There was not a scratch on her, and the tattered remains of her clothes, shredded first by the rough tarmac and then by her inexplicable growth, fell from her expanding body like torn ribbons. The people surrounding her came up to her waist, then her broad hips, then her thick thighs, and so on as she grew. Confronted with the impossible and unexplainable, the crowd erupted into panic; those who had tried to push their way closer to her now found themselves fighting with their fellows to get back away from the growing woman.
Her head was pounding like someone was beating a drum inside it and her stomach lurched. She was only dimly, vaguely aware of what was happening to her. The shrieks and cries of a dozen diminishingly small people reached her ears only faintly, sounding as though she was underwater and hearing their voices from the shore. Gilly tried to look down and take stock of her situation, but each time she opened her eyes the world swam drunkenly and white and yellow stars danced. What little furtive glances she could catch, of knee-tall people, then mid-shin, then ankle-height frantically scurrying away or staring up in horror and bewilderment, and of the world itself falling away from her as though she was somehow being propelled upwards.
She was, in a way. Within seconds Gilly was towering over the buildings either side of the street, including the hotel building and the fast food restaurant either side of her, and her growth still showed no sign of abating. Her expanding feet began to sink in the tarmac as though it was made of mud, and the advancing wall of flesh swept aside people and cars alike, until they all but filled the width of the road itself, blocking it. A car, its driver panicked beyond rational thought by the giant woman towering over her, smashed into her toes, followed by the ones behind it. Another tried to avoid the resulting collision by mounting the pavement, scattering everyone fleeing in the opposite direction, but as her massive foot swelled it was caught up and rammed through the glass front of a laundrette.
A wave of nausea caused Gilly to double over, clutching at her stomach, and with that the dizziness grew worse. Her legs felt weak, trembling as though they struggled with her increasing mass, and her growing form wobbled. She lifted her left leg and stepped back to give herself more support, entirely without thinking. The driver in the van, who, still stricken with fear at the sight of this lady’s heel advancing towards him, saw a footprint-shaped crater, crested with a ridge of crumbling tarmac and concrete. He was mesmerised by the sight of it, forming an almost perfect imprint of the underside of her foot, that he had no comprehension that she must inevitably place it down again. When it landed directly atop him, his van, and about half a dozen or so people who barely had the time to comprehend their demise before their lives were snuffed out by a simple step, it was half again as big as when she lifted it from its crater.
The ground shook beneath the impact, cars that were lucky enough not to be caught beneath the foot bounced on their respective suspensions, while people close by were blown off their feet by the sudden displacement of air. Her victims - individuals too arrested by awe and fear to run - simply vanished beneath the unstoppable mass of Gilly’s sole in an instant. To the horrified pedestrians who were lucky enough not to be caught beneath her deadly step, it appeared that one moment they were there, a disorganised clump of people staring dumbly, and the next they had disappeared, the sight replaced by the absurd view of a massive foot almost filling the entire width of the highway. The tarmac road heaved beneath the enormous mass of the giantess standing upon it, rising up around her foot as it sank into the ground. And still she was growing.
Gilly could only watch, merely an observer to what her own body was doing. The ground continued to recede away beneath her. From her perspective it looked as though she was standing in a glass lift ascending rapidly through a transparent tube, that is until she looked down to see her naked body. Her head cleared, the mental fog lifting, and the nausea faded with it. When she had moved her foot to steady herself, she only became cognisant of what she had done and the grim, murderous implications of what to her was a simple act of stepping back to avoid falling over when she had completed it. She looked down in horror at her own right foot, with the image of the street occupied by people and a van just before she had simply trod on them still burned in her mind.
Panic now gripped the crowds at her feet, and from her vantage point some several hundred feet in the air, she guessed, she saw perhaps hundreds of these ant-sized people, some gawking up at her vast, naked body, and others scurrying away from her at peak ability. Just standing there, her very presence inspired chaos. Visible from miles around now, over the fast food restaurants and apartment buildings and shops that barely reached above her shins, it would only get worse. The blare of car horns and the screams of tiny people, strangely high-pitched and sounding quite distant, reached her ears.
