The cavernous interior of Astraea's famous mouth was just beginning to flood with saliva as her azure eyes scrutinized the living contents beyond a tiny row of windows, when she heard the lyrical chime of her phone. Exhaling, almost with disappointment, she instead curled her tongue from the corner of her lip rather than lashing it out, then produced her cell and held it to her ear. Still, her gaze didn't falter from staring through the glass squares lining the bus, which she palmed yet higher in the air, as the civilian-packed vehicle teetered across her open hand, but then fixed securely in place by her enormous fingers wrapped tightly over the roof.

            "Hi, honey," she cooed into the receiver. Her tone rang in dire contrast to the playful malice she otherwise suggested to the mortally-terrified occupants of the city bus she'd scooped off the ground like a mobile vending machine. Though delayed in feeling them squirm on her tongue, the appetizer of their fear was satiating enough to last a phone conversation. "How are your folks today?"

            "Oh, great! Just great," her husband Mitch replied with faux-cheer. "Well, fine, but you know how it is."

            "Do I? What's the matter?"

            "Not a huge deal. They just got a couple more of those... letters. From people who know I'm related to them."

            "And it upset them."

"It... may have spooked them a little. But I reminded them how safe they are there here."

"Did they happen to save the letters?" she asked. "I'm sure someone has the resources to find out who sent them. Just so the... police... have it in their records. For emergencies."

"Dear, there's no need for you to do anything. The letters weren't even threatening, they were just rude."

"Do anything? Don't be silly, sweetie. I wouldn't "do" anything so brash as opening the tops of their homes and inviting them up here for an up-close in-depth conversation, until their ability to write rude letters was utterly and completely negated. No, I might just stroll past the general area where they live. There's no crime in that, is there? If you could just find out their zip code-"

"Please, Astraea. Believe me. It's fine. Forget I even mentioned it," Mitch sighed.

The one-thousand-foot Apex suppressed an adoring smile, despite the marginal letdown of her husband not selling out the lesser members of his species. Not that she ever expected he would, but it didn't hurt to check from time-to-time, just in case he was annoyed enough at the disturbance to his extended family, and wanted his wife to have a special treat. Certainly she'd implied in the past, without quite crossing the line into distastefulness, that she'd be more than willing to reward such help from Mitch with extra bedroom fun: by no means, she'd emphasize, was he to think of it like she wanted to pay him for human bounties with sexual favors, though she wasn't sure he totally believed her. It was moot either way, since Astraea didn't have the willpower to actually withhold those rewards, regardless of whether or not Mitch ever learned to aid-and-abet his wife's voracious public services.

"Oh, very well. If you insist. You have my vow: I will not go track down and swallow the people who've been harassing your parents. I'll just have to find my nutritional requirements elsewhere," the giantess cooed, emphasizing these words with particular clarity for her audiences on both ends of the phone.

She rolled her eyes and let her lips widen into a gleaming smirk, then refocused her meaningful stare on the paralytic micro-faces looking back at her through the bus windows. After this bit of outspoken honesty, she felt a fresh rush of their apprehension shoot through her. Then, while listening to her spouse's response, Astraea "absentmindedly" lowered her palm from the level of her face, so the doomed passengers were forced on a slowly-descending bus tour that traced down the mountainous swell of her bust, past the border of her tank top and down to her toned mocha-tan midriff for a preview. The rise she got out of them now made goose bumps prickle up her forearm.

"And what about Ana? Hopefully not doing anything I wouldn't do," Astraea questioned, knowing full-well those parameters left her daughter with a lot of freedom. "I'd ask her myself, but you know how she is about answering texts from anyone except her friends."

"Oh! Well, you know. She's... being her wonderful self." Mitch's forced smile was almost visible through the airwaves. "Enjoying our getaway."

"All right, what is it?"

"Huh?"

"Whatever it is you're not telling me."

"It's nothing, hon."

"Come on. How long have we been married?" she coaxed. Astraea bobbed her head with impatience, letting her short silver locks sweep past her cheeks. Another glance at the bus made her stomach audibly gurgle, causing the passengers shriek, which in turn staved off her hunger just a little longer. "Give me some credit here. What did our sweet darling baby girl do?"

"All right. Look, I'm... not trying to sound like I'm blaming her. At all. I know it was just because she wanted to protect me-"

"Go on."

"-but, it's... Bart Townsend."

"Him? That nosy muck-raking piece of human-"

"-she ate him."

"-human garbage, God rest his soul," Astraea solemnly finished, though it was impossible to keep a crescent grin off her lips which nearly blinded the bus inmates when she raised the vehicle back up toward her face and glossed her mouth with a serpentine tongue. Part of her wanted to correct herself and point out that in fact Anastasia, not God, would be resting the tenacious little reporter's soul right in her belly, but she decided Mitch would miss the humor in this.

Pride swelled within Astraea even more powerfully than the whiffs of delicious fear seeping from the bus, and that was saying something. Her only disappointment was that she hadn't gotten to terrorize and then finally scarf down Townsend herself, given all the grief he'd caused Mitch, who throughout the mud-slinging remained humble and even advocated that the journalist be allowed to keep being an asshole, much to Astraea's loving resentment.

Still, this was almost as good. Already she'd withdrawn the phone from her ear and started texting a series of thumbs-up and heart emojis to Anastasia, who would surely bemoan her equally-giant parent's unhipness, but the matriarch didn't care; she was too happy.

"I'm sorry. It sounds like that upset you," Astraea said. "Was he following you again?"

"Well, yes. By air, too, so it was tough to tune him out. I asked her to just ignore him, but I think after a few miles of flying after us and yelling through the speakers, he must've struck a nerve. Then Ana just stopped walking and opened her mouth. I thought it was to tell him off, but instead of talking, she just took a step toward the helicopter, and..."

"Oh, no," Astraea empathetically crooned, while adding more approving emojis to her daughter's text chain. "That's unfortunate it had to happen that way. But if it's... any consolation, sweetie, that's one less probably-better person Ana will have to take in today."

"I know, I know," Mitch glumly replied. "It's just... he's always been attacking our family, our relationship... I guess I always hoped, somehow, I might be able to show him he was wrong. You know, rise above it. Be the bigger person."

"Aww. Don't say that," Astraea sighed, now feeling a twinge of guilt for reveling so much while her husband mourned. "You can and do "rise above it" every single day. I think that's why I married you. That, and your music made you the sexiest little thing I'd ever heard. But, you also never have an obligation to be the bigger person, in any scenario. Understand? Let us take care of things sometimes."

"Sure," he said, not sounding quite convinced, but grateful nonetheless. "Thanks, honey. Listen, I didn't mean to put a damper on your day out and about without us."

"Are you kidding? I was almost dying of boredom here," Astraea amorously fibbed. "But, you are right that I'm taking advantage of the sunshine."

The roiling in Astraea's stomach was getting loud enough that the passengers could hear it even lofted up at the level of her face, but the giantess couldn't help but frown now. Much as she hated to admit it, that nagging bit of Mitch-specific morality she'd accidentally developed at the same time as her love for him was about to deprive her of this scrumptious busload. She huffed, then began tipping the vehicle backward and forward like a rainstick, and was fittingly treated to an instrumental chorus of yelps from within, but this was an unsatisfying substitute compared to making a meal of them.

"If you're sure, then... I'll let you go," Mitch said, mildly cheered-up despite his sorrow. "I love you."

"Love you too, honey."

With that, Astraea ended the call and refocused her attention on the bus with a final bout of glaring intensity, just to squeeze every bit of anxiety out of them she could before they started fainting. She extended her glistening slime-drenched tongue from between her full lips and raked the slippery mass over the windows, greasing them in drool and even denting the bus walls inward slightly.

How simple it would be to pry the back of the thin metal husk away, then tilt it backward over her parted lips, shaking toward the dark wet maw until every last passenger lost their grip on the seats and tumbled into her throat. This was supposed to be her cheat meal, or rather her cheat day. Of course Mitch understood that his wife had to occasionally feast on actual micro-bodies or otherwise perish, but it was nevertheless easier and far more fun to indulge herself while he was off in another city under their daughter's care. But of course, right before she could dump these first little souls past her teeth, swish them in a sweltering spit bath, and gobble them down by the half-dozen, one conversation rearranged all her plans. Damn that Bart Townsend, tainting Astraea's day off one last time while on his way to a boiling grave in Ana's tummy.

            "Wow," Astraea stated aloud, fully realizing what she was about to do. "Maybe I really am tamed after all."

