The ruthless sun beats down on a weary shrine maiden as she trudges her way across the vast wasteland. The brown sole of the vast sandal stretches on for miles, all the way to the distant horizon where the young woman can see her destination: five massive toeprints like shallow craters lined with the moist sweat of the sandal’s owner. In fact, almost the entire sole is coated with the liquid, and as she makes her long trek to the other side, she is forced to wade through it, the sweat soaking her own tabi socks all the way up to the knee. To make matters worse, an overwhelmingly pungent stench fills the humid air around the maiden, suffocating her in the cheesy smell of feet, closing in on all sides and attacking her nose. It’s so strong that the smell alone has started to make her light-headed.
She presses on. She knows what will become of her if she cannot make it to the toeprints. Despite the tiring heat, a shiver runs down the maiden’s spine as she imagines her fate: a little red speck, barely visible to the naked eye, staining the ground beneath her. She shakes her head, dispelling the thought, and pushes forward. It does her no good to worry about such a thing. All she can do is keep moving forward.
Several disproportionately deafening sounds unnerve her as she hikes. The familiar crashing of waves implies the sandals are somewhere by the ocean, however at her size the sound is amplified dramatically so that each crash is reminiscent of thunder. A distant chatter, vaguely reminiscent of human voices makes her believe she is in a public setting, like a beach or a pier. This idea is reinforced by the various grains of sand she passes along her journey, each ranging from the size of a boulder to little hills several times larger than herself.
Eventually, the little shrine maiden reaches a landmark: the shaded portion of the sandal, created by the shadow of the sandal’s towering toe post and eclipsing strap. After hours of continuous exercise, the shrine maiden collapses, almost involuntarily, into the shade, basking in the coolness of the layer of sweat beneath her. A voice in the back of her head nags at her, reminding her that she does not have the luxury to rest and that if she stops now she may never get back up, but she ignores it. Her muscles ache, her face and neck are sunburnt, so she takes this chance to give herself some rest before continuing on. She closes her eyes gently, allowing herself to sink further and further out of consciousness, until…
A ground-shaking boom jolts her awake. The shrine maiden lifts herself up out of the sweat layer quickly, frantically taking in her surroundings. The shade she had once found refuge in had shrunk with the passing of time and the sun’s drift down the sky, now leaving her exposed in the harsh sunlight. Another boom resounds across the sandalscape and with it the sole beneath her trembles again, and then another boom, and another, echoing at a moderate rhythm. With each quake, the ground shakes more, and the booms get louder, until a colossal figure grows on the horizon past the toeprints, silhouetted against the outline of the setting sun. The shrine maiden’s stomach drops as she realizes her predicament.
The figure stops just above the sandal, its immense body soaring miles into the sky. The shrine maiden recognizes her: it’s Yae Miko, the Guuji of the Grand Narukami Shrine, and on a more urgent note, the sandal’s owner. She’s dressed in a revealing pink bikini, her soft, pale body slick with water presumably from the ocean, dripping lazily down her monolithic legs and mountainous breasts. The colossal kitsune lowers herself to a squat, a devilish grin spread across her looming facade.
“So this is where I left it,” she mutters to herself. Her otherwise inward voice roars across the sandal, forcing the little shrine maiden to cover her ears. The Guuji’s deep purple eyes scan the sole, as if looking for something. The shrine maiden throws herself to the ground to avoid her gaze, but her efforts prove counterproductive: the sudden movement attracts the Guuji’s attention. A satisfied sigh washes over the sandal.
“And what do we have here?” Yae asks playfully. The little shrine maiden quivers, refusing to look up in the desperate hope that the Guuji might lose interest. “I see you down there, little one.”
Suddenly, the panic keeping the maiden paralyzed thaws and bursts forth through her. Instinctively, her mind in a frenzy, the shrine maiden shoots up and begins scampering away from the titaness at a speed she did not know she was capable of. She lunges through the knee-deep layer of sweat still blanketing the sandal, losing her balance and tripping more than once, but each time she scrambles back up, determined to make her getaway. But the sandal is still so vast, and the edge still so distant. There is no chance she could make it to the edge in time.
The Guuji chuckles as she watches the mote fall over herself. “I appreciate your commitment, little one,” Yae teases. “Keep going, you’re almost there. Surely those terribly little legs of yours can outrun mine.”
