Late Bloomer (Chapter 8) (Patreon)

“Are you… sure this is a good idea?” Jimena’s little sister Malena asked into the walkie-talkie she’d been given. Having been dropped off via helicopter in an unoccupied mountain range, the glamorous brunette cutie held a bottle of water mixed with a heavy dose of her sibling’s mass-expansion formula in the other hand. She’d been instructed to drink it only once the signal was given, so she could grow large enough to get both giantesses under control, but Malena was understandably hesitant about the idea of instantly ascending to a size large enough to fit several metropolises under the treads of her white sneakers. “You’re sure this will help Jimena? I’ll be big enough to keep her from squishing anybody else?”

            “That’s correct,” a military voice replied through the radio.

            “And… you won’t hurt her? If I do this? You’ll shrink Jimena back down and she’ll be okay?” Malena insisted, worried above all about her sister’s safety. “And then me too? I don’t want to be big forever.”

            “You have our word. Please, there’s not much time. Drink the formula.”

            Sighing and shutting her eyes to summon the courage, Malena uncorked the bottle and then guzzled the liquid contents in one breath: not because she was eager, but to ensure she didn’t become too frightened halfway through drinking to finish. The girl raised the walkie-talkie to her lips, about to ask how long the compound would require to take hold, but she didn’t have to speak, as the answer arrived in the form of her body meteorically rising and swelling in every direction as if a personalized Big Bang had gone off within her, causing growth as swift as the ever-expanding universe. The steep mountains below her sneakered feet turned to refined grit in an instant, while Malena’s lovely tan countenance was first haloed by the clouds and then immediately surpassed them. Up along the whole incomprehensibly-huge measure of her stature, which totaled no less than one hundred and fifty miles tall, the awestruck young giantess could feel various stratospheric climates, warmer along her slim denim-clad legs and then chillier up closer to her white midriff-bearing top, all the way to the top of her head, where she could now see the stars out in the cosmos.

            “JIMENA!” Malena cried out, upon seeing her big sister what felt like a short distance away, but in reality was halfway across the country. Her ingenious sibling had always been the taller one between them – which made it all the more ironic that today, now that Jimena had evolved herself into a one-hundred-mile behemoth, her not-so-little sister actually looked down upon her from a far-superior position of height and strength. Malena’s voice seemed to rumble the whole hemisphere, quaking the ground below her shoes with the force of the cheerleader and nerd’s earlier battle, and the biggest giantess of all hadn’t even taken a step yet. Once she experienced the vibratory eminence of her sheer immensity, however, the newly-grown girl couldn’t help but take a step forward. In the blink of an eye, she’d forgotten what her most important mission was here – to prevent any further collateral by overpowering the smaller titanesses into submission if necessary – and instead was too maddeningly tempted to explore the gift of her godlike scale, just for a few moments.

            Which, for millions of ordinary people watching from the ground – including the same fools who’d just given Malena the power to dwarf two massive destroyers – meant they could only watch, powerless and terrified to their cores, as her red-rimmed sneakers alone seemed to fill the skyscape like clouds spacious enough to wreath a continent. Then the girl took a step, crossing state lines in a single lazy bound. And even when she gently set her foot down as softly as she could, sinking forests and lakes and populous cities alike into the rubber entrenchments of her shoe soles, the ground shuddered from coast to coast.

Everything below the booming stride of her world-threatening foot was naturally ruptured down to a nucleus-thin strip of unrecognizable dust, but even cities that were nowhere near Malena’s foot was impacted by earthquakes more devastating than all seismic activity from their histories combined. And then she took another step, heavier this time, as the power obviously rushed to her head just as it had with Leila and Jimena. Malena arched her sneaker-clad sole off the ground, twisting the ball of her foot down upon colorful patchwork rural landscape until it was smeared into a uniform paste of extinction, and finally let her heel fall again.

            A croon of stimulated fascination echoed out from the one-hundred-fifty-mile-high girl’s lips just as loudly as the laughter and roars of the smaller giantesses, which was somehow even more troubling to the terrified listers far below who had no choice but to weather the natural disasters that resulted by the dozen each time Malena so much as flinched her foot forward. She wasn’t attacking them maliciously, as Leila had done. Nor was she sincerely dedicated to stopping the carnage, like her sister was. Malena, obscenely grand as she was now, had simply become like a force of nature, too far elevated above humanity to have either feelings of benevolence or ill will. She just had to follow her instinct and exercise the most irresistible power anyone alive had ever felt, which in this case, meant she was compelled to continue strutting forward, her mission long forgotten. Step by step, vast new footprint-shaped canyons were violently sculpted into the American wasteland, affecting every citizen no matter how far away.

            The bizarre irony was that, at least in part, this last-ditch attempt for humanity’s salvation had worked too well: Malena was now significantly taller and stronger than either her sister or Leila, and could’ve very easily subdued both lesser giantesses to prevent them from further obliterating any other crinkly paths of microscopic manmade civilization clean off the map. If she’d wanted to do that. But Malena’s consciousness had ascended to match her planetary-challenging hugeness now, and she was no longer the least bit concerned with the ridiculous purpose she’d been given by the now mite-like problem-solvers far below.

It was much like the transformation Leila had undergone, achieving the omnipotent self-glorifying psyche of a pure world-breaking goddess, only in the span of seconds rather than minutes. Both the hundred-mile-tall cheerleader and her friend were startled into jaw-hung astonishment at the abrupt appearance of a much-larger Malena impossibly towering above the both of them, at first wondering if she was a mirage. But there could be no hallucinating footsteps as thunderously impactful as those, once the supremely titanic younger girl’s Converse-clad feet began treading and smashing up segments of the country like a casual second Pangaea split.