The empire of Unifica was worried for the first time in its entire grand rule. First it was just one major city raising its voice, calling for a change in world leadership. Then that idea spread to surrounding areas, increasing discontent and forming a rebel peace-keeping army. In the span of one year, half a continent was now preparing to challenge the planet’s stewardship, and Unifica at last had to address it somehow, or risk descending into chaos. They chose to send in their best woman.

“You say the meeting will take place in Province G-75, sir?” Marigold spoke into her transponder-phone, which on its own was larger than any town on Earth. The blonde-haired officer sat with her bare legs daintily crossed upon the artificial chair Unifica had built for her out of space-metals, taller than every other structure in the world, unless of course one counted Marigold herself.

“That’s correct, though the mission will take place in surrounding provinces as well. You’ll know the meeting spot when you see the fleet of airships we’ll be sending out to rendezvous with you,” her superior answered through the speaker. “So just keep your wits about you and your eye-line fixed high up, soldier. You’ll see the flares.”

“Yes, sir. I do usually like to keep an eye below, but you say the area is uninhabited?”

“Completely. You have my word.”

“What sort of work will I be doing out there, sir?” Marigold added. With her free hand, she tipped her military cap further back, then swap-crossed her legs, alternating which set of five bare toes she used to graze through the puddly ocean waters, while the other foot happily bobbed miles above. “My mission briefing wasn’t very clear.”
“Nor was it intended to be. This is a higher security clearance than you’re used to, soldier. Once you make contact with the fleet, they’ll fill you in on the job. It won’t take long, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll be for the good of everyone in Unifica.”

“Wow! Well, I do trust you, sir, as you know. Thank you. I look forward to serving.” Marigold’s green eyes practically sparkled, widening with delight and a burgeoning sense of duty, even though she wouldn’t know the nature of her work until later today.

“You’ll be expected at 1400 hours. Don’t be late, soldier, and good luck.”

As soon as her superior dismissed her from the conversation and hung up, the girl stifled a gleeful squeal. Her whole body trembled with anticipation, but she kept her composure, straightening her hat and ensuring every brass button was in place. Though Marigold always enjoyed getting to help out around the world, since it gave her a sense of purpose saving lives and preventing conflict, not to mention the guilty fun of demonstrating her immense size and strength to her billions of spectators, it meant a lot to hear that her work would benefit everyone.

Watching the clock, Marigold timed her departure perfectly, as the last thing she wanted was to be the one holding up operations on such an important job. Giving her uniform one last smoothing touch-up, and her long golden locks a comb, the girl set off along the pre-determined geographic path laid out by Unifica as a one-woman global roadmap. This ensured Marigold could take normal steps without fear of harming any civilization, which was still a prospect she occasionally had nightmares about. Nevertheless, she’d grown confident in service to the empire, and the girl happily took dizzying province-long strides down the path. She religiously studied the GPS on her phone to ensure she didn’t deviate from the cleared path, though she could just as easily have followed the obvious trail of canyons in the shape of her bare feet stamped from numerous previous trips around the world. Grasslands, tundra, desert, and mountain ranges alike were crumpled down like deflated bread dough wherever Marigold took a confident step.

Marigold kept her eyes trained dead-ahead. Unifica’s elite airship fleets were designed for extreme altitude operation, particularly in the years since they recruited a girl who happened to stand at extreme altitudes even while not on her tip-toes. This meant, as long as she searched this elevation, she was sure to find the meeting place. Tracking down the airship flares was vital, as Marigold was lacking in many details for the mission, and would require either a message on her phone or a sonic super-weapon just to be able to contact her mission cohorts.

Communication had always been a “slight” issue for Marigold, ironically not due to her personality, as the girl was bubbly, upbeat, and outgoing despite the challenges presented in being such an utterly titanic creature. Rather, it was simply impossible for her to speak directly to, let alone even see, a normal-sized human being. Attempts had been made, but even with her eye up close and a person standing in Marigold’s hand with fireworks, making a connection was rough. Either the people would stumble and fall into the deep gulches that formed the soft, fleshy divots of Marigold’s delicate spiral-patterned palm texture, or the giantess would accidentally bat an eyelash, and generate typhoon winds that sent her visitors tumbling away. After that, too afraid of hurting anyone who got on or near her body, Marigold and Unifica opted exclusively for telecommunications, and it had yet to steer the girl wrong.