            Ensuring the bus was still in working order by spinning its wheels with a fingertip, in spite of the minor damage she'd caused when slicking its windows and crunching in some of the frame with bulging tongue musculature, Astraea stooped, tapped her fingers on the vehicle one last time, and set it gently in the street next to her bare dark-bronze tanned foot. After a moment of hesitation, perhaps expecting they were about to be flattened like a tin can under her sole, the driver got ahold of himself and hit the gas, squealing off down the road.

            Standing in the deserted streets, as the surrounding blocks were abandoned once Astraea set foot in downtown proper, the giantess puffed up her chest and peered across the adorably-sprawling stone-and-steel landscape, with her hands on her hips and her toes thumping the concrete until it cracked. So, maybe the city wasn't going to serve as exactly the free-for-all smorgasbord she'd planned from the very instant Ana and Mitch left town, but she was still determined that a hearty meal was out there somewhere among the urban mess, all nervous and plump with sin. It was a huge city, even by the standards of a thousand-foot-tall sentinel, which meant there statistically had to be literal handfuls and mouthfuls of wrongdoers whose worthiness as snacks would outweigh Astraea's respect for her husband's wishes.

            A fifty-story roof in the affluent inner circle of downtown, shinier than its neighbors, housed an open-air restaurant, pool complex, and even tennis courts. Densely populated with wealthy families enjoying the sun, the news of Astraea's arrival in town had to have reached their ears, though the majority of the patrons blissfully remained at play in the summer heat, likely thinking themselves immune to a visit from the silver-haired stalker. This was the only reason the giantess could really think of to explain their continued presence as she turned a corner between skyscrapers and approached the rooftop club, puzzled and amused.

Far below, stragglers were hysterically racing away from Astraea's oncoming bare peds, on foot and by car, and gifting her with a continuous stream of fear. Yet she felt no such thing wafting from the moneyed hundreds on the roof, at least until she was within three paces of overlooking their little waist-height kingdom. Her attention was only directed below enough to avoid trampling aggrieved micro-citizens, as she'd instead set her sights squarely on the waterpark.

"Now, that does look refreshing," Astraea commented, when her shadow cast over the whole of the complex. By now, the once over-confident masses were standing in preparation for a mass exodus. She knew that collective look of speechless rigid-legged terror well, and knew the delight of its soul-teasing effect even better, but also expected any second for the people to scatter, fighting each other to pile into the elevators and staircases. And that was just irritating. Moments before chaos could break out, then, she pre-solved the problem by plucking water slides clean out of the pool like doll accessories, the ladders still packed with bodies waiting their turns. Then she blockaded all the major exits just by turning the chutes on their sides.

"Whoops. My apologies, but I'd hate to make you all leave so soon on my account," Astraea boomed, cupping a hand over her lips. In her opposite palm, she uncurled her fingers to reveal the unharmed-but-havoc-stricken guests she'd caught by dumping them off the slides before trapping everyone on the roof. "See, I just so happen to be in the market for something high-priced and tasty. As I'm sure you all know, I insist on hand-picking anything that goes in my body. Health reasons, you understand. So it really is vital that I have the widest selection possible. Please, don't get up. I can see you all better this way."
            Having averted a screaming stampede, and skipped right to the stage where everyone sat still as stone, and absolutely stinking of dread, Astraea proceeded to examine the contents of her titanic pool-puddled hand. There, eleven men and women appropriately shivered with the greatest volume of fear out of everyone on the rooftop.

 "Anyone in the mood for a jacuzzi soak?" she asked, then parted her lips and those pearly-white-lined jaws, even pointing her roiling tongue to her palate, so the gooey moat of saliva at the base was made easily visible to her passengers. "It's not as big as the pool you were about to use, but much cozier. The jets are just bubbling now. Come on now, any takers? If you climb in yourself, without any help, I might just let you relax there while I scrape together some lunch. Don't worry, I can multi-task. There's only a 70% chance I'd swallow you, too, and an even smaller chance that I'd do it on accident."

Astraea then pointed her tongue down, sloppily laying the tip across the heel of her flattened palm, which created a sticky gangplank of pink flesh for the eleven unlucky poolgoers to finally complete their interrupted water slide voyage. Upon offering this path, and steaming out hot breath from the cavernous blackness which blew back the hair of her bug-eyed potential victims, the occupants of the giantess's hand at last got over the shellshock and went into full-blown shrieks. Their vocalized terror seemed to infect the whole roof too, just as Astraea had hoped and practiced countless times before to perfection. The throngs went into a frenzy, some leaping into the pools and others clambering pointlessly over the broken water slides.

The ensuing panic party offered a hearty first course for Astraea, who rippled with ambrosial tingles, though the real treat was the reaction of the people in her hand, appropriately the most terrified of all. Their view into that well-known mouth, up the slippery bridge of her tongue and toward a destiny in her gullet so many fellow citizens had faced over the years, was enough to make these eleven as potent in their horror as the rest of the club members below combined. Shuddering slightly from the thrill, Astraea retracted her monstrous organ back between her lips, murmured with street-quaking chuckles, then finally lowered her hand back toward the roof, dumping the traumatized contents into the deep end from a safe height.

“Oh, yes, that’s a very good start,” she purred. “Thanks, everyone, for a little taste of the high life. Well, at least not as high as… never mind, I’m sure you’d rather just get back to soaking up sun and wiping your tears with hundred-dollar-bills. Stick around, though. I just might be back to see you again, depending on how much of my appetite I can fill elsewhere. In case you haven’t heard, though, I’ve got a lot of room in here. So don’t worry about losing your spot.”

Astraea massaged her sculpted midriff in circles as she backed away from the roof, with her talkatively-grumbling tum still displayed in all its tan glory roughly at the level of the pool club. This final glance down at her audience, combined with her lip-glossing tongue and tone of total conviction, provided a nice flash of apprehension for the road, before she continued gracefully barefoot-thudding between city blocks.

###

A university professor walked along the school’s green space, but paused to study the bronze triple-scale statue of the institution’s founder which sat at the center of the city campus, just like he did every day as a form of reflective decompression. When he took a step to move on, however, the spires of thick shadows striped across the memorial art and grounds. Startled into tripping over, the professor jerked the other way, and found himself looking straight up at a peachy line-textured palm expansive enough to rip the whole Classics department off the university block single-handed. Astraea’s fingers extended overhead, with the spiraled index and thumb pads coming together as they descended perilously near to the professor. Yipping, and knowing he hadn’t a prayer of outrunning a pinchy fate between the silver-maned giant’s digits, the man dropped into a pitiful cower, teary-eyed and whimpering.

Yet he wasn’t flattened between rounded walls of enclosing finger flesh for delivery to her digestive tract. Instead, he heard metallic groaning, then a pop, and dared look up at where the founder’s statue was, or rather where it used to be, as the giantess had just grabbed it instead and pried it loose with greater ease than a toothpick in wet batter. Despite the bronze figure being 3-to-1 in scale, it still was hilariously dwarfed in the tan leviathan’s surprisingly-dainty grasp, as the professor watched it soar along with her mighty hand several hundred feet back into the air.

Without delay, Astraea pursed her hunger-moistened lips and popped the man-shaped memorial into the space between, nudging him fully inside using a delicate pinky finger. Having inserted the statue fully, she hunched yet lower to the ground, ensuring the professor could not only see her cheeks inflating and remolding while she swished the bronze hunk about her maw, but hear the gushing of saliva with each revolution. She didn’t swallow, but stuck out her tongue, with the statue cradled on the end, the object itself the comparative size of a baby carrot for her. Only then did those crystal-blue eyes of hers focus instead on the little man, at which point she extracted the statue from her tongue at such a meaningful pace that, with only a deliberate gesture and a few strings of saliva, Astraea silently communicated exactly what the professor was already thinking. Planting the metallic surrogate back on its pedestal, except upside-down and dripping with drool, she let her fingers hover another moment over the greenspace and the lone professor, again making him wonder whether her sucking on the statue was a substitute for him, or just a preview before the real feeding.

“All yours, teach,” Astraea said, sliding her glistening tongue across her top row of teeth, then ascended out of the crouch back to full height. For all two steps it took to exit the campus, she experienced a profound fear-burst, proving she’d been right to single him out. Though he didn’t show the same hysteria of the others, he was a little terror factory unto himself.

