Chapter 19

“Do we have a confirmed kill?” General McKenzie asked.
 
No one would have said that he was nervous. His voice was deep and steady as always, commanding the respect of everyone who worked for him. The truth was that he was melting inside, though. Never in his more than thirty years of service had he had to face a situation that was comparable to this one.
 
And never before had he had to give an order like the one he had just given. The smoke was still too thick for the satellite images to show how much of the city the bombing had taken, but he knew the amount and type of ordinance they had released, so he did not fool himself into thinking that it would be contained.
 
Rationally, he knew he had done the right thing. As a General, in a situation like this, his duty was to present options to the civilian leadership and to make recommendations based on rational facts. This was what he had done.
 
Kyle McKenzie was as freaked out by the giant woman like everyone else, but different from others, he had also been  cool enough to analyze her presence from a military point of view. Her destructive power had become obvious soon enough. And still, for a while, he had been hopeful, seeing that she was using it with some contention. Laura Anderson had been considerably less shocked and considerably more focused than General McKenzie would have expected a 22-year-old woman of her size to be. Up to some point, she had looked like a woman with a plan. And, as weird as this was, it had made him think for a long while that the best way to deal with her would have been through negotiation. No matter how surreal the situation was, this was what the textbook of said about dealing with opponents with a target in mind and with the power to cause massive destruction.
 
The situation had degenerated soon enough, way beyond the point of no return. Laura Anderson had started acting like a monster, and the world stopped seeing her like someone that could be reasoned with. To the world, Miss Anderson was something that had to be destroyed.
 
Different than most others, Kyle McKenzie still saw the rational and smart young woman in her, but he concurred with everyone else in the need to eliminate her as soon as possible.
 
He would blame himself forever for not having been ready when she had left the city and got into the ocean. She had returned, and once this had happened, the General knew that there would be no clean way of ending with this.
 
Laura Anderson had been way more destructive since her return, every minute she spent in the city ending with dozens of deaths. And with her path taking her back towards the densest parts of downtown, Kyle McKenzie realized that things would only get worse.
 
He had never thought he would recommend a course of action consisting of bombing one of the country's cities. It had taken him his entire self-control to prevent his anxiety from  showing. He could not afford it. He could not allow his men to have any doubts. Not with what he was going to order them to do. 
No matter how wrong it felt, he knew it was the right thing to do. Leaving Laura Anderson at large was not an option. Not after what he had seen her do. He felt both relief and regret when both the President and the SecDef had accepted his conclusions and his recommendation. They had obviously understood they were choosing the better of two evils. Lesser leaders would have blamed him and would have tried to deflect responsibility for what was going to happen. They had luckily taken ownership of the situation.
 
The General had known that his chance had come when the giantess had changed her path and got into a low-rise residential neighborhood. She had even slowed her pace down, looking more careful than she had been in the last minutes. The planes had been flying at high altitude for a while now, and his aides started to position them for an imminent attack. He gave them the green light when Miss Anderson stopped for long enough at a certain spot. General McKenzie had wondered why, of all the places in the city, she was stopping there. The planes were already inbound when he realized that she was there for someone.
 
Kyle McKenzie had had a moment of doubt, but he had disregarded it when he concluded that it would be hard to find a better moment. The giant woman was surrounded by blocks and blocks of residential buildings, so the number of collateral victims was not going to be small, but it would probably be smaller than in any other area of the city. And with her having shown no desire to abandon Emerald, it was his responsibility to bring her down before she could create any more victims of her own.
 
After a while of tampering with one of the buildings, Miss Anderson sat down. An entire block was gone under her ass, and soon another one followed its fate when she extended her legs.
 
Planes had got in position shortly after that. Kyle McKenzie had given the most painful command in his career. Shortly after, Laura Anderson had disappeared from the multiple displays in the command center, being replaced by white flashes in the satellite cameras and by more lively explosions in the shots taken by high altitude observation planes.
 
They had shot at her everything they had short of nuclear weapons. Someone at Intelligence had favored penetrator rounds over other options. Most of the ordinance used had ended up being bunker-busters. No one knew how tough Laura Anderson was, so they had planned with ample margin. Of course, the high yield explosive in the ordinance that had been shot at her had done more than just hit the giantess.
 
As General McKenzie waited for the smoke to clear, he mentally counted the number of blocks that had been covered by it. He contained a shiver as he realized it was way too high. The affected area was as large as a five by five street grid. Twenty-five blocks. He blocked his mind's attempt to estimate the number of victims. 
 
