"Do you think of yourself as a hero?"

The witch laughed, and somewhere in Raphael's being his heart dropped. She couldn't have been much older than him, by what, a year, two? But he knew that even where he currently stood the gap in strength between the two was far greater than that. Raphael was no master wizard, but in his studies, in the bits of magical knowledge up from time to time out in the world, he had learned to recognize when an opponent's power was far superior to one's own. And for as long as Raphael had known Racheal, her power had always been far beyond what he could understand.

"Aren't you going to ask what I'm doing here?"

He had his wand trained solidly on Racheal, though his hands were trembling badly. "Don't move an inch."

Racheal laughed. She began approaching him. It was so hard to put into words what scared Raphael about her. She looked so unassuming. She didn't wear the robes of her dominion, or any robes at all. She walked around in high waisted jeans, a basic tee shirt. Fucking Converse. It shouldn't have been possible to be intimidating in converse sneakers but Rachael found a way, every time she found a way. There was this passion about her, this energy that flowed out from her movements as easily as water that shook the mountains with her footsteps and the trees with her breaths.

She put her hand over the wooden wand, her palm directly over its point. 

"Come on, show me the pride and joy of Dearden Academy, the prodigy Raphael!"

This wasn't happening right now. This couldn't be happening. It had been so long since he had seen her, he had almost started to find himself again. He had trained, gotten stronger, gained confidence in his powers, it couldn't just all go to shit so easily. He had to do something, anything. Raphael dug deep within himself, searching desperately for any reserves within himself, whatever strength he could still draw out from within.

"Oh, you're probably wondering right now what happened to everyone in this shithole. Do you want me to show you?"

"FLAMATICA!"

A huge fireball erupted from the wand, engulfing the two and the entire surrounding village. In a flash, it disappeared. Raphael blinked in disbelief. Rachael grinned, sticking out her tongue, a glowing red orb fizzling out on it.

"Firega? Really? Wow, funny joke Ralphie, what did you really spend two years training yourself in? You don't need this crap!"

She tore the wand from Raphael's grip. With a single hand she snapped it in two. With the other, she began fishing through her pocket.

"What did you do with this town? Where did everybody go?"

Racheal pulled out a bar of chocolate, holding it up to Ralphie. There were some words inscribed into the chocolate. With a trembling voice, Raphael read them off.

"Renee, 34. Baker." Raphael could feel his head spinning. "No... no... you didn't. You wouldn't."

Rachael pulled it back, immediately taking a bite. Through her chewing, Rachael spat out a few words. "It makes them taste better, I think. Knowing where they come from, and all, I guess."

Raphael summoned his wand back to his side, reforming in his hand and glowing with a refined brilliance. "No, don't lie to me Rachael, what did you do with them!"

Racheal looked down at her body, then back up at Raphael. "Where do you think, dummy?"

The light flickered. "No..."

"I ate them. Every man, woman and child in this town. What, did you think they were doing anything with their lives? Slaving away for some sixty years, dying like everyone else? I gave them a higher purpose, Ralphie, come on you have to see where I'm coming from here."

"Why."

"Oh, I. I dunno. It's been a while since I'd gotten in trouble with the law, I guess I wanted to do something bold."

"And because of that, all these people had to die?"

Before she could shrug, another explosion rang clear through the air. Every tree within a dozen meters burst in a hail of dust, the ground itself breaking under Raphael's strength. Raphael lowered his wand, huffing up a cloud of smoke. He wasn't sure how many more of those he could force out. If he could just put her down for a few minutes...

"Come on Raphie, you know how this always goes."

A bold shot out from above the dust cloud, striking down Ralphie before he could even react. Dark energies coursed through his blood. He felt the uncomfortably familiar sensation of vertigo. It was as though he were falling back into a deep memory of a time he thought he had long since buried...