Gilly stared down at her feet. Together, side by side, they would more than fill the road and the pavement. The width of one of her massive feet nearly stretched from one side of the road to the other, and she only avoided them ploughing through the facades of the buildings either side by placing one foot behind her. The crowds continued to mill around directly in front of her toes, and she noted that each individual tiny person was barely taller than the smallest of her digits. She guessed that they would be about half an inch tall compared to her, which would make her…
“Uh oh.” Her voice thundered from above and was heard across nearly half the city.
Maths was never her strong point, and she gave up trying to calculate it. Trying to frantically piece everything together, she remembered eating a burger and fries at the fast food place, then looking the wrong way before crossing the road because she forgot that the Americans drive on the opposite side, and then getting hit by a truck. Somehow that had made her big. Very big. Her first thought was that she had been isekai’d into a new, tiny world, albeit without her clothes for some reason, but looking down at her feet, bending a little so that the generous curve of her bust would not obstruct her view below as it usually did, she spotted that same fast food restaurant with its familiar sign on a pole that now only reached her ankle on the right of the street she stood in, and the dingy hotel on the left like a small shoe box standing on its end. No, this was her world.
She remembered the muddled haze of growth dimly, and that she had moved her foot to steady herself. Twisting awkwardly around her waist, she lifted her left foot out of its crater, and balancing on her right leg with her arms out for balance, peered over her shoulder into the crater. It seemed little more than an elegant little footprint to her; the weight of her foot had deformed the tarmac as if it was wet sand at the beach, creating an almost perfect mirror of her sole, with the undulations and ridges within marking out her toes and her instep, and all framed with a ridge of crumbling tarmac. Gilly could make out a few red spots and a white rectangle - the remains of people too slow to escape and of the van that had collided with her.
Dead. There was no way they could have possibly survived that. The realisation sent a cold shiver down her spine. Gilly gasped and her hand flew to her open mouth. She had murdered half a dozen people just by stepping on them like they were bugs. Her foot returned into the crater that marked their graves.
It had to be a dream. Gilly pinched herself on her left forearm, and the twinge of pain there told her that she was not. Looking into the streets at her feet, it was like looking into a model city, yet the sheer amount of tiny detail confirmed the horrifying truth that this could only be real. The buildings that lined this stretch of main road mostly reached just above her shapely ankle, with the tallest of the modest apartment buildings and offices as tall as her knees. She saw the advertisements on the billboards, the cracking paint in the concrete, and even through skylights and windows into rooms and corridors. In the streets themselves she saw road vehicles trapped in traffic like cholesterol blocking an artery, tiny newsstands, telegraph cables, street lights, and trees with green leaves swaying almost imperceptibly in the wind.
Yet what dominated her attention were the people. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even more, in the streets before her feet. She could just about make out a few individual details - different colours of clothing, skin, hair, and so on. Some who were not running as fast as their tiny legs would carry them stared back at this immense woman towering over them, and she was shocked to find that for those closest to her she could even make out individual facial expressions, though most of those were of abject terror. No mere dream could hold such detail.
It was impossible. Madness. This was Gilly’s fantasy, yes, but it had always been one that could never be real, and almost never involving herself in the starring role either. That’s what stories and collages and role-plays were for. She’d masturbated over the fantasy of this scene countless times before, ever since her adolescent libido was piqued by finding the iconic poster of The Attack of the 50ft Woman at a shop. But this was real, and those were real people at her feet and real people she had just stepped on like bugs.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said absently, looking down into the street as though one of the tiny, half inch-tall people might say something. All she got out of them was screaming.
Pat would know what to do, he always did, but he was in a work meeting over in the city centre, where those skyscrapers were. They were miles away, but at her size Gilly thought it might be little more than a short walk, no further than from her parents’ house to the corner shop. One, however, that would take her straight through more streets still populated with hundreds, thousands, of people.
Looking around at the streets below her, and feeling quite disorientated and giddy from this perspective, she could see that they were absolutely bloody everywhere. There was nowhere she could go without stepping on anyone again, and even with the time she had spent standing there they had yet to do the sensible thing and get out of the streets and into the presumed safety of the buildings. If anything, the streets had gotten more crowded as the chaos caused by her mere, gigantic presence worsened. People attempting to flee by running through the streets were blocked by those who stood to gawk at the sudden appearance of a giant naked woman. So it was with vehicles in the roads, as pile-up after pile-up clogged the roads, further blocking their panicked flight. A few mounted the pavement and ploughed through the crowds. The cacophony of screams, shouting, horns, and crashing still sounded distant and muffled to Gilly, and in a way they were, being hundreds of feet below her, but were noticeably getting louder.
