Sergeant O’Shea could not take his eyes away from the naked woman in the distance. She was drop dead gorgeous. Her beautiful dark eyes were easy enough to see, even from the distance. Combined with her high cheekbones, thick lips and framed by jet black hair, she looked as wild as mysterious, and of course incredibly attractive.

She had the face of a centerfold… and the body too. It would have been hard for O’Shea to suggest any improvement to her hourglass figure with its silky legs, wide hips, washboard flat stomach or oversized yet unbelievably firm breasts. No doubt she had been blessed by genetics, but also by regular visits to the gym, as it was made obvious by the firmness of it all or the tense muscles that were hinted under her tanned skin.

Under normal circumstances, she would have been any man’s dream. Yet, today that woman was the city’s nightmare. Also his, since Keith O’Shea had no idea on what the hell he was supposed to do once the woman, who dwarfed every single building around her, reached them.

She had noticed them shortly after they had started to get ready. And she started heading towards them not long after. Her expression had scared the crap out of him at first, but it was softening as she approached. It was almost as if the woman was welcoming their sight, compared to whatever had been going through her head before.

Keith could sense his men’s nervousness. He could not blame them, considering he was at least as freaked out as they were. Murmurs started spreading along the blockade, no one had any clue on what they were supposed to do, and the woman was approaching fast. Incredibly fast, as a matter of fact. She had covered half a dozen blocks in no time and even if O’Shea had already accepted that the shakes were produced by her steps, he was still freaked out every time her feet set down and the ground under him trembled.

She had cut the distance with them in more than half and they still had no instructions. Tension could be cut with a knife. Then, the radios cracked, and they got their orders. He could clearly identify the Colonel in charge of the operation.

“At my command, fire at will. That bitch has killed hundreds of people already. Let’s bring her down!” he said, reinforcing the last sentence as if to give the men some morale. It worked with some, not with O’Shea. And he could see that not with many others.

Keith mentally questioned the wisdom of the order they had just been given, but there was no time to argue. The woman took three more steps in their direction. Her expression was almost kind by now. The radio cracked again:

“Fire. Bring the bitch down!”

*=*=*=*=*

For the first time in Lucia’s life, the sight of cops was very welcome. Almost as if she had had triggered a mental switch, she forgot about the crowds and journalists around her and her fury at them and focused entirely on her first sighting of authority since she had woken up in the ruins of the hospital.

The cops were organized in a blockade, or at least an attempt at one. It was not yet properly formed. Lucia tried to block the thought of how ridiculous they actually seemed and focused on the bright side of the situation. Despite how naïve it could all seem, she felt hopeful.

Forgetting about everything she had done until now, she saw the cops down the road as her first contact with someone that could help. These were the people she had intended to meet when she had started for the sea and these had to be the people that could get her the help she needed. They might even be able to clear a path for her to the beach, where she would be able to relax considerably versus being surrounded by buildings that she now knew were quite fragile.

So, feeling positive after some time, she headed for the blockade, her mind completely focused on cooperating with the police. She was a couple of blocks away when the firing started. She heard the bangs and felt the stings all over her body. Her mood changed very quickly from hopeful to incredibly mad.

The cops’ weapons were powerful, and the fire was intense and before she could realize, Lucia was covering her face and taking a couple of steps back. Reaching the intersection immediately behind her, she just ducked to her left and hid behind a quite tall building that reached all the way to her massive chest and offered good enough cover. Debris fell from its façade as she was not careful when doing so and she pushed her ass against the high-rise a little too hard. She breathed in hard, feeling incredibly pissed-off about what had just happened, when she heard some cheers coming from the main road.

“They are cheering!” her mind screamed. “The cops started shooting at me without even saying ‘Hi’ and the people are cheering!”

Then it completely sunk in. In their minds, she was a monster. They were not only scared of her because of her size, they thought she was a real monster, not a person, and they were hunting her down.

