Malva held me in the palm of her hand, and it was all I could do to stare up at her immense, wicked grin as my heart hammered in my chest, blood rushing in my ringing ears.  She started to walk around, humming a little tune as she started nudging and kicking all of the scattered Flare Balls into a pile in the center of the room.  I squealed as she casually tossed me into the air once and then again as she walked around.  Before long her collection was complete and she settled to the ground in front of it, crossing her legs and setting me off to the side of the pile as she continued humming along.

I watched in wordless terror as she took one Ball after another, cracking it open and dumping the person inside onto the ground before she carelessly tossed the empty containers aside, each one landing with a clatter that made me cringe.

It was the way she grinned that made it so frightening, and the little tune she just kept humming as she went along.  It didn’t take much time for the twenty-some tiny souls to be emptied out, and once they had been Malva reached over and popped open my Ball as well, shaking me out onto the floor before setting it aside with noticeably more care.

She'd stolen my Ball. Of course she had; she'd done the exact thing to Shauna. The fact that she hadn't smashed it gave me some hope that she wasn't planning anything truly terrible for me, but in truth I had absolutely no idea what she actually was planning to do. Wasn't she supposed to belong to me? I'd caught her like Chloe wanted me to, and even if it had seemed rather be grudging at times, she'd always obeyed my commands.

"Malva, what are you doing!" I shrieked at her from far below on the floor. "Stop this right now! Pick up my Ball and turn me back."

I took an involuntary step back when she turned her attention towards me and let out this long, terror amused and derisive laugh.

"You're supposed to listen to me!" I cried out, though a significant amount of uncertainty had crept into my voice.

Malva just shook her head and made a show of slowly pulling herself up from the ground, like a cruel and threatening colossus of femininity wearing a menacing and condescending smile of smug superiority.  I'd felt insignificant in her shadow when she was still sitting on the floor, but seeing her so far above us... I knew I was visibly trembling but it seemed like I was the only one. The rest of the tiny people seemed mostly confused, milling about and just staring up at this four hundred foot tall version of the woman that gave them the news on their Holo Casters.

"Sorry, runt," she muttered in her low and throaty voice, sensuality dripping from her lips with each carefully enunciated syllable. "I played along for a while, 'cause you're just this special kind of sexy when you think you're in charge, but this... this is just too important."

That was when her boot started to shift, and as I watched in mute horror it slowly slid through the air to hover inches above the still staggering and bewildered crowd.  It wasn't until it started to descend towards them that I found my voice and began to scream and scream and scream.

"Stand still," Malva quietly commanded, and It was almost as strange as it was horrifying to watch her step down in the midst of the crowd. None of them seemed to react at first, so dazed by whatever the Flare Balls had done to their minds in the brief time they'd been inside, but once the thick tread of her boot sole started to force the five or six people beneath it down to the ground some waves of panic began to spread around her unstoppable boot.  I still must have been audible above the crowd, though, because when I screamed "Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it!" she actually seemed to pause.

"Is there a problem, little Lucy?" she taunted, nearly sneering as she turned her tremendous eyes to stare down at me while carefully keeping several people pinned flat beneath her foot.  “You don’t like how I deal with people who stand in our way?”

“We already caught them!” I protested, still feeling a little strange to be talking about people as I was.

“They were going to fight us,” Malva growled, and she must have grown tired of keeping her boot raised while we spoke.  Her thick heel settled to the ground and I watched it utterly pulverize a young man’s arm, sending him into a desperate, high-pitched wail. “They don’t want to be part of our world, so why not give them their wish?”

She chuckled at her own bit of cleverness, and I started to protest again.  “But-”

“Hey.”  She narrowed her eyes at me, and I was immediately silenced by the firmness of her voice, gasping to feel her suddenly undisguised malice directed at me.  “You don’t want to be a part of this?  There’s your way out.”  She jerked her chin towards her raised boot, and my eyes followed down along her body to simply stare at the black leather wrapped around a foot that was poised to snuff out a half dozen lives.  “Go ahead and wriggle your way under there, runt.  I’ll even act as sad as possible when I tell Chloe that her favorite toy betrayed us and had to be squished.”