The first time Racheal shrank him, he was in his room, working on an assignment for potions. He could feel it now, that tangible fear from a being ground into carpet by toes the size of his head. She bent down to get a better look, a terrifying monument over him that cast a shadow dozens of times long as he was tall. What scared him then though, was her expression. He could just barely make it out from under her mattress of a right foot. She wasn't angry, or even mocking. She was curious, as though this were just an interesting experiment with her powers she had never thought of before. She didn't, couldn't have possibly understood the way the pressure she was putting on him right now was driving up his heart rate, filling his veins with adrenaline, causing some largely underexamined long term mental hangups. Her world right then was just checking out a casual curiosity in her best friend's dorm room. His world right then was, well, her.

Even then he could feel that incredible power from her, but neither had yet to realize just how bottomless her potential really was. It was all just fun, teasing between rivalrous dorks too chickenshit to act on any deeper impulses. It wasn't until after they had graduated the academy that their paths in life had begun to diverge. But nothing like this had happened before. She had been stronger than Raphael for a while now, but it was very possible that even she didn't realize just how big the chasm between them had grown.

Raphael rose to his feet. He couldn't have been more than eight inches tall, judging just by just how high the rocks at his feet had grown. The crater seemed more like an open field now of barren rock and dirt, punctuated only by the several dozen foot tall giant floating far above his head. Even with all of his experience, it still seemed plainly impossible that something that large could float so easily, gently in the air. Even the laws of the universe bended to Racheal. She began to lower herself to the ground, then simply dropped out of the sky like a rock. Her feet hit the ground with a thud that shook the ground underneath Raphael.

"Please Raphie, take this seriously at least once. I haven't been able to feel your power since I saw you. Where's the inferno, the firestorm? Are you still holding back?"

She was approaching, it was just a walk but it still gave him only seconds before she would overtake his position. Despite his strength, he knew from experience that he had no hope of breaking out of Rachael's spells, especially one she had such intimate knowledge of. Raphael began firing off spells, anything and everything he could think of. Windstorms, earthquakes, ice beams, summons, banishments, explosions of every size and figure. He couldn't go through the humiliation again. And, though this was harder for Raphael to accept, he knew somewhere deep down that if he let her escape this time, there would be no one in the entire country who could measure up to her. He couldn't see anything but for the extravagant lightshow he was sending out in all directions, blindly hoping that some would hit the colossus in front of him.

It was done. Raphael couldn't make anything out in the dust storm he had brought up, but he had his chance. He turned, immediately breaking out into a run. All he needed was a few seconds and he could be in the trees and out of site before-

"Where are you going."

Out of the sky came a hand, immediately pinning Raphael to the ground. He was writhing around, but no more than a mouse caught in a bear trap could he do anything the free himself. He couldn't do anything but strain his neck looking up to Rachael's face. Her smile could swallow a tiger whole. Just from here he could smell her breath, the faint odor of chocolate... of people... still on her lips. But she wasn't smiling. For the first time in a long time, the girl with the strength of a demigoddess wasn't smiling at all.

"I just want to know one thing. Are you scared of me?"

Raphael didn't know how to answer that question.

"I just... I want to have a fight. This is a fight, isn't it? And then you get angry at something I said, or did, and we have a standoff, and it's pretty close but I get away so basically I won anyways, and we do it all again next week, right? Tell me this is a fight, because I can't feel your energy right now. To tell you the truth... I can't feel anyone's energy anymore. It's like... it's all so small to me. No offense, I mean."

Raphael was losing his mind. Not just at being humiliated by an old rival/crush, not just in failing on his duty to his country, not only in pushing his body to insane limits only to be brushed aside by a giant fucking hand. He was also feeling his soul being torn in two sitting in her presence. It was like touching a metal radiator at full blast. Every time she got overexcited, he could feel himself fade. Any reserves of strength he tried to muster instantly went out in that presence. He couldn't maintain himself. Any longer under this and he was a goner.

"I thought that I could fight you and I could finally see someone who was on my level, but you're just like the rest. It's like, are any of you even real? I feel like I'm walking around people made of feathers, like if I breathe too hard you'll all fade away. But it's worse than that, you know? Because it's not even breathing anymore, is it? I have to be careful not to *think* too hard or else I'll set another village on fire or whatever. It's not fun anymore."

"stop." Raphael squeaked out a pained groan.

