title: Shark Attack aliases: [] tags: [FA] author: [Kyrm] id: [42175187] date: 星期一, 三月 6日 2023, 10:44:09 上午 modified: 星期一, 三月 6日 2023, 10:46:19 上午

[TOC]

Shark Attack

Author: Kyrm Source: Shark Attack [Commission]

Ten plastic ships floated together on the boiling sea. Rumbling waters dispersed them. Steam took the role of mist, a humid cloud simplifying everything more than a few feet out into dark shapes.

Stranded on the middlemost ship was Marius. While the other rudderless sailors rode wherever they were carried, his ship buoyed in place. Rocked by bubbling waters that lapped over unguarded sides and wet his paws with their unusual warmth.

All ten of them assumed the same stance to avoid going overboard: arms wrapped around the inadequate masts jutting from their boats. To call them boats, however, was much too generous. These were parodies made from cheap, brightly colored plastic—so narrow Marius and the others had to stand rigid or risk unbalancing them.

Stand. Hold. Drift. It was all they could do as the steam clouds divided them.

The dog on the craft closest to Marius was taken first. Five long, jointed serpents emerged around him. He managed a single moan of terror, cut short as the serpents simultaneously descended, snapping him and his ship into the depths.

Only a few seconds passed before it reemerged, darting from the steam and pinching another rider by his shirt. Reeling him away, cries dwindling the further he went.

Mocking them, knowing they could only stand and wait for their fates, it descended from the sky next. All five hydra heads wiggled eagerly from the same flexing body. They provided ample time for the cat onboard to squeak his pleas. Pitilessly, the predators dove, driving the boat and its rider underwater.

Another loud plunk came from behind Marius, and he turned in time to see an identical, five-headed sea serpent balling around ship and rider. Both serpents lifted their squealing prizes into the air and carried them away.

He watched them return to the only visible landmass, too titanic for distance to obscure it: an island, rising out of the water.

An island that breathed.

It loomed in the distance, a smooth plane angled away from him, interrupted by round, twinned hills. Both sea monsters flew their prey past those hills, to the island’s very peak. The left serpent shook the ship in its clutches, and the person dangling from its mast fell, same as all the others had. The right one was shaken out next.

Both people were dropped somewhere inside the island peak. Their reception was met with an ominous, finalizing:

“Gulp!”

Followed by a bellowing sigh, as if the wind had decided to announce its happiness.

One by one, they were picked off. Carried to that island’s peak. Announced by another mighty gulp.

Staying in one spot seemed to give Marius an advantage. His ship’s decision to remain idle made him a less interesting target. At first, he assumed this was a good thing. But some nagging part of him, the part that had a cold grip on his stomach, said that he would wish he was the first to be taken...

At least then it would have ended quickly.

They were all taken, everyone except Marius. He floated there for a time, waiting to be snatched. Minutes rolled by, and his legs were getting tired.

Beyond the steam, a new sound carried. Many times deeper than his voice, but distinctly feminine. It echoed from the island, which seemed to be in the throes of an earthquake.

“And that. Leaves. One,” the island announced.

The waters roiled beneath Marius, but there was nothing he could do except hold his breath. A wave tumbled him overboard and he emerged gasping—treading water as he stared up at a smooth yellow stalk larger than an apartment building. Even more sprawling were the wide, curving fins that fanned from it.

“I go through so much trouble, and then I blow through all of you in a couple minutes,” the island tutted in self-reprimand.

The tail waved like a titanic fan, its fins dispersing the accumulation of steam in one gesture. After that, it slithered underwater. It had done its job, revealing the reality of Marius’s sea.

A sea that wasn’t a sea.

An island that wasn’t an island.

And the monsters, well...

“At least, almost all of you,” she said.

The sea serpents weren’t separate monsters, but parts of a monstrous whole. The hands of the tormentor who had snatched Marius and the others away from their lives. Put them on their little toy rigs and cast them into her running hot tub.

Porcelain curved around its borders. Sleek. Smooth. Impossible for someone his stature to scale. In other words: a water-filled deathtrap.

Dominating that death trap was an isle of woman. A black-haired shark. Alabaster colored her smooth stomach, the hills that were her breasts, the chin and cheeks of a curving snout that had callously sent nine people to their ends. Framing all that white was a black-striped sunset gradient more butterfly than predator. Oranges and yellows, all bathed in wet gloss that caught dim ceiling lights. It seemed so horribly wrong that someone so beautiful could do this, but Marius knew she had done it.

And he knew she would do it again.

“So, what’s your name?” Such a pedestrian question felt out of place, booming at a volume that could captivate a thousand souls. Especially when it was only leveled at one.

When he didn’t answer, annoyance claimed her brow. “Tch.” She sneered, flipping a bang away from her left eye. “Not a conversationalist, huh?”

