For Augustus, swatting the jet was easier than swatting a gnat. A gnat could have flown any which way to escape or at least be harmlessly swept away by the resulting air current. The cushion of air ahead of Augustus’ moving palm was enough to buckle the jet’s rigid frame, rendering it utterly inoperable even before it crashed into a wall of skin, annihilating the aircraft and its pilot in a fiery instant.
A grim smirk of satisfaction had been on Augustus’ face ever since he began his growth this morning. Steadily growing by the minute, first he could just neatly fit a man under his sole, later on a lovely couple he came across, then a car, then a bus, a house, an office building, a city block…
He now stood at just over one thousand meters, taller than any skyscraper that ever has or will be built. The jets sent may have had an inkling of a chance had they shown up a little earlier but now they were nothing more than a welcome change of pace from the young man’s casual massacre of the city.
“I wonder if they went out thinking they were doing something very brave.” Augustus regarded the speck of soot left on his palm, his voice booming through the countryside “very stupid, more like, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”
The handsome young redhead swept his hand through the sky as casually as if he was brushing aside some invisible window drapes, catching another pilot and their craft with the back of his hand. The craft exploded, barely tickling the giant. “I appreciate you guys coming out here, breaking you all really breaks the monotony of breaking everything else!”
One of the remaining pilots, rookie Ryan Holt, had little more than adrenaline holding his psyche together. He had trained to defend his nation from any threat whether land, sea, or air, but no amount of training could have prepared him for this.
Mason’s and Lopez’s were gone in the span of a minute, White and Tyler the minute before. The chain of command was breaking down rapidly as the insanity of the situation took hold. The hysteric chatter on Ryan’s comms seemed distant compared to the pounding blood in his ears. He heard someone screaming, maybe Wayde, before being abruptly cut. At his 9-o’clock Ryan saw the now familiar cloud of black smoke from a destroyed jet wafting from the giant’s football field sized hands, which was now approaching. Fast.
“Shitshitshitshitshitshit…” The beige expanse of the giant’s palm dominated the view ahead of the cockpit the moment Ryan yanked his joystick hard, the G-forces ramming into his body as he pitched skywards into the blue. The jet rattled as it passed through turbulence of the giant’s movement, another noise on top of din of the comms, the roaring afterburner, his heart pounding in his ears, and another explosion…
“Boooop!” Augustus tapped a jet with his index finger, sending a cloud of shrapnel onto to the neighborhood below. Maybe he should pace himself? If this was the only squadron he’d see at this size it might be a bit of a shame not to savor the moment. After he smeared the soot and bits of fuselage from his fingertip, Augustus rested his hands on his hips and took in the situation. He watched as the remaining jets, maybe about five of them, doubled back and began firing. Swarms of rockets, each one more than capable of piercing even thickest armor of any tank, spew forth from the jets. The giant didn’t make any effort to avoid them as they made impact with his chest, exploding in dozens of fireballs against his sleeveless shirt. Streams of tracer rounds from autocannons peppered his arms and chest as the jets made their passes and circled back in a frantic orbit. Volley after volley hit their mark and each one had the same effect. Nothing. After several minutes of this ineffective assault, Augustus grew bored.
“Well, I gotta say that was a pretty impressive light show, for gnats.” Augustus brushed down his shirt and arms, flaking off bits of shrapnel finer than any dust from the redhead’s perspective, “but I think it’s high time I offed the rest of you.”
With a shrug and a crack of his knuckles, Augustus got to work. He swung his arm a little faster this time, slapping two planes from the sky in one fluid movement. From the corner of his eye he spotted one flying low, perhaps hoping to avoid his attention? Augustus quickly quashed that hope with a careful step directly on top of them, leaving them no time to steer or even eject before it disintegrated against his sole, the remains driven into a crater where a block of apartments used to stand. He spotted the next one just beyond his arm’s reach, though a single step that landed on top of a nearby university was more than enough to close the distance for Augustus to flick the tiny craft into nothing more than a puff of dust.
“Looks like I win!” Augustus gloated, spotting no more jets to destroy, “Honestly you gnats would’ve accomplished more if you just flew as far away from me as you could, some of you might’ve survived long enough to see what I was going to do with the rest of this city, but i guess I can’t expect something with a brain smaller than a grain of sand to know better than to fly within arms reach of me. Better off as dust on my fingertips.”
Unbeknownst to Augustus, there was one pilot left to hear his sadistic bragging. Ryan, flying beyond the giant’s notice, was breaking out in a cold sweat under his flight suit as he listened to squadmates scream over the comms and fall silent one by one. The fear eating away at the pit of his stomach had expanded into a feeling of absolute dread throughout his body, all the way down to his fingertips gripping his jet’s controls white knuckled. He was out of rockets with maybe a two second burst worth of ammo left in the cannon. Ryan knew that even if he had enough in belt to fire it for two hours straight it wouldn’t make any difference, nothing they threw at that thing did. The thought of returning to base crossed his mind, but then what? Refuel and reload for another useless run of wasted ammo? How many more would die by the time he got back in the air? And if the giant followed him back to the airfield there’d be no opportunity for a second try for all the good it would do. The giant needed to be stopped now. But how?
Ryan continued to circle high above as the giant began to turn their attention to what remained of the university campus he’d stepped on. Ryan kept the monster at least a kilometer below him as he weighed his options. As his jet turned westward the sun was in his face, idly recognizing how the glare was made bearable by his tinted visor. That’s when it dawned on Ryan.
The eyes. That’s where he could hurt him.
Ryan accelerated ahead of the giant before making a wide u-turn. He kept his crosshairs on the giant’s face as he accelerated. The roar of the engines picked up as Ryan initiated the afterburner, rapidly closing in on his target. At the speed he was going there’d be little to no opportunity to disengage or bail once he got a clear shot at the eyes, though that was the thing on Ryan’s mind. The only thing that mattered anymore was wounding this giant psychopath and if that meant going out in a fiery blaze then so be it. Hell, with any luck he’d fly right into the bastard’s eye at max speed.
The giant continued to draw nearer faster and faster. The onboard computer spat out altitude warnings, warnings of fuel tanks running after the long sustained burn. Ryan ignored them. The giant’s face was clearer and clearer, its boyish charm betraying the man’s monstrous actions. Ryan’s finger hovered over the trigger, he had a clear shot. Just a little closer, a little closer…
Then the giant looked up, his smirk growing into a haunting grin. A hand the size of a football field came into view at Ryan’s two-o’clock just he squeezed the trigger. The last of the ammo spurted from the cannon. Ryan didn’t have a chance to see if he hit his mark before his body was launched forward, accompanied by a tremendous CLANG that seemed to come from all around. A rib cracked as the seatbelts stopped him from slamming into the dashboard at machspeed. The roar of the engines, the manic chattering of the radio, and the monotone drone of the flight assistant ceased all at once, leaving only the mysterious sound of steel grinding and buckling. Ryan grimaced behind his oxygen mask, doubled over the buckles of his belts and clutching at his wounded chest. He was in pain, which meant he was alive. But how?
“Ah!” a young man’s voice boomed, one Ryan had quickly become all too familiar with the past hour, “Looks like I missed one!”.
Ryan frantically tested the controls, no response. With the dead dashboard and familiar hum of the craft gone silent, It became quickly apparent that his fighter wasn’t moving. Where was he, Ryan thought? With dreaded hesitance, the pilot looked up out of his cockpit for the first time since he stopped moving and locked eyes with the grinning, red headed giant.