Chapter 5: Suburb

By now the soldiers Aoi ate were reduced to genetic goop and mass mash. She absorbed it all and gained a few more feet, along with another bounty of genetic material to experiment later.

The one semi-useful thing she learned was that Paris had stationed much of the nation’s army therein. They figured they’d be able to annihilate her with tanks and artillery and a few things she didn’t know yet.

That meant the suburb a few hundred feet from her was almost entirely undefended. Noah did get a minor message from command about some of the guard force being mobilized here, but not much. The vast majority of France's army was protecting the capital city.

It made sense, the nations economy rested heavily on its capital. She was a little less hungry now thanks to those soldiers, but she couldn’t do much internal experiments on the harvested DNA without some more radioactive materials.

Far as she knew this suburb didn’t have any. They were close enough to Paris that they probably leeched off the city’s grid. She’d keep an eye out, but even if out of luck, this little suburb held a great prize. It was no mere stop over on her path to Paris.

This was the relatively new and upscale settlement of Vanille, and she toured a facility here with her biology class at the start of the semester. It was a so called “gene bank”: for both animals and plants.

Way back in the old days, they’d store entire eggs of animals there. Thankfully, a technique was discovered to perfectly preserve any source of DNA: for most creatures, blood was the easiest to get and most plentiful. This dramatically increased storage capacity for the buildings, since you only needed a drop or so for a complete collection of, say, scorpion genome.

As a result, the World Genome Preservation Institute was formed. Their goal was to have complete copies of genome data stored all over the globe. That way, if an animal went extinct, they’d still have data to study from a variety of locations. Each country had at least one such building, which they haughtily dubbed “Arks”.

Aoi planned to take everything that bank had before moving on. Then, she’d have the full genetic spread of planet earth to toy with.

Finally out of that no-name town and off those barren roads, Aoi set her eyes on the real treat and her feet square on two opulent residences. Vanille was an upscale suburb. It was hard to find a home that wasn’t at least 2 stories: many were three or more. The roofs were colorful, and the space between each home and its neighbor lush with green shrubs and trees.

Aoi took another step. A married couple ran out of their home, but not in time before a light viridian sole, dozens of feet long, slammed down upon them. Their meticulously shingled roof shattered with their bones, and Aoi purred at the sensation of magnificent masonry cracking between her toes.

She sighed. “I gotta say.” She took another step, landing square on another home. “The fancier the house is, the better it feels.”

Crunch, stomp, smash. She walked atop the pencil-tall homes like she was playing some weird variant of hop-scotch. It actually reminded her of that dance-game at the one arcade back in Paris.

‘That was the only non-nerdy game Yoshimi could beat me at’, she thought.

‘Yoshimi...’

Aoi felt her anger rising again. It was the one bit of being human that still stung her: that abandonment back at the crater. Her roommate and lover was probably back in Paris, or maybe she fled the country by now.

‘Fucking back stabbing...’

Aoi clenched her fists. At least she had stuff to take her frustration out on. She spotted a cul-de-sac just a few steps away. The houses at the end of this street were populated by people who all thought to get in their cars and drive off at the same time. Foolish, since some panicked couple crashed into another, and now they had trapped themselves.

Rage slipped to pleasure as she loomed her foot above the two crashed cars: each still occupied. Gazing down at all the people stuck in the area. “Aww, bit of a roadblock I see? Let me help with that.”

Everyone looked on in horror as she lowered her foot with excruciating slowness. The people within pancaked beneath the pressure. Once the deed was done, everyone tried to scatter, but Aoi was quick to cut them off. Her long prehensile tail curled down and to the right. It burst through one of the homes and slammed its tip down on a fleeing man.

Others were fleeing left, trying to move out the upper end of the cul-de-sac there to escape, between the buildings. Aoi’s throat rumbled as if lurching up phlegm from her throat. If only she was hocking a loogie; what she coughed up was far worse.

