses to the air force emissaries in her ear (and emergency televised government messages urging everyone to remain calm while a solution was discovered), it seemed as though an end to this madness might soon be in sight, and then humanity could begin the tragic recovery process of mourning for the patches of civilization Jimena and Leila had “unintentionally” squashed into seven-mile tread-molded stone mush graves beneath their fashionable footwear.

            When the news reports stated that, thanks to the cooperation of the scientifically-gifted giantess, the high-altitude VTOLs were already flying skyward with a shrinkage antidote loaded up for dispersal, impromptu celebrations broke out in the streets. Crowds cheered, strangers hugged, and witnesses who’d spent the last hour praying and weeping for what they believed was their almost-assured destruction beneath an unthinkably gargantuan young woman’s city-flattening sole now finally allowed themselves to think they had a future after all. Everything was going to be all right, or so it seemed. Satellites and news cameras were aimed to the stratosphere and projected live on every TV and phone as the swift military response fleet soared up toward the glistening pink cavern of Jimena’s awaiting mouth.

            Just when the aircraft came close enough to delivering their medicinal payload that all anyone could see on the screen were the rippling fields of the fifty-mile braniac’s tastebuds, however, a catastrophic disturbance knocked her lips far off-balance and caused the live video feeds to all cut to static as the vehicles spun chaotically into burning impacts upon Jimena’s chest. The exact cause of this interruption could be far better understood with the naked eye rather than viewed through a TV, and to a soul-harrowing degree, as the massive population waiting breathlessly in the streets and rooftops of towns one treacherous stride away from the giantess’s stance watched the horizon fill up with the deadly incoming march of the golden-crowned cheerleader. Their whooping and victorious hollering immediately cut to a gasp of choked silenced, then was overtaken by a far-louder cacophony than a million exultant roaring little voices ever could have created by just the planetary-resonant THHHHWOOMs of Leila’s footfalls alone.

Unlike Jimena, Leila showed no regard for the hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of collateral she caused with each silvery urban patchwork she pulverized to exquisite dust along the burly crease-crimping terrain of her naked athletic peach soles in rapid succession; that much was clear already from the deafening conversation she exchanged with her friend just before their collision. The sportier giantess hadn’t just pushed her friend off-course to prevent the shrinking solution’s transmission onto her vast tongue, but body-checked her with enough force that it seemed Jimena might fall straight onto her back. Even before that could happen, though, the impact alone between the unbelievably gargantuan girls’ momentum-breeding silhouettes sent axis-altering shockwaves down through their soles and straight into the ground, thus inflicting upheaval even more calamitous than their earlier earthquaking stomps. In every type of topography surrounding the titanesses’ peds, skyscrapers tipped into one another Rube Goldberg-style, oaken forests ripped up and practically erupted like dead dandelion seeds, and mountain peaks scattered more easily than kicked pebbles.

            As it turned out, Jimena managed to swing the sandaled monolith of her foot out in time to catch herself from collapsing fully, but considering all the fresh havoc wreaked lethally over dozens of towns and Mother Nature alike after Leila’s defiance, plus the capital city that happened to exist under the misplaced rubbery-treaded grid of Jimena’s seven-mile shoe and so was now scrunched into a lifelessly compact fine-rubble silt form, it was difficult to feel much joy in that averted extension of disaster.

            “LEILA, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” Jimena bellowed, forgetting in her bewilderment to whisper, which only added to the aftershock reverberations plaguing the cities so precariously stationed near her powerfully repositioned shoes. “We HAVE to do this! It’s the only way to FIX what I did!”

            “NO!” Leila shouted even louder. Insolently raising her foot to stamp it like a petulant child, then, horrified tens of thousands of folks were swallowed by the risen shadow of that creamy nude sole, its sweat-shiny miles of meaty flesh still smutty with juicy toejam blobs the size of ocean liners, and then had only seconds to catch their breath under this humid obstruction to the sky before Leila’s sole came down upon them without a second thought, smothering and instantly atomizing them all to an indistinguishable smote paste. “Look at how GREAT this is, Jimena! They can’t STOP US! We can do whatever we want to do! How can you just GIVE THAT UP?”

            “Are you CRAZY?” the dark-maned giantess shrieked. She clumsily dodged, then, as Leila rushed toward her again, and in doing so the latter mowed her plush-padded toes across yet more high-rises, woodlands, and screaming innocents below. Since neither friend was particularly adept at wrestling, their struggles now (at least from the sky) would’ve appeared as borderline-humorous playground tussles between bratty grade-schoolers. From the ground, of course, the result of Jimena and Leila’s clash was only deathly serious. With each unschooled swipe the girls took at one another, their feet would seismically reposition, leaping miles away and then crashing back down over another yet-uncrunched span of civilization until everything immediately beneath them began to better resemble a disheveled toy sandbox.

            People who, only minutes before, had stood proudly in the streets together, applauding and thanking their lucky stars that the danger might soon shrink back down to normal, now rushed in panicked masses to reach locations they foolishly believed might offer them protection, should either a giantess’s sandal or bare sole descend heavier than a celestial hammer of judgment. They piled into basements, manholes, and bomb shelters in every city, causing violent in-fighting amongst the folks that almost mirrored the larger-scale battling happening far above them between Jimena and Leila. It was every man, woman, and child for themselves, as the majority of onlookers scrapped one another to take cover, and the rest simply fell to their knees in traumatized shell-shock, too awed and horrified by the visage of those two ordinary-seeming young ladies – each one standing at a height more than quadruple the length of Manhattan Island stacked end-to-end – trading blows and slamming their apocalyptic feet every which way with no immediately-recalled regard for the vulnerable near-microscopic human lives in range of those heaving soles. Even Jimena, who was so incredulous over her friend Leila’s apparent god complex, had forgotten the importance of stepping lightly, such that entire cities were wiped clean off the map every few seconds in sprays of mile-wide earthen debris and pounding shuffles from flexed-out giantess toes.