The last few weeks had been harrowing. The government of the planet Caementa, capital of the creatively-named Caementum Empire, had been agitating for a war. An ‘upstart' interplanetary power, referred to in media cycles as ‘the Infernal Sector', had absorbed much of their small corner of the cosmos, right up to Caementa's borders. That the expansion had halted the moment contact between the two was made, with no signs of pressing them further, mattered little; such ascendancy flew in the faces of the powers that be, and any change in the balance of things, no matter how minor, was perceived as a risk to power to be crushed with all haste. For the sector to be run by what was said to be a woman, who they were even calling a goddess, just confirmed the threat.
Reports from and about their new interstellar neighbour, and the new neighbour's newly taken denizens, had been mixed. Entire worlds seemingly submitted overnight with little more than words, only to be left almost exactly as they'd been found. Others spoke of battles rending whole systems apart, over little more than a whim. Whatever the case, a long, protracted invasion against them was being prepared, and it didn't take much thought to conclude that a costly, brutal war was either entirely unjustified, or foolishness to the point of self-destruction. Any voices that brought attention to those facts were falling silent day by day however, stifled or even vanishing entirely, to the point it seemed that all those who remained were either uncaring at the prospects of the colossal, brewing conflict, or wholly excited for it.
This is where we find Sasha, cooped up in a high-rising apartment block and hoping for something to make it all just stop. Not half as fearful as she was angry, the blond athlete nonetheless kept to herself all her thoughts on what was happening. Not that she had many left to share them with, almost anyone she knew who was even mildly against the war had simply vanished. She wanted, no, needed to do something, but didn't know how, not without simply disappearing with nary a sound like all the rest. And so she stayed, simmering and seething to herself, wanting for it all to go away. Her dreams that night offered quite the way to bring it about.
She couldn't remember many of the night's details, but she woke feeling better rested than she had in what felt like could have been years. A woman had appeared to her, bearing a striking resemblance to a newspaper's caricature of the Infernal Sector's ruler, only without the horns, and quite a bit less snarling. It had taken a little while for her to open up, but afterwards she felt little else from the fiery figure but warmth and power. What was said and when, she couldn't recall and really, most of it mattered little. The woman knew what she desired, deep down, beyond the simple anger. A deal had been struck, a mile grown for every city gone; Sasha was about to conquer the world, one mile at a time.
"The first one's free" were the last words she could recall when she sat up in her bed, the woman's mirthful laughter framing her thoughts as the daybreak waved them away, and the world settled back into its place. In her hand was a glowing orange sphere, the size of a golf ball and a texture of cracked glass. It felt warm, and thumbing it over, cracks split and reformed as if it were barely holding together against the force within. Grinning wide, she stood from her bed, and without a second thought, Sasha clenched her hand into a fist, and crushed the orb like an empty shell. The world went white.
For most of her life, Sasha had harboured a rather specific fantasy: to grow utterly gigantic, and tower over all. Even with the blessings of good genetics--standing almost another foot above six feet tall, and with an hourglass fit for measuring years to boot--it wasn't enough. Seeing over the crowds wasn't enough. She honestly wanted to stand so high above them that even her toes loomed over everyone else like they were little more than dust. As fantastical a desire as it was, she'd never really put much thought into it, and the few times she'd gotten off to thoughts of laying entire landscapes to waste with her simple tread had left her both frustrated and longing for something unattainable.
Unattainable until now.
The sheer onrush of power surging through her blanked out all other thoughts. She didn't notice the apartment block all but exploding from her form, nor did she register the blocks her feet turned to rubble as they grew over them. Every sensation, from whole buildings crumbling to the smallest piece of debris bouncing off a toe, was felt in detail, but it all was all overpowered by the growth. By the time her vision cleared, Sasha had skyrocketed to six feet north of a mile. A mile was a lot, and for it to come all at once left her utterly stunned.
She'd fallen a short distance as her building crumbled like a sand pile once it could no longer hold her, and the quakes caused by her landing were still rumbling through what was left of her hometown while she took it all in. The city wasn't a large one by any measure, only boasting a single real megascraper. Some in the north were home to dozens, with countless smaller towers besides. Caementa was a relatively urbanised world, not the largest in the empire but quite close to it, and a town of half a million was almost out in the boondocks to some more cosmopolitan Caementans. That said, Tepra Tower, the tallest building here, the gem of the skyline to anyone calling this place home, barely came up to her knees.
She was, quite literally, in the clouds, the lowest of those fluffy white shapes brushing by below her naked chest. While It was one thing to fantasize about being such a megalithic size, being it was another entirely. "Oh, God..." The words passed her lips unbidden, their volume surprising her as much as they deafened those below. She was heavy, her mass weighing down on the earth terrifically, and she was almost afraid to move forward in case she couldn't stop herself... after all, nothing else could now.
A feeling like a lump catching in her throat filled her from head to toe. Her sculpted, curvaceous form was bared for all the world to see, but that didn't so much as give her pause. She was colossal, utterly unstoppable, and those years of fantasies were about to become a very tangible reality. She bit her lip, and with the city below still reeling from the aftershocks of her ascent, she strode forward.
A block's worth of buildings, concrete and steel, render and rebar, found itself beneath one of Sasha's well-kept feet. She was proud of them, like she was the rest of her body, and made care to keep them looking soft and delicate. As soft and delicate as they could be when she'd spent half her life pounding them across the sand. She'd always wondered, when she'd gone to the beach for sport or leisure, whether stepping on those wet, oddly shaped clumps of sand left when the tide went out could be comparable to treading on a city. The sandcastles they'd been beforehand couldn't, she thought, but that didn't stop her from treading through them whenever the coast was clear. Letting her foot fall, she was about to find out.
