Chapter 20: Obsolete Earth

It took Belle a bit of time to devour all the cities she had conquered, but that still wasn’t enough time for Australia to prepare.

Belle appeared looming above the country. Her body was since back to its old smoothness, no buildings or hoops on her body since she had absorbed those all earlier when she decided humanity’s future was ‘within’. To that end, she looked on the outside just as she did when she first escaped the Voxhaben Complex.

Only bigger, far, far bigger.

Belle was so vast that the ocean’s depth didn’t even crest her toes. She spoke to the people of Australia via radio, hijacking every station effortlessly. If she spoke aloud, her voice would simply destroy them all on its own, so this was the only means of communication she saw fit.

“Australia, good to finally meet you all. You’re actually one of the more recently developed and steamtech-ified countries there is, which means you still have plenty of natural resources to plunder and devour. How considerate.”

She laughed, then crouched down. The entire planet groaned.

“I expect it’ll feel wonderful jostling down my throat, as will all of you. Of course, to be honest, most of you won’t have the honor of living within me for long. I’ve decided to re-purpose nearly all of humanity that’s left. My criteria for preservation has grown rather strict, you see. There’s already so many people inside me, squirming around. I can feel all their little feet pattering as I speak.”

She laughed again, her superior hearing picking up a country’s worth of screams.

“But, don’t worry, even with such stringent criteria, I expect at least 10% of you will live on within me, and that’s more than enough. Now, without further ado, it’s time for me to dig in.”

Belle stuck her hands into Australia, quite literally “digging-in” to it. Her fingers tore through layers of the planet like butter. She was at the size where she was eating landmarks more than cities. Mere settlements were simply along for the ride.

She was thankful she still had no sense of taste, as she imagined eating rocks and dirt wouldn’t be ideal. Then again, she wondered why she didn’t simply design a sense of taste for herself, and make everything taste sublime?

It was something she considered for the future. For now, she was simply concerned with devouring the Australian continental regions. Belle was doing this to further her power and advancement more than for fun.

The fun, as always, was merely a bonus.

Belle had taken care to swarm minibots from her hands to the surface of the country, so that the people were safe as she shoved them into a mouth far, far too vast for them to comprehend. They heard the sound of her ‘breath’ though, and knew what it was. They were of course spritzes with steam and saliva as well.

She devoured the country, handful by handful. Millions more were sorted by her body’s merciless machinations, all the while she gradually tore into the landmass. The ocean began to flood into the spaces made by Belle’s greedy hands. By the time she was finished, what was left of Australia was but a few layers of earth, now deep beneath the ocean which had pooled over it.

Just like that, Belle had eaten her first country. She made a quick detour to New Zealand to the east and did much the same before finishing up Indonesia. Yet more millions now digested within her, or were lucky enough to live in her internal cities, where their every move was watched, every word heard by the omnipresent minibots within.

There was only one area left to consume. Belle had eaten her first country in a day, land and all, and it was time to devour her first continent.

From those devoured landmasses she had accrued enough size to quickly grow big enough that it made more sense to float around the Earth than walk on its surface. As it was, her every step was a global calamity. A wiggle of her toes had brought tectonic plates to fragments, so this simply made sense to her.

Her body moved through space via a series of jets she had molded from metal on her body. The steam moved her gigantic body, nearly one thousand miles tall, with effortless ease in zero-gravity. It was trivial for her to resist the Earth’s gravity as well, just a vast amount of literal tons of steam jetted from from her front side was all that was needed there.

Belle hovered over the continent of Africa, letting her jets relax so she fell a bit towards it.

Once a colonized region, the people there had since resisted their imperial aggressors and divided into advanced nations at peace with one another. They were self-sufficient and independent. It was overall a beautiful tale of perseverance and determination, but Belle thought little of it. It didn’t matter to her. The entire continent was food. Human history before her rise didn’t really matter now. In her eternal rule, she figured pre-Belle times would be spoken of only in whispers if at all.

Thus, the ancient pyramids and modern steamtech cities alike went down her throat. The people were all sorted according to their skill-sets and her fancies. All the beautiful landscape features, too, were devoured. Mount Kilimanjaro was no more, a mere snack to her that fit in her mouth with no more than two bites.

They had their military force ready to defend. It did nothing, nothing but fill her more. A continental chorus of screams rung out as she dug her hands so deep the resulting quakes alone started breaking up the continent.

‘All the better’, Belle thought. ‘That’d it’d crack into palm-sized bites just for me~’

She had thought it a tad ironic that the continent form which all humans were said to have come from, as some scientists argued, would be the last one to have any living humans on it. All others were since picked clean. She figured no scientist of any sort would have been able to predict, before the creation of her beautiful brass body, that the future of humanity would be within one woman.

Belle finished devouring the continent, feeling a bit stuffed. She had to wait to finish digesting all that matter. It was the first time she felt she had to wait between meals in quite some time.

Indeed, she still had meals to go. Belle planned for the entire Earth to be her snack.