Arriving alongside G-75, Marigold lifted one foot up. The shadow of her sole and waggling toes swallowed up the whole western corner of the province. Before settling her full weight down, however, the girl double- and triple-checked her device one last time, ensuring she was in the right place. She’d never been given clearance to step across this part of the continent before, and she didn’t know much about it, but perhaps that was why she was here today: to help them terraform for future generations. Marigold shrugged and let her foot sink into the untouched landscape, forestry and mountainous sprawl alike crumbling apart until the underbelly of her foot met bedrock beneath. She took a step, then two, and by then was more than comfortable striding around this new land.

Still, Marigold was careful not to leave the bounds of the province until she was given orders. Her footsteps landed gingerly yet with authority over multicolored patches of terrain, some which she might have noticed were curiously silver-toned and prickled like low-cut grass, suspiciously similar to a city; however, her gaze was affixed above in search mode. First, she had to find the fleet. After having completed a variety of missions, most of which began by meeting airships close to eye level, the girl had gotten very good at spotting them. However, she didn’t even see a speck of their usual crimson sparks, let alone the cluster of insectoid city-sized vehicles.

“How strange,” Marigold said to herself, thumbing the corner of her lip. Her clock read 1400 hours, sharp. “I guess I’ll just have to wait.”

Marigold revolved in all directions, casually shuffling her bare heels in circles until the shape of her every motion was worn into the earth. Impatiently, her long and agile toes grappled with the powdered remnants of planetary crust, jumbling avalanches’ worth of rock and a sparkling mixture of those curious silvery particles, which she still didn’t take note of. While the giantess idly sighed, scarcely thinking of what her feet were up to now that she was in “safe” territory, her ten disastrous digits made quick work of the towns below.

Tightly-packed urban alleys of a dozen cities had no choice but to look up, given the sudden eclipse of the sun, just in time to watch the peachy-patterned texture of Marigold’s sole flesh washing overhead like an ocean unto itself. Her feet moved too fast, covering too many miles in a single breath, for most to comprehend what was happening. All they knew for sure was a rush of cataclysmic wind and the shadowy ravine-laden sculpture of the unidentified object above. Whenever the girl’s foot paused, however, granting just enough stillness for the most observant onlookers below to question why there was a miles-wide toeprint swirling like a vortex over their whole city at once, this was generally the last thought anyone had, as a halt meant Marigold’s unconscious padding and shuffling was about to render yet another town into paste.

Her soft, bulbous toes clawed into the breakable earth, digging well-below the ground level of any city unlucky enough to exist below Marigold, simply in the act of absent-mindedly entertaining herself. Then, when the oval of spiraled skin curled back up, hugging the grit up toward the ball of her foot, everything shattered as a unit. Entire cities, sometimes more than one in a single swoop, were pulverized against the tender inner flanks of Marigold’s toes. Miles back along that same foot, uncountable numbers of rural communities and thickly-populated urban spaces alike were turned to rubble beneath the girl’s high-arched sole and unforgiving heel.

Though some cities could momentarily remain standing if they were fortunate enough to be “missed” at first, aligning with the tidal-wave-sized sole wrinkles or the crevices between the officer’s dexterous toes, all it took was one twitch or adjustment in balance to clobber these locations as well. Occasionally all the ticklish grazing of her skin along the multi-tiered topography made the giantess need to scratch, which resulted in her rubbing her foot even more vigorously into the ground, until the annoyance was quenched and her footstep had doubled the depth of its last crater.

Within several minutes of waiting, most of the province was in utter ruin. Marigold’s broad footprints now pockmarked the once-lush landscape beyond recognizing. There was barely a scrap of land, an entire square mile, not yet blessed by the unaware blonde’s wandering toes and itchy soles. Most shapes were still distinct, matching the contours of her feet, with a diverse color palette filling in the spaces depending on whether she’d stepped on a greenery-rich national park or a populous skyscraper-dotted civilization. The longer Marigold strolled in circles, anxiously trying to spot the airships, however, the less distinguishable her individual footsteps became from one another, and the more everything under her came to resemble a vaguely beige, smoking slab of clay.