Beneath the bubbles, he made out the black silhouette of a leg long as a landing strip. It breached, triggering waves that forced him under. He struggled back to the surface, fighting weaker ripples while paddling towards his ship—overturned, but it would still help him float.

The shark drew her leg back towards herself, monolithic thigh and calf squashed together to form a pillar. Just as easily: it began to unwind. Four black, truck-sized oval shapes emerged ahead of her leg, each capped by a yellow claw. The nearer they drew, the more they peeked from the water. Rising higher to reveal the sleek white sole supporting all four toes.

Her foot smashed past Marius with the force of a freight train. If he had actually made it to his boat, he would have been swept along with it. The implications of this became all the more horrifying as her foot fully erupted from the water. A hollow gonging sounded as she slammed her foot against the porcelain wall opposite her.

Underscoring it: the crunch of a toy boat made of stronger material than Marius’s bones.

“I’m Rho, by the way,” she said. “Pleasure to eat ya.”

He knew she didn’t mean meet.

Rho pulled her foot away from the wall. Colorful scraps slid down it, sinking into the water. “Oh, dear,” she cooed, “it seems your ship hit some rocky shores.” Heaving her calf into the air, the shark used it to darken Marius’s sky. Dripping water rained all around him until she drew her leg even further back—until he looked up and saw a sky of shark sole.

He wished he was brave enough to stare down his fate with dignity, but he did what he always swore he wouldn’t when faced with a giant:

He tried to flee, his breaststrokes carrying him a pitiful distance.

“You should be careful, you know.” With each pitiful mote of distance he swam out from under the shadow of Rho’s foot, she lazily inched it over him. Lowered it towards him. “It’s dangerous, being stranded out at sea.” She made it that way. Within the confines of her tub, she was a living storm. Her foot rushed down. Water absorbed an otherwise crushing blow that plunged Marius towards the bottom of the tub.

Rather than smash him against the bottom, she stopped partway before the tub floor. He opened his eyes; they bulged as he saw her smooth white sole overhead. He patted it at first, trying to tempt her to budge. He couldn’t bank on her showing mercy, so he started to swim. Each desperate attempt was counteracted by a slight movement of her foot, which remained over him.

His lungs wouldn’t hold much longer. He pounded his fists against her sole. Its unblemished surface wrinkled in a scrunch, and then it swept backwards at a speed that only made him feel more defeated. She could maneuver through these waters without trying. It wasn’t enough that she was a hundred times his size, she was also a shark.

He took her foot’s movement as a sign to swim back up. As he thrashed his arms in a bid for the surface, he realized he was too far down. He wouldn’t make it. He would have to breathe. He would drown. He—

Rho’s foot lunged towards him, toes parted like open jaws. They engulfed his frail body between them and lifted up. The moment he tasted air, he took the longest breath of his life. Her toes were slippery enough that he could force his arms out; he slung them over the skin between them, shamelessly resting his cheek there while regaining his composure.

She laughed all the while.

“What, not even a ‘thank you’ for being your life preserver?”

Reluctantly, Marius opened his eyes.

With Rho’s leg upraised, he had a view of the entire room. Spacious—she had money. Power enough to decide who lived and died among his tiny kind, and then power amongst her own kind as well. A spoiled giantess. Who knew how huge the rest of her home was? How remote it was compared to the rest of the world? Even if he escaped, the best he might be able to manage was living in her walls. Existing in constant fear of her footsteps. Sneaking out to steal table scraps until the day she again caught him, and then he would be the table scrap.

“You’re not getting out,” she said, confirming his fears. Drawing his hopes away from the world outside the porcelain tub. Bringing his gaze down the reality that was the bridge of her beautiful leg, along the length of that devastatingly beautiful body… then settling on her smirk.

“I know that tiny mind of yours is thinking what you did to deserve this.” Rho wiggled her toes as she talked, rubbing her slick skin up against his. Making him sputter by pushing toe flesh into his face. “No one sold you out or anything. Truth is...” She clenched toes too wet to crush him. As the pressure built, they launched him out. He slid down the front of her foot, scrabbling for purchase on the nightmarish water slide. But it was all perfectly smooth. He plunged along her tibia, reached her knee—then flew off it.

Hurtling through clouds of steam, he tried to change his trajectory from the inevitable. Partway through, he landed on a wrinkled platform of white sharkskin. He somersaulted once before his surroundings curved up like a bowl and stopped his momentum. He hopped to his feet, looking up at his looming captors—the many-jointed “hydras” that had taken everyone else away. Her fingers, all arched inwards, their tips teasingly curled forward as if looking down on him.

Whenever one of them so much as twitched, the ground reacted. Forcing him to stumble, shying away from one finger to be taunted by another. It would only take a second for them to curl together and crush him in a fist. Preoccupied with the fingers, he forgot all about the massive face sweeping in through the steam.