It was both a blessing and a curse to locate such treasures in the city, as Astraea couldn’t help but think of the missed opportunities. Were it not for Mitch, she’d be the owner of a very convenient at-home garden of especially-fearful whelps who could provide her with a boost just by opening their box and licking her lips in their full view, perhaps occasionally eating one just to keep them guessing, before sealing them again in darkness to stew.

###

A crimson-chrome street racer drifted around another curb, then sped down a straightaway at over 100 MPH. Having lost the cops several minutes ago, she was free again to enjoy the road for her favorite adrenaline-spiking sport, particularly now, when the traffic had dwindled to almost nothing. These were absolutely ideal driving conditions, allowing her to hammer the pedal even more, or at least she believed so, until the reason for the depopulated streets revealed itself in the form of Astraea literally putting her foot down.

Though the Apex settled her weighty sole too in good time, the first contact, and reason the racer came to a grinding halt that nearly flipped her car, was actually the hundred-story invader’s big toe impacting like a slow-moving meteor. The meaty bulb of her digit came down, flushing from deep-tan to pale pink due to the pressure of acting as a roadblock. Concrete crunched under that silken curve, and right as the racer went into a tailspin, Astraea plopped the rest of her titanic piggies down, skillfully creating a parking space out of the fleshy V-crevice between her two largest toes.

“Sorry, pedestrian crossing. I have the right of way,” the giantess thundered down to the speed-nut at her foot. “You leave me no choice but to make a citizen’s arrest. Which means I’ll have to impound this noisy little thing.”

The car bonked into the tender mocha valley, and recovered quickly, but well before the awestruck thrill-seeker could zip out in reverse, Astraea casually closed her toes together. The smooth shafts compressed, softly enough that the vehicle was spared totaling via smushing just yet, though the racer heard some of the engineering buckling, and let loose a blood-curdling yelp unlike any she’d made before. Though not even a high-speed police pursuit could make her sweat, seeing those gigantic walls of toe skin closed in, until only a strip of light entered through the sun roof, broke through the mental barrier and caused the racer to experience years of suppressed life-or-death uncertainty at once.

As a result, Astraea threw her head back and moaned even louder than the griping from her unsated stomach, her body awash again in goose bumps that bristled all the way into the toe vice clutching a tiny car mere pounds of pressure away from imploding. When satisfied, she flexed her digits out at once and let the hunk of mostly-scrapped hardware, along with its shaken passenger, hit the pavement. Just like that, then, Astraea arched her heel up and kept right on walking over her.

“Don’t worry, that should buff right out. Just slow down a little next time, won’t you?” she whispered over her shoulder. “I really do my best not to step on too many of you, what with it being much more useful to gobble you up instead, but I can’t be held responsible for what happens to your flashy toys if I just happen to be strolling along, mostly-minding my own business, when you drive right into ME. Yes, I’m better than a human in just about every conceivable way, but I’m not a psychic, either.”

As late morning stretched into early afternoon, Astraea still savored the luscious sensations of her cheat meal day, though ever-conscious of her husband’s miniscule-but-significant emotional presence, let her empty gut keep on gurgling. Each new prospect she happened across, attracted by the ethereal aroma of their unease, she scrutinized for any good reason she might have to not only frighten them into oblivion, but toss them down her gullet and line her interior with their soul. Yet with every one, just as she was about to convince herself they were probably unworthy enough for consumption, she could imagine her sweet husband’s quiet exhalation and staid-yet-disappointed expression. That was perhaps the worst part: he wouldn’t even say anything to stop her, but would let the sorrow fester, making it near-impossible for Astraea to fully enjoy her catch.

“You’re welcome, Mitchy,” she inaudibly sighed to herself with each possible meal she merely tasted instead of scarf down.
Unfortunate loners pacing the sidewalks, hailing taxis or taking calls, provided on-the-go goodness for Astraea, as she swooped a hand low over their heads, cruised a burly bare foot at them like a battering ram, or simply opened her mouth wide enough to let them see her shining uvula. An office building belted out a whole company’s worth of cries when the giantess squatted low enough to let the globes of her enviably-toned short-clad buttocks fill their window views, in range where even a cautious sit-down would cause the whole complex to fold in on itself. Crowds exiting restaurants after the lunch hour were spooked straight back into those establishments when Astraea hunkered down on her hands and knees, peering in at them and languorously stroking her tongue around her lips, until a puddle of saliva gelled in the street.

All these options were tempting, and now five hours into her semi-unrestricted terrorizing of the city, the Apex was feeling the strain. She needed someone to physically put in her belly, if not many someones, because her body was starting to wise up to the tease of the scares without the follow-through of diminutive forms involuntarily inch-worming down the ribbed tunnel of her esophagus. Just as she was mouthing eeny-meeny-miney-moe while counting out random passerby in the distance, Astraea heard a shout from a nearby alley, accompanied by a burst of fear not owed to her presence, which naturally made its unseen source all the more intriguing and worthy of another stomach growl.

“No offense, Brody, but you’re puttin’ me in a real awkward position here,” spoke the exact reason for that fear. The six-foot-five mountain-man nonchalantly smacked a crowbar against his palm while slowly advancing on the debtor, who was already on the ground, bleeding from the temple and backed against the alley trash bins. “See, if you don’t pay up, then that makes me look like I’m not doing my job, and it’s just a whole thing. Much, much easier if you stick to the schedule. Then I only have to ask politely!”

“By MONDAY! You’ll have it ALL, p-plus EXTRA!” Brody wailed.

“Oh, you’re right about that. The extra part, I mean. But, you’re gonna have it today, or…” the loan shark’s heavy said, but paused to smirkingly admire the blossoming existential fright he saw lighting up his victim’s face: not just nervous and stammery as before, but sheer eye-popping throat-drying ghost-faced alarm. Intimidating though he knew himself to be, the collector didn’t often see this much hilarious fright on a “customer’s” breakable countenance, and so he paused to appreciate it. This was going to be easier than he thought.
“A… A-Ap…” the sprawling debtor wept. He raised a shaking arm and pointed behind the collector, who was too amused by this display to turn around, or notice the mysterious glob of syrup-consistent drool that plummeted from the sky like a cannonball and splashed into the street two feet behind him.

“What the fuck was that again?” the man laughed, cupping his ear and waving the crowbar. “Cat got your tongue?”

“No, I believe I do,” a sultrily-feminine voice boomed from directly behind the collector like a droning subwoofer, accompanied by broiling gale-wind that nearly made him face-plant. “But fair’s fair. You can have mine.”

With that, Astraea vertically extended the widened gangplank of her beefy bud-stippled tongue, inched it forward the final distance, and adhered the loan shark’s man to her sticky pink beast. From the moment she had his squirming self glued in place, and received the benefit of his startled unease followed immediately by the richer flavor of his recognition of exactly who had spoken to and then licked him, the Apex’s saliva flowed out in disproportionate quantity to the relatively-petite amount of man she had available for gulping.

Still, this response came as buildup from the rest of the fun she’d had around town while unnaturally curbing her hunger, not to mention the combined ultra-trepidation of the victim and perp. Now it all flowed like a liquefied-taffy waterfall of bubbles and steamy fluid down her engorged mouth-muscle, of course pouring too down the spread-eagle little man who couldn’t wriggle free from the pull of her taste buds despite his panic-grunting. Funnily enough, this exact juxtaposition of their bodies couldn’t help but remind Astraea of a certain “marital” roleplaying encounter she’d had with her husband the day before his departure with their daughter, a comparison that only egged her on further. Unlike Mitch, though, this guy’s writhing turned to violent seizing and screams when the woman slowly began retracting her tongue, and him, back into the muggy darkness of her drippy maw, truly milking the moment and squeezing so much soulful terror from both the new victim and the wounded witness below that the goose bumps rippled all across her body including her tongue, seemingly doubling the bumps on her sensitive appetite-aroused flesh.

The crowbar clattered back to earth in a puddle of spit, the last visible sign of the loan shark’s man, as Astraea forcibly welcomed him into the gooey face-melting palace of her inner jaws, sealing her lips with an unnecessarily vocal slurp and an unintentional spritz of saliva that plastered the ground and even hit the debtor in the face. She winked at him, not especially wishing to terrorize the paltry thing to literal death when he was already having such a terrible day, but also didn’t miss the chance to savor his increased fear, and was gratified to notice that as much as Brody was intimidated by the possible-hitman currently entombed inside her mouth, it was nothing next to the mortal jitters he projected when that gallon blob of her needful spit swallowed his head. In case her total victory wasn’t already obvious to all parties present, this was a tantalizing bit of proof.

