Chapter 5: Mass

Saki stood back up from her lean and shrugged her shoulders. Looking around the city, it seems chaos was beginning to spread. Some helicopters--news and otherwise--watched her from a distance they deemed safe. The streets were alight with cars driving to the nearest traffic jam out of the city. Of course, plenty of fleeing people as well. If someone went back in time and told her she’d be the star of a real live kaiju scenario, she wouldn’t have believed them.

After that moment’s reflection she got to work. The jig was probably up that she was no mere giant, what with the news recording that small battle there. No more fun nanite surprises for everyone. A shame. On the flip side, it meant less reasons to hold back too.

San Jose didn’t have many tall buildings till the late 2080s, and even still most structures had 30 floors at most. True skyscrapers over 300ft tall were rare.

Still, the average building in this block would provide trillions upon trillions of nanites if its mass was converted: overall, over ~100ft each. So, naturally, she decided to take each and every one.

It was a short street, but even after knocking over or converting three buildings, there was still about a dozen or so left on either side.

Saki just walked right into them. There was no resistance. They broke against her chest, legs or, if small enough, beneath the sole of her destructive steps. To collect the rubble, she just willed a bit of nanites to form at her ankles. Passing through the fabric of those stirrup leggings of hers, the localized fog of grey swept through the remains her destruction left behind--and expanded. By the time Saki stomped towards the edge of the street, every lump of concrete, every bent girder of steel, and every carelessly flattened car was turned into more of the swarm. With a dramatic flick of her finger, she called the grey mist back to her body and inhaled it.

Then she grew.

Saki infused her main body with this new mass. The nanites worked even faster with more to divide work between, and she rocketed upwards to more than 5x her old height. The size-surge caused her feet to dig deep furrows into the earth. Asphalt and concrete were ripped to shreds by twitching toes and the sides of her feet. Sadly for Saki, her nanites were so efficient at clearing the area that there weren’t any buildings close enough to be smashed by her body as it grew. The sidewalks on the wide street did get torn, either side, lengthwise with her feet, but that was it. When she converted the buildings, all that was left was smooth foundation.

Thankfully San Jose was a big city, and there was plenty of fun still to be had. Saki stood a good 3300ft tall (1km) and looked straight ahead towards a dense mob. They mobbed about stopped cars in their way like ants detouring around small rocks. Countless vehicles were abandoned at the first sign of traffic, as the chances on foot become better when your 80mph electric sedan was gridlocked. That was the most common barricade towards getting away from Saki.

But she was about to make more.

Ahead of her, 20 steps or so, was a nice cluster of 4 city blocks with a park in the middle. With only some shrubbery and short trees, the wide open park was an easy open area to run through, and was swarmed with people trying to head away from the giant.

Nice and dense. ‘Perfect’, Saki thought.

She extended her hand and fired a cloud of nanites. With the grey cloud approaching the park, people panicked. Videos and streams of the ‘Saki Incident’ were circulating on the internet by now. They saw what these ‘nanites’ did to those trucks. Feeling the swarm brush against their flesh, they cried out, worried they’d be consumed. Yet, rather than engulf all those morsels, the horde of nanites flew right past them and went straight to the edges of the park and formed into tall silver walls at its boundary.

She was boxing them in.

Like livestock in a pen, they were trapped and crowded. Almost everyone in that area thought it wise to cut through the park, and now they were stuck. The ground quaked beneath them as over half-a-mile of sadism was stomping their way. Saki’s steps were wider than the streets, so buildings on either side in her path flattened beneath the sides of her feet.

Her steps also claimed countless car pile ups. The clusters were smashed into novella-thin sheets of metal. Many were still occupied by those who refused to accept that they weren’t going anywhere in such traffic. They didn’t have enough time to scramble out before Saki’s sole came down to render them into paste.

About 10 steps away from the poor souls in the park, Saki came across a skyscraper on her right. It *almost* fell over from a step she had just made. She recognized it as one of the HQs of a company started in 2072: Smart Pan Co. Their ‘smart’ kitchen gear was a big hit in the marketplace.

That was irrelevant though, what amused Saki here was that the 500ft tall edifice was *just* shorter than the length of her foot! She paused a moment to take that in, placing her right ped by the building to compare it closer.

While that foot settled deep into the road, she noticed again that fabric strap wrapped around the foot’s arch. She wondered why Eirica insisted on stirrup leggings for the adaption suit design, given that feet were essentially bare at that point anyways. Seemed useless: but it did give her a fun idea.

