The glow of a pair of computer monitors was the only thing that was lighting up the otherwise dark room, the only lamps shining a light on a messy room. The bedroom was decently sized, though ill maintained. Clothes were scattered across the floor, the bed had its sheets wrinkled and cast aside exactly as they were when the occupant had woken up. The curtains were drawn over the windows, thick enough not a bit of light could escape inside. Stacked upon the desk were large cans of energy drinks, empty and just left there instead of thrown away. A slovenly room that served as a reflection into its occupant. 

The glare of the monitors was reflected upon a pair of glasses, tired sleep deprived blue eyes following whatever was on the screen. Katrina’s gaze raked over one of the monitors, looking over some videos. She had a pair of earbuds firmly wedged in her ears as she watched, her gaze tired but there was an intent feeling to it. On her other screen was a game of some kind, other player avatars moving around in a hub area as they went about whatever business they had going on. 

*Destiny Sword Online* was a particularly popular MMO and Katrina was a rather avid player and streamer of it in recent months. She had opted to not go live today since she was prepping for a rather tricky raid. She rewound a certain part of the video of another raid group working through it, memorizing some of the tricks as well as noting a few places that could probably be improved on in the run her group would be doing. Raiding was a grind in the game, it could take hours just to clear one raid depending on how hard it was. For someone like her who made a living off streaming it was easy to do, but for most people they had schedules and such. 

Katrina was a rather lovely young woman to look at despite her rather lazy lifestyle. Messy blonde hair was pulled into a rather loose ponytail, moist and fresh from a shower. She had a rather sloppy black hoodie thrown on and a pair of grey and loose sweat pants as well. Her form was rather slim and filled but the clothes didn’t exactly show that off. She was a rather pretty girl and likely could have had anyone wrapped around her finger, but she didn’t really care enough for it. 

As she was going through the video she heard a ping in her DM service. She opened it up, the dark background soothing on the eyes. Was from one of her close friends, Lena. She opened up the DM chain they had. 

“Lol guess what I found in my kitchen this morning.”

Kat snorted. “Idk, a bf that doesn’t one night stand you?”

“Fuck you, no. Sec.” 

The next thing Kat saw was an image. Between a pair of pale fingers with black painted nails was a… woman. She was naked and scrawny looking and the expression of fear and pain was frozen on her face. The massive fingers had gripped her by the hair and were holding her aloft, something that absolutely had to hurt. The woman herself was no bigger than half a thumb. Kat snorted and rolled her eyes. 

“A hume? I thought it was something interesting. Not like you’re the first gigan to have a hume sneak into a pantry.” Kat responded, a complete lack of care for the plight of the woman being held up. 

Humes were one of the three splits of sizes upon the world. It was said a long time ago, hundreds of years ago, there was an event known as the Divergence. Everyone prior to the Divergence was the exact same size. Once it hit, three distinct splits were created. About 60% of the population became what were classified as Lilim. Humans that shrank down to an inch tall. 39% became Humes, essentially those that stayed the same and were unaffected by the Divergence at all. 1% however grew to roughly fifty meters tall and became Gigan. Over the years there was much turmoil and conflict before at last, Gigan asserted themselves as the rulers of mankind. Beneath them were Humes, and at the very bottom were Lilim. That was all pretty much history at this point of course. 

Katrina was a gigan, her grandmother had been one of those uplifted by the Divergence. So was Lena as well. Gigan lived in their own sectioned off places and were generally regarded as the best places a person could live. Humes however tended to have to work rather hard for a living, many of them could well be forced into desperation or end up kidnapped and dragged into a Gigan area. Humes in Gigan areas were generally regarded as fair game by the Gigan of the world. And then there were Lilim, who generally tended to be regarded as dust by Gigan. They had no real rights as far as people were concerned. This was the only world Kat had ever known. 

“hey hey it was the fridge thank you very much

anyway how should I get rid of her, thinkin garbage disposal tbh”

Kat gave that about as much thought as one might give to someone asking what color nail polish they should be wearing. “I mean if she was in the kitchen, volunteering to be part of breakfast.” She replied. 