The Guuji stands back up to her full height to demonstrate the full length of her skyscraping legs. To Yae’s dismay, the maiden does not look back to witness the taunt. The Guuji’s mischievous smile fades into an unimpressed glare.
“Stop running, speck,” she spits. The maiden stops in place at once, almost against her will. “Your futile little game has bored me.” She pauses a moment to think, putting a finger to her chin for dramatic effect. Something sinister flashes behind the Guuji’s eyes as she comes to a conclusion.
The Guuji’s toes curl over the heel of the sandal, pressing down and lifting the front half up. The sudden shift makes the maiden’s stomach drop and her face is pushed against the sweaty ground as it flies upwards. Then, she starts sliding down the slick slope, picking up speed as she goes until she’s gliding so fast that she’s passing comparative miles in an instant. Before she reaches the heel of the sandal, Yae lessens the incline a little, slowing the maiden’s descent just enough to keep her from breaking when she slams into the Guuji’s big toe. The soft, meaty surface of the toe absorbs most of the impact. The Guuji gives the maiden a moment to recover and peel herself off the sweaty skin of her block-sized toe.
“Let’s make a deal, shall we?” the titaness proposes. Her toes wiggle playfully, rubbing against the tiny shrine maiden and revealing their sand-caked undersides. “The conditions are simple. I’m going to put on my sandals which you have so rudely trespassed upon. If you can manage to survive my trek home, I get to keep you as my little pet!
However, if you cannot endure the journey,” she continues, lifting her immense big toe and hovering it over the shrine maiden, “well, you can imagine the results of that.” With inhuman precision, the kitsune bops the maiden on head, gentle enough to not cause any injury, before withdrawing her toes from the sandal. Then, she digs her toes underneath the sandal heel and lifts up, sending the maiden barreling back down towards the toe end. The young woman stops against the sandal’s toepost and the gigantic Guuji removes her foot from beneath the sandal, letting the sole become level again.
“I hope you’ve prepared yourself,” the Guuji muses. “I’ll be honest with you: bugs don’t usually last very long beneath my feet.”
Still recovering from her second sudden tumble of the evening, the shrine maiden watches as her tormentor’s colossal foot starts to slide into her sandal, gradually closing the distance to the toe post, toes wriggling in anticipation. The foot hovers slightly above the sole, casting the ground below in an all-encompassing shadow like a storm blocks out the sky, falling grains of sand replacing raindrops. The shrine maiden gets up and begins sprinting around the base of the toe post, its circumference the size of a running track. Eventually, the Guuji’s foot reaches its destination, hovering over the shrine maiden and the rest of her puny world. She throws herself at the toe post, only halfway around it, and scrunches her eyes, bracing for impact as the foot descends.
A powerful force squeezes the young woman against the toe post, pushing to and fro as Yae gets her foot settled in. It comes to a stop, pressing the little woman firmly in place and smothering her in sweaty, smelly toe skin. With every labored breath, the maiden gags at the smell, only to close her mouth once again after her tongue gets a taste of the flesh immediately in front of it.
“Here we go, speck,” Yae warns from above. Suddenly, the toe against her moves up, dragging the maiden with it and her puny world tilts left. The maiden slides across the big toe’s surface, getting wedged deeper between the Guuji’s toes. After the Guuji’s step reaches its peak, the world moves back down and becomes level again, before lifting up the other way, this time tilting to the right, sliding the maiden back to where she started, her body dragging across the Guuji’s big toe the whole way. Then the world tilts to the left once more as the Guuji takes another step and the process repeats, the little shrine maiden being dragged back and forth against her captor’s toe.
She can’t take much more of this. The constant tilting of the world makes the maiden want to hurl, and the dragging feels like it's going to rub her face off. Desperate to remove herself from this fleshy prison, the little maiden begins squirming, hoping to pull herself free from big toe’s pinch against the toe post.
“Having trouble down there?” Yae taunts. The shrine maiden ignores her, continuing her struggles as she continues to slide back and forth. After a few minutes and a little luck, she finally manages to shimmy her way out of the toe’s hold and onto the firm sole below. However, she finds herself in an even worse predicament.