Aoi’s maw shot open and she spewed a stream of slime at the front of those souls dumb and brave enough to try and flee. The fluid was equal parts blue and green. It sizzled the asphalt easily enough, so the people it splashed down on fared even worse. They melted before everyone's eyes. Their skin burnt as much as it soapified.

Aoi wiped her mouth and flicked the residual stuff off onto a nearby roof, where it singed a hole through the roof and started to corrode some priceless decor.

She addressed the freshly-halved crowd of 15 or so. All the men and women looked up, shivering.

“That was a sample of a new corrosive compound my body was working on. Equal parts acidic and basic. Normally the pHs would cancel out, but the main components are immiscible with each other here.”

Aoi crouched down and curled her tail through another home, then back inwards. The people stared back at the fluid she just spit up. It fizzled deep into the ground before finally stopping. Soon, the smooth flesh of that tail bumped into them and penned them all into the approximately 30m ‘ring’ she formed.

“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not puke. It didn’t come from my stomach. Not that I couldn’t make it there if I wanted, just that what I spit up didn’t--anyways.”

Aoi took a look around, all eyes were on her, most on her face but a few on those wiggling back tentacles of hers or up at her hair. They moved a little on their own when she got excited.

“Oh, do you like my hair?” she smiled and bent down to move her head into the crowd. The short, undulating tendrils on her head started to brush up against the ground. Aoi dragged the tip of one against a pearl-clutching suburbanite lady’s cheek.

The kaiju-woman laughed in an uproar. Consequently, a bit of spit from her mouth sprayed out over some poor salary-man type. There was the faintest bit of that corrosive fluid from earlier still on it—well, ‘faintest bit’ to Aoi. Big as she was, it was enough to inundate his hand. The poor guy’s fingers steamed on contact and he erupted in a ferocious yell. He watched his hand slough off his arm and land to the asphalt below. There, it looked much like a dropped chunk of lasagna; the colors and shape were on point for that.

Everyone started freaking out again, trying to run or climb over her tail. Aoi huffed, leaned in, and just grabbed them up with her hair tentacles.

She rose back to her full height and used the appendages to move some of those people in front of her gaze.

Green irises on black sclera squinted at them. “You know, I think I’ll take you all as to-go snacks. I’ve got to stop at a bank and I think I’ll enjoy your company.”

Aoi stamped through one of the houses of the cul-de-sac on her way out. One of the couples in her head-throng of tendrils started to wail a bit louder. Must’ve been theirs.

Right past the cul-de-sac was a little shopping area rife with short chic stores and boutiques. There were also a few quaint little grocery stores as well with all sorts of expensive wines and meats and all that.

She talked to the upper-class suburbanites in her hair. “You know, I could never afford to shop there, though we did visit it once.”

She casually moved a hair tentacle into her mouth and slurped some guy off it. Post gulp, some guy in the back of the throng said “Who’s we?”

The others glared at him--if they could see him through the cluster of tendrils of course. Such questions would only invite trouble: and that one did. The head tentacles all squeezed at once, enough to break a couple bones and that inquisitive man in question had his chest clenched right off to the tunes of screams and gasps.

“Never you mind that, food.”

Her mood soured again as she thought of Yoshimi’s abandonment. Aoi arched her foot back and kicked a perfume shop thousands of meters west. It was mostly in splinters and pieces at that point, but it did indeed go that far.

Aoi swiped her tail across a row of clothing and antique stores. She stomped on one of those grocery stores then lifted her foot up to slam it down on a cluster of shops to its side. Again and again she stomped, tail swishing left and right to bulldoze over and mash down cars and stores and everything around her.

Amid the damage, her tentacles slid more morsels into her mouth. All were gulped down except for two. One of those she chewed up, the other she suckled with some acidic spit. She felt them writhe and scream in her mouth, turning to a soupy puddle she swallowed down.

Aoi sighed. ‘I gotta admit’, she thought. ‘Rampaging does make me feel a bit better.’

It was time to put play aside though. She could see the building now. That ‘Ark’

She walked towards it.