Her tongue capsized into her cheek, pinning the collector against the springy give of her orifice’s interior, before trading him to the other side and performing the same submission-hold with only the gentlest firming of her tongue-tip. For a minute she repeated this, never hard enough to let him pass out, puffing her cheeks with his body while warming up her salivary glands even further, to the point that Astraea had to consciously choose not to tip him into her wide-open throat and extract his spectral essence with every inch he was imbibed down the snake-like chute of her digestive tract. This one, above all others she’d come close to feasting upon physically as well as spiritually today, was almost-assuredly a winner. In truth, she would ultimately sleep just fine after eating any number of the city’s flawed denizens, knowing she’d only somewhat-fudged Mitch’s hopes for her, but with this fellow particularly and anyone of his ilk, she’d sleep peacefully with a smile on her face and wet dreams in her mind’s eye.
And that gave her an even better idea.

All the while, Astraea felt the miniscule tough guy flailing, at first fighting with a genuine belief that he might scramble his way back to the port of her lips and escape, though because the giantess had arched back into a crouch, he’d have shattered on tumbled impact, even if she was clumsy enough to let him depart her maw. And she never was. Instead, allowing him to come close by crawling on his hands and knees along her tongue while fresh spit gushed from the walls, Astraea felt one of his tiny hands defiantly punch between the moist pillowy seal of her lips.

This was as far as she allowed the prank to go, though, before her mouth assumed a Cheshire curve and the vibratory giggles in her throat beyond, as well as the sweep of her tongue, ensured his arm was slipped back inside like spaghetti. She washed him through the now-substantial living tank of her saliva, pressurizing her cheeks and sucking on him until the little fiend’s clothes semi-disintegrated and his fear reached a fever pitch, delicious enough that the silver-haired street-stomper simply had to get him out of there, or she’d lose control, without even taking the opportunity to invest in a more fulfilling future meal. Hocking, Astraea spat the guy into her waiting hand, unspooling him along a continuous honey-like strand of translucent slaver like watery rope, until he was flattened and submerged in the pool, but usefully alive.

“I suppose I should thank you both. First you down there for being quite so terrified of this crunchy little morsel here, but mainly you for inspiring him so very well, enough for me to smell it from a quarter-mile off. Really, I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Okay, that’s a lie, but you know what I mean,” Astraea intoned, waggling her fingertip against the slobbered-up strong-armer so his writhing form was rolled over the spit moat in her cupped palm-pit. “Seriously, though, an excellent job. You may as well have slapped barbeque sauce on yourself and rang the dinner bell. Although… on the off-chance you were hoping not to be chomped into bacon bits today, maybe we can come to some sort of business arrangement.”

Shocked and hysteria-laden though the little heavy already was from his surprise lapping, swishing, and subsequent sentencing to mealtime, he appeared the most genuinely gob-smacked of all now. Sitting on the dizzily-elevated platform of the Apex’s mighty hand, he wiped the goo from his eyes and looked up into her opalescent blues, and allowed himself to believe she wasn’t in fact cracking a joke just before tossing him head-long into her undulating gullet.

“B-Business? With… you?”

“Yes, assuming you still use those sorts of terms. I’m willing to bet that the most straightforward words like robbing, blackmailing, and slaughtering haven’t caught on yet in your line of work, though. Either way, I’m guessing you’re the sort of little fellow who knows a good deal when he hears one, even if he has to sell a few friends down the river. Or, down into me, as the case may be. Let’s face it: you’re a big guy for a human, but you’ll hardly last two chews for me, and then I’ll still be left with a bad case of the rumbly-tumblies. I’d much rather hold off a few more minutes for the bigger main course. All you’ve got to do is tell me where your operation is based, and I swear on my life and the lives of my loved ones, that I will not mash you up with my teeth and then swallow you down.”
Sweating up a storm and worming even more uncomfortably in the saliva-mire, the loan collector made an effort to stand on Astraea’s palm. He slipped once in the hungry froth, managing to wobble to his pitiful full height, only to be gently prodded in the gut by the chuckling giantess’s pinky finger and plopped back into her enzyme-juices.

“T-They’ll… they’ll kill me,” he gulped, unknowingly gifting the giantess with a body-wracking bout of pleasure that made her palm shiver beneath him. This only caused her to crave the answer more, trying to conceive of insignificant edible whelps who could cause such horror in one of her potential snacks. Perhaps it was more than just a solitary loan shark paying his bills. “If I talk, I’m fuckin’ dead, but not just that. Y-You know? They’ll chop me up in pieces and keep me awake the whole t-time they do it!”

“Oh, I have no doubt they’d be grumpy, if there was a single one of them left to come after you when I’m through, but let this reassure you: this is my cheat meal day, I’ve got a very big appetite, and yet I haven’t been able to find a single worthy candidate drop on down there. Until now,” Astraea explained matter-of-factly. She plucked at her lower lip with a hooked forefinger, gliding the tip of her digit down her chin and along her neck, past her bountiful cleavage and all the way down to the muscled mocha-tan wall of her impatiently-growling midriff. This demonstration ramped up his already-considerable dread, bypassing even the reeking fears of the poor weakling he’d been threatening to hospitalize and making Astraea feel such a vivid tapestry of thirsts, carnivorous and even carnal, her naughtier imaginative instincts again pre-emptively supplanted Mitch into her palm instead of this boring squealer. Oh, how much she wished to slide her fingers yet lower down her torso, but that would be best saved for later. For now, she suppressed a giddy secret-keeping grin and threw in a fib to help seal the deal: “Just a word of advice, too… you might want to make up your mind soon, because my saliva has already begun the process of digesting you. More than a few minutes spent taking a bath in it, and you’ll be asking me nicely to just slide your little head between my molars and put you out of your misery.”

“OKAY, OKAY!” he shrieked, as if cooked suddenly in acid. “Fuck… it’s corner of Park and Ninth, big automotive warehouse, by the wharf! Can’t miss it. The whole goddamn enchilada’s in there. Drug runners, weapons cache, money-moving… P-Please, just… if you are goin’ there, just… g-get rid of ALL those bastards, so they can’t come for me? I’m g-gettin’ out of the business, cross my heart n’ hope to die.”

Jackpot.

“I suppose I can get on board with that,” Astraea drawled.

“R-Really?” he squeaked with genuine hope.

“Well, yes. But, primarily the part where you hope to die.”

The collector had no time to sputter up a real defense, only mustering a peep as the giantess’s widespread maw opened like a portal to a dimension of steam and saliva; her lips kissed her palm around where he was mired in drool strings, and though her tongue scooped near his hunkered form, the volume of appetite-whetting fear reeking off of him was enough that Astraea needed only shoot him into her throat via industrial-strength suction, without any contact until he was already dunked head-first into the pulsating canal and inching his way down. Having been held back for so long by guilt and unwilling-willpower, the Apex was nearly overcome at her first corporeal feeding of the day. If anything, she struggled with swallowing him for a moment due to the volume of spit oozing from her cheeks and clogging her throat, but she managed nonetheless with a satisfied gurgle and a necessary backhanded lip-wipe to clear the excess. When she’d finished, with her pupils dilated and insides warmed by the little nexus of soul-depth terror plunging into her gut, Astraea looked down and found the debtor had fainted from all the commotion.

“You’re welcome,” she said, before arching back to full majestic height and backpedaling out of the alley. She was glad he’d conked out, really, since it made him so much less tempting as a second appetizer, and considering she’d saved him, Astraea was really going to have to wrestle with the seemingly-obvious ethics that she deserved to gulp him down herself, especially when it was his dread that drew her to the scene like an animal in heat in the first place.

Luckily for the debt collector, there were much bigger fish to fry, or rather a lot more tiny fish, but in quantities big enough and crimes heinous enough that she could probably make a buffet of them. And that was a far more tempting offer. Astraea crossed her fingers, hoping for the densest gathering possible of black-hearted munchies, and began the trek toward the wharf. With her eyes on the prize, the Apex wasn’t so concerned with striking terror into the hearts of everyone she passed using meaningful winks, toe-swoops, and tongue-revolutions, but of course her presence alone, stampeding placidly through the streets, was more than enough to keep her temporarily fed with collective anxieties below on the way to her destination.

