Giantess World
“Are you boys up here somewhere?” Marigold called out in a thunderous voice, though she did her best to keep to a whisper. She cupped both hands around her mouth to project, turning to the four compass directions for full coverage. To ensure every corner of G-75 could hear, she took long strides around the terrain, crossing the entirety of the province in a single bound that seemed to vibrate the Earth itself when she landed. “If you can hear me, send up all your flares now so I can find you! Or… maybe a sonic cannon? Oh, it’s also all right if you’ve got some missiles! They can’t hurt me, they’ll just wrinkle my uniform a little if they’re off-course. Hello? HELLO! Oh, it’s no use…”
At the end of thirty minutes, Marigold was turned into a nervous wreck, thinking of the disappointment she was sure to inspire in her superiors for failing to locate the mission meeting place. Province G-75, meanwhile, was a different kind of wreck altogether. After countless laps around the perimeter and through the heart of the land, Marigold’s lumbering peds had worn the ground down to a slick uniform surface, with only a toeprint here or there to make the area recognizable as anything other than a patch of frequently-visited footpath. Indeed, it now looked just as well-worn, if not more so, than the designated geographic aisle “streets” across the world that Marigold was usually restricted to, in order to prevent squishing civilizations. After trying to contact her superior officer twice more, and stomping the province every which way out of sheer boredom and uneasiness, the trooper finally received a message back. It was simple:
Mission aborted, soldier. No further instructions. Return to your base.
Marigold frowned. She considered asking if this change was her fault, or if Unifica had merely altered its plans, but decided not to question her orders. After all, she was a loyal soldier, with faith in her commander, and so Marigold pocketed her phone and found the road home.
Unbeknownst to her, as she exited the province and strolled back over the horizon, the survivors and bystanders surrounding the G-75 massacre watched by the thousands via eye witness and guerilla news footage as the angel of doom ended her horrifying extermination of the populace under her bare feet and at last stalked off to parts unknown. The seismic smack of her distant footsteps made every one of them tremble. But even once Marigold was far enough away not to make the very earth quaver, the citizens of the adjacent provinces, previously standing side-by-side with the resistance originators, continued to shake in their boots. Any defiance to the empire they once held had been thoroughly replaced with survival instinct over the course of less than an hour.
By the next day, the continent was re-unified, offering unconditional terms of surrender to Unifica for a war they hadn’t even had the chance to participate in yet. Every single resistance leader, soldier, and piece of military hardware had been wiped out under Marigold’s feet while waiting for the conflict to begin. The chief conspirators were extinct, and any nations friendly to the original cause had just watched Unifica’s most effective enforcer stamp out the competition like it was nothing. Even provinces not yet known to Unifica as rebel allies ousted themselves and pleaded for peace, lest they incur the empire’s wrath when next Marigold went out for a walk. Within a week, Unifica had lived up to the root inspiration of its name, and brought the world back into line with its interests, minus a single province, which was now a smote wasteland dotted by divots and smears in the shape of a colossal young woman’s antsy, wriggly, naked foot: a grave warning to any future instigators.
Marigold hadn’t received an order for almost a month since the cancelled mission. Like a schoolgirl awaiting word from a crush, she spent most of her time monitoring her transponder, hoping for work from her superior or even a word of explanation. Just when she’d begun to suspect she was on unspoken probation by Unifica, however, the sky-high golden-haired officer received a call. She tried not to sound too desperate when she answered, desiring only to continue serving the good of the world and the little people who lived in it.
“Yes, sir?” she greeted.
“At ease, soldier. This… this isn’t an official communication,” he said. Immediately Marigold sensed something was different. She’d never once heard her superior speak with a word out of place. His voice was aggrieved, nearly tremoring.
“Oh. What… is it, sir?”
“I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. It was too much. But you deserve to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“The mission in G-75.”
“The one that was aborted, sir? Please, have I done something wrong?”
“N-No, soldier. In fact… you completed the mission exactly as planned.”
“Pardon me, sir, but… I didn’t complete any mission! I only waited in the uninhabited province, looking for the fleet, but I couldn’t find them, and-”
“No. You did the mission,” he interrupted. “Just as Unifica ordered.”
“What are you talking about?” Marigold demanded. “What did they… what did I do?”
“I’m sorry.” The voice on the phone croaked. He sighed, then spoke in a hiss: “G-75 wasn’t uninhabited.”
The line went silent for close to a minute, though it seemed much longer. Marigold felt as though she’d been dealt a smarting blow to the cranium, which was a novel sensation for a girl whose footsteps shuddered the planet itself. She shook her head, staring into the blank phone. The color drained from her face, redistributed as a chill in the bone.
“T-That’s… that’s not true,” Marigold whimpered. “Why else would they have sent me there, if it wasn’t empty wilderness?”
“G-75 wasn’t wilderness. It housed some of the most densely populated city-states in this hemisphere-”
“No.”
“-and you were sent there, without knowledge, in order to prevent a war between Unifica and the rebels-”
“No...”
“-and you did, by clearing the entire province of Unifica’s enemies. By… stepping on them.”
“NO!” Marigold screamed. Her cry wrapped around the world. “Tell me it’s not true! Please!”
“I tell you this now because I’ve resigned my position. I… regret my part in what transpired, and accept personal responsibility for involving you,” her superior said with as much compassion as he could muster, though even for a career military man, he too was on the verge of relative hysterics. “I’m sorry, Marigold.”
The astronomic officer sunk into her chair, stifling the sobbing in her throat, with a hand covering her mouth and raging rivers of tears coursing down her cheeks already. Wrapping her legs around the pillars of the chair, she endeavored to lift her gargantuan bare feet away from touching any part of the ground, until she was fully suspended from the vulnerable planet below. “No, no, no, no…”
Chapter End Notes:
Oof, and that's the end of this one. Just a quickie this time, but you can expect to see Marigold appear again (albeit a slightly different version of her), plus other tales in this same subgenre of well-meaning but destructively humongous ladies. Thanks for reading!