Instead, he put all his focus on confirming the neutralization of the biggest threat his country had had to face in its entire history.
 
The thick smoke had been clearing for too long. Kyle McKenzie narrowed his eyes, trying to pierce through it. The blow came through the radio before the images were there.
 
"It's a negative sir."
 
“What?” he asked, shocked.
 
The report had come from one of the units on the spot, barely out of the destruction radius of what they had shot.
 
"Target is not neutralized."
 
Kyle was going to yell at them when the smoke cleared enough for him to get a view. He could only see her massive shadow at first. She was sitting back up, her movement letting him know that she was alive. He felt a ball of ice in his stomach as the images became clearer and clearer.
 
He contained the yell of frustration every cell in his body wanted him to let out. His mind switched focus. If at least she had been hurt enough…
 
The rate at which the smoke was opening up was much faster now. Laura Anderson’s face was easy enough to see among the last wisps of it. It looked incredibly angry. But besides some scorch marks, there were no signs of harm. No wounds, no blood, not even some burnt skin.
 
“Oh my God!” General McKenzie said, finally losing his cool.
 
 
 
 
Laura was quickly evolving from disorientation to rage. Her mind was still debating whether she had felt pain or not, but no matter what the conclusion was, this had been the closest she had been to a physical threat since her growth. Not even the explosion of the gas tanker had felt like this.
 
It had been like… being punched. In the space of a few seconds she had been hit dozens of times in every spot of her vast anatomy, and each of the times she had noticed the sudden increase in pressure, like someone slamming his fists at her. She was not sure if it had been painful, though. It had been uncomfortable. And disorienting too. Her ears had been whistling for a couple of minutes, and her eyes had watered at the intense heat and light.  Needless to say, she had been thrown backward.   
 
She was starting to recover her sight and her hearing as she clumsily started to sit down, trying to make some sense of what had just happened. Her mind was slowly coming back to speed. There was, of course, only one possible explanation: she had been attacked.
 
She felt rage start to pool inside her as she was processing the stupidity of the little people for having made another attempt on her. Would they never learn?
 
Then, something in the back of her mind told her that she was missing something. Something critically important. She completed her movement to sit and looked at her surroundings. In the attempt to kill her they had completely fucked up a pretty large section of the city. So, they had reached that point.
 
Then, memories of the section of the city she was at finally worked as an adrenaline shot to her still startled brain and she opened her eyes wide. A deep fear was quickly rising inside her. She looked down at her palm, in a foolish hope that physics would not work like they were supposed to. There was nothing and no one in there. Only blackened remainders of the missiles that had been shot at her.
 
The fear gave way to despair. It filled every cell of her body, making her feel a coldness she had never experienced before, a coldness she would have never thought she would feel now that she had become a goddess. And then, the ice started to melt and gave way to rage like none she had felt in her life.
 
They had killed her! The fucking ants had killed the only person in the world she cared about. Ice and fire fought a battle inside her. Rage quickly won.
 
She had the most prodigious mind ever, but right now every neuron could only process one thought: they would pay!
 
Opening her thick lips, Laura let out an inhuman bellow as her mind broadcasted the only thing going through it: hate!
 
Tens of thousands died in an instant, their minds too weak to resist Laura's unfocused mental burst. Several thousand more died a few seconds later when the shock made them lose control of their vehicles. Millions dropped to their knees and covered their ears as the deepest fear they had ever felt invaded their consciousness. No matter whether they had seen her in action before or not, every citizen in Emerald that was still alive understood one thing: the giant woman was going to kill them. Plenty lost their sanity forever.
 
Laura started standing up, her head quickly clearing the remainders of the smoke and reaching a new and unknown to her height of close to 1,200 feet. They had gone too far. She had been too good to them, she now realized. She had been careful first, selective later. She had expected them to come to terms with the new reality on their own. And it had cost her everything. It had cost her the only person that had mattered to her in the world.
 
They had never deserved her mercy. Humans were selfish, traitorous creatures. She had always known that. She had just been too self-confident. And because of this, Stacy was dead!
 
A tear started forming in Laura’s right eye when a defense mechanism kicked in. Yes, she had been too confident, but she had not been the one killing Stacy! The humans had! And they would pay! She would correct her previous mistake, even if too late.
 
“You fucking idiots!” she screamed for all the city to hear, about to break into a cry. “What the fuck did you do? You fucking killed her!” she added, her tone as angry as it could get.
 