Rachael's focus turned back to Raphael. "What?"

"Please... stop."

Rachael's eyes saw red. "What did you just fucking say?"

"You win, I can't..." Raphael blinked back tears. His body was in hell, his ego shattered long ago.

"No. No you don't get to just quit. I went through so much to try and find you again, just to get your fucking attention, for you to just... give up and start crying like some sort of wuss.

"Help me, Rachael."

Raphael felt a rib break as Rachael's hand gripped around his entire body, pressing down with immense force. She stood up, bringing Raphael with her. Though it wasn't fun to have the anger of a young god on oneself, the broken pace did break up the flow of untethered power that had been kicking his ass just seconds ago. Out of one fire, into another, equally but differently hot fire. He couldn't look her in the eye.

"If you don't fight me, right here, right now, I will walk north for an hour, and the first city I come across, I'm going to destroy just like I did this town. I'll crush, swallow, break, nearly every person I find, and that'll be just the lucky ones. If you don't fight me Raphael, I'll fucking find and kill everyone you love. I can see them right now, floating around in your head like thought bubbles in a comic book. I know where I can find them, don't fuck with me. Fight me."

Tears were still forming in Ralph's eyes. "I... I can't."

She let go, letting his broken body tumble to the floor. She put down her foot right in front, her shoe itself more a large, impossible animal than a real part of a real breathing human being.

"Fight me or I'll kill you, I'll crush you right under my boot right fucking now, it'd be easy, it'd be so... so fucking easy..."

Her voice was trailing off, getting more and more lost inwardly into herself. This was somehow even more terrifying than dealing with her in her ordinary moods. It was the knowledge, somewhere deep down, that she wasn't even in total control over her own feelings here, and that even in this state she was still quite possibly the strongest wizard of the modern age, perhaps one of the most powerful who ever lived.

"I'll... I'll chain you up and I'll break you every single day and bring you back... I can do that you know I can do that, and I'll turn you into pudding and swallow you up and turn you into plaster and paint you into my hair and turn you into sandals and wear you til the straps break... I'll turn you into a balloon and pop you and and and"

She was crying now, mourning. Was she feeling some sliver of guilt for the endless devastation she caused, however unlikely? Was she weeping for the old friend she was now crushing into dust below her feet? Or was she, more likely, shedding tears for the last bit of resistance keeping her tethered to humanity, maybe the only rival she had ever known. Her unbounded power was terrifying to see, he could sense it growing even now. It was as if, the well of strength at the core of her being was instead an endless abyss, unending and unyielding in its ferocity, herself nearly incapable of not letting it buzz out.  Already he had seen its impacts, the way her feet sank into the earth from her inhuman unholy strength she could use to tear into brute steel as easily as he might slip his hand through water, or the way that the nearby plants and trees seemed to wither and die as life itself seemed to flow into her, only to be subsumed entirely by the endless emptiness that seemed to drive her every hour of every waking day.

It was something deeper within Ralph that pushed him out from under her boot. He couldn't overpower her, he knew that, but there was just the slightest chance he could slip out from under her grip. He let himself shrink for just a moment, let the natural endless strength pouring out from her flow into him to ease along the process. He sees her visage grow grander, more all-consuming, more all-encompassing as he loses just a few critical inches in a few moments. He was five inches tall by the time he would be able to fling himself outwards. This would be a long shot, but his own cleverness helped him through their encounters before. Even if he wasn't able ever to overpower her, her incredible strength made it particularly easy to fall into uncreative traps. If he could just-

Her eyes gleamed over the tiny scurrying wizard on the forest floor and it was all over. She didn't even raise a hand this time, just merely *willing* him to shrink further did it all in for him. He saw her gaze from far above, hundreds of feet in the air from his perspective, and he immediately felt an unbearable pressure push over him, as though every bit of air had been sucked out from his body. It was as if crystalized defeat had been slung into his core.

And then it hit. The familiar feeling of the world's perspective growing far, far beyond its usual bounds rushed through him as his body began to dwindle in size now at a faster and faster rate. He could barely breathe as it pushed him deeper into himself. His vision blurred, blurred, blurred, blurred, and then slowly settled as the light began to return to himself. He breathed in and out as his strength returned to him. Everything sounded so loud now. And then he looked up, and his heart gave in.