Nervous now, Marigold kept her phone open, just in case she’d missed a change in the plan. Yet there wasn’t a single message. Coming to a relative standstill for the first time in ten minutes, she still couldn’t help but tap one foot. The concussive force of each gently-intentioned footfall scattered the smushed remains of cities for dozens of miles around the impact zone of every descending toe. Grit and debris billowed out to the oceans, only to be turned back by still-crashing waves churned up by Marigold’s arrival here. A universal mixture of crushed buildings, mountain peaks, and trees now jumbled together, becoming unsettled like sawdust at the slightest disturbance of Marigold’s feet, which happened to be often. Some of these miscellaneous demolished city-clouds were caught up in a series of tornadoes created by the grinding and rolling of her toes, and were kicked into overdrive whenever the girl flattened her soles hard to the ground for a tap. Those wind-storms often delivered the manmade detritus right back to the same foot which caused its undoing, thus caking dirt and destruction into the deep valleys between Marigold’s digits. Hundreds of thousands of rebel-citizens, most now deceased after the initial crushing but some miraculously still alive via bizarre physics, gravitated toward those catastrophic feet: caught in her sole-dimples, speckled along her heel and ankle, and especially jammed into every groove of Marigold’s toe-skin texture. If her strict attention happened to drift down to ground level for even a moment, which of course it never did, she’d have noticed little more than the accumulation of unknowingly organic lint clumped between her lovely toes.

“Maybe I should give them a call. Just to be certain,” Marigold said aloud to soothe herself. After all, it simply wouldn’t do to spoil such an important mission over so trivial a matter like the meeting place. Maybe they’d changed the flare color to blue, not knowing the giantess would never spot it against the sky? Nevertheless, she dialed her superior’s number, and tap-tap-tapped her foot in time with the dial tone. To her dismay, she received a busy signal.

“Oh, no. That’s not good at all!” Marigold grumbled, awaiting the answering machine. “Hello, sir? I’m reporting for duty at Province G-75, as instructed. I arrived at the meeting place fifteen minutes ago at 1400 hours, but nobody is here. I don’t see the fleet or their flares. Please advise. Was the meeting site changed? Where are you, sir?”

After that, Marigold ended the message, not wanting to appear too out-of-sorts, and therefore risking a blight on her military professionalism. Still she wrung her hands, opening up her phone every thirty seconds to check for a response, and resumed her nervous pacing yet again. More even than before, Marigold focused on the skyline, practically to the exclusion of all her other senses, in order to find the fleet. If the girl wasn’t so adept at marching, she might’ve nearly stumbled over her own two feet while doing so, especially after her trampling footprints had nearly smoothed the province proper to an almost slippery surface, at least relative to one of her immense size.
She squinted, focusing her depth perception down to only what was directly in front of her face. Several times, in her thoroughness, Marigold wandered to the edges of the province, kicking up sandstorms and raining boulders down from the plush underhang of her rising feet into the neighboring lands. Without even setting foot upon one of these nearby cities, most were mowed down anyway by Marigold’s meandering journey: victims to giantess-induced earthquakes and meteor-like bits of toe-grunge flung their way whenever the girl flexed her foot at the top of an arc.

Those towns that survived instead were made to witness the absolute deconstruction of the resistance capital, all its sister cities, and the entirety of the anti-Unifica military in less than twenty minutes flat. Even through the muddy haze of smoke and ash that now coated all of G-75, the one-time rebels could see one undeniable shape, or rather two, wreaking havoc on millions of lives and quashing the hope of revolution in a matter of oblivious goddess-sized tramples.

“Are you boys up here somewhere?” Marigold called out in a thunderous voice, though she did her best to keep to a whisper. She cupped both hands around her mouth to project, turning to the four compass directions for full coverage. To ensure every corner of G-75 could hear, she took long strides around the terrain, crossing the entirety of the province in a single bound that seemed to vibrate the Earth itself when she landed. “If you can hear me, send up all your flares now so I can find you! Or… maybe a sonic cannon? Oh, it’s also all right if you’ve got some missiles! They can’t hurt me, they’ll just wrinkle my uniform a little if they’re off-course. Hello? HELLO! Oh, it’s no use…”

At the end of thirty minutes, Marigold was turned into a nervous wreck, thinking of the disappointment she was sure to inspire in her superiors for failing to locate the mission meeting place. Province G-75, meanwhile, was a different kind of wreck altogether. After countless laps around the perimeter and through the heart of the land, Marigold’s lumbering peds had worn the ground down to a slick uniform surface, with only a toeprint here or there to make the area recognizable as anything other than a patch of frequently-visited footpath. Indeed, it now looked just as well-worn, if not more so, than the designated geographic aisle “streets” across the world that Marigold was usually restricted to, in order to prevent squishing civilizations. After trying to contact her superior officer twice more, and stomping the province every which way out of sheer boredom and uneasiness, the trooper finally received a message back. It was simple:

Mission aborted, soldier. No further instructions. Return to your base.

