The forbidden library seemed empty when Subaru entered. Save for his footsteps and their echoes, not a sound could be heard anywhere within its grand extent. “Beatrice! Hello? Are you in here?” he shouted, loud as he could, thinking if nothing else the noise would get her rushing in to berate him for yelling.
It had been a couple weeks since he'd last seen the library's caretaker, and he was starting to worry for her. She was probably fine, he told himself, maybe busy with some solitary pursuit, but he still wanted to check up on her to make sure everything was okay.
When he didn't get a reply, though, he started to worry again. Was she sleeping somewhere? If she'd heard him she would have come over to yell at him for sure. Maybe she wasn't in here at all, he thought. Still, he decided to make a lap of the library and see if he could find her.
There were so many bookshelves and corridors in the ancient place that it would take him a long time to search it thoroughly. Not that he was trying to do that. Subaru had only a vague idea of the library's full layout, and he walked its halls with only a faint notion of where he might search for Beatrice, every so often calling out to her.
In time he had made it to the furthest reaches of the library, corners previously unexplored by him. He glanced at the spines of the ancient tomes filling up the bookshelves here, but among the hundreds of books not a one of them was in any language he understood. And still there was no sign of Beatrice.
He was starting to think this was all a waste of time when he found something promising: a small door he'd never seen before, looking oddly out of place among all the bookshelves. Being familiar with Beatrice's ability to create new corridors out of nowhere and do other amazing things, he immediately thought the door must be her doing. He ran up to it, sliding a bit as he came to a stop, and grabbed the handle meaning to pull the door open immediately.
But as soon as his hand came in contact with it, it felt as if a bolt of electricity shot through his body. Powerful magic launched him backwards, and when he landed he was too stunned to notice anything except how much his head was spinning. It was a long couple minutes before he came back to his senses and could take stock of himself. His hand still hurt and he still felt a weird tingly sensation all over, but when he opened his eyes it was something else entirely that captured his attention.
Between his grabbing the doorknob and coming to again, it seemed like the whole world had changed. Not that he was in a different place or anything—so far as he could tell it was still the same library as before, in the same hall and with the same bookshelves—but everything was bigger now. Way bigger, like a thousand times at least. The ground was here and there littered with what seemed like boulders but were really just grains of sand, and in the air floated countless specks of dust that were only a little smaller than him.
The change was shocking, but Subaru barely had time to come to terms with it when the handle on that strange door turned and it swung open. Then he found her at last: Beatrice, the library's 400-year-old caretaker. She was as cute and dainty as ever, with that “serious” look on her face that made for such an adorable contrast with her appearance. And yet, in his eyes, she was the biggest, most powerful being to ever exist, a living mountain whose lovely pink shoes thundered against the ground with each step. A being so immense, and moving so quickly, that Subaru sat frozen in place as his mind tried to parse what he was seeing.
He was still petrified when she started walking towards him, and when the sole of her dainty shoe appeared in the sky, he only had time to scream and raise his hands before he was crushed.
His death came so quickly that Subaru had no time to feel pain, and he instantly awoke on the ground as though nothing had happened. Frantically he opened his eyes, and was horrified when he saw that he was still shrunk down to that pitiful size. For a moment he had hoped that Return by Death might have sent him back to before this terrible mistake occurred, but no. No, of course not; that would have been much too easy. It was his lot in life to suffer, and all he could do was accept that suffering and face it head-on.
With grim resolve he rose to his feet and looked to the door. Beatrice wasn't here yet, but he could already hear her footsteps approaching, albeit faintly. Thinking to before his death, he called up in his mind the image of her shoe coming down to crush him and tried to ascertain the shortest path to safety, then ran in that direction.
Before long, he heard the door open behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Beatrice coming closer. His heart skipped a beat. Just the sight of her sparked terror inside him, and he forced himself to look away so that he wouldn't be thrown into a blind panic. Even so, he could still hear her coming closer, still feel the earth trembling with the might of her footsteps. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM they came, growing ever more powerful, until the earth shook so intensely that he could no longer stay afoot. He threw himself flat on the ground, hoping that way to avoid being crushed. But it was too late again. Her foot came down, and he was once again crushed.
His heart was still racing when he returned again, as was his breathing. He forced himself to calm down, and to start thinking more carefully about his situation. There was no point in throwing himself into whatever plan came to mind first if he didn't have any idea what to do afterwards. His death under Beatrice's foot was painless, so there was no downside to staying here until he worked something out.