“lol youre so bad Kat I was gonna make my shake anyway sooo”

Kat rolled her eyes and waited a moment to make sure she wasn’t replying before getting back to her research. She reached for a can of her energy drink and found it was empty. The blonde frowned, getting up and walking out of the room. The lights were on in the hall of her house and she winced from it. Her roommates were probably already gone for the day. She rented a house with a couple of college students, she had enough for her own place but eh. She knew the girls pretty well and the place was comfortable enough. 

She searched through her fridge and let out a sigh as she found she was indeed out of her sweet sweet fuel. Which meant she had to go out and get more. Meant going outside. She stuck out her tongue at the thought but at the end of the day there was no choice. Kat walked back to her room and slipped on some loose black flipflops and shoved her phone and wallet into the pocket of her hoodie before heading out of the house and into the blazing blinding light of the day. 

The sun greeted her by stabbing her in the eyes, its glare intense as summer was in full swing. She blinked a few times, her eyes watering for a moment before she adjusted and stretched. Her joints popped and groaned for a moment before she kept on her way. The house was on the edge of a neighborhood that was on the border of the hume districts. So one could look out right from the front lawn and down a hill toward where a little wall had been erected over a more urban sprawl. The wall would have come up to Kat’s waist. More of a fence really. Her steps thundering in the distance were enough that they could be felt below, faintly, but they certainly could. 

Katrina was heading for a little store on the edge of the neighborhood. It was where she did most of her shopping. She was a simple woman with very simple needs after all. Maybe she’d pick up some stuff for her roomies while she was out as well. Might as well save them a trip. It quickly came within view and she pulled out her phone, idly typing out some messages to both her roommates asking what they wanted. Her eyes were rather glued to the screen as she made her way down a sidewalk she was used to traveling. 

If she had been looking up she might have noticed what appeared to be a rather large patch of black upon the sidewalk just before reaching the store. One would be forgiven for mistaking it for a large patch of soot that got spilled. That was not the case of course as it was moving around ever so slightly. Compared to a Gigan, Lilim were essentially little more than dust. It would be a miracle if a Gigan noticed a single Lilim really, though they could make out crowds of them. Lilim tended to live in the Hume districts and even there it was… unpleasant to be a Lilim. Something they often, and rightly, blamed the Gigan for. 

So protests like this one weren’t unheard of. Thousands of Lilim had spilled out onto a sidewalk and demanded all manner of things with large signs, speakers, and sparklers. Equal rights for all sizes, a demolishing of the caste structure that had become set in stone, and places built for Lilim to live in beyond what Humes made as an afterthought. There were so many of them in one place it would have been hard to not notice something was up. 

Kat, of course, was far too busy thumbing through her phone and checking some social media feeds. The ground shook beneath thousands of the utterly insignificant people on the sidewalk, most noting as Kat got closer that her attention was rather focused. She was coming closer. And closer. Every step shook the ground more and more, pebbles jumping here or there and a number of Lilim falling over as the impacts of her sandal clad feet rattled their very bones. 

They started to try and scatter and move but it was far too late. Her shadow fell over them all, the patch of thousands of Lilim loomed over by a single Gigan. She didn’t notice or care about them, she wasn’t going out of her way for this. They just happened to be standing where she was walking. And it was this that served as a fine show for why separation of the castes was necessary. For practicality if nothing else. 

Above hundreds of Lilim a single black flip flop loomed overhead, a dusty sole with bits of dirt clinging to the bottom. Its shadow was cast deep over those tiny beings below, screams that would never reach Kat’s ears being let out. Wails that were mixed in with each other to become little more than faint noise that would have reached Hume’s ear but had no chance of reaching a Gigan’s ear. 