Marigold frowned. She considered asking if this change was her fault, or if Unifica had merely altered its plans, but decided not to question her orders. After all, she was a loyal soldier, with faith in her commander, and so Marigold pocketed her phone and found the road home.

Unbeknownst to her, as she exited the province and strolled back over the horizon, the survivors and bystanders surrounding the G-75 massacre watched by the thousands via eye witness and guerilla news footage as the angel of doom ended her horrifying extermination of the populace under her bare feet and at last stalked off to parts unknown. The seismic smack of her distant footsteps made every one of them tremble. But even once Marigold was far enough away not to make the very earth quaver, the citizens of the adjacent provinces, previously standing side-by-side with the resistance originators, continued to shake in their boots. Any defiance to the empire they once held had been thoroughly replaced with survival instinct over the course of less than an hour.

By the next day, the continent was re-unified, offering unconditional terms of surrender to Unifica for a war they hadn’t even had the chance to participate in yet. Every single resistance leader, soldier, and piece of military hardware had been wiped out under Marigold’s feet while waiting for the conflict to begin. The chief conspirators were extinct, and any nations friendly to the original cause had just watched Unifica’s most effective enforcer stamp out the competition like it was nothing. Even provinces not yet known to Unifica as rebel allies ousted themselves and pleaded for peace, lest they incur the empire’s wrath when next Marigold went out for a walk. Within a week, Unifica had lived up to the root inspiration of its name, and brought the world back into line with its interests, minus a single province, which was now a smote wasteland dotted by divots and smears in the shape of a colossal young woman’s antsy, wriggly, naked foot: a grave warning to any future instigators.

Marigold hadn’t received an order for almost a month since the cancelled mission. Like a schoolgirl awaiting word from a crush, she spent most of her time monitoring her transponder, hoping for work from her superior or even a word of explanation. Just when she’d begun to suspect she was on unspoken probation by Unifica, however, the sky-high golden-haired officer received a call. She tried not to sound too desperate when she answered, desiring only to continue serving the good of the world and the little people who lived in it.

“Yes, sir?” she greeted.

“At ease, soldier. This… this isn’t an official communication,” he said. Immediately Marigold sensed something was different. She’d never once heard her superior speak with a word out of place. His voice was aggrieved, nearly tremoring.

“Oh. What… is it, sir?”

“I told myself I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. It was too much. But you deserve to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The mission in G-75.”

“The one that was aborted, sir? Please, have I done something wrong?”

“N-No, soldier. In fact… you completed the mission exactly as planned.”

“Pardon me, sir, but… I didn’t complete any mission! I only waited in the uninhabited province, looking for the fleet, but I couldn’t find them, and-”

“No. You did the mission,” he interrupted. “Just as Unifica ordered.”

“What are you talking about?” Marigold demanded. “What did they… what did I do?”

“I’m sorry.” The voice on the phone croaked. He sighed, then spoke in a hiss: “G-75 wasn’t uninhabited.”

The line went silent for close to a minute, though it seemed much longer. Marigold felt as though she’d been dealt a smarting blow to the cranium, which was a novel sensation for a girl whose footsteps shuddered the planet itself. She shook her head, staring into the blank phone. The color drained from her face, redistributed as a chill in the bone.

“T-That’s… that’s not true,” Marigold whimpered. “Why else would they have sent me there, if it wasn’t empty wilderness?”

“G-75 wasn’t wilderness. It housed some of the most densely populated city-states in this hemisphere-”

“No.”

“-and you were sent there, without knowledge, in order to prevent a war between Unifica and the rebels-”

“No...”

“-and you did, by clearing the entire province of Unifica’s enemies. By… stepping on them.”

“NO!” Marigold screamed. Her cry wrapped around the world. “Tell me it’s not true! Please!”

“I tell you this now because I’ve resigned my position. I… regret my part in what transpired, and accept personal responsibility for involving you,” her superior said with as much compassion as he could muster, though even for a career military man, he too was on the verge of relative hysterics. “I’m sorry, Marigold.”

The astronomic officer sunk into her chair, stifling the sobbing in her throat, with a hand covering her mouth and raging rivers of tears coursing down her cheeks already. Wrapping her legs around the pillars of the chair, she endeavored to lift her gargantuan bare feet away from touching any part of the ground, until she was fully suspended from the vulnerable planet below. “No, no, no, no…”