The few inches around him were now like an entire open field, the little cracks in the dirt now small gorges he could easily fall between. Grains of sand and dirt littered the wastes like boulders, some taller than he was. And then there was the

THOOM.

A burst of wind blindsided him like a solid wall of force, carrying him off his feet so far, he feared for a second he would fly about on the currents forever. He crashed into the ground again, skipping once, twice, then thrice, a human skipping stone on the dirt lake. He felt his leg shoot up with pain, no doubt sprained somehow. He was left face up though, left to take in her. Racheal. The word felt so unfit to describe what she was now. If he craned his head up further back, he would see her face. If he craned it down, he would still see her face. If he craned it to the left her face, the right, her face, there was no sky but Racheal. He must have been directly over her eyes, he realized, just barely able to take both of their immensities into himself. That wind must have been her bending down to just pick him out of the dirt and dust on the ground. Her eyes were so.... Big. They were big like the moon was big, so big they were difficult to perceive as big because the perspective was so absurd it was hard to hash out. He limped to his feet, one leg laying idle as the other stumbled forward, but as he backed up bit by bit to get a better scope of the area, he realized nothing he did would change the place she took up above him. He could run, run, run for miles and he wouldn't escape her direct gaze.

She lightly exhaled through her nose, and it was like an explosion went off. Raphael flew back up into the air. This time he had the good grace to put up a protection spell before crashing back into the earth again. It felt like he had been picked up dozens of feet, but what were dozens of feet to a being so total? She was so utterly beyond where the sky would ordinarily be. He felt beyond small. So terribly beyond small. Her light breath was a roar, in and out, in and out, that came close to drowning out his thoughts in their rumble.

He made another quick spell with what draining reserves he had left. Gravity, so that the next movement she makes wouldn't send him into the distance for good. He realized only now she was casting a spell of her own, the rings of her endless eyes glowing with a danger unseeable. A sensory spell meant to pick him out from the surroundings. She breathed again and this time he was left to sit and bear the power, his own defenses struggling against a force stronger than any weapon or spell ever cast. The breath of a young witch.

She spotted him, and he went to his knees. It wasn't his own reaction, though certainly the feeling of defeat in his chest at having been brought to a speck before a speck, so microscopic her own magical abilities had difficulty targeting his sub-millimeter body, was overwhelming in itself. It was just the strain put on from being so small while under the full weight of her gaze. Her own magical abilities pressing down to locate him and now ponder his existence were tearing him from the inside out, ripping apart all the arcane defenses he had. It was once said that every sentient being, no matter how weak, has a small bit of magic that keeps up some basic protections against the will of other sentient beings. That a spell was simply that will, harnessed to a fuller power that it might modify the world around it. That was why transformation spells, forcible transformation spells, were so unimaginably difficult and dangerous, why Racheal's mastery of them was one of the most dangerous things about her. And at his current size, he couldn't fight back against her strength. Which meant, her casual will, so powerful and overwhelming as it was, was now like the hand of god bashing through his personal walls. He could feel her, her vision of him, her imagined idea of him, threatening to override his own presence and existence.

Raphael wanted to say something up to her, but he felt no need. There was nothing he could say that could reach her. Even with her enhanced senses, his own words would seem like water against her mind. She had mastered it, every art, every form, every school of magic and wizardry. The strength warlocks sold decades of their lives away for was hers with the merest touch. Any limitations a sorcerer might be expected to have, unseen, unseeable. It was just her. It was all just Racheal. She had no connection to humanity anymore, she had truly transcended it. And it hurt Raphael more than anything to know how utterly lonely this made her feel, but there was nothing he could do anymore.