All the running and scrambling and fleeing of course was ultimately futile. There was no chance they could escape. At least not those close to the center of where her foot was falling. There was an overwhelming shockwave of force that was sent out as her foot slammed down, smashing to the earth like the hammer of a mighty deity compared to this living dust beneath her. A shockwave that blew a number of people off their backs or even launched them back away from the point of impact. Some were launched up into the air, falling back to the ground hard or for those particularly unlucky smacking into the grey fabric of Kat’s sweatpants. They had to cling there like dust, hoping to survive this living mountain of a woman.

Above those that had managed to clear the shadow of her sandal was now a wall. A back wall that was many times their own size. Something that was unfathomable in and of itself to them, it was the height of her black flip flop. It was utterly vast, unlike any hume’s foot or footwear. That at least was something these Lilim could understand. This was on another level. Enough to spur many to try and scatter further away. To run as fast as they could. Staying here was suicide. With a step Kat had just killed hundreds of them. 

The blonde’s other foot lifted up, continuing her rather casual walking motion. Her foot sailed overhead, her pale toes hugging the leather strap of the sandal as her foot soared far above the crowd. Its shadow enveloped another patch toward the back of the crowd, people screaming as they tried to flee, but it was much too fast. Something so big shouldn’t have been moving so fast but there was no escaping Kat. Her foot slammed down, the blonde snuffing out hundreds more without so much as breaking stride. 

When she stepped away from the crowd, the ground where she had stepped… it was littered with indiscernible dots of red. Hundreds of them. The same as the faint ones on the bottoms of her sandals. The blonde made her way into the store and left behind an impression on the Lilim. One of terror. One of sheer fear and terror as they started to scatter, abandoning any hopes of protesting here in favor of seeking out the distant safety of the Hume districts. Anything to not be made so irrelevant by an uncaring being. 

Kat made her way into the little store and started wandering around the aisles, looking for the things that her roommates had said they wanted. She tossed them into a basket and then picked out a case of her energy drinks from a fridge in the back. The blonde rubbed the back of her neck as she started checking out at the register. Her eyes turned toward the outside of the store through the windows, noting a couple of women dressed in office attire looking down at the ground and taking pictures with their phones. One made a motion with her foot and the other seemed to be snickering. Probably some dumb Hume. She had no idea why they didn’t just stay in their lanes. Safer that way. 

She looked at the counter as she was being checked out and at some of the promotional items. She lingered on a particular item. There were plastic and clear tubes in rows. Inside them were Lilim. She picked one of the tubes up and held it up to her face, rotating it between her fingers. She could vaguely see the numerous specks inside moving as much as they could given they were packed in there. There wasn’t a trace of sympathy in her blue eyes, only apathy. Like she wasn’t looking at humans. Lilim lived like 30 years tops and bred so fast it was insane supposedly. Combined with the scale and it was easy for any gigan to just not see them as people.

The tube read *Lilim Spice, Good on Food or in the Bedroom!* $3.99 Expiration: 07/16/2761. So good for a few days. Made sense.

Kat idly picked out a few of them and set them out on the counter like one might some sticks of gum. The bored college age girl idly scanned them in, dark fingers curling around them and bringing them over the scanner one by one before putting them in the same bag as some snacks Kat had bought for her friends. The blonde paid out and nodded to the woman before grabbing her bags and her case of energy drinks and heading out. 

By the time she walked out of the store the sidewalk was clear from the Lilim. The office workers were also walking down the street toward a tram station, a spring in their steps as their heels bore the fresh stains of a massacre. Kat didn’t even glance down as she walked back home, not really much caring for whatever happened to what the women had been having their fun with. Some small folk in a Gigan district getting squished was as morally compromising as worrying over the fate of ants in a road. 

She made her way back inside the house and put away everything in the kitchen. She headed back to her cave with a bag of chips, an energy drink, and one of the tubes of Lilim. She sat down at her desk in the darkness once more and was looking at her notifications. Looked like Lena sent her something. She checked and saw a video was waiting for her and the thumbnail was a blender with fruit inside it and atop the fruit was that same hume in the pictures. Katrina rolled her eyes. 