Obviously the first thing to do was to avoid being crushed, but what came next was the big question. While it was possible that this curse was temporary and he'd grow back in a few minutes, it was also possible that he'd be stuck like this until someone grew him back.
Beatrice's magic had done this to him, so she could probably reverse it too. That meant enlisting her help had to be his first priority after escaping death. Even if she couldn't fix him, at least she could take care of him until someone did. But how was he supposed to do that? Beatrice was unspeakably huge, or rather, he was unspeakably tiny, and every time he saw her step into the library, every time he saw the sole of her shoe fill up the sky, it only drove home how great the distance between them both was. He was nothing but a dust mite at the feet of a goddess; how could he possibly get her to notice him when he was so insignificant?
For many, many loops, Subaru only lay on the floor, sinking deeper into despair with each repetition as Beatrice's sheer immensity was hammered into his mind by her world-shaking steps. The problem seemed utterly intractable to his mind; he thought he might make himself heard if he could only climb up to her ears, but how to start the climb was beyond him. Her dress didn't quite reach the floor so he could only start from her shoes, but if he was anywhere near them when they landed he'd be blown away by the impact.
In the end, he had to give up all his planning and trust that he would find some other answer once he made it out of this alive. As soon as he revived again, he jumped to his feet and started running in the direction of safety, sprinting as fast as he could. Again Beatrice opened the door soon afterwards, and again she walked towards him. Subaru felt a chill take hold of him when he felt her feet coming down behind him, wondering if perhaps there was no escape at all from this death loop and he would spend all eternity as a dust mite crushed under her shoe. He pushed himself to run harder than he ever had before, almost flying along the ground, anything at all to escape that awful fate. Then Beatrice's foot came down, and this time, he lived.
The impact was immense. A shockwave spread out over the earth as her foot thundered against it, and the little puff of wind from her step sent Subaru sky high. In the air he turned and tumbled, surrounded by the countless specks of dust whose idyllic flight Beatrice's appearance had disturbed. The whole world whizzed by so fast that he had no sense of where he was or where he was flying to.
It was a only few panicked seconds before he landed on something big and pink. He scrambled to get a grip on it, and quickly did so as the whole surface seemed to be made of rope-like cables. Then, with everything shaking, he looked to his right and saw a vast pillar of pink and purple swinging by hundreds of feet away. That's when he realized that he had landed on the threads of Beatrice's striped tights, somewhere on her shin, and that the cables he was clinging so fiercely to were the individual fibers that made up a single thread, with the thread itself being wider than he was tall.
Beatrice's other leg stopped swinging a fraction of a second later, and then this one swung forward as she took another step. Carried along with it, Subaru traversed thousands of feet in less than half a second, and felt the force of the giant foot's impact on the floor even from all the way up here. He held on securely despite the tremendous shock, but still the whole thing scared him. He felt like the wind might blow him away at any moment, and decided to go somewhere he'd be protected from it. Whenever Beatrice's leg wasn't moving, he carefully climbed towards a nearby gap between the pink threads, meaning to crawl through to the other side. But his grip on the fibers was weaker while he climbed, and just as he reached the opening, the impact of another step broke his hold on them. He fell down along her leg, his trajectory steered by the whims of the air currents, and eventually landed right above her shoe's topline, falling between the threads of her stocking to hit her skin beneath.
Subaru had no choice but to cling to her for safety, even as her own steps threatened to dislodge him again and send him still further down, where he might meet his end under her foot. He spent many minutes down there—hours, it felt like—while Beatrice kept walking. Subaru wondered if she was taking a full tour of the library, but in time she stopped and took a seat, finally putting an end to this trip.
Once she kicked off her shoes and left her feet resting on the floor, Subaru felt he could finally take a deep breath and let go of her skin. Exhausted after holding on so fiercely and for so long, he was content to lie on her foot and let the soreness drain from his muscles. He snuggled against her skin, letting the softness and warmth of her foot soothe his tired muscles. Thankfully she didn't move her feet much at the time, and he could so relax that he nearly fell asleep on her foot, but then there came a sudden jolt as her foot was lifted up.
Pinching the fabric of her tights down at her foot, she stretched it up and pulled it back, readjusting it all to deal with a bothersome bit of bunched-up fabric down on her sole, never suspecting as she dealt with it that the speck-sized Subaru was being sent rolling down the slope of her foot until he slipped down her toes and was wedged between the two massive walls of skin. Then, when she set her foot back down, her toes splayed a bit under the weight and Let Subaru fall from them, to land down on the fabric stretched under the arch of her toes.