The other alternative she could think of was to try and take the shortest route out of the city itself, but she saw that the city spread out for miles around her in a great urban and suburban sprawl. Taking a direct route out to the countryside beyond where, in theory, she could wait for help without harming anyone, would still mean carving a path through the populated streets. Another ‘short’ walk for her, but a horrific massacre for the tiny people who would fall under her feet. At least, she considered, such a path would take her through the less densely-populated districts, where there seemed to be no buildings taller than her knee, if that.
That left staying put and waiting, and judging by the insanity taking place at her feet, smoke now rising from where a lorry had crashed through the front of a laundrette, she caused just as much damage through her sheer, imposing presence alone. It seemed there was nothing that she could do, even just standing still, that did not result in something breaking and someone getting hurt or worse.
“I need to find Pat,” said Gilly, addressing the crowd at her feet. “Please, loves, I need you to get out of my way.”
Those who had panicked and fled were some distance away, which was a few steps to her, but others had stayed behind to gawk at her. She could make out a few holding up phones, apparently taking photos or filming her, and she belatedly realised that she was completely stark naked.
Embarrassment flushed her freckled cheeks red, as she held her left arm across her ample bosom, the softness of her bust all but spilling out over her forearm, and placed her right hand over her crotch to give herself some semblance of dignity. Gilly could almost feel hundreds, perhaps thousands or more, pairs of eyes on her now, across the city, and now the image of her naked and impossibly huge was probably broadcast across the entire world thanks to those tiny people with their tiny little phones. A few had moved, sent scurrying down the street with her warning ringing in their ears, but some stayed there, rooted to the spot and observing her through their ubiquitous screens.
“For fuck’s sake!” she snapped, the entire crowd, even the people at a ‘safe’ distance, flinched from the force of her god-like voice. “I said to get out of my way!”
With that, she raised her right foot. The vast appendage cast its foreboding shadow over half a dozen abandoned cars and finally those stragglers were pushed into action. They were not fast enough. Gilly tried to place her foot down as slowly and delicately as she could, but even then a couple of tiny, bug-sized people who had been trapped by the piled-up cars were crushed effortlessly; she had touched her toes down first, and the first few cars crumpled effortlessly and those doomed victims were simply flattened beneath the impossible weight of even those 'small' and 'delicate' digits. She then rested her sole down, with yet more abandoned vehicles crushed beneath it. The sensation was curious - the feeling of the cool metal collapsing with a satisfying crunch from what was to her a gentle step, the more delicate tickle of what were human bodies all but dissolving under foot. The street groaned as far more weight than it was initially designed to cope with had shifted and then settled atop it, and that was even before she shifted her weight to her right foot. As she did so, her foot sank deeper into the tarmac, deforming it into another neat footprint.
“Bugger.” She warned them, Gilly reassured herself, but they didn’t listen, and now they were crushed beneath her sole. More than that, she tried to ignore just how intoxicating the sensation was.
The rest fled in mortal fear of her, as whatever spell of curiosity or lust that caused them to stand and stare had been broken by the sight of their fellows disappearing under a vast foot. They pushed and pulled in a frantic attempt to get away from the giant woman’s murderous footsteps. The second of which came when she lifted her left foot, and, with a little less grace than her previous step, brought it down on half a dozen more doomed souls too slow to get out of her way.
The impact shook the ground, knocking over people within a few feet of her, by her warped reckoning. A spiders' web of cracks rippled through the tarmac, following the shockwave of her footstep, as the ground rippled and churned beneath the immense weight crashing down upon it. This time, the survivors had barely enough time to recover before Gilly’s other foot cast its imposing shadow upon those people struggling to stand and flee seconds before it ended their lives.
Gilly kept walking in spite of each step bringing greater and greater casualties, doing her damnedest to ignore it all and focus on finding Pat. A few more steps and dozens more people squished beneath her massive feet brought her to a two-way intersection, and she noticed, in a sort of abstract manner, that from her new vantage point she could see the grid-based road system peculiar to American cities. A wider road running perpendicular to the one she was following seemed to offer the more direct route into the city. Though packed with more people who had clearly seen her looming over their surroundings, she decided that it would be easier to walk down there without having to awkwardly position her feet to avoid putting them through the buildings either side.