Saki bent down to pinch up the skyscraper. Smart Pan Co. had a strict “bunker down” emergency policy designed to maximize productivity even during dangerous events. Consequently, most of the employees were still inside, huddling under their desks per orders from management. A few poked their heads out to see through the big pane windows on every floor. The knew she was close, but they didn’t quite expect to see the whorls of her finger prints smushed against the glass like that.

Saki didn’t want the structure to crumble too soon, so she sent trillions of nanites from her hand into the building: reinforcing it. That and a little bit of inhuman nano-precise dexterity let her lift up the building without issue.

Though the building didn’t crumble, it did shift. With the building swaying as Saki brought it upwards, the hundreds hiding inside slipped across the floor along with anything not tied down. From side to side, like a pendulum, it swayed. A few of the middle floors got to take in her full scale piece by piece. The expanse of black pants fabric transitioned into fair skin then a deep hole: her navel. Then, more black fabric of her top and all the up past an indulgent smile to a big, brown eye. Saki stared right into the heart of the building.

“Hey there, I’m gonna try something a bit silly. I hope you all inside don’t mind. Not that it matters, my nanites have already welded all the exits shut. You might find the glass a little harder to break, too.”

Saki gave a mock pout as she finished her sentence, then chuckled at their plight. She didn’t think anyone would want to jump out of the thing but, if they thought they were getting eaten or something, some might’ve figured that a smart call.

She had something else in mind. With impeccable balance, the giant woman lifted one leg up towards her waist. Her other hand held her foot by its top side, so her sole faced upward. From a distance, the helicopters might think she was checking out what she stepped on. Not quite. With a wide grin she slipped one finger through that spandex strap around the arch of her right foot. Tugging it upwards, she moved the skyscraper into it, then let go.

The band of spandex snapped the skyscraper in place, rumbling the entire thing. If not for Saki’s reinforcements that would’ve shattered the building on its own. Now, the spandex band of the stirrup leggings held the thing snug to her sole. The band around the arch took up about 1/4th to 1/3rd of her foot’s surface area. Thus, the 8 or so floors around that area were treated the light-snuffing sight of black spandex on three sides, while one side’s windows looked out straight into the lightly wrinkled surface of Saki’s sole as it pressed against the glass.

Saki grinned at the sight. Wiggling her toes, those inside would contend with a minor quake. The inside view of her foot changed as those wrinkles scrunched and shifted in tandem with the ‘slight’ movement she did.

Her voice thundered around them as she spoke. “Alright, I’m slowly gonna call my nanites back. If the building survives enough by the time I walk to the park then, well, I suppose I’ll let you go~”

Screams erupted as she slowly set her foot back down to the city.

It was like some sick carnival ride. Everyone bobbed around in the tumult. Her foot settled. With Saki’s mix of holding back pressure and keeping the structure rigid with nanites, the first step of the foot didn’t do anything other than cause the structure to groan. Anyone watching from a helicopter’s live-stream would see her posture a bit off with that skyscraper under one foot kind of ‘boosting’ her up a bit.

She moved her left foot forward. They heard the boom, then tumbled against the floor/walls as she took another step.

Saki pulled back an eighth of the nanites she infused the building with. They still worked their hardest, but now, as her right foot and the skyscraper hit the ground, chunks of it were dented. Collapsed inward, a few were caught in bend girders and deformed windows. They were squished to stains. Her left foot moved, and she took yet another step.

Another chunk of nanites were called back. Spread thin now, the next step of Saki’s almost finished this sick game. The masses inside lurched up as the foot came down, then slammed upwards. There, Saki’s sole pressed down to dent the building inwards, gibbing them from the impact force of bent steel alone.

Another step of her left foot. Saki was pretty close to that park, just a few more steps really. Yet, those in the building wouldn’t last even one more. The skyscraper couldn’t even slip free: the strap part of the stirrup leggings was just too snug.

Her next step had her pulling back another mass of nanites into her body. The building was barely held together now, and what little was held was by her efforts. It was like a brittle eggshell which cracked as her foot came down. The window pane looking out to her foot burst open. Soft, smooth and warm foot flesh came down and flattened everyone and everything inside. They barely had time to process it, but at least their torment was finally over.

Saki assailed the city’s ears with a bout of laughter. In just four ‘gentle’ steps they were gone, flattened. Hundreds of lives. At least she figured out a use for that dumb little foot strap. She lifted her ped up again and pulled out a flattened rectangle. She held it between two fingers and flicked it into the distance. It spun about in the air before landing several dozen blocks over, ravaging everything at the impact sight. A small cloud of nanites flew back from there to her main body.

She didn’t want to be wasteful after all. In fact, she intended to have fun with each and every poor soul she trapped in that park.