Her first act of destruction had been incidental, a side effect of letting the idea of being so gargantuan get into her head. Her second was entirely deliberate. A sharp intake of breath, and her foot --toes, ball and all-- was settling into the earth. She hadn't even needed to press down; tens of thousands of tons of offices and apartments, and who knew how many hundreds, how many thousands of people within, all but vanished underneath. One step. "Fuck..." Her voice lingered, tremors rocking every building within a mile. Those few parts of the block that her foot hadn't fit over collapsed moments later, either partially obliterated by her heel, or simply too close to the foot-shaped crater. Just a bit bigger and she'd not even need to aim. "It's so easy..."
Each stride she took, circling the city, would bring her faintly nearer to the downtown proper. She could only imagine how she looked from down on the ground, both hellish and divine at once, though she'd never swap these positions, not in a million lifetimes. Her other foot came up, the rubble of her old home tumbling from the top and crumbling from the sole, and she stamped it, hard, into another built up block. Construction material exploded through the surrounding structures, and she could see weblike, hairline fractures tearing through tarmac from the point of impact. The roads themselves were collapsing under her assault, into the subway and sewer tunnels below. She thought they might be, anyway. She was much more interested in how little resistance these buildings were putting up. After all, these were not small buildings.
None of them were small, she thought, as she continued her spiralling advance towards the Tepra Tower. Some of those she was trampling really were quite large, shading thousands of pedestrians almost all hours of the day. They were large, whereas she was... uncontrollably massive. That thought could keep her excited all by itself. The sensations that came with it were enough to drive her off the deep end. She came to a halt outside the business district, an office complex standing tall enough that she'd need to actively lift her leg to step down on it. She could have walked through it, scattering it like dust as she had with another, one step prior, but the optics were important to her. A lifelong fantasy like this, Sasha needed to get it right on her first pass.
"It really does feel like sand~" She gushed to herself, curling her toes through the rubble beneath them, right on the outskirts of downtown. Behind her, and all around the city centre, stretched a series of circling footprints, deep, gently curved craters marking her passing across the inner suburbs. Detritus and debris were all that was left, Sasha being methodical in her demolition of the place; she needed to be if she wanted to grow, after all. The din of calamitous panic had been reaching her ears the entire time, if faintly, but it was only when she neared the core that she noticed it separately to the sheer volume of her steps and quakes. It only grew quieter as there was less and less city to scream.
Another mark that she wasn't big enough, at least in her head, was that many of these buildings still rose above her ankles. Not for long, at least. "Thank you for your contribution." She called down, her voice dripping with mirth and lust. It was the first and only time she'd address this city, content that its blighted existence was now reduced to nothing but fuel for herself. Taking care where her feet fell, it was almost as if she were crushing soda cans, only that cans took at least some effort; she only had to so much as drop her foot, and the towers tumbled, another thousand or so voices leaving the chorus. The light show was nice, she thought, if fickle. Gas mains and pipelines seemed to erupt in flames with her tread, until they too were flattened into the earth.
Every edifice eradicated brought her closer to Tepra. She'd been up the top of it a few times in her life, school trips to the skydeck, or an outing with friends in simpler times. She loved the view, but Sasha had always kept quiet about her real favourite thing to do there. She'd lose herself in thought, imagining that it wasn't a goliath skyscraper beneath her, but her own goliath body, with her looking down on all the fleeing, floundering masses. A reverie she was usually shook out of by a tap to the shoulder, and always to some disappointment. She'd been thinking so small.
The closer she came, the more she realised just how much she dwarfed the tower; it was smaller than a child to her. Sasha found herself getting excited, and ran her hands along herself. One went down to hover by her thigh, while the other came up to cup her left breast. Inadvertently, on its way she collected some water, in the form of pale, fluffy cumulus. The shock of cold moisture against her tit hammered it home. The idea that she was this much bigger than even Tepra, that there were clouds she stood higher than... "Fuck, I'm gigantic."
She pulled her hand from the lips of her sex, which to no surprise of hers, she found to be glistening, No time to get distracted, not when she was so close. Lifting her leg high, her thigh straight out in front of her, Sasha's toes clipped the top of Tepra Tower, and the viewing deck she'd once thought so high up, so titanic, was obliterated, debris scattering over the ruined city below. The ball of her foot positioned right above the now open, this was it. One more act of wanton demolition, and everything about this place that said ‘city' would be gone, and another mile of size would be hers. A mile was too much, it was undeniably, categorically too much, but she'd known it now, and Sasha wanted more. Her form tensed, and she drove her foot into the earth.
The first time she'd grown, she'd been far too small to make any sense of what she was feeling, it had been simply too much, and her mind had blanked much of it out. This time, as her stomp connected with the ground, and the heart of her hometown detonated, Sasha felt it. To double one's size, to octuple one's mass in moments was still quite a lot to handle. Warmth flooded her, and even while the shockwave and fragments scattered from impact, her head sped up through the clouds. A moan that would echo across the province passed her lips, the sensation of being more forefront in her mind. The sky was slightly clearer, the ground was slightly more clouded. Her feet sunk deeper into the dirt. What she needed to work to fit herself over beforehand would now be crushed easily, and even the planes were closer. She grinned, and looked down at the next closest city, but a few dozen steps away.
Sasha began to walk.