There wasn’t much light or really anything else in the room, so Malva’s gargantuan, somewhat shadowy form utterly dominated the empty space, nothing but a seemingly endless expanse of cracked tiles spread in every direction and the few functioning bulbs in the chandelier above her left her grinning face and shining hair ringed in a halo of light.  She was unstoppable, godlike in power and presence over the helpless things, the entirety of Kalos’s resistance at her feet.

“No?” she asked, that same smirk persisting as she continued to taunt me.  “Then shut up and watch, little girl.”

An evil goddess, that’s what she was.  I’d known she was twisted, and certainly dangerous, but as she slowly and carefully pushed her boot towards the floor it became absolutely and completely clear that Malva was nothing but pure evil.  The silence surrounding the first squelches and crunches was almost the most disturbing element, but the rest of the people finally started to panic as more of the screams beneath Malva’s thick sole turned to gurgling squelches.

“Good,” she purred, watching as whatever remnants of the Flare Ball’s influence over the crowd gave way to their growing mortal terror.  She took her time pushing her sole to the floor, seeming to savor every detail of the lives being obliterated beneath her boot.  “Scream for me, weaklings,” she demanded with a lustful sigh, making a dramatic show of slowly twisting her foot in the splattered remains of her first victims.  “I love your stupid fear.”

People started to break away from the group, drawing a cruel laugh from the giantess above them as she lifted her bloody boot and tracked the movements of a few fleeing together, a man and woman and boy close to my age, possibly a family.  I was still considering their relationship to one another when she stomped down, erasing them from existence and splattering bits of them in every direction.

“Go ahead,” she murmured, letting out a little sigh as she dragged her foot back and smeared what was left of the family across the floor.  “Run.”

I wanted to help or cry or do something, do anything at all, but what could I do?  What could any of them do, isolated in the middle of the floor, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide with Malva towering over all of us like we were nothing but scurrying ants on the ground.  I found myself crawling back into my Ball and curling up against the plastic, trying my best to hide my eyes and look away and failing completely.

This was so much more than just a mass execution for Malva.  She toyed with her victims, nudging them about with the toe of her boot, viciously taunting them as they ran about this way and that.  “Don’t stop,” she laughed, always with that dark, ringing laughter as a woman tripped and fell, then instantly vanished in a spray of gore beneath her sole.  “Stop and you squish,” she chuckled.

“Squish, squish, squish,” she cackled, smashing three more with three separate little taps of her toes.  She crushed them so easily, so casually and effortlessly and seemed to think about nothing more than how fun, how exciting it was to eradicate these little people at her feet.

“Anyone want to stop?” she teased, sweeping her boot through a bunch of the fleeing people, sending them tumbling and sprawling across the tile.  She bit her lower lip, eyes gleaming as she pushed them around with her foot until she’d built a wriggling pile of humanity, then she let out a little breath as she settled her sole on top of them.  I don’t know why but I tried to count them while they struggled, shrieking and writhing beneath the incalculable pressure of her building-sized boot.  “You can try….” she began, but interrupted herself with a revoltingly sexual moan as she slowly shifted her weight forward and crushed eight or nine or ten tiny people to pulpy smears.

“...Begging for mercy,” she concluded, her eyes fluttering as her black boot remained perched atop the flattened remains of the group it had just crushed.  I quickly looked away, but so did she, scanning the ground for more little things to play with.  A pair of women had fallen at some point or maybe just given up, just laying on the ground, huddled close to one another and hiding their faces while they sobbed in absolute despair.

Malva took a second to aim the broad stacked heel of her boot at them, then dropped it onto their bodies, silencing their cries with a sharp, wet smack.  An older man was off to their side, quite a distance away by his perspective but only a couple of feet for the massive Malva.  He’d fallen to his knees, taking her invitation to beg for his life quite seriously, but as soon as she noticed him she pivoted on her heel, its thick tread noisily squeaking as it twisted atop the women’s ruined bodies before the simultaneous thud and squelch of her other boot stomping down signaled the end of his life as well.

Her chest was rising and falling as she scanned the ground for more people to play with, and I knew it was entirely from excitement rather than exertion.  She hadn’t exerted herself at all, barely needing any effort to utterly destroy a dozen lives.  I couldn’t see anyone still standing, but I imagined someone out there had to have survived.  Whatever miniscule hope I was trying to summon swiftly faded, though, as Malva let out a long and happy sigh while turning around, firmly treading through the broad swath of gore she’d reduced the captive crowd to.