The effect was only compounded while Astraea, enjoying the lingering aftertaste of the collector’s body and soul, felt the flood of her spittle rising disproportionately with nowhere to go. She puffed her cheeks, deciding to save this bubbly lubrication for the meal ahead, though several stray dollops managed to escape the corners of her lips anyway, splashing cowering passerby and tripling their fearful value. Though she was teased by several other tasty prospects sensed within the skyscrapers and hiding in the streets, Astraea didn’t waver from her target, arriving at the warehouse in short order. She paused outside, noting the cars parked in the lot included several million-dollar rides. After letting her surplus drool slop a few, then crunchily brushing them with her bare instep into a heap to blockade the building’s exits, she peeked at the bay doors on the side, but found them too small for a proper entrance. And the Apex had no intention of introducing herself while on her knees.

So instead she plowed her fingers through the roof, raking it apart like tin foil, until sunlight spilled within and her towering visage was made apparent to the crowd of shifty suit-clad men inside. From her chiseled thighs on upward, she became their sky. All of them looked to her silver-crowned godlike physique at once, wild-eyed with weapons drawn, though many dropped their guns upon recognizing who the invader was. Astraea, no longer able or preferential to containing her saliva-volume, parted her lips just enough that gloopy precipitation began plunking into the warehouse by the gallon, while she counted out the bodies inside, several of which were pinned down immediately by her salivary gunk.
“Oh, motherlode…” she hissed. When she smiled, the largest spillage yet released. Astraea supposed, under certain circumstances, her uncontrollable drooling might be ridiculed by such theoretically-tough customers as these boys, with all their palette-stacked drugs and heavy weaponry. But considering her city-wide reputation, their exponentially-ascendant horror, and her humbling size advantage, she didn’t suppose anyone was liable to laugh at the messy side-effects of her hunger.

“Don’t let me interrupt your meeting, boys…” Astraea thundered to the classy-dressed outlaws, letting through a slither of a theatrical snarl she knew they’d take as real. Their fearful atmosphere thickened before she’d finished the first sentence. “…but I was told I’d find a free lunch in here. As you above all know, there’s usually no such thing as that, so I thought I’d have to take a look for myself, and… well, would you look at that. Sometimes we find happy surprises. So, what’s a girl got to do to get some decent service around here? I don’t know if you can hear my stomach from way down there, but I am completely famished, and I think all… fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven of you, goodness… will really hit the spot. Now, which of you worthless little excuses for life would be so kind as to feed me FIRST?”

Looking to one another, then their likely-superiors, the men opened fire on Astraea. Unperturbed, however, save for the ticklish ping of bullets on her upper thighs and riveted midriff, the giantess pried the roof further open, then tossed the majority of the flimsy coating away altogether, and gingerly lifted her foot over the wall to place it inside. She was especially careful now not to catch any high-squishable fellows in the expanding shadow of her sole, knowing what a pity it would be to pulp them, when they’d serve such a better purpose by meeting their end higher up. Her second foot followed with the same caution and set down with a confident thud, her wiggly caramel-tan toes providing meaty new bullseyes for the crime gang to harmlessly unload upon with assault rifles and grenades.

Judging by the amount of clandestine materials piled around the place, and the fact that the warehouse real estate was in fact large enough for the Apex to stand inside, she was delighted to find that whatever-his-name-was in her belly had told the truth. This was exactly what she’d been waiting for. Descending into a crouch, the giantess put her six pack close enough to their tiny ears so everyone penned in the newly open-air warehouse, as promised, could hear the liquidy baritone of food-demanding growls. Now squatted above them all like an immense cat on the prowl for prey not even large enough to qualify as mice by comparison, Astraea stuck out her tongue as far as it could reach, then stroked it slimily about her lips for the most over-dramatic lip-smacking yet, but it had the desired effect. Flexing her feminine yet amazonian-burly anatomy for all to appreciate, she entered a near-fugue state of urgent hunger.

In the back of her mind, Astraea knew she ought to show some restraint and enjoy each individual morsel one by one, tonguing over every spiced note of their dismay before glugging them down and absorbing the nutritious soul within. There was no reason to rush, especially since none of them were going anywhere, and here she had a veritable convention of characters that would all fit nicely into Mitch’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on his wife’s diet. Even still, consciously acknowledging all this, the Apex couldn’t stop herself from snatching the closest three gunmen and expertly finger-catapulting them toward her waiting lips in such rapid succession, she’d already swallowed them whole before their compatriots even realized their ranks had been thinned. In truth, it was slightly wasteful to not so much as sample their tearful flavors during their swift arc into her esophagus, but Astraea gave herself a pass. This was simply what happened when she ignored her body’s needs this long, and besides, they were only grunts, too dumb to feel wholly dominated.

Once realization passed between the rest of the lads, their shoulder-to-shoulder throng dispersed, with some ducking for cover among the warehouse shelves, and others assuming more tactical firing-squad formations. Not that it made their bullets any more effective. Entertained and even impressed, Astraea brought her hand down slowly over their stupidly-courageous ranks, giving them a humongous target to expend machine-gun clips upon, all to no avail, though the image of her strong sun-kissed palm overtaking them like a UFO did have the desired result, and the next four men she scooped up were scared silly, though they still managed to continue squeezing the triggers. They even kept firing while the Apex tipped her head back, luxuriously closed her eyes and parted her lips, then tipped them down the slope of her hand like popcorn nibbles. The effect was a slightly-crackly sensation that tempted Astraea’s inner cheeks, tongue, and eventually throat, not unlike gulping a carbonated libation with some added zing, and as the goose-flesh prickled her beefily voluptuous figure in tandem with the heavily-swished foursome’s melting journey toward her gut, she made a mental note to let the rest of them keep hanging onto their loud toys all the way down to their destinies inside her.

Then she went for more, hunting them by hand at a methodical pace to build suspense like delicious seasoning, but only as slowly as she could stand to wait.

The encounter in the alley had helped ignite “the mood” in Astraea, but now that she had a full plate to enjoy, and the security of knowing she wouldn’t hypothetically break her husband’s heart by gorging on this crowd, the stirring had become undeniable. She fidgeted in her aggressive squat, nigh-involuntarily moaning and letting out freshly-glistening chandelier strands of drool, though no more than a flailing arm or two of her frenzied captives were allowed to touch the world outside her lips again. The more she felt them thrash, reminding her of Mitch’s passion during last night’s romp, the more Astraea was guided to repeat the same tongue choreography she’d firmly imposed on her spouse, though naturally with a far different finishing move that pushed the presumable-mobsters in the opposite direction, toward dark rather than light. Each swallow made the volume from her sensual whines compete with the acidic scowl of her tummy; the central valley of her shorts was sure to darken with fluid if these unluckies kept on squirming so ardently on their counterclockwise tongue-powered tours of her mouth before she shoveled them into the digestive slide.

“A-minus for effort, boys,” she murmured. “But, A-plus for flavor.”

Not wanting to use up all the “braver” creatures before they had a chance to properly shiver in her omnipotent orbit, however, she now walked her middle and forefinger along like a set of fifty-foot legs, straight toward an older man who was cry-screaming orders at three gun-toting subordinates, pushing them in front as human shields, but eventually his back hit a wall. The Apex needed only the gentlest tap of a fingertip to bowl each shooter over, and then there was nothing separating her from the boss: not the head honcho, she guessed from his tremulous boggle-eyed appearance, but important enough to have a lot to lose here today, including an oversized ego.

“Go on, then, little one,” she slurred, making her fingers pace back and forth in front of the man, while more of her saliva puddled on the floor just beyond. Already he was radiating more despair than anyone else she’d been allowed to consume today. “Aren’t you going to make me an offer?”

“W-What do you want?” he blubbered with pants-wetting horror. “A-Anything here. Take it, it’s yours. You want… c-cash?”

“Honestly now,” Astraea snarked, laying a hand across her bosom. “There’s no way you haven’t heard of me. Do I really look like the kind of woman who gets paid in dollars?”

“B-Bodies, then,” he muttered with a nod. “I can get… you people. H-Hundreds. All of ‘em… alive. P-People nobody’ll miss. Merchandise. Just… f-food for ya.”

“That’s a good guess, but wrong again,” the Apex sighed with a shrug. While listening to the elder boss’s negotiating, she occasionally gave him reason to choke up by reaching down, plucking his downed guardsmen off the ground, and hurling them with a single wrist-flick toward her lips, all without breaking eye contact with him. The first two passed cleanly into the drenching blackness, riding the speckled slip-n-slide of her tongue toward the back hatch, while the third was nearly missed, bouncing off her teeth and hugging the plush pink rim of Astraea’s lower lip to keep himself from falling all the way back to the concrete below, only for the giantess to help him out by curling her red muscle all the way out and succulently coiling him into its jealous embrace. “And do you know why? Because… news flash… I don’t have to go very far to find my own food. I can still eat anyone I want, including you and all your naughty little friends here, and for once, people would actually thank me. Do better.”