And then she yelled. She yelled, and every single one of Raphaels defenses dropped at the same time as a wall of sound and destruction leveled everything. He felt his form shake and contort as his ears started to bleed, as reality curved into itself. He flew, high high into the air like dust, witnessing the hole of Racheal, her oceanic eyes, the mountain ranges of her nose and lips, her continental chest that seemed to zoom off into infinity beyond arms so far away they might as well not have existed at all. And then with speed that should not have been possible for any single thing to move with, her hand came into view, swatting him with the ease of a fly. She saw him. He was smaller than a millimeter, like an ant to an ant, a speck with no hope of being spotted amongst the dirt and dust that so totally dwarfed him, and yet she saw him as clear as if he had been standing next to her. And she swatted him into her palm.

She was still yelling. He couldn't tell what she was saying, it was all noise. Some anger, maybe. Perhaps a sob. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He felt his body start to contort in on itself as his memories blurred together with hers. Half remembered conversations, half forgotten odes, conjectures blending with his actual self and being as Racheal unconsciously totally overwrote Raphael. He would scream from it all if he had words to scream with, but he sufficed with weeping with her instead.

He felt himself pressed down into the ground as she got up, the sheer G-forces threatening to squish him out of existence had Rachael not already decided what she would do with him. It was too late for him to even try to kill himself now, her idle protections were too strong for even that now. He was totally at the mercy of her unconscious will. He looked up into her eyes, each muscle in her face moving like its own separate world onto itself, an endless expanse of miles and miles. He looked up past where the sky would be, out to where the stars would be. Out to where she now swarmed in. She had made her decision.

She got to her feet, and took in a deep breath. She did not look at the speck of a speck in her hands. She merely let her power continue diminishing him, deeper and deeper. She could see his pool of mana now- his full strength, at his full size, compared to her magical well as her current size compared to his insignificance. A drop in the ocean. Her power swallowed it up greedily anyways, the mana pool of one of the strongest wizards in a generation little more than a crumb to a hungry lion. It was so obvious now. He was never her rival, he never could have been anything even close to a rival. They weren't even the same species, it was asinine to expect as much. But he was her friend, or she believed as much, and out of respect for that she would give him the greatest reward she could ever give to another soul. She scratched her head, and that was that.

She didn't use her vision to see his plight, as he tumbles down. Sooner or later it was possible he'd merge into her entirely, and she'd get the faintest idea of his consciousness dissipating as his memories, thoughts, and hopes became more food to satiate her endless hunger. Or maybe he'd live, maybe she'd let him live, as a parasite, fighting off the bacteria and gnats on her scalp while feeding off her body. It really didn't matter. Raphael, the Raphael she knew, had died a very long time ago. She was just burying the corpse now.

She stretched out. Without Raphael around, she felt less a reason to pretend to be a good little witch. She might as well see what her power's truly capable of, unchained. She breathed out. And then she felt it. Every soul and spirit within a hundred miles of her location. Workers and farmers and soldiers and students and mages, nobles and peasants alike living out their lives in infinite complexity. A beautiful, wonderful world of people who belonged with each other. A world she didn't belong in, a world she never belonged in. She feels where they are down the millimeter, and then let go of her barriers.

Instantly, the boundaries of Racheal dropped, and she flooded out. It wasn't visible on the material plane, but on any magical or spiritual plane her essence could be seen reaching out like a flood, an endless flood of her that rushed outwards at unrelenting speeds. It hit the nearest village like a volcano erupting, as every man, woman, and child in the village disappeared, their clothes left right where they stood. The bugs and the trees and the foliage, too, disappeared, the entire area left cold and lifeless. And this happened everywhere. Over and over, countless times a second, the essences of all the people in the world Racheal had observed from the outside dissipated inside her endlessness. She wondered if she would grow, but she didn't. She wondered if she would change at all from it, but she couldn't. It was like adding twenty to infinity, the result was still infinity. There would always be more of Racheal than everything else put together.

She finished, finally, with depopulating the local kingdoms. There were survivors, namely some academies of particularly powerful mages that managed to make defenses for themselves and the neighboring areas. Some capitals still stood. She could have done more but, no, she figured she had done enough already. If she killed too many, after all, there would be no one else to play with. But she didn't hide her presence either. She left it flaring red hot, a warning to god and man alike, that once there was a witch named Racheal, a girl whose heart would soon tear the world asunder.