As the world tilts right, the young woman finds she has nothing to hold onto and begins sliding down towards the front end of the sandal. She gets a glimpse of the now grassy ground far below, a farther fall than anything she would ever imagine to survive. Now in a free fall, the shrine maiden waves her arms back and forth, finding nothing but air as she plummets to certain death. Then, at the last moment, the Guuji’s second toe comes back down and the maiden lands hard on its underside, her body plastered against it among the thousands of grains of sand with the help of a sticky layer of sweat. She clings on for dear life as the titaness continues her walk.
“Hang in there, speck,” the Guuji teases once more. “We’ve still got a ways to go.”
With each step, the little maiden feels her body peeling off the toe, threatening to send her falling again. She clings onto the soft, slick surface as best she can, but it’s not enough to fight gravity. She drops from the toe towards the inclined sole beneath her, but this time instead of falling towards the toe end and out of the sandal, she hits the sole and slides downwards toward the rest of the Guuji’s foot. She passes the toe post and continues her quick descent along with many grains of sand rolling with her beneath the ball of Yae’s foot, its expanses hovering over the sandal’s sole since her foot is lifted off the ground. It’s not long before the Guuji’s foot starts descending back down towards the sandal as she continues her step, and to the little maiden, it’s as if the heavens themselves are crashing down to earth, threatening to crush her into paste.
With another stroke of luck, the young woman slides under the foot’s arch as the ball of her foot smashes against the sole behind her, and the maiden’s descent slows to a safe stop. Without skipping a beat, however, the ground tilts the other way, threatening to send her tumbling back towards the Guuji’s toes. But before she can slip back under the ball of her foot, the maiden gets up and runs with the inclining slope, using it to her advantage to pick up and speed and then jump at the foot just before it ascends again, adhering herself to the flesh just like on the Guuji’s toe before instead of falling back the way she came.
However, just like on the Guuji’s toe, this trick does not last long as with a few more steps the maiden is peeled off the moist skin once again. She hits the sole and slides down underneath the Guuji’s heel rapidly. This time she’s sure she can make it out from under the Guuji’s foot in time, but this poses another crisis. With time to spare, she slides back into the sunlight at the end of the sandal while Yae’s heel hits the sandal, but the maiden doesn’t stop there. With how quickly she’s sliding, she’s at risk of flying off the back of the sandal completely and falling to her death.
The maiden claws at the slick sole beneath her, hoping to slow her descent, but she can’t get a firm grip through all the grime. She skids downwards, slowing down gradually but not fast enough, until she comes to a complete stop just at the very edge of the sandal, her legs dangling off the side while she grips the corner with her upper body. Her grip falters, and just before she plummets to the ground below, the Guuji takes yet another step forward, pulling her sandal up under her and allowing her little passenger to clamber back on, then slide back down the sandal, hitting the Guuji’s damp heel where she remains stuck for the rest of the journey. Eventually, the world stops tilting back and forth, and an announcement roars from above.
“Here we are,” the Guuji declares. The little woman glued to her heel looks around, still panting from the rigorous trial she had only barely endured. Surrounding her was a massive room, stretching on for what seemed like forever, immense furniture so huge and distant that it blurred into the background like mountain ranges. The Guuji sits in a nearby chair and slips her feet from her sandals, pulling one leg up over her knee. She picks up one of her sandals and inspects it meticulously.
“Where’d you go, my little speck?” she mutters to herself. Her eyes catch a little dot on the back of her heel. “Ah, there you are.” An enormous finger reaches down to the maiden and its long, pink nail scrapes her from the heel. Yae holds the mite of a woman up to her eye. The maiden watches as the giant violet eye many times bigger than herself stares down at her coldly, sending a shiver down her spine.
“You sure have seen better days,” the Guuji comments. It’s true, the little maiden quivering on her nail is drenched head to toe in sweat and grime, her hair tangled and matted. “Usually I would discard a revolting little pest like you away without a second thought, but I suppose I did make a deal, and I have no intention of going back on it. I suppose I can make you my little pet.”
Yae throws her hair back behind her head nonchalantly, knocking the maiden off balance and onto her knees. “Honestly, though, I didn’t expect you to survive the way home. You’ve proven to be quite the resilient bug. I like that.” The Guuji flashes her a maniacal smirk. “I imagine you’ll bring me much amusement.”