The forest was quiet here. Kalluto hadn't noticed it at first, but it had been a while since he'd heard any signs of life. Not even the buzzing of insects was heard; nothing but the branches rustling in the breeze, and his and Alluka's footsteps. The boy frowned, and halted his steps. Did this quiet have something to do with their mission? He thought a while and shook his head. It was yet another thing he didn't understand, compounding the confusion he'd felt since setting foot in this place.

His family's instructions had been clear enough. Word had reached them of a group of hidden cities in which dangerous plots were being hatched—plots which could lead to governments being overthrown. He and Alluka had been sent to investigate whether such a threat truly existed, and to eliminate it if possible.

The cities in question had vanished into thin air not long ago. Everyone thought some disaster had disintegrated them, but new information suggested that they were still around somewhere. Somewhere in this forest, allegedly, though Kalluto hadn't seen any sign of them yet in all this time walking around with Alluka. It seemed strange to think that such large locations could be hidden here without anyone noticing. Surely this forest wasn't big enough to hold all of them. Not for the first time, he wondered if the cities might be hidden underground.

“Kalluto, are we almost there yet? My feet are getting tired,” Alluka complained, also not for the first time.

Kalluto breathed in and out slowly. He looked back at his brother. “Brother,” he always said, though Alluka would have preferred “sister” instead. He did look the part, too, with his long hair and girlish demeanor, and with the shrine maiden's outfit he wore. For that matter, Kalluto himself was often mistaken as a girl, with his delicate mouth, his long eyelashes, and his dark furisode. Anyone who didn't know them would likely take them for a pair of girls.

“I already told you I don't know, Alluka. If you want to finish the mission quickly, then help me find the cities. I said we should split up, didn't I?”

“Yes, but... I wouldn't feel safe being all alone out here.”

Kalluto shook his head. How could the Zoldyck family have raised such a weak and cowardly child? “I suppose it's okay to rest a while, if it will get you to stop complaining,” he said.

“Thank you so much!” Alluka sat down at the foot of a tree and sighed, taking off her boots and thick tabi socks to air out her feet. “Won't you sit with me, brother?”

Kalluto stared intently at the ground, not hearing Alluka's voice. There he saw a pair of footprints on a bare patch of dirt. They didn't look fresh, exactly, but in this weather he figured they couldn't be more than a couple days old. Could the prints lead to the cities he was looking for?

“Kalluto?” Alluka's insistent tone intruded on his thoughts. He eyed his brother, considered leaving him here and carrying out the mission himself, but then decided his parents wouldn't be too pleased if he did.

“Forget your rest. There's a trail here. We'll follow it and see where it leads.” Alluka complained, but Kalluto was already ignoring him again, following those footprints to their destination; if that led nowhere interesting, he'd turn around and trace them back to their origin.

Together they followed the tracks until these suddenly ended in the middle of the forest, right before a patch of mossy-looking ground. Could this place be the entrance to whatever underground passage hid those cities? Kalluto stopped to think. In the meantime, his brother walked past him.

Alluka, Kalluto saw, was walking barefoot, with his boots in hand. His soles trod the mossy patches, leaving behind perfect footprints there. Kalluto was about to berate him for not paying attention, but his eyes were drawn to the “moss” that his brother stepped on, and to the very fine trails of smoke that were floating up from the edges of his footprints.

“Kalluto? Why did we stop?” Alluka asked, standing in the middle of all that “mossy” earth. Kalluto ignored it and walked up to one of his footprints instead. He crouched by it, leaning in close to examine the surface. Something moved down there, he saw—creatures so small that until now they had been invisible to him, some rushing to and others away from Alluka's print.

Kalluto examined their behavior closely. He looked at their nests, riddled with geometric patterns. A suspicion began to form, one so absurd he would have dismissed it if it came from anyone else, and to confirm it he dug up a piece of ground with his long red fingernails and dumped it on his palm.

What from a little further away had seemed tiny mites and their nests were now revealed to him as mite-sized humans and their houses. His suspicion proved true: the vanished cities had been shrunk and hidden in this forest.

Kalluto stared in awe at the people in his hand. There were dozens of them, men, women and children all huddled together or backed away from his face, trembling under his lilac eyes. How many more were in this little clearing? He thought back to the briefing he'd received. All together, the vanished cities had been home to over ten million people.