“I… I…” he stammered.

“I said DO. BETTER.”

Astraea’s dramatized roar, not quite emotional but nevertheless a spit-flinging bellow that echoed through the warehouse walls and made even the tougher thugs go jelly-kneed, made the little boss slump to the ground and flatten harder to the wall. It was as though the sound waves themselves had crucified him there, though in reality it was the fear which only came once he truly comprehended that he couldn’t use money or influence to get out of this jam: a far richer flavor of distress than the Apex had extracted yet from the hired grunts still scurrying at her feet.

“See, there you go,” she congratulated, a molasses-like dollop of excess saliva spilling in a continuous rope from her lip to the floor before it split. Astraea spread both palms on the ground and cruised them lethargically toward the wall, until her drumming fingertips flanked the little fellow on either side. The further forward she lurched her Olympian figure, the more the shadow of her chiseled overhanging thighs overtook her next quivery snack. “I knew you could come up with something good to offer, if only you set your mind to it.”

“P-Please don’t… d-don’t do this,” he minced, all bravado dissipated. The older man clasped both hands in prayer and looked up at the beautiful silver-haired doombringer squatted directly above him, doing his best to ignore her elegant claws poised threateningly on either side of him like fallen redwoods. “I’m… n-not worth it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt about that. The value of your life, I mean,” she agreed in a flinty whisper. “But… and I mean this as the highest compliment… you really are one cowardly little bastard.”

Getting ravenous now, Astraea skipped the airborne tricks and simply indulged her occasionally-animalistic verve, cocking her head with a final smile that wrung a last drop of psychological torment from him, before she lunged tongue-first for the ground with a viper’s speed, briefly sandwiching the screaming little creature between the wall and her oozing taste buds right at the organ’s center. When the metal barrier began to buckle from the strength of the Apex’s flat-tongued sampling, she scrape-licked him straight up the surface for eighty feet before gulping the boss fully within and consuming him mind, body, and soul on a bedding of gushing drool and well-done anguish.

“All right, enough playing around,” Astraea gravely proclaimed to the rest as she wiped her mouth and languorously swallowed down the most pleasurable nether-awakening bite yet of today’s outing. Tilting back on the axis of her shapely physique, around which the terror and spectral being of every entrapped man now gravitated toward thanks to her sheer presence, she breathily addressed her public with just enough snarl to keep their adrenaline high. “I wonder which of you can top him? I won’t lie, boys, your manager or whoever that was got pretty darn spooked, so you’ve got your work cut out for you, though I have faith that at least one of you is up to the task. I can smell it from here. Well, let’s face it, you’re all about ready to faint as it is. But we can still push that a little further. So, who’d like to go cave-diving next?”

Men, most of whom made careers out of never flinching while business rivals were murdered in front of them, now sprinted for their lives and wailed like emergency sirens. Pushing and shoving one another to be first through the exits, only to find the doors catching against the pile-up of sports cars outside, factions breathlessly split off, with some racing up the warehouse catwalks to reach the ceiling hatch ladders.

Though ordinarily Astraea would’ve enjoyed spending longer to build up their desperation, she couldn’t resist allowing most of them to reach the upper pathway, only to bow her head, extend her tongue, and slide it along the narrow grated railing, collecting at least five runners on the murky flat of her tongue before sucking them all inside, straight toward early retirement in her belly. Even when she paused to lick her lips and moan, giving the others time to muck through the spit-slime tract she left behind and start climbing the ladder, none made it so much as a quarter of the way up the rungs before the Apex came down again. Her newly-cleansed tongue flexed and stickily swept their bodies up one by one off the catwalk as if vacuuming dust mites, though of course using a far-stronger form of collection.

Some of the so-called cleverer men took refuge behind shelving while Astraea concerned herself with the higher levels, then made a break for the weapons caches and began arming themselves with the kind of hardware which could’ve left a tank as cinder. Nevertheless, when they began letting grenades and rockets fly in the warehouse, in the process blowing over more shelves and starting a few minor fires, the payloads all landed on the Apex’s exposed inner thighs and the toned lower architecture of her tan stomach as she elevated slightly-higher in her squat to play with the catwalks. One blast even seemed to land directly on her tight shorts-clad crotch, a move which urgently earned the woman’s steely-eyed attention when she looked down with whiplash-speed and glared through the grating at the hidden fraidy-cats with their RPGs firing the equivalent of nerf pellets at her privates.

“No,” she succinctly intoned, her voice cold as her terrified victims’ blood. Without an instant of fanfare, Astraea scraped her fingers through the whole row of weapon stores, whereupon she collected more than a dozen men and their toys in a handful, and unceremoniously shoveled them into her wide-open mouth for a fast-food delivery. She was tempted to gnash her teeth through them before passage, but didn’t want to half to pick their disrespectful bits out of her teeth later, and so merely disposed of them all in a single swallow to put them out of sight and out of mind.

Meanwhile, others were making their escape attempts through the bay doors. Before they could raise the gate more than a meter, only to discover another impassible dam of vehicles awaiting, thugs found themselves bathed in the thick-striped shadows of broad outstretched fingers waving overhead. Three men who’d foolishly chosen to escape through the main shipping entrance dove apart just in the nick of time for the merciless Apex’s hand to cascade down with a hard eardrum-popping slap to the concrete which marooned each of the three in the low-lying V-canyons between her spread digits: regardless of how obvious her intention was to do this rather than splat them easier than gnats, the trio nonetheless chimed in with birdlike shrieks.

Their dread was given better reason to worsen when Astraea simply cinched her fingers close together again, narrowing her hand to an expansive plank and nonlethally snaring the three in the clamped fault lines between. The boys yelped, fruitlessly firing off shots and battering their fists on hilly knuckles as the Apex lifted them past her bent legs, the washboard edifice of that midriff, then examined the captures pinched astride her straightened fingers as if to study a manicure for imperfections, though her gaze was devoted solely to the squirmy beings now cooked to just the right degree of panic. After her supreme irritation at the victims toting the big guns, she felt in need of a slower catch to rescue her provocative mealtime mood.

“My aim must be improving. Sometimes when I pull that trick, at least one of you gets crunched in half,” the highly-dexterous giantess lied in another throaty purr, sensing their struggles increase as a result. “This way, you’ll get to feel everything on your way down. Lucky, lucky you.”

As the criminals’ worming and tension levels reached a peak, their faces fogged over with scorching steam like a locomotive blasting from the smiling furnace of the Apex’s deliriously-wide lips. They heard the fluidic squelch of cheek flesh pressurizing inside, a massive rippling tongue thoughtfully massaging over the palate, and as her glistening ivory chompers came shining into view with every inch her mouth opened, all three finger-trapped men fully expected to have their heads shorn clean off between the giantess’s enclosing canines. Instead, the Apex impatiently wrapped her lips over her index and middle digit at once, instantly casting the ever-louder gunman into the saliva-shimmering eclipse of her maw.

Though he could see little now as she gently closed her mouth around the majority portions of her fingers, his weapon’s muzzle provided brief glimpses of the truly-cavernous arena of her inner jowls, the harrowing plunge toward her throat, and the bubbling moat below her tongue which was now creeping closer toward the hopeless thing held in the thrall of her fingers. With every bullet he fired off, offering another blink-and-he-missed-it epileptic view of the Apex’s hungry interior, her curiously-ascendant tasting muscle neared like a crimson sea serpent rising from the gooey depths. The buildup to the lick was gradual, but the instant after the man felt the giantess’s oppressive tongue plaster against his body for a taste, the gun dropped from his hands and his head jerked back due to violent suction as she slurped him instantaneously out of her fingers and into her gullet.

Though the second two lads were nearly lost in the process of the hundred-story predator fitting her comely lips around one pair of fingers without releasing the others, she was cautious to keep her hand rigid, and they remained in her capture, hearing gunfire and muted cries from inside as Astraea’s lips came within mere feet of covering them as well. Their turn was soon to arrive, and they both knew it, watching the surplus froth drip from her loosely-closed lips and then redouble to the volume of bilge-pump liquid when the Apex quickly withdrew her fingers from her mouth, with their coworker nowhere to be seen. Winking, she loudly gulped down the second man like a ring pop in much shorter order.