There would be no beach, no help, no going back to normal. They would hunt her down and keep trying until they could finish her. She would have felt despair if she had not been so angry.

“Those fucking tiny bugs are trying to kill me! They are trying as hard as they can!” her mind screamed at her again.

They did not want to talk to her, reason with her, try to reach an agreement she was more than willing to reach. They were just interested in killing her. In their eyes, she was not a woman going through a really weird situation; she was an abomination that had to be eliminated.

It was hard to accept. Her rage was thinking for her, though, leading her to reach the conclusion that the entire world was against her, now. And then, her mind screamed something else at her than: “Anyone who shoots at me dies!”

Lucia was breathing hard, thinking on what to do. Her rage was screaming at her to go out and face them, to show them what happened to those that attacked her. To show them how useless their weapons were against her now. To finish them like the bugs they were. She clenched her fists and was about to turn around the corner when a voice in the back of her head stopped her. Her last floodgate of sanity was trying to keep her rage at bay.

It told her that if she did what her anger was screaming at her to do she would cross the final line. She was vaguely conscious that she had already crossed several others when she had killed those that had attacked her or when she had brought half a city block down, but in her mind,  those had been unavoidable, accidents she could explain if she was given the chance. If she fought the cops back and killed them, as her anger was demanding, there would be nothing else to explain. She would declare war to them.

“They already declared fucking war on you!” her mind screamed again.

There was no denying that, of course. Still, the “easy” reaction felt wrong. If she could convince them that she was not dangerous, that all she wanted was a little help… things could still turn our right for her. Someone had to know how to shrink her back to normal. If she had grown she could be shrunk. There had to be a way. There had to be some way she could recover her life.

She was breathing very hard now. She heard some noises from the main avenue. Something was going on there. She did not dare to risk a look. She was still making her mind up. Finally, she had managed to calm down enough. She felt that she was thinking more clearly. Lucia focused on the happy path. She held to hope. No one was interested in more violence, right? She wanted to have her current situation resolved and the cops wanted to get rid of the threat they saw in her. They could reach an agreement. Yes, they had to be able to reach an agreement.

It was not easy to get in the right mood, in any case. Not after she had been hit dozens of times by a group of cops she felt she could easily crush in retribution. But it was the right thing to do.

A quick look down her body showed her a few tiny red splotches, but they were quickly fading away. Other than that, there were no apparent permanent effects of the attack. It helped calming Lucia down. And getting her more willing to cooperate with the police.

She did not turn the corner back into the main road immediately. It wasn’t time yet. She was sure that she did not need to do that to be heard and she did not want to risk a rushed reaction from the cops if she showed back in their sights. She cleared her throat and talked in a loud voice. Windows in the street she was in rattled. She was sure that she could be heard for blocks.

“Listen to me, please. My name is Lucia Torres. I’m 27. I’m not dangerous. I am just a normal woman. I don’t know how I got this big, but all I want is to have this fixed. You don’t have to be afraid. All I want is to get to the beach and stay there until someone finds out how to fix what happened to me. I know people are scared of me. I know I caused some accidents. I did not want to. And I promise I’ll be extra careful.”

This should be enough, she thought. Still, she decided to play it safe.

“Of course, I can go anywhere else you tell me to go. I just want to get out of the city and cause as little trouble as possible. I will follow your instructions.”

She had to admit it felt a little unnatural. No matter how much she wanted to get back to her normal life, the truth was that during her short while as a giant woman she had got used to be the one giving the orders, so her words felt strange. Still, she knew that she had no other option. Not if she wanted to cling to the last shred of hope that she could get out of the mess she had got into.

She gave them a while. She got no answer from the road. She thought on what to do. There was only one thing left.

“Ok, I’m going to come out. Please, don’t be afraid. I just want to talk. I want to reach an agreement.”

She tried to look as little threatening as possible as she stepped back into the main road. Her over exaggerated gesture would have even looked ridiculous if she had not been dwarfing the buildings next to her.

