A sole a quarter-mile long smashed into the earth with such concussive strength that it toppled multiple smaller buildings in the city beyond, causing chaos in the streets where cars had clustered in a hopeless deadlock to escape on the highways. Andrea dug her foot down, twisting and churning her naked flesh upon the ground. Her toes burrowed easily into the flattened rubble, grappling for purchase and reinvigorating the strength of her flexed thigh. She could actually feel the ticklish explosions of totaled military hardware within the boundless wrinkles of her cute sole. A girlish snicker erupted from her throat.
Maybe she’d been hasty by panicking before. Maybe, just maybe, there was something to all of this madness?
A point of light as bright as a dying star lit up from a silo somewhere a few miles away. Andrea nearly had to shield her eyes as the glowing dot rose up on its arcing trajectory and traveled toward her. Not much larger than a matchhead, the missile made its way toward Andrea’s chest. Frowning, the girl reached out, cupped both hands around the weapon, and smushed it between closed palms.
Nuclear energy fumed inside her clasped hands. A distorted mushroom cloud, held in Andrea’s palms, imbued her entire body with incredible warmth, like she’d just stuck her face momentarily over a steaming oven. The girl was briefly spooked by the sheer forearm-rattling strength of the explosion for her destruction-keen foes.
Only then did she notice the swell of the wind around her cheeks, the dizzying spiral of the ground below, and the sudden fall of the clouds from above her head down toward her calves. Andrea opened her hands again, savoring the lingering tingle of the nuclear bomb as though she’d just received a full-body massage, and nearly wiped out on eye contact with the earth.
She’d grown again. And this time, the increase made her first growth spurt look like a puberty-ridden tween’s usual weekly inch gain by comparison.
At least ten times her previous size, if not greater. A veritable celestial being, which was especially appropriate, given that her head rose easily higher than the atmospherically contained pocket of oxygen around Earth. She had to be somewhere in the deific neighborhood of seventy miles tall.
Andrea was a goddess now.
This word “goddess” was the first to enter her mind, and she saw no reason to adopt any other. Certainly none of the microscopic mortals down below could do any better to describe her. As the largest, most powerful being on the planet now by an astronomic margin, anything less would be an insult.
The cosmic young woman stooped down, hands on her knees, and bowed as close to the earth as she could manage. Black hair hung in a canopy like raining storm clouds over the world. Her foot which still wore the flip-flop arched back, the flesh of her sole slapping against the pink rubber as the flexed appendage barreled through untold miles of land surrounding her city. Surely multiple townships were bulldozed by this simple act, and Andrea hardly deigned to turn around and observe the literal hundreds of thousands of crushed houses, buildings, and city blocks smeared into her foamy shoe tread. She planted her fingers into the earth for support, feeling them sink through grass and loam as though the entire planet was made of melted clay.
On earth, the effects of Andrea’s second nuclear-powered growth were exponentially dire. The rest of the small town where her crushed high school belonged was wiped out by the expansion of the angelically white-garbed goddess’s ten-mile-long feet. Her big toe crashed through a mountain peak, causing an avalanche as her sweet digit emerged through the rocky underbelly. A flash-flood of boulders visited upon the town on the opposite valley, wiping out neighborhoods and city districts alike from the mere prod of Andrea’s toe above.
The hometown city wasn’t faring much better. The hapless history teacher Mr. Duncan stood atop his car, peering over the hopeless wreckage of the downtown area, or whatever remained of it. Cars jammed every which way, blown in the wind of the giant teen’s steps or otherwise brushed aside by cascading buildings. Then, of course, there was the centerpiece of the carnage and the symbol of humanity’s incoming fall: Andrea’s pudgy, adorable pinky toe rested peacefully atop the crumpled remnants of the urban spread, her shortest digit taller than any single skyscraper could’ve hoped to match. Buildings fortunate enough to survive her lurch forward were bent in all manner of gravity-defying directions, leaning into the slight wrinkles of her beefy, impenetrable skin. Occasionally her foot would twitch as she endeavored to crouch over the earth, flicking another city block into oblivion.
An early night fell in shadow, as Andrea’s seventy-mile form well and truly blocked out the sun. She smiled broadly as the kingdom of insects at last became visible once again. Where before the high-rise towers were just lofty enough to scrape Andrea’s ankles, now, all of the city was shallow enough to form a lowly carpet. For a girl as large as her, the only true differentiation was by color and captured light. The skyscrapers were so paltry as to be hardly noticeable from the flat, grassy plains which encircled them. She traced her index finger through the valley, scooping away entire city blocks in a mush of rubble upon the pad of her digit, and pressed the rippled destruction to her lips.
“Dear Lord,” the history teacher uttered. He swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a baseball. “It’s time, isn’t it?”