“I was just bored,” she said, breath blowing apart mist. Her wide grin showcased a gallery of razors, interlocking in a jagged zigzag.

“Please,” Marius whined. A perfunctory word for a perfunctory point in his little life. He was already her next meal, but this was all he could think to do. Dropping to his knees, splashing water from puddles recessed in bunches of palm flesh. Clasping his hands together. Trying to find that glimmer of compassion.

It was blown away with a low chuckle, a tongue traced across teeth.

“I guess I’ve let you stew long enough,” she said, and began to inch her maw downwards. With each moment, it took up more of his view. She cradled her snout with her fingers.

Marius let out a sound he didn’t know he could make. Some garbled whine as he went from on his knees to his back—the only way to avoid contact with that impending grin, so close he could touch it. Then he was pinned beneath her snout, snuffling at him like she was a dog.

“Ahhh,” she sighed, her maw parting to encompass the ends of her palms. Marius went rigid. He suddenly missed being sniffed. Without any light, he could only dimly make out her hanging rows of teeth. The drool-slicked bowels of a cavern he was about to be intimately acquainted with.

Nothing appeared to move, but he felt gravity shifting at his back. She was lifting her last morsel into the air, angling her palm higher and higher. Realizing what she was doing, he went to grab the wrinkled ridges of her palm—trying to cling to something but finding her body too smooth.

The angle steepened, his center of mass steadily bowing forward. As it reached near-vertical, the point at which Rho must have had her head thrown all the way back, he fell forward. His knees bumped one of her lower fangs, flinging him head-first inside the shark’s maw.

It was as though time in the hot tub had been training him for this moment.

The tub was hot, her breath was hotter.

Her spit, thicker. More fur-clotting.

And her tongue: a more violent version of the waves that had tossed him about. It saved him from falling into the back of Rho’s gullet, but only for later. The slobbery mass slithered beneath him. Out in the tub, the water had been less terrifying. Water, after all, didn’t think. It only reacted to its environment. This pink slab didn’t roll him about because it was a force of nature—though it certainly felt like one.

It rolled him about because it was malicious. Because Rho, someone he had just met, thought it was fun to torment him.

Playing with her food, she acquainted Marius with every inch of the cavern where he would spend the rest of his life. A life that wouldn’t last more than a few more revolutions of the second hand. She rammed him against the rigid wall of her teeth. Slammed and squelched him into the roof of her mouth. Dragged him about without giving a moment to recuperate, tenderizing him until all the fight had been pummeled out of him—limp limbs swaying with each tongue-led motion.

Her mouth, the last thing he would see.

Her tongue, the last thing he would feel.

Her spit, the last thing he would taste.

Her breath, the last thing he would smell.

A deep drone sounded in the backdrop: an almost sensual hum. Deafening reverb ensured she would be the last thing he heard as well. Rho didn’t care what he had accomplished in his life. It didn’t matter if he still had plans, because he had the misfortune of crossing paths with the bored shark. He had caught her eye by virtue of being small, helpless—the traits that made others condescend to his kind. Think of them as in need of protecting.

Well, he did need protecting.

But there was no one around to protect him. He was alone with Rho’s tongue, bullying his limbs to aching exhaustion. He almost felt something like gratitude when gravity next shifted. Rho, tilting her chin up—pinning him to the backs of her front teeth, his arms hanging over the tip of her tongue. In the dark, far below, he made out her glistening, clenching gullet.

A single flick of the tongue and he began to tumble down. Humid air blasted out beneath him in one last, droning sigh. Her ever-flexing throat caught his right leg. Then his left. He didn’t fight its crushing force; even if he did somehow escape, he was too weak to take more than one step.

Up to his waist. His shoulders. His head. The slick tunnel massaged the air from his lungs. Claustrophobic, crowding, bumping him back and forth.

Before he hit the bottom, he was unconscious.

Rho registered the last of her morsels as a little pill rolling down her throat. When at last the ferret passed through to join his buddies, she patted her stomach and let out a sigh.

“On the bright side, turning into calories that’ll keep me going for the day is more than you would’ve achieved in all of your little lives,” she said, smiling at her stomach as if her meals were alive in there. Maybe they were: her stomach quivered. It turned out to be a false alarm, though—it was growling from hunger.

“Geeze.” She got up from the tub and turned it off, soaked feet slapping against the tiled floor. Grabbing a towel, she began to dry off. “Guess you guys weren’t enough, oh well. Really inconsiderate—both to me, and your kind.” She cast her dripping towel aside and polished the steamed mirror until she could see her face. Flashing fangs to practice a beastly grin. “Guess I’ve got to go find some more of you.”

Humming to herself, Rho strolled out of the room, patting her growling stomach to reassure it that she was going to find it a good, hearty, wriggling meal.