The blonde opened up her bag of potato chips and pulled the tab of her energy drink, enjoying the bliss of the sweet carbonated life that flooded her veins. She then gripped the tube of Lilim and used her nail to fumble with the seal. They always made the tape on them so hard to get off. She tore it off with some great effort before pulling off the cap and upending the tube over the opening of her bag of chips. 

Hundreds of naked pale forms were sent screaming down into the depths of the bag, landing upon vast golden potato chips, grains of salt like rocks to them. The foil of the bag glistened all around and it was a vast confusing landscape of chips with an opening on high showing the uncaring face of Kat. She emptied out the tube and tossed it away before rolling up the opening of the chips and shaking. 

The Lilim inside found themselves shaken around inside the bag, screaming and smashing into chips all around. Some were simply killed by this while most were just displaced all over the bag and all over the chips. Kat gave it a good few shakes so she got a decent spread before opening the bag back up and setting it on the desk near her backlit keyboard. A vast cave for the Lilim as they had to gather their wits. 

Kat clicked play on the video meanwhile and reached into the bag. Vast pale digits loomed above a chip with a couple dozen Lilim on it, clamping on either side of the chip and lifting it up out of the cavern of the bag. They screamed as they were lifted toward Katrina’s waiting mouth and tossed inside. Pearly white teeth munched away at the chip, the Lilim upon it reduced to mere seasoning for a snackfood. 

Speaking of snacks, the soundless video started and Kat saw the Hume in the blender was pounding at the glass, screaming her head off and pleading very visibly with tears running down her face. Kat had no doubt that she had sworn up and down to serve Lena, to do whatever she wanted forever, to worship her. The usual really. Honestly, it was the typical stuff in most smaller folks playbook. They all kinda begged the same way when you broke it down. Kat could even fill in the blanks without sound. 

A pale finger reached forward from out of frame and hovered over the button to activate the blender. Kat tossed another chip in her mouth, snacking away and finding that honestly. There was *maybe* a bit more of a spice to it. Not much but she could tell it was a little bit of a different flavor. Not fucking $3.99 per tube flavor mind you. Highway robbery. Maybe like a dollar per tube. At most. 

Lena’s finger finally pressed onto the blender and there was a moment, a single moment, where Kat could see a level of fear and terror on the tiny expression inside that was… kind of hot honestly. She flushed ever so as she watched the blender turn into a slurry of a fruity smoothie. A fruity smoothie with an absolutely blended Hume now included in the mixture. Kat ate a few more chips before wiping her hands on her hoodie. Some Lilim that had been clinging to her fingers screamed as they were turned into nigh invisible smears upon the fabric. Then she started typing. 

“How’d it taste?” Kat replied. 

There was a pause before a reply popped up. “not bad actually 

hard to taste 

but there was definitely something extra to it ya know?”

Kat smirked at her bag of chips. “I think I know exactly what you mean.” The blonde said. 

She didn’t take long to plow through her chips. The blonde paused and took a drink from her energy drink as she finished off the bag. Those Lilim that had escaped upon her tongue and between her teeth, trapped in a vast humid hell of Kat’s mouth, found a wave of sticky and acidic liquid flooded the mouth. It swept them up in a burning riptide before they were swallowed down, washed down her throat with the rest of the ones that had made that trip today. 

Kat took the empty bag up. There were a number of survivors at the bottom of the bag, screaming up at her, crying out for some kind of mercy amidst the crumbs. The only mercy they found was Kat balling her fist up and crushing the bag, rolling it up into a ball and lazily tossing it at her overfilled garbage can nearby. Some had likely survived even this, though it was only to enjoy the indignity of being lowered to the level of trash. 

That all done she wiped her hands again and turned her attention back to the raid she had been researching. She had a stream later for something else so had to get her study in before that. The lives of Humes and Lilim ended in just the morning, well those weighed on her as much as crumbs in the bottom of a bag of chips.