That dreadful humming had started again.  Her steps were carefully placed as she walked, further crushing anything that looked like something more than messy red smears, occasionally giving a little twist of her toes to squish any bigger bits or still squirming people she came across.

“Oh my god, that was good,” she happily sighed once she’d completely run out of little things to crush.  At least I prayed she was done smashing things beneath her boots, because she was turning towards me and making her way across the bloodied floor, every step squishing and splashing through the wet mess she’d made.

I rediscovered my ability to scream when she crouched down over me and stretched out a hand, snapping my Ball shut around me and rising back with me in her grasp.  Her fingers wrapped all around me and I knew, I absolutely knew that I was completely held in her power.  My pulse hammered through every inch of my body as I stared back at her heavily lidded eyes and the faintest sheen of sweat at the corners of her brow.  Was she going to squeeze and crush me in her hand?  Maybe just pop my Ball open and dump me out, letting me fall for hundreds of feet and splatter upon impact with the ground?

A burst of light around me caught me by surprise, and in the next instant I was pulling myself up to my full height, glancing around at the scene for a moment before meeting Malva’s gaze with a cold and icy stare.  Truthfully, the little red smears and streaks looked a lot smaller from so far above them, but that didn’t change what I’d seen Malva do.

“Well, that was super easy,” she breathed, giving me this easy smile that seemed to just further emphasize all the malice inside her.  “Pretty cool, huh?”

That was all I could take.  Thirty people, good and innocent people just crushed to death in mere minutes and here she was, laughing about how cool it was?  I howled as I lunged at her, no real plan in mind aside from going for her face, even if I had to rip that smirk off of her face with my fingernails I was going to do it.  

I flew through the air towards her, ready to rip her to shreds, but she was more than ready for me.  In one fluid motion she took a small step to the side and brought her knee smashing up into my stomach, sending me tumbling over it and leaving me to land roughly on my back, groaning and gasping for breath.

“Nice, Lucy,” Malva laughed, dropping her horribly gory boot onto my chest and forcing what little air I had managed to suck down back out of my lungs.  I was normal sized at least, but here I was, trapped beneath her heel and staring up at her like the other helpless people she’d snuffed out without a care.  “You might be a Pokemon Champion, but you’re still just a stupid little girl.  This kind of works out, though, since I’ve got all these guts on my shoes.”

She started to twist her boot into my blouse to emphasize her point, leaving me to whimper while my vision started to swim from a lack of oxygen and the mess from Malva’s sole began seeping through my shirt.  “How’s that?” she asked, sliding her foot forward and lifting her toes to show off the underside of her boot, its thick heel still crushing down on my collarbone while her sole’s thick tread hovered inches from my face.

My first glimpse of those reddish streaks drove me to turn my head to the side, but Malva instantly shouted, “Look at it!” and I compulsively obeyed, my head snapping back to stare directly at the bottom of her boot.  Much of the mess that the dozens of dead had left behind had already been wiped off on my chest, but it was still somewhat stained and reeked with the stench of death mingling with the scents of leather and rubber.

“Clean yet?” she taunted, and I squealed, shaking my head as she lowered her foot a fraction of an inch more towards my face.

“Then lick it,” she growled, letting her toes lower a little more.  I let out a fearful grunt and clamped my mouth shut as her slick lugged sole grazed my nose and lips.

“Lick it,” she droned, drawing out each syllable as she rocked her boot back on its heel and then slapped her sole down onto my face again.  This time I turned my head to the side in protest and she just leaned forward, letting her wretched, heavy black boot smash down on me with all of her weight.  I could only whimper pathetically as she twisted her boot back and forth, grinding my face under her foot while she simply cackled with delight.

By the time she was done I was sobbing hysterically, tears rolling down my face and shooting streaks of pain lancing across my skull as the nauseating scents of the squashed and splattered dead smeared into my skin.

“Stupid,” she spat once again with a cruel little sneer as she stepped off of my face and turned to walk away, and for my part I could only lay on the floor, watching as her heavy heels pounded their way back down the hall and eventually disappeared into the darkness.  I didn’t get up, nor did I feel like I had it in me to ever get up again.  Every sniffle I took and every reddish smear I saw reminded me of the horrible things Malva had done to all of those innocent people.  What we’d done.  What I’d helped her do.