The Great Awakening (Chapter 28) (Patreon)

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            Petty Officer Third Class Rodriguez had worked hard to reach her first rank in the navy as efficiently and soon as possible, and was dead-set on climbing the ladder all the way to the top, like her father two decades before. Excellence and duty ran in her veins, she felt, which meant she felt little hesitation or even apprehension when the order came down in the wee hours of the morning for all battle-ready vessels in range of the NYC coast to load up and race to the aid of the city, which had become the target of a yet-unidentified threat. The navy’s mobilization was delayed, however, which meant by the time the fleet arrived at the Big Apple, the sun was up, and Rodriguez had a clear view to the insurgent. Even while the half-wrecked city was engulfed in flames and dust, its sky-bumping visitor was completely visible, as the inferno she’d caused didn’t touch her ankles. Suddenly, bravado was hard to come by.

            Though unnerved, PO3 Rodriguez didn’t let it show, however, and directed her subordinates to their positions on-deck of the battleship. Their vessel were posted close to the rear of the pack, with more heavily armed boats taking point and already opening fire on the distant target, but even now Rodriguez felt the behavior of the waves changing in response to the violence rippling out from the epicenter of New York City each time the giantess gently slammed her bare soles back down, or even so much as walked her fingers through the streets, demolishing all in their path. The officer gripped a railing, realizing she had to re-learn her sea legs all over again, as the ocean wasn’t just choppy in its ordinary fashion, but ominously disturbed, almost vibrating, as before a storm.

            Of course, the storm was already here and spreading chaos on a yet-untold level: it just hadn’t finished mashing all of Manhattan a solid quarter-mile deeper into the planet. But it was only a matter of time until this tempest, in the form of a woman whose single footstep could rattle a county and sink an entire army, stretched her influence beyond the borders of the city again. Rodriguez watched the ten-mile woman’s naked feet moving with ponderous promise, their elegant shapes never speeding toward the next targets, but lowering with grace, as though the dark-haired beauty was carefully considering her choice of stomping ground and almost reconsidering before setting her pale smooth soles down on another once-proud borough anyway and feeling it all crumble to fit the shape of her anatomy.

In fact, that was probably exactly what the girl was doing, a fact that made Rodriguez’s blood chill all the more, as it confirmed that the giantess’s actions were no accident, even if it meant their vessels were able to approach the beaches in one piece, rather than getting dragged to the briny depths under tidal waves. Because it was plain to Rodriguez that if their enemy actually put any real effort into stamping the city, not just tiptoeing about and letting the urban terrain steadily mush, but raising her knee and impacting the ground as though she meant to kill a scuttling roach, there would be no more army or navy, let alone a Manhattan to save. The island might simply fold in on itself from a single blow, and everything around her giant foot would either dissolve or become one with the ocean.

It was the realist in Rodriguez that allowed her to foresee this, and also made her understand even now that they had no chance of halting the giantess’s giddy progress. Still, they had a responsibility to try, and so the PO3, without conveying the hopelessness in her face, barked orders at her lessers and gripped the railing again, as the waves crashing on the hull grew taller each time their faraway foe so much as rolled her stance forward on the balls of her ginormous feet, taking her pinkish heels skyward, before arching them all the way back down for an earth-quaking thud.

Just as the first line of ships neared the harbor, close enough that their artillery could actually ping harmless strikes off the crouching invader’s feet, Rodriguez noticed those twinkling hazel irises tipping toward the water for the first time. Cataracts of silky midnight hair swept over her cheeks, briefly concealing her gaze lofted five miles high, and then her mighty fingers brushed it aside, and it became clear she was staring directly at the boats. For a ridiculous moment, Rodriguez could’ve almost sworn she was sharing direct eye contact with the girl, if only inadvertently, since it was doubtful their enemy could even discern individual vessels on the waves, let alone the far-smaller crews.

Though the giantess was clearly enamored and razor-focused on her literal step-by-step undoing of New York, the glow of this bombastic greeting from the navy was enough to get her attention, albeit not enough to do the slightest harm. Even from a mile away, the officer could see that they weren’t so much as blackening the ruddy ointment-shining curves of the leviathan girl’s toe flesh with soot. Her feet were dirtied on the undersides and creamy front-facing hemispheres of her digits, but this was all self-inflicted from trampling everything between Manhattan and Chicago, and didn’t appear to pain or even bother her at all, despite the dizzying swaths of crushed forestry, powdered buildings, and foil-thin squished cars decorating the ringed grooves of her titanic toeprints. Then the girl started to rise, not fully, but high enough that clouds partly obscured her expression, as she turned herself toward the oceanic border of the Big Apple.

No travel was required, though, as the girl merely had to pivot on a single heel, cruising her foot in a fan-shaped arc that bulldozed cleanly through another broad segment of skyline. Buildings either fell under her sole or rolled over one another, piling up like dustpan dreck. Rising smoke from this act then greyed out Rodriguez’s view to their foe’s position, but it soon cleared when those thick-bulbed toe ends pushed through the dark ash veil like peachy serpents, flattening another section of shore under the fleshy shafts of her digits, and plopping the five smooth bulky ends just far enough forth to reach the water.

The splash-back was more dramatic than any of the aquatic shudders the ships had yet weathered on their approach, soaking every deck and occupant, including Rodriguez, even though their ship was bringing up the rear from a full half-mile back. Boats in the front found themselves with enough excess water onboard to require emergency bilge pumping, and still they hadn’t come into direct contact with the girl. NYC (or whatever remained of it) was no longer visible to the naval reinforcements, with only disturbed sky able to be seen past the living islands of those impossibly-tall and perky toes, scrunching and distorting with soft wrinkles, then lurching forward again when the giantess descended back to a squat and shuffled yet further into the ocean.

Though the one-woman army had scarcely gotten her bare toes wet, she was already winning the waterfront battle, courtesy of her digits’ concussive influence just from the gentlest dancing and pat-a-caking of the sandy bedrock under their squirmy heft. Rodriguez directed her underlings as calmly as she could, though found it hard to rip her gaze from the middle distance, as the city-destroyer’s full attention was now devoted to the cadre of battleships blasting her with cannon fire. From the look of apathetic cool on her gigantic face, the boats may as well have been a series of biscuit crumbs discovered floating in a teacup.