Ten million mite-sized people... no, less than that. Surely less, after Alluka had trampled their cities. How many had died under her brother's dirty soles? A million? More? Kalluto looked looked at the other prints cratering the tiny cities, looked at his brother sitting in the middle of them all and looking back so innocently.

It was so much to take in at once. How had these cities been shrunk? Whatever had done it must have been immensely powerful. Could these people grow back? Could they shrink him and Alluka? Either one of those possibilities could spell trouble for the two. He opened his mouth, about to give Alluka an order, but something gave him pause. Around Alluka's feet and rear, a number of little fireballs appeared, existing only for a second before fading away. They were explosions, he realized. To these tiny cities, they would have been big enough to destroy a whole block, and yet they were so pathetically weak and small that Alluka didn't even seem to notice he was under attack. Then Kalluto looked down and saw the same explosions taking place around his sandals. Some even reached his white tabi socks, leaving tiny dark spots on them.

Was this the weapon the cities had been developing? It really didn't matter, he supposed; the important thing was that these cities had resorted to these weak attacks to defend themselves. If this was the worst they could do, then he and Alluka had nothing to worry about.

Kalluto closed his fist, crushing the measly humans under his fingers. “Well, brother, it seems the trail ends here. There's nothing to do but to rest a while and then head back.”

“Whew! Thank goodness!” Alluka stretched out his legs; his heels drew two long gashes over the cities, and his thighs and calves fell down in their wake, crushing thousands who his heels had missed. He lay back on the ground, flattening hundreds of thousands, and gave a small sigh as he started to relax.

Kalluto smiled as he imagined what scenes of chaos must be playing out around his brother. “Careful, Alluka. Haven't you noticed you're lying on an insect nest?” Alluka gasped and quickly stood up, looking down, hastily patting himself down. “Calm down, they're harmless,” he said, slowly taking off his sandals and socks. “Oh, I'm sure they must be upset that we're here disturbing them, but they're weak and pathetic little things, almost too small to see. There is nothing they can do to stop us.” Kalluto raised his foot over that part of the city which Alluka's first step had left untouched. His foot cast its shadow over tens of thousands of the mite-sized humans, darkening their hearts just as surely as it darkened the land. The thousands screamed in horror as the young boy's sole filled the sky with pale, sweaty skin. The sole hovered a couple inches over them, stretching and scrunching as the toes slowly wiggled. The wrinkles of his sole were big enough to swallow houses, and even his little toe alone could have crushed any palace with a single tap. The smell of his foot, the heat and humidity, permeated the air, made them feel like they were in a sauna. The people felt like they were drowning in air thick with his evaporated foot sweat. They coughed and gagged, and couldn't even try to flee despite all the time he was giving them. Kalluto couldn't even imagine how much the mere presence of his foot affected them, but he loved the rush of power he got knowing that millions of lives were at his mercy, that millions cowered and trembled at the sight of him.

The thrill when his foot descended on the tiny city was indescribable. He could barely feel those little buildings as they crumbled from the merest touch of his skin, and he definitely couldn't feel any of those thousands who his sole reduced to stains, but if anything that lack of feeling made it all the more exciting as it showed how far he stood above these “people”.

The little bugs still tried attacking him; he could see tiny specks leaving trails of smoke as they flew up from the city, exploding against his skin with tiny fireballs, a shade lighter than the red of his toenails. If he paid close attention he could just barely feel something where they struck, a slight tingling sensation that turned ticklish when they struck his toes. “What pathetic little specks. Is this the best you can do? To think that your worst attacks can't even damage my toes.” He wiggled his digits, each impact of his thundering toes creating a shock wave that blew away any little specks who found themselves too close to him.

Locating the source of their attacks, Kalluto raised his foot and set his toes down just beyond it. His digits raked the earth in a mass upheaval that upturned hundreds of micro homes and left hundreds more buried under tons of dirt. He saw a bigger explosion when his toes passed over where those attacks had been coming from, and when he set his foot down afterwards there were no more explosions.

Kalluto smiled and looked at his brother. Alluka was still standing in the middle of all those cities, standing with one foot on top of the other while scanning the ground nervously. “What's the matter with you?” Kalluto asked. “Don't tell me you're still scared of those insects.” Alluka shook his head. “I'm looking a way out of here that won't crush any more of them.”