“I’m going to head down here,” she announced to the fleeing people, nodding left in the direction of the road, as if that might encourage them to get out of her way.
They did not. Her first step down the wider road was just as deadly as the previous ones, perhaps more so, as were the subsequent ones. Gilly tried to keep her eyes on the skyscrapers in the distance, as though ignoring the slaughter at her feet would make her less culpable, and became curious to see how she would now measure up against those glittering towers of glass and steel.
A bus packed full of screaming tourists, the tour guide frantically trying to force open the door that had been jammed shut by a van that had crashed into it, was crushed out of existence. The sensation of a vehicle that large crunching beneath her sole was enough to make her stop in her relentless march of death, and though every moral, rational part of her mind demanded that she ignore it and carry on, the feeling of the rectangular structure collapse, its inhabitants squished, and the remnants thereof forced into the ground into her footprint made her stop and take notice.
Curious, Gilly removed her foot from its footprint, placing it back a little and planting it squarely atop half a dozen or so luckless individuals who had thought themselves lucky to escape being stepped on. She apparently hadn't even noticed them, even as she crushed them underfoot. The giantess squatted down into the street, her thick, shapely legs bending awkwardly to keep her knees from crashing into the cardboard box-sized buildings that surrounded her. Her wide, generously proportioned hips and thighs, however, had other ideas, and as she lowered herself down she felt the rough facades scrape against her skin as she lowered herself down.
Dazed and shell-shocked survivors behind her stared up at the biggest backside they had ever seen, and if she should choose to sit down it would certainly be the last. Gilly’s arse was wedged between the buildings on either side of the street. Two pale globes of flesh that loomed over those individuals too stunned by conflicting feelings of mortal terror and inexplicable lust for this hot, naked, enormous woman who had very nearly killed them by walking down their street. The big, spherical rear looked deceptively soft, as though one might be able to sink harmlessly into its warm, yielding flesh, but the crumbling facades of the structures demonstrated that being sat on by this inexplicably huge woman would be no safer than being stepped on.
The flattened tour bus was embedded in her perfectly formed footprint, amidst a few other cars and red splotches. Gilly reached down, dug her thumbnail underneath the pancaked wreckage, surprised at how easily hardened tarmac yielded like clay, and peeled it free like a sticky label. She lifted up this sliver of metal and plastic, squashed to a paper-like thinness by the mere act of her stepping on it. It was almost unrecognisable as a bus, resembling more a small rectangle of kitchen foil. Gilly turned it between her fingers, fascinated by its sudden and horrific transformation by her sole. The red fluid seeping through the cracks, stark against the dirty off-white paint, was a grim reminder of its doomed occupants.
Gilly came back to her senses abruptly, and dropped the flattened wreckage of the tour bus to the ground. She'd killed them, and many more simply walking down the street, but as she surveyed her surroundings again it appeared that the multitudes of tiny people were still inexplicably filling the roads. The street should have been evacuated by now, she thought, and though her intentions to walk along it had been made perfectly clear it was still clogged with scurrying, ant-like people just in front of her toes.
Balancing on her toes, she reached out to steady herself by placing her hand atop an office building that reached just above the level of her bent knees. Her delicate fingers curled around a corner of the structure's roof, and Gilly could not help but stare transfixed at the ridiculous image of her own hand resting on a building that, moments earlier, would have towered over her. On a whim she sank her fingers into the structure, and saw that the brick and mortar disintegrated into dust under her effortless strength. Her fingers curled up into a fist around the corner and effortlessly tore away a handful of shattered masonry. Clouds of dust and debris erupted between her fingers and showered bystanders below with lethal clumps of broken masonry.
Having torn away a portion of the roof Gilly could peer inside the hole she had made and see inside. It was a small open plan office, with two rows of workstations, a number of potted plants, a water-cooler, and a small kitchen area for tea and coffee. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, and chunks of debris and broken masonry lay scattered across the dingy carpeted floor and the desks. Most of the workers had fled, indeed a glance down confirmed yet more people streaming through the doors of this office building into the street below, some colliding with the sides of her feet in their mad dash to get away.
