3 weeks later…
In the end that’s how long it took for Power Girl and her swarm to utterly consume the Earth, or at the very least scour it of everything edible! When she and the others were finished with Gotham Karen moved on to the next city, and the next, and the next, and the next one from there. Every major city was destroyed and reduced to rubble within minutes, their people, animals, plants even the raw materials like wood and paper were devoured until all that was left were hewn rock and metal, the husks of used nests left behind and discarded as the swarm moved on for more to feed on.
They were like locusts, swarming over the coast by the thousands devouring everything in sight. And with every ton of mass they consumed merely added to the bulk of their numbers. The females of their ranks; the queens, brood mothers, whatever they chose to call themselves churned out spawn like an assembly line, dozens or hundreds at a time. Daily! By the time they had striped the East coast bare they numbered in the millions, and kept right on going.
The military were powerless, even their most powerful weapons were useless and by the time half the country was gone they had resorted to stockpiles they promised themselves they’d never use. Nuclear, chemical, biological, they seemed to work briefly at first… That is until the swarm started adapting, then it all seemed to feed them, empower them further. Over a dozen hydrogen bombs used to stem them in Nevada and yet the radiation was soaked up so readily like a sponge by the monsters that not even a handheld Geiger counter could read any lasting radiation. After the first week both North and South America were scoured bare and clean, and without a second thought other nations desperately went into action fighting this vicious new species.
By the second week the swarm had numbered in the hundreds of millions, and they had flown from the west cost to the shores of China and Russia, each one of the bloated monstrous creatures were the size of an aircraft carrier, slamming down onto the shore and biting into the buildings and landscape, devouring everything natural or manmade, they cared not what they sunk their teeth into.
When the feeding was paused it was only so that the males and females would collide with one another, massive leviathans writhing in orgies spanning as far as the eye can see, howling and roaring out loud as fluids spilled and splashed, hardening onto the earth at their taloned feet only to be moulded into nests for the newborns births mere minutes after conception, practically doubling their numbers on the spot. When their new additions matured days later, growing to match their parents the swarm as a whole continued on, their sights on what they hadn’t eaten yet.
By the third week the Earth was barren, the human race extinct and gone, as were everything else! And yet the swarm pressed on, their maddening hunger driving them to drain the oceans dry just to fill their demanding stomachs. From space had anyone been alive to see it, the process would have looked like a peach swarming with ants, it’s surface gnawed upon for hours until it’s skin was gone and the billions of creatures had eaten away everything usable before hitting its core.
Just three weeks and the Earth had been striped to the point that it matched its neighboring moon. Dead, grey and cold even the atmosphere had been drained. The planet had shared the same fate as its sister Mars. But unlike the rust red planet, Earth was no longer their prison. The alien species having finished its meal and grown innumerable took to the skies and flew off into space. From there the entire solar system had become available to them. Venus and Mercury were scoured in days, made cold and barren, left discarded only the smear of resin nests left behind as evidence of their presence there. Jupiter and Saturn took almost a year! Their moons used as nesting grounds while the swarm took draining sips from the gas giant’s atmospheres, their numbers doubling with every wave. By the time Neptune and Uranus were scoured a month later, Pluto was all but an afterthought.
5 years later and all hell had broken out in all the civilized parts of the galaxy! Rumors and whispers at first, travelling merchants and starship travellers told stories of planets once habitable with whole civilizations were gone overnight, overtaken by an unknown enemy. Over time word reached the Green Lantern core the threat had finally made itself known… By then the swarm could be seen even from space. A hideous smear of green translucent chitin shimmered in the star light, light-years across like a mobile nebula it enveloped stars, passing through them as an amoeba and leaving behind nothing but death. Every lantern core had gotten involved, the threat so obvious even cores that were bitter enemies set aside old grudges to face this darkest night.
To the swarm it didn’t matter, or more importantly it merely drew their attention away from the reef star systems only to garner its efforts towards Oa itself. Seeing this green tide come to crash down on its defenses the seven cores of light stood their ground, ready to strike back with all the force of their powers. From the outside looking in the center of the galaxy was like a candle being drowned out by a slow flowing green wax, colours and flashes bled out, scalding the swarm in the millions only for it to be drowned out bit by bit, the light getting dimmer.
"HURRY! We must stop them here, or else the entire Galaxy is destroyed!" The immortal guardians locked away in the main battery hall on Oa watched on with their telepathy, the night’s sky lit with the beams and hard-light constructs of their Green Lanterns fighting side by side with the Reds, Blues, Yellows, Star Sapphires and Violets, even Larfreeze had spent his entire collection of living trophies to fight this swarm. But for each leviathan the lanterns killed there were two more to take its place. Then they heard it, felt it, sensed it…
A presence had arrived, sickly and depraved it was like a maddening lust, or gluttony that struck out against every living thing present on and around the planet. Clutching their minds and screaming the guardians looked around frantically as it spoke out with a haughty purr.
MINE!
Talons the size of the hall’s pillars pierced into the ceiling of the battery’s chamber, prying it off to be tossed away out of sight. Looking up the blue ancients were driven to powerless fits of panic at the titanic creature looking down at them. Easily the size of a city in her own rite Power Girl smiled at her prize, her many rows of teeth glinting in the jade green light and her six yellow reptilian eyes glared at the glowing battery at the center of the room. Lowering her claw Karen tore the green battery out of its anchors with ease, lifting it up to admire its surface like one would admire a candy. Extending her three prehensile tongues they wrapped around the tiny thing, pulling it into her maw just before her jaws closed shut, a coo of pleasure escaping her pouting lips and four nostrils. Tracing her claw down her long bulbous serpentine neck she followed the battery down her throat, caressing down the cleavage of her twenty breasts until it stopped at the spherical mass of her perpetually pregnant belly.
Bellowing out a roar that shook the city and made the guardians numb and deaf, they looked up in horror to find the sky dark with the gloss green chitin of billions of leviathans ready to descend on their world, but the true horror came from looking up at the head of that swarm one last time, just as Power Girl’s many eyes began to glow green, as did millions of glowing specs which appeared underneath the surface of her bloated womb. At that one final instance they knew that this terrible force of destruction had now ascended to something truly unstoppable.
And the look she gave them just as her water broke and green glowing grubs began to exit her birth canal…
She knew it too.
The End.