Laura was breathing heavily, not out of exhaustion but out of excitement.
 
“I will crush every single one of you. I will turn you into nothing more than stains in my sole!” she screamed to a terrified city.
 
 
 
“Sir, should we give any instructions to wave 2?” an aide said.
 
General McKenzie was so shocked about the situation that he had forgotten about wave 2. In the original plan, the nimbler attack planes were meant to deliver a more surgical strike with anti-tank missiles to finish off the job after the more massive impact of the initial attack.
 
Seeing how ineffective the heavy ordinance had been, Kyle McKenzie had no doubts about the possibilities of the second wave. He did not react, though. After all, he did not think anything he could command the planes would make a difference, at this point. He was mistaken.
 
 
 
 
Laura was standing in the middle of ground zero, trying to make her mind up on which section of the city to unleash her rage upon when she heard the whistle of the fighter planes as they approached for an attack pass. Armed with anti-tank missiles, the second wave of planes needed to necessarily fly lower, making them more noticeable to her.
 
Lower was still too high for Laura, who had grown so used to her new condition that not being able to reach something felt extremely frustrating. It was even worse in her current state of rage.
 
She unconsciously widened her stance and placed her hands on her hips as she sneered at the approaching planes. She spied a dozen trails converging on her, but it was clear that no matter how low they were flying she would not be able to punish them as they deserved. 
 
Or so she had thought.
 
Despite the distance and their speed, Laura’s enraged mind found a connection to the twenty-four people on the dozen attack planes converging on her. It took her only a nudge of her overwhelming mind power to fry them all at once.
 
The dozen trails suddenly lost their synchronism. Seeing the planes randomly crush in different spots of the city made Laura feel briefly satisfied within her general state of rage.
 
“No one is safe from me anymore!” Laura bellowed.
 
No matter how pissed she was, the realization that her mind allowed her to reach where her vast size did not was a rush of power.
 
It was time for the city to feel her wrath.
 
She was at the edge of ground zero in three steps. There was no one in the street, but it did not matter. Without further word, Laura raised her foot and rested it on top of a twenty-story building that could barely make it to mid-shin. The building groaned as she merely held her sole on its roof. Then, she pushed down, demolishing the building as if it were a sand castle. She knew she had snuffed a few hundred lives in one step. It was a drop in the ocean compared to the loss she had just suffered. Sneering, she kicked three identical buildings, turning them to dust in one swift gesture.
 
A few seconds later, people started pouring out of neighboring condos. If they thought they would be safer in the streets than in their homes they were deeply mistaken; Laura thought as she found the thickest concentration of people and planted her foot on it. It was way  larger than it should have needed to be to finish them all, so her sole also ended up partially destroying another apartment building. It suited her well.
 
“How long do you think it’ll take me to kill you all?” she asked aloud.
 
Laura maneuvered her body with ease, finishing an entire block in the process. She then chose the largest avenue that would take her to downtown.
 
She had been trying to avoid too many casualties during most of the morning and had ended up killing tens of thousands instead. Now, Laura was actively looking for maximum damage and the city noticed it.
 
The crowd got thicker with every new step towards downtown. Not in the mood to spare any life, Laura started advance like a tightrope walker, making sure that her heel landed close enough to the toes of her other foot, removing any hopes of salvation for those that were foolishly trying to escape from her.
 
Her body count started to increase at an astronomical rate, each small movement of her feet adding hundreds of names to an already dreadful list. Yet, she was very far from being satisfied. Laura doubted whether the millions of people in the city would be enough for that.
 
She reached an intersection and stopped. The crowd was thick in all directions save the one she had come from. Laura had to make a decision, but she did not feel like sparing anyone. Facing the road to her left and noticing the gentle slope as it moved towards the sea, Laura smiled evilly and squatted.
 
She did not even warn them this time, as her body obeyed her wishes and what had just been an itch soon turned into a roaring torrent of a warm but deadly golden liquid. A few dozens were instantly crushed under the sheer weight and pressure of her piss. Most others were mercilessly dragged down the avenue, along with cars and urban furniture. Laura found their humiliating demise strangely  fitting, but was far from satisfied with “just” one mob.
 
"You are less than nothing," she said as she stood up again, smirking as the thousands of gallons she had expelled from her body kept doing their job.
 
Her little act of retribution did not go unnoticed to the rest of the crowd that was close enough to her to take good notice. Laura loved both seeing and sensing their increased fear.
 