The miniscule detail was impressive, far more so than any of her masturbatory fantasies. She leaned in closer and found that she could make out individual sheets of paper resting on the desks, though the writing and diagrams on them would be far too tiny for her to make out. Her hot breath stirred the papers. There were people still in the building too; one woman hiding under a desk and sobbing hysterically, a man in a dusty and torn suit standing at the kitchen area, his hands gripped around the counter and apparently frozen in terror, staring up at her. They were so small, only half an inch in size - tiny and pathetic enough to be squished beneath her fingertip if she so pleased. No, she corrected herself, it was she who was big. Gilly wanted to examine them up close, but there was no possible way for her to extricate them from their hiding places without squishing them like bugs.
Gilly decided that she had wasted enough time playing, Pat still needed to be found so he could fix this, somehow, and she placed her hands on her knees and rose to her full, terrifying height. Where her prodigious hips had scraped the sides of the buildings had ground away their facades, leaving streaks of cascading debris into the streets and dust marring her pale, freckled skin. Trying to push herself up without leverage, for she reasoned that if she was to use the buildings to steady herself the massive strength granted by her new size would have utterly demolished them, and watching the ground rush away from her faster than she was used to made her wobble unsteadily on her feet. Giving up on her attempts at maintaining modesty, she swung her arms out for balance, and as she stood tall amidst the small buildings and the tiny people at her feet, her great body wobbled clumsily until she regained her balance. Her enormous breasts quivered with her gyrations.
She glanced over her shoulder at the destruction she had left in her walk - just a few steps had left deep, bloodied craters in the tarmac - and felt a pang of guilt whither her from within. But when she saw that a small crowd had gathered almost immediately beneath her and realised that they must have been leering up at her bum she felt a sudden and inexplicable sense of rage take her. They might have seen her arsehole, or even her pussy, and taken photos and videos. Even from hundreds of feet up she could see them holding up their phones. Her big arse would be all over the internet by now.
“You little-!” Gilly raised her right foot high into the air and brought it down upon the crowd in a petulant stomp. The people there had no time to react before they were snuffed out of existence. The impact shook the ground, sending a ripple through the street that expanded outwards, knocking the tiny people over and shattering glass windows for a hundred feet around. Cracks deeper than those caused by her cautious walking down the street spidered out from her footprint, swallowing cars and people alike. Her foot sank deeper into the tarmac, apparently striking the water mains as jets of water erupted from the cracks and soaked her toes. The roof of the building she had peeled back shuddered and then collapsed, burying those office workers beneath rubble.
“Shite,” she said, watching the devastation she had caused from a single stomp. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
Gilly’s hands balled up into tight fists and she breathed a sigh of frustration. She was angry at herself for not maintaining control of herself, for while the casualties caused by her little walk down the street had been accidental, she would have a hard time explaining the flattened remains of people under her right foot as anything but deliberate. But they should have known better, she thought, than to linger around a giantess and annoy her by leering up at her privates while she was feeling vulnerable and exposed. It was their own damned fault they got stomped on, and once she realised that she felt better.
She looked back at the street towards downtown, where she hoped Pat would still be. Her distraction had given the fleeing crowd a bit of a head start, but once she started walking, the abandoned cars flattened into thin slivers of metal beneath her marching feet, that distance was very rapidly closed. This time she didn’t bother trying to conceal her nakedness, and walked down the street with a determined, forceful sort of gait, with her arms swinging defiantly. Gilly had tried to be gentle, but her innate clumsiness was magnified to deadly proportions by her colossal size, and she had barely made any progress to her goal either. If she wanted to find Pat soon, then she had to get a move on.
As Gilly approached the crowd of people pushing and pulling in frustratingly slow flight from her, she thought about those giantess fetish stories she’d masturbated over time and time again. Her libido aside, she had often thought it was unrealistic that people would just mill around aimlessly in the streets as a giant woman wrecked their city or that they wouldn’t organise an evacuation of the immediate area. But here, now that she was a real, living, breathing giantess, she saw that perhaps there was some truth to that. Yet there was nowhere else for them to go, for even buildings were nothing compared to her might. She raised her foot over the crowded street, seeing individual tiny human beings looking up at her in horror, and hesitated for a second before placing it down right on top of them. A dozen lives were ended, and a dozen more when she made another step, and another, and another… each one a massacre.