She saw that there had been some activity in the blockade during the time she had been hiding behind the building. A couple more cars and a van had arrived and also what looked like a large SWAT truck. Even from the distance and her height, Lucia saw that there was a clear difference between the truck and the rest of the vehicles. It looked much more threatening.

The cops did not shoot right away. Those were good news. Lucia smiled and said:

“Ok, I just wanted to…”

Just then, she saw a flash in the back of the blockade and almost immediately, she saw a trail of smoke moving quickly in her direction. She was not prepared at all for that. She realized what it was when it was already too late. She was beginning to flex her muscles to duck the approaching rocket when she felt it hitting her square in the stomach.

It felt like being punched. She squealed as she coughed all the air out of her lungs and then she started falling backwards. Windows shattered and debris peeled off from the façades of nearby buildings as first her ass and then her head hit the road behind her with enormous force, making her surroundings shake like a magnitude 5 earthquake. She remained motionless for a few seconds. It hurt. It hurt like hell.

Then she heard it. More cheering. It was much louder than before. She could not see it, but for all she knew there had to be hundreds of people down the road yelling and waving their hands as she laid down on the pavement, feeling as if she had been ran over by a bus.

Dizziness started to fade away and the facts came back to her head. And then she felt the rage back. It taking over her, feeling much stronger than it had ever felt before. It screamed at her:

“They shot a rocket at you!”

Being shot by guns and rifles has been infuriating enough, but this? For all she knew, they had shot her with whatever they used to blow tanks up. They really wanted to kill her. They wanted to kill her very badly. And, for all she knew, she should be dead. In her first action since she had been hit, she clumsily moved her right hand to her stomach, in the spot the missile had impacted. It still stung. And it burned. She could feel the blisters, but she had to move her fingers away, since their touch made the pain much more intense. Something was not right, or at least not as she would have expecting.  She brought her fingers back to her face and saw some burnt tissue on them. But no blood. She was not bleeding? It made no sense.

Her hand’s movement had had another effect. It took her a couple of seconds to understand. The cheering had stopped. People had realized that she wasn’t dead.

The last floodgate in her conscience broke and rage took completely over her, mixed with something else that had been building up in the back of it all morning long.

She felt something rush along her body. It had to be adrenaline. Her muscles tensed and she could have sworn that she felt some stretching as well. It was quick, though. She felt an incredible surge of strength and before she knew she was already sitting.

She could see that her sudden recovery had taken the cops unprepared. She looked down at her stomach and could see a bad looking burn to the left of her belly button. But for all that she knew, there should have been a nasty bleeding wound, instead.

She moved her fingers back to the area and felt the pain once more. Not having broken a bone in her life, Lucia did not think she had ever been hurt so badly. But, then again, she had never been shot with a missile before.

Adrenaline was still pumping at full speed along her bloodstream. She narrowed her eyes as she took yet another look at the very confused blockade and before she knew, she was back on her feet, looking down at it all.

The cops reacted with a mix of frenzy and panic as Lucia took two steps forward, closing the gap with her attackers while keeping an incredibly angry stare locked on them.

Then, there was another flash from the blockade. Despite being closer to the shot, this time Lucia was ready for it. She followed the trail of smoke as it moved towards her. It seemed slower than the previous one. Somehow, it felt as if time had suddenly slowed down. The muscles in her legs and torso tensed and reacted with amazing speed when she took a step to the left and then turned, putting her body sideways to the road. The missile passed next to her and she could feel the heat of its jet engine on her stomach and tits. She then followed it with her sight until she saw it crashing and exploding against the side of a tall building 4 blocks behind.

She sneered as she saw that the cops had not been expecting this. Gunfire erupted soon enough, but somehow the bullets seemed to sting less than they had before. Only those impacting the already burnt area were significantly annoying. Lucia just placed her left hand in front of her eyes, to prevent being hit there, and kept advancing. Her next step brought her to an intersection that was just a block away from the blockade. She then decided to try something. The results were spectacular.

