Best Laid Plans (Chapter 7) (Patreon)

“If you’re just joining us, what you’re seeing is live footage over the bay, showing what appears to be a… giant woman… and though our radar shows her to still be thirty miles from shore, as you can probably tell, she might as well be standing on top of us already,” the reporter chanted from her seat in the helicopter, going off-script as her voice became more frantic. Her eyes bugged while she pounded a fist on the window so the cameraman could capture the fullness of the shadowy silhouette cast over the waters, trudging through ocean depths no deeper than a rainy puddle. “Again, we are in fact recording LIVE from Manhattan, showing you what seems to be the same… monster who it was just reported as wiping most of the west coast off the map.”

The copter zoomed high over the shore, avoiding the tidal waves splashing across the beaches thanks to the landmasses of Nicole’s feet churning up the ocean and turning it to filth-hued froth while the dirt was rinsed off the grooves in her skin via saltwater bath. Thirty miles seemed conservative, given just how close those mountainous bulb-ended toes had already come, but if anything, they were overestimating the giantess’s proximity to the Big Apple. Then again, for a woman who, by all accounts, stood three hundred miles tall, with feet that were four times as long as Manhattan Island alone, any distance would’ve seemed meager.

The next shuffling step the giantess took brought her kaiju of a bare foot mere miles from the beach, forcing the entire population to look up at the immense wall of gridded toe-skin molded like planets unto themselves, attached to a foot that could’ve covered the entirety of New York City beneath her infinite sole.

Even the gusts of rushing wind from her oncoming digits were enough to make the news helicopter fall immediately into a tailspin. The reporter screamed, grasping for support, while the camera was shattered against the window. Somehow, though, the vehicle pulled out a nosedive just in time to dip upward from the thrashing waves, but those stormy winds were quickly chased by the source itself: a feminine foot powerful enough to bend weather to its will, literally, as Nicole’s slightest toe movements could now summon typhoons to drown the biggest cities on Earth, without even having to compress a crater down into ten-mile-long islands with her quadrillion-ton heel. Of course, the giantess wished to more personally deliver her justice, skin-to-earth, and was careful not to allow the waves to overtake Manhattan.

The helicopter, meanwhile, saw through the window that they were now being pursued by thick meaty toes as tall as fourteen Empire State Buildings stacked atop one another like building blocks. There truly was no prior scale of comparison sufficient to conceive of body parts this astronomic, let alone the entire giantess herself. Nicole was not only tall enough that she could’ve snugly fitted all of Manhattan beneath the brawny wrinkle-field of her nude arch, but in possession of a body that could’ve laid across the state of New York itself like a mossy mattress for a relaxing nap. Though her face was too high beyond the clouds now to be viewed without satellite technology, every terrified soul below understood precisely how Nicole felt about her upcoming visit to the city by the earth-shaking laughter she hurled down upon them in anticipation.

“GO! SHE’S GONNA FUCKING STEP ON US!” the reporter screeched at the panicked pilot, who roared through the sky as fast as the helicopter could carry them, though it was still barely fast enough to outrun the slow trudge of Nicole’s deadly digits passing through the glistening surf.

The giantess came so close up behind the chopper, the traumatized reporter could, for a while, see only the geometric outlines of dark skin cells rounding out the horizon of her toes, still soft but battered by homeless years spent padding naked over concrete. The passengers closed their eyes, expecting at any second for the helicopter to be brushed aside like an unseen gnat by the fortitude of the giantess’s burly stride, only for the harrowing winds and up-close view of the girl’s unpedicured pore-pocked foot flesh to give way again to clear skies and peaceful stillness, at least briefly.

When the chopper recovered, now hovering a full mile above New York in the madness of the escape, the reporter pressed her nose to the glass in disbelief of the giantess’s foot nestled just up to the edge of New York City, a mere scrunch of the toes or drumming of the heel away from shattering the beloved metropolis into broken shards.

“Oh my God… what is she doing?” the helpless woman cried, almost too frightened to gaze out the window now. “Isn’t anyone going to do something to STOP her?”

“Hello, New York. Remember ME? No, of course you don’t,” the voice of a goddess blared from on high. “But you will, after I’m through with you.”

***

Nicole gazed once more at the crumbly rubble embanked in her hand, careful to treat it like fine china so the doctor remained alive and well enough to keep pumping her full of omnipotence. Smiling, she returned her attention to the pitiful island metropolis far below, aching to show it far less restraint. She gently scrunched her ginormous toes until the dark flesh paled caramel, watching the churning ocean froth gush as supercell waves onto the shoreline. Of course she could so easily obliterate all of New York City in just one more stride, without even having to lift her foot off the ground.

At three hundred miles tall, the whole populous urban pocket would fit snugly under her decadently filthy brown sole, making for a satisfying crunch little more dramatic than the underfoot breaking of autumn leaves. The buildings would topple like needles stood on end. Yet to do so too quickly would be a waste, so Nicole took a deep breath, and cautiously raised her ped out of the water, waiting until most of the thousand-gallon droplets had plunked off her moistened arch wrinkles, before slowly bringing her hovered foot to bear above the hysterical city.

Still, as the shadow of her monumental foot hovered over Manhattan, far dwarfing the isle with a much more tremendous ovular mass of tender blistered mocha flesh stretching fifteen miles past the edges of the city in both directions, dirtied saltwater dripped from the grooves in Nicole’s toes and out of the creased ravines of her sole, flooding the streets below. To the giantess, it felt like little more than the ticklish last trickles sliding down her foot while exiting a steamy morning shower, but for the invisibly-micro people beneath the shadow of her sole, the ocean runoff was turning the gridlocked streets into chaotic rapids.

“Any last words?” Nicole coolly questioned to the city at large. She began to swing her foot back and forth, gently fanning the waves created by the ocean droplets, which also allowed her to observe the delicate carnage via the windows of space between the shafts of her toes. Already she could see several smaller buildings drowning, while thinner skyscrapers swayed in time with the floating bulwark of her sole. “I just want everyone down there to know, from the bottom of my heart… that if even just one of you had been kind to me during those years I spent alone on the streets, begging for change so I could stay alive and try to get a job, I might not have done this. Yes, if a SINGLE person down there had ever proven they were worth allowing to exist, then all of you would’ve been saved too right now. But no one ever did. I was spit on, kicked, and almost arrested just for trying to survive every cold night and brutal day. So I feel no guilt, no shame, in paying you back for every hour of hell you people put me through before. These streets used to be my home, and now they’re going to be your final resting places.”