***
Dave had only gone out to the convenience store to grab some beer for the game later, now he was running for his life from some impossibly huge woman with an accent he couldn’t place. He ran, still carrying a plastic bag with a six-pack of beer in his hand, with hundreds more all around him. Tripping over someone who had fallen, he bounced into a lamppost, losing his grip on his carrier bag, and turned to see… her.
He craned his head back to see this skyscraper of a naked woman bearing down on him. Huge, curvy, with a sexy swing of her broad hips and a jiggle of her massive breasts with each cataclysmic step. His eyes were fixated on her tits; it was impossible to ignore the biggest breasts in existence. If she was normal size, he wagered that if was to grope them the soft flesh would spill over his hands. A shudder through the ground as her foot stepped down tore his attention away from her bust. He looked up to her face, tilting his head back further, to see her soft, round features, framed by a mess of shoulder-length, frizzy ginger hair. For a moment, he felt those stark green eyes fix on his, but it was impossible - she was only looking at where she was about to step next.
Dear god, or goddess, he thought, she was hot.
The giant woman had moved faster than anything that size had any right to. In seconds she was almost upon him, the earthquakes with each step worsening as she approached. Looking up, Dave saw that her pretty face was obscured by the underside of her bust. His gaze travelled down the plane of her stomach, slightly pudgy but not overly so, and settled lustfully upon her brazenly naked womanhood. The small, trimmed tuft of pubes there matched the ginger of her hair, he noted. He clung tightly to the lamppost as people continued to surge around him, staring up at a cunt that could swallow him whole with a mixture of raw fear and lust. The cacophony of screams and cries was relentless around him, interspersed with the sounds of car horns.
Her foot swung above him, and his scream of utmost mortal terror joined the chorus. Dave’s knees gave way and he sank down to the ground, his arms gripping the lamppost in desperation. He looked up at a truly massive sole sweeping overhead, obscuring his view utterly of the giant woman who was about to just fucking step on him like the insect he was to her, and could make out dirt and debris clinging to the warm, wrinkled skin there. Though it was in shadow, he could make out certain dark red stains there, amidst the general grime that had accumulated from her walk down, or on, the streets he lived. He thought, grimly, he was about to join them.
Then, daylight. The god-like appendage passed by over him, and then struck the ground right beside him. The impact shook the ground with a tremendous, heavy ‘thud’ that reverberated through Dave’s entire body, silencing dozens of screams. Where before was a street packed with men and women fleeing was now the impossible, ludicrous sight of a massive foot, incredibly close to him so that it appeared to his relatively tiny viewpoint like a wall of pale white flesh. Rising to his unsteady feet, with his head ringing and feeling like it was packed with cotton wool, he reached out with his left arm, with his right still wrapped around the lamppost for support. Straining a little, he found that he could touch the real-life goddess. Only his fingertips could just about graze the skin of her heel, with her ankle bone looming over him as though to mock his tiny size compared to the giantess. Her skin felt warm to the touch, and smooth even with the thin lines criss-crossing its surface.
This wall of flesh shifted, and Dave flinched back with a yelp. The giantess’s foot rose ponderously from its crater, swung forwards, and landed a couple of hundred feet further down the street. Still clinging to his lamppost, he found that he could peer over the ridge of broken tarmac that had formed around the vast footprint as though this huge woman was walking on wet sand instead of a road, and could see what had become of those people who had fallen beneath her divine sole. Great smears of gore, flattened clothes, pancaked vehicles, and other bits and pieces that were rendered thoroughly unidentifiable by the goddess’s step. Absolutely nothing could have survived. Others lucky enough to have avoided her step were either rendered catatonic with their near-brush with death, huddling on the sidewalk with thousand-yard stares, or had been driven into screaming fits of hysteria, yet Dave was barely aware of them.
The ground tremors grew fainter and fainter as the giantess continued her deadly stroll down the street. Dave tore his eyes from the horrific sight before him, watched the source of all of this destruction and carnage saunter away with no more urgency or care than any woman casually walking along. Yet though he knew that each such step had much the same effect as the swimming pool-sized, foot-shaped crater beside him that marked the graves of dozens of innocent souls, he could not help but leer at the biggest, sexiest ass he had ever laid eyes on. The twin globes of her rear jiggled slightly with each powerful step, reminding him that this catastrophe was caused not by some impersonal force of nature, but a woman of immense size and power.