In the dim light making it in through the threads, Subaru looked up and saw Beatrice's gigantic toes hanging overhead. Dainty little things they were in reality, but to him even the smallest of them was as big and impressive as any castle he'd ever seen. A single twitch, a single curl of her toes, might be enough to end his life. Indeed, just a moment later they all stretched and splayed, pulling at the criss-crossing threads on which he stood and nearly sending him falling between them, then came back down with a resounding THUD. All that was only a taste of the power they held.
Subaru knew he needed to get somewhere safe again, and quickly he ran to the sole of her foot, where he jumped onto her skin and started climbing up between her toes, helping himself to the tiniest imperfections of her skin as the perfect footholds. Climbing up the wrinkled wall, he silently begged her not to move her foot yet. But Beatrice couldn't listen. He hadn't even made it halfway up her toes when she curled them tight around him. Then the wrinkles of her skin folded up, and tiny Subaru was swallowed whole by one of the smallest. The pressure wasn't enough to crush him, but even when her toes relaxed her skin still didn't release him. He was sealed in there, entombed in an airtight crevice of her flesh, and surrounded on all sides by her divine presence. He pushed against her skin with all his might, trying to get some air, but couldn't create even a sliver of space for himself.
With his lungs aching, little by little he lost feeling and awareness until he blanked out completely. Then, just like that, he was back under Beatrice's toes again, trying to find another way out.
Going between her toes was out of the question now, and since he knew that she would curl her toes sooner or later, he also couldn't stay down here. Instead he walked along the threads to the toe of her stocking, running right past the tips of her toes, and from there climbed up the fibers until her toes curled behind him. He survived it, and when the mighty digits uncurled her second toe brushed over him and swept him along on its tip.
Though he knew that he'd have to reach her ears eventually, Subaru thought it was too dangerous to try scaling her at a time like this, especially from all the way down here. Better to wait until she was resting so he could simply walk across her body. Until then, he decided to crawl under her toenail and wait.
But her nails were finely trimmed, and there was hardly any space for him underneath. Still he squeezed himself in as best he could, but it was so tight in there that all it took was a little bit more pressure on her toes and instantly he found himself being crushed. Not the immediate crushing he'd found under her shoe this time—her toe was too soft for that. Instead his body was slowly and painfully ground down, his bones crushed and his limbs broken, until his skull gave in and his life left him.
He reappeared on the tip of her toe again, and immediately moved to climb over the giant nail and crawl further along her foot. Forget waiting in one place until it was “safe”—if there's anything he'd learned down here it was that he was never really safe at this size.
Each time he'd died, his save points had been incredibly generous, and while he didn't know what rules they operated on, he believed he could probably count on that generosity being the case so long as he was tiny. Better to make progress little by little and go back only a minute or two if he died, than to wait for the right time and end up dying before it came.
He crawled up her foot and out of her tights, then climbed up the fibers towards her knee, until he reached her lap nearly an hour later. Though he'd died a few times, his save points proved as generous as he'd expected, and he could keep making progress with only small adjustments to his journey.
Up on her thigh, he looked up and found that everything above her belly was blocked from view by a table. Together with the occasional sound of turning pages, he figured she must have been reading a book up there.
After taking a minute to recover, Subaru started running across to her waist, hoping to get there before any other setback happened. But he was still a minute away from her dress when Beatrice suddenly adjusted her position. The movement of her legs send him tumbling down the inner face of her thigh, and though he tried to grab ahold of the fibers, the persistent wobbling of her flesh while she tried to get more comfortable kept throwing him off. He tumbled head over heels and finally he ended up in the canyon between her thighs, wedged in her softness and warmth. He grabbed her tights again and started to pull himself out, making slow yet steady progress, until Beatrice crossed her legs and he was engulfed by her thighs.
The subtle friction of one leg against the other as she bobbed her foot up and down had Subaru sliding along between them too. Without realizing it she rolled him around like the tiniest piece of lint, effortlessly overpowering all his struggles to escape her.
The pressure was immense, but thanks to her softness, it was nowhere near enough to crush him, nor even to suffocate him usually, though reduced circulation did numb his body and dull is mind. Still, it wouldn't last too long. Only a few minutes later, Beatrice recrossed her legs the other way around, and this time Subaru wasn't caught between them. He breathed easily now, and prepared to start climbing up. Only, he couldn't. When he tried to move his limbs, he found them all bound by something. He looked aside and saw that they had all gotten tangled up in a mass of fibers. They must have ended up like that while he was being rolled all over her tights.