"Are you scared?" she asked. "Let me give you a hand."
 
Feeling more comfortable than ever with her mind powers, Laura focused on the stretch of avenue uphill from the one that had suffered her rage already. She immediately started broadcasting a mild fear, causing the crowd to feel a surge of panic. Frowning, Laura kept at it and started to increase the intensity, satisfied by the increased control she was feeling. 
 
The crowd had never looked too coordinated, but the impact of her tampering was obvious enough when entire groups of people started crashing against each other while others were dropping to their knees. Laura was enjoying it, even if she knew deep inside that what she was doing was purely sadistic. She did not mind, as proven by the fact that she kept on increasing the fear she was projecting on the tiny mites.
 
They soon started turning against each other. It was exhilarating, at least from Laura’s point of view. She wanted more, so she kept going. Their pathetic reactions were almost becoming arousing. Laura felt a rush of power, which as usual, came together with a more carnal type of excitement. It made her lose focus. Trying to recover it proved to be fatal, at least for the crowd. Thousands dropped dead in an instant, their synapses killed by the goddess’ overwhelming mindpower.
 
"Oh," Laura said panting. She felt a little sheepish at the unexpected results of her toying with their minds, but not at all guilty. If anything, it felt good to be reminded that her goddesshood reached far beyond her phenomenal size.
 
The few minutes she had used to punish those in the avenue that crossed the one she had been advancing through gave the original crowd she had been chasing a bit of a head start. Nothing that could not be quickly fixed once she resumed walking, in any case.
 
Laura did not start right away, though. Instead, she crouched once more and reached out to the closest building to her right. It turned out that her still unknown boost in size gave her the edge she needed to accomplish what she was looking for. Digging her hands in the asphalt with ease, Laura met the building’s parking lot and cupped her hands upwards. She stood back up, effortlessly ripping at 30-stories tall high-rise from the ground. It turned out that the most challenging part of the feat was to keep the structure in one piece as she got back to her full height.
 
She reached out with her brain, feeling the hundreds of lives inside.
 
“Did you think you were safe from me in there?” she asked in a challenging tone. “No one is safe from me anymore!” she then boasted.
 
Her intention had been to toss the building at the fleeing crowd. The results were mixed. It would have been unfair to say that she had not achieved heavy damage, but the truth was that the execution had not been as expected. Already quite weakened by the mere act of ripping it from the ground, the building did not hold together once she pushed it from her. So, rather than falling into her intended victims in one piece, the high-rise broke in smaller chunks that were thrown in multiple directions. Plenty of them caught the crowd as intended. Others just sailed in different directions, damaging some other buildings in the area or even surprising other groups of people in neighboring streets. Still, the results had lacked the spectacularism she had been aiming for.
 
Sneering, she just moved forward. If the trick she had tried had not worked, she would need to finish the job the old-fashioned way: under her soles. A dozen steps later, the crowd was no more.
 
Laura had not set herself a specific destination, but her path was unconsciously leading her towards the heart of downtown, where the tallest buildings stood. In her mind, the most packed people were, the easier they would be to crush.
 
It was not long before she met another crowd. She contented herself with crushing them as she advanced, at first, but after a few blocks, she felt like she should show the world that she was more than a pair of deadly feet.
 
Stopping in another large intersection, she placed her hands on her hips once more, in a gesture that was quickly becoming a signature, one that was telling the world that she was above and looking down at it.
 
There was no trace of compassion in her voice as she addressed them.
 
“Seeing how you try to escape from me would be fun if it was not so pathetic!”
 
Without a further word, Laura crouched down and reached out. The crowd's screams joined in a single shriek as she stood back up, a packed city bus held in her fingers.
 
She repositioned the vehicle so that she was holding it with the fingertip of her index finger in the front and her thumb’s in the back. Then she peeked inside with brown eyes, each larger than any of the windows on the bus. She smirked at the pandemonium.
 
"Scared, aren't you?" she asked with a mix of cruelty and pride. "I would be if I were in your position. But then again, if I were so puny as you are, I would also do my best to prevent someone like me from getting mad. You, on the other hand, are going above and beyond to attack me and piss me off." 
 
She brought her fingers together as soon as she finished her sentence, instantly turning the bus into a mangled heap of metal and snuffing 50 lives in the process. There was a collective gasp from the street as she did so. It was curious, Laura thought. She did not get the same type of reaction when she killed plenty more at once every time each of her feet landed on a crowd. It probably had to do with the fact that she had used her hands instead of her feet, she reasoned. It seemed to make things more personal.
 
