The Great Awakening (Chapter 16)

Lilly held the sample of tanks and military personnel, glued together by marshy land ripped up in tandem, as gently as possible between the ringed pads of her thumb and index, cautiously enough in fact that the soft centers of her fingerprints retained the shape of shallow mountain peaks. The pressure from these rounded points alone was sufficient to hold up the crumpled terrain and smattering of military hardware like stray sprinkled black pepper. The soldiers of course were invisible to Lilly now, even with the pinched earth held up so close to the pools of her pupils for inspection that the details became blurry in her vision, but she knew they were mixed in there. At first it hardly seemed worth the trouble to try picking up these first-line fighters, since they were so miniscule in comparison as to feel indistinguishable from any other speck of ground the giantess had trampled by the hundred-acre.

            Yet she dipped her hand again and took up a second collection nonetheless, this time doing her best to concentrate on the amusing and nigh-ticklish sensations of earth, metal, and humanity crushing to mulch between her delicately enclosed fingertips. As early as last night, Lilly doubted she’d have possessed the focus necessary to detect the differences in texture between powdered gravel and bulletproof micro-tanks being compressed to the size of toolboxes. To a being as incredulously humongous as her, such distinctions became meaningless. Still, now having enjoyed a great deal of practice in plucking fascinating clumps of civilization straight off the ground like ripe berries, Lilly could’ve sworn her senses were heightening, or rather adjusting, in order to savor every benefit of her stature and might. In this case, when she swirled her fingertips together, causing the creamy pads of her digits to orbit one another and the spiral prints to tenderly grind like slow-moving galaxies, she believed she could perceive the contrast between objects: the ever-so-slightly higher resistance of the armored vehicles which managed to endure her crushing strength for a split-second longer than the soil they were previously parked upon, before Lilly had reached down and squinched them clean off Mother Earth.

            It would’ve been impossible to find just one transport, of course. A figurative needle in a mile-wide haystack would’ve been simpler. However, after stooping low enough to view the traffic jam of tanks and gunner-armed jeeps foolishly lined up for slaughter, Lilly had gathered enough of them in a single hunk between her compactor-strength digits to notice multiple instances of those steel grains like hardier sand being scrubbed into the rounded grooves of her fingerprints, especially the wider racetrack-like loops on her thumb.

Though it wasn’t quite as palpably thrilling as successfully picking up a skyscraper and feeling its thread-like mass maintain recognizable shape for a precious fleeting instant in grasp before coming apart like a microscopic mandala, Lilly nonetheless smirked with swelling delight to feel these dots of pathetic manmade difference getting blended deeper into the earthen mush with every spin of her fingertips. She almost wished to feel the troopers, too, if only in hope of noting a lucky one or two squirming for mercy amidst the carnage before also succumbing to the mess, though at the same time she knew that in order to feel such detail of their pleading and wriggling, she’d need to surrender a lot of her ten-mile height, and it would be a cold day in hell before she wished such a thing.

            Whether or not she could actually feel the tanks against the dirt, since they could’ve easily been imagined by a being so immense, was irrelevant to Lilly; she was fairly certain she could do it, and therefore, perhaps by the same logic that allowed her overwhelming advantage of physical power to remold the architecture and tiny lives below at her whim, so too did it seem possible that she could decide what was true or not. The giantess couldn’t help but giggle at this notion of grandeur, then pressed her fingertips together just a little harder, until everything between them was evenly pancaked. God, they were so feeble. More fragile than anything Lilly could’ve ever conceived of from her old size. The dust spilled out the plush perimeters of her digit ends once she was squeezing them together hard enough for her joints to subtly bend from effort, proving how slim the chance that she could ever weed out the sensation of human bodies snow-angeled flat against the deep ravines of creases in her skin. Still, it was amusing to pretend.

            Once this second clump of land was reduced to soft particles, with the hard ground, million-dollar tanks, and dozens of soldiers interwoven into refuse fine as ash, Lilly’s hand descended again, but rather than reach out for another piece of topography to primp and scour until it spread into her skin as lotion, she spread the spires of her fingers wide to catch herself against the ground. Briefly she relished the feeling of all ten outspread digits sinking into the shaky bayside earth easily as bubble bath foam, then used this temporary leverage to bring her gaze back down to the ground to observe what remained of her attackers. It certainly took more work to spot the courageous little things now, since her approaching footsteps, kneeling, and subsequent finger clawing had scattered their forces like terrified gnats. Plus, she’d generated a massive smoke screen over the “battlefield” simply by interacting with terra firma with any force beyond sweeping finger strokes, which ensured they may as well not have existed, for how little they counted in her far-reaching vantage.

After once again batting the mist of devastation away, though, Lilly’s searching paid off, when she noticed the remaining tanks, lucky enough not to be trounced in the mile-radius of her knees or fingers, rolling away as fast as they could. Some raced back toward the mainland, and others drove directly into the Hudson, just to escape by any means necessary. Alongside them, after squinting to the point of greater eyestrain, the giantess distinguished crowds of fleeing army men, which were still only visible when packed together in horrified throngs sprinting away from her as fast as their microbial legs could carry, though even their presumable top speeds made it seem to her like they weren’t moving at all.

Growing mildly bored now of the paltry rush from picking apart these toy soldiers on the mainland, while there was still an entire fragile metropolis at arm’s length beyond just waiting to be turned upside-down figuratively if not literally, Lilly shifted forward on her monumental axis. Her knees bowled yet deeper through bedrock, causing the shelf of land to groan and the waterside itself to plunge into the waves. Then those braced fingers merely walked their way straight into the river like elegant five-legged kaiju; as the Hudson was barely a mile-and-a-half wide at its most extreme here, she needed only travel the length of one of her sneakers to reach Manhattan. The voyage was short, but performed with incredible care, since the last thing she wanted was cause undo destruction before she’d had the chance to do so methodically and with full intention in every building she bulldozed, car she bounced into the heavens, and imperceptible human life sacrificed at the altar of fun.

It didn’t take long to make her move, though, as it was but one step, and soon the giantess was crouched with both shoes damming the river, the thrashing tide not even rising high enough to wet the fabric above the rubber rims of her footwear. Squatting delicately, knowing that an unbalanced tip of her lithe frame in either direction would cause a seismic shift drastic enough to topple everything in sight, she narrowed her eyes and took a genial gander at the military forces wrapped around the island rim. Just as infinitesimal in scale as the last laughable team, no matter how thickly crowded the tanks and troops, they were at least easier to spot wearing their camo and speckled across the golden-white sands in formations which would soon disperse as easily as their comrades across the river. Thus they were instantly endeared to Lilly more, renewing her hope of spotting the pitiful men and women plastered across her extremities once she stole herself a piece of the city proper.