She had seen it laying there, almost unscratched, in the middle of the road. It was a very large SUV, one of those she had always thought ridiculously massive for a city. She kicked it on the side and sent it rolling on itself at great speed and towards the blockade. Firing stopped as the SUV crashed with two squad cars and the three vehicles exploded spectacularly, debris injuring several of the cops that had not been harmed by the initial crash.

The break in the shooting was welcome by Lucia, who could now remove the hand from her face and look at the former blockade. Most cops were now either injured or trying to help their injured friends and did not look like a threat anymore. This did not make her despise them any less. Her eyes narrowed, she advanced towards the blockade as she said:

“I’m so gonna crush you!”

In Lucia’s mind, the cops were not a potential solution to her problem anymore, or someone she could reach an agreement with. They were the enemy, they had hurt her and all she wanted to do was to punish them for that.

When she was about to reach the blockade, two of the cops that were still well enough jumped into one of the undamaged squad cars and tried to get away from her. A second later, the car lay flat under Lucia’s right foot, pressed a few of feet into the road.

She was now in the middle of the former blockade. Looking down, she could see the few cops that could still move scurrying like mice.

“You annoying bugs!”

She stomped on them. All it took her were a few well-placed steps, each of them accounting for a dozen or more of the tiny pests at a time. It almost felt too easy. She did not care if they were injured or not. They all deserved to die and nothing was going to deny her that pleasure. When she finished with the cops, she just kicked a pretty unscratched van into the third story of a neighboring building. Panting, she looked down. There was only one vehicle left. The SWAT truck. She had seen some of the uniformed Lego-sized men getting into it. She bent down and picked the supposedly large vehicle up by the roof. It offered a refreshing resistance to her grab, compared to the other cars she had picked up so far. She tilted it slightly, feeling that there seemed to be a sizeable group of cops inside. Lucia just shook the vehicle vigorously, like someone shaking a can of spray paint, turning them all into pulp, unprepared as they were for her astronomical strength.

She was about to rip the doors open and look inside, curious to see the results of her handiwork, when the screams from the road caught her attention. Bringing her arm down and holding the truck at her side, she looked down the avenue.

The laggards of the mob were only a couple of blocks away. The crowd was a few hundred strong. She knew those were the same guys that had cheered when she was being shot and had celebrated it when they thought she had been killed by the missile.

With a very pissed off look in her face, she yelled as loud as she could:

“Did you think I was dead? I was merely scratched!”

She unconsciously looked down at the burn in her stomach as she said so. It still hurt, but somehow the pain seemed to be less intense and the appearance was a little less worrisome than it had been a few minutes ago. She might have overreacted when she had looked at it the first time. She arched an eyebrow, positively surprised that she seemed to be even less hurt than she had thought.

“You will need much more than that if you want to hurt me!” she yelled back at the crowd.

They did not react to her angry words of defiance. They just kept on running and screaming. Lucia was mad at them. She was as mad at them as she had been at the cops. Ones had tried their best to kill her, but the others had wanted her dead all the same. In her current state of mind, they deserved to be crushed as badly as the police officers.

Then, something that had been building up in the back of her conscience kicked in. They had tried their best to kill her, yet there she was, somewhat hurt but not too badly. They, on the other hand… she took a look down at the former blockade once again. It looked as if it had been washed out by a natural disaster. She felt some strange pride at it. Especially when she realized that she had not even had to break a sweat.

Her nipples swelled, and she felt warmth in her womanhood as an incredible power rush took over her body. She had felt traces of it all during the morning, but now the feeling flooded her. She was powerful. Incredibly powerful. She had crossed every single remaining line with her act of retribution, but at the same time she had freed herself from any restraint. She was not subject to any authority anymore. She had just crushed it.

She addressed the crowd once more, in a loud and now very arrogant tone.

“You should have taken the chance while I was willing to be nice. But since it seems that the only language you are willing to use is violence, I’ll show you that I’m way better at killing you than you are at hurting me!”

