Late Bloomer (Chapter 7) (Patreon)

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            The cities that remained standing in the aftermath of the giantesses’ rumble weren’t even convinced they were still alive at first, presuming instead that they had to have been squashed to powder-fine smithereens under a foot crashing toward them with the force of a moon and were simply in some kind of strange purgatory now. Such an outcome just made more logical senses. However, once Leila had knelt above them, with her entire svelte hunched-over figure becoming their sky, and her smug laughter rattling them to their bones, it became clear that they hadn’t been squished, and were simply the “lucky” ones to have survived.

Though no one was celebrating just yet, as the admittedly-gorgeous but nevertheless deadly hundred-mile blonde closely inspected these yet-unmolested pockets of civilization, running her fingers in between the city limits and causing buildings to quake at the stroke of her hand alone. Her breathing alone caused unnatural localized cyclones to pirouette through the streets of one intact city, sweeping citizens and cars alike down the pathways as easily as dust caught in a vacuum cleaner each time Leila giggled again.

            Yet the level of alarm reached new heights once more when Jimena was seen to be walking toward them from the far distance, lifting her foot and slowly leap-frogging directly over her gigantic accomplice. Expecting another fight to break out, the people who hadn’t yet been subdued by the wind of Leila’s laughter or the ground-swell of her caressing fingers watched these two incalculably humongous young women coming into contact again and doubted their city would stay in one piece for longer than ten more seconds, because it would only require an accidental scrape from Jimena’s sandal treads or a plastering from Leila’s palm, and the cracked bedrock upon which this town was mounted like a miniature snow globe decoration would be smothered into a flat soot smear embedded in the grooves of the giantesses’ fingers or fleshy toe gaps. And they’d be forgotten.

            That anticipation meant the citizens were then doubly surprised, first that they’d survived the battle at all, and next that Jimena continued marching over and beyond Leila without a struggle. And since this god-complex cheerleader was already looking directly upon their fair city with a smile, but hadn’t purposefully clawed or curb-stomped them off the face of the Earth, perhaps the girls had seen the error of their ways, the people hoped? Maybe the nightmare might soon end?

Then that notion was promptly killed when, as soon as Jimena was occupied trying to reestablish contact with DC, a look of supreme devilishness overcame Leila’s enchanting countenance. And since she was looking at the city from so close-up, none of the desperately awaiting micro-citizens missed her expression, pissing their pants or fainting before they’d even realized her intentions. Showing dexterity rare for a girl who was obviously so willing to stamp, toe-clench, and pile-drive her filthy perspiration-caked naked foot across the delicate landscape no matter how many thousands of speck-sized lives she crushed, Leila next began to carefully carve into the terrain surrounding this last-bastion city using just her fingernail. Since she was so tremendous now, the planet’s crust broke like bread at her whim.

            When she was done, the blonde then slid her fingers ever-so-delicately beneath the uprooted ecosystem, and at once, had turned the once-earthbound city into a floating island that could fit snugly into the palm of her hand. This was, in fact, what Leila did with the town once she’d quietly scooped it out of the six-mile-wide crater she’d just dug up, plopping the mostly-preserved artifact of the city atop her hand and grinning over its adorably breakable skyline. Her purpose still wasn’t clear, since the girl could’ve so easily destroyed the city at any stage of this process, but instead had treated them like a gardener lovingly drawing fresh flowers from soil.

What did she mean to do with them? Buildings swayed as loosely as wheat stalks, and the streets were left in a state of bedlam as citizens scrambled to find shelter, though it seemed nowhere they went was safe, because every hiding place in the city was still currently cradled in the titanic hand of an impulsive blonde schoolgirl. All she’d have to do was curl her fingers down, make a fist, and the place would split asunder into crumbs.

            But that wasn’t Leila’s purpose, either. Instead, whether out of vengeance or simply a cruel sense of humor, she painstakingly carried the city over toward Jimena without making a sound. The scientific giantess’s sandal was vacant now, with her meaty fifteen-mile arch splayed upward as she knelt obliviously above DC, which gave Leila the perfect opportunity to mischievously deposit the entire handful of the dread-drenched city and all its screaming inhabitants directly toward the grimy insole depression of Jimena’s leathery footwear isle.

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            Though for many hapless mortals caught in the wake of Leila and Jimena’s landscape-cleansing footsteps it seemed all hope was lost, enough determined spirit remained below to make for one last-ditch effort at salvation, before the gorgeous hundred-mile-tall frenemies could accidentally squash the rest of civilization into dust. The brainier giantess’s reversal formula had unfortunately only made the nation’s problems larger, literally, but the puny scientists in DC with whom Jimena had conferred were able to glean enough knowledge from her accidental hyper-growth experiment to begin engineering an actual solution to shrink both the destructive cheerleader and her well-meaning friend back down.

Until the new formula was completed, however, an extreme measure was required to stave off any further disaster: a guardian to prevent the titanic sky-reaching girls from demolishing any more cities beneath the gentlest brush of their toes. As it turned out, Jimena’s original chemical recipe was specifically tailored only to certain genetic structures, which meant that not just anyone could grow, and so left the emergency response team with very few options. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before they found one.