He tried for minutes to untangle himself, but the knots were so firm and complex that it proved impossible. Maybe if he died he could jump back to before this happened, but seeing how well he'd fared between her thighs, he didn't feel his life at risk. Ironically, being safely trapped in here was a bigger setback than even his death might be.
The only option open to him was to wait, to study the fibers, and maybe in time find a way to free himself from them. But that proved harder than he thought, and he hadn't made any progress on his bindings when Beatrice hopped out of her chair. When she started walking, he gave up on his efforts—it would do him no good to break free now if it meant falling off and losing all the progress he'd made, without even the assurance that Return by Death would bring him back up here. Besides, there wasn't much he could do while Beatrice was up and walking, her thighs brushing against him and each other with her every step.
At least it wasn't the worst place to be trapped, he told himself as he whiled the time away on her leg. He still tried to break free whenever she stopped for a while, and he made some small progress with his left arm, but nothing to write home about, and he was still all tied up by the time Beatrice entered her bedroom.
It was there that the youthful spirit began undressing, first slipping off shoe, then pulling down her tights and letting them slump onto the floor. Subaru fell along with them and, luckily for both, he ended up inside the pile of fabric. He saw nothing of her carefully removing her dress, hair ribbons, and tiny crown to change into a fresh outfit identical in appearance.
Beatrice sat at the foot of her bed, swinging her legs up and down with a thoughtful look on her face. For hours now, she had the nagging feeling that she had forgotten something, yet she still couldn't figure out what. Was it the books? No, she had put them all back in their proper place before leaving the library. It wasn't the cleaning either, since she had taken care of that this morning. And she'd locked the library door after leaving, so it couldn't be that either.
Door? Wait, that was it! The other door, the one she had created herself in the back of the library. She forgot to check if anyone had triggered the safety measures on it. Since it had never happened before, she simply forgot all about it.
Well, she probably wouldn't find anything, but it was worth making sure all the same. Beatrice closed her eyes, breathed in, and slowly exhaled. Focusing on the flow of mana, she tried to read the traces of her spell. When she found them, she gasped and opened her eyes. Someone had fallen for it after all. What's more, she could detect traces of the spell now, albeit faint ones—that must have been what was nagging at her all this time.
She focused on that trace, resolved to follow it wherever it lead, most likely back to the library. She was surprised when the trace turned out to be coming from inside this very room, from a spot on the floor.
Beatrice stood. She walked over to her discarded tights. Whoever had fallen for the trap was right down there.
Mana flowed into her eyes, enhancing her sight beyond any human limit. She looked down at the tights, scanning their surface for any signs of humanity. When she found none from this angle, she gripped the waistline by her toes and stretched it out on the floor. Still nothing. But when she flipped the thing over, her eyes instantly seized on the shrunken victim and widened in surprise.
Meanwhile, down below, Subaru had been listening keenly to her actions ever since she hopped off the bed gain, and waited to see what would happen. When she stopped right by the tights, he thought he would be killed somehow, and wondered if that might be better than being stuck here all night.
She didn't crush him, but he took another scare when she stretched out the tights, and again when she flipped them over. When he was left facing up, he looked straight ahead and found her eyes staring right back at him.
His breath caught in his throat. Was she really looking at him? No, it couldn't be. He was much too small for anyone to notice from that distance. It was impossible, he knew. But was it really?
He held on to hope even as he told himself how dumb he was being, and when he saw and heard her delicate lips whisper, “Subaru? Is that really you I suppose?”, he rejoiced with tears in his eyes. Finally, she had found him. Finally, he was saved. Beatrice would grow him back and this nightmare would be over. And with a sigh, he gave a silent prayer of thanks for this weight lifted off his soul.
“You little worm. I should have known it was you. And now I'll have to punish you for snooping around, I suppose.”
And just like that Subaru's hopes came crashing back down. The young man couldn't help but tremble as he met the hard gaze of her colorful eyes; whatever was coming next, he knew it wouldn't be good for him.
If only he hadn't touched that damn door.
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
A Re:ZERO story. Subaru finds himself reduced to a speck while looking for Beatrice and must find a way to get her help.
RATING: PG
TAGS: Nano, F/m, Entrapment, Feet, Footwear, Legwear, Unaware, Fantasy
RATING: PG
TAGS: Nano, F/m, Entrapment, Feet, Footwear, Legwear, Unaware, Fantasy