Following that line of thought, Laura dropped to her knees without warning, knocking hundreds of people off their feet and crushing a few dozen under her never-ending legs. They were mere side effects since she was looking for something else.
 
Reaching into the thickest of the crowd, Laura tried to scoop as many people as possible. She had been rough enough, so she knew better than to expect all her catches to survive the ordeal, but she was satisfied enough with the number of squirming bodies in her palm as she raised it and opened it under her nose.
 
"I love holding a few of you in my palm. Out of all the stuff I can now do, this is still the best reminder of what I've become, of how much above you I am. Does it work for you as well? Does this help you realize your insignificance?" Laura asked.
 
She did not get any answer, just a few screams and some short-lived attempts at moving over the uneven surface of her hand.
 
Frowning a bit, Laura reached out with an extended finger of her free hand and pinched two of the squirming bodies between its tip and the palm that was holding them. A slight push was enough to make them pop and to increase the volume of everyone else’s screams.
 
“You’re so helpless” Laura stated, neutral. “Why can’t you realize? Why would you still hold to the illusion of defeating me? It beats me, it really does. If I, God forbids it, were in your position I want to believe that I’d be smart enough to understand that I would not have any other option but to submit. But no, you just have to fight me, as if that was going to change anything." 
 
The crowd in her hand was looking up at her colossal face in terror.
 
"It was amusing, at first. Feeling you breaking against me was even entertaining. But now… now you've cost me everything I ever cared about in this world. And you are going to die for it."
 
Laura started closing her hand into a fist as she completed her sentence. She activated her mind receptor to feel the ever-increasing  anguish of those held on it, as her skin wrapped and closed on itself, narrowing the space and time they had to live.
 
She tightened her fist until her knuckles whitened and gore oozed through them. Laura had never been too sympathetic for any of the lives she had taken so far. But now she had truly enjoyed sowing them, even if not a million deaths would be able to fill the hollow space she now felt in her soul.
 
She stomped her left foot hard on the closest mob as she once more realized that Stacy would not be back, that she would live her reign over humanity alone. No one would ever be able to replace her. Stacy had been the only connection between her past life and her present reality, the only human that had known her before she had ascended to goddesshood. She had loved her before, and she knew she would love her now. Laura would never be able to feel the same for anyone else, with every other person she would meet from now one being but a mite in her eyes.
 
Thinking about people with special connections made her remember something. The world, who was looking at her in awe, did not understand it at first when it saw her reaching into her womanhood. After all, she looked anything but aroused. Then, she removed her hand, holding an orange free-fall lifeboat and everyone was even more surprised.
 
This included Laura, who could have sworn that the boat looked a bit smaller than she remembered it. She reached inside it with her mind and felt several lives, even if pretty battered ones. It had not been so long ago that she had taken this boat, her goal having been to collect a group of humans she would keep handy. It felt like a million years ago, though.
 
She had been a different Laura then. She had felt invincible, in charge, playful. She still knew she was invincible, but now she also knew there were still things she could lose. Her playfulness was long forgotten, her mind now only filled with hatred.
 
"I hope you enjoyed the ride," she said, her voice suggesting otherwise. "I don't feel like having any more of you close for the time being, though" she added.
 
And as simple as saying the words, Laura tightened her fist around the boat, crushing it and her carefully selected passengers in a heartbeat.
 
 
 
"She has no empathy left," Laya said.
 
“She has none to show” Quo corrected her.
 
“But you did not want a psychopath” Laya stated.
 
"She is not one," Quo said. "She is a ruthless woman with a massive ego and that has been hurt when she thought that impossible." 
 
“Did you know Stacy would be killed?” Laya asked.
 
“That was impossible to predict. I had actually anticipated a more gradual escalation. The former authority had to eventually come up with some military response that could be effective enough to annoy her. I was not anticipating that she would be hurt, even if only emotionally."   
 
“Does it change anything?” Laya asked.
 
“Not in the long run. It does accelerate things considerably. It will increase the death toll too” Quo said.
 
“What if she goes on a retribution quest forever? How would that make her different from a psychopath?” Laya asked.
 
“She won’t. Laura Anderson is a smart woman. She has a plan. She will eventually realize that there is no other fate for her than ruling humanity. It will make her even less compassionate when projecting her power, though”
 
“You don’t seem worried” Laya observed.
 
"I'm not. I think this was a lucky strike."