“There isn't one,” Kalluto said. “And why do you care? These insects are beneath us. It doesn't matter what we do to them. Quit worrying and step out of there. Or would you prefer I crush all those bugs myself so you don't have to avoid them anymore.” Kalluto walked forward, each step trampling thousands, and stopped a couple strides from Alluka, waiting for him to act.

Alluka looked down anxiously, then raised his foot over a patch of ground that looked mostly clear of the little insects. “Please get out of the way, little bugs,” he urged them, holding his foot over their heads so they might have time to escape.

Down below, grains of sand fell from his sole and crashed into the shrunken cities like meteors, crushing people and buildings alike. Every little breeze, every twitch of his toes, sent even more raining down, spreading chaos below.

The tiny people tried to flee, and many of them had already gotten away from under his foot, but while waiting for them Alluka's balance faltered and his foot came down elsewhere to steady him, crushing a patch of dirt that was still teeming with people. Regret filled Alluka, and he apologized to the little bugs, but at the same time he found that he liked the feeling of stepping on their little nests, and curled his toes over the rubble in delight. The few survivors who huddled down between his digits were then buried in the dirt and meaty toe-flesh. His teal-colored toenails scraped some tiny buildings up, and compacted them against his skin.

“Enjoying yourself?” Kalluto asked. “It's fun crushing bugs, isn't it? But do you know how to make it more fun? Just pretend that all those worthless mites are people. Think about how gigantic we must seem to those specks. Their homes can't even survive a touch from our toes. You and I are like gods next to them.” Alluka looked down at his feet and felt his heart beat faster as his brother spoke. He took another step, setting down his heel at the border of another city“Are you running yet, tiny people?” he said, growing so excited when he thought about hundreds of frightened people running in the shadow of his foot, screaming in terror of his toes. Alluka giggled and slowly lowered his foot—to give them a chance to escape, he told himself, but in truth it was to savor the moment. Alluka was so used to feeling powerless that even imagining that he had the power to crush hundreds underfoot was thrilling to him. He set his foot down and laughed. “You're right, bother, this is so much fun!” The two siblings crushed more and more of the tiny cities—a pair of wrathful deities punishing the puny mortals at their feet. They even started bonding over their destruction of the tiny cities.

Kalluto sat with Alluka and scooped up a chunk of a city with his fingers, holding thousands in the palm of his hand. Sticking out his tongue, he carefully licked up some of those tiny buildings and people, and brought them all inside. They all struggled hopelessly to escape the vast swamp of spit spread over his tongue, sinking down between taste buds the size of houses, screaming their hearts out into the boy's cavernous mouth even as their voices were drowned out by the powerful sloshing sounds.

Kalluto held out his hand to Alluka. “Try it,” he said, offering up the people he still held.

Alluka eyed the “insects” skeptically, and leaned in for a whiff. As he inhaled, hundreds of people were sucked up by the powerful vacuum, and went flying into his nostrils, where they got stuck to nose hairs and huge mucusy walls. Too small and weak to even tickle Alluka, they struggled against the boy's snot but only sank deeper into it. Alluka then licked up all the people Kalluto still held, and swished them around playfully all over his mouth. He couldn't even taste them, but imagining how scared those people must be still made it fun.

A bit later, the two sat with another city, one of the few that still remained. The people down there looked on in horror at the giant toes that surrounded their city, toes whose playful wiggling was felt all over the city. Then those toes slid forward, tearing up more and more of the city until it was all destroyed.

Afterwards, Kalluto picked up his brother's foot and peered closely at it. There were a few survivors down there, he saw, clinging to Alluka's foot like pathetic germs, especially on and between his toes. They would have to deal with them all to make sure the mission was completed, he knew, so he opened his mouth and started licking his brother's toes, bringing all the puny bugs into his mouth to be eaten. But Kalluto found that he enjoyed it, and he went even further, sucking on Alluka's cute little toes to make sure there would be no survivors. Alluka was shocked at first, but accepted Kalluto's foot worship and even started to enjoy it, especially when Kalluto scooped up more of the tiny cities and sprinkled them on her toes, getting stuck on his spit so he could lick them clean all over again.

An hour later, the cities were completely wiped out, and Kalluto blew the area clean with his fan to make sure no tiny people remained either. But on his own feet hundreds of survivors still remained unnoticed, taking refuge in the wrinkles of his skin or under his red toenails. They would live in his shadow for the rest of their miserable lives, fearing and worshipping him as a god, slowly forgetting that it had ever been otherwise.