As she said that, she arched her arm and threw the SWAT truck in the direction of the crowd. She had never known that she had such a good aim. The truck easily flew the more than two blocks that separated her from the mob, loudly crashed in a packed section of it and then rolled over itself half a dozen times, trampling several more people before it burst into flames. Lucia had to suppress a laugh as she saw that the effects of her throw had been much larger than anticipated. Apart from the ones that had been crushed by the truck or trampled by it afterwards, there were several others that seemed to be seriously injured, hit by the debris that was shot away from it when it hit the ground.

She moaned, feeling actual physical pleasure from what she had done. Lucia did not care at all that they were civilians, not cops. Not anymore.  She just registered the consequences of her effortless action as another proof of her power.

She was beginning to be drunk with it.

“Of course they were afraid!” she thought. “Look at me and look at them. I have the power to do anything I want, and they are helpless to do anything about it!”

Her attention was caught by a movement she saw through the corner of her eye.

*=*=*=*=*

“Shit, she has seen us” Diaz whispered.

O’Shea would have loved to say that it had just been a product of his imagination, but he was not completely sure.

They had managed to sneak away from the main group in the blockade while the giant woman was methodically finishing their friends and colleagues. And now they were hiding around a corner, too afraid to risk an escape in the open street. The level of anxiety was too high not to risk a peek around the corner from time to time, though. O’Shea had hoped that they would be too small for her to notice them, but now he was not so sure.

When the woman stopped talking and turned her head in their direction, he felt a very cold shiver running down his spine.

An instant later he was having a much closer look than he would have wanted to the woman’s face. As concerning as that alone would have been, what scared the crap out of Keith was the predatory look in her eyes.

*=*=*=*=*

Like everything she did, Lucia moved with the grace and agility of a feline, pivoting on her foot and crouching first, then stooping forward to look around the corner. She smiled wickedly when she saw a group of five cops cowering in there.

They tried to flee. She just moved her hand in place, enveloping the group and easily catching all of them in one scoop, not stopping to pay attention at just how dexterous she had got in handling the small world around her.

Standing back up, she opened her palm under her face and looked with great satisfaction at the five tiny officers. They were squirming like worms. The combination of their size, their movements and their stupidity made them lose their humanity in Lucia’s eyes.

Only a couple of them were lying in a position where they had eye contact with her. She savored the fact that they were utterly terrified and imagined that their three colleagues would be in the same state of mind.

Her inner mind was screaming to her to do one thing only. She consciously knew what that would mean. It would not make a difference, though, her subconscious added. Lucia knew by that time that there was no going back to normal, anymore. The rules of the game had changed. She was stuck with what she had become, at least until the little fuckers found some way to kill her.

She felt they would not have an easy time bringing her down, but deep inside Lucia knew that they would eventually succeed. It was a bleak perspective, but it also freed her. She did not need to worry about the consequences of her actions anymore. They were determined already. She just needed to focus on seizing the moment.

Her lips curled in a smirk, in anticipation for what was going to happen. Then she sneered at the two terrified cops in her palm whose faces she could see.

“Are you regretting having shot me already?” she asked with as much disdain as she could.

And then, she just started closing her fingers around them. There were screams, some of them really anguished. It only made it better for Lucia, who had the look of a mad woman as she started feeling the first bones break. Soon she could not see the five victims in her palm, she could just feel them. She kept going, tightening her fingers as hard as she could, making her knuckles white. Lucia felt a dark pleasure as she felt the cops’ bodies squish under the titanic strength of her fingers.  She just went on, not stopping until blood and gore started oozing between them.

She opened her palm and observed the mess. None of the corpses were recognizable anymore. All she could see was a puddle of gore, mixed with dark blue cloth pieces. This was a sight that would have made her throw up just one day before. Now she was looking at it with a sense of achievement. They had tried to kill her, so she had killed them instead. Not only did it feel fair, it also felt reinvigorating. The times of being pushed around were over.