Internally, Astraea knew this style to be a tad indulgent, as were most of her methods for gobbling these fellows down while they were already out of their minds with fright. The unnecessary performative part of the feasting was likely what would’ve disturbed Mitch rather than her choices of meals themselves, and no-doubt their daughter would’ve rolled her eyes at some of her mother’s theatricality, even as she furtively snickered at its effectiveness. Still, the Apex had waited all day for this, and she doubted any of the scum in this room was going to take offense at her messy table manners.

Plus, she really did need to garner some more spectacular fear from these remaining cretins to make up for the piggish chauvinistic offense of that rocket to her groin.
Crystalline spit flowed into the now-vacant spaces between Astraea’s pinched fingers, leaving the third and naturally-most panicky mini-man, still displayed like macabre jewelry, to gift the titanic huntress one last sniff of his apprehension before she downed him in the same barbarous way. Ironically, though, the trickling fluid that added so greatly to his terror, along with the up-close view of the gorgeous silver-maned giantess’s ravenous smirk promising the same end, was flowing over the Apex’s knuckles in a volume now which lubed up the squirmy on-deck victim’s body just enough to let him slide free between her fingers.

Astraea, not wanting to crush and thus waste food which had just reached the perfect temperature of horror, allowed him to slip, then scooped her palm below his flight path to keep him from a crippling landing. As she leaned back to recapture him, however, the man didn’t land in her hand, but upon the hillier and far-more buoyant surface of her left breast, through which he could feel her heartrate instantaneously hasten, and when he looked up to meet her ice-frigid gaze, he knew the rise was born of abject fury, not titillation.

“You…” she spat, straining the word into multiple syllables that made the man’s blood run colder every split-second. “…do not… get to put your disgusting cockroach hands there. Ever. Who do you think you are?”

The man leapt up from Astraea’s tan-brown slightly-jiggly pectoral flesh as though he’d landed on hot coals, but the damage had already been done. Before he even had the chance to dive clear of her boob, her lightning-quick fingerpads were burying him in a pointed grasp, decidedly firmer than the last embrace, and raising him to her face. Strangely, though the Apex’s voice was quieter now than when she was bellowing to everyone in the warehouse and taunting them over their edibles fates, the little man couldn’t help but think he was seeing “real” anger from her now, a glimpse behind the dramatic façade of her booming threats, wide smiles, and starvation-suffering behavior. And the irate reality was much more frightening than the show. A low growl curdled in Astraea’s throat, blowing out into the accidental tit-grabber’s puny face with eye-watering heat like the preamble to a dragon’s fiery belch, and then she flicked him into her mouth and swallowed with such speed, it was wholly a toss-up whether he’d even survive long enough to have his soul fully extracted during the gullet-snaking descent, but the Apex wouldn’t have cared in his particular case.

Nevertheless, she did manage to suck out his full fearful nutrition, massaging her throat and loudly murmuring with the sense-electrifying pleasures gratefully returned to her system by that slower feeding. Gradually, too, her pulse settled from staid rage-mode back into more nebulous passion. It was one thing for them to shoot her in the crotch, but quite another to actually touch her, skin-to-skin, in that presumptive way which so often tempted her to forego Mitch’s pleading and just turn all mankind in the city (with the emphasis on man) into an all-she-could-eat smorgasbord. And since Astraea had never actually discovered her stomach’s capacity for the munchy little things, considering the limits of her husband’s tolerance were always reached before belly space, the Apex was led to believe she would have a great deal of room inside for them, taking barely a pause between gulps.

The third fellow’s oafishness aside, though, she’d successfully swished and gobbled her way back into “the mood,” more skin-crawlingly tongue-swirlingly sensuous than she’d felt all day. And funnily enough, that last creep’s bone-deep despair at experiencing her legitimate anger had been just the ticket. With that, Astraea’s whole thousand-foot physique was activated with every flavor of fulfillment and temptation.

Again the sensory memory of her husband’s tender touch resumed, and right on her bosom no less, as if Mitch was here to shower her breasts with micro-kisses and calm her down following that insulting grab-up by that falling morsel. Per usual, though, the vivid thought of her most recent marital activities did anything but gentle the giantess down, and instead only further riled her into hungry libidinous necessity. What’s more, the atmosphere of the warehouse had been reignited with collective frenzy by the survivors and especially their bosses, all of whom had used this opportunity to arm themselves with more toy weaponry, as if the previous examples weren’t enough to make them lay down and beg for the quickest-possible consumption. Not that she would’ve granted such a thing, anyway.

“Oh, you stupid, pathetic, tiny things…” Astraea gutturally moaned, now forgoing almost all playful ceremony, though even her turned-on whisper still struck them like a thunderclap. “You can’t imagine how much I’m going to enjoy swallowing each and every one of you.”

The Apex crept forward on her hands and knees, though not remotely submissive in her posture, which still made her appear a sort of beautiful war machine advancing languidly along the warehouse floor, her cut musculature tightening beneath mocha-tan flesh with every movement forth, in the way of a lioness ready to pounce. Though her gaze was hauntingly glazed over and a near-continuous drool stream was strung out all the way from Astraea’s lips down to the ground in a gooey trail a hundred feet back beneath her crouched frame, however, the giantess’s mind now registered the blind-firing terror-rich targets scattered among the illegal paraphernalia only so far as they existed, were horrified, and highly edible.

Instead, from the moment that sensory recollection of Mitch was visited upon her by that boob-dropper, with Astraea’s adorable and good-hearted hubby’s mere essence slicing through all the panicked noise and hungry carnage of this day out, he became her sole focal point again. She felt his presence so potently, that he may as well have been clinging to her lips now, laying amorous smooches while the ravenous ring of her mouth undulated right back and lubed him head-to-toe in saliva. And as aroused as it made her already to rattle the very souls of so many slurped-up mobsters, heightening their delectably agonized moods with every sloppily-consumed body, the feeling was incomparably multiplied when combined with the sharp memories of last night’s romp in the sack with that one precious little man whom she only-occasionally (usually in the split-second at the absolute peak of orgasm) imagined swallowing one day for good.

That sensation of Mitch at her mouth, his kisses and gyrations and tiny member prodding at her pillowy lower lip, then influenced Astraea’s hand scooping savagely through the nearest crowd of criminals like a bear’s paw through honey. She collected eleven victims and brought them directly toward her low-roaring maw, whereupon she clapped her palm flush against the rim of her cheeks and chin, ensuring all of them were dumped into her wide-open orifice with no chance of eking out the sides, despite the slippery rivulets of spit that gushed out in all directions with a pronounced “Hhhhommm…” from the giantess’s throat. In direct correlation with her recalling the plop of Mitch’s body being suctioned into her mouth last night, from mere gooey peck to a French snog, she began to suck on all eleven writhing frames and their ticklish gunfire at once.

Where her husband had received a highly-regulated volume of pressure inside his one-hundred-story spouse’s oral cavity, however, firmly-yet-sensuously imbibed, the crooks she actually had inside now weren’t so lucky. They were thrashed between cheeks, near-smothered in bubbles, and battered by her tongue belly-flopping in and out of that saliva wading pool. Neither did any of the fearful human scum currently receiving the spin-cycle treatment around her teeth get to enjoy the perks of being married to Astraea while inside her mouth, chiefly among those her expert talent at guiding Mitch to gently body-slam the flat of her tongue and sidle his hard-on between her throbbing pink taste buds. Though the Apex did her fair share of sampling this mouthful of ruffians, salivating more with every disturbed scream and each déjà vu tingle back to her night with Mitch, she ensured the process was nothing but disorienting and wholly overwhelming for these creatures, making their experience nothing like the full-body BJ her husband was suckled into, and instead much more similar to the approximate experience of being hard candy.

In spite of her tongue’s quick-striking brutality with the minions and overall unlivable churning atmosphere of her mouth, though, Astraea still lingered heavily on that memory of drawing pleasure from Mitch. She’d done so slowly, making each body-drinking pulse lengthier and tighter, yet still secure in the knowledge that she never put her little love in danger, and certain he shared that sentiment, as she centered him like a pearl on her oozing serpentine muscle. She didn’t have to guess at his comfort, either, since the only “fear” she ever perceived from Mitch was the novel flutter of his heartbeat whenever she posed a new erotic tango for them to attempt. Otherwise, though, he was only content and stupid-horny while hunkered submissively upon her tongue in the sweet-scented darkness, as she massaged him toward climax. She supposed this more than anything else was even further proof that she’d married the right being, jokes of “taming” aside, because he still got her hotter than anyone, even totally lacking in fear to feed her.

Playing the vividly-memorized event back in her mind, at the same instant Astraea that recalled making her hubby moan and surrender atop her tongue so she could swallow that seed of his devotion, she also cleared out the current jumble of slobbered-up thugs in one impressively hard gulp. Naturally this end also diverged from her time with Mitch, who was usually either daintily extracted from her mouth between loving fingertips, or just spewed messily out into her palm inside a deluge of frothy spit, depending how dirty the couple was collectively feeling that evening. These boys, the most frightened they’d ever been, were destined only to travel down toward slimier depths in the opposite direction. Letting out a harmonious chirp of satisfaction in both appetite and sexuality, the same hand which had stuffed those eleven gunners between her lips now traveled down toward Astraea’s arched-up thighs, tantalizingly stroking the pillar of her middle finger up the dampening central ravine in her shorts.

Having now cornered the remaining little animals in a small enough sector of the warehouse that the Apex could reach all of them no matter where they scurried, she shifted sleepily from her haunches into a resting lean on her hip, blockading off the rest of the space with the mere imposition of her dark-tanned shine-glazed abdomen, which rose and fell to the beat of her libido. The giantess’s body was crackling with need now, and even ordinary contact with every exposed skin cell of her ultra-athletic frame contributed to the rush. Shutting her eyes, and easily tuning out the syndicate’s obvious head honcho barking his orders like a sore-loser general to his rapid-firing underlings, Astraea serenely maintained her focus on that erotic ghost of last night’s fun, remembering the way Mitch boldly clambered off her palm, down to her chin, and traveled the length of her neck toward her collarbone as she lay still on the bed.

With a grin that further stupefied her tough-cookie foes below, she recalled the way she’d ever-so-slowly swallowed heavy globes of her own saliva to savor the last dregs of their foreplay, each gulp probably sufficient to drown Mitch. The way she drank it down caused small moving hills to travel along her throat in chase of the little man making his way over her soft flesh, and each time he went still, allowing the lump to pass beneath him. In recapturing that moment, Astraea had already grabbed up another cluster of the warehouse’s bad boys, but rather than stuffing them juicily within at once, tilted her head all the way back and fed herself their bodies one at a time like an Egyptian queen popping grapes. Each of these fellows was pointedly swallowed as slowly as the Apex could manage, so she could feel every delicate squirm from within, every drop of their dread, and most importantly, revisit the sensation of Mitch’s nakedness clinging to her neck as her swallows passed underneath him.

While one hand flicked individual thrashers atop her tongue, the other had yet to abandon her revved-up nethers. Not in the least bit afraid now of exposure, the titaness’s fingers had crept fully into her shorts and begun roughly tempting the petals of her vulva, just as she had last night when her husband passed into the valley of her bare breasts. It was hard to resist swirling a thumbpad around the hardening summits of her nipples now, followed up by slurping another mobster sub-boss out of her own pinched fingers like a tug-of-war chew toy, as her masturbatory efforts intensified and her moans became more lyrical. Such a display might’ve fascinated many of these dark-hearted lads earlier, but now having come to grips with their inescapable demises, the sight of the giantess’s fingers pistoning into her shorts with such violence, which brought her obvious pleasure yet could’ve crushed them each in a single stroke, only further flavored their terror. This only sent Astraea into a hungrier high, creating a vicious cycle for the survivors, but the most delicious lust-fest for her.

Mitch, after an indulgently fondling passage through his wife’s cleavage, had reached her stomach by now. And as much wonderful time as he’d taken traversing the upper regions of her body, even from a distance and with his back turned, Astraea could sense his heightened excitement, which reflected in her own beefily svelte shape coating entirely in goose bumps and hairs standing on end. Shy though he could sometimes be about it, among his cuter traits, the Apex was well-familiar with Mitch’s affinity for her abdomen, and always made time in their play for this. She couldn’t help but adore his fondness for the area too, their occasional differences about her diet habits aside, but the giantess couldn’t think of a sexier site for him to fixate upon than the place which ultimately held so many of her little living fear-boosters and their scrumptious souls. Humbling himself on all fours, and low enough that his gargantuan spouse could again feel the pricked compliment of his attentive crotch, the little guy wormed lovingly over the broad hard-packed washboard terrain of his wife’s dusky-complexioned tummy.

Astraea was all but unconsciously feeding herself now from the gunmen, slowly but inevitably reaching for each buffoon in this last refuge of the warehouse on autopilot. She smushed them between her devilishly kiss-shaped lips, and steadily thinned their ranks toward single digits after a thorough swishing, allowing the last dregs of their panic to percolate like fancy gulps of wine. The swallows were now timed with her heavier penetrative finger-pulses, though the tenderer operation of her clit was made in only conjunction with the precise skin-to-skin memory of everywhere Mitch had gone last night in his decadent travels over her abs, as though she was directing his movements joystick-style on her own hyper-sensitive nub. She glowed at the feeling of his pico-tongue on her warm skin, her own gut gurgles which vibrated her husband’s body in answer, and his limbs stroking over the thick peaks and shallow valleys between partitions of that slicked six-pack muscle-sculpture earned by regular crunches and natural Apex superiority. All this of course he’d done in the shadow of her palm while the vigorous finger-thrusting into her pussy had become a force of nature, as it did again now with an audience of humiliated and distraught soul-vessels.

“God, Mitch…” she whispered with such ragged lasciviousness that it was only heard as a godlike growl by the final nine man-meals below. “…I could just eat you up.”

Then the silver-crowned Apex drew a deep gasp, filled her lungs to capacity, and entered a near-fugue state, simply obeying the necessity of her powerful body. Just as she’d collected Mitch again from the armored flesh-plain of her stomach last night, albeit using sweetly-fragrant cum-gluey fingers to make him easier to capture, so too did she snatch up all nine of the stragglers in one clenched paw, including the leader of the whole operation, who most fervently radiated soul-crushing dismay out of anyone in the room today. Meanwhile her opposite hand never had to leave its post, stormily massaging herself toward climax and now bobbing her hips in time with the presses, so her bouncing glutes cracked the warehouse floor and her curling toes strained the metal walls as she extended both legs fully out to fill the arena. In stark contrast to the wishes of the nine human insects currently in her fist, she’d sensed Mitch’s desire to pass back into his wife’s mouth, even if he hadn’t been begging for it aloud, and she was only too happy to oblige both him and herself then, as she was now.

“Come in here now,” she throatily repeated to the men in her clutches, exactly as she had to Mitch before depositing him inside. The only exception was a slightly different intonation which had aroused her husband to a near touchless finish, but which instead verged on driving the mobsters to wailing madness. “I… am going… to finish you. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Then in they went on a spiraling river rapids of impatient saliva, suckled and squeezed and mock-gnawed while their eardrums were perforated by Astraea’s crescendo of an orgasmic cry. Mitch, as was only right, had been gently ladled into the scoop of her tongue again, safely immersed in hot fluid, and affectionately pumped into an even bigger finish that was perfectly timed with his wife’s own delightfully fingered end. Although her tiny spouse had been gratified even further to hear the Apex’s familiar and thunderous groan quaking all around his achingly-stimulated self, the nine leftover crooks, and their hot-headed chief especially, found it to be a deeply upsetting last noise to hear just before the gargling flush under that uvula and into the giantess’s gullet which spelled out their soul-rending finales from life.

At once, all was quiet again. The warehouse was left a messy wreck of weapons and crates, with Astraea’s fulfilled and flexed-out physique lazily spread out now to fill in the all-too-small space to enjoy the aftermath. A widening pool of nectar had formed on the dented ground, poured out of her shorts and even right through the fabric’s skin-hugging blackness. Similar though smaller puddles were taking shape on either side of where the Apex’s cheeks had come to lay, since she couldn’t help but salivate throughout that game, beyond the capacity of her lips to contain it. For half an hour, the woman didn’t so much as move except to let her gleaming abdomen relax and her fingertip to pass back and forth over the tip of her tongue, where she could’ve bet her life she actually tangibly tasted some microbial remnant of Mitch from last night, unlikely though that was.

“Oh, honey…” she crooned, as if she had him crouched right over her lips again with a smile on his